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NEW YORK (AP) —
EDITOR'S NOTE: The death of John Lennon still reverberates as a defining moment for a generation and for the music world.
A man who helped define rock and roll, a leader of the peace movement, an icon of the Baby Boom generation, his sudden shooting death at the hands of Mark David Chapman inspired shock and mourning, and for many marked the end of an era.
Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison and was last denied parole in August 2014.
"I am sorry for causing that type of pain," Chapman told the parole board then. "I am sorry for being such an idiot and choosing the wrong way for glory." Chapman can try again for parole next year.
At a 2010 hearing, Chapman recalled that he had considered shooting Johnny Carson or Elizabeth Taylor instead, and said that he chose Lennon because the ex-Beatle was more accessible, that his century-old apartment building by Central Park "wasn't quite as cloistered."
Thirty-five years after the death of a cultural touchstone, The Associated Press is making a version of its original coverage available with photos.
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Former Beatle John Lennon, who catapulted to stardom with the long-haired British rock group in the 1960s, was shot to death late last night outside his luxury apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, police said.
Authorities said Lennon, 40, was rushed in a police car to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving.
Doctors said he suffered seven severe wounds in his chest, back and left arm, but they did not know how many bullets had hit him. Dr. Stephen Lynn said, "I am sure he was dead when he was shot."
Police said the shooting occurred outside the Dakota, the century-old luxury apartment house where Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, lived. It is across the street from Central Park.
Police said they had a suspect and described him as "a screwball" with no apparent motive for shooting Lennon.
Lt. John Schick said he expected the man, in his mid-20s, to be held through the night.
Lennon's wife was not hurt.
Chief of Detectives James Sullivan said Lennon and his wife were walking into the enclosed courtyard of the Dakota about 10:50 p.m. when five shots rang out. Lennon staggered up a few steps into the building and collapsed, he said.
Police Officer Anthony Palma, who was one of the first officers to arrive, said officers found Lennon lying face down in the office of the nine-story apartment building and carried him to a patrol car. Miss Ono was taken to the hospital in another car, he said.
Palma said she became hysterical when doctors told her that Lennon was dead. "Tell me it isn't true," he quoted her as crying.
Sullivan said the suspect was a 25-year-old man from Hawaii who had reportedly been hanging around the Dakota for some time.
Jack Douglas, Lennon's producer, said he and the Lennons had been at a midtown studio called the Record Plant and that Lennon left at 10:30 p.m. Lennon said he was going to get something to eat and go home, Douglas said.
A bystander, Sean Strub, said he was walking south near 72nd Street when he heard four shots. He said he came around the corner to Central Park West and saw Lennon being put into the back of a police car.
Some people say they heard six shots and said John was hit twice," Strub said. "Police said he was hit in the back."
He said others told him the assailant had been "crouching in the archway of the Dakota. ... Lennon arrived in the company of his wife and the assailant fired."
At Roosevelt Hospital, Dr. Lynn announced that Lennon was dead shortly after midnight. He said Lennon had been brought in shortly before 11 p.m.
"Extensive resuscitation efforts were made and despite transfusions and other methods he could not be revived," he said.
"Significant damage was done to the major vessel in the chest," Dr. Lynn said. "There was massive blood loss and he could not be saved. ... I am sure he was dead when he was shot. ... His house is less than a mile away from the hospital and I don't think it was possible to rescue him by any means."
Lennon rocketed to fame in the early 1960s when he and fellow Britons Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr introduced a sound that changed the course of rock 'n' roll.
Lennon, who turned 40 on Oct. 9, was responsible for writing many of the group's songs.
In an interview earlier this year— his first major interview in five years — Lennon said he had wanted to leave the Beatles as early as 1966 but did not make the move until four years later because he "just didn't have the guts."
After the Beatles broke up in 1970, Lennon continued writing songs and recording.
But in 1975 he dropped out for five years, saying he wanted to be with Yoko Ono and their son, Sean. Lennon also had a son, Julian, by his first wife, Cynthia, whom he left in the late 1960s.
In 1976, he won resident's status in the United States after a court fight against a deportation order stemming from a British drug conviction.
It was not until last summer that he returned to music, and his 14-song album, "Double Fantasy," was released last month. The album, which includes songs by his wife, is based on Lennon's experiences over the five years, during which he kept house, cooked and cared for their son.
The seed for the Beatles band dates to 1955 when Lennon met McCartney at a Liverpool, England, church social. They started performing as a duo called the Quarrymen and were joined three years later by Harrison.
Starr did not come into the band until 1962 — a year before the Beatles hit the top of the charts in Britain with "Please Please Me."
"Beatlemania" did not cross the ocean to the United States until 1964.
MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. (AP) —
Donald Trump called Monday for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," an idea swiftly condemned by his rival GOP candidates for president and other Republicans.
The proposed ban would apply to immigrants and visitors alike, a sweeping prohibition affecting all adherents of Islam who want to come to the U.S. The idea faced an immediate challenge to its legality and feasibility from experts who could point to no formal exclusion of immigrants based on religion in America's history.
Trump's campaign said in a statement such a ban should stand "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." It said the proposal comes in response to a level of hatred among "large segments of the Muslim population" toward Americans.
"Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life," Trump said in the statement.
At an evening rally in South Carolina, Trump supporters cheered and shouted in support as he read his statement. Trump warned during his speech that without drastic action, the threat of attacks is "going to get worse and worse."
"As he says, we have to find out who they are and why they are here," Rod Weader, a 68-year-old real estate agent from North Charleston who attended the rally and said he agreed with Trump's plan "150 percent." ''Like he said, they are going to kill us and we've got to stop it."
Since the Paris attacks, a number of Republican presidential contenders have proposed restrictions on Syrian refugees — with several suggesting preference for Christians seeking asylum — and tighter surveillance in the U.S.
But Trump's proposed ban goes much further than those ideas, and his Republican rivals were quick to reject the latest provocation from a candidate who has delivered no shortage of them.
"Donald Trump is unhinged," Jeb Bush said via Twitter. "His 'policy' proposals are not serious."
John Kasich slammed Trump's "outrageous divisiveness," while a more measured Ted Cruz, who has always been cautious about upsetting Trump's supporters, said, "Well, that is not my policy."
Trump's plan also drew criticism from the heads of the Republican Party in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the first three states to vote in next year's presidential primaries.
New Hampshire GOP's chairwoman Jennifer Horn said the idea is "un-Republican. It is unconstitutional. And it is un-American," while South Carolina chairman Matt Moore said on Twitter, "As a conservative who truly cares about religious liberty, Donald Trump's bad idea and rhetoric send a shiver down my spine."
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Trump's proposed ban would apply to "everybody," including Muslims seeking immigration visas as well as tourists seeking to enter the country.
His campaign did not immediately respond to questions about whether it would also include Muslims who are U.S. citizens and travel outside of the country, including members of the military, or how a determination of someone's religion might be made by customs and border officials.
Instead, Trump said via a campaign spokeswoman: "Because I am so politically correct, I would never be the one to say. You figure it out!"
There are more than 5,800 servicemen and women on active U.S. military duty and in the reserves who self-identify as Muslim and could be assigned to serve overseas. Trump said in an interview Monday night on Fox News, "They'll come home." He added, "This does not apply to people living in the country, except that we have to vigilant."
It was also unclear whether Trump's ban would apply to Muslim allies in the fight against Islamic State militants. Ari Fleischer, a former aide to Republican President George W. Bush, tweeted, "Under Trump, the King Abdullah of Jordan, who is fighting ISIS, won't be allowed in the US to talk about how to fight ISIS."
But at Trump's rally in South Carolina, the proposed ban struck supporter Shelley Choquette as reasonable, because "it's not going to be forever. I think everybody needs to be checked."
Religion can factor into immigration decisions, but that typically happens when people are fleeing religious persecution. People of a particular religion may get favorable treatment by the United States, as when Russian Jews sought to leave the Soviet Union.
In the late 1800s, Congress passed legislation broadly aimed at halting Chinese immigration. But said Leti Volpp, a University of California expert on immigration law, "there is no precedent for a religious litmus test for admitting immigrants into the United States."
"Excluding almost a quarter of the world's population from setting foot in the United States based solely upon their religious identity would never pass constitutional muster," Volpp said.
Trump's proposal comes a day after President Barack Obama spoke to the nation from the Oval Office about the shootings in San Bernardino, California, which Obama said was "an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people."
The FBI said Monday the Muslim couple who carried out the massacre had been radicalized and had taken target practice at area gun ranges, in one case within days of the attack last week that killed 14 people.
Trump's campaign has been marked by a pattern of inflammatory statements, dating back to his harsh rhetoric about Mexican immigrants. He has taken a particularly hard line against Muslims in the days since the Paris attacks, advocating enhanced surveillance of mosques due to fears over radicalization.
"Donald Trump sounds more like a leader of a lynch mob than a great nation like ours," said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "He and others are playing into the hands of ISIS. This is exactly what ISIS wants from Americans: to turn against each other."
White House spokesman Josh Earnest accused Trump of playing on people's fears and trying to tap into "a darker side, a darker element" of American society.
From the Democratic presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders said "Trump and others want us to hate all Muslims" and Hillary Clinton called the proposal "reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive."
On Capitol Hill, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said, "It's just foolish."
But will it hurt Trump in the campaign? "I have no idea," McCain said. "I thought long ago that things he said would hurt his prospects, and he continues to go up."
WASHINGTON (AP) —
A long-awaited rewrite of federal education law appears headed toward final congressional approval.
The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to end debate on a widely criticized No Child Left Behind Act, setting up a final vote Wednesday. The sweeping legislation would give the states greater control over the nation's public schools but still maintain annual testing to gauge student progress.
The federal government would see its influence in education policy substantially limited and would no longer be able to tell states and local districts how to judge the performance of schools and teachers.
Under the legislation, which easily passed the House last week, states and districts would come up with their own goals for schools, design their own measures of achievement and progress, and decide how to turn around struggling schools. That's instead of Washington mandating what critics had dubbed a one-size-fits-all approach to governing the country's 100,000 public schools.
The White House has indicated that President Barack Obama would sign the measure into law.
"It's the biggest step toward local control of schools in 25 years," Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said in an interview. He was a chief architect of the bill along with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington.
"Keeping higher standards and real accountability comes from communities and states and not from Washington," said Alexander, a former education secretary.
Murray, a former preschool teacher, said the legislation would still hold under-performing schools responsible, but would leave it to the states to decide how to do that. Murray also praised the bill for including a key priority for her — a focus on early childhood education.
"For the first time ever, our federal education law will recognize the importance of early learning with the grants program that we have put in place. It's a very good beginning state for our nation," Murray said in an interview.
The grants program will use existing funding to help states improve quality and access to early childhood education.
The No Child Left Behind Act passed with broad support in Congress and was signed by President George W. Bush in 2002. It was praised for its main intent, which was to use annual standardized tests to identify achievement gaps in learning and identify failing schools in need of support.
But it was later criticized for a heavy-handed federal approach that imposed sanctions when schools came up short in annual testing progress — leading teachers, administrators and others to worry that the high stakes associated with the tests was leading to a culture of over-testing and hurting classroom learning.
No Child has been up for reauthorization since 2007, but previous attempts to renew the law have gotten caught in a broader debate over the federal role in public education.
The new bill, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, would keep the key feature of the No Child law: annual reading and math testing of children in grades three through eight and once in high school. And it would require schools to report the results by students' race, family income, and disability status.
It would also encourage states to set limits on the total amount of time kids spend taking tests and would end federal efforts to tie test scores to teacher evaluations.
But instead of federal mandates on what targets schools needs to be meeting, states would be responsible for working with schools and local districts to develop achievement goals and accountability plans. States, however, would be required to intervene in the nation's lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, in high school "dropout factories" and in schools with persistent achievement gaps — something Democrats insisted must be part of any education overhaul.
On Common Core, reviled by many conservatives, the bill says the Education Department may not mandate or give states incentives to adopt or maintain any particular set of academic standards.
The Common Core college and career-ready curriculum guidelines were created by the states, but have become a lightning rod for those worried that Washington has too much influence in public schools. Since 2012, the administration has offered grants through its Race to the Top program for states that adopted strong academic standards for its students.
The bill also ends the waivers the Obama administration has given to more than 40 states, exemptions granted around the more onerous parts of No Child when it became clear that requirements such as having all students proficient in reading and math by 2014 would not be met.