The Latest: Police: 5 officers hit in Houston shooting
HOUSTO (AP) — The Latest on five Houston officers injured during a shooting (all times local):
6:15 p.m.
Houston police say five officers have been struck in a shooting and have been taken to local hospitals.
In a tweet, Houston police say the officers were “struck with gunfire following an encounter with a suspect” Monday afternoon in a neighborhood in southeast Houston.
Mayor Sylvester Turner tweeted that the suspect “is down.” Additional information on the suspect was not immediately available.
Turner was seen Monday evening entering one of the hospitals where the injured officers were taken.
Police say the officers were transported to hospitals. Their conditions were not immediately known.
Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, says one of the injured officers was taken to a hospital by helicopter.
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5:48 p.m.
Officials say at least three Houston police officers have been wounded in a shooting.
In a tweet, Houston police say the officers were “struck with gunfire following an encounter with a suspect” Monday afternoon in a neighborhood in southeast Houston.
Mayor Sylvester Turner tweeted that the suspect “is down” and at least three officers have been injured.
Police say the officers are being transported to a hospital. Their conditions were not immediately known.
Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, says one of the injured officers was taken to a hospital by helicopter.

(UPDATE:  4:30 p.m.) Police have made an arrest. Police say a man was arrested after he barricaded himself in his girlfriend’s Beaver Falls home Monday afternoon. Beaver Falls Police reported a 22-year-old man from Ellwood City was allegedly involved in an incident in North Sewickley Township on Sunday night which resulted in a felony arrest warrant being issued for him.. The man said to have arrived at his girlfriend’s home on 17th Avenue in Beaver Falls Monday afternoon while she wasn’t home. When the girlfriend came home he barricaded himself and the female inside the home not allowing her to leave. Beaver Falls Police and Beaver County SWAT were both called to the scene around 1:40 p.m. The suspect peacefully removed from the house around 3:45 p.m. and turned over to North Sewickley Township Police and transported to the Beaver County Jail.

(Beaver Falls, PA) There is a SWAT situation underway in Beaver Falls near the Big Beaver Falls High School. Beaver Falls Police and a SWAT team were sent to the location around 1:40 pm ass the situation started developing.

No further details are being released at this time according to a Beaver County  911 dispatcher.

Stay tuned to Beaver County Radio for updates as this situation continues to develop.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Lawmakers have returned to the Pennsylvania Capitol but have yet to revisit legislation on child sexual abuse scandals since an October fight killed a bill that would have allowed long-ago victims to sue the Roman Catholic Church and other institutions.
The Legislature’s new two-year session began in earnest Monday, with little mention of legislation reflecting the state attorney general’s landmark grand jury report on child sexual abuse in Pennsylvania’s Catholic dioceses.
No votes are scheduled and talks are low-key as Pennsylvania’s dioceses begin opening temporary victim compensation funds spurred by the grand jury report.
Continued deadlock in the Legislature raises the possibility that now-adult victims will have little option but to apply to a diocese compensation fund — and sign away their right to sue — even if lawmakers later approve legislation giving them another chance to sue.
John Delaney, who has told of his rape as a 12-year-old boy by a priest in the Philadelphia archdiocese, said several people he knows have received offers ranging from $180,000 to $375,000. Delaney, now 48, isn’t sure he would accept an offer if it means giving up the right to sue.
“It’s not about the money,” Delaney said. “It’s about holding people accountable for their actions. I want my day in court.”
Several other states have approved a window for time-barred victims to sue, and neighboring New York’s Legislature was expected to approve such a bill Monday.
For Delaney and many other victims in Pennsylvania, including those in the grand jury’s Aug. 14 report, state law ended their right to sue decades ago, when they turned 20.
Compensation funds are fine for some victims, victim advocates say. But, they say, they allow the church to control its own punishment, while some victims want the tools offered by a court to force dioceses to divulge what church officials knew about an abuser, and whether they covered it up.
Compensation funds promise a faster payout. Lawsuits take longer but promise bigger payouts, say veteran victims’ lawyers.
The grand jury recommended a two-year reprieve, and the bill included provisions to give future victims more time to sue and prosecutors more time to pursue charges.
The Republican-controlled state House of Representatives passed it overwhelmingly, and it had support from Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and Senate Democratic leaders.
However, Catholic bishops and for-profit insurers opposed the two-year window, and a critical mass of the state Senate’s Republican majority blocked a floor vote on it.
The legislation collapsed .
Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati said he has no plans to restart legislation in his chamber and has had little contact about it since the debate stalled late at night Oct. 17.
“Nobody has picked up the phone to call me since I left here that Wednesday evening of session with a counterproposal,” Scarnati, R-Jefferson, said this month. “I have not received anything.”
The House now has a new majority leader, Rep. Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster, who is not as friendly to a two-year window as his predecessor.
Cutler’s office said he is discussing a compromise bill with Shapiro’s office and other lawmakers.
Philadelphia’s archdiocese opened a fund in November, and the Pittsburgh and Scranton dioceses followed suit last week. The dioceses set a deadline of Sept. 30 to apply, and they require someone accepting an offer to forfeit their right to sue later.
The funds are modeled on a system adopted by five New York dioceses in the past two years as a debate raged there over allowing victims a window to sue.
New York’s diocese funds, using the same third-party administrator, awarded a maximum payout of $500,000 and an average of about $188,000.
Other dioceses in Pennsylvania are expected to set up something similar.
Scarnati said he is satisfied by how Pennsylvania’s dioceses have moved to set up compensation funds .
“I think we give that time, see how that goes and it can only be judged by the victims that participate in it,” Scarnati said. “And that will be the judgment.”
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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at www.twitter.com/timelywriter.

Trump AG pick says he’s discussed Mueller probe with Pence
By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, William Barr, says Vice President Mike Pence is among the officials with whom he has discussed the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
Barr said in written responses to Senate questions made available Monday that he and Pence have had occasional conversations since the spring of 2017 on matters including policy and personnel. Some of those conversations included “general discussion of the Special Counsel’s investigation in which I gave my views on such matters as Bob Mueller’s high integrity and various media reports.”
“In these conversations, I did not provide legal advice, nor, to the best of my recollection, did he provide confidential information,” Barr told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat.
In his role as special counsel, Mueller is investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election. If confirmed by the Senate, Barr would inherit oversight of Mueller’s investigation. The Senate Judiciary Committee is prepared to vote on Barr’s nomination to be attorney general this week or next.
Barr described the Pence conversations in response to a question from Whitehouse about whether he had ever discussed Mueller’s investigation with anyone at the White House. He has also acknowledged that he discussed Mueller with Trump himself when he turned down an opportunity to represent the president in the special counsel’s investigation.
“During the meeting, the President reiterated his public statements denying collusion and describing the allegations as politically motivated. I did not respond to those comments,” Barr said.
He also reiterated how he shared with lawyers for the White House and for Trump a June 2018 memo he had written in which he disputed the idea that the president could have obstructed justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey.
Barr’s responses to the senators’ written questions largely matched his testimony from earlier this month. He repeated his intention to release as much of Mueller’s findings as possible, though he said he did not know what form a report from the special counsel would take.
Barr also said he would resign if Trump claimed executive privilege to cover up evidence of a crime, and if he were asked to fire Mueller without good reason.
“I would resign rather than follow an order to terminate the Special Counsel without good cause,” Barr wrote in response to a question from New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker.

Insurance claims from deadly California wildfires top $11.4B
By KATHLEEN RONAYNE, Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Insurance claims from California’s deadly November 2018 wildfires have topped $11.4 billion, making the series of fires one of the most expensive in state history, officials said Monday.
More than $8 billion of those losses are from the fire that leveled the town of Paradise, killing 86 people and destroying roughly 15,000 homes, state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said. Roughly $3 billion worth of damage is related to two Southern California wildfires that ignited during the same week.
“We have a long way to go before we can feel whole again,” Lara said after announcing the numbers.
The $11.4 billion total is slightly below the losses claimed from 2017 wildfires that ripped through Northern California wine country in October and Southern California in December.
While far more houses were destroyed in last year’s wildfires, home values are much lower in rural California communities, officials said last year.
The losses could keep rising. In all, wildfire insurance claims in California last year neared $12.4 billion, Lara said.
The new numbers come as Pacific Gas & Electric Corp., the nation’s largest utility, prepares to file for bankruptcy as early as Tuesday. State officials have not yet determined the cause of last year’s wildfires, but PG&E equipment is suspected in the Paradise blaze.
California law makes utilities entirely liable for damage from wildfires sparked by their equipment, even if the utility isn’t found negligent. PG&E has said it faces billions in possible damages from fires.
Regardless of what happens with the utility, California’s insurers are prepared to pay out all the claims, most of which were filed by residential property owners, Lara said.
“We are confident that the insurers have the money to make sure that we make people whole,” Lara said.

President Donald Trump says he doubts he’d be willing to accept less than the $5.7 billion he has demanded from Congress to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump tells The Wall Street Journal that he doesn’t think congressional negotiators will strike a deal he’d accept to end the border wall standoff and pledges to build a wall anyway using his executive powers to declare a national emergency if necessary. Democrats oppose a wall and say it would be ineffective and wasteful.

Lawmakers have returned to the Pennsylvania Capitol, but they have yet to revisit a response to child sexual abuse scandals since the debate’s late-night collapse on last year’s final voting day. The Legislature’s new two-year session began in earnest today, with little mention of legislation reflecting the state attorney general’s sweeping grand jury report on child sexual abuse in Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic dioceses.

Hillary Clinton is not ruling out a presidential rematch against President Donald Trump, according to CNN’s White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny. Zeleny told a panel on CNN’s ‘Inside Politics’ on Sunday that Clinton is telling people that, given all this news from the indictments, particularly the Roger Stone indictment, she is not closing the doors to the idea of running in 2020. Zeleny’s report did acknowledge there are no official announcements or campaign plans in the works.

THE 2018 OVERDOSE DEATH DATA FOR BEAVER COUNTY WAS JUST RELEASED THIS MORNING. BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO HAS MORE. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report….