The nation in brief

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“It’s time for government to scale back, not for people of faith to scale back.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, one of several speakers at a gathering of conservative activists who said Republicans should emphasize social issues like abortion and gay marriage in this year’s elections Article, this page

Students to get prod on college-aid forms

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama said Friday that the Education Department will lead an initiative to make sure that more high school students complete federal financial-aid forms to help them find ways to pay for college.

Appearing with first lady Michelle Obama at Coral Reef High School in Miami, Obama said getting into and completing college was “our ticket to success” and it can be for more high school graduates.

While the Free Application for Federal Student Aid is the gateway to aid for students seeking higher education, Obama said, more than 1 million students annually fail to complete the forms.

The Obamas and their daughters planned to spend the weekend at the Ocean Reef Club, a golf resort in Key Largo. He’s looking forward to “a little bit of down time in the warm weather with his wife and daughters,” said Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman.

Filings urge end to NSA phone sweeps

NEW YORK - A federal appeals court should outlaw the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ telephone records, concentrating searches instead on terror suspects, civil-liberties lawyers said in papers filed seeking a reversal of a lower-court judge who ruled the program was legal and necessary to fight terrorism.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union submitted papers to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan late Thursday, saying it is wrong that the agency for more than a decade has kept a record of all phone calls made or received on major U.S. telephone networks.

“Courts have insisted that the government’s intrusions on privacy be precise and discriminate,” the lawyers said in their appeal. “The phone-records program is anything but.

To pursue its limited goal of tracking the associations of a discrete number of suspected terrorists, the government has employed the most indiscriminate means possible - collecting everyone’s records.”

The government declined to comment Friday.

Border agents now directed to hold fire

WASHINGTON - The head of the U.S. Border Patrol announced new rules Friday to limit agents from shooting at moving vehicles or people throwing rocks or other objects at agents, reversing a policy that has led to at least 19 deaths.

Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher ordered customs and border agents not to step directly in front of a moving vehicle, or use their bodies to block it, in order to open fire on the driver. He also barred shooting at vehicles whose occupants are fleeing from agents.

Fisher also ordered agents to seek cover or move away from rock throwers if possible, and not to shoot at them unless the rock or other object “poses an imminent danger of death or serious injury.”

The Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau reported last week that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had commissioned a group of law-enforcement experts to conduct an independent review of 67 shootings along the nation’s borders between 2010 and 2012, but then rejected the group’s recommendations to impose stricter limits on shooting at vehicles and rock throwers.

Fisher’s directive Friday, contained in a four-page memorandum titled “Use of Safe Tactics and Techniques,” effectively reverses that decision and sets new standards on use of force for the Agency.

Mom’s drive into surf called murder try

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - A pregnant South Carolina woman who drove a minivan carrying her three young children into the ocean surf off Florida was charged Friday with attempted murder and child abuse, with authorities saying the children were screaming to bystanders that she was trying to kill them.

Bystanders and officers helped rescue Ebony Wilkerson, 32, and her children, ages 3, 9 and 10, from a minivan as it was almost submerged Tuesday on Daytona Beach.

Volusia County Sheriff Ben Johnson said Wilkerson has denied trying to hurt her children. However, the children told investigators otherwise, and witnesses said she tried to keep them from rescuing the children. The windows were rolled up and the doors were locked, and one of the children tried to wrestle the steering wheel away from her, Johnson said.

“She told them to close their eyes and go to sleep. She was trying to take them to a better place,” Johnson said.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 03/08/2014

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