In White House, Newtown mom pleads for gun control
In White House, Newtown mom pleads for gun control
WASHINGTON — The mother of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Connecticut school shooting used the opportunity to fill in for President Barack Obama during the presidential weekly radio and Internet address to make a personal plea from the White House for action to combat gun violence.
“Thousands of other families across the United States are also drowning in our grief,” said Francine Wheeler, choking back tears in the address broadcast Saturday. “Please help us do something before our tragedy becomes your tragedy.”
Ben Wheeler was among the 20 first-graders and six adults killed in the Dec. 14 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
Francine Wheeler was the first person to deliver the address other than Obama or Vice President Joe Biden since the two took office in 2009.
Her husband, David Wheeler, sat silently next to her as she made the recording in the White House Library. Both wore the small green pins that have become a symbol of the shooting.
Obama asked Wheeler to deliver this week’s address, which was taped Friday. The White House said Wheeler and her husband wrote the remarks.
Palestinian Authority
prime minister resigns
JERUSALEM — Beleaguered Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad resigned late Saturday after struggling for years against political rivals and lackluster public support.
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who in recent months had also clashed with Fayyad, accepted the resignation, but asked him to remain in office until a replacement is named, according to Palestinian Authority spokeswoman Nour Odeh.
The departure means that a new Palestinian government, the fourth since 2007, could be formed in the coming weeks.
Because Abbas will remain president, Fayyad’s resignation is unlikely to have a significant effect on the Obama administration’s renewed efforts to relaunch peace talks, but it may complicate plans promoted by Secretary of State John F. Kerry to unveil new economic development in the West Bank.
Fayyad, 61, had served as prime minister since 2007. The former International Monetary Fund banker was highly respected by international donors, including the U.S., and credited with reducing government corruption and reforming Palestinian institutions.
Activists say Syrian airstrike kills 20 people
BEIRUT — A Syrian government airstrike on a town in the country’s northwest killed at least 20 people Saturday, shattering store fronts, setting cars ablaze and sending a giant plume of black and gray smoke into the sky.
President Bashar Assad’s air force has been one of his biggest assets in the two-year-old civil war and he has used warplanes and helicopters to try to check rebel advances, although the regime also frequently hits civilian areas.
A Human Rights Watch report this week accused the Syrian government of committing war crimes by using indiscriminate and sometimes deliberate airstrikes against civilians, killing at least 4,300 people since the summer.
Saturday’s air raid struck the town of Saraqeb in Idlib province, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights activist group. The Observatory said three children were among the 20 people killed in the attack.
Russians ban 18 Americans from country in retaliation
MOSCOW — Russian officials Saturday banned 18 American officials from entering the country, a day after the U.S. announced similar sanctions on 18 Russians in connection with the prosecution and subsquent death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
The lawyer’s death in custody in 2009, after he allegedly blew the whistle on a multimillion-dollar scam, led to passage of a law calling for visa restrictions and financial sanctions for those involved. The American list published Friday included Russian police officers, tax inspectors and other officials, most of whom were involved with the Magnitsky case.
The Russian list published Saturday on the Foreign Ministry’s official website contained names of 18 U.S. officials, generals, judges, attorneys, agents responsible for organizing the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp or for the arrests, prosecution and judging of Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout and Russian pilot turned drug-smuggler Konstantin Yaroshenko. Both have been convicted and sentenced to long prison terms in the United States.
By wire sources