In a news release during the sweep, ICE’s acting director, Thomas Homan, said that “864 criminal aliens and public safety threats remain at large in the community, and I have to believe that some of them were able to elude us thanks to the mayor’s irresponsible decision.”
Mr. Trump is flying into San Diego, where he will view prototypes of a border wall being built along the Mexican border, before speaking to troops at a nearby military base. From there, he is heading to Beverly Hills for a high-roller Republican fund-raiser before flying back to Washington on Wednesday morning. He is not planning to meet with any California leaders, or tour any part of the state outside that stretch along the border.
It is the first time the president has come to this state since he campaigned here during the Republican presidential primary nearly two years ago. His appearances at the time set off demonstrations and clashes with the police, including one in which his motorcade was blockaded by protesters as he turned up to speak at a state Republican Party convention outside San Francisco. (Mr. Trump was forced to leave his vehicle and trudge up a hill, climbing over a fence, to get into the venue).
Similar demonstrations are expected again. Protesters — and some supporters — are planning rallies in the San Diego area before the president’s visit on Tuesday. One group, Women’s March San Diego, is planning to erect a large sign in opposition to the border wall that the president would see from the air, should he fly in by helicopter. Another group, which calls itself San Diegans for Secure Borders, is planning a rally on Tuesday in support of the president’s immigration policies. Among those scheduled to attend, the group said, are “parents whose children were murdered by illegal aliens who crossed our unsecured border illegally to kill our citizens.”
Los Angeles is girding for protests as well, though demonstrators may be confused over where to go. The location of Mr. Trump’s fund-raiser, and where he is staying, has been kept secret. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, Officer Rosario Herrera, said no permits had been issued for major protests as of Monday morning, and that any road closings would be determined later in consultation with the Secret Service.
“We are prepared for anything that arises in the city of L.A.,” she said.
Indeed, California Democrats seem eager for Mr. Trump’s arrival: the state Democratic leader, Kevin de León, who is running for Senate, called for a demonstration even before Mr. Trump takes off from Washington, on Monday next to the Beverly Hills sign, with labor and civil rights groups.
The White House expressed no hesitation about Mr. Trump finally visiting the state that has been leading the opposition to him. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, said that while Mr. Trump may not have won California, “there is certainly a lot of support for this president, not just there but across the country.”
Ms. Sanders also said that Mr. Trump had no second thoughts about pressing ahead with the border wall. “The president campaigned on this, he talked about it extensively and he’s the president,” she said, adding it was “something that he is not going to back away from.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Tensions between California and Washington have been high since Mr. Trump was elected, reflecting the decidedly different political philosophies between the president and many Democrats here. A poll by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in December found that only 30 percent of respondents approved of his job performance; his national job approval rating has hovered around 40 percent, depending on the poll.
And California now looms as prime territory for Democrats seeking to retake Congress next year. At least seven Republican congressional seats in California are viewed as vulnerable, many of them located right near where Mr. Trump will be touching down. Republican strategists have advised candidates for office here to distance themselves from the president; a key question on Tuesday will be which, if any, Republican members of Congress will appear in public with the president.
Neither side appears inclined to calm the waters in advance of Mr. Trump’s visit. Mr. Sessions, in addition to challenging the three California immigration laws, has also threatened to bring obstruction of justice charges against Libby Schaaf, the Democratic mayor of Oakland, for warning constituents this month of impending raids by federal immigration officers. Over the weekend, the president used his weekly address to criticize the state’s immigration policies.
“California’s leaders are in open defiance of federal law,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t care about crime. They don’t care about death and killings. They don’t care about robberies. They don’t care about the kind of things that you and I care about.”
And again on Monday, on the eve of the president’s trip, the White House continued to go after California Democratic leaders, hosting a conference call attacking their positions on immigration. Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, singled out three California Democrats by name — Mr. Brown, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Nancy Pelosi. He quoted recent statements they made criticizing immigration enforcement and sought to rebut them one by one.
Democrats here showed no sign of backing down. Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles described Mr. Trump as being out of touch with the nation and the world. “Why would our president come all the way across the country to look at wall samples in a state where he’s taking away more people’s health care than anywhere else?” he said.
At a news conference Monday morning, Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, listed ways he sees his state as exceptional: “When President Trump comes to California, he’ll see a state that’s No.1 in manufacturing, agriculture, high-tech, in graduating young people from college,” he said.
“Our state is going to keep moving forward, keep welcoming people who want to work hard, no matter what happens in Washington,” he said.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Brown, who is entering his final year in office, used his letter to urge Mr. Trump to lend his support to the high-speed train line Mr. Brown has been trying to build between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The plan has been put in jeopardy because of cost overruns and opposition from Republicans in Washington.
“In California we are focusing on bridges, not walls,” Mr. Brown said. He urged the president to visit the Central Valley where “more than a dozen bridges and viaducts are being built for the nation’s first and only High-Speed Rail line.”
“You have lamented that ‘we don’t have one fast train’ in our country.” Mr. Brown said. “Well, Mr. President, in California we are trying to fix that. We have a world-class train system under construction. We invite you to come aboard and truly ‘Make America Great Again.’”
As California has emerged as the seat of the resistance to the Trump administration — on issues from immigration to climate change, to offshore oil drilling and marijuana policy — there has been a growing sense of separateness between here and the rest of the country.
Joe Mathews, a columnist for Zócalo Public Square, a nonprofit news site, recently compared California’s tenuous ties with the rest of America to mainland China’s relationship with Taiwan, which has its own ambitions of independence. Calling California a “halfway country” just like Taiwan, Mr. Mathews wrote, “our state has the ambitions, economy and democracy of a leading nation.”
With the exception of the Civil War and the civil rights battles of the 1960s, there appears little historical precedent for the kind of clashes — in language and policy — that are now on view between California and Washington. “There’s just a sense that the Trump presidency is moving the nation in the exact opposite direction from where California wants it to go,” said Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. “So the estrangement is quite high.”
Professor Pastor argues in a forthcoming book, “State of Resistance,” that California’s own measures against undocumented immigrants in the 1990s prefigured Mr. Trump’s hard-line positions on immigration. California voters approved a 1994 ballot initiative that would have cut off state benefits to illegal immigrants, a move that was championed by the Republican governor at the time, Pete Wilson. The initiative was thrown out in court, but the Republican embrace of it contributed to the party’s long decline in political power as the state became more Democratic and Latino.
Continue reading the main story
AUSTIN, Texas — Police said Monday that they believe three packages that exploded at homes and killed two people here are connected, raising fears that a bomber is on the loose in a city hosting tens of thousands of people for a world-renowned music and technology festival.
Authorities said it was too early to say what motivated the attacks and did not rule out the possibility of a hate crime. The two people killed in the explosions — a teenage boy and a 39-year-old man — were black, and a 75-year-old Hispanic woman was seriously injured.
The first explosion occurred March 2, when a package on the front porch of a northeast Austin home exploded and killed the man. At the time, police said his death was “suspicious” but believed it was an isolated incident with no continuing threat to the community.
That changed Monday morning, when a pair of packages detonated at homes several miles apart over a matter of hours. Investigators were still responding to the first — which killed a 17-year-old boy and seriously injured an adult woman — when the second blast detonated at a house farther south, seriously injuring the Hispanic woman. Police confirmed soon after that those cases were connected to each other and to the March 2 death.
Police and the FBI said they were working to solve the mystery and urged residents to be cautious in approaching packages left at their doorsteps unexpectedly. Officials said the packages that exploded did not come through the mail or a standard delivery service.
Austin Police Chief Brian Manley described the explosives as arriving in “box-type deliveries” but did not elaborate, citing the ongoing investigation. He said police did not know whether the victims who were killed or injured were the specific targets of the packages.
Austin is in the midst of hosting South by Southwest, a festival for which it has become famous, though authorities said that they did not believe the explosions were tied to that event.
The two victims killed in the explosions are relatives of prominent members of Austin’s African American community. The first, 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House, was the stepson of Freddie Dixon, a former pastor at a historic black church in Austin.
“This is a real mystery, and how all of this mystery comes together, I have no idea,” said Dixon.
He said he did not know of anyone who had a grudge against his stepson, who worked in construction, was married and had an 8-year-old daughter. But Dixon said he himself is good friends with Norman Mason, the grandfather of the teenager who was killed Monday. The teen has not been formally identified.
Mason is a dentist in East Austin who has for decades mentored African American student-athletes at the University of Texas at Austin. His wife, LaVonne Mason, is co-founder of the Austin Area Urban League.
LaVonne Mason confirmed her grandson was the 17-year-old victim who was killed in the explosion Monday morning. She declined to say anything further, citing an ongoing investigation.
“The investigation is going to take two to three days,” Mason said. “We are not at liberty to talk or discuss anything.”
Dixon said he wondered whether if the families’ connection might have motivated the crimes.
“Are you trying to say something to prominent African American families?” Dixon asked. “I don’t know who they’ve been targeting, but for sure, they went and got one of my best friends’ grandson. Somebody knew the connection.”
But Dixon noted that he did not know the woman injured in the third blast, whom relatives identified as Esperanza Herrera. They said her mother, Maria Moreno, suffered minor injuries.
Manley said that just as in the other bombings, the woman who was injured came outside her home, found a package and picked it up. That’s when it detonated.
“It’s not time to panic, but it’s time to be vigilant,” Manley said.
Later on Monday evening, according to the Austin American-Statesman, police temporarily shut down an area near the city’s downtown convention center because a guitar case in a trash can was deemed a suspicious package. The newspaper also said police received 63 suspicious-package calls through Monday afternoon, compared with two last Monday, as residents were being more cautious.
In the neighborhoods where bombs went off, residents were taking heed.
Lois Williams, 85, said the blast early Monday morning woke her up in her home about a block away.
“I just heard this – BOOM. It sounded like they were slamming the trash can lids,” Williams said.
Speaking with a reporter hours later in her driveway, Williams said she was not afraid because she doesn’t typically get packages but added that “I’m going to be looking.” A postal worker delivering Williams’ mail hugged her, saying, “Be careful.”
Rianne Philips, who lives next door to House, said her husband was the first to find House after the fatal blast.
She said that she was alarmed to hear about the latest bombings but also relieved that the police were now more focused on House’s death.
“They’re not going to let this slide,” Philips said. “It’s really sad, but this means there’s a lot of attention on this now.”
Isaiah Guerrero, 15, said he was spending the first morning of his spring break making music on his computer when he heard the third explosion go off just before noon Monday.
“It sounded like two cars hit each other, you know? Like, rammed each other,” Guerrero said.
The house shook, and so did his body, the teenager said. Guerrero then climbed up a tree and on top of his house. Within minutes, police and fire officials swarmed the scene, closing off streets. Guerrero, who lives behind the house where the bomb went off, said he couldn’t see the damage to the front of the house.
He echoed law enforcement officials in warning the public to pay attention to things like packages, “especially if you didn’t order something,” he said. Guerrero added: “I expected my spring break to be peaceful, not harmful.”
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Monday it was dispatching members of its National Response Team (NRT) to help respond to the explosions. According to the agency, this group activates for “significant fire and explosion incidents,” considered those that are either large in scale or particularly complicated due to the size or scope.
In the past, that has included responding to the West, Tex., plant fire in 2013; a string of church fires in Texas; and the bombings in Oklahoma City and at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The NRT works with other investigators to reconstruct scenes and determine what caused the fires or explosions; in cases involving bombings, the team also searches for evidence to be used in any prosecution that may follow.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said his office is offering a $15,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or people responsible for the “atrocious attacks.”
“I want to assure all Texans, and especially those in Austin, that local, state and federal law enforcement officials are working diligently to find those responsible for these heinous crimes,” Abbott said in a statement.
Manley said local and federal law enforcement agencies would ensure “every stop would be pulled out” to solve the cases.
“We are not going to tolerate this in Austin,” he said.
Berman, Wang, Zapotosky and Keith McMillan reported from Washington. Shane Harris in Austin contributed to this report, which has been updated.
Hillary Clinton has blamed her election loss to President Donald Trump on the “middle” of America, which she accused of “looking backwards.” Her remarks, which have been seized upon by conservative commentators as “dismissing America’s Heartland,” were made to an audience in Mumbai, India, on Saturday.
Describing election maps from November 2016, which showed most of the central United States, with the exception of big cities, voting for Mr. Trump, Clinton said: “All that red in the middle, where Trump won, what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
She said Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign “was looking backwards,” playing on what she said were feelings in the non-urban United States of voters who “didn’t like black people getting rights,” or women getting jobs.
That rhetoric drew a harsh rebuke from the “GOP War Room” channel on YouTube, which labelled her comments as “Dismissing America’s Heartland to a foreign audience.”
Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, but under the U.S. Electoral College system, each state gets one vote for each member of Congress representing the state. Clinton’s loss of key states in the electoral college, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, shocked both her own campaign and many political observers.
Clinton, who continues to tour the world promoting her book, “What Happened,” on her failed presidential bid, has previously blamed FBI Director James Comey and Russian intervention in the election for her shocking loss to Mr. Trump.
“I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me, but got scared off,” she told an international women’s summit in New York in May of last year.
Clinton was on a private trip to India this week, which saw her give several speeches on both the U.S. election and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies in the Asian nation.
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain gave President Vladimir Putin until midnight on Tuesday to explain how a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union was used to strike down a former Russian double agent who passed secrets to British intelligence.
Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, have been in hospital in a critical condition since March 4 when they were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping centre in the southern English cathedral city of Salisbury.
Prime Minister Theresa May said it was“highly likely” that Russia was to blame after Britain identified the substance as part of the highly-lethal Novichok group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet military during the 1970s and 1980s.
“Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia,” May said.
“Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country,” May said.“Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”
Russia, which holds a presidential election on March 18, has denied any role in the poisoning and says Britain is whipping up anti-Russian hysteria.
Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko, summoned to the Foreign Office, was given until the end of Tuesday to explain what happened or face what May said were“much more extensive” measures against the $1.5 trillion Russian economy.
If no satisfactory Russian response is received by midnight London time then May will outline Britain’s response in parliament. She is due to hold a meeting of top security officials on Wednesday.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the poisoning represented the first use of nerve agents on the continent of Europe since World War Two. The British response, he said, would be“commensurate but robust”.
Russia has requested access to the nerve agent used against Skripal but Britain has denied it access, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. Interfax reported that Russia had summoned the British ambassador.
Britain could call on allies for a coordinated Western response, freeze the assets of Russian business leaders and officials, expel diplomats, launch targetted cyber attacks and cut back participation in events such as the soccer World Cup.
European allies including French President Emmanuel Macron expressed solidarity with Britain though President Donald Trump has not yet publicly commented on the attack.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the United States had full confidence in the assessment that Russia was responsible. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the United States stood by Britain but stopped short of blaming Russia.
The European Union pledged to stand by Britain, which is due to leave the bloc in just over a year’s time, though the bloc has struggled to maintain a common front on Russian sanctions.
A conservative ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Norbert Roettgen, said that if Russia fails to cooperate then there should be a joint Western response.
British lawmakers say Russia’s oligarchs, the super-wealthy who amassed fortunes under Boris Yeltsin and Putin, should be denied entry to the luxury lifestyles offered by London and the West.
The British capital has been dubbed“Londongrad” due to the large quantities of Russian money that have poured in since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The EU has travel restrictions and asset freezes against 150 people and 38 companies. EU nationals and companies are also banned from buying or selling new bonds or equity in some state-owned Russian banks and major Russian energy companies.
May said Russia had shown a pattern of aggression including the annexation of Crimea and the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died in 2006 after drinking green tea laced with radioactive polonium-210.
A British public inquiry found the killing of Litvinenko had probably been approved by Putin and carried out by two Russians, one of them a former KGB bodyguard who later became a member of the Russian parliament.
Both denied responsibility, as did Moscow.
Putin, a former KGB spy who took over as Kremlin chief from Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, has denied allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and says the West has repeatedly tried to undermine Russian interests.
Skripal betrayed dozens of Russian agents to British intelligence before his arrest in Moscow in 2004. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2006, and in 2010 was given refuge in Britain after being exchanged for Russian spies.
Since emerging from the John le Carre world of high espionage and betrayal, he has lived modestly in Salisbury and kept out of the spotlight until he was found unconscious on Sunday.
A British policeman who was one of the first to attend to the stricken spy was also affected by the nerve agent. He is now conscious in a serious but stable condition, police said.
Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Robin Emmott in Brussels, Andreas Rinke in Berlin and Katya Golubkova in Moscow; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and Richard Balmforth
Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.
Airline officials were trying to determine what caused the crash.
“Further details of the crash are still awaited,” said Kamrul Islam, general manager of marketing support for the airline.
Images on social media showed heavy black smoke rising from the airport.
Image from #Kathmandu crash site —
• Turboprop aircraft appears to be a Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 aircraft operated by US Bangla
• US Bangla are a Bangladeshi Private Airline, which was founded in 2013 under a United States-Bangladesh joint venture company
• Dhaka-Nepal route pic.twitter.com/Zaikb1yC5o—
Alex Macheras (@AlexInAir)
March 12, 2018
Airport officials said that several people were still trapped in the wreckage 90 minutes after crash. Twenty-five burned bodies were visible at the site, and a photojournalist said that 10 survivors had been taken to the hospital. He said the plane came to rest about 150 feet from the runway.
After the crash, the airport was shut down, and officials said several planes were circling in the sky above Kathmandu waiting for clearance to land. Some were short on fuel as they waited.
The airline’s posted schedule said Flight 211, a Bombardier Dash 8 from Dhaka, was scheduled to land at 2:15 p.m., around the actual time of the crash. The plane, a twin-engine turboprop, can carry as many as 78 passengers.
US-Bangla Airlines began operations in 2014, and its route between Dhaka and Kathmandu was its first international one, said CAPA-Center for Aviation. The airline is a subsidiary of the US-Bangla Group, a joint American-Bangladeshi company.
Continue reading the main story
As a candidate, Trump used to boast he could become the first Republican to win the state, and its 55 electoral votes, in nearly three decades. Instead, Hillary Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, more than accounting for her nearly 3-million advantage in the popular vote nationwide. California’s result became the basis for Trump’s false claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton.
The White House on Sunday vowed to help provide “rigorous firearms training” to some schoolteachers and formally endorsed a bill to tighten the federal background checks system, but it backed off President Trump’s earlier call to raise the minimum age to purchase some guns to 21 years old from 18 years old.
Responding directly to last month’s gun massacre at a Florida high school, the administration rolled out several policy proposals that focus largely on mental health and school safety initiatives. The idea of arming some teachers has been controversial and has drawn sharp opposition from the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers lobby, among other groups. Many of the student survivors have urged Washington to toughen restrictions on gun purchases, but such measures are fiercely opposed by the National Rifle Association, and the Trump plan does not include substantial changes to gun laws.
Rather, the president is establishing a Federal Commission on School Safety, to be chaired by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, that will explore possible solutions, such as the age requirement for purchases, officials said.
DeVos characterized the administration’s efforts as “a pragmatic plan to dramatically increase school safety.”
“We are committed to working quickly because there’s no time to waste,” she said on a conference call with reporters on Sunday evening. Invoking past mass school shootings, she continued, “No student, no family, no teacher and no school should have to live the horror of Parkland or Sandy Hook or Columbine again.”
President Trump watches as Julia Cordover, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student body president, speaks during a listening session on gun violence at the White House on Feb. 21. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The administration’s proposals come after 17 people were shot and killed last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a massacre that spurred officials in Washington to reevaluate gun laws.
Democratic lawmakers and gun-control advocates accused Trump of succumbing to pressure from the NRA and other special-
interest groups.
“The White House has taken tiny baby steps designed not to upset the NRA, when the gun violence epidemic in this country demands that giant steps be taken,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “Democrats in the Senate will push to go further including passing universal background checks, actual federal legislation on protection orders, and a debate on banning assault weapons.”
Kris Brown, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement that “President Trump has offered only drips of water in response to a five-alarm fire.”
Trump has said he was personally moved by the shooting — and by the persistent and impassioned calls for action from some of the teenage survivors as well as parents of the victims — and elevated the issue of school safety in his administration. He has called for raising the minimum age for purchasing an AR-15 or similar-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old.
“Now, this is not a popular thing to say, in terms of the NRA. But I’m saying it anyway,” Trump said in a Feb. 28 meeting with lawmakers. “You can buy a handgun — you can’t buy one; you have to wait until you’re 21. But you can buy the kind of weapon used in the school shooting at 18. I think it’s something you have to think about.”
But the White House plan released Sunday does not address the minimum age for gun purchases. Pressed by reporters about the apparent backtracking, a senior administration official said the age issue was “a state-based discussion right now” and would be explored by DeVos’s commission.
[‘I love this place.’ Trump campaigns for Pa. candidate but keeps spotlight on himself]
At a political rally Saturday night in Pennsylvania, Trump mocked the idea of commissions to solve the nation’s drug epidemic. “Do you think the drug dealers who kill thousands of people during their lifetime, do you think they care who’s on a blue-ribbon committee?” Trump said. “The only way to solve the drug problem is through toughness.”
Administration officials demurred Sunday night when asked why Trump found commissions an inadequate response to the drug epidemic but an appropriate way to respond to gun massacres.
“There are not going to be one-size-fits-all approaches and solutions, and I think that that is a very cogent argument for having a commission,” said a senior administration official, who would answer questions from reporters only on the condition of anonymity.
The centerpiece of the administration’s plan is Trump’s vow to “harden our schools against attack.” Since almost immediately after the Parkland shooting, the president has advocated arming some teachers as a solution to stopping future massacres.
“A gun-free zone to a maniac — because they’re all cowards — a gun-free zone is, let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us,” Trump said during a Feb. 22 listening session at the White House with teachers, students and parents.
The administration will start working with states to provide “rigorous firearms training” to teachers and other school personnel who volunteer to be armed, said Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. The White House has not proposed offering states new funding for this training.
Lily Eskelsen García, president of the NEA, the teachers lobby, said last month that “bringing more guns into our schools does nothing to protect our students and educators from gun violence. Our students need more books, art and music programs, nurses and school counselors; they do not need more guns in their classrooms.”
The NRA supports the idea of allowing armed teachers in schools. Bremberg said the administration is backing two pieces of legislation: A bipartisan bill by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) that is designed to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System; and the STOP School Violence Act, which would authorize state-based grants to implement violence prevention training for teachers and students.
The administration also is urging all states to pass risk-protection orders, as Florida recently did, allowing law enforcement officers to remove firearms from individuals who are considered a threat to themselves or others and to prevent them from purchasing new guns, Bremberg said.
Lastly, the administration wants to better integrate mental health, primary care and family services programs, and the president has ordered a full audit and review of the FBI tip line, he said. The FBI has said it ignored a warning that 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz might attack a school just weeks before he allegedly carried out the rampage in Parkland.
“The president is determined to get to the root of the various societal issues that lead to violence in our country,” Bremberg said. “No stone will be unturned.”
At the Justice Department, meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Saturday took an incremental step toward banning “bump stocks,” devices that can make semiautomatic weapons fire like fully automatic firearms.
Sessions submitted to the Office of Management and Budget a proposed regulation on bump stocks. The proposal still requires that office’s approval, and once that is complete, it must be published and public comments considered before it becomes reality.
While some gun-control advocates welcomed the move, others argued that it would be better for Congress to pass legislation banning the devices. Federal officials had in years past concluded that they could not legally regulate bump stocks, and the new move to do so is likely to be met with lawsuits from manufacturers of the devices. The NRA does not oppose regulating bump stocks under existing law, but it does object to new legislation.
In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott (R) defied the NRA on Friday by signing into law a new set of gun regulations that imposes a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns, raises the minimum age for buying those weapons to 21 and bans the possession of bump stocks.
“I am going to do what I think are common-sense solutions,” Scott said after the signing. “I think this is the beginning. There is now going to be a real conversation about how we make our schools safe.”
[Florida Gov. Rick Scott breaks with NRA to sign new gun regulations]
The new Florida restrictions have drawn opposition from some Republicans nationally. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he does not support raising the age to purchase long guns, such as AR-15-style rifles, which have been used in many of the recent mass shootings.
“We send our sons and daughters over to Afghanistan, in Iraq,” at age 18, Johnson said. “They defend our freedoms. I think if they do that, they ought to be able to buy a hunting rifle.”
Trump has vacillated in his public pronouncements about guns. He and GOP leaders in Congress have been afraid to cross the NRA ahead of the November midterm elections because the gun lobby has long been a powerful force mobilizing conservative activists in elections.
At his Feb. 28 meeting with lawmakers, Trump sounded open to new restrictions on gun purchases. “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” he said, winning the approval of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and other Democrats who have long sought to toughen gun laws and ban semiautomatic assault rifles.
But NRA leaders then met privately with Trump, and the president had an apparent change of heart and backed off more-restrictive proposals. Last week, Trump met in the Oval Office with Kyle Kashuv, a Stoneman Douglas student who has become one of his school’s few pro-gun-rights activists with his frequent appearances on Fox News Channel.
Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.
It might be an awkward setting for Mr. Trump, though, who would be wary of not being seen as a supplicant. And North Korea might want to give Mr. Trump, who has expressed an interest in military parades, a display of its own.
When Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Pyongyang in 2000 in an attempt to convince Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father, to halt his ballistic missile program, she attended a mass propaganda performance that included an image of the very missile she was trying to get North Korea to curtail.
The governor of the South Korean island of Jeju has proposed holding the meeting there. The island, south of the Korean Peninsula, is a tourist destination, and its relatively small size and population could make security easier than in a large city like Seoul, the South’s capital.
Washington would also be a potential spot, although Mr. Kim would most likely be wary of making the American capital his first trip abroad as North Korea’s leader.
A meeting there would also be awkward for the White House, which would be wary of the propaganda value it could give the North. When Marshal Jo Myong-rok, a high-level North Korean military official, visited Washington in 2000 to invite Mr. Clinton to Pyongyang, he first met with Dr. Albright while wearing a business suit. He then changed into a medal-festooned military uniform and high-brimmed hat to meet with Mr. Clinton, creating an uncomfortable image for the White House.
China is North Korea’s only significant ally, although their relationship has hardly been close in recent years. Still, China was one of the few countries Kim Jong-il traveled to as North Korea’s leader.
China has also played an active role in promoting negotiations among all sides and was a host to the so-called six-party talks a decade ago. Geng Shuang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Friday that China welcomed the meeting and would “continue to make unremitting efforts” for a “peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue.” But he did not directly answer a question about whether Beijing would be host.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Geneva, the city in neutral Switzerland, has hosted high-level meetings between rivals, like between President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. And Kim Jong-un would have more familiarity with the country, where he studied in the late 1990s, than most other places.
Like China, Russia has been an occasional destination for North Korean leaders. Mr. Kim himself has not gone as leader, though. He canceled plans to travel to Moscow in 2015 for events to mark the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. A visit to Moscow might not look good for Mr. Trump, either, given the charges that Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election to help his campaign.
Sweden has long been a key intermediary between the United States and North Korea. The United States does not have an embassy in the North, and Sweden is the so-called protecting power that provides consular services for Americans, including meeting with citizens who are imprisoned there. Sweden has also been the site of talks between North Korean officials and experts from the United States, South Korea and elsewhere. And last week a Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, reported that Ri Yong-ho, the North Korean foreign minister, would visit Sweden soon, fueling speculation about a possible meeting location.
Mongolia, which shares borders with Russia and China, has pursued a policy of neutrality in recent years and has good relations with both the United States and North Korea. Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, a former Mongolian president, tweeted in support of a meeting in Ulan Bator, saying: “Here is an offer: US President Trump and NK leader Kim meet in UB. Mongolia is the most suitable, neutral territory.”
Correction: March 12, 2018
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the capital of Switzerland. It is Bern, not Geneva.
Continue reading the main story