In brief

Gun reform urged in Ohio as Texas Democrats shun Trump visit

DAYTON, Ohio — Ohio’s Republican governor bucked his party to call for expanded gun laws Tuesday and some Democrats in Texas told President Donald Trump to stay away as both states reeled from a pair of shootings that killed 31 people.

A racist screed remained the focus of police investigating the massacre at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, while the FBI opened an investigation into the mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, citing the gunman’s interest in violent ideology.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine urged the GOP-led state Legislature to pass laws requiring background checks for nearly all gun sales and allowing courts to restrict firearms access for people perceived as threats.

Persuading the Legislature to pass such proposals could be an uphill battle. It has given little consideration this session to those and other gun-safety measures already introduced by Democrats and DeWine’s Republican predecessor, John Kasich, also unsuccessfully pushed for a so-called red flag law on restricting firearms for people considered threats.

Trump’s divisive words collide with his call for unity

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday will bring a message aimed at national unity and healing to the sites of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. But the words he offers for a divided America will be complicated by his own incendiary, anti-immigrant rhetoric that mirrors language linked to one of the shooters.

It is a highly unusual predicament for an American president to at once try to console a community and a nation at the same time he is being criticized as contributing to a combustible climate that can spawn violence.

White House officials said Trump’s visits to Texas and Ohio, where 31 people were killed and dozens wounded, would be similar to those he’s paid to grieving communities including Parkland, Florida, and Las Vegas, with the president and first lady saluting first responders and spending time with mourning families and survivors.

“What he wants to do is go to these communities and grieve with them, pray with them, offer condolences,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. He said Trump also wants “to have a conversation” about ways to head off future deadly episodes.

“We can do something impactful to prevent this from ever happening again, if we come together,” the spokesman said.

Ohio shooter said to have wrestled with dark thoughts

DAYTON, Ohio — A man who fatally gunned down nine people outside a Dayton, Ohio, bar had long wrestled with mental illness that manifested itself in a fascination with tragedy, uncontrollable urges to unleash violence and suicidal thoughts so deep he twice put a gun in his mouth, ready to pull the trigger, a woman who dated him said Tuesday.

Though her account failed to pinpoint what drove 24-year-old Connor Betts to carry out Sunday’s attack, the woman who said she went out with him for a few months earlier this year offered the most detailed portrait yet of a troubled young man obsessed with the darkest of thoughts.

“I have no idea what his motivation was. I will never know,” Adelia Johnson wrote in a 2,200-word recounting of the relationship she sent to reporters and posted online. “There wasn’t a hate crime. He fought for equality. This wasn’t a crime of passion. He didn’t get passionate enough. This wasn’t very premeditated. He wasn’t a thorough planner.”

The tone was set on their first date, she said, when Betts showed her a video of last year’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and narrated it play-by-play. Later, he steered conversations to talk about world tragedies and his suicidal thoughts.

“He trusted me with so much of his darkness that I forgot most of it,” Johnson wrote, adding that she brushed off much of what she heard. Talking about serial killers made sense as it was a theme in a Sinclair Community College psychology class they both were taking, a captivation with disaster and violence was offset by the sweetness of a “perfect gentleman,” and joking about a desire to hurt others was seen as the coping tool of a man grappling with illness.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88

NEW YORK — Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in “Beloved,” ”Sula” and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York after a brief illness.

“Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,” Morrison’s family said in a statement through the publisher. “She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends. The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.”

Few authors rose in such rapid, spectacular style. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” was published. By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her “visionary force” and for delving into “language itself, a language she wants to liberate” from categories of black and white.

Morrison helped educate her country and the world about the private lives of the unknown and unwanted. In her novels, history — black history — was a hidden trove of poetry, tragedy and good old gossip, whether in small-town Ohio in “Sula” or big-city Harlem in “Jazz.” She regarded race as a social construct, and through language founded the better world her characters suffered to attain, weaving in everything from African literature and slave folklore to the Bible and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In his own words: Ex-Cardinal’s letters to abuse victims

VATICAN CITY — At first glance, the handwritten postcards and letters look innocuous, even warm, sometimes signed off by “Uncle T.” or “Your uncle, Father Ted.”

But taken in context, the correspondence penned by disgraced ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to the young men he is accused of sexually abusing or harassing is a window into the way a predator grooms his prey, according to two abuse prevention experts who reviewed it for The Associated Press.

Full of flattery, familiarity and boasts about his own power, the letters provide visceral evidence of how a globe-trotting bishop made young, vulnerable men feel special — and then allegedly took advantage of them.

The AP is exclusively publishing correspondence McCarrick wrote to three men ahead of the promised release of the Vatican’s own report into who knew what and when about his efforts to bed would-be priests. Access to an archbishop for young men seeking to become priests “is a key piece of the grooming process here,” said one of the experts, Monica Applewhite.

Pope Francis defrocked McCarrick, 89, in February after a church investigation determined he sexually abused minors as well as adult seminarians. The case has created a credibility crisis for the Catholic hierarchy , since McCarrick’s misconduct was reported to some U.S. and Vatican higher-ups, but he nevertheless remained an influential cardinal until his downfall last year.

Former Fed leaders defend Powell against Trump’s attacks

WASHINGTON — In a strong rebuke to President Donald Trump, the four living former leaders of the Federal Reserve say that the head of the nation’s central bank should be able to make interest-rate decisions free of political pressure and the threat of being removed or demoted.

The former chairs — Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen — argued in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal that history has proven that central banks deliver the best results for the economy when they act “independently of short-term political pressures.”

Current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has come under heavy attacks from Trump, who has repeatedly attacked Powell’s decisions and has reportedly explored the possibility of either firing Powell or demoting him as Fed chairman.

Powell, the only Republican on the Fed’s seven-member board at the time, was tapped by Trump to replace Yellen as Fed chairman starting in February 2018 after Trump decided not to offer Yellen a second four-year term.

For the past year, Powell has been subjected to a steady stream of attacks from Trump who was unhappy that the Fed raised rates four times last year and has been slow to cut rates this year. The Fed did slash its key policy rate by a quarter-point last week and economists believe that more rate cuts are coming to cushion the U.S. economy from the turbulence stirred up by Trump’s trade battle with China.

Peter Strzok sues FBI for firing him over anti-Trump texts

WASHINGTON — A veteran FBI agent who wrote derogatory text messages about Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Tuesday charging that the bureau caved to “unrelenting pressure” from the president when it fired him.

The suit from Peter Strzok also alleges he was unfairly punished for expressing his political opinions, and that the Justice Department violated his privacy when it shared hundreds of his text messages with reporters.

“This campaign to publicly vilify Special Agent Strzok contributed to the FBI’s ultimate decision to unlawfully terminate him,” the lawsuit says, “as well as to frequent incidents of public and online harassment and threats of violence to Strzok and his family that began when the texts were first disclosed to the media and continue to this day.”

The complaint, which names as defendants Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray, revisits a political drama that was seized on by conservative critics of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as proof that the bureau was biased against Trump. It provides new details about the circumstances of Strzok’s firing and amounts to the latest defense of his reputation, coming months after a fiery congressional hearing in which he insisted that his personal views never influenced his work.

Multiple investigations are underway examining whether the FBI acted properly during the Russia investigation, and Strzok remains a frequent target of Trump’s scornful tweets. A Justice Department inspector general report focused on the early days of the Russia probe is expected to be released in the coming weeks.

Manson prosecutor: Keep them all locked up forever

LOS ANGELES — Stephen Kay was a fresh-faced prosecutor just 27 years old and three years out of law school when circumstances handed him the Charles Manson “family” murder case.

Over the next half-century, it would come to define his career and lead to death threats that to this day he worries a Manson sycophant might try to carry out.

“I don’t dwell on it, but I’m careful. I always look around to see if I’m being followed or anything,” the retired prosecutor said recently as he paused to discuss the case that punctured the peace, love and happiness movement that flowered in the late 1960s.

Kay helped lock up Manson family members but never really relinquished the case in his decades with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. He attended some 60 parole hearings over the years where he argued the killers should never be released.

“The crime was simply too heinous,” he said.

Changing the channel on the bad rerun of shooting coverage

NEW YORK — Revulsion over the weekend’s twin mass shootings and the nagging sense that it’s all an inconclusive rerun has frustrated the news media and those who rely upon it — and triggered the stirrings of a new debate over how such tragedies should be covered.

“It’s time for journalists to take sides,” tweeted prominent Columbia University professor Bill Grueskin, and he’s not just a voice in the wilderness.

News outlets have been dominated by coverage of the shootings that killed 31 people in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Editors at The New York Times discovered the extent to which nerves are frayed when they put together the newspaper’s Tuesday edition.

The first edition’s lead headline, “TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM,” provoked a social media backlash. Some tweeters said they canceled subscriptions in disgust.

“Let this front page serve as a reminder of how white supremacy is aided by — and often relies upon — the cowardice of mainstream institutions,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet.

Boom in overdose-reversing drug is tied to fewer drug deaths

NEW YORK — Prescriptions of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone are soaring, and experts say that could be a reason overdose deaths have stopped rising for the first time in nearly three decades.

The number of naloxone prescriptions dispensed by U.S. retail pharmacies doubled from 2017 to last year, rising from 271,000 to 557,000, health officials reported Tuesday.

The United States is in the midst of the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in its history. About 68,000 people died of overdoses last year, according to preliminary government statistics reported last month, a drop from the more than 70,000 in 2017.

“One could only hope that this extraordinary increase in prescribing of naloxone is contributing to that stabilization or even decline of the crisis,” said Katherine Keyes, a Columbia University drug abuse expert.

About two-thirds of U.S. overdose deaths involve some kind of opioid, a class of drugs that includes heroin, certain prescription painkillers and illicit fentanyl. Naloxone is a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses, restoring breathing and bringing someone back to consciousness. It first went on sale in 1971 as an injection. An easier-to-use nasal spray version, Narcan, was approved in 2015.