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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco's iconic Golden Gate Bridge moved a big step closer to getting an oft-debated suicide barrier after bridge officials on Friday approved a $76 million funding package for a net system that would prevent people from jumping to their deaths.

The bridge district's board of directors voted unanimously in favor of the funding for a steel suicide net, which includes $20 million in bridge toll revenue. Federal money will provide the bulk of the remaining funding, though the state is also pledging $7 million.

A tearful Dan Barks, of Napa, who lost his son, Donovan, to suicide on the bridge in 2008, said after the vote that he was almost speechless.

"A lot of people have done so much incredible work to get this accomplished," he said.

After the vote, he rose from his knees and shared a tearful embrace with Sue Story of Rocklin, whose son Jacob jumped off the bridge in 2010.

"We did it, Dan! We did it! It's no longer the Bridge of Death anymore," she said.

At least some of the money still requires additional approval. The bridge's board, however, has now taken its final step in adopting the net.

"The tragedy of today is that we can't go back in time, we can't save ... the people who jumped off the bridge. But the good thing, with this vote today, we can vote in their memory," board member Janet Reilly said. "We will save many lives who have followed in their footsteps and that's what so extraordinary about today."

The Golden Gate Bridge, with its sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, has long been a destination for people seeking to end their lives. Since it opened in 1937, more than 1,400 people have plunged to their deaths, including a record 46 suicides last year, officials said.

Officials have been discussing a suicide barrier on the bridge for decades. The bridge's board voted in 2008 to install a stainless steel net, rejecting other options, including raising the 4-foot-high railings and leaving the iconic span unchanged.

Two years later, they certified the final environmental impact report for the net, which would stretch about 20 feet wide on each side of the span. Officials say it will not mar the landmark bridge's appearance.

But funding for the project remained a major obstacle.

A significant hurdle was overcome two years ago when President Barack Obama signed into law a bill making safety barriers and nets eligible for federal funds.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California in a statement Friday praised the bridge's board and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, who has been a staunch supporter of a barrier.

"The Golden Gate Bridge is a source of immense pride to San Francisco, but for too many families in our community, it has also been a place of pain," Peloisi said. "A suicide prevention barrier offers a critical second chance for troubled men and women acting on often impulsive suicidal thoughts. Together, we can ensure this magnificent landmark stands as a faithful companion for all San Franciscans, awing and inspiring visitors for generations to come."

Most jumpers suffer a grisly death, with massive internal injuries, broken bones and skull fractures. Some die from internal bleeding. Others drown.

Kevin Hines, who miraculously survived his suicide attempt after jumping off the structure in 2000 at age 19, urged the board before its vote to "not let one more family sit in eternal pain, in perpetuity because of politics."

He later broke down after the unanimous vote approving the funding.

"I feel like a giant weight has been lifted off my shoulders, all of our shoulders. I feel free," Hines said. "I feel a sense of hope that I haven't had in a very long time. It's not over yet, we will be here until that net is raised and no more people die."

Richard Gamboa of Sacramento, whose son, Kyle was among the 46 bridge suicides last year, said while Friday's vote is momentous, he's not done fighting.

"It's not over for me. I'm going to keep coming here and urging them to get the barrier done. When I go on that bridge and look down and see that net there, then I will be at peace," Gamboa said.

John Brooks, whose 17-year-old daughter, Casey, jumped from the rust-colored span in 2008, told the board Friday that he hopes that some measure is taken before the net is constructed to provide some kind of safety to everybody.

"What I really don't want to see between now and the time it is done is more deaths," Brooks said. "That will be a cruel irony."

Board members and San Francisco supervisors David Campos and London Breed both agreed that the sooner the barrier is built, the better.

"We need to build it as quickly as we can," Campos said.

Bidding on the job is expected to start next year, with completion of construction expected in 2018.

BRUSSELS (AP) — Over Russia's objections, Ukraine's new president on Friday signed a free-trade deal binding his country more closely to Western Europe, sealing the very agreement that triggered the bloodshed and political convulsions of the past seven months.

Russia, meanwhile, fended off for the time being a new, more crippling round of Western sanctions over its intervention in Ukraine, where a fragile cease-fire between government forces and pro-Moscow separatists in the east was set to expire Friday night.

"What a great day!" a beaming Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said in Brussels upon the signing of the economic agreement with the European Union. "Maybe the most important day for my country after independence."

Since it became independent in the 1991 Soviet collapse, Ukraine has been involved in a delicate balancing act between Russia and the West. The Kremlin wants to keep Ukraine, the birthplace of Russian statehood and Russian Orthodox Christianity, in its orbit.

In November, under pressure from Moscow, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanuknovych spiked the EU pact, triggering huge protests that drove him from power. Moscow responded by annexing the mainly Russian-speaking Crimean Peninsula in March, and pro-Russian separatists soon rose up in Ukraine's eastern provinces.

While Friday's signing marked a defeat for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has threatened to cancel trade preferences for Ukraine, the Kremlin made no immediate move to punish its neighbor.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia will take the necessary measures to protect its markets only when the agreement takes effect. That will take a few months.

Meanwhile, EU leaders decided not to immediately impose new sanctions on Russia for the uprising. But they warned that punitive measures have been drawn up and could be levied immediately.

And they demanded Russia and the rebels take steps to ease the violence, including releasing all captives, retreating from border checkpoints and launching "substantial negotiations" on Poroshenko's peace plan.

The weeklong cease-fire, which both sides have been accused of violating, was set to expire at 10 p.m. local time. Poroshenko said he would decide whether to extend it. Insurgent leader Alexander Borodai said the rebels were ready to do so and would also soon release the European observers they have been holding for weeks.

At the signing ceremony, Poroshenko reminded EU leaders of the bloodshed in his country.

Ukraine "paid the highest possible price to make her European dreams come true," he said, asking the EU to pledge that one day Ukraine can join the 28-nation bloc. Membership "would cost the European Union nothing," he said, "but would mean the world to my country."

In Kiev's Independence Square, the site of last winter's huge protests against Russian domination, balloons the color of the EU's blue flag were released over the crowd as a rock band pounded out the European Union's anthem, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

The crowd of several hundred was far smaller than the hundreds of thousands who jammed the square at the height of the protests. Rain, people getting out of town ahead of a long holiday weekend, and the simmering conflict in the east worked to restrain the mood.

Protest veteran Oleg Mityukhin, 48, came wrapped in the Ukrainian flag.

"I think there will be less corruption, there will be better quality goods, and it will be a push forward for the development of Ukraine," he said.

The agreements signed Friday let businesses in Ukraine and two other former Soviet republics, Moldova and Georgia, trade freely in any of the EU's nations without tariffs or restrictions as long as their goods and practices meet EU standards. Likewise, goods and services from the EU will be sold more easily and cheaply in the three countries.

Amanda Paul, a policy analyst at the Brussels-based think tank European Policy Center, said Russia has levers to inflict serious economic pain on Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia through trade restrictions, cuts in energy supplies or the deportation of migrant workers from those countries.

European Commission experts estimate the deal will boost Ukraine's national income by 1.2 billion euros ($1.6 billion) a year.

The deal also demands that Ukraine adopt EU rules on government contracts, competition and copyrights — steps that could reduce corruption and make the country more attractive to investors.

___

Isachenkov reported from Moscow. AP correspondents David McHugh in Kiev, Geir Moulson in Berlin, Juergen Baetz in Brussels, Laura Mills in Moscow and Balint Szlanko in Donetsk, Ukraine, contributed to this report.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — President Barack Obama's administration has taken the U.S. gay rights revolution global, using American embassies across the world as outposts in a struggle that still hasn't been won at home.

Sometimes U.S. advice and encouragement is condemned as unacceptable meddling. And sometimes it can seem to backfire, increasing the pressure on those it is meant to help.

With gay pride parades taking place in many cities across the world this weekend, the U.S. role will be more visible than ever. Diplomats will take part in parades and some embassies will fly the rainbow flag along with the Stars and Stripes.

The United States sent five openly gay ambassadors abroad last year, with a sixth nominee, to Vietnam, now awaiting Senate confirmation. American diplomats are working to support gay rights in countries such as Poland, where prejudice remains deep, and to oppose violence and other abuse in countries like Nigeria and Russia, where gays face life-threatening risks.

"It is incredible. I am amazed by what the U.S. is doing to help us," said Mariusz Kurc, the editor of a Polish gay advocacy magazine, Replika, which has received some U.S. funding and other help. "We are used to struggling and not finding any support."

Former President George W. Bush supported AIDS prevention efforts globally, but it was the Obama administration that launched the push to make lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights an international issue. The watershed moment came in December 2011, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the United Nations in Geneva and proclaimed LGBT rights "one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time."

Since then, embassies have been opening their doors to gay rights activists, hosting events and supporting local advocacy work. The State Department has since spent $12 million on the efforts in over 50 countries through the Global Equality Fund, an initiative launched to fund the new work.

Just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act last June, consular posts also began issuing immigrant visas to the same-sex spouses of gay Americans.

One beneficiary was Jake Lees, a 27-year-old Englishman who had been forced to spend long periods apart from his American partner, Austin Armacost, since they met six years ago. In May Lees was issued a fiance visa at the U.S. Embassy in London. The couple married two weeks ago and are now starting a new life together in Franklin, Indiana, as they wait for Lees' green card.

"I felt like the officers at the embassy treated us the way they would treat a heterosexual couple," said Armacost, a 26-year-old fitness and nutrition instructor. "It's a mind-boggling change after gay couples were treated like legal strangers for the first three centuries of our country's history."

Some conservative American groups are outraged by the policy. Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, calls it "a slap in the face to the majority of Americans," given that American voters have rejected same-sex marriage in a number of state referendums.

"This is taking a flawed view of what it means to be a human being — male and female — and trying to impose that on countries throughout the world," Brown said. "The administration would like people to believe that this is simply 'live and let live.' No, this is coercion in its worst possible form."

The American efforts are tailored to local conditions, said Scott Busby, the deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department. Ambassadors can decide individually whether to hoist the rainbow flag, as embassies in Tel Aviv, London and Prague have done, or show support in other ways.

The official U.S. delegation to the recent Winter Olympics in Russia included three openly gay athletes. Soon after that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow opened its basketball court for the Open Games, an LGBT sporting event which had been denied access to many of the venues it had counted on. The U.S. Embassy also operates a website where Russian gay and lesbians can publish their personal stories.

While some gay rights activists say support from the U.S. and other Western countries adds moral legitimacy to their cause, it can also cause a backlash.

Rauda Morcos, a prominent Palestinian lesbian activist, said local communities, particularly in the Middle East, have to find their own ways of asserting themselves. She criticized the U.S. and Western efforts in general to help gay communities elsewhere as patronizing.

"It is a colonial approach," she said. "In cases where it was tried, it didn't help local communities and maybe made things even worse."

An extreme case has been Uganda, which in February passed a law making gay sex punishable by a life sentence. In enacting the bill, President Yoweri Museveni said he wanted to deter the West from "promoting" gay rights in Africa, a continent where homosexuals face severe discrimination and even attacks. In response, the U.S. imposed sanctions and Secretary of State John Kerry compared the policies to the anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has waged an assault on what he considers the encroachment of decadent Western values and the government last year banned "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors," making it a crime to hold gay rights rallies or to openly discuss homosexuality in content accessible to children. Afraid for their security, some Russian gay advocates try to keep their contacts with Western officials quiet.

Jessica Stern, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, praised the U.S. policy but said there have been missteps along the way, citing a 2011 U.S. embassy gathering in Pakistan that prompted a group of religious and political leaders to accuse the U.S. of "cultural terrorism."

And in Senegal a year ago, President Macky Sall bluntly rebuked the visiting Obama for urging African leaders to end discrimination against gays. Sall said his country was neither homophobic nor ready to legalize homosexuality, and in an apparent jab at the U.S., he noted Senegal abolished capital punishment years ago.

"The response in the local press was voluminous praise of the Senegalese president, maybe not actually for his stance on LGBT rights, but for effectively asserting Senegal's sovereignty, yet the two became intertwined," Stern said.

Busby, the State Department official, denied that increased harassment by governments is ever the consequence of U.S. advocacy, instead describing it as "a cynical reaction taken by leaders to advance their own political standing."

In some countries, like Poland, the U.S. efforts are a catalyst for change.

The embassy there financed a 2012 visit to Warsaw by Dennis and Judy Shepard, the parents of Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student who was tortured and murdered in 1998.

A group of parents who heard their story were so shaken by the Shepards' tragedy that they founded a parental advocacy group, Akceptacja, which is fighting homophobia. The parents are now reaching out to their lawmakers personally, in what advocates say is the conscious adoption of an American strategy of families of gays and lesbians appealing to the hearts of officials.

"The killing of Matthew Shepard represents the fear I have that my son could be hurt for being gay," said Tamara Uliasz, 60, one of the group's founders. "I realized that what happened in Wyoming could happen here."

_____

Associated Press writers Ezequiel Abiu Lopez in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda; and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A fear of voting has gripped Democratic leaders in the Senate, slowing the chamber's modest productivity this election season to a near halt.

With control of the Senate at risk in November, leaders are going to remarkable lengths to protect endangered Democrats from casting tough votes and to deny Republicans legislative victories in the midst of the campaign. The phobia means even bipartisan legislation to boost energy efficiency, manufacturing, sportsmen's rights and more could be scuttled.

The Senate's masters of process are finding a variety of ways to shut down debate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., now is requiring an elusive 60-vote supermajority to deal with amendments to spending bills, instead of the usual simple majority, a step that makes it much more difficult to put politically sensitive matters into contention. This was a flip from his approach to Obama administration nominees, when he decided most could be moved ahead with a straight majority instead of the 60 votes needed before.

Reid's principle aim in setting the supermajority rule for spending amendments was to deny archrival Sen. Mitch McConnell a win on protecting his home state coal industry from new regulations limiting carbon emissions from existing power plants. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, faces a tough re-election in Kentucky.

This hunkering down by Democrats is at odds with the once-vibrant tradition of advancing the 12 annual agency budget bills through open debate. In the Appropriations Committee, long accustomed to a freewheeling process, chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., has held up action on three spending bills, apparently to head off politically difficult votes on changes to the divisive health care law as well as potential losses to Republicans on amendments such as McConnell's on the coal industry.

"I just don't think they want their members to have to take any hard votes between now and November," said Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb. And there's "just no question that they're worried we're going to win some votes so they just shut us down."

Vote-a-phobia worsens in election years, especially when the majority party is in jeopardy. Republicans need to gain six seats to win control and Democrats must defend 21 seats to the Republicans' 15.

So Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, probably shouldn't have been surprised when his cherished bill to fund the Labor, Education and Health and Human Services departments got yanked from the Appropriations Committee's agenda this month. Word quickly spread that committee Democrats in Republican-leaning states feared a flurry of votes related to "Obamacare."

"It's not as if they haven't voted on them before," Harkin griped. "My way of thinking is, 'Hell, you've already voted on it. Your record's there.'" Harkin blamed Senate Democratic leaders.

Two other appropriations bills have run aground after preliminary votes. The normally non-controversial energy and water bill was pulled from the committee agenda after it became known that McConnell would have an amendment to defend his state's coal mining industry. McConnell is making that defense a centerpiece of his re-election campaign and his amendment appeared on track to prevail with the help of pro-energy Democrats on the committee.

Again, after consulting with Reid, Mikulski struck the bill from the agenda.

McConnell pressed the matter the next day, this time aiming to amend a spending bill paying for five Cabinet departments. Democrats again headed him off.

Democrats privately acknowledge that they're protecting vulnerable senators and don't want McConnell to win on the carbon emissions issue. They also see hypocrisy in McConnell's insistence on a simple majority vote for his top — and controversial — priority while he wants Democrats to produce 60 votes to advance almost everything else.

Another measure, financing the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, failed to get a committee vote last week after speeding through a subcommittee hearing. Mikulski blamed problems with timing. But it was known that Republicans had amendments on hot-button issues coming.

Fear of voting is hardly new. In the last two years of the Clinton administration, Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., blocked Democrats from offering a popular Patients' Bill of Rights, and more. At the time, Charles Schumer of New York and Dick Durbin of Illinois were among the Democrats who cried foul.

These days, Durbin and Schumer hold the No. 2 and No. 3 Democratic Senate leadership posts and now that their party is running the place, they're backing Reid's moves to clamp down on GOP amendments.

"You've always got senators on both sides of the aisle of all political persuasions and all regions whining and complaining how they don't want to vote on this amendment or that amendment," Lott says now. "It always frankly agitated me because I felt like these are big boys and girls." He said "it has gotten worse and worse and worse."

Republicans say Democratic leaders are trying especially to protect Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Landrieu says she hasn't asked for such help.

"I've taken so many hard votes up here," Landrieu said. "I could take more."