Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON—President Obama will address Planned Parenthood’s annual gala on Thursday, the organization announced today.

“President Obama has done more than any president in history for women’s health and rights,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said in a statement announcing that Obama will deliver the keynote address at the organization’s “Time For Care” dinner in Washington. “We are honored to have President Obama join us…at this pivotal moment for women’s health.”

Richards also served as a surrogate for Obama’s reelection campaign, touting the president’s record on women’s issues during the heat of the race.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer and HBO’s “Girls” creator Lena Dunham will be honored the event.

Planned Parenthood provides a variety of services for women, including contraception, cancer screenings and abortions.

Obama reaffirmed last week that he favors abortion rights.

“What I can say is this: You know, I think, President (Bill) Clinton said it pretty well when he said abortion should be safe, legal and rare,” Obama said in an interview with NBC’s Today show.

Last year, Obama taped a video message praising Planned Parenthood and telling members he would fight Republican efforts to cut their federal funding.

During the campaign, he also charged that the GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, would end funding for the organization.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

`WASHINGTON — With authorities identifying two ethnic Chechen brothers as the suspects responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, the hot-and-cold U.S.-Russian relationship is facing an unexpected twist.

Early in President Obama’s first term, his administration proposed a “reset” in the historically complicated relationship with Russia, which resulted in a short warming of relations between the countries.

But over the last few years, the relationship has been soured by a series of policy disagreements — including differences over the ongoing civil strife in Syria where Russian President Vladimir Putin has opposed the ouster of Bashar Assad, while Obama says the Syrian president must go.

The White House won’t give details of any coordination they’ve had with Russian officials since identifying Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the suspects for Monday’s blasts in Boston.

But on Friday evening, Obama spoke with Putin and “praised the close cooperation that the United States has received from Russia on counterterrorism, including in the wake of the Boston attack,” according to a White House statement.

Even before the Chechen connection surfaced publicly on Friday, Putin condemned the explosions as a “disgusting” crime and offered to help the U.S. investigation in any way he could. On Friday, the suspects’ father, who is living in Russia, told CNN that he had been questioned by Russian authorities before being released.

A U.S. law enforcement official, who was not authorized to comment on the investigation, said investigators have been drawn to the overseas travel records of the elder suspect, Tamerlan, who was killed in a firefight with police on Friday morning.

The travel records show that the 26-year-old man left John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 12, 2012, for Sheremetyevo International Airport, near Moscow. The suspect returned to JFK on July 17, 2012, but the purpose of his visit is unclear, the official said. But authorities say they have found no formal links between the suspects and any terrorist groups.

Fiona Hill, a Russia analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Putin may angle to “reset the reset” and argue that Obama needs to be more concerned about the Chechen separatists, some of whom have made their way to fighting with Taliban in Afghanistan and the Syrian opposition.

After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Putin — who at the time was waging a brutal counterinsurgency effort against separatists in the predominantly Muslim population of Chechnya in southern Russia — reached out to President Bush in the hopes of collaborating on intelligence efforts and winning the U.S. support for their fight in Chechnya.

“Where the U.S. wanted to talk about Afghanistan, he wanted to talk about Chechnya and have the U.S. turn a blind eye to the human-rights abuses there,” Hill said.

The U.S. and Russia coordinated on national security matters in Afghanistan and central Asia in the aftermath of Sept. 11. But the U.S., while it has backed Russia’s territorial integrity and supported its right to combat terrorism, has kept an arm’s length from Russia’s battles in Chechnya.

In recent years, Russia watchers say that cooperation on security matters has diminished as the USA and Russia increasingly find themselves at odds on a host of issues, ranging from the war in Syria to corruption in Moscow.

“There is increasingly a conviction (in Washington) that the Russians continually pick the wrong side, and that when and if it comes to cooperation on national security issues with the United States, we do not want to tip our hands to Moscow because of who they may share information with,” said Matt Rojansky, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The other side is what does Russia have to offer the United States, that it is not offering in return.”

Chechnya sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and subsequently separatist groups fought two bloody wars with the authorities in Moscow.

Militants have also made several high-profile terror attacks in Russia and the North Caucasus region over the years, but have never targeted the United States. In the most notable incident, they took over a school in Beslan in the North Ossetia region in 2004. When the siege ended, more than 330 people had died — half of them children.

Today, violence has been reduced dramatically in Chechnya, but it continues to simmer there and elsewhere in the North Caucasus region.

Russia is hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, near the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, hundreds of miles from Chechnya, and Russian officials remain concerned about security there, analysts say.

“They are keeping tabs on them, and they are pretty darned concerned about them blowing up the Sochi Winter Olympics,” Hill said.

Obama and Putin’s predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, started off on the right foot.

In the first year of Obama’s presidency, the two nations forged an agreement on nuclear arms treaty and administration officials was pleased with the Russian’s backing tougher U.N. Security Council sanctions on Iran.

But the relationship has chilled since Putin returned to power nearly a year ago.

Administration officials raised concerns that Putin was heavy-handed in squashing dissent among the middle-class opposition movement ahead of his inauguration last year, and they expressed displeasure with the prosecution of members of the punk band Pussy Riot, which was critical of Putin.

Putin also ruffled feathers in Washington by canceling long-standing projects in Russia run by the United States Agency for International Development.

In December, Putin retaliated against the U.S. Congress passing a law punishing Russian human rights violators by signing into law a measure prohibiting the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens.

But some experts say the Boston tragedy may provide an opportunity for another thawing.

“Certainly, in the past these situations have helped promote reconciliation between the U.S. and Russia,” said Jeffrey Mankoff, a Russia analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Potentially that could happen again.”

Contributing: Kevin Johnson

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — After the Senate knocked down his best legislative hope for expanding background checks on gun sales, President Obama showed anger, if not disdain, for many of his former Congressional colleagues.

“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” he said.

When Obama introduced his ambitious gun legislation less than a month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, he vowed to use “whatever weight this office holds” to make his gun-safety proposals a reality. And after the Senate failed to muster enough votes to move forward with the amendment by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., Obama spoke of members of Congress as if they were living on a different a planet.

“The American people are trying to figure out, how can something have 90% support and not happen?” he said, noting that polls show a vast majority of Americans back bolstering background checks.

But as the gun vote, at least this round, winds down, it’s worth asking the question: Should Obama have been more personally involved in the legislative sausage making?

White House aides say there was nothing more that Obama could have done. In the days after Sandy Hook, the president’s senior advisers, including David Plouffe and Dan Pfeiffer, told him it would be very difficult if not impossible to get something done, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

But Obama responded to them that he had to try, and he was willing to put his political capital into it. The White House was also concerned about how to use the president to keep the issue in the public sphere without burning out the public, the official said.

When it came to the political fight necessary to move this legislative mountain, however, Obama left much of the heavy lifting to Vice President Biden.

Biden, a 36-year veteran of the Senate, was the one who met with the National Rifle Association, victims of gun violence and other stakeholders as he crafted recommendations for the president’s gun-safety agenda. He was the president’s bulldog who lamented the “black helicopter crowd” that accused Obama of wanting to take Americans’ guns away. Biden was the one who shamed lawmakers worried about their NRA scoring, telling them to get some “courage” like the parents of the Sandy Hook victims.

Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, an analyst at the Democratic-leaning think tank Third Way, said putting Biden out in front was the right strategy. “It would have shut down negotiations with Republicans if Obama had owned (gun safety) as his proposal,” she said.

After the Senate rejected the background-check amendment, Obama allowed that he was disappointed but refused to acknowledge defeat.

“We return home with the determination that change will happen — maybe not today, but it will happen. It will happen soon,” he said. “We’ve always known this would be a long road, and we don’t have the luxury of turning back.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — After the Senate knocked down his best legislative hope for expanding background checks on gun sales, President Obama showed anger, if not disdain, for many of his former Congressional colleagues.

“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” he said.

When Obama introduced his ambitious gun legislation less than a month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, he vowed to use “whatever weight this office holds” to make his gun-safety proposals a reality. And after the Senate failed to muster enough votes to move forward with the amendment by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., Obama spoke of members of Congress as if they were living on a different a planet.

“The American people are trying to figure out, how can something have 90% support and not happen?” he said, noting that polls show a vast majority of Americans back bolstering background checks.

But as the gun vote, at least this round, winds down, it’s worth asking the question: Should Obama have been more personally involved in the legislative sausage making?

White House aides say there was nothing more that Obama could have done. In the days after Sandy Hook, the president’s senior advisers, including David Plouffe and Dan Pfeiffer, told him it would be very difficult if not impossible to get something done, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

But Obama responded to them that he had to try, and he was willing to put his political capital into it. The White House was also concerned about how to use the president to keep the issue in the public sphere without burning out the public, the official said.

When it came to the political fight necessary to move this legislative mountain, however, Obama left much of the heavy lifting to Vice President Biden.

Biden, a 36-year veteran of the Senate, was the one who met with the National Rifle Association, victims of gun violence and other stakeholders as he crafted recommendations for the president’s gun-safety agenda. He was the president’s bulldog who lamented the “black helicopter crowd” that accused Obama of wanting to take Americans’ guns away. Biden was the one who shamed lawmakers worried about their NRA scoring, telling them to get some “courage” like the parents of the Sandy Hook victims.

Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, an analyst at the Democratic-leaning think tank Third Way, said putting Biden out in front was the right strategy. “It would have shut down negotiations with Republicans if Obama had owned (gun safety) as his proposal,” she said.

After the Senate rejected the background-check amendment, Obama allowed that he was disappointed but refused to acknowledge defeat.

“We return home with the determination that change will happen — maybe not today, but it will happen. It will happen soon,” he said. “We’ve always known this would be a long road, and we don’t have the luxury of turning back.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Regardless of who is behind the twin blasts that shook Boston, President Obama now finds himself grappling with the fallout of a terror attack on U.S. soil under his watch.

In recent years, Obama has dealt with an al-Qaeda-inspired U.S. soldier gunning down 13 of his comrades at a U.S. military installation in Texas, and there have been near misses, including a failed attempt by a Pakistani-American man to blow up a car bomb in Times Square and a foiled attempt to take down a Detroit-bound airplane by a young Nigerian man who hid explosives in his underwear.

But in the more than 11 years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States has managed, through stepped-up surveillance by the national security apparatus — and no small amount of luck — to avoid a spectacular attack on civilians like the one that hit the Boston Marathon, one of America’s oldest and most iconic sporting events.

In his initial response to the bombings, Obama has chosen to offer calm, vow justice for the perpetrators and request patience from the public as law enforcement authorities hunt for the individuals or groups responsible for the attack.

The president on Tuesday also quietly suggested that in the 20 hours since the attack, authorities are still struggling to figure out the who and why behind the attack.

“What we don’t yet know is who carried out this attack or why,” Obama acknowledged. “Whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization — foreign or domestic — or was the act of a malevolent individual. That is what we don’t yet know.”

Obama avoided the use of the word “terrorism” to describe the incident in his first comments hours after the bombings, even as White House officials were quick to call it “an act of terror.” But on Tuesday morning he noted that investigators were pursuing it as an “act of terrorism.”

On Tuesday, aides and allies of Obama emphasized the president’s engagement and defended his cautious approach.

Overnight, Obama received updates on the investigation from White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco. The president received another round of briefings from Monaco, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other senior members of his team later Tuesday morning, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary declared there were no indications suggesting the bombings “are indicative of a broader plot.”

And Obama said he has made clear to aides that he expected to be kept up to date on developments and directed his team to make sure that all federal resources were available for authorities on the ground in Boston.

“The president is actively involved here in responding,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Obama is clearly cognizant of the expectations that the president faces in a moment of such crisis, and the criticism his predecessor, George W. Bush, faced for his actions in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush was visiting a Florida classroom at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center and famously continued to read from a children’s book after learning from an aide of the unfolding event. Bush said in a 2011 interview with National Geographic that he didn’t want to rattle the children, but he also “wanted to project a sense of calm” to Americans he knew would later see images of his initial reactions.

“There’s this tension between getting the president out there to play that role and the need to go out there and gather facts,” former White House senior adviser David Axelrod explained on MSNBC on Tuesday morning. “In this case, the facts are slow to come.”

At the same time, Obama wanted to reassure the American people and Bostonians that, as he put it on Monday: “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

On Tuesday, Obama leveled with Americans that “clearly we’re at the beginning of our investigation.”

“It will take time to follow every lead and determine what happened,” Obama said. “But we will find out. We will find whoever harmed our citizens, and we will bring them to justice.”

Axelrod, who has been one of the president’s closest advisers for many years, suggested Obama’s measured response is reflective of his awareness that what he says will have reverberations around the globe.

“I’m sure what was going through the president’s mind was ‘We really don’t know who did this,’ ” Axelrod said. “You just don’t know, and so I think his attitude is, let’s not put any inference into this. Let’s just make clear we’re going to get the people responsible.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Regardless of who is behind the twin blasts that shook Boston, President Obama now finds himself grappling with the fallout of a terror attack on U.S. soil under his watch.

In recent years, Obama has dealt with an al-Qaeda-inspired U.S. soldier gunning down 13 of his comrades at a U.S. military installation in Texas, and there have been near misses, including a failed attempt by a Pakistani-American man to blow up a car bomb in Times Square and a foiled attempt to take down a Detroit-bound airplane by a young Nigerian man who hid explosives in his underwear.

But in the more than 11 years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States has managed, through stepped-up surveillance by the national security apparatus — and no small amount of luck — to avoid a spectacular attack on civilians like the one that hit the Boston Marathon, one of America’s oldest and most iconic sporting events.

In his initial response to the bombings, Obama has chosen to offer calm, vow justice for the perpetrators and request patience from the public as law enforcement authorities hunt for the individuals or groups responsible for the attack.

The president on Tuesday also quietly suggested that in the 20 hours since the attack, authorities are still struggling to figure out the who and why behind the attack.

“What we don’t yet know is who carried out this attack or why,” Obama acknowledged. “Whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization — foreign or domestic — or was the act of a malevolent individual. That is what we don’t yet know.”

Obama avoided the use of the word “terrorism” to describe the incident in his first comments hours after the bombings, even as White House officials were quick to call it “an act of terror.” But on Tuesday morning he noted that investigators were pursuing it as an “act of terrorism.”

On Tuesday, aides and allies of Obama emphasized the president’s engagement and defended his cautious approach.

Overnight, Obama received updates on the investigation from White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco. The president received another round of briefings from Monaco, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other senior members of his team later Tuesday morning, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary declared there were no indications suggesting the bombings “are indicative of a broader plot.”

And Obama said he has made clear to aides that he expected to be kept up to date on developments and directed his team to make sure that all federal resources were available for authorities on the ground in Boston.

“The president is actively involved here in responding,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Obama is clearly cognizant of the expectations that the president faces in a moment of such crisis, and the criticism his predecessor, George W. Bush, faced for his actions in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush was visiting a Florida classroom at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center and famously continued to read from a children’s book after learning from an aide of the unfolding event. Bush said in a 2011 interview with National Geographic that he didn’t want to rattle the children, but he also “wanted to project a sense of calm” to Americans he knew would later see images of his initial reactions.

“There’s this tension between getting the president out there to play that role and the need to go out there and gather facts,” former White House senior adviser David Axelrod explained on MSNBC on Tuesday morning. “In this case, the facts are slow to come.”

At the same time, Obama wanted to reassure the American people and Bostonians that, as he put it on Monday: “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

On Tuesday, Obama leveled with Americans that “clearly we’re at the beginning of our investigation.”

“It will take time to follow every lead and determine what happened,” Obama said. “But we will find out. We will find whoever harmed our citizens, and we will bring them to justice.”

Axelrod, who has been one of the president’s closest advisers for many years, suggested Obama’s measured response is reflective of his awareness that what he says will have reverberations around the globe.

“I’m sure what was going through the president’s mind was ‘We really don’t know who did this,’ ” Axelrod said. “You just don’t know, and so I think his attitude is, let’s not put any inference into this. Let’s just make clear we’re going to get the people responsible.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Obama is keeping abreast of the ongoing murder trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, but the White House is steering clear of delving too deeply into the case.

Gosnell, who is on trial in Philadelphia, has been charged in the murder of a woman during a botched abortion, as well as the murders of seven babies born alive.

“The president does not and cannot take a position on an ongoing trial, so I won’t as well,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Monday.

Obama is “aware” of the case but it would be inappropriate for the president or White House to weigh in on an ongoing legal proceeding, Carney said.

“Certainly, the things that you hear and read about this case are unsettling,” he added.

The trial is in its fifth week. Former employees have described doing ultrasounds, giving intravenous drugs and helping with abortions, even though they lacked medical training or certification, in unsanitary conditions.

One unlicensed doctor, Stephen Massof, testified that Gosnell taught him to cut the necks of babies after they were born to ensure the babies died. Massof has pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree murder, and seven other former employees of the unlicensed Philadelphia clinic have also been convicted in the case.

Gosnell’s defense attorney says no babies were born alive and that the patient died from unexpected complications.

The trial started March 18, but initially received little national media attention. That changed after an opinion column in Thursday’s USA TODAY in which contributor Kirsten Powers criticized major media outlets for ignoring the trial.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.