AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EST

Senate sets up showdown votes on shutdown plans

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate leaders on Tuesday agreed to hold votes this week on dueling proposals to reopen shuttered federal agencies, forcing a political reckoning for senators grappling with the longest shutdown in U.S. history: Side with President Donald Trump or vote to temporarily end the shutdown and keep negotiating.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. set up the two showdown votes for Thursday, a day before some 800,000 federal workers are due to miss a second paycheque. One vote will be on his own measure, which reflects Trump’s offer to trade border wall funding for temporary protections for some immigrants. It was quickly rejected by Democrats. The second vote is set for a bill approved by the Democratic-controlled House reopening government through Feb. 8, with no wall money, to give bargainers time to talk.

Both measures are expected fall short of the 60 votes need to pass, leaving little hope they represent the clear path out of the mess. But the plan represents the first test of Senate Republicans’ resolve behind Trump’s insistence that agencies remain closed until Congress approves $5.7 billion to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. For Democrats, the votes will show whether there are any cracks in the so-far unified rejection of Trump’s demand.

Democrats on Tuesday ridiculed McConnell’s bill, which included temporarily extended protections for “Dreamer” immigrants, but also harsh new curbs on Central Americans seeking safe haven in the U.S.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the GOP plan’s immigration proposals were “even more radical” than their past positions. “The president’s proposal is just wrapping paper on the same partisan package and hostage taking tactics,” offering to temporarily restore programs Trump himself tried to end in exchange for wall funding, Schumer said.

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Los Angeles teachers approve contract, end strike

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Teachers overwhelmingly approved a new contract Tuesday and planned to return to the classroom after a six-day strike over funding and staffing in the nation’s second-largest school district.

Although all votes hadn’t been counted, preliminary figures showed that a “vast supermajority” of some 30,000 educators voted in favour of the tentative deal, “therefore ending the strike and heading back to schools tomorrow,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, accompanied by leaders of the union and the Los Angeles Unified School District, announced the agreement at City Hall a few hours after a 21-hour bargaining session ended before dawn.

“This is a good agreement. It is a historic agreement,” Garcetti said.

The deal was broadly described by officials at the news conference as including a 6 per cent pay hike and a commitment to reduce class sizes over four years.

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High court lets military implement transgender restrictions

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration can go ahead with its plan to restrict military service by transgender men and women while court challenges continue, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.

The high court split 5-4 in allowing the plan to take effect, with the court’s five conservatives greenlighting it and its four liberal members saying they would not have. The order from the court was brief and procedural, with no elaboration from the justices.

The court’s decision clears the way for the Pentagon to bar enlistment by people who have undergone a gender transition. It will also allow the administration to require that military personnel serve as members of their biological gender unless they began a gender transition under less restrictive Obama administration rules.

The Trump administration has sought for more than a year to change the Obama-era rules and had urged the justices to take up cases about its transgender troop policy immediately, but the court declined for now.

Those cases will continue to move through lower courts and could eventually reach the Supreme Court again. The fact that five justices were willing to allow the policy to take effect for now, however, makes it more likely the Trump administration’s policy will ultimately be upheld.

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Defying Pelosi, Trump proceeds with State of the Union plans

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is moving forward with plans for President Donald Trump to deliver his State of the Union speech next week in front of a joint session of Congress — despite a letter from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi requesting he delay it.

The White House sent an email to the House sergeant-at-arms asking to schedule a walk-through in anticipation of a Jan. 29 address, according to a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the planning by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Nancy Pelosi made the invitation to the president on the State of the Union. He accepted,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “At this point, we’re moving forward.”

The move is the latest in a game of political brinksmanship between Trump and the House Speaker as they remain locked in an increasingly personal standoff over Trump’s demand for border wall funding that has forced a partial government shutdown that is now in its second month.

The gamesmanship began last week when Pelosi sent a letter to Trump suggesting that he either deliver the speech in writing or postpone it until after the partial government shutdown is resolved, citing security concerns. But the White House maintains Pelosi never formally rescinded her invitation, and is, in essence, calling her bluff.

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Boys school shuts down amid fallout over Washington videos

COVINGTON, Ky. (AP) — A Kentucky boys’ school shut down its campus Tuesday as a precaution and a small protest was held outside their diocese as fallout continued over an encounter involving white teenagers, Native American marchers and a black religious sect outside the Lincoln Memorial last week.

President Donald Trump tweeted early Tuesday that the students at Covington Catholic High School “have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be” but he hopes the teens will use the attention for good, and “maybe even to bring people together.”

The recorded images that initially generated outrage on social media were tightly focused on the students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, who seemed to laugh derisively as they surrounded an elderly Native American beating a drum.

Later Tuesday, presidential press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the White House has reached out to the Kentucky students.

“We’ve reached out and voiced our support,” Sanders said. She added that no one understands better than Trump when the media jumps to conclusions and “attacks you for something you may or may not have done.” And if the president does invite the students from Covington Catholic High School to the White House, Sanders said, it will be sometime after the shutdown has concluded.

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Giuliani’s media blitz draws ire of Trump and some allies

NEW YORK (AP) — Rudy Giuliani’s latest media blitz, which was filled with a dizzying array of misstatements and hurried clarifications, agitated President Donald Trump and some of his allies, who have raised the possibility that the outspoken presidential lawyer be at least temporarily sidelined from televised interviews.

Trump was frustrated with Giuliani, according to three White House officials and Republicans close to the White House who were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations. The president told advisers that he felt his lawyer had obscured what he believed was a public relations victory: the special counsel’s rare public statement disputing portions of a BuzzFeed News story that Trump instructed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie before Congress.

The president told confidants that Giuliani had “changed the headlines” for the worse and raised the possibility that Giuliani do fewer cable hits, at least for a while, according to the officials and Republicans.

Several of Trump’s influential outside allies also have begun expressing reservations about Giuliani. Some members of this informal network of advisers, whom the president frequently calls from the White House residence, urged Trump in recent days to bench Giuliani — but most stopped short of suggesting he be fired, according to four White House officials and Republicans close to the White House.

Trump has not expressed an inclination to dismiss Giuliani.

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Chilean transgender school protects children from bullying

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Growing up as a transgender child in Chile, Angela was so desperate to escape the physical and verbal abuse from other students at her elementary school that she thought about taking her own life.

“I just wanted to die,” said the now 16-year-old. “I didn’t want to exist, because what they did to me made me feel awful.”

After suffering years of discrimination, Angela and some 20 other transgender minors aged 6 to 17 have found hope at Latin America’s first school for trans children . The institution, founded by the Chile-based Selenna Foundation that protects their rights, is a milestone in a country that was so socially conservative that it only legalized divorce in 2004.

In recent years, the families of trans children have demanded greater acceptance — a call that recently led to the approval of a law that allows people over the age of 14 to change their name and gender in official records with the consent of their parents or legal guardians.

Activists and parents of transgender children say that’s the stage of childhood or pre-adolescence when children discover that their gender does not correspond to their body.

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Salvadoran man to be charged in 4 fatal shootings in Nevada

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A man suspected of being in the U.S. illegally shot and killed four people in Nevada over the past two weeks, including an elderly Reno couple, authorities said, and the slayings added fuel to the immigration debate.

Wilbur Ernesto Martinez-Guzman, 19, from El Salvador, has been jailed in Carson City since Saturday on possession of stolen property, burglary and immigration charges. Authorities said they expect to file murder charges against him in Reno in the shooting deaths of a Washoe County couple and in Douglas County in the slayings of two women in Gardnerville.

Carson City Sheriff Ken Furlong said federal immigration authorities told his office that Martinez-Guzman was in the country illegally. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not have details on his entry into the U.S.

The investigation is ongoing, the sheriff said, and it was too early to comment on a possible motive.

Investigators who had been tracking Martinez-Guzman considered him “an imminent threat” when they arrested him Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of a shopping mall.

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Newark operations resume after drone reports halt arrivals

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Flight arrivals at Newark Airport were briefly suspended Tuesday evening after a drone was spotted over another nearby airport, officials said, in the latest incident of the unmanned aircraft affecting commercial air travel.

At about 5 p.m., the Federal Aviation Administration received two reports from flights headed to Newark that they had spotted a drone about 3,500 feet (1,000 metres) over nearby Teterboro Airport. The administration said in a statement that arriving flights were held briefly but resumed after no further sightings were reported.

The airport, which serves New York City, said just after 7 p.m. that it was operating normally again. The FAA had no reports of delays at the airport on its website.

Brett Sosnik was on a United Airlines flight bound for Newark when the pilot told passengers that they would be circling in the air because of a drone spotted in Newark airspace. Sosnik, who was returning from the Bahamas, said his plane circled for about half an hour.

“I was looking around trying to find a drone in the air when we were closer to landing, but I didn’t see anything,” said Sosnik, a New York City resident who works in marketing. “There’s got to be a way to combat that stuff and not have it affect huge airports with such a little piece of technology.”

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Russell Baker, author and NY Times columnist is dead at 93

LEESBURG, Va. (AP) — Russell Baker, the genial, but sharp-witted writer who won Pulitzer Prizes for his humorous columns in The New York Times and a moving autobiography of his impoverished Baltimore childhood and later hosted television’s “Masterpiece Theatre,” has died. He was 93.

Allen Baker told The Associated Press that his father died on Monday from complications after a fall.

Baker in his later years, he lived in Leesburg, Virginia, not far from the rural community of his native Morrisonville.

Amiable and approachable, but also clear-eyed and street smart, Baker enjoyed a decades-long career as reporter, columnist, critic and on-air personality. He won Pulitzers in 1979 for the “Observer,” the Times column he wrote for 35 years, and in 1983 for his autobiography “Growing Up.”

The Great Depression and World War II shaped Baker’s early life. He began his career as a reporter in 1947 and rose to become a national New York Times reporter in Washington, D.C., in 1954.

The Associated Press