Obama: Opportunities lack of minorities
NEW YORK – In a deeply personal response to outbreaks of racially motivated protests, President Barack Obama on Monday blamed a lack of opportunity in minority communities and harsher treatment of black and Hispanic men by police for fueling a sense of “unfairness and powerlessness.”
The country’s first black president called for a nationwide mobilization to reverse inequalities and said the cause will remain a mission for the rest of his presidency and his life.
“There are consequences to indifference,” Obama said.
Helping to launch a foundation to assist young minorities, Obama said the catalysts of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Baltimore were the deaths of young black men and “a feeling that law is not always applied evenly in this country.”
Gnarly, dude: 15-foot waves hit California
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. – Hundreds of spectators lined the beach and gasped, cheered and clapped Monday as surfers sliced across 15-foot waves at The Wedge, a Newport Beach break known for its powerful waves.
Big surf has been pounding south-facing sections of the Southern California coast since Sunday, keeping lifeguards busy and attracting daring surfers and bodysurfers with boards, wetsuits and fins in tow.
A high-surf advisory remained in effect through Tuesday.
New cache of Twain letters discovered
SAN FRANCISCO – Scholars at the University of California, Berkeley have pieced together a collection of dispatches written by Mark Twain when the author was a young newsman in San Francisco.
In the letters, the man who would write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, likened the city’s police chief to a dog chasing its tail and accused city government of rascality. Some of the letters carried his flair for embellishment and may not be entirely true.
“This is a very special period in his life, when he’s out here in San Francisco,” said Bob Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project on the Berkeley campus.
“He’s utterly free, he’s not encumbered by a marriage or much of anything else and he can speak his mind and does speak his mind. These things are wonderful to read, the ones that survived.”
GOP moving on Iran bill moving again
WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans labored Monday to salvage bipartisan legislation granting lawmakers the right to review or even reject any agreement the Obama administration makes to ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for concessions on nuclear research and development.
Officials said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., hoped to avoid staging a showdown vote to limit debate on the measure.
The legislation was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a unanimous vote last month, and supporters easily turned back a pair of proposed changes in early skirmishes on the Senate floor.
But the measure hit a snag last week after Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., proposed additional changes that drew strong objections from Senate Democrats, as well as from Republicans who favor keeping the bill free of controversial provisions that could prompt the White House to withdraw its support.
Associated Press
