Californians brace for nights of freezing temps

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Californians are bundling up with sweaters and gloves and stocking up on firewood as they brace for several nights of very unseasonable freezing temperatures.

The National Weather Service is forecasting morning frost on San Diego beaches. Big Sur, on the central coast, prepared for daytime highs almost 20 degrees below Boston's. Even the snowbird haven of Palm Springs faced the possibility of freezing temperatures at night.

In addition, San Diego zookeepers turned up the heat for chimpanzees, tourists covered their hands on Hollywood walking tours, and some farmers broke out wind machines and took other steps to protect crops from freezing.

Freeze warnings were in effect in San Diego County valleys and deserts Saturday morning with lows in the 20s and 30s, the weather service said.

In Sonoma County, homeless shelters started handing out extra warm clothes on Friday to protect people from freezing overnight temperatures.

Morning temps fell into the 20s and 30s in many areas, and much lower in the mountains. A low of 12 degrees was recorded in the Big Bear mountain resort east of Los Angeles.

Some customers drove more than an hour to buy firewood.

"It's crazy busy here," said Renea Teasdale, office manager at The Woodshed in Orange, south of Los Angeles.

Still, it was business as usual as much of the state contended with temperatures in the high 40s and low 50s.

"It's still sunny Southern California, and I'm going to work on my legs all year long," said Linda Zweig, a spokeswoman for the Del Mar Fairgrounds, which is hosting a 5-kilometer run north of San Diego on Sunday. The lifelong San Diego-area resident is prone to wearing two sweatshirts when the temperature drops but refuses to give up on shorts.

In the San Joaquin Valley, the heart of California's citrus production, growers prepared for another round of freezing temperatures late Friday after seeing little crop damage Thursday night.

They run wind machines and water to protect their fruit, which can raise the temperature in a grove by up to 4 degrees, said Paul Story, director of grower service at California Citrus Mutual. Existing moisture, sporadic rain and cloud cover can also help keep in heat.

Snow shut a 40-mile stretch of a major highway north of Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon, forcing hundreds of truckers to spend the cold night in their rigs and severing a key link between the Central Valley and Los Angeles.

The California Highway Patrol reopened the Grapevine segment of Interstate 5 some 17 hours later.

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Several hundred thousand due in Paris to protest gay marriage

PARIS (Reuters) - Several hundred thousand people are expected to march through Paris on Sunday against the planned legalization of same-sex marriage in the first mass protest against the unpopularPresident Francois Hollande.

Strongly backed by the Catholic hierarchy, lay activists have mobilized a hybrid coalition of church-going families, political conservatives, Muslims, evangelicals and even homosexuals opposed to gay marriage for the show of force.

So many are expected to converge on Paris from around France that police had organizers split it into three separate columns starting from different points around the city and meeting in the Champ de Mars park at the Eiffel Tower.

Frigide Barjot, an eccentric comedian leading the so-called "Demo for All," insists the protest is pro-marriage rather than anti-gay and has banned all but its approved banners saying a child needs a father and a mother to develop properly.

"We're all born of a man and a woman, but the law will say the opposite tomorrow," she said last week. "It will say a child is born of a man and a man."

Hollande, who promised to legalize gay marriage and adoption during his election campaign last spring, has a comfortable parliamentary majority to pass the law by June as planned.

But his clumsy handling of other promises, such as a 75 percent tax on the rich that was ruled unconstitutional or his faltering struggle against rising unemployment, has soured the public mood. A mass street protest can hardly help his image.

MARRIAGE OR JOBS FOR ALL?

Same-sex nuptials are already legal in 11 countries including Belgium, Portugal, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Norway and South Africa, as well as nine U.S. states and Washington D.C.

Gay marriage opponents such as Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, head of the Catholic Church in France, have asked why Hollande is pushing through a divisive social reform called "marriage for all" when voters seem more concerned about "jobs for all."

Vingt-Trois spearheaded the opposition with a critical sermon in August. Other faith leaders -- Muslim, Jewish, Protestant and Orthodox Christian -- soon spoke out too.

Avoiding religious arguments that could put off the secular French, they struck a chord with voters by stressing problems they saw emerging from same-sex marriage rather than letting the government shape the debate as an issue of equal rights only.

Opinion polls show reform zeal cooled somewhat once these arguments were heard. Support for gay nuptials has slipped about 10 points to under 55 percent and fewer than half the French now want gays to have adoption rights.

Under this pressure, legislators dropped a plan to amend the draft law to allow lesbians access to assisted reproduction techniques such as artificial insemination that are now limited to heterosexual couples with fertility problems.

RIVAL MARCH

Organizers insist they are not against gays and lesbians, but for traditional marriage. "We are marriagophile, not homophobe," said Barjot, author of a book entitled "Confessions of a Trendy Catholic."

Most national faith leaders will not join the protest, but at least eight Catholic bishops have said they would march.

"I'm happy many Catholics will be mobilized, but this is not a church demonstration against the government," said Vingt-Trois, who plans to go meet marchers but not join them.

Opposition leader Jean-Francois Cope and other conservatives, as well as leaders from the far-right National Front, will march as private citizens without political banners.

Civitas, a far-right Catholic group whose protests have been openly anti-gay, plans a rival march that will run parallel to one of the "Demo for All" columns. Organizers say they will have about 10,000 volunteer marshals to keep order during the march.

Brazil: Indigenous squatters resist eviction

An Indian man wearing a headdress and holding a bow and arrow stands behind two policemen in riot gear on the site of an old Indian museum, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. Police on Saturday surrounded the site, now an indigenous settlement of men and women living in 10 homes, and prepared to enforce their eviction. The settlement is next to the Maracana stadium, which is being refurbished to host the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2016 Olympics and the final match of the 2014 World Cup. The streets around the stadium will also undergo a vast transformation as part of the area's transformation into a shopping and sports entertainment hub. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Police in riot gear surrounded a settlement of indigenous people next to Rio de Janeiro's storied Maracana stadium on Saturday, preparing to evict them as soon as an expected court order arrived.

The site commander, police Lt. Alex Melo, explained officers were "waiting for the order, and understand it can come at any time."

But the order still had not arrived after a tense, daylong standoff. Frightened residents wondered why law enforcement came without an order to enter, and federal public defenders who have worked on the protracted legal battle over the space tried to mediate.

"This is absolutely arbitrary. They can't enter without an order," said public defender Daniel Macedo. "If they did, they could be charged with a crime, with abuse of authority. It could be a blood bath, which could look really bad for the government of Brazil and the state."

The indigenous group includes men and women of about 10 ethnicities — mostly Guarani, Pataxo, Kaingangue and Guajajara — who have been squatting for years in 10 homes they built on the site of an old Indian Museum, abandoned since 1977.

The police arrived early in the morning and surrounded the compound. By noon, the residents locked the main gate. As supporters arrived, the Indians lowered a wooden ladder over the brick wall surrounding the complex to let them in, later pulling the ladder back up.

During the nerve-racking wait on Saturday, the squatters painted their faces and bodies and donned elaborate headdresses, at times playing rattles and flutes or whistling bird calls. Some displayed ornamental bows and arrows over the wall and through the gate separating them from the black-clad police in body armor.

The settlement and the remains of the building that lodged the museum are adjacent to the Maracana, which is being refurbished to host the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2016 Olympics and the final match of the 2014 World Cup.

Blighted streets around the stadium are also to undergo a vast transformation to become a shopping and sports entertainment hub, complete with parking lots. Most of a favela, or shantytown, about 500 meters away has already been demolished to make way for the new development.

The governor of Rio de Janeiro, Sergio Cabral, told a news conference in October that the building's razing is necessary for hosting the World Cup.

"The Indian Museum near the Maracana will be demolished," Cabral said then. "It's being demanded by FIFA and the World Cup Organizing Committee. Long live democracy, but the building has no historical value. We're going to tear it down."

However, a letter from FIFA's office in Brazil to the federal public defender's office published in the newspaper Jornal do Brazil said that the soccer authority "never requested the demolition of the old Indian Museum in Rio de Janeiro."

The indigenous have been resisting their possible eviction for months, operating with little or no information from authorities about what to expect, or what alternatives are available to them, said their leader Carlos Tukano.

"I know they are going to come in, and our proposal is to remain firm, but without moral or physical aggression," he said. "We cannot fight them with bows and arrows; they are armed."

Most of the approximately 30 Indians who live there and about 200 sympathizers packaged the compound Saturday to discuss how to peacefully deal with a possible police action. Several men, masking their faces with shirts, climbed high into the upper floors of the tumble-down building and surveyed the scene with professional bows and arrows.

The squatters believe they have history and the law on their side.

The crumbling mansion with soaring ceilings that housed the old museum was donated by a wealthy Brazilian to the government in 1847 to serve as a center for the study of indigenous traditions.

After the museum closed more than three decades ago, Indians of various ethnicities started using it as a safe place to stay when they came to Rio to pursue an education, sell trinkets in the streets or get medical treatment.

"They would come here without money, without knowing anyone, and sleep in the streets," Tukano explained. He himself is from a village deep in the Amazon. "We made this our space."

The head of Rio state legislature's Human Rights Commission, representative Marcelo Freixo, called for the need to stay calm and avoid violence.

"Conflict here is not in anyone's interest," he said before addressing the squatters and supporters inside the compound. "If there is a judicial order, the police will have to enforce it, but we have avoid any injuries with dialogue."

As he spoke, state public defender Eduardo Newton proposed an alternative legal tactic.

Under state law, Newton said, there can't be a mass eviction without proper legal proceedings. With group approval, he began gathering documents that would prove that more than 10 families lived on the grounds so he could try for a rushed stay on the eviction notice.

Police, meanwhile, police continued to stand guard the compound.

29 Belfast cops hurt in Catholic-Protestant clash

DUBLIN (AP) — Northern Ireland police fought day-and-night street battles with Protestant militants Saturday as a protest march to Belfast City Hall degenerated into riots when many marchers returned home to the Protestant east side.

The Protestants, who have blocked streets daily since Catholics on the council decided Dec. 3 to curtail the flying of the British flag, have frequently clashed with police in hopes of forcing politicians to overturn the decision. The street confrontations have stirred sectarian passions, particularly in Protestant east Belfast and its lone Catholic enclave, Short Strand, flashpoint for the most protracted rioting over the past six weeks.

Saturday's violence began as police donning helmets, shields and flame-retardent suits tried to shepherd the British flag-bedecked crowd past Short Strand, where masked and hooded Catholic men and youths waited by their doors armed with Gaelic hurling bats, golf clubs and other makeshift weapons. The two sides began throwing bottles, rocks and other missiles at each other and, as police on foot struggled to keep the two sides apart, Protestant anger turned against the police.

Police marched down the street with shields locked, backed by blasts from three massive mobile water cannons. Officers also fired at least a half-dozen baton rounds — blunt-nosed, inch (2.5-centimeter)-thick cylinders colloquially known as plastic bullets — at rioters.

After the initial two-hour clash subsided, police at nighttime confronted a renewed mob of Protestant youths on nearby Castlereagh Street, where a car was stolen and burned as a barricade. A police helicopter overhead shone its spotlight on the crowd, which chanted anti-police and anti-Catholic slogans.

Police commander Mark Baggott said 29 of his officers were injured in the two operations, bringing total police casualties above 100 since the first riots outside city hall on Dec. 3. The clashes have costNorthern Ireland an estimated 25 million pounds ($40 million) in lost trade and tourism and in police overtime bills.

Baggott described Saturday's police deployment as "a difficult operation dealing with a large number of people determined to cause disorder and violence." He credited his officers with "exceptional courage and professionalism."

The Protestant hard-liners, however, have accused police of pursuing heavy-handed tactics that have worsened the riots. Police have provided no casualty figures for civilians, who often avoid hospital treatment so that they are not identified as rioters and arrested. More than 100 rioters have been arrested since Dec. 3. The Associated Press photographer in Belfast, Peter Morrison, suffered serious injuries to his head and hand when clubbed by policemen on Dec. 3 outside city hall.

The Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party said 10 Short Strand homes were damaged during Saturday's clashes. Sinn Fein councilman Niall O Donnghaile, who represents Short Strand, said it was the 15th illegal Protestant march past the Catholic enclave since last month. He said the marchers clearly wanted to attack Short Strand residents.

"People do not come to 'peaceful protests' armed with bricks, bottles, golf balls and fireworks," O Donnghaile said of the Protestant marchers.

Belfast used to have a strong Protestant majority, but the Dec. 3 vote demonstrated that Catholics have gained the democratic upper hand, stoking Protestant anxiety that one day Northern Ireland could be merged with the Republic of Ireland as many Catholics want.

Gun Control's 'Opportune Moment'; NRA Vows Fight

Still days away from any announcement of the White House's proposals for addressing gun violence -- and less than one month since a mass shooting claimed the lives of 27 people, including 20 first graders, in Newtown, Conn. -- Americans are lining up around the block to buy guns.

And though gun control advocates say this is an "opportune moment" to enact stricter gun controls, the National Rifle Association is vowing to fight what it calls "a real threat to Second Amendment rights."

As ABC News first reported, December saw an unprecedented spike in background checks. A record 2.78 million registered for background checks last month, compared with 1.86 million in December 2011. Guns have disappeared from store walls, with buyers aware that the Obama administration wants changes.

Proposed changes could affect not only gun laws, but also mental health spending and current policies on violent movies and video games.

"This is an unusually opportune moment for the president to advance a policy goal like gun control, if he is of a mind to do it, even if Congress is resistant," gun expert and State University of New York Cortland political science professor Robert Spitzer said.

Vice President Joe Biden met with law enforcement, at-risk youth advocacy communities, national service organizations, the mental health community, interfaith groups, the entertainment industry, and gun owners themselves this week to get a variety of perspectives on gun violence issues.

In a meeting with representatives from the video game industry, including members of Electronic Arts, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, and Activision Blizzard, Inc., the makers of the highly popular "Call of Duty" games, Biden said he asked for help.

"We're anxious to see if there's anything you can suggest to us that you think would be -- would help, as this president said, diminish the possibility, even if it only saved one kid's life," the vice president said Friday.

The makers of video games cite research that finds no connection between violent video games and violent crime.

"There is no evidence that suggest that exposure to violent video games is associated with violent criminal behavior," said Dr. Christopher Ferguson, professor of psychology at Texas A&M International University.

But Dr. Victor Strasburger, chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine and pediatrics professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, said today's video games are more real, more intense than anything that's come before.

"Kids spend an incredible amount of time with the media. They see increasingly violent media," he said. "Why in this country would we spend $250 billion a year on advertising if we didn't think advertising affected people?"

Biden is expected to provide three major recommendations on the future of gun control.

Among the recommendations could be reinstituting the assault rifle ban. A ban was passed in 1994 as part of a crime bill, but expired 10 years later with its effectiveness still highly debated.

Universal background checks are also expected to be recommended. Currently, background checks are only conducted when a gun is purchased at a retailer. Universal background check would extend to any private sale of a gun, eliminating the loop hole of gun shows.

Biden may also recommend limit magazine clips, possibly banning high-capacity clips and restricting gun users to 10 rounds of ammunition, sparking what some call a "war on ammo."

The NRA, the most powerful gun lobby, is prepared for battle, vowing to fight any proposed changes to current gun legislation to protect gun owners' rights.

"I think that's a real threat to their Second Amendment rights, and we intend to do all we can to protect them," NRA president David Keene said.

Gun control advocates hope that President Obama, fresh off his reelection victory, will be able to tap into the nation's outrage over the murder of 20 first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School to get changes through Congress.

Spitzer said he is not sure whether that momentum will be enough.

"I think the likelihood that Congress will enact a sweeping set of gun control now is unlikely, but I think it's possible, because the conditions exist right now that are very similar to conditions that existed in the past when Congress did enact stronger gun laws," Spitzer said.

Biden is expected to make his recommendations Tuesday, and he has suggested that the president may be able to make some changes on his own using executive orders.