AP News in Brief 01-25-19

Maduro orders Venezuelan diplomats out of US as crisis grows

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Nicolas Maduro on Thursday ordered all of Venezuela’s diplomats home from the United States and defiantly closed the country’s embassy as relations between the two nations rapidly collapsed.

Maduro warned that if U.S. officials “have any sense” they will pull out their own diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, rather than defying his order for them to leave.

“They believe they have a colonial hold in Venezuela, where they decide what they want to do,” Maduro said in an address broadcast live on state TV. “You must fulfill my order from the government of Venezuela.”

Tensions have soared between the two nations after the Trump administration recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido, who claimed Wednesday to hold the presidency and vowed to remove Maduro, calling him a “dictator.”

Maduro retaliated by severing relations with the U.S. and giving American diplomats 72 hours to leave Venezuela. However, Washington said it would ignore the order after Guaido issued his own statement urging foreign embassies to disavow Maduro’s orders and keep their diplomats in the country.

Senate rejects rival Dem, GOP plans for reopening government

WASHINGTON — A splintered Senate swatted down competing Democratic and Republican plans for ending the 34-day partial government shutdown on Thursday, leaving President Donald Trump and Congress with no obvious formula for halting the longest-ever closure of federal agencies and the damage it is inflicting around the country.

The Democratic proposal got two more votes than the GOP plan. There were six Republican defectors, including freshman Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who’s clashed periodically with the president.

There were signs lawmakers on both sides were seeking ways to resolve their vitriolic stalemate, if only temporarily.

Moments after the votes, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., spent a half-hour in the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and a parade of senators from both parties took to the Senate floor to advocate reopening agencies for three weeks while bargainers seek a solution.

“We’re talking,” Schumer told reporters, one of the most encouraging statements either side has made since the shutdown began Dec. 22.

High heat but no record: 2018 was 4th warmest year on Earth

WASHINGTON — While Earth was a tad cooler last year than the last couple of years, it still was the fourth warmest on record, a new analysis shows.

With the partial U.S. government shutdown, federal agency calculations for last year’s temperatures are delayed. But independent scientists at Berkeley Earth calculate that last year’s average temperature was 58.93 degrees (14.96 degrees Celsius).

That’s 1.39 degrees (0.77 degrees Celsius) warmer than the average from 1951 to 1980 and about 2.09 degrees (1.16 degrees Celsius) warmer than pre-industrial times.

It’s likely other temperature measuring groups will agree on 2018’s ranking since they had it at fourth hottest through November, said Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. The Japanese Meteorological Agency has already calculated it at fourth. Record-keeping started in 1850.

Only 2016, 2017 and 2015 were warmer than last year, with only small differences among them. That was mostly because of natural yearly weather variations like El Nino and La Nina, Hausfather said. He said it would be foolish to call last year’s slight dip a cooling trend.

From wire sources

Florida elections chief resigns when blackface photos emerge

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida’s top elections official abruptly resigned Thursday after a newspaper obtained pictures of him in blackface dressed as a Hurricane Katrina victim at a 2005 party.

Secretary of State Michael Ertel, who had been on the job less than three weeks, resigned just hours after he testified about election lawsuits before a state legislative committee.

The Tallahassee Democrat obtained pictures taken at a Halloween party 14 years ago that show Ertel dressed in blackface while wearing earrings, a New Orleans Saints bandanna and fake breasts under a purple T-shirt with “Katrina Victim” written on it. The photos were taken two months after the deadly storm ravaged the Gulf Coast region and eight months after Ertel was appointed Seminole County supervisor of elections. The newspaper hasn’t said how it got the photos or identified the source.

Ertel was the Seminole elections supervisor until new Gov. Ron DeSantis picked him last month to take over the department that oversees elections.

DeSantis said Ertel regretted dressing up in blackface, but he said that he was right to step down after the pictures emerged.

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Out of touch? Trump aides struggle with shutdown empathy

NEW YORK — One White House aide mused that the shutdown was like a paid vacation for furloughed workers. President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law said employees’ “little bit of pain” was worth it for the good of the country. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross questioned why cash-poor workers were using food banks instead of taking out loans.

The president himself says workers simply need to “make adjustments.”

With hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay during the monthlong partial government shutdown, Trump and his team, which includes the wealthiest Cabinet ever assembled, have struggled to deliver a full dose of empathy for those who are scraping to get by.

Ross set off howls when he was asked on CNBC on Thursday about reports that some of the 800,000 workers currently not receiving paychecks were going to homeless shelters to get food.

“Well, I know they are, and I don’t really quite understand why,” he said. “The obligations that they would undertake, say borrowing from a bank or a credit union, are, in effect, federally guaranteed. So the 30 days of pay that some people will be out … there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be able to get a loan against it.”

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Agency: Deadly California fire caused by homeowner equipment

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Investigators said Thursday that a 2017 wildfire that killed 22 people in Northern California wine country was caused by a private electrical system, not equipment belonging to embattled Pacific Gas &Electric Corp.

The state firefighting agency concluded that the blaze started next to a residence. It did not find any violations of state law.

“I eliminated all other causes for the Tubbs Fire, with the exception of an electrical caused fire originating from an unknown event affecting privately owned conductor or equipment,” CalFire Battalion Chief John Martinez wrote in his report.

Some details about the property, including its owner and address, were blacked out of the report. It said the Napa County property about 3 miles (5 kilometers) north of Calistoga was built in 1946 on about 10.5 acres (4.2 hectares) with a wine cellar, pool and several outbuildings.

The fire was one of more than 170 that torched the state in October 2017. It destroyed more than 5,600 structures over more than 57 square miles (148 sq. kilometers) in Sonoma and Napa counties.

Police say Florida bank attack that killed 5 was random act

SEBRING, Fla. — Investigators have found no obvious reason why a man accused of fatally shooting five women picked a small-town bank in Florida as the place to carry out his attack, authorities said Thursday.

Zephen Xaver’s attack did not appear to be part of a robbery, and he had no apparent connection to the SunTrust branch or the four employees and one customer who were killed, police said.

There was also no evidence that Wednesday’s attack was planned, although a former girlfriend said Xaver often talked of killing people.

“We believe it was a random act,” Sebring Police Chief Karl Hoglund said Thursday at a news conference. “Aside from perhaps driving by and seeing it was a bank, we have no known evidence that he targeted this bank for any particular reason.”

That randomness hit Carol Davis, who manages the hair salon and spa next door, hard. If the gunman had driven 10 seconds farther, just one more driveway, the victims would have been her, her staff and her customers.

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Belt buckles and beer: Federal shutdown hits businesses hard

WASHINGTON — From power restaurants in Washington and a belt-buckle maker in Colorado to a brewery in California, businesses that count heavily on federal employees as customers are feeling the punishing effects of the government shutdown.

In many cases, it’s forcing them to cut workers’ hours and buy less from suppliers — measures that could ripple through the larger U.S. economy.

“It’s a fog with no end in sight,” Michael Northern, vice president of a company that owns three restaurants in the Huntsville, Alabama, area near a huge Army base that houses some 70 federal agencies, including NASA. He said business is down 35 percent. “People are just going home and nesting, trying to conserve resources.”

Western Heritage Co. in Loveland, Colorado, which makes buckles for uniformed employees of the National Forest Service and other outdoor agencies, has seen sales plummet 85 percent this month and laid off 12 of its 13 workers.

In the nation’s capital, Clyde’s Restaurant Group, which owns the Old Ebbitt Grill restaurant down the street from the White House and 10 other dining spots, reported a 20 percent drop in sales and is cutting hours for waiters and kitchen staff.

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Rare pangolins languish in China wildlife rescue system

WASHINGTON — When Chinese police found them in the trunk of a smuggler’s car, 33 of the trafficked pangolins — endangered scaly mammals from southern China — were still alive, wrapped in plastic bags soaked with their own urine.

But the fate of the creatures — whose scales are worth nearly their weight in silver on the black market — was not a happy one. Every last pangolin died in government captivity within a few months of the August 2017 seizure.

A pioneering environmental nonprofit in Beijing has launched an investigation, called “counting pangolins,” to figure out what happens to such animals recovered from the illegal wildlife trade. Its findings so far highlight discrepancies between environmental laws and outcomes.

China is hardly unique. The number of environmental laws on the books worldwide has increased 38-fold since 1972, according to an exhaustive U.N. Environment report released Thursday. But the political will and capacity to enforce those laws often lags — undermining global efforts to curb issues like wildlife trafficking, air pollution and climate change, the report found.

“The law doesn’t self-execute,” said Carl Bruch, a study co-author and director of international programs at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, D.C.

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