3:45 p.m.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have arrived in Pittsburgh to pay tribute to 11 people who were gunned down at a synagogue Saturday.
It is an uneasy visit for the president. The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and the Democratic mayor of Pittsburgh didn't want Trump to visit while people were mourning the victims' deaths.
The shooting was the worst attack on Jews in the nation's history.
The Trumps were joined Tuesday by his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner.
One of their stops will include laying white roses and a stone from the White House for each of the victims at a makeshift memorial outside the Tree of Life Synagogue.
3:10 p.m.
Pennsylvania is deferring at this time to federal authorities on the prosecution of the suspected Pittsburgh synagogue gunman.
District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. had asked the U.S. Marshals Service Tuesday to relinquish custody of Robert Bowers so he could be arraigned on state charges filed last Saturday. But the request was denied.
Zappala says it is "prudent" to let Bowers be prosecuted "at the federal level at this time."
Federal prosecutors are seeking approval from Attorney General Jeff Sessions to pursue the death penalty. Bowers did not enter a plea in court Monday.
1 p.m.
More than 1,000 people have poured into one of Pittsburgh's largest synagogues to mourn the two intellectually disabled brothers who were killed in Saturday's massacre.
Rabbi Jeffrey Myers says Cecil and David Rosenthal were the very definition of "beautiful souls" at their joint funeral Tuesday at Rodef Shalom. Myers also survived the attack and is officiating at five other victims' funerals.
He says their absence will be deeply felt at Tree of Life, the Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 people were gunned down Saturday in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.
Their family asked for donations to be sent to Tree of Life or Achieva in lieu of flowers.
Services for Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz were also being held Tuesday.
11:30 a.m.
Pennsylvania's governor and Pittsburgh's mayor both say they will not join President Donald Trump during his scheduled trip to Pittsburgh.
Trump faces an uneasy welcome Tuesday afternoon in the anguished community of Squirrel Hill, home to the Tree of Life synagogue where 11 people were gunned down during Sabbath services on Saturday.
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf's campaign spokeswoman, Beth Melena, says the governor based his decision on input from the victims' families who told him they did not want the president to be there on the day their loved ones were being buried.
Democratic Mayor Bill Peduto says he also won't greet Trump.
Peduto earlier said the White House ought to consult with the families of the victims about their preferences and asked that the president not come during a funeral.
11 a.m. UPDATE: Synagogue shooter was obsessed with Jewish refugee agency, online records show
Just moments before the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 people dead, the suspect is believed to have posted a final social media rant against a Jewish refugee settlement agency most people had never heard of, but which has increasingly become the target of right-wing rage and conspiracy theories.
"HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people," Robert Gregory Bowers wrote on the platform Gab early Saturday. "I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."
The group, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, was founded in 1881 in a Manhattan storefront to assist Jews persecuted in Russia and Eastern Europe. HIAS is now among nine groups that contract with the State Department to help refugees settle in the United States, and it has recently clashed with the Trump administration over policies that have throttled the flow of such newcomers.
Leaders of HIAS and the group's Pittsburgh affiliate vowed to continue their work.
"We were the perfect target for this murderer, because we're Jewish and we help refugees. So he gets to check off the two hate boxes," Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, told a news conference Tuesday in Pittsburgh.
Hetfield said HIAS is getting flooded with donations, with more coming in from non-Jews around the world than Jews for the first time in the organization's history.
Analysts who follow the extreme right say the fixation some extremists have with HIAS appears to be fueled by a mix of anti-Semitism and the recent caustic rhetoric about an immigrant caravan trudging slowly toward the United States.
Specifically, they believe Bowers ascribed to the "white genocide" conspiracy, which holds that Jews are prominent among the forces seeking to destroy the "white race" by bringing in non-white people. The Gab.com account believed to be Bowers' includes several recent postings or re-postings critical of HIAS.
Based in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Silver Spring, HIAS has an annual operating budget of $42 million and receives about half of its money from the federal government. It has resettled refugees of different faiths from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran and elsewhere. Among the thousands of people it has aided are Google co-founder Sergey Brin and singer Regina Spektor.
As the Trump administration restricted the number of refugees allowed into the U.S., HIAS and its local affiliates went from resettling 4,191 refugees in 2016 to 1,632 for the fiscal year that just ended.
Though HIAS strongly supports the rights of asylum seekers to a fair hearing, it has no connection to the immigrant caravan, said spokesman Bill Swersey.