BREAKING NEWS: Rex Tillerson is out as secretary of state. President Donald Trump is telling reporters that he made the decision to oust Tillerson “by myself.” The president is adding that Tillerson will be “much happier now,” and he appreciates his service. Trump says he and Tillerson had been “talking about this for a long time,” and they had disagreed on issues like the Iran deal. Trump is praising the energy and intellect of his incoming Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who has led the CIA. This breaking news report is brought to you by…

Eliminating abortion procedures that are performed specifically to prevent the birth of Down syndrome children was the topic of a rally held Monday in the state capitol. House Speaker Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny) and Rep. Judy Ward (R-Blair) were joined by other lawmakers in support of their bill, which would amend the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act to prevent the abortion of any child solely due to a diagnosis of possible Down syndrome. Rep. Jim Marshall (R-Beaver) commented on the proposed legislation…

Schools all across Beaver County are making preparations for Wednesday’s planned national 17-minute student walkout.  Beaver County Radio News Correspondent Sandy Giordano has details. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report…

WEATHER FORECAST FOR TUESDAY, MARCH 13TH, 2018

TODAY – FLURRIES AND A FEW SNOW SHOWERS
THROUGHOUT THE DAY. HIGH – 35.

TONIGHT – PARTLY CLOUDY SKIES. A FEW FLURRIES OR
SNOW SHOWERS POSSIBLE. LOW – 24.

WEDNESDAY – CLOUDY SKIES. A FEW FLURRIES OR SNOW
SHOWERS POSSIBLE. HIGH – 34.

House panel’s initial report says no collusion with Russia
By MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have completed a draft report concluding there was no collusion or coordination between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, a finding that pleased the White House but enraged Democrats who had not yet seen the document.
After a yearlong investigation, Texas Rep. Mike Conaway announced Monday that the committee has finished interviewing witnesses and will share the report with Democrats for the first time Tuesday. Conaway is the Republican leading the House probe, one of several investigations on Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
“We found no evidence of collusion,” Conaway told reporters, suggesting that those who believe there was collusion are reading too many spy novels. “We found perhaps some bad judgment, inappropriate meetings, inappropriate judgment in taking meetings. But only Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn or someone else like that could take this series of inadvertent contacts with each other, or meetings or whatever, and weave that into sort of a fiction page-turner, spy thriller.”
Hours later, Trump tweeted his own headline of the report in excited capital letters: “THE HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HAS, AFTER A 14 MONTH LONG IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION, FOUND NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION OR COORDINATION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA TO INFLUENCE THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.”
Conaway previewed some of the conclusions, but said the public will not see the report until Democrats have reviewed it and the intelligence community has decided what information can become public, a process that could take weeks. Democrats are expected to issue a separate report with far different conclusions.
In addition to the statement on coordination with Russians, the draft challenges an assessment made after the 2016 election that Russian meddling was an effort to help Trump. The January 2017 assessment revealed that the FBI, CIA and NSA had concluded that the Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, waged a covert influence campaign to interfere in the election with the goal of hurting Democrat Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Trump’s campaign.
House Intelligence Committee officials said they spent hundreds of hours reviewing raw source material used by the intelligence services in the assessment and that it did not meet the appropriate standards to make the claim about helping Trump. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the intelligence material.
Conaway said there will be a second report just dealing with the intelligence assessment and its credibility.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement soon after the GOP announcement, saying it stood by the intelligence community’s findings. DNI spokesman Brian Hale said the office will review the findings of the committee’s report.
According to Conaway, the report will agree with the intelligence assessment on most other details, including that Russians did meddle in the election. It will detail Russian cyberattacks on U.S. institutions during the election and the use of social media to sow discord. It will also show a pattern of Russian attacks on European allies — information that could be redacted in the final report. And it will blame officials in President Barack Obama’s administration for a “lackluster” response and look at leaks from the intelligence community to the media.
It will include at least 25 recommendations, including how to improve election security, respond to cyberattacks and improve counterintelligence efforts.
Democrats have criticized Republicans on the committee for shortening the investigation, pointing to multiple contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia and saying they have seen far too few witnesses to make any judgment on collusion. The Democrats and Republicans have openly fought throughout the investigation, with Democrats suggesting a cover-up for a Republican president and one GOP member of the panel calling the probe “poison” for the previously bipartisan panel.
The top Democrat on the intelligence panel, California Rep. Adam Schiff, suggested that by wrapping up the probe the Republicans were protecting Trump. He called the development a “tragic milestone” and said history would judge them harshly.
Republicans “proved unwilling to subpoena documents like phone records, text messages, bank records and other key records so that we might determine the truth about the most significant attack on our democratic institutions in history,” Schiff said.
The report is also expected to turn the subject of collusion toward the Clinton campaign, saying an anti-Trump dossier compiled by a former British spy and paid for by Democrats was one way that Russians tried to influence the election. Conaway did not suggest that Clinton knowingly coordinated with the Russians, but said the dossier clearly “would have hurt him and helped her.”
He also said there was no evidence that anything “untoward” happened at a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between members of the Trump campaign and Russians, though he called it ill-advised. Despite a promise of dirt on Clinton ahead of the meeting, there’s no evidence that such material was exchanged, he said.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is also investigating the Russian intervention, is expected to have a bipartisan report out in the coming weeks dealing with election security. The Senate panel is expected to issue findings on the more controversial issue of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia at a later date.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, also investigating the meddling, is expected to release transcripts soon of closed-door interviews with several people who attended the 2016 meeting between the Trump campaign and Russians. It’s unclear if the Judiciary panel will produce a final report.
The congressional investigations are completely separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which is likely to take much longer. It has already resulted in charges against several people linked to Trump’s campaign.
___
Associated Press writer Chad Day contributed to this report.

Pa. House election hits final day of campaign in close race
By BILL BARROW and MARC LEVY, Associated Press
CANONSBURG, Pa. (AP) — The final day of campaigning Monday before votes are cast in Pennsylvania’s closely watched congressional election drew a visit by Donald Trump Jr. and lots of door-knocking all over the southwestern district where polls show a close race.
President Donald Trump tweeted about “steel and business” in a final push to sway voters and Donald Trump Jr., visiting a candy-making business, touted Republican Rick Saccone as someone who will be “helping fight with my father” for jobs to come back from overseas.
Saccone, a 60-year-old state lawmaker, has struggled with an electorate that favored Trump by nearly 20 percentage points just 16 months ago. He’s up against 33-year-old Conor Lamb, who pitches himself as an independent-minded Democrat.
Trump Jr., eating ice cream with Saccone at Sarris Candies in front of dozens of cameras, said Trump supporters “gotta stay in the game, they gotta stay motivated.”
“Our guys just can’t take winning for granted,” Trump Jr. said. “They have to get out there, they have to continue this fight, now, for the rest of ’18, in ’20 and in eight years we can make a big difference. They just can’t be lazy. They’ve gotta get out and vote, and if they get out and vote, we win easily.”
The outcome Tuesday of 2018’s first congressional election is being closely watched as a key test of support for Republicans ahead of November’s midterms. Democrats must flip 24 GOP-held seats to claim a House majority, and an upset will embolden them as they look to win in places where the party has lost ground in recent decades.
Republicans, meanwhile, would be spooked about their prospects in this tempestuous era of Trump, who most recently visited Saturday night on Saccone’s behalf.
Trump Jr. was the latest in a line of national pro-Trump figures to appear with Saccone, a strong Trump supporter who boasts one of the most conservative voting records in Pennsylvania’s Legislature.
But that hasn’t given Saccone much traction against Lamb, a Marine veteran and former federal prosecutor in a district with influential labor unions and a long history of coal mining and steel-making.
Lamb has crystallized the debate over whether a younger, charismatic Democrat appealing to win back traditionally Democratic voters can overcome Republican party loyalty in a GOP-leaning district at a time when Trump remains a divisive figure.
A poll released Monday by Monmouth University shows Lamb at 51 percent and Saccone at 45 percent, a district previously held by former eight-term Republican Rep. Tim Murphy.
Pollsters interviewed 372 likely voters by telephone from March 8-11. The sampling margin of error was plus or minus 5.1 percentage points.
The seat is open after Murphy resigned amid the revelation that the strongly anti-abortion lawmaker had urged a woman with whom he was having an affair to get an abortion when they thought she might be pregnant.
A key difference between Murphy and Saccone: Murphy tended to have labor union support. Saccone does not.
GOP and Trump-aligned groups have spent more than $10 million to prop up Saccone and have painted Lamb as a lackey of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and weak on immigration.
“Lamb will always vote for Pelosi and Dems….Will raise taxes, weak on Crime and Border,” Trump tweeted Monday.
For his part, Lamb has held the national party at arm’s length, opposing sweeping gun restrictions, endorsing Trump’s new steel tariffs, avoiding attacking the president and telling voters he wouldn’t back Pelosi for speaker if Democrats won a House majority.
Lamb, however, keeps to party orthodoxy on unions.
He blasts the new Republican tax law as a gift to the wealthy and paints congressional Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, as a threat to Social Security and Medicare.
The area has trended away from conservative Democratic representation in Congress and the state Legislature to Republican over the last two decades in districts drawn by Republicans. Registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans by almost a four-to-three ratio in a district where gun rights are a high priority, and Democrats still hold some local offices.
Saccone had a full schedule of retail visits Monday, including at an ambulance company. Touring the candy-maker, he greeted workers and urged them to vote.
“Bring your friends and family, drag them out,” he told hair-netted employees boxing up chocolate for Easter.
Lamb had no public events scheduled Monday, instead spending the day knocking on doors with his campaign volunteers. Aides say he planned to visit multiple counties in the district, which includes parts of four counties in the greater Pittsburgh area.
Meanwhile, his Allegheny County field office was hopping with activity. Local volunteers were manning phone banks, while others regularly came in to pick up their instructions for visiting voters home on the final day before polls open.
“I was really down after the presidential election, but Conor has me totally enthusiastic again … his youth, his energyy, his ideas,” said Patricia Bancroft, 62, a new retiree who says Lamb is the first political candidate she’s ever volunteered for.
Saccone on Monday insisted he did not support cuts to Medicare or Social Security, and accused the left of trying to scare seniors. He also said he didn’t give the Monmouth poll much credence.
“We’re out meeting people every day and everywhere I get it’s 100 to 1 for Rick Saccone,” Saccone said. “So I’m ready. I’m ready for tomorrow.”
___
Barrow reported from Carnegie, Pennsylvania. Follow Barrow and Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP and https://twittter.com/timelywriter .

Wife of man shot by police on burglary call files lawsuit
PITTSBURGH (AP) — The wife of a man shot and killed by Pittsburgh police officers responding to a burglary call has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit.
Authorities said officers shot 57-year-old Christopher Thompkins in January 2017 after someone fired in their direction as they arrived at the front door of the Larimer home.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Brenda Richmond alleges police fired “indiscriminately” and without warning, hitting her husband rather than the intruder. She earlier said Thompkins grabbed her gun to chase the intruder down the steps.
The suit filed Friday against the city, the police chief and three unnamed officers seeks damages for excessive force, failure to train police and wrongful death.
A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office said “We are reviewing the complaint and will be taking appropriate action.”

THE ANNUAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS EXPO ATTRACTED OVER TWO-THOUSAND VISITORS AT 102 EXHIBITS AT CCBC OVER THE WEEKEND. BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO WAS THERE. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report…

Attending the health expo on Saturday was this representative from Farm To Home….

WEATHER FORECAST FOR MONDAY, MARCH 12TH, 2018

TODAY – SUNSHINE AND CLOUDS MIXED. A FEW FLURRIES
OR SNOW SHOWERS POSSIBLE. HIGH – 43.

TONIGHT – CONSIDERABLE CLOUDINESS. A FEW FLURRIES
OR SNOW SHOWERS POSSIBLE. LOW – 26.

TUESDAY – FLURRIES AND A FEW SNOW SHOWERS
THROUGHOUT THE DAY. HIGH – 36.