ATLANTA — Pro-gun Georgia lawmakers Thursday took revenge on Delta for cutting ties to the National Rifle Association, killing a proposed tax break on jet fuel that would have saved the airline millions.
A sweeping tax-cut bill that the Republicans had amended to strip out the fuel-tax exemption passed the GOP-controlled House and Senate by wide margins, just days after Delta reacted to the school massacre in Florida by saying it would no longer offer discount fares to NRA members.
Republican Gov. Nathan Deal criticized the Delta controversy as an “unbecoming squabble” but said he would sign the broader tax measure in whatever form it passed.
Delta, which is based in Atlanta and has 33,000 employees in Georgia, would have been the prime beneficiary of the break, worth an estimated $38 million a year to airlines.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In Kentucky, parents have pooled money to pay an armed officer to begin patrolling schools. A mayor outside Cleveland, Ohio, is urging a security levy to pay for guards. And a town in New Jersey has begun assigning off-duty police to stand vigil inside all its school buildings.
In the jittery aftermath of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, novel efforts to ramp up school security are flying fast as districts across the United States respond to heightened fears as well as threats and rumors of violence that have only seemed to multiply since the latest tragedy.
American schools have been stepping up investment in security for years, and many districts have offered assurances about procedures already in place since the Feb. 14 shooting that left 17 dead. But some parents are saying it’s just not enough.
In Monroe Township, New Jersey, 400 people crowded a meeting last week on school security, some rattled by rumors about an unsubstantiated threat online. The school system already has unarmed guards, but the mayor and police chief agreed to immediately assign armed, off-duty police officers to patrol each of the town’s eight schools. It’s expected to cost the town $200,000 for the first two months.
WASHINGTON — Russia’s claim to have developed new strategic weapons impervious to Western defenses seems unlikely to change the balance of global power.
Russian nuclear missiles already have the ability to annihilate the U.S., and U.S. defense strategy is based mainly on the deterrent threat of massive nuclear retaliation, not on an impenetrable shield against Russian missiles.
Some analysts said President Vladimir Putin’s statements about the new weapons may speed up what they see as an emerging arms race with the United States. Just last month the United States cast Russia as the main reason it needs to develop two new nuclear weapons: a lower-yield warhead for a submarine-launched ballistic missile and a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile.
The Trump administration has vowed to expand U.S. nuclear strength, while criticizing Russia’s buildup. Putin’s remarks seem unlikely to change that equation or divert the Trump administration from its path toward modernizing the full U.S. nuclear arsenal at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars while also expanding missile defenses.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration told Congress on Thursday that it plans to sell Ukraine 210 anti-tank missiles to help it defend its territory from Russia, in a major escalation of U.S. lethal assistance to Ukraine’s military.
The long-awaited move, which lawmakers of both parties have been urging for years, deepens America’s involvement in the military conflict and may further strain relations with Moscow. It came the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his country has developed new nuclear weapons he claims can’t be intercepted by an enemy.
The $47 billion sale includes the 210 American-made Javelin missiles along with 37 command launch units. In anticipation of the sale, the United States has already started training Ukraine’s forces on how to use them. The missiles will come from existing U.S. Army stockpiles, probably those that are already stationed in Europe, speeding up the process for transferring them to Ukraine’s military.
ATLANTA — When a north Georgia high school teacher was charged this week with firing a gunshot from inside a barricaded classroom and setting off a frantic lockdown and evacuation, it was not his first troubling encounter with police.
Just over a year ago, school employees and a police officer began searching Dalton High School after social studies instructor Jesse Randal Davidson went missing.
He was finally found sitting on the curb along a street a few blocks from the campus, being propped up by two school staff members, police said.
“I attempted to speak with Davidson as did staff members but no amount of stimulus would draw a response,” an officer wrote in his report. Davidson was then taken to a hospital.
In 2016, Davidson walked into the lobby of the Dalton police headquarters and told a wild story including his suspicions that someone had been murdered, police said. Detectives couldn’t verify that any of it was true, and he was taken to the hospital since he’d expressed thoughts of hurting himself, police wrote in their report on that episode.
From Associated Press