Iowa City, Iowa
Among their priorities: eliminating gun-free zones at schools, reducing requirements for background checks and ensuring that concealed carry handgun permits from one state are recognized everywhere in the U.S.
“This is our historic moment to go on offense and to defeat the forces that have aligned against our freedom once and for all,” Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association, said in a video after the Nov. 8 election. “The individual right to carry a firearm in defense of our lives and our families does not and should not end at any state line.”
In pursuing their agenda, the gun lobby and its GOP supporters could find themselves at odds with two other tenets of Republican orthodoxy: states’ rights and local control.
“It would be ironic to see conservatives who long have professed a belief in states’ rights override states’ choices in this area,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Irvine School of Law.
Beirut
Medical officials secured yet another plot for the dead.
But they say they have no way to dig graves with government troops now crashing into opposition-held eastern Aleppo, shelling civilians as they flee and forcing thousands to squeeze into a chaotic, devastated and shrinking pocket of neighborhoods.
“We have no more room,” said Mohammed Abu Jaafar, the head of the local forensic authority. His department is so overwhelmed, the staff registering the dead pleaded with him not to take any more bodies.
“Even if I were to consider mass burials, I don’t have the machines to do the digging,” he said in a telephone interview.
Dignity in death has been lost as the rebel-held enclave that has held out for four years collapses.
Santiago, Cuba
The private, early-morning ceremony was attended by members of Fidel Castro’s family, the ruling Politburo of the single-party system he founded, and Latin American leaders who installed closely allied leftist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Brazil.
After nine days of fervent national mourning and wall-to-wall homages to Castro on state-run media, the government barred independent coverage of the funeral, releasing a handful of photos and brief descriptions of the ceremony later in the day.
The ceremony began at 6:39 a.m. when the military caravan bearing Castro’s remains in a flag-draped cedar coffin left the Plaza of the Revolution in the eastern city of Santiago. Thousands of people lined the two-mile route to Santa Ifigenia cemetery, waving Cuban flags and shouting “Long live Fidel!”
The ashes were delivered to Castro’s younger brother and successor, President Raul Castro, who wore his olive general’s uniform as he placed the remains into a niche in the enormous grey boulder that will serve as his tomb. The niche was sealed with a green marble plaque emblazed with the name “Fidel” in gold letters.
— Wire reports
ATLANTA (AP) — When U.S. Forest Ranger Jody Bandy confronted the man in the Pisgah National Forest, he said he’d been at the nearby wildfire and “couldn’t take it anymore.”
Then he ran from the officer, tumbling head-over-head down the mountainside, into the river below and slamming into boulders in the water, Bandy said in a court affidavit.
After an ambulance took the bleeding man to a hospital, Bandy peered through the front windshield of his pickup and saw what appeared to be a suicide note on the dash, the affidavit says.
The Nov. 19 encounter in western North Carolina underscores the toll these wildfires can take on people who live through them.
Many survivors need help to cope, and signs of problems such as nightmares, depression and anxiety might not show up for months, said Valerie Cole of the American Red Cross. In some ways, escaping a fire-filled forest as thousands did recently in and around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, can be more traumatic than hurricanes, floods or earthquakes, experts say. One reason: Flames spread so rapidly that people had no time to prepare.