California governor scales back high-speed train
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday he’s abandoning a $77 billion plan to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco and will focus instead on completing a 119-mile (190-kilometer) segment in the state’s agricultural heartland.
Voters approved a ballot measure in 2008 calling for the linking of Northern and Southern California, a rail project initially estimated to cost $33 billion and be completed in 2020. Subsequent estimates more than doubled the cost and pushed the timeline to 2033.
“Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first State of the State address. “The current project, as planned, would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.”
Newsom pledged to finish the segment already under construction through California’s Central Valley. He rejected the idea critics have raised that it will be a “train to nowhere” and said it can help revitalize the economically depressed region.
While that construction continues Newsom said the state will conduct environmental reviews on the entire Los Angeles to San Francisco route and push for more federal and private money to connect the valley to the state’s economic powerhouses, though he didn’t say how.
Notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman convicted
NEW YORK — Mexico’s most notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was convicted Tuesday of running an industrial-scale smuggling operation after a three-month trial packed with Hollywood-style tales of grisly killings, political payoffs, cocaine hidden in jalapeno cans, jewel-encrusted guns and a naked escape with his mistress through a tunnel.
Guzman listened to a drumbeat of guilty verdicts on drug and conspiracy charges that could put the 61-year-old escape artist behind bars for decades in a maximum-security U.S. prison selected to thwart another one of the breakouts that made him a folk hero in his native country.
A jury whose members’ identities were kept secret as a security measure reached a verdict after deliberating six days in the expansive case. They sorted through what authorities called an “avalanche” of evidence gathered since the late 1980s that Guzman and his murderous Sinaloa drug cartel made billions in profits by smuggling tons of cocaine, heroin, meth and marijuana into the U.S.
As the judge read the verdict, Guzman stared at the jury, and his wife watched the scene, both with resignation in their faces. When the jurors were discharged and Guzman stood to leave the courtroom, the couple traded thumbs-ups.
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan lauded the jury’s meticulous attention to detail and the “remarkable” approach it took toward deliberations. Cogan said it made him “very proud to be an American.”
Maduro challenger plans caravans for US aid to Venezuela
CARACAS, Venezuela — Opposition leader Juan Guaido pushed back plans to get badly needed food and medicine into Venezuela by nearly two weeks, a timeline that threatens to deflate momentum toward unseating entrenched President Nicolas Maduro.
Surrounded Tuesday by thousands of cheering supporters, Guiado set Feb. 23 as the date for bringing in the badly needed U.S. assistance that has been warehoused on the Colombian border since last week, but provided few details.
The 11-day wait was sure to be a disappointment for Venezuelans desperate for the supplies. More than 2 million people have fled the country’s soaring hyperinflation, food and medical shortages over the last two years. The minimum wage, which most Venezuelans earn, amounts to less than $6 a month, and it is common to see people scouring garbage for food in the streets of Caracas.
“Right now, I’m going to give this order to the armed forces,” Guaido told the mass of people gathered in Caracas. “Allow in the humanitarian aid. That’s an order.”
Despite the authoritative-sounding assertion, there has been little evidence that the allegiance of the security forces — the country’s key powerbroker — has swung behind Guaido, a virtually unknown lawmaker until last month, when he took the helm of the opposition-controlled National Assembly.
Rule could limit college response to off-campus sex assaults
WASHINGTON — At some of the nation’s largest universities, the vast majority of sexual assaults take place not in dorm rooms or anywhere else on school property but in the neighborhoods beyond campus boundaries, according to data obtained by The Associated Press.
But the schools’ obligation to investigate and respond to those off-campus attacks could be dramatically reduced by the Education Department’s proposed overhaul of campus sexual assault rules. That’s alarmed advocacy groups and school officials who say it would strip students of important protections in the areas where most of them live.
At the University of Texas in Austin, officials have received 58 reports of sexual assaults on campus grounds since the fall of 2014 while fielding 237 involving private apartments, houses and other areas outside campus, according to the data obtained through public records requests. Another 160 reports didn’t include locations.
“The majority of our students are just not in proximity to campus, and a lot of things happen when they’re not on campus,” said Krista Anderson, the university’s Title IX coordinator. Of the school’s 51,000 students, she said, only about 18 percent live in campus housing.
For now, federal guidelines urge colleges to take action against any sexual misconduct that disrupts a student’s education, regardless of where it took place.
National debt hits new milestone, topping $22 trillion
WASHINGTON — The national debt has passed a new milestone, topping $22 trillion for the first time.
The Treasury Department’s daily statement showed Tuesay that total outstanding public debt stands at $22.01 trillion. It stood at $19.95 trillion when President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017.
The debt figure has been rising at a faster pace following passage of Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut in December 2017 and action by Congress last year to increase spending on domestic and military programs.
Michael Peterson, head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, says “our growing national debt matters because it threatens the economic future of every American.”
Peterson said that interest on the national debt already costs more than $1 billion daily, and “as we borrow trillion after trillion, interest costs will weigh on our economy and make it harder to fund important investments for our future.”
