Washington GOP boosts pressure on Alabama party on Moore

WASHINGTON (AP) — Washington Republicans tightened pressure Tuesday on Alabama’s GOP to keep a defiant Roy Moore from being elected to the Senate next month, with many voicing hope that President Donald Trump could use his clout to resolve a problem that Republicans say leaves them with no easy options.

With Alabama Republicans reluctant to block Moore and enrage his legions of loyal conservative supporters, national GOP leaders were turning to Trump as their best chance of somehow turning the tide. Two women by name have said Moore molested them in the 1970s when one was 14 and the other 16 and he was a local district attorney, and three others said he pursued romantic relationships with them around the same time.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in all-out warfare with Moore, said there’d be conversations about the anti-establishment firebrand after Trump returns Tuesday night from Asia. He said he’d already spoken about Moore to the president, Vice President Mike Pence and White House chief of staff John Kelly.

“He’s obviously not fit to be in the United States Senate and we’ve looked at all the options to try to prevent that from happening,” said McConnell, who Monday said he believed Moore’s accusers. “This close to election, it’s a complicated matter.’”

Moore has denied abusing the women but has not ruled out dating teen-agers at the time, when he was in his early 30s.

Syria market atrocity shows brokers unconcerned with attacks

BEIRUT (AP) — One day after a ferocious attack on a market in northern Syria killed more than 60 people, the collective silence from the three architects of an agreement to ease the fighting in Syria has raised serious questions about their commitment to protect civilians caught in the crossfire of the country’s devastating civil war.

Turkey, Russia and Iran are the guarantors of an agreement meant to freeze the lines of conflict in Syria and protect against the sort of horror that befell market-goers in the town of Atareb on Monday.

“It doesn’t seem to matter if we are bombed or not,” said Fayyad Akoush, 26, who escaped from a grocery that was damaged by the attack.

There were at least three airstrikes on the market, which destroyed one building and damaged several others, according to witnesses and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group. Shoppers were crushed under the rubble or blown apart by the blasts, their limbs torn from their bodies or their heads crushed.

The Syrian Civil Defense search-and-rescue volunteers, known as the White Helmets, told The Associated Press they had given up hope of finding more survivors and were still digging for bodies of the missing more than 24 hours after the attack. They said at least 61 people were killed.

Is gun-maker liable for Newtown? Court takes up the case

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Newtown school shooter Adam Lanza heard the message loud and clear when gun-maker Remington Arms marketed an AR-15-style rifle as an overpowering weapon favored by elite military forces, a lawyer for relatives of some victims of the massacre told the Connecticut Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Lanza, who killed 20 first-graders and six educators with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S on Dec. 14, 2012, was obsessed with violent video games and idolized the Army Rangers, attorney Joshua Koskoff said.

Koskoff asked the high court to reinstate a wrongful death lawsuit against Madison, North Carolina-based Remington. He said the Bushmaster rifle and other AR-15-style firearms were designed as military killing machines and are too dangerous for the public, but Remington glorified them and marketed them to a younger demographic that included the 20-year-old Lanza.

“Adam Lanza heard the message,” Koskoff told the justices, whose decision isn’t expected for several months. “They marketed the weapon for exactly what it was. They used images of soldiers in combat. They used slogans invoking battle and high-pressure missions.

“Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years,” he said.

Iran to probe state-built homes destroyed by deadly quake

SARPOL-E-ZAHAB, Iran (AP) — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani launched an investigation Tuesday into why government housing built by his hard-line predecessor collapsed while others withstood a powerful earthquake near the border with Iraq that killed more than 530 people.

In the Kurdish town of Sarpol-e-Zahab, which was reconstructed in the decades since the 1980s war with Iraq, the outer walls of apartment complexes tumbled away in the magnitude 7.3 earthquake Sunday night. The housing was built as a part of the “Mehr” or “kindness” project of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Some now-homeless survivors simply wept outside, while others angrily showed Associated Press journalists the destruction done by the quake.

“Other buildings near our apartment are not damaged as much because they were built privately,” said Ferdows Shahbazi, 42, who lived in one of the Mehr buildings.

She sarcastically added: “This is ‘kindness’ as the name suggests very well!”

Rescuers used backhoes and other heavy equipment to dig through toppled buildings in Sarpol-e-Zahab, home to more than half of the dead. The apartment complexes sit next to lush pastures in the almost entirely Kurdish province of Kermanshah, nestled in the Zagros Mountains along the border with Iraq.

Both rescuers and residents stood on the remains of homes, looking through the rubble. Searchers used dogs to comb the debris — just as they have since Iran’s 2003 earthquake in Bam that killed 26,000 people — although some clerics insist the animals are unclean.

The quake badly damaged the Sarpol-e-Zahab hospital, forcing the army to set up field clinics. The quake also reportedly killed an unspecified number of soldiers in an army garrison.

Aside from the 530 people killed in Iran, 7,817 were injured, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. Health Minister Hassan Ghazizadeh Hashemi, who visited Kermanshah on Tuesday, warned that the death toll probably would rise.

Climate negotiators look to leaders to boost talks

BONN, Germany (AP) — Diplomats began wrapping up negotiations on advancing the Paris climate accord Tuesday at a global conference in Germany, setting the stage for political leaders to fly in and provide a final shot of momentum.

The talks now in their second week are largely technical in nature. But the Trump administration’s threat to pull the U.S. out of the agreement and extreme weather events in many parts of the world have created pressure for other governments at the meeting to strongly affirm their support for the 2015 Paris accord.

Much of the limelight Wednesday is expected to fall on Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, which is co-hosting the U.N. talks in Bonn with Fiji. Environmental campaigners want Germany to show its commitment to curbing global warming by announcing a deadline for phasing out the use of coal, a major greenhouse gas.

President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands, whose country risks being swallowed by the Pacific Ocean if global warming causes sea levels to keep rising, said a declaration that Germany will end its use of coal “would be a signal of hope for my country and for every vulnerable country around the world.”

Merkel will be joined by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and French President Emmanuel Macron, who has come out strongly in favor of efforts to fight climate change since taking office earlier this year.

Washington GOP boosts pressure on Alabama party on Moore

WASHINGTON (AP) — Washington Republicans tightened pressure Tuesday on Alabama’s GOP to keep a defiant Roy Moore from being elected to the Senate next month, with many voicing hope that President Donald Trump could use his clout to resolve a problem that Republicans say leaves them with no easy options.

With Alabama Republicans reluctant to block Moore and enrage his legions of loyal conservative supporters, national GOP leaders were turning to Trump as their best chance of somehow turning the tide. Two women by name have said Moore molested them in the 1970s when one was 14 and the other 16 and he was a local district attorney, and three others said he pursued romantic relationships with them around the same time.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in all-out warfare with Moore, said there’d be conversations about the anti-establishment firebrand after Trump returns Tuesday night from Asia. He said he’d already spoken about Moore to the president, Vice President Mike Pence and White House chief of staff John Kelly.

“He’s obviously not fit to be in the United States Senate and we’ve looked at all the options to try to prevent that from happening,” said McConnell, who Monday said he believed Moore’s accusers. “This close to election, it’s a complicated matter.’”

Moore has denied abusing the women but has not ruled out dating teen-agers at the time, when he was in his early 30s.

Syria market atrocity shows brokers unconcerned with attacks

BEIRUT (AP) — One day after a ferocious attack on a market in northern Syria killed more than 60 people, the collective silence from the three architects of an agreement to ease the fighting in Syria has raised serious questions about their commitment to protect civilians caught in the crossfire of the country’s devastating civil war.

Turkey, Russia and Iran are the guarantors of an agreement meant to freeze the lines of conflict in Syria and protect against the sort of horror that befell market-goers in the town of Atareb on Monday.

“It doesn’t seem to matter if we are bombed or not,” said Fayyad Akoush, 26, who escaped from a grocery that was damaged by the attack.

There were at least three airstrikes on the market, which destroyed one building and damaged several others, according to witnesses and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group. Shoppers were crushed under the rubble or blown apart by the blasts, their limbs torn from their bodies or their heads crushed.

The Syrian Civil Defense search-and-rescue volunteers, known as the White Helmets, told The Associated Press they had given up hope of finding more survivors and were still digging for bodies of the missing more than 24 hours after the attack. They said at least 61 people were killed.

Is gun-maker liable for Newtown? Court takes up the case

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Newtown school shooter Adam Lanza heard the message loud and clear when gun-maker Remington Arms marketed an AR-15-style rifle as an overpowering weapon favored by elite military forces, a lawyer for relatives of some victims of the massacre told the Connecticut Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Lanza, who killed 20 first-graders and six educators with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S on Dec. 14, 2012, was obsessed with violent video games and idolized the Army Rangers, attorney Joshua Koskoff said.

Koskoff asked the high court to reinstate a wrongful death lawsuit against Madison, North Carolina-based Remington. He said the Bushmaster rifle and other AR-15-style firearms were designed as military killing machines and are too dangerous for the public, but Remington glorified them and marketed them to a younger demographic that included the 20-year-old Lanza.

“Adam Lanza heard the message,” Koskoff told the justices, whose decision isn’t expected for several months. “They marketed the weapon for exactly what it was. They used images of soldiers in combat. They used slogans invoking battle and high-pressure missions.

“Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years,” he said.

Iran to probe state-built homes destroyed by deadly quake

SARPOL-E-ZAHAB, Iran (AP) — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani launched an investigation Tuesday into why government housing built by his hard-line predecessor collapsed while others withstood a powerful earthquake near the border with Iraq that killed more than 530 people.

In the Kurdish town of Sarpol-e-Zahab, which was reconstructed in the decades since the 1980s war with Iraq, the outer walls of apartment complexes tumbled away in the magnitude 7.3 earthquake Sunday night. The housing was built as a part of the “Mehr” or “kindness” project of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Some now-homeless survivors simply wept outside, while others angrily showed Associated Press journalists the destruction done by the quake.

“Other buildings near our apartment are not damaged as much because they were built privately,” said Ferdows Shahbazi, 42, who lived in one of the Mehr buildings.

She sarcastically added: “This is ‘kindness’ as the name suggests very well!”

Rescuers used backhoes and other heavy equipment to dig through toppled buildings in Sarpol-e-Zahab, home to more than half of the dead. The apartment complexes sit next to lush pastures in the almost entirely Kurdish province of Kermanshah, nestled in the Zagros Mountains along the border with Iraq.

Both rescuers and residents stood on the remains of homes, looking through the rubble. Searchers used dogs to comb the debris — just as they have since Iran’s 2003 earthquake in Bam that killed 26,000 people — although some clerics insist the animals are unclean.

The quake badly damaged the Sarpol-e-Zahab hospital, forcing the army to set up field clinics. The quake also reportedly killed an unspecified number of soldiers in an army garrison.

Aside from the 530 people killed in Iran, 7,817 were injured, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. Health Minister Hassan Ghazizadeh Hashemi, who visited Kermanshah on Tuesday, warned that the death toll probably would rise.

Climate negotiators look to leaders to boost talks

BONN, Germany (AP) — Diplomats began wrapping up negotiations on advancing the Paris climate accord Tuesday at a global conference in Germany, setting the stage for political leaders to fly in and provide a final shot of momentum.

The talks now in their second week are largely technical in nature. But the Trump administration’s threat to pull the U.S. out of the agreement and extreme weather events in many parts of the world have created pressure for other governments at the meeting to strongly affirm their support for the 2015 Paris accord.

Much of the limelight Wednesday is expected to fall on Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, which is co-hosting the U.N. talks in Bonn with Fiji. Environmental campaigners want Germany to show its commitment to curbing global warming by announcing a deadline for phasing out the use of coal, a major greenhouse gas.

President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands, whose country risks being swallowed by the Pacific Ocean if global warming causes sea levels to keep rising, said a declaration that Germany will end its use of coal “would be a signal of hope for my country and for every vulnerable country around the world.”

Merkel will be joined by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and French President Emmanuel Macron, who has come out strongly in favor of efforts to fight climate change since taking office earlier this year.