Trump risks Republican rift on immigration

WASHINGTON - Donald Trump has exposed anew the deep rift inside the Republican Party on immigration, a break between its past and the country's future the party itself has said it must bridge if the GOP ever hopes to win back the White House.

As they headed into the 2016 election, Republicans thought they had a strategy for moving past their immigration woes. Outlined in a so-called "autopsy" of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney's loss to President Barack Obama, it called for passing "comprehensive immigration reform" - shorthand for resolving the status of the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally.

Those plans ran aground in the GOP-controlled House, falling victim to the passionate opposition among conservatives to anything they deem "amnesty" for such immigrants.

Some Republicans then hoped candidates with more moderate positions on immigration - such as Jeb Bush, the Spanish-speaking former Florida governor, or Sen. Marco Rubio, a Miami native and son of Cuban parents - would rise during the 2016 campaign and boost the party's appeal to Hispanic voters.

Obama sees inspiration in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS - Visiting residents on tidy porch stoops and sampling the fried chicken at a corner restaurant, President Barack Obama held out the people of New Orleans on Thursday as an extraordinary example of renewal and resilience 10 years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

"There's something in you guys that is just irrepressible," Obama told hundreds of residents assembled at a bustling new community center in an area of the Lower 9th Ward that was once under 17 feet of water. "The people of New Orleans didn't just inspire me, you inspired all of America."

He held out the city's comeback as a metaphor for what's happening all across a nation that has moved from economic crisis to higher ground.

Events mark slaying of Emmett Till

JACKSON, Miss. - Sixty years after a black Chicago teenager was killed for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, relatives and civil rights activists are holding church services and movie screenings to remember Emmett Till.

They're also trying to continue the legacy of his late mother, Mamie Till Mobley, who worked with young people and encouraged them to challenge injustice in their everyday lives. It's a message that Deborah Watts, a distant cousin of Till's, sees as relevant amid the killings in recent years of young black men such as Trayvon Martin in Florida and Tamir Rice in Ohio.

Watts, of Minneapolis, was a toddler when Till was killed. She said as she grew up, she spoke often with Mobley about Till.

"It was her motivation to turn his death into something positive," Watts said Thursday in Jackson.

The 14-year-old Till was visiting relatives in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta on Aug. 24, 1955, when witnesses said he violated the Jim Crow social code by whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working behind the counter of a store in the tiny town of Money.

Clinton likens views on women to those held by terrorist groups

CLEVELAND - Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday drew parallels between terrorist organizations and the field of Republican candidates for president when it comes to their views on women, telling an Ohio audience her potential GOP rivals were pushing "out-of-date" policies.

"Now extreme views about women? We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don't want to live in the modern world," Clinton said.

"But it's a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States, yet they espouse out-of-date and out-of-touch policies," she added at a rally with 2,800 people in Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University. "They are dead wrong for 21st century America."

In her remarks, she did not mention any specific terrorist or militant groups, such as the Islamic State, which has held women as sex slaves in Iraq and Syria. Republicans swiftly accused the Democratic presidential front-runner of directly comparing the Republican presidential field to terrorists.