Trump says he would have rushed into Florida school, unarmed
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, who’s been highly critical of the law enforcement response to the Florida school shootings, says he would have rushed in, unarmed, if he’d been there.
Speaking to a roomful of governors at the White House, Trump said Monday, “You don’t know until you’re tested, but I think I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too.”
Trump’s heroic hypothetical vividly demonstrated his frustration at the way the deadly events unfolded at the school in Parkland, Florida.
His session with the governors, in Washington for their annual winter meeting, was heavily focused on finding ways to address the massacre of 17 students and teachers in a Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was the latest gathering in which the president spoke of a need to enact new gun-control measures as well as act to improve school safety.
Trump said his recent calls for the arming of many teachers wasn’t a universal one, instead likening it to taking advantage of educators with athletic talents to provide additional protection within schools.
Still no cease-fire in Syrian enclave; Russia orders pause
BEIRUT — As a U.N. cease-fire failed to take hold in Syria, Russia on Monday ordered a daily “humanitarian pause” to allow civilians to evacuate an embattled rebel-held enclave near Damascus, while airstrikes continued and Syrian ground forces fought to push into the besieged area from the west.
But civilians caught in the violence mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order of a limited, five-hour daily truce.
“It is like legitimizing the strikes on civilians,” said activist Firas Abdullah, a resident of Douma, a town in the region where at least 13 members of a family were killed Monday when their home collapsed after an airstrike.
“They will be so kind to grant us a mere five hours when they will not bomb us. Then the rest of the day, they will bomb us as usual. It is like a permission to kill,” Abdullah said.
A weekend resolution approved by the U.N. Security Council for a 30-day cease-fire across Syria failed to stop the carnage in the eastern Ghouta region that has killed more than 500 people since last week.
Transport safety rules rolled back under Trump
WASHINGTON — On a clear, dry June evening in 2015, cars and trucks rolled slowly in a herky-jerky backup ahead of an Interstate 75 construction zone in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Barreling toward them: an 18-ton tractor-trailer going about 80 mph.
Despite multiple signs warning of slow traffic, the driver, with little or no braking, bashed into eight vehicles before coming to a stop about 1½ football fields away. Six people died in the mangled wreck and four more were hurt. The driver was convicted of vehicular homicide and other charges last month.
In response to this and similar crashes, the government in 2016 proposed requiring that new heavy trucks have potentially life-saving software that would electronically limit speeds. But now, like many other safety rules in the works before President Donald Trump took office, it has been delayed indefinitely by the Transportation Department as part of a sweeping retreat from regulations that the president says slow the economy.
An Associated Press review of the department’s rulemaking activities in Trump’s first year in office shows at least a dozen safety rules that were under development or already adopted have been repealed, withdrawn, delayed or put on the back burner. In most cases, those rules are opposed by powerful industries. And the political appointees running the agencies that write the rules often come from the industries they regulate.
Meanwhile, there have been no significant new safety rules adopted over the same period.
Court: US anti-discrimination law covers sexual orientation
NEW YORK — Ruling in the case of a gay skydiving instructor, a federal appeals court in New York on Monday became the second one in the country to declare that U.S. anti-discrimination law protects employees from being fired over their sexual orientation.
The decision could set the stage for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the question once and for all.
In a 10-3 ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that while it and other courts around the U.S. previously found that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act didn’t cover sexual orientation, “legal doctrine evolves.”
“We now conclude that sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination,” Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann said, writing for the majority.
The decision involved Donald Zarda, who was fired in 2010 from a skydiving job in Central Islip, New York, that required him to strap himself tightly to clients so they could jump in tandem from an airplane. To put one female student at ease about the physical contact, he said, he told her not to worry — he was gay. The school fired Zarda after the woman’s boyfriend called to complain.
After Florida rampage, some owners are destroying their guns
ATLANTA — One man in upstate New York sawed his AR-15 rifle into pieces and posted a video of it on Facebook. A woman in Connecticut did the same with her handgun. Not far from scene of the Florida high school shooting, another man brought his assault weapon to police and asked them to destroy it.
In response to the killings of 17 people by a 19-year-old with an AR-15, some gun owners are waging personal protests against mass shootings.
The AR-15 is the gun drawing the most scorn during these public displays of destruction playing out on social media. Their owners say they love to shoot it, but enough is enough.
Scott Pappalardo is one such gun owner. Sitting in the backyard of his home in Scotchtown, New York, cradling the Eagle AR-15 rifle he’d owned for 30 years, Pappalardo called himself a firm believer in the Second Amendment who considers the rifle his favorite, but said he’s pained by the steady drumbeat of mass shootings.
“Here we are, 17 more lives lost. So when do we change? When do we make laws that say maybe a weapon like this isn’t acceptable in today’s society?” he said in a video on his Facebook page. People blame mental illness, video games, bad parenting and other reasons, but he said “ultimately, it’s a gun like this one that takes away the lives.”
