Politics

In a prime-time speech from the Oval Office Sunday night, Obama said that the United States would defeat the threat of terrorism — without compromising American values.

Obama began his third Oval Office address by remembering the 14 Americans who died in Wednesday’s attack in San Bernardino, California.

He noted that the FBI has no evidence that the attack was directed by a terrorist organization, but said it was clear the shooters had gone down the “dark path of radicalization.”

“This was an act of terrorism,” Obama said, “designed to kill innocent people.”

He praised the work of counterterrorism officials who have “disrupted countless plots,” and noted that terrorist attacks have shifted since Sept. 11 — changing from elaborate plots to less complicated attacks, like shootings at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009 and Chattanooga, Tenn., earlier this year, as well as the attack in San Bernardino.

“The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it,” Obama said. “Our success won’t depend on tough talk or abandoning our values or giving in to fear.”

He said victory against the Islamic State would involve hunting down “terrorist plotters” around the world, providing training and equipment to Iraqi and Syrian forces fighting the Islamic State, disrupting the organization’s funding and recruitment, and pursuing a cease-fire and political resolution in the Syrian war.

But the president later added that it’s important that the U.S. not get involved in an extended ground war in Iraq or Syria.

At home, Obama said, he has ordered a review of the visa program the female shooter in San Bernardino used to enter the country, and urged technology and law enforcement leaders to “make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.”

He called for Congress to tighten restrictions on guns — prohibiting those on the no-fly list from purchasing weapons, and making it harder for anybody to purchase assault weapons — and put stronger screening in place for those who come to America without a visa.

He also called for Congress to authorize the use of military force against ISIS, while noting that he has been ordering the military to strike Islamic State targets for over a year.

The president exhorted the American people not to “turn against one another” — in particular, not to treat the fight against terrorism as a war between America and Islam.

“ISIL does not speak for Islam,” Obama said, using another acronym for the Islamic State. “They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death.” He also noted that most victims of terrorism are also Muslims.

He called for Muslims to confront radical ideology. But he also said it was crucial for all Americans to reject discrimination, religious tests and “proposals that Muslim-Americans should somehow be treated differently, because when we travel down that road, we lose.”

The speech comes during a period of national anxiety, following a massive terrorist attack in Paris and the shooting in San Bernardino.

The setting and timing of the address signal its significance, as NPR’s Domenico Montenaro reported earlier Sunday:

Underscoring its importance, this will be just Obama’s third Oval Office address. The other two were about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the end of combat operations in Iraq, both in 2010. Obama has addressed the nation several times since then, but has preferred other backdrops like the White House East Room where he announced the death of Osama Bin Laden in 2011.

Sundays in America mean church and professional football. Obama will squeeze in his address — expected to last between just 10 and 15 minutes, according to White House staff — between games. The president’s speech is scheduled to begin soon after 8 p.m. EST, which is sandwiched right between the late afternoon slate of football games, which end around 7:30 p.m. EST, and Sunday Night Football.

In a departure from previous Oval Office addresses, Obama delivered his speech from a podium, instead of from behind his desk.

He concluded his speech by reiterating that the U.S. will defeat the threat of terrorism.

“We are on the right side of history,” the president said. “We were founded upon a belief in human dignity: That no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law … Let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional. Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear. …

“So long as we stay true to that tradition, I have no doubt that America will prevail.”

Video of the speech is archived below, via the White House.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Former President Jimmy Carter told his congregation on Sunday that his cancer is gone, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Carter, 91, broke the good news during the Sunday School class he teaches at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.

The paper reports:

“‘He said he got a scan this week and the cancer was gone,’ Jill Stuckey said by phone from Maranatha, where Carter was still in the midst of teaching to about 350 people, many of them visitors. ‘The church, everybody here, just erupted in applause.'”

Citing Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, the Associated Press reports that doctors did not detect any cancer during his previous scan.

During a press conference in August, Carter announced that his melanoma had spread to his liver and brain. He seemed resigned and said that he was at ease with his potential death.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said.

But since then, Carter has continued to teach Sunday School and continued to help build homes for Habitat for Humanity.

“I’m feeling better than anybody expected me to so I’m still maintaining a pretty normal schedule, I’d say,” Carter told NPR during an interview last month.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

After news emerged Friday that the female shooter in a deadly attack in California had pledged allegiance to ISIS, the extremist group issued a radio bulletin calling Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook “supporters.” The group did not claim to have planned or ordered the attack.

The mass shooting in San Bernardino, which killed 14 people who had been attending a holiday party at a social services center, prompted President Obama to call for tighter gun control laws – and to pledge that investigators will “get to the bottom” of the case.

In his weekly radio address released Saturday, Obama said: “We are Americans. We will uphold our values — a free and open society. We are strong. And we are resilient. And we will not be terrorized.”

The president’s speech aired the day after a federal source told NPR that Malik had pledged her support to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by using a Facebook account that was created under an alias. Both Malik and her husband were killed later, in a shootout with police.

That federal source also cautioned that investigators had no reason to believe ISIS had played a role in plotting the attack. Instead, the FBI is exploring the idea that the couple may have become “self-radicalized” somehow, taking their inspiration from ISIS.

Update at 3:25 p.m. ET: U.S. Sees No Sign Of Broader Involvement

After President Obama received an update on the San Bernardino investigation Saturday, the White House released a statement saying “The President’s team also affirmed that they had as of yet uncovered no indication the killers were part of an organized group or formed part of a broader terrorist cell.”

Original post continues:

According to jihadist monitor SITE Intelligence, ISIS made two statements about the California attacks today — in Arabic and English — calling Malik and Farook supporters and martyrs.

On Friday, the FBI’s David Bowdich, assistant director of the Los Angeles office, said the agency is “investigating these horrific acts as an act of terrorism.”

In the U.S., the shocking attack has also prompted new calls for gun control, with President Obama saying today:

“For example, right now, people on the No-Fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun. That is insane. If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous, by definition, to buy a gun. And so I’m calling on Congress to close this loophole, now.”

A call for changing America’s gun laws also sparked what is reportedly the first front-page editorial by The New York Times since 1920, with the paper’s editorial board demanding an end to “the gun epidemic in America.”

From that editorial:

“It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection.”

As member station KPCC reports, while the two rifles recovered from the San Bernardino attackers were bought legally, they were also found to have been modified in ways that made them illegal under California’s assault weapons ban. One could accept a high-capacity magazine — and could be reloaded more rapidly than allowed under law — while the other had been (apparently unsuccessfully) modified to make it fully automatic.

Military-style weaponry has also been part of the discussion about what tools civilian police forces should have in the U.S., where recent cases of police shootings have led to a push for police to think of themselves not as warriors but as guardians of the public’s safety.

NPR’s Martin Kaste explored those questions in the light of the San Bernardino attack, for a report on last night’s All Things Considered.

Noting that military-style equipment drew negative attention during last year’s protests in Ferguson, Mo., Martin spoke to San Bernardino SWAT team commander Lt. Travis Walker, who told him that the attack shows why police have such gear.

“Society has changed, weaponry has changed that individuals have access to,” Walker said. “And it’s not that we seek to militarize law enforcement. The goal is to try to make sure that we reduce the number of human casualties.”

Another view came from Sue Rahr, who runs Washington state’s police academy — and who urges police officers to see themselves as guardians, rather than warriors.

“Frankly, the most important thing we can do is figure out ways to prevent or predict when these are going to happen so we can stop them before they happen,” Rahr said, “because there’s no way — with the best training and equipment in the world, we [only] have about two or three minutes before the worst of it is usually over.”

The resettling of Syrian refugees in the U.S. has become a political and religious flashpoint. On Friday, for instance, Texas dropped its request for a federal court to immediately block Syrian refugees from entering the state. A Syrian family, including two young children, is now expected to arrive in Dallas on Monday.

By contrast, in Indiana, Gov. Mike Pence asked the Catholic Archdiocese in Indianapolis to turn down a family of Syrian refugees expecting to settle in that state later this month. At a meeting Wednesday with Indianapolis Archbishop Joseph Tobin, Pence expressed security concerns over the resettlement.

“They had a frank exchange of views,” Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski tells NPR’s Lynn Neary. Wenski serves on the migration committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Wenski explains: “I think the governor was saying, ‘Don’t take these people,’ and the archbishop was saying, ‘Think it over, governor, and don’t stand in the way of a humanitarian and Christian and American solution to the plight of this family.’ ”

Wenski believes that the Indianapolis archdiocese will proceed with its plans to bring the Syrian family into the state.

“I don’t believe the governor has the legal authority to prevent that from happening at this point. But I think the archdiocese of Indianapolis would be happier to have the governor’s OK or approval,” Wenski says.

“Because basically the church has no interest in introducing a family that has already been traumatized, by being uprooted in their own homeland, into a situation where they would find hostility or danger.”

The office of Gov. Pence tells NPR it has not received word on a final decision from Catholic Charities Indianapolis.

Interview Highlights

On his answer to the security concerns of refugee-resettlement opponents

What we’re trying to tell them is to take a deep breath. Because, first of all, to scapegoat these refugees is not very American.

And if ISIS wanted to infiltrate people into the United States, they could do so without using Syrian refugees, especially when the Syrian refugees are undergoing almost a two-year process of vetting that is quite thorough. It is not the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] that are vetting them; it’s the State Department and Homeland Security and whoever they require to help them in doing the vetting process.

On whether the family in Indiana will be accepted elsewhere if blocked from settling in that state

Well, I think that would be the alternative. Certainly we would look through our network … through our dioceses and Catholic charities and find a suitable location for them.

The bishops’ conference, under its program of migration and refugee services, has settled hundreds of thousands of refugees over the past 30 or 40 years. I think some Syrians have probably already come to the United States in the past years.

I know that the archdiocese of Indianapolis wanted to go forward, but as I said earlier, it’s nobody’s interest to introduce traumatized people into an environment that would be hostile to them and perhaps even put them in danger.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

President Obama will deliver an Oval Office address at 4 p.m. Alaska time on Sunday, discussing the San Bernardino attack and the broader issue of terrorism.

The mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., which killed 14 people earlier this week, is currently being investigated by the FBI as an act of terror. The president will provide an update on the ongoing investigation, the White House says.

He will also discuss “the steps our government is taking to fulfill his highest priority: keeping the American people safe,” according to a statement, as well as “the broader threat of terrorism, including the nature of the threat, how it has evolved, and how we will defeat it.”

An address from the Oval Office carries strong symbolic weight.

Sunday’s speech will be the third Oval Office address of Obama’s presidency: he previously delivered speeches on the Deepwater Horizon Spill and the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Lawmakers are considering alternatives to their expensive and controversial office space in Anchorage.

When the state renewed its lease on the Legislative Information Office in downtown Anchorage last year, it paid about $7.5 million for renovations — and saw its annual rent spike from under $700,000 to more than $4 million per year.

The deal was negotiated by Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage, and approved by the Legislative Council, which handles the legislature’s administrative business.

But with a budget crisis prompting cuts across the state, the high rent has become an embarrassment for lawmakers.

The question now is whether the state can get out of the deal and find anything cheaper.

On Friday, the Council heard a range of options prepared by its chair, Republican Sen. Gary Stevens of Kodiak. Stevens’ report found the cheapest option — by far — would be to move into the state-owned Atwood Building, a few blocks away.

Moving into the Atwood Building would cost about $10 million over 10 years. Keeping the existing lease would cost an estimated $40 million over 10 years, Stevens found, while buying the current building outright would cost at least $43 million.

But lawmakers expressed concern that breaking the existing lease could prompt expensive litigation. A decision on the building was postponed Dec. 19.