WASHINGTON – The Republican-led House backed a measure Thursday that seeks to bar women from being required to register for a potential military draft, a victory for social conservatives who fear that forcing females to sign up is another step toward the blurring of gender lines.
By a vote of 217 to 203, lawmakers approved an amendment that would block the Selective Service System from using any money to alter draft registration requirements that currently apply only to men between the ages of 18 and 25.
The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, was added to a financial services spending bill. The House also approved an amendment by Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., that would block any money in the bill from being used for sanctuary cities, a term for jurisdictions that resist turning over immigrants to federal authorities.
WARSAW, Poland – President Barack Obama opened a five-day, two-country mission early Friday to buck up a beleaguered Europe and brush back an aggressive Moscow.
On what is expected to be his last presidential visit to the continent, Obama is due to attend a summit of NATO allies in Warsaw, before moving on to Seville and Madrid for his first presidential visit to Spain. In both corners of the continent, he’ll be surrounded by leaders still reeling from Britain’s decision to pull out of the European Union and sorting through uncertainty about the future of the decades-old experiment in international cooperation.
The White House says Obama will offer words of reassurance that the departure – whenever it occurs – won’t disrupt the decades-old trans-Atlantic ties that bind. He’ll emphasize that Britain’s exit, which does not affect its membership in NATO, only makes the 28-member military alliance more essential and its cooperation with the European Union more important. And amid leaders’ anxiety about whether his possible successor, Republican Donald Trump, would retrench from Europe, Obama will make case for stronger alliances and the benefits of globalization.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Saudi Arabia identified on Thursday suspects in two of the three attacks that struck the kingdom on the same day this week, including one outside the sprawling mosque where the Prophet Muhammad is buried in the western city of Medina that killed four Saudi security troops.
In a statement released by the Interior Ministry late Thursday, authorities said the Medina bomber in Monday’s apparently coordinated attacks was 26-year-old Saudi national Na’ir al-Nujiaidi al-Balawi.
Three suicide bombers behind a botched attack, also Monday, outside a Shiite mosque in the eastern region of Qatif in which no civilians or police were wounded, were identified as Abdulrahman Saleh Mohammed, Ibrahim Saleh Mohammed and Abdelkarim al-Hesni, all in their early 20s. It was not immediately clear what nationality or nationalities the three carried.
The ministry said investigations following the attacks led to the arrests of 19 suspects, seven Saudi and 12 Pakistani nationals. No other details were immediately available.
BATON ROUGE, La. – Four previous “use of force” complaints were lodged against the two white police officers in the video-recorded shooting death of a black man and they were cleared in all of them, according to internal affairs documents released Thursday.
The complaints included three black men and a black juvenile. One of the men was shot when police said he pointed a gun at them and the others were injured during arrests and a police pursuit in a vehicle.
The documents were released a day after the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, who was killed by police during an altercation outside of a convenience store where he was selling CDs. Police say he was armed and an eyewitness said he had a gun in his pocket.
Sterling was a convicted felon, which would have barred him from legally carrying a gun, according to court records.
Cellphone video of his shooting was posted online and set off angry protests in this city of about 229,000, where 54 percent of the population is black and more than 25 percent live in poverty.
NORRISTOWN, Pa. – A judge on Thursday denied Bill Cosby’s bid to force his sex-assault accuser to testify before trial, ruling prosecutors worked within the law by using police statements as a stand-in for her at his preliminary hearing.
Cosby’s lawyers argued they should’ve been allowed to cross-examine accuser Andrea Constand at the May 24 hearing because her decade-old statements about the 2004 encounter raised more questions than it answered.
But Judge Steven T. O’Neill said that a 2013 change in state court rules cleared the way for prosecutors to use those statements and other evidence in lieu of forcing Constand to take the witness stand before trial.
Prosecutors applauded the judge’s decision.
Associated Press
