The superintendent provided BuzzFeed News with an image of some of the river rocks that have been collected and stashed in buckets in each of his school’s classrooms.
Before this, Helsel said the district “didn’t really have a plan or program for armed intruders.”
So two years ago, he recruited the help of a company called ALICE (short for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) that touts itself as the “number one active shooter civilian response training.”
After teachers and students were trained by ALICE on all of the actions to take in the event of an active school shooting, including standardized lock-ins and lockdowns. Helsel thought to implement one “last resort” protocol.
“Every door [to the classroom] has a device installed that secures the door shut,” he said. “It makes it darn near impossible to gain access. Our staff is then trained to barricade the door.”
However, if all else fails, and the shooter attempts to or successfully enters the classroom, the teacher and students will have the rocks to defend themselves.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday that the Justice Department is proposing a regulation to define bump stocks as machine guns under federal law, effectively banning the device used by a gunman in Las Vegas last fall that killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others in just minutes.
“After the senseless attack in Las Vegas, this proposed rule is a critical step in our effort to reduce the threat of gun violence that is in keeping with the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress,” Sessions said in a statement issued on the eve of the March for Our Lives anti-gun-violence rally expected to draw hundreds of thousands to the nation’s capital.
Sessions’s effort to ban the device is likely to face lawsuits from manufacturers.
After the October shooting, Justice Department officials started a process to ban bump stocks — gun accessories that attach to a semiautomatic firearm and effectively turn the rifles into machine guns, which are prohibited under federal law.
In February, after 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., President Trump increased pressure on the Justice Department to forbid bump stocks, ordering Sessions to move as quickly as possible. Trump issued a memo instructing the attorney general “to dedicate all available resources to . . . propose for notice and comment a rule banning all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns.”
The Justice Department is proposing to amend the regulations of its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives division to say that bump stocks fall within the definition of an automatic weapon because they allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.
The proposed rule will be published in the Federal Register with a 90-day comment period. If the rule becomes final, bump-stock devices would be banned and people who have the devices would be required to surrender, destroy or make their devices permanently inoperable.
In 2010, ATF decided it could not regulate bump stocks because officials said the devices did not meet the definition of a machine gun. A 1986 law bans the sale of machine guns manufactured after 1986 and restricts the sale of such guns before that year.
ATF officials concluded that bump stocks did not fall under the law because they did not permanently alter a gun’s trigger mechanism.
The Trump administration asked ATF to reconsider that decision.
On Friday, after Sessions’s announcement, Trump took to Twitter to blame his predecessor for allowing bump stocks to go unregulated for the last eight years.
“Obama Administration legalized bump stocks,” Trump tweeted. “BAD IDEA. As I promised, today the Department of Justice will issue the rule banning BUMP STOCKS with a mandated comment period. We will BAN all devices that turn legal weapons into illegal machine guns.”
Current and former ATF agents have told Congress that because of ATF’s 2010 conclusion, it is Congress that must take action on the devices.
American Media Inc. paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story (her lawyer took nearly half) and assured her she would be able to write fitness columns for two years. AMI also said she would land on the cover of several of the company’s publications, including Star magazine, Radar Online and Men’s Fitness, where she had appeared in 1998. In pushing her to sign the deal, the men at AMI emphasized McDougal’s age, telling her that since she was an “older model,” the deal would be very important, according to the suit.
President Trump’s national security adviser is out. H. R. McMaster, will be replaced by John R. Bolton, a hard-line former U.S. ambassador.
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Video
How the Las Vegas Gunman Planned a Massacre, in 7 Days of Video
Using exclusive surveillance footage obtained from MGM Resorts, we pieced together the last days of Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas gunman. He plays video poker, laughs with hotel staff and hauls bag after bag of weapons into his suite.
By MALACHY BROWNE, NATALIE RENEAU, ADAM GOLDMAN and DREW JORDAN on Publish Date March 22, 2018.
Using exclusively obtained surveillance footage, we pieced together the last days of Stephen Paddock, the gunman who rained lethal fire on a music festival in Las Vegas last October, killing scores.
He plays video poker, laughs with hotel staff — and hauls bag after bag of weapons into his suite.
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Photo Credit
Manu Fernandez/Associated Press
•“The most important thing is that we fix this system.”
Not everyone was impressed by Mr. Zuckerberg’s statements, days after we broke the story that data from over 50 million profiles had been secretly scraped. “He avoided the big issue,” an analyst said, “which is that for many years, Facebook was basically giving away user data like it was handing out candy.”
On “The Daily” podcast, one of the reporters who interviewed Mr. Zuckerberg described how it went. (Facebook’s outreach was so sudden, they had to ask him to hold the line while they read his just-posted public statement.)
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Photo Credit
Erin Schaff for The New York Times
•Septuagenarian schoolyard taunts.
Joe Biden started it. T he former vice president — who may be considering a 2020 challenge for the presidency — said that if he were younger (he’s 75), he would “beat the hell” out of President Trump for disrespecting women.
This week’sedition asks: Where is integration working in the country, and where is it failing? (A big inspiration for the piece was an Uber driver who turned out to hold a Ph.D. in literature.)
And many of you connected with the reflection on Nippers in our last newsletter. Here are some of your responses on why you love — or hate — the lifesaving surf program for kids.
• Tencent Holdings, Asia’s most valuable company, lost more than $26 billion of market capitalization after it warned that it would be reducing spending on content and technology to pursue sustained growth.
• Citigroup is setting restrictions on the sale of firearms by business customers, making it the first Wall Street bank to take a stance in the divisive U.S. gun control debate.
• Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money are up for sale.
• The great Pacific garbage patch contains at least 79,000 tons of material spread over 1.6 million square kilometers, according to a new study. That’s about the size of Mongolia or Iran, and as much as 16 times larger than past estimates. [Science News]
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• The Queensland police confirmed that two Americans died in a helicopter crash off the Great Barrier Reef on Wednesday. [The New York Times]
• A Perth department store was accused of racial profiling after staff members called security on an Indigenous teenager shopping with his father. [ABC]
• “Dead to me.” The immigration minister Peter Dutton denounced the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Guardian after they criticized his plan to fast-track visas for white South African farmers. [The Guardian]
•The ashes of Stephen Hawking, the renowned cosmologist, will be interred next to the grave of Sir Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey. [The New York Times]
• Honey Popcorn, a K-pop group made up of Japanese adult video actresses, released its debut mini-album, “Bibidi Babidi Boo.” (Watch the video.) The backlash in South Korea has been intense. [Yonhap]
Smarter Living
Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.
• Encourage great hotel service by following these tips.
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Noteworthy
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U.S. National Archives, via Associated Press
• The Juneau, a long-lost Navy cruiser blasted apart by a Japanese torpedo in World War II, was discovered off the coast of the Solomon Islands by a team funded by the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen. Among the hundreds of dead were five brothers from one Iowa family.
• In praise of Grandma. As the Overlooked project started, we asked readers to suggest women they felt deserved, but didn’t get, obituaries in The Times. Here are the stories you told us about your grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
• And a team of scientists spend time in the streets of Tokyo and the shark-filled waters of Asia in “The Rising Sea,” a thriller by Clive Cussler and Graham Brown that’s No. 1 on our hardcover fiction and combined print and e-book fiction lists.
Back Story
Photo Credit
Frank Duenzl/Picture-Alliance, via Associated Press
It’s a shortcut used the world over — and even beyond, having been uttered at least once during a space mission.
On this day in 1839, The Boston Morning Post published “O.K.” for the first known time, using the abbreviation next to the words “all correct.” (It’s not written “okay,” The Times stylebook says.)
There have been many theories about its origin, but the most likely is that O.K. was an abbreviation for the deliberately misspelled “orl korrect” (all correct), and the expression gained prominence in the mid-19th century.
Allen Walker Read, a longtime English professor at Columbia University, debunked some theories in the 1960s, including that the term had come from Andrew Jackson’s poor spelling, a Native American word or an Army biscuit.
Today, O.K. is “an Americanism adopted by virtually every language, and one of the first words spoken on the moon,” the Times obituary of Mr. Read noted in 2002.
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The professor didn’t “appreciate having ‘O.K.’ overshadow the hundreds of other etymologies he divined,” it continued. He also tracked early uses of Dixie, Podunk and the “almighty dollar.”
In the 1920s, Mr. Read hitchhiked through western Iowa hunting down the word blizzard.
“A man called Lightnin’ Ellis had first used the word for a snowstorm in 1870,” he learned. “Within 10 years, it had spread throughout the Midwest.”
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Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning. You can also receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights.
And our Australia bureau chief offers a weekly letter adding analysis and conversations with readers.
Watching the footage, nearly six months later, is a kind of compulsive ghost-hunting. In the antiseptic stare of the surveillance camera, even the most ordinary interactions are deformed, made weird only by what we know now. It is unnerving because it ends in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. It is unnerving because even with his every movement laid out, the grotesquely composed protagonist of this film gives away nothing.
Video
10 Minutes. 12 Gunfire Bursts. 30 Videos. Mapping the Las Vegas Massacre.
The shots began at 10:05. Twelve bursts of gunfire later, the police broke down Stephen Paddock’s door at the Mandalay Bay. The Times mapped 30 videos to draw perhaps the most complete picture to date of what happened.
By MALACHY BROWNE, DREW JORDAN, NICOLE FINEMAN and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date October 21, 2017.
The faces of hotel guests and staff are blurred to preserve their privacy, reducing them to smudges that crisscross the screen at random. Mr. Paddock is the only person who appears throughout, the Waldo whose distinctive frame and faintly lopsided gait our eyes quickly learn to seek out in every frame. The clips begin when he appears and end after he leaves. The other people are little more than a backdrop.
Except that some of them may become his victims. And some are already his unwitting accomplices.
Over and over in the clips, Mr. Paddock is seen leaving the Mandalay Bay for his home in Mesquite, returning with a dark minivan loaded with suitcases. Over and over, valets take his keys; over and over, bellhops stack his luggage on gold carts, helping him transport at least 21 bags over the course of seven days. As they take the service elevator upstairs, Mr. Paddock chats with them. He cracks a joke. He tips.
They have no idea that the suitcases they are so conscientiously carrying are full of guns and ammunition.
Mandalay Bay employees are virtually the only people with whom Mr. Paddock interacts in the surveillance footage. He checks in at the V.I.P. desk, eats alone at the resort’s sushi restaurant, makes snack runs to the gift shop and gambles at the high-stakes video poker machines. Casino hosts greet him as a regular. Security cameras capture him with arms aloft, celebrating a $1,000 win.
But his movements are otherwise sedate, deliberate, unobtrusive, so much so that when he raises a hand to scratch his face in the elevator at one point, the extra movement registers as significant, even sinister.
Toward the end of the footage, two guests carrying shiny plastic inner tubes get off the elevator, padding out in flip-flops. Mr. Paddock pauses to let them off, then gets on.
It is the afternoon of Sept. 30. They seem to be on their way to the pool. He is on his way upstairs, where his guns await.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appealed to State Department employees on Thursday to maintain their integrity and to be kind in a “mean-spirited town” as he bid farewell to the staff he led for barely a year.
Tillerson urged a few hundred employees gathered in the main lobby of the Harry S. Truman Building to show respect for each other and to undertake one act of kindness a day. He drew sustained applause when he added: “This can be a very mean-spirited town. But you don’t have to choose to participate in that. Each of us get to choose the person we want to be, and the way we want to be treated, and the way we will treat others.”
Tillerson, 66, was fired by President Trump on March 13. He officially learned of his dismissal through a Trump tweet saying that CIA Director Mike Pompeo would be his replacement.
Tillerson had rebuffed suggestions he would resign amid a series of White House leaks over the previous months, apparently calculated to shame him into leaving, and lately had insisted he would be at the State Department through the end of the year, if not longer.
In his speech, Tillerson did not mention Trump by name but invoked the values of respect, integrity, honesty and accountability, all core attributes he cited at meet-and-greet gatherings with embassy employees around the world.
Outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson waves as he walks out of the doors of the State Department on March 22, 2018. (Susan Walsh/AP)
“Never lose sight of your most valuable asset, the most valuable asset you possess: your personal integrity,” Tillerson said. “Only you can relinquish it or allow it to be compromised. Once you’ve done so, it is very, very hard to regain it.”
“I hope you will continue to treat each other with respect,” he continued. “Regardless of the job title, the station in life or your role, everyone is important to the State Department. We’re all just human beings trying to do our part.”
Tillerson officially remains secretary of state until March 31, but he has turned over the day-to-day running of the agency to his deputy, John Sullivan. In a speech, Sullivan said Tillerson was returning to his ranch in Texas later in the day.
“His work for our country, leading the department, his voice for peace, for humanitarian assistance has been an inspiration for me,” Sullivan said. “And I was honored — have been honored to work for him, to have been selected by him to serve as deputy secretary of state.”
All secretaries of state make their ritual arrival and farewell speeches in the lobby of the building where Tillerson spoke the day he first entered it on Feb. 2, 2017, and again on Thursday.
Many speak from the stairway to a mezzanine so they can be viewed by all in the jam-packed room. But Tillerson addressed the crowd from the lobby floor, standing in front of a wall plaque dedicated to State Department employees who have been killed in the line of duty. It was a poignant nod to Tillerson’s concern for the safety of his staff. He often spoke of waking up in the morning wondering whether everyone was safe.
The crowd of assembled of employees Thursday was noticeably sparser than usual. A large number of senior officials have resigned or taken early retirement, in part because they did not want to serve the Trump administration but also because they considered Tillerson remote and instrumental in their being sidelined in U.S. foreign policy.
Among those in the crowd was Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary who was fired when he contradicted the White House version of Tillerson’s dismissal. Goldstein told reporters that his boss had not spoken to the president that morning and had no idea why he was being replaced.
Although some had mixed views of Tillerson’s brief tenure — and some were highly critical — many thought he had been treated shabbily by the White House.
Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert who served under six secretaries of state, tweeted that Tillerson, who had the shortest tenure of any top diplomat in modern U.S. history, “never had a chance and was treated in a cruel/humiliating manner.”
But criticism still followed Tillerson as he walked out the door.
John Kirby, a former State Department spokesman who now works as an analyst on CNN, tweeted, “Tillerson deserves credit for being a gentleman a man of integrity. But we should not forget the degree to which he failed to: advance a cohesive foreign policy . . . promote respect the expertise of career diplomats . . . and fight for the resources the State Dept sorely needs.”
Tillerson’s 14 months at the helm of State Department were marked by several disagreements with the president he served. Tillerson urged Trump not to withdraw the United States from international commitments made by the previous administration, such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump is contemplating leaving.
Trump in turn repeatedly undercut Tillerson, often contradicting his top diplomat’s measured statements with a breezy tweet. Their relationship never seemed to recover after Tillerson reportedly was overheard referring to Trump as a “moron,” a remark Tillerson never denied, calling it beneath his dignity. Trump later offered to compare IQ test results.
In leaving an administration where federal employees are sometimes denigrated as being part of a “deep state” intent on derailing Trump’s agenda, Tillerson expressed appreciation for the contributions made by State Department employees. He thanked employees “from the mailroom to the seventh floor and all points in between.” The seventh floor is where Tillerson and his senior aides have offices.
“The country faces many challenges,” he said, “in some instances perplexing foreign affairs relationships, and in other instances serious national security threats. In these times, your continued diligence and devotion to the State Department’s mission has never been more necessary.”
Crews work on downed power lines following a nor’easter. CBS News
Major power outages are possible, especially given the hit the power grid took during the earlier March nor’easter.
On Monday, New York’s Westchester County Board of Legislators held a special meeting on the massive power outages caused by the previous storms, grilling representatives of Con Ed and NYSEG, CBS New York reports.
Many customers in Westchester are still frustrated with the delayed response to power outages after those storms downed trees and power lines.
“There were three cables on the street, a pole with the transformer, a tree came down,” said Mamaroneck resident Karen Fontecchio.
In New Jersey, cleanup from March’s previous storms was still ongoing.
By Tuesday evening, Gov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency. He said the biggest shortfall during the last storm was the performance by utility companies, which the board of public utilities was investigating.
“We’re also, preemptively in this storm to get work, to nudge them and all others ahead of this,” Murphy said. “That encourages them bringing in other men and women from our sister utilities, which they are apparently doing.”
PSEG says it has mobilized nearly 600 mutual aid and contract employees ahead of the storm. JCPL representative Ron Morano says wind is once again a major concern. In preparation for Wednesday, the company is bringing in extra workers from Ohio and setting up two more staging areas in Ocean and Essex County.
In addition, the utility company will have a daily call with local officials to get feedback and response.
Electrician Mike Lettera of Big Electric in Paramus says generator installations were at an all-time high.
Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew McCabe for what Sessions called a “lack of candor,” McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate, but McCabe’s previously-unreported decision to actually put the attorney general in the crosshairs of an FBI probe was an exceptional move.
One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that.
Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News was told.
By then, Sessions had recused himself from the FBI’s probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, giving Rosenstein oversight of the growing effort.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on November 14, 2017, in Washington, DC.
Within weeks, Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation and related inquiries, including the Sessions matter.
Two months ago, Sessions was interviewed by Mueller’s team, and the federal inquiry related to his candor during his confirmation process has since been shuttered, according to a lawyer representing Sessions.
“The Special Counsel’s office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress,” attorney Chuck Cooper told ABC News on Wednesday.
According to the sources, McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after a top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., wrote a letter in March 2017 to the FBI urging agents to investigate “all contacts” Sessions may have had with Russians, and “whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred.”
It’s unclear how actively federal authorities pursued the matter in the months before Sessions’ interview with Mueller’s investigators. It’s also unclear whether the special counsel may still be pursuing other matters related to Sessions and statements he has made to Congress – or others – since his confirmation.
During his confirmation in January 2017, Sessions told the Senate committee that he had not been in contact with anyone connected to the Russian government about the 2016 election. He also said he was “not aware” of anyone else affiliated with the Trump campaign communicating with the Russian government ahead of the election.
Two months later, after a Washington Post report disputed what Sessions told Congress, the attorney general acknowledged he had met the Russian ambassador twice during the presidential campaign, but insisted none of those interactions were “to discuss issues of the campaign.”
Sessions “made no attempt to correct his misleading testimony until The Washington Post revealed that, in fact, he had at least two meetings with the Russian ambassador,” Leahy and Franken said in a statement at the time. “We know he would not tolerate dishonesty if he were in our shoes.”
Sessions called any suggestions that he misled lawmakers “false.”
Nevertheless, charges subsequently brought by Mueller raised more questions over Sessions’ testimony to Congress.
In November, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos admitted to federal authorities that during the campaign he was in frequent contact with Russian operatives about setting up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Papadopoulos pitched the idea to Sessions and Trump at a meeting of the then-candidate’s foreign policy team in March 2016.
Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesActing FBI Director Andrew McCabe, testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill, June 7, 2017.
Sessions later told lawmakers he “always told the truth,” insisting he didn’t recall the March 2016 meeting when first testifying to Congress. He later remembered the meeting after reading news reports about it, he said.
“We are concerned by Attorney General Sessions’ lack of candor to the Committee and his failure thus far to accept responsibility for testimony that could be construed as perjury,” Leahy and Franken said in their March 2017 letter to then-FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump two months later.
It is a federal crime for anyone to knowingly provide false information to Congress – or to a federal law enforcement agency. No charges have been announced against McCabe, and there’s no indication that the FBI has recommended he be charged.
McCabe was fired Friday after the Justice Department‘s inspector general concluded that McCabe misled investigators looking into how Justice Department and FBI officials handled matters associated with the 2016 presidential election.
In October 2016, hoping to push back on a series of news reports questioning whether he might be trying to protect Hillary Clinton, McCabe authorized two FBI officials to speak with a reporter about his efforts to boost the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation. When he was questioned later about that decision, McCabe “lacked candor – including under oath – on multiple occasions,” Sessions said in a statement announcing McCabe’s firing.
“The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability,” Sessions said. “As the [FBI’s ethics office] stated, ‘all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.'”
McCabe vehemently denies misleading investigators, saying in his own statement that he is “being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey.”
For more than a year, Trump and other Republicans have questioned whether McCabe harbored a political bias when making law enforcement decisions as deputy director. McCabe’s critics point to his ties to Democrats, particularly his wife’s failed Democratic run for state senate in Virginia nearly three years ago.
But in an interview with ABC News, McCabe insisted politics was “absolutely not” a factor in any of the decisions he made, noting he has considered himself a Republican all his life.
A representative for McCabe declined to comment for this article.
Franken, one of the two senators who pushed the FBI to investigate Sessions, resigned from Congress in December amid several claims of sexual misconduct.
–ABC News’ Trish Turner and Matt Mosk contributed to this report
Just two days before tariffs on foreign-made steel and aluminum are scheduled to take effect, the Trump administration has yet to make public its plans for how the import levies will work in practice — creating confusion for its closest allies.
In recent days, top steel suppliers such as Brazil, South Korea and Japan have complained that the office of the U.S. trade representative has yet to establish a process for countries to apply for tariff exemptions, leaving it unclear whether any will be granted in time to forestall billions of dollars in border charges.
“We’re waiting for an indication of the procedure for us to make our proposal,” said Sérgio Amaral, Brazil’s ambassador to the United States. “There’s no indication by the USTR as to how this is going to work.”
The White House promised earlier this month that countries could ask for a waiver of the new import taxes of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. Only countries with a U.S. security relationship are eligible, and they must propose alternative ways of addressing administration concerns over rising import figures.
But with time running out, no official guidance on how to apply has been made public, leaving diplomats baffled. The delayed rollout raises the risk of disrupting trade between the United States and some of its closest allies.
“It’s very hard to predict what the final outcome would be,” said one South Korean official, who would discuss confidential discussions only if granted anonymity. “But we will know soon. The 23rd of March is right around the corner.”
Foreign officials this week went to Washington in the hope of gaining clarity about the administration’s plans. Cecilia Malmström, the European Union’s trade chief, arrived Tuesday for meetings with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other administration officials, vowing in a tweet that she would “insist that the E.U. as a whole is excluded” from the tariffs.
The Commerce Department said Wednesday that Ross and Malmström would “launch immediately a process of discussion” on trade issues, including steel and aluminum, “with a view to identifying mutually acceptable outcomes as rapidly as possible.”
Peter Altmaier, the German minister for economic affairs and energy, met with Ross one day earlier in the hope of heading off a trade war between the United States and E.U. The E.U. has made public a 10-page itemized list of U.S. products that could be targeted for retaliatory measures if the steel and aluminum tariffs take effect March 23.
Japan’s economy minister and foreign affairs minister have met directly with U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer. But “the specific process for obtaining a country exemption from the tariffs established by President Trump’s proclamation on steel and aluminum has yet to be disclosed,” the Japanese embassy in Washington said Tuesday.
On Capitol Hill Wednesday, Lighthizer told the House Ways and Means Committee that the import taxes will not apply to countries that have begun talks with the United States, likely including South Korea, Argentina, Australia and the E.U. He said talks with Brazil, the No. 2 steel supplier to the United States, may begin soon.
“Countries will get out as we come to agreement. Some will be in position where the duties will not apply to them in course of negotiations,” Lighthizer said in his first public comments on the matter. “Our hope is end by the end of April we (will) have this part of the process resolved.”
The president’s March 8 decision to announce the measures, citing a threat to national security, took aides and allies by surprise. On a call with reporters to explain the move, a senior administration official provided conflicting statements about whether all countries or just those with U.S. security ties could seek waivers.
Lighthizer’s subsequent assignment to oversee the exemption process, which could involve dozens of countries, comes at a time when his office remains thinly staffed.
“They want to cut deals with everybody. But they’re not set up to do that in real time,” said William Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official.
Trump imposed the tariffs under a little-used provision in U.S. trade law that allows such measures in the case of threats to national security. That rationale has irked several of the countries targeted, such as Japan, South Korea and Germany, which are steel suppliers and longtime American allies.
In 2017, the United States imported 34.6 million metric tons of steel from 85 countries.
Trump exempted from the tariffs Canada, the U.S. market’s leading source of steel, and Mexico, ranked fourth, at least while talks aimed at renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement make progress. The president also said that if he allows some countries to escape the tariffs, he may raise the import levies on others.
Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he doubts that many other countries will evade Trump’s new taxes. “If you exclude Europe, why not Japan? Then pretty quickly the economic significance of the tariffs get whittled down to something more symbolic,” he said.
Brazil offers a good illustration of the complexity involved in clamping down on market distortions that most analysts blame on China’s excessive production of industrial metals.
The Latin American giant buys about $1 billion worth of metallurgical coal from U.S. mines and uses it to produce semifinished steel, which is then sold to U.S. customers for use in making finished steel products.
“We provide inputs that make U.S. steel more competitive,” Amaral said.
Administration officials have said that exempting too many countries from the tariffs might permit Chinese steel to enter the United States via those countries. But shipping steel from China to Brazil costs more than twice as much as sending it to East Coast ports in the United States, making such transshipment impractical.
Brazil, a U.S. defense treaty ally, also has 16 trade levies designed to keep Chinese steel out of its market.
Amaral, who has met with several members of the U.S. Congress to plead Brazil’s case, said he is “confident” that ultimately the country will be spared the U.S. tariffs. “There is no argument that will justify these measures being taken,” he said in an interview.
Lighthizer shared with European Union officials five general criteria for weighing exemption requests, including a country’s level of cooperation with U.S. aims at the World Trade Organization, its willingness to keep its metals exports at 2017 levels and its handling of trade with China, according to a former U.S. trade official familiar with the discussions.
Officials from Hong Kong, which accounts for 0.2 percent of U.S. aluminum imports, said they have tried in vain to contact officials at the White House, State Department and other agencies seeking clarification.
“We are up for seeking an exemption. But we don’t see any specific procedures for doing so,” said Clement Leung, Hong Kong commissioner for economic and trade affairs.
The Commerce Department is in charge of a separate process that permits companies to win approval to import steel and aluminum products that are not made in the United States without paying the new tax. Applicants must complete a five-page Excel spreadsheet and file a separate form for “each distinct type and dimension of steel product to be imported,” the department said.
Commerce is getting a late start. In 2002, when the United States last imposed steel tariffs, the exclusion system was established four months before President George W. Bush announced the trade measures.
But Reinsch, an international business specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the process should operate in a straightforward manner now that it is up and running. “Commerce knows how to do that,” he said.
Ms. Damond, 40, a yoga and meditation instructor who was engaged to be married, had called 911 twice that July night to report what she feared was a sexual assault happening outside her home in an affluent part of Minneapolis. Officer Noor and his partner, Officer Matthew Harrity, arrived minutes later.
The two officers were driving through an alley near Ms. Damond’s home with their emergency lights off, state investigators said, when Officer Harrity reported being startled by a loud noise. Moments later, Officer Noor, the passenger in the police car, fired a shot through the cruiser’s open driver’s side window, fatally striking Ms. Damond.
Neither officer’s body camera was turned on, and there is no known video of the shooting.
In a statement released by their lawyer, Robert Bennett, members of Ms. Damond’s family applauded the charging decision and called it “one step toward justice for this iniquitous act.”
“We remain hopeful that a strong case will be presented by the prosecutor, backed by verified and detailed forensic evidence, and that this will lead to a conviction,” the family’s statement said. “No charges can bring our Justine back. However, justice demands accountability for those responsible for recklessly killing the fellow citizens they are sworn to protect, and today’s actions reflect that.”
For months, the authorities released little information about what led to the gunfire, and Officer Noor declined to speak to investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who were asked by the city to review the shooting. The state agency finished its investigation in mid-September and handed over its findings to Mr. Freeman’s office.
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Ms. Damond’s death happened a month after a police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a motorist in nearby Falcon Heights. It renewed debate in the Minneapolis region about how officers use force and treat residents. Protesters marched, demanded policy changes and at one point shouted over the mayor at the time, Betsy Hodges, during a news conference.
For years, activists in Minnesota have protested police shootings, including many high-profile cases in which black men were killed. Some of the same activists demonstrated after the shooting of Ms. Damond, who was white, and suggested that her death might galvanize some white people who had previously been silent about police misconduct.
Officer Noor, a member of the area’s large Somali immigrant community, began patrolling the district in southwest Minneapolis 14 months before the shooting. He was the first Somali officer to be stationed in that area, and was seen as a cultural bridge to a community that has at times had tensions with the police.
After the shooting, Ms. Hodges moved quickly to dismiss the Minneapolis police chief, Janee Harteau, and the police department announced new rules requiring body cameras to be turned on in more situations.
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“Why don’t we have footage from body cameras?” Ms. Hodges said in July. “Why were they not activated? We all want answers to those questions.”
Ms. Hodges, who faced criticism for her handling of police shootings, was defeated for re-election in November and left office in January. Don Damond, Ms. Damond’s fiancé, endorsed the winning mayoral candidate, Jacob Frey, and said that Ms. Hodges’s efforts to improve the Police Department “were too little, too late.”
Activists demanded the swift filing of criminal charges against Officer Noor, but Mr. Freeman resisted the requests, saying he needed to wait for the findings of the investigation.
“We have received some emails and phone calls from members of the community demanding that we charge the officer immediately and ascribing all kinds of nefarious reasons as to why we haven’t done so,” Mr. Freeman wrote in August.
In December, Mr. Freeman was videotaped at a labor union gathering saying that investigators in the case “haven’t done their job,” that Officer Harrity’s statement was unhelpful, and that he did not have enough information to make a charging decision.
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“I’ve got to have the evidence, and I don’t have it yet,” Mr. Freeman said in the video. “And let me just say, it’s not my fault.”
Mr. Freeman later apologized to the state investigative agency and said, “I was wrong to discuss both the agency’s work and what discussions we are having internally at the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office.”
Mr. Freeman initially said he expected to make a charging decision in 2017. But he reversed course on Dec. 28, saying that “review of the case will not be rushed” and that the investigation would continue into the new year.
Prosecutors often face difficulty securing convictions against police officers involved in shootings. In the Falcon Heights case, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in June by jurors in a neighboring county for the fatal 2016 shooting of Philando Castile. Officers in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Missouri were acquitted last year in trials over fatal shootings.
Minneapolis police records released after the shooting showed that Officer Noor had been the subject of three citizen complaints during his short career. Details about the incidents were not released. A day before the shooting of Ms. Damond, a lawsuit accusing Officer Noor and two colleagues of misconduct was filed in federal court.
Ms. Damond’s death added to a longstanding, tense debate over police conduct in Minnesota, where the shooting of Mr. Castile in Falcon Heights prompted large protests, and where demonstrators in Minneapolis camped for days outside a police station in 2015 after an officer shot and killed Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man.
