No mystery to Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh’s gun views

No mystery to Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh’s gun views

SILVER SPRING, Md.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh says he recognizes that gun, drug and gang violence “has plagued all of us.” Still, he believes the Constitution limits how far government can go to restrict gun use to prevent crime.

As a federal appeals court judge, Kavanaugh made it clear in a 2011 dissent that he thinks Americans can keep most guns, even the AR-15 rifles used in some of the deadliest mass shootings.

Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Donald Trump has delighted Second Amendment advocates. Gun-law supporters worry that his ascendancy to America’s highest court would make it harder to curb the proliferation of guns. Kavanaugh has the support of the National Rifle Association, which posted a photograph of Kavanaugh and Trump across the top of its website.

The Supreme Court has basically stayed away from major guns cases since its rulings in 2008 and 2010 declared a right to have a gun, at least in the home for the purpose of self-defense.

Pope accepts resignation of McCarrick after sex-abuse claims

VATICAN CITY

In a move seen as unprecedented, Pope Francis has effectively stripped U.S. prelate Theodore McCarrick of his cardinal’s title following allegations of sexual abuse, including one involving an 11-year-old boy. The Vatican announced Saturday that Francis ordered McCarrick to conduct a “life of prayer and penance” before a church trial is held.

Breaking with past practice, Francis decided to act swiftly on the resignation offered by the emeritus archbishop of Washington, D.C., even before the accusations are investigated by church officials. McCarrick was previously one of the highest, most visible Catholic church officials in the United States and was heavily involved in the church’s yearslong response to allegations of priestly abuse there.

Francis received McCarrick’s letter offering to resign from the College of Cardinals on Friday evening, after a spate of allegations that the 88-year-old prelate had for years sexually abused boys and had sexual misconduct with adult seminarians.

The pope then ordered McCarrick’s “suspension from the exercise of any public ministry, together with the obligation to remain in a house yet to be indicated to him, for a life of prayer and penance until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial,” the Vatican said.

The McCarrick case posed a test of the pontiff’s recently declared resolve to battle what he called a “culture of cover-up” of similar abuses in the Catholic church’s hierarchy.

Vatican meets MeToo: Nuns denounce their abuse by priests

VATICAN CITY

The nun no longer goes to confession regularly, after an Italian priest forced himself on her while she was at her most vulnerable: recounting her sins to him in a university classroom nearly 20 years ago.

At the time, the sister only told her provincial superior and her spiritual director, silenced by the Catholic Church’s culture of secrecy, her vows of obedience and her own fear, repulsion and shame.

“It opened a great wound inside of me,” she told the Associated Press. “I pretended it didn’t happen.”

After decades of silence, the nun is one of a handful worldwide to come forward recently on an issue that the Catholic Church has yet to come to terms with: The sexual abuse of religious sisters by priests and bishops. An AP examination has found that cases have emerged in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia, demonstrating that the problem is global and pervasive, thanks to the universal tradition of sisters’ second-class status in the Catholic Church and their ingrained subservience to the men who run it.

Some nuns are now finding their voices, buoyed by the MeToo movement and the growing recognition that adults can be victims of sexual abuse when there is an imbalance of power in a relationship. The sisters are going public in part because of years of inaction by church leaders, even after major studies on the problem in Africa were reported to the Vatican in the 1990s.

Editor calls Capital Gazette victims ‘friends of the people’

ANNAPOLIS, Md.

The five Capital Gazette employees killed in an attack in their newsroom last month were “friends of the people,” and “not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy,” the executive editor of The Washington Post said Saturday at a benefit concert for the victims’ families and colleagues.

While Martin Baron didn’t mention President Donald Trump by name while speaking to an audience from the concert stage, he clearly had the president in mind. Trump has repeatedly denounced the press as the “enemy” of the American people.

Baron spoke of all five of the victims by name, and he described them as “friends of the people, the people of Annapolis and beyond.”

“Not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy because of the profession they choose or the place they worked,” Baron said to applause from the audience. “Not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy by the man who killed them, and not one of them deserved to be called an enemy by anyone else, either. Nor does anyone else in our field deserve to be labeled that way.”

5 relatives dead in murder-suicide; 3 at Texas nursing home

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas

Police were trying to determine a motive Saturday after they said a man fatally shot four family members at two locations, including his father and stepmother inside a Texas nursing home before killing himself there too.

Richard Starryson fatally shot himself inside Retama Manor nursing home after killing 85-year-old Ernest Starry and his wife, Thelma Montalvo, Friday night, said Enrique Paredez, a police lieutenant in the Corpus Christi suburb of Robstown. A gun was recovered at the scene.

Paredez said a family member later called officers to the couple’s home where their 13-year-old adopted son and a 41-year-old son of Montalvo were also found shot to death. The names of the other two sons and Montalvo’s age were not released.

The reason behind the shootings was unclear, Paredez said at a Saturday news conference.

New white rhino at North Carolina zoo is named Nandi

ASHEBORO, N.C.

The first white rhino born at the North Carolina Zoo in 41 years now has a name.

The zoo says the new rhino’s dad picked out the name Nandi from three put on poles stuffed with Timothy hay.

Nandi was a queen of the Zulus who died in 1827 in what is present day South Africa. Her son was Shaka, King of the Zulus. Nandi means “a woman of high esteem.”

The zoo let people vote on seven names of strong women, either real or fictional, to narrow the choice to three finalists – Nandi, Mamba and Diana.

Nandi was born July 2 after zookeepers had almost given up on her father, Stormy, impregnating a female. Now Stormy has gotten a second female at the zoo in Asheboro pregnant.

Funeral held for last five of nine relatives killed in sinking

INDIANAPOLIS

An Indiana family that lost nine relatives in the sinking of a duck boat on a Missouri lake was held up as an inspiration Saturday as hundreds of people gathered in their memory.

Gov. Eric Holcomb and Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett were among those at Eastern Star Church for the funeral of Horace Coleman, 70; his wife, Belinda Coleman, 69; Ervin Coleman, 76; Angela Coleman, 45; and her 2-year-old son, Maxwell. It came a day after the services for Glenn Coleman, 40, and his three children: 9-year-old Reece, 7-year-old Evan and 1-year-old Arya.

The governor attended both ceremonies and assured their survivors that they are not alone.

Tia Coleman – Glenn Coleman’s wife and mother of their children – and her 13-year-old nephew were the only two survivors among 11 Coleman family members who boarded the boat before it sank in a sudden storm July 19 on Table Rock Lake in Branson, Mo., killing 17 people .

Associated Press