Trump order would ban most transgender troops from serving
PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) President Donald Trump released an order Friday night banning most transgender troops from serving in the military except under "limited circumstances," following up on his calls last year to ban transgender individuals from serving.
The White House said retaining troops with a history or diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" those who may require substantial medical treatment "presents considerable risk to military effectiveness and lethality."
Trump surprised the Pentagon's leadership in a 2017 tweet when he declared he would reverse an Obama-era plan to allow transgender individuals to serve openly. His push for the ban has been blocked by several legal challenges, and three federal courts have ruled against the ban. The Pentagon responded by allowing those serving to stay in the military, and began allowing transgender individuals to enlist beginning Jan. 1.
"This new policy will enable the military to apply well-established mental and physical health standards including those regarding the use of medical drugs equally to all individuals who want to join and fight for the best military force the world has ever seen," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday.
The new policy was promptly assailed by congressional Democrats and civil rights groups. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted, "No one with the strength & bravery to serve in the U.S. military should be turned away because of who they are. This hateful ban is purpose-built to humiliate our brave transgender members of the military who serve with honor & dignity."
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Trump signs $1.3 trillion budget after threatening veto
WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump grudgingly signed a $1.3 trillion federal spending measure Friday and averted a midnight government shutdown but only after undercutting his own negotiators and setting off a mini-panic with a last-minute veto threat. The episode further eroded the already damaged credibility of both the president and a White House staff that had assured the nation he was onboard.
Trump said he was "very disappointed" in the package, in part because it did not fully pay for his planned border wall with Mexico and did not extend protection from deportation to some 700,000 "Dreamer" immigrants due to lose coverage under a program the president himself has moved to eliminate.
But Trump praised the bill's provisions to increase military spending and said he had "no choice but to fund our military."
"My highest duty is to keep America safe," he said.
The bill signing came a few hours after Trump created his latest round of last-minute drama by tweeting that he was "considering" a veto.
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Protesters gather in Washington, demanding gun control
WASHINGTON (AP) Washington is preparing for a massive rally in support of gun control, one that organizers hope will prove that the country has reached an emotional tipping point on gun violence, with teenagers seizing the initiative and leading the demand for change.
The nation's capital is generally nonchalant about protests, but Saturday's gathering has prompted more attention and speculation than usual.
Estimates on crowd size are notoriously unreliable but organizers are hoping to draw 500,000 protesters; that would match last year's women's march and make this one of the largest Washington protests since the Vietnam era. It would also bolster claims that the nation is ready to enact sweeping changes to its gun control laws. More than 800 other concurrent marches are planned in cities across America and dozens of locations overseas.
"I look at the younger kids and the future generations and I never want them to go through what we went through or see what we saw," said 15-year old Kayla Renert, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed on Feb. 14.
Renert, who sheltered in a classroom during the attack and had a friend wounded in the leg, was on a bus bringing her to Washington from the airport after flying up from Florida Friday morning. She pointed out that the Parkland shooting wasn't even the most recent school shooting in the United States. One student was wounded and another later died from her wounds after being shot Tuesday in southern Maryland; the 17-year old gunman was also killed.
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White House staffers on edge as Trump eyes another shake-up
WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump is tired of being told "no."
Six weeks of staff churn and pronouncement shocks reflect a president who has grown increasingly confident on the job and more trusting of his instincts. After 14 months in the Oval Office, Trump is more comfortable bucking the advice of White House staffers and congressional Republicans, and that is increasingly putting even his allies on edge.
Trump may have an even more dramatic shake-up in mind for his administration.
The president has floated to outside advisers a plan to do away with the traditional West Wing power structure, including the formal chief of staff role, to create the more free-wheeling atmosphere he relished while running his business and later his presidential campaign at Trump Tower.
The sense of apprehension is palpable in the West Wing, where tempers are running short and uneasy aides discuss their future employment prospects behind closed doors, according to six White House officials and several outside advisers. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal dynamics.
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Second half of Sweet 16 filled with compelling matchups
Loyola-Chicago and its game-planning nun are headed to the Elite Eight. So too are Kansas State, Florida State and Michigan in this maddest of Marches.
Day 2 of the Sweet 16 has Villanova's Jalen Brunson vs. West Virginia's Jevon Carter, Duke's athletes trying to solve Syracuse's zone and the arm brace saga of Purdue's Isaac Haas. Oh, and all those athletes between Kansas and Clemson.
No wonder sports fans love this time of the year so much.
The marquee matchup comes in the East Region Friday in Boston, where Villanova, one of two No. 1 seeds remaining, faces Press Virginia.
The Wildcats have been on a tear while everyone has been tearing up their brackets, making 31 combined 3-pointers in lopsided opening NCAA Tournament wins over Radford and Alabama. Villanova (32-4) has been even better on defense, holding its first two opponents to 37 percent shooting and less than 60 points per game.
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Army Corps faces questions about vetting border wall company
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) Federal officials are saying little about how they chose a Nebraska startup to build an $11 million section of border wall in California, including whether they knew of the company's connections to a construction firm flagged in a government audit for "many potential fraud indicators."
The top Democrat on the House Committee on National Security is seeking answers from the Department of Homeland Security on what vetting was used last year to select SWF Constructors of Omaha for the job. The company, founded last year with only one employee, is an offshoot of Edgewood, New York-based Coastal Environmental Group, which has been repeatedly sued for underpaying or failing to pay subcontractors.
"It seems DHS has awarded a contract to a brand new company with questionable connections and without the proper prior performance," Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. "In the rush to build President (Donald) Trump's wall, a portion of it may be built by a company with a history of mismanaging and wasting taxpayer funds."
Thompson's office said it had not received a reply to its request by Friday.
A wall along the Mexico-U.S. border was a central promise of Trump's campaign. The contract with SWF is for just a fraction of the larger project, about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) of post-style barriers at the border at Calexico, California.
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District arms teachers with rocks in case of school shooter
A rural school district in Pennsylvania is arming teachers and students with buckets of rocks as a last resort should an armed intruder burst in, the superintendent said Friday.
Every classroom in the district about 90 miles (145 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia has a 5-gallon bucket of river stones, said Blue Mountain School District Superintendent David Helsel.
"We always strive to find new ways to keep our students safe," Helsel told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, adding that the rocks are one small part of the district's overall security plan.
Throwing rocks is more effective than just crawling under desks and waiting, and it gives students and teachers a chance to defend themselves, he said. The district has about 2,700 students at three elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.
Staff and students in the Blue Mountain district have been trained in a program called "ALICE" which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate. Helsel said the rocks are part of the "counter" portion of training, fighting back if the intruder makes his way into the classroom.
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Stocks tumble on trade fears; S&P has worst week in 2 years
NEW YORK (AP) Stocks around the world plunged Friday as investors feared that a trade conflict between the U.S. and China, the biggest economies in the world, would escalate. A second day of big losses pushed U.S. stocks to their worst week in two years.
Investors fear that if China responds in kind to sanctions on $60 billion worth of Chinese imports the White House announced on Thursday, it will be a first step toward a full-blown trade war that could damage the global economy and slash profits at big U.S. exporters like Apple and Boeing.
The market's two biggest sectors slumped the most. Technology stocks have made enormous gains over the past year, but since they do so much business outside the U.S., investors see them as particularly vulnerable in a trade dispute. The sector dropped 7.9 percent this week.
Banks also fell sharply. Amid the trade-war rumblings, investors fled to the safety of bonds and drove down yields, a potential negative for bank profits. That marked a reversal from earlier in the week, when banks rose as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
It wound up being the worst week for U.S. indexes since January 2016. The S&P 500 index sank 6 percent. Among notable decliners was Facebook, which lost 13.9 percent, or $68 billion in value, as outrage mounted over its handling of user data. That's about as much as the company was worth in in 2012, the year of its initial public offering.
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Lobbying pays off for small drugmaker in budget bill
WASHINGTON (AP) Tucked in the massive congressional budget bill is a provision that props up the price Medicare pays for a handful of medications, costing taxpayers millions at a time when the Trump administration is vowing to reduce the cost of prescription drugs.
Lawmakers acted after a lobbying campaign by a small Washington state pharmaceutical company called Omeros. Its main product is a drug called Omidria, used by hospitals in cataract surgery, which had recently lost a coveted Medicare reimbursement status. Individuals associated with the company also stepped up their political contributions.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, the fourth-ranking House Republican, took the issue to Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., securing a place for the drug provision in the 2,232-page spending bill signed Friday by President Donald Trump, aides said. The provision restores the drug's expired reimbursement status for two years, making it more lucrative for hospitals to continue using it.
The targeted provision succeeded even as broader health care measures failed to make the cut in the budget bill, from legislation to stabilize insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act for millions of consumers, to a drug-industry backed effort to roll back recent changes that shift some Medicare costs to pharmaceutical companies.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the pricing break for the Omeros drug and three products from other companies will cost taxpayers $26 million over 10 years, taking into account long-range effects.
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New witnesses detail sexual misconduct by Tavis Smiley
PBS says more witnesses have detailed sexual misconduct allegations against talk-show host Tavis Smiley, who was suspended in December and later fired.
In papers filed in Washington, D.C., Superior Court in response to a breach-of-contract lawsuit by Smiley, PBS said the witnesses spoke to an independent investigator and corroborated initial accounts that Smiley had established a pattern of sexual relationships with subordinates.
The filing Tuesday also said he subjected subordinates to unwanted sexual advances including requests for specific sex acts and made lewd jokes.
"Over a dozen individuals reported that they were either subjected to or witnessed unwelcome, inappropriate sexual comments or conduct or otherwise inappropriate behavior by Mr. Smiley or were informed of the misconduct contemporaneously," the court filing said.
Smiley and his representatives stuck by their denials.