The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
NATION/WORLD
ALABAMA As vote nears, Moore avoids spotlight
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore has been a rare sight on the traditional campaign trail in the days ahead of a critical U.S. Senate race. He has appeared at only a handful of rallies in front of friendly audiences and steadfastly has shunned reporters from the mainstream media.
Moore’s past campaigns have never been heavy on public appearances, but his relative absence from the spotlight this time has been noticeable.
Meanwhile, in his sternest rebuke yet, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby said repeatedly Sunday his state can “do better” than electing fellow Republican Moore to the U.S. Senate, making clear a write-in candidate was far preferable to a man accused of sexual misconduct.
Days before the pivotal race, Shelby, who is Alabama’s senior senator, said he had already cast an absentee ballot for another, unspecified Republican, even as other prominent state Republicans fell in line behind Moore.
Moore faces Democrat Doug Jones in the special election Tuesday to replace Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general.
“I couldn’t vote for Roy Moore. I didn’t vote for Roy Moore. But I wrote in a distinguished Republican name. And I think a lot of people could do that,” Shelby told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The race settled into church for worship on Sunday, with the minister at a historic black congregation calling the race a life-or-death matter for equal rights, conservatives standing by Republican Roy Moore and others feeling unsettled in the middle.
Speaking at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, where four black girls died in a Ku Klux Klan bombing in 1963, the Rev. Arthur Price evoked the civil rights era between hymns. Jones, the Democratic nominee, prosecuted the last two Klansmen convicted in the attack and has attended events at the church, a downtown landmark with twin domed towers.
“There’s too much at stake for us to stay home,” Price said of Tuesday’s election. He didn’t endorse Jones from the pulpit but in a later interview called the candidate “a hero” to the congregation and Birmingham.
Despite allegations of sexual misconduct involving teen girls decades ago, Moore isn’t being abandoned by worshippers at Montgomery’s Perry Hill Road Baptist Church, where Moore spoke at a “God and Country” rally in September before the accusations arose.
Leaving the red-brick building after a service that ended with a hymn and an altar call, Kevin Mims said he didn’t believe the claims against Moore. But even if true, he said, they occurred long ago, and Moore is a conservative who stands “on the word of God.”
JERUSALEM Israeli, French leaders tangle over decision
The French and Israeli leaders sparred verbally Sunday over the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, while new violence rippled across the region following the move by U.S. President Donald Trump.
In Jerusalem, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli security guard, seriously wounding him in the first attack in the volatile city since Trump’s pronouncement Wednesday. In Beirut, scores of Lebanese and Palestinian demonstrators clashed with security forces outside the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy, and Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo demanded that the United States rescind the decision.
The move upended decades of U.S. policy, and a longstanding international consensus, that the fate of Jerusalem be decided in negotiations. Israeli and Palestinian claims to the city’s eastern sector form the emotional core of their conflict, and Trump’s announcement was seen as siding with the Israelis and has drawn wide international criticism.
At a meeting in Paris with Israel’s visiting prime minister, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned recent violence against Israelis. But he also expressed “disapproval” of Trump’s decision, calling it “dangerous for peace.”
“It doesn’t seem to serve, in the short term, the cause of Israel’s security and the Israelis themselves,” Macron said.
NOBEL PRIZE Peace laureates urge world to ban nukes
A survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima compared her struggle to survive in 1945 to the objectives of the group awarded this year’s Nobel’s Peace Prize during a formal presentation Sunday.
Setsuko Thurlow, who was 13 years old when the U.S. bomb devastated her Japanese city during the final weeks of World War II, spoke in Oslo, Norway as a leading activist with the Nobel-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Thurlow said the Hiroshima blast left her buried under the rubble, but she was able to see light and crawl to safety. In the same way, the campaign she is part of now is a driving force behind an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons, she said after ICAN received the Nobel prize it won in October.
“Our light now is the ban treaty,” Thurlow said. “I repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima: ‘Don’t give up. Keep pushing. See the light? Crawl toward it.’ ”
The treaty has been signed by 56 countries — none of them nuclear powers — and ratified by only three. To become binding it requires ratification by 50 countries.
ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn, who accepted the prize along with Thurlow, said while the treaty is far from ratification “now, at long last, we have an unequivocal norm against nuclear weapons.”
“This is the way forward. There is only one way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons — prohibit and eliminate them,” Fihn said.
CALIFORNIA New evacuations as huge fire flares up
LOS ANGELES — A flare-up on the western edge of Southern California’s largest and most destructive wildfire sent residents fleeing Sunday, as wind-fanned flames churned through canyons and down hillsides toward coastal towns.
Crews with help from water-dropping aircraft saved several homes as unpredictable gusts sent the blaze churning deeper into foothill areas northwest of Los Angeles that haven’t burned in decades. New evacuations were ordered in Carpinteria, a seaside city in Santa Barbara County that has been under fire threat for days.
“The winds are kind of squirrely right now,” said county fire spokesman Mike Eliason. “Some places the smoke is going straight up in the air, and others it’s blowing sideways. Depends on what canyon we’re in.”
The department posted a photo of one residence engulfed in flames before dawn. It’s unclear whether other structures burned. Thousands of homes in the county were without power.
Firefighters made significant progress Saturday on other fronts of the enormous fire that started Dec. 4 in neighboring Ventura County. Containment was way up on other major blazes in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego counties.
HEALTH Price hikes push insurance buyers into hard choices
Margaret Leatherwood has eight choices for health insurance next year but no good options.
The cheapest individual coverage available in her market would eat up nearly a quarter of the income her husband brings home from the oilfields.
The Bryson, Texas, couple makes too much to qualify for Affordable Care Act tax credits that help people buy coverage. But they don’t make enough to comfortably afford insurance on their own, even though Paul Leatherwood works seven days a week.
“I hate to put it like this, but it sucks,” said Margaret Leatherwood, who stays at home and takes care of her grandchildren.
This largely middle class crowd of shoppers is struggling to stay insured. They’ve weathered years of price hikes and shrinking insurance choices with no help. Faced with more price increases for next year, they’re mulling options outside insurance or skipping coverage entirely - a decision that could lead to a fine for remaining uninsured and huge bills if an emergency hits.
WOMEN: Sex misconduct common in hospitality
CHICAGO — In the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against several prominent men in entertainment, politics and journalism, accounts like the ones these women share quietly play out in restaurants, bars and hotels across the country and rarely get the headlines.
Court documents and interviews with the women and experts on the topic show hospitality industry workers are routinely subjected to sexual abuse and harassment from bosses, co-workers and customers that are largely unchecked.
The nature of the work, which often has employees relying on tips, can make them especially vulnerable to abuse.
“I was absolutely humiliated,” said Sharonda Fields, who said the abuse at the Atlanta restaurant began shortly after she started working there last year. “It was degrading. I felt embarrassed. I felt low. I just felt like nothing happened when those guys talked to me that way, and especially when the staff and the managers knew what was going on. It made me feel like dirt.”
She filed a lawsuit against the restaurant last spring. Calls to the restaurant from The Associated Press went unanswered.
SYRIA Agency calls for evacuation of 137 sick kids
The United Nations children’s agency said Sunday 137 children stranded in a rebel-held suburb near the Syrian capital require immediate evacuation amid a crippling siege in which five have reportedly died from a lack of medical care.
The Eastern Ghouta suburb, home to 400,000 residents, has been besieged since 2013 and humanitarian conditions there have deteriorated sharply amid violence that intensified since Nov. 14. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says at least 202 people, including 47 children, have been killed since.