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Freedom Under Fire: 5 takeaways from AP’s series on rising tension between guns and American liberty

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

In a country shadowed by the threat of mass shootings and neighborhood violence, courts have embraced an increasingly absolute reading of the right to guns. That raises difficult questions about how to protect the full range of freedoms Americans cherish.With nearly 400 million guns in civilian hands, the violence they enable feels to many like a threat to their right to worship in peace, go to school and be safe at home. To many others, an unfettered right to own and carry guns is essential to protecting those liberties.With shooting deaths in the U.S. up sharply, the Associated Press examined the rising tensions between those beliefs and the struggle for answers. Here are the key takeaways from each story:Amendment vs. commandment: Do guns belong in churches?When two pastors rise to their respective pulpits on a Sunday morning, both shoulder a growing weariness about shootings in the world outside their doors. But their views on how to respond are diametrically opposite.“I’m reall...

In a first, MIT trains students to resolve clean energy conflicts

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — As the United States injects hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy through its signature climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, criticism is growing louder about where, how and whether new development should be allowed.As opposition grows, once-routine regulatory processes are taking several years, if they are completed at all. Some communities are concerned about landscape changes, some property values and others wildlife preservation. Layered on top of these debates is misinformation, which sows doubt and mistrust among developers and communities.A new class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a glimpse into a novel way of resolving these types of conflicts.MIT is offering a first-of-its-kind course that trains students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Supervised by a professional mediator, students work directly with developers, local officials and community members. Students get academic cred...

In the shadow of loss, a mother’s long search for happiness

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

AJIJIC, Mexico (AP) — There’s a look Sandy Phillips came to know each time she arrived somewhere a gunman had made famous. Her road trip through mass shooting sites went on for a decade and always seemed to have a new stop. When she reached it, she’d lock eyes with someone and see the catatonia, as plain as the weight of every leaden step they’d taken since the news that upended their life.She, too, had inched through days when all the world’s laughter went silent and its beauty was lost. In a morning fog, she’d question if it all was a nightmare, and in the black of night, when the grisly visions clawed her awake, she’d lie there wishing it was she who had died. Life became a torturous cycle punctuated by her own sobbing. She was sure she was creeping toward insanity.Now she found herself in Newtown or Parkland or Uvalde or whatever fresh hell had just been put on the map. She had lessons to share, advice that could only be amassed by someone who’d lived through the same. So, she’d...

Abuse victims say gun surrender laws save lives. Will the Supreme Court agree?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

As Janet Paulsen prepared to leave her husband, who had become increasingly volatile over their 15-year marriage, she slipped down to his gun safes one night while he slept to try to change the combination locks.“There were 74 firearms in my house,” said Paulsen, who was stunned by how many guns she found, but could not figure out how to change the codes. “When I went to get my protection order, I brought pictures of all of those firearms with me.”Georgia, where she lives, is not among the 21 states with gun surrender laws that can force people to relinquish their weapons while they are deemed a risk to themselves or others. So Paulsen’s husband, whom she accused of threatening and erratic behavior, was only ordered to stay away from her and their 13-year-old twin boys until a court hearing.That changed a few days later when she said he tried to track them through a phone locator app, a violation of the protection order that prompted a misdemeanor charge, two hours in jail and a cou...

Veterans are more likely than most to kill themselves with guns. Families want to keep them safe.

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

FLINT, Texas (AP) — She leaned out of the tent at a small-town summer festival, hoping someone would stop to ask about her tattoos, her T-shirt, the framed pictures of her son on a table in the back of the booth.Barbie Rohde has made herself a walking billboard for this cause. She feels called to say the words, as much as they sometimes rattle the people who stop at her booth: “veteran suicide.”A man in an Army cap recoiled and walked away. His wife said she was sorry, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and struggles to speak of it.“I worry for him and for us every day,” she said.Rohde reached underneath her display tables, grabbed a gun lock and wrapped it in a blue bandana, printed with the phone number for the Department of Veterans Affairs crisis line: call 988, press 1.“Here’s some free goodies for you,” she said, and tucked it discreetly into the bag with two T-shirts the woman bought.Rohde runs the most active chapter of a nonprofit called Mission 22, aimed at end...

For parents who’ve been through shootings, raising kids requires grappling with fears

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (AP) — By the time Hollan Holm pulls the family minivan into Chickasaw Park, the buzz rising from a crowd clustered around a large picnic shelter makes clear this afternoon’s story-sharing is already underway.In the thick heat just outside the pavilion, a youth football coach recounts the grief of losing his 19-year-old son, shot dead in the parking lot of a local liquor store in 2012. Under the rafters, a mother of five, infant son balanced on her hip, recalls her 15-year-old cousin, gunned down just across the park last December.Holm also carries a story of trauma. But it’s from his own youth, when it was shattered by gunshots.“Dad, are you speaking today?” asks his daughter, Sylvia, a sixth grader wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban fighter at 15 for asserting girls’ right to an education.“They’ve got other folks lined up,” says Holm, who a generation ago survived one of the first school mass shootings to...

Two pastors worry for their congregants’ safety. Are more guns the answer or the problem?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. (AP) — Inside the columned church on the corner, the rich tones of the organ have wrapped congregants in their embrace. The time has come for the Rev. Jimmie Hardaway Jr. to preach the lessons embodied by the Prince of Peace.If only the world outside Trinity Baptist’s stained-glass windows were a more peaceful one. Alas, it is not.So when Hardaway rises to the pulpit this Sunday morning – weeks after a 24-year-old man was shot to death in the street two blocks from the chapel, and days after a mass shooting claimed six lives at a church-run school in Tennessee – he carries a .380 caliber semiautomatic pistol concealed in the pinstriped folds of his suit.“I’m really not free if I have to sit here and worry about threats to a congregation,” says Hardaway, one of several religious leaders who sued New York officials last fall after lawmakers restricted guns in houses of worship. He notes the similarities between Trinity’s worshippers and those at a historic Black ch...

A UN report urges Russia to investigate an attack on a Ukrainian village that killed 59 civilians

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.N investigators on Tuesday urged Russia to acknowledge responsibility for a missile strike on a Ukrainian village that killed 59 civilians, conduct a transparent investigation into what happened, provide reparations for victims and hold those responsible to account.The strike on a cafe in the village of Hroza on Oct. 5 was one of the deadliest strikes since the Kremlin’s forces launched a full-scale invasion 20 months ago. Whole families perished while attending a wake for a local soldier who died fighting Russian troops. The blast killed 36 women, 22 men and an 8-year-old boy. Numerous bodies were found torn to pieces, and it took nearly a week to identify all the dead. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a report published Tuesday it “has reasonable grounds to believe” that a Russian Iskander missile — a short-range precision-guided ballistic weapon — probably caused the blast in Hroza.The extensive damage and weapon debris at the sce...

TMX Group reports Q3 profit and revenue up from year ago

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

TORONTO — TMX Group Ltd. reported its third-quarter profit rose compared with a year ago, helped by higher revenue, partly offset by an increase in operating expenses.The operator of the Toronto Stock Exchange says its earned net income attributable to equity holders totalled $85.3 million or 31 cents per diluted share for the quarter ended Sept. 30.The result was up from a profit of $81.0 million or 29 cents per diluted share in the same quarter last year.Revenue totalled $287.3 million, up from $266.8 million a year ago.On an adjusted basis, TMX Group says it earned 35 cents per diluted share, up from an adjusted profit of 34 cents per diluted share in the same quarter last year.The adjusted profit matched the average analyst estimate compiled by financial markets data firm Refinitiv, while the average forecast for revenue had been for $292.6 million. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 31, 2023.Companies in this story: (TSX:X)The Canadian Press

Neighborhood in Taylor references Matthew Perry sitcom

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:37:00 GMT

TAYLOR, Texas (KXAN) – As fans across the world mourn the loss of actor Matthew Perry who died Saturday, those who visit one part of Taylor are reminded of his work every time they look at a street sign. Street names in the northwest Taylor neighborhood reference familiar characters and moments from the 1990s television show "Friends". Perry starred as Chandler Bing on the NBC sitcom. Texas neighborhood has ‘Friends’-themed street names Names like Pivot Street, Yemen Road, Janice Road, Marcel Court, Onna Street, Break Avenue and Gunther Way. "I was walking and suddenly realized the names of the streets were named after Friends," said Laura Hovan Oehler. "I put it together with Onna. O, N, N, A, I thought that was strange.  Onna Break, Janice. So yeah I did finally put it together."If you’re a “Friends” fan, then you remember the pivot scene, when Ross asks for help moving a sofa upstairs. When Ross, Rachel and Chandler start attempting to turn up the stairs, Ross starts y...