Pregnant mom shot to death in apartment with infant son sleeping next to her

A pregnant mother of one was gunned down in her bedroom with her four-month-old baby boy sleeping next to her.

Amber Baker, 20, was shot Sunday morning in her Central Fresno, California apartment.

Family members told ABC 30 that the shooting happened during a party the young mom, who was six weeks pregnant with her second child, was having at her apartment. Amber was apparently in bed with her son sleeping son next to her when she was shot.

Police said they responded to a 911 call at 5:45 a.m. at the Griffith Gardens apartment complex.

Georgia dad accidentally shoots and kills daughter’s friend

"We found a female, a white female, in her 20s, I believe she was 20 years old and she was suffering from trauma to her upper body," officer Joe Gomez told Your Central Valley. "The officers that arrived performed CPR until EMS got there and she was pronounced deceased there at the apartment."

Authorities said several people were in the apartment when they arrived and they have all been brought in for questioning.

"She graduated high school, and she did everything she was supposed to do," Amber's sister Katie Martin told ABC. "She has a beautiful baby that she loves so much, and he is going to grow up without a mom, and it's devastating."

Amber's family said the baby boy was fine and is staying with his father.

Neighbors said moments before the shooting, they heard arguing coming from the apartment.

"From what we've heard so far, someone went into her room, an unknown male shot her," Martin said. "Somebody knows something and they're not saying. And we just don't understand why someone would take her life in the middle of the night.”

Amber's other sister, Cassie Baker, told ABC 7 she thought whoever shot her sister was after money because the pregnant mom had just got her tax refund.

"Honestly, that's the only thing I can think of because my sister was just too nice," she said. "She was too kindhearted, she loved everyone."

SpaceX Moon mission extends Elon Musk's ambitions

Elon Musk, it seems, loves nothing more than to spin plates. When most of us might be looking to lighten the load, he's piling on the ambition.

The serial entrepreneur's latest gambit is to fly people around the Moon. Two wealthy individuals have apparently lodged significant deposits with his SpaceX company to make this journey.

We have no idea who they are, just that these space tourists include "nobody from Hollywood".

That Mr Musk should announce his intention to carry out a Moon loop should not really be a surprise; such a venture is on the natural path to deep-space exploration and colonisation - his stated end goals.

What does take the breath away is the timeline.

He's talking about doing this journey in late 2018, in hardware that has not yet even flown. That's Elon for you.

For sure, his Falcon rockets have been working for some time now and the Dragon capsule has become something of an old hand at shuttling back and forth to the International Space Station (ISS). But the circumlunar project is another step on from robotic cargo runs to low-Earth orbit.

The Falcon Heavy, the much bigger rocket that will be needed, should make its debut this summer.

The crew version of Dragon, with its all-important life-support equipment, is targeted to make its maiden voyage at the end of 2017.

This will be an unmanned test outing; the first flight to the ISS with people aboard is slated for the spring of 2018.

That does not leave much time to configure and adapt systems for the longer, more arduous Moon mission.

The Dragon may need to carry some extra propellants, oxygen, water, etc, to help sustain the required trajectory and the passengers. Communications at a distance would also have to be considered. But Mr Musk in his telecon with reporters on Monday said that major modifications to the Dragon or the Falcon would not be required. The journey is likely to last at least 6 to 7 days.

"Back in the Apollo days the outbound journey would usually take between two and three days and the same for the return journey, maybe about a one-week round trip once they leave the Earth," commented Jason Davis from the space advocacy group the Planetary Society.

"It is a little bit different than say putting an astronaut in low-Earth orbit on the International Space Station because your quick return to Earth is no longer an option.

"Once you fire that rocket and head towards the Moon, you can't turn around and go home so you are really kind of on your own for about a week with no-one to come and save you if there is a problem."

Mr Musk said his tourists understood the risks, and that they would receive "extensive training before going on the mission."

The entrepreneur added that the mission would be completed on autopilot. It's hard to imagine the ticketed passengers flying without also being accompanied by an astronaut of experience, and yet this seems to be what will happen. You might have thought that were there to be a problem, having someone aboard with intimate knowledge of the Dragon's workings could be really important.

It's a point picked up by retired Nasa astronaut Clayton Anderson in a BBC News interview: "I would tell [the tourists] to be ready for anything as best as possible.

"If you get on a flight from London to Washington DC, all you need to know is how to buckle your seatbelt and how to put an oxygen mask on your face before you put it on a child; how to find the emergency exit and how to use the bathroom.

"I hope for them it's that simple and that safe, but it remains to be seen. I would advise them to know as much as possible about any contingency activities that could happen and what their exact roles and responsibilities would be."

Of course, history tells us that everything in space "moves to the right". Timelines are rarely fixed. And SpaceX is not immune in this respect.

The Falcon Heavy is behind on its original schedule; like Musk, we all thought he'd be flying people to the ISS regularly by now; and his recently promised robotic Mars landing has just been pushed back two years. And don't forget the long list of satellite operators who've seen their launches delayed in the aftermath of two Falcon mishaps.

So, don't be surprised if this Moon loop also extends into the future. The really interesting sub-plot, however, is what this all means for the US space agency (Nasa).

It can be no coincidence that its leadership has announced that it will be looking to put people on the maiden flight of the agency’s huge new rocket, the Space Launch System, and its associated crew capsule, Orion.

These systems are currently due to fly in an unmanned test configuration late next year. A Nasa inquiry could now see a way to slip the mission to 2019 and make it a manned outing instead.

This would make for an intriguing comparison. You would have two missions launching almost at the same time, to both go around the Moon on what is termed a free-return trajectory, except one (SLS/Orion) would have cost considerably more to get to the launch pad than the other (Falcon Heavy/Dragon). It depends how you calculate it, but the difference is in the billions of dollars.

It is said that President Trump is looking very hard at how to expand commercial space activity during his administration. The Moon missions would give him considerable food for thought.

Publicly, both Musk and Nasa are on the same page. The agency, which has invested considerable sums in SpaceX, released a statement late on Monday saying that it commended "its industry partners for reaching higher".

Musk tweeted: “SpaceX could not do this without Nasa. Can't express enough appreciation”.

But the comparisons are inescapable. And this is a wave we are witnessing.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been quietly acquiring space credentials through his impressive Blue Origin company. He is building a rocket to rival the Falcon Heavy that he calls New Glenn. He's even got one on the drawing board that's bigger still called New Armstrong.

The ambition is the same as SpaceX. So is the cost model. That is, to create something which is considerably cheaper than the public sector can deliver with its onerous oversight and its (politically driven) distributed manufacturing methods.

After all, it is in part the cost of access to space that has slowed the pace of exploration since the Apollo era.

Navy punishes Special Ops group for flying Trump flag

An unspecified number of Navy Special Warfare forces have been punished for flying a Trump flag on a military convoy seen traveling through Louisville last month, igniting fears of an authoritarian state among some motorists.

An inquiry by the unit’s commander found that the service members “violated the spirit and intent of applicable DoD regulations concerning the flying of flags and the apparent endorsement of political activities,” according to a statement issued Tuesday by Lt. Jacqui Maxwell of the Naval Special Warfare Group 2 in Virginia Beach, Va.

She said “administrative corrective measures” were taken with each individual based on their respective responsibility.” She declined to elaborate on the punishments or how many were punished.

The Navy had previously said flying the flag was inappropriate and that a command inquiry would be initiated.

The spotting of the flag-flying convoy on Interstate 65 on Jan. 29 ignited a furious national debate.

Some motorists said they were alarmed by military units flying the flag of a national leader rather than the country, which they said gave the appearance of a fascist government or a “banana republic” and underscored concerns under the new president.

Others argued that Trump is now the commander in chief, not a political candidate, and said they saw nothing wrong with service men and women supporting him.

Military regulations say personnel should avoid implying Defense Department sponsorship or endorsement of any “political candidate, campaign or cause.”

Maxwell said the Special Warfare forces were training in and around Fort Knox. She said they were based on the East Coast but she couldn’t disclose where for security reasons.

The vehicles were unmarked, which Maxwell also said could have been for security reasons.

The White House declined to respond to requests for comment at the time.

Photos and videos of the convoy were first posted by a new Louisville-based political organization, Indivisible Kentucky, that opposes Trump and his agenda. Witnesses variously described the convoy including four and 10 trucks.

A Pentagon spokesman initially said that he thought the trucks were military surplus and being driven by private citizens.

NASA returns priceless bag of moon dust to Chicago-area woman after lawsuit

A priceless bag of moon dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission has been returned to a Chicago-area woman after she won a landmark legal victory against NASA.

NASA officials handed over the lunar dust bag - the only known one of its kind - at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday under court order.

It marks the only known case in which a private citizen has won ownership of a lunar object that the government had previously sold, apparently by mistake, attorneys involved said.

"It's what every collector wants. You want to find the thing that's super special," attorney Christopher McHugh said of the bag, which has been called priceless and a national treasure.

McHugh represents Nancy Lee Carlson of northwest suburban Inverness, who he said bought the moon bag from a government auction in 2015 for $995.

Having been inspired by broadcasts of lunar landings while she was growing up, Carlson is an avid collector of space objects, McHugh said. Carlson, a corporate attorney, stored the lunar bag in a box in her closet for safekeeping.

She took the object to The Field Museum in Chicago to research the history of the object, and they referred her to officials at the Johnson Space Center, who analyzed the bag. Once they verified that it contained lunar dust collected from a space mission, they confiscated it, asserting that it was government property, sparking a legal fight over its ownership.

Previously, the government had seized the bag in a criminal case against Max Ary, the former president of a space museum in Kansas. He was convicted in 2006 of theft for selling objects from the museum for his own profit, according to court documents.

But because of a mix-up in inventory, no government official at the time realized the historical importance of the artifact, and without the knowledge of NASA officials, the U.S. Marshals Service put the bag up for auction in 2015 at www.forfeiture.gov, to obtain restitution in the case.

Students suspended for forming human swastika

Four students at SAIL high school were suspended in December after administrators learned they lay down and formed a human swastika in a field on the school's campus.

Leon County Schools officials confirmed the incident Tuesday, after a concerned SAIL parent, who is Jewish, met with principal Tiffany Thomas to discuss actions taken by the school.

The parent, who asked to have their identity withheld to protect his child, said they only learned about the incident from their child last Friday, during a conversation about the recent uptick in incidences of anti-Semitism in schools and community centers around the country. The parent said his child said there have been other incidents of students making other anti-Semitic remarks, then told him of the suspensions.

Following his meeting with Thomas, the parent said he was reassured by the response from SAIL, who he said took every measure to discipline those responsible. He added he was surprised such a thing would happen at the magnet school, which prides itself on providing a creative and personalized high school experience. The parent said he has always known SAIL to be a tolerant and inclusive environment.

Thomas addressed the incident in an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat Tuesday.

"As a school community, we really pride ourselves on continuing with our safe, caring and respectful school climate," she said. "One of our main school goals is cultural diversity, and we have formed committees and clubs around these themes to promote cultural awareness all year long."

Thomas added the school has a Holocaust Remembrance Day scheduled for March, which is made possible through a partnership with the Holocaust Education Resource Council.

Across the country, anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise. There were 31 bomb threats Monday, called into 23 community centers and eight Jewish day schools, the JCC Association of North America said. Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the events marked the fifth series of attacks already this year.

Trump says 'sometimes it's the reverse' when asked about anti-Semitic incidents: report

President Trump reportedly said "sometimes it's the reverse" when asked about the wave of recent anti-Semitic incidents across the country.

Trump made the comments to a group of state attorneys general Tuesday, an attendee told BuzzFeed News.

"He just said, 'Sometimes it's the reverse, to make people - or to make others - look bad,' and he used the word 'reverse,' I would say two to three times in his comments," Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told BuzzFeed after the meeting.

"He did correctly say at the top that it was reprehensible."

Shapiro said Trump would be speaking about the issue during his address to Congress on Tuesday night.

"I really don't know what he means, or why he said that," Shapiro said, adding that he hopes the president will clarify the remark.

"It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me."

White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was a private conversation and she was not there and could not confirm the veracity of the comments.

"He's been extremely clear and extremely consistent on that topic. Any act of violence against people of the Jewish faith is condemned by this administration. Full stop," Sanders added.

The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement the organization is "astonished" by the president's comments.

"It is incumbent upon the White House to immediately clarify these remarks," CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.

"In light of the ongoing attacks on the Jewish community, it is also incumbent upon the president to lay out in his speech tonight his plans for what the federal government will do to address this rash of anti-Semitic incidents."

Earlier this month, the president spoke out against anti-Semitism.

"Anti-Semitism is horrible and it's going to stop and it has to stop," Trump said in an interview with MSNBC during a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Since the beginning of the year, many Jewish community centers in cities across the country have received bomb threats. Last weekend, headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia were knocked over and damaged.

FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossier

The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement.

The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email accounts.

While Trump has derided the dossier as “fake news” compiled by his political opponents, the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that bureau investigators considered him credible and found his line of inquiry to be worthy of pursuit.

Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials, according to the people familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

At the time of the October agreement, FBI officials probing Russian activities, including possible contacts between Trump associates and Russian entities, were aware of the information that Steele had been gathering while working for a Washington research firm hired by supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to the people familiar with the agreement. The firm was due to stop paying Steele as Election Day approached, but Steele felt his work was not done, these people said.

Steele was familiar to the FBI, in part because the bureau had previously hired him to help a U.S. inquiry into alleged corruption in the world soccer organization FIFA. The FBI sometimes pays informants, sources and outside investigators to assist in its work. Steele was known for the quality of his past work and for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence. The Washington Post was not able to determine how much the FBI intended to pay Steele had their relationship remained intact.

The dossier he produced last year alleged, among other things, that associates of Trump colluded with the Kremlin on cyberattacks on Democrats and that the Russians held compromising material about the Republican nominee.

These and other explosive claims have not been verified, and they have been vigorously denied by Trump and his allies.

The FBI, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee, is investigating Russian interference in the election and alleged contacts between Trump’s associates and the Kremlin.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters that he had seen “no evidence so far” of Trump campaign contacts with Russia but said a bipartisan House inquiry would proceed so that “no stone is unturned.”

The revelation that the FBI agreed to pay Steele at the same time he was being paid by Clinton supporters to dig into Trump’s background could further strain relations between the law enforcement agency and the White House.

A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment. Steele’s London-based attorney did not respond to questions about the agreement.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to comment.

Steele, 53, began his Trump investigation in June 2016 after working for another client preparing a report on Russian efforts to interfere with politics in Europe.

U.S. intelligence had been independently tracking Russian efforts to influence electoral outcomes in Europe.

Steele was hired to work for a Washington research firm, Fusion GPS, that was providing information to a Democratic client opposed to Trump. Fusion GPS declined to identify the client.

Steele’s early reports alleged a plan directed by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin to help Trump in 2016.

“Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years,” Steele wrote in June.

Steele’s information was provided by an intermediary to the FBI and U.S. intelligence officials after the Democratic National Convention in July, when hacked Democratic emails were first released by WikiLeaks, according to a source familiar with the events. After the convention, Steele contacted a friend in the FBI to personally explain what he had found.

As summer turned to fall, Steele became concerned that the U.S. government was not taking the information he had uncovered seriously enough, according to two people familiar with the situation.

In October, anticipating that funding supplied through the original client would dry up, Steele and the FBI reached a verbal understanding: He would continue his work looking at the Kremlin’s ties to Trump and receive compensation for his efforts.

But Steele’s frustration deepened when FBI Director James B. Comey, who had been silent on the Russia inquiry, announced publicly 11 days before the election that the bureau was investigating a newly discovered cache of emails Clinton had exchanged using her private server, according to people familiar with Steele’s thinking.

Those people say Steele’s frustration with the FBI peaked after an Oct. 31 New York Times story that cited law enforcement sources drawing conclusions that he considered premature. The article said that the FBI had not yet found any “conclusive or direct link” between Trump and the Russian government and that the Russian hacking was not intended to help Trump.

After the election, the intelligence community concluded that Russia’s interference had been intended to assist Trump.

In January, top intelligence and law enforcement officials briefed Trump and President Barack Obama on those findings. In addition, they provided a summary of the core allegations of Steele’s dossier.

News of that briefing soon became public. Then BuzzFeed posted a copy of Steele’s salacious but unproven dossier online, sparking outrage from Trump.

“It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” Trump told reporters in January. “It was a group of opponents that got together — sick people — and they put that crap together.”

He later tweeted that Steele was a “failed spy.”

The development marked the end of the FBI’s relationship with Steele.

After he was publicly identified by the Wall Street Journal as the dossier’s author, Steele went into hiding. U.S. officials took pains to stress that his report was not a U.S. government product and that it had not influenced their broader conclusions that the Russian government had hacked the emails of Democratic officials and released those emails with the intention of helping Trump win the presidency.

“The [intelligence community] has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions,” then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said in a statement in January.

The owner of a technology company identified in Steele’s dossier as a participant in the hacks is now suing Steele and BuzzFeed for defamation. BuzzFeed apologized to the executive and blocked out his name in the published document.

Comey spent almost two hours this month briefing the Senate Intelligence Committee. Democrats in the House have informally reached out to Steele in recent weeks to ask about his willingness to testify or cooperate, according to people familiar with the requests. Steele has so far not responded, they said.

Radicalised Australians increasingly young, spy chief warns

The age of Australians being radicalised by the Islamic State (IS) group is increasingly getting younger, the country's top spy has warned.

Data showed a significant rise in young suspected extremists from 2013 to 2015, said Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) chief Duncan Lewis.

He said adherents of an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam posed the greatest terror threat to Australia.

But he stressed "99.9% of Australian Muslims" were of no interest to ASIO.

Mr Lewis said in 2013, 45% of suspected Sunni Islamic extremists were aged between 25 and 34. Two years later, 40% were aged between 15 and 24.

"It basically dropped by a decade in the space of a couple of years," he told a senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night.

"We are still looking at a very young cohort that are impacted and influenced by this... extremist, violent message."

He said the trend would continue to affect Australia's security environment.

"The other 99.9% of Australian Muslims are not involved in activities of security concern in any way and are of no interest to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation," Mr Lewis said.

His comments came hours after a 42-year-old Australian man was arrested on suspicion of trying to advise IS on missiles.

Amazon data centre fault knocks websites offline temporarily

Several high-profile websites and services were knocked offline by a failure at one of Amazon's major US data centres.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows firms to rent cloud servers in order to host data on the internet without needing to invest in their own infrastructure.

On Tuesday, sites such as Quora, a Q&A forum, and Trello, which helps people monitor productivity, went down.

After several hours, Amazon said it had rectified the problem.

It did not make public the reason behind the disruption.

As well as sites that went down, other services, such as workplace collaboration tool Slack, also lost some key functionality.

Specifically, it was AWS's S3 - which stands for Simple Storage Service - that was affected.

To varying degrees it serves around 150,000 sites and services around the world, mostly in the US.

AWS is used by some of the web's most recognisable and powerful names including Netflix, Spotify and Airbnb. While none of those services went offline on Tuesday, users did report performance issues and slowdown.

US government services such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were also affected.

Downtime is a critical issue for any cloud service. Amazon competes with Google, Microsoft and others for what is an increasingly lucrative line of business for the web giants.

Tagged animals at risk from hunters and nature-lovers

At-risk species, including wolves and sharks, are being targeted by hunters using signals sent by radio tags to home in on the animals.

The behaviour of non-endangered species is also being skewed as nature fans use the signals to get close to wild animals, say biologists.

A group of scientists has now begun collecting evidence to measure how tagged species are being harmed.

They are calling for changes to tagging systems to make them harder to abuse.

Hunting and fishing

Prof Steven Cooke, a biologist at Carleton University in Canada, said growing numbers of scientists who use tagging were getting increasingly worried about the "unintended consequences" of the technology.

"We go out and do the science and provide the information and assume all is good but there are many ways in which this process can be corrupted," Prof Cooke told the BBC.

Tagging with transponders that communicate via satellite or radio was becoming an increasingly common way to study species, he said, and had produced "incredible" insights into the movements and lifestyles of many different creatures.

In some cases, he said, tags were used to keep an eye on small populations of endangered animals but there were also many cases in which tagging was used on a much more ambitious scale.

For instance, he said, more than 100,000 tagged fish were released in to the Columbia River basin every year to help monitor fish stocks, movements and migration patterns. The Great Lakes were also home to more than 5,000 tagged fish, he added.

Many different groups of people were interested in using the signals sent out by tags to locate all kinds of animals, said Prof Cooke.

A paper co-written by Prof Cooke and other biologists for the Conservation Biology journal detailed some of the "troubling" ways in which tags had become an inadvertent aid to poachers, hunters, photographers and nature lovers.

"This is not something that a lot of papers have been written on," he said. "We found a lot of the examples by searching on the net and on news sites and less traditional sources."

Examples gathered by the scientists included:

• sharks tagged during a conservation programme in western Australia were found and then killed by people homing in on radio signals
• attempts by poachers in India to hack GPS data sent by collars on Bengal tigers
• commercial fishing vessels using radio data to find fish known to feed near the species they want to catch
• efforts by "wolf-persecution" groups in the US to decode signals to help them hunt down the predators

Some national parks had taken steps to limit abuse by banning the radio receivers that can pick up the "beeps" sent out by some types of tag, said Prof Cooke.

As a result of the paper, other biologists shared information about other ways tagged animals were being targeted, he said.

Prof Brendan Godley, director of the centre for ecology and conservation at the University of Exeter, said the lifestyles of some species made it easier to abuse tag data.

Knowing the approximate location of a shark, he said, would help track it down as they were likely to respond to lures, such as baited lines or food trails, put in the water close to them.

By contrast, he said, other species may be far harder to find, despite being tagged, because they did not respond in the same way.

Prof Godley added that tagging had an impact far beyond improving our understanding of how animals live.

Tagging can directly contribute to conservation efforts and make them much more effective, he said.

"Within two weeks of tagging leatherback sea turtles we were able to show that the marine park that was set up for their benefit was inadequate," he said.

Data provided by tagging showed which locations fishing fleets were told to avoid when turtles were nearby.

However, he added, it was clear that tagging had become a contentious issue that had to be tackled.

"Scientists need to do a better job of getting the public aware of why they are doing the research and we need to do a better job of sharing the dividends of our work," he said.

A Top Republican Said He’d Vote Against the GOP’s Obamacare Replacement Bill

Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) said he would not vote for an Obamacare replacement bill, according to a statement on Twitter.

“There are serious problems with what appears to be our current path to repeal and replace Obamacare. The draft legislation, which was leaked last week, risks continuing major Obamacare entitlement expansion and delays any reforms. It kicks the can down the road in the hopes that a future Congress will have the political will and fiscal discipline to reduce spending that this Congress apparently lacks,” he said.

Walker, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) continued: “The bill contains what increasingly appears to be a new heath insurance entitlement with a Republican stamp on it. In that form and absent of substantial changes, I cannot vote for the bill, and, in good conscience, cannot recommend RSC Members to vote for it either.”

His comments come after after a leaked draft of a Republican Obamacare replacement plan circulated last week. The draft would dismantle the Obamacare subsidies, and abandon its Medicaid expansion, according to Politico.

Records show EPA's Pruitt used private email, despite denial

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt occasionally used private email to communicate with staff while serving as Oklahoma's attorney general, despite telling Congress that he had always used a state email account for government business.

A review of Pruitt emails obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request showed a 2014 exchange where the Republican emailed a member of his staff using a personal Apple email account.

Emails released under court order last week in response to a different public records request yielded additional examples where emails were addressed to Pruitt's private account, including a 2013 exchange with a petroleum industry lobbyist who emailed Pruitt and a lawyer on the attorney general's staff. That suggests Pruitt made his private email address available to professional contacts outside his office.

It is not illegal in Oklahoma for public officials to use private email as long as they are retained and made available as public records. Pruitt's use of the private account appears to directly contradict statements he made last month as part of his Senate confirmation.

In a written questionnaire, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., asked Pruitt whether he had ever conducted state business using personal email accounts. Pruitt responded: "I use only my official OAG email address and government issued phone to conduct official business."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., later followed up with Pruitt on the issue when he testified Jan. 18 before the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee. The senator asked why an email address with the Apple address me.com was listed on a form as one of his business contacts.

"The 'me' address is not a business email address," Pruitt responded. "I am not sure why it was designated as such."

Pruitt did not respond Monday to emails sent to his EPA staff seeking comment.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the issue raises questions about Pruitt's credibility.

"Now that he is in charge of protecting clean air and water in every community across the country, the public must decide for themselves whether they can trust Pruitt when he can't even be honest about his email or his ties to the oil and gas industry," Wyden said Monday.

AP and other news organizations reported last week that 7,500 pages of emails released following a lawsuit filed by a left-leaning advocacy group showed Pruitt and his staff in Oklahoma coordinated closely on legal strategy with fossil-fuel companies and special interest groups working to undermine federal efforts to curb planet-warming carbon emissions.

The emails were released after an Oklahoma judge ruled that Pruitt had been illegally withholding his correspondence, which is public record under state law, for the last two years. Pruitt's Republican successor, new Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, has appealed that ruling and is fighting to keep hundreds more withheld emails from public view. Hunter's spokesman, Lincoln Ferguson, did not return telephone and email messages on Monday seeking clarification on Pruitt's use of a private email or whether more messages to the Apple account were among those still being withheld.

Senate Democrats earlier this month sought to delay a vote on Pruitt's confirmation until after the requested emails were released. Republican leaders used their slim majority to confirm him to lead the federal agency he had frequently criticized and repeatedly sued during his six years as Oklahoma's attorney general.

Pruitt's use of private email was first reported earlier this month by FOX 25 television of Oklahoma City.

Senate environment committee chairman John Barrasso, R-Wy., declined to comment Monday about whether Pruitt was inaccurate in his testimony. Barrasso's spokesman, Mike Danylak, pointed to another exchange during Pruitt's testimony where he was asked whether he would use only government email to conduct business at EPA, so that his correspondence would be publicly available through the Freedom of Information Act.

"I really believe that public participation and transparency in rulemaking is very important," Pruitt responded.

Leaders of House Panel Are Sharply Split on Russia Inquiry

The top Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee gave sharply conflicting views on Monday of their panel’s bipartisan investigation into Russian efforts to influence the presidential election, raising questions about whether they will be able to work together on the inquiry.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, said that he had been briefed on the intelligence community’s assessment of the Russians and contended that there was no evidence anyone from the Trump campaign had communicated with the government in Moscow.

“We can’t have McCarthyism back in this place,” Mr. Nunes said at a news conference on Capitol Hill, referring to the congressional investigations in the 1950s into whether Americans were Communist spies. “We can’t have the government, the U.S. government or the Congress, legislative branch of government, chasing down American citizens, hauling them before the Congress as if there’s some secret Russian agent.”

Yet the committee’s ranking member, Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said that it was too early to rule out ties between Russia and President Trump’s associates, because the panel had not yet been provided with any evidence collected by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

“We don’t know whether there were U.S. persons involved, but it is our responsibility to find out,” Mr. Schiff said in an interview on MSNBC. “And I don’t think anyone on the committee, or our chairs in the House or Senate, ought to be stating a conclusion or deeming it their responsibility to push back on unfavorable press stories.”

The divide has grown starker since The Washington Post reported on Friday that the White House had enlisted Mr. Nunes as part of an effort to push back on a story this month by The New York Times. The Times report focused on contacts between Russian intelligence officials and Trump associates and campaign aides.

In an interview that aired Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, said that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate Russian meddling in the election. The statement from Mr. Issa was notable, as he is a hard-line Republican who was one of President Obama’s biggest critics.

On Monday, Mr. Issa again called for an independent review. “The American people need a cleareyed view of the nefarious actions of the Russian government,” Mr. Issa said.

The issue of lawmakers helping the administration was also a point of contention in the Senate on Monday. The minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, sharply criticized Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has acknowledged helping the Trump administration push back on the story. Mr. Burr and the intelligence committee’s top Democrat, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, are also conducting an investigation into Russia.

“Senator Burr is on notice, because what he did was wrong,” Mr. Schumer said. “This is not the way to conduct a fair, impartial investigation that goes where the facts lead.”

Republicans and Democrats who set out to work together on politically charged investigations often end up refusing to cooperate with each other. From 2014 to 2016, Democrats repeatedly clashed with Republicans who were leading an investigation into the attacks on an American outpost in Benghazi, Libya. And in 2014, Republicans refused to sign on to the findings of a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the C.I.A.’s use of torture and deceit in its detention program.

At his news conference, Mr. Nunes said the ”major crimes” that have taken place during the Trump administration were government leaks to the media about national security matters, including transcripts of conversations the president has had with the leaders of Mexico and Australia.