The top Democrat on the US Senate Armed Services Committee has announced a funding package of $500 million for Israel’s missile defense as part of a key US defense bill, the Time of Israel (ToI) reports. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand made the announcement Tuesday even as four progressive Congressional Democrats are demanding cuts in US aid to Israel if it proceeds to annex parts of the West Bank.
The US Defense Department has published a list of twenty major companies, including Huawei, that it has determined are owned or backed by the Chinese military, BBC News reported Thursday. A result of this determination, the US may apply new sanctions against the companies listed.
The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety in a new legal brief filed late Thursday night.
A federal appeals court in California on Friday ruled that the Trump administration’s use of Pentagon funding to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was illegal.
House Democrats passed a bill Friday to make Washington, D.C., the 51st U.S. state, a historic move unlikely to gain traction in the Republican-held Senate.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved a sweeping Democratic police reform bill on Thursday, sending the measure to the Senate despite opposition from President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) heard last week that President Donald Trump’s partial withdrawal of American troops from northeast Syria in 2019 created a vacuum in which Turkey and Turkish-backed militia have been able to threaten local vulnerable civilian populations including Christians and Yazidis. Condemning Turkey’s latest airstrikes and ground operations in the region, the USCIRF called for the US government to “utilize all diplomatic and economic leverage to protect vulnerable religious minorities in northern Iraq — as well as neighboring northeastern Syria — from Turkey’s indiscriminate military operations,” the Christian Post reported.
President Donald Trump announced Friday that his administration will try again to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program instituted by the Obama administration, Politico reported. The renewed effort follows last week’s Supreme Court ruling that the Trump administration had not provided adequate reasons for ending the program in 2017.
U.S. Senate Republicans unveiled a law enforcement reform bill on Wednesday as a rival to more sweeping Democratic legislation, as Congress sought to curb racial discrimination and police abuses three weeks after the death of George Floyd.
U.S. Senate Republicans unveiled a law enforcement reform bill on Wednesday as a rival to more sweeping Democratic legislation, as Congress sought to curb racial discrimination and police abuses three weeks after the death of George Floyd.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Wednesday the latest round of U.S. sanctions against Syria, tightening pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and his government, amid concerns the war-torn country’s population will suffer.
The US Department of Health published a new rule Friday asserting that protection against “sex discrimination” in health care applies only to people who are biologically male or female. Focussed on Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, the final rule rolls back an Obama-era regulation which had added “gender identity” as grounds under which a person could suffer health care discrimination. Religious and conservative groups have welcomed the rule as protecting freedom of conscience and allowing federally funded medical practitioners and insurance companies to refuse the provision or coverage of transgender treatments. However, human rights groups are concerned the rule will leave trans-Americans without access to standard needed health care that is unrelated to sex change.
The Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee has approved subpoena power for a politically charged congressional investigation of the Justice Department’s probe into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its contacts with Russia.
US Senate Republicans announced on Tuesday that they are working on a bill to address police reform and racial injustice, Reuters reported. The move came after Congressional Democrats put forward police reform legislation on Monday.
A majority of Minneapolis City Council members voted Sunday to dismantle the city’s police department and replace it with a new model of public safety, the New York Times (NYT) reported. The move follows activists’ calls to “defund police” after the violent death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis law enforcement officers two weeks ago. As Republicans have expectedly described such calls as “appalling” and “outlandish,” Congressional Democrats have also distanced themselves from the calls, focussing instead on bringing a new bill addressing police reform.
U.S. President Donald Trump has condemned alleged plans by Democrats to dismantle and defund the police at a time when the nation faces riots following the death of George Floyd, the unarmed black man who died in police custody.
Efforts by Democrats to dismantle and defund the police department represents a “rolling back” of the “protective layers that protect Americans in their homes and places of business,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Monday.
Uncle Sam has added $1.2 trillion to the budget deficit over the last two months, according to the latest numbers Monday that detail how the government has used cash to try to combat the coronavirus pandemic and its economic catastrophe.
The Congressional Budget Office projected Monday that the country will lose nearly $16 trillion in gross domestic product over the next decade because of the pandemic.
“Remember … Ambassador, you’re not talking to a diplomat, you’re talking to a soldier.” When President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, said those words to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, he also spoke to American intelligence agents listening in on the call. For three years, congressional Democrats have assured us Flynn’s calls to Kislyak were so disturbing that they set off alarms in the closing days of the Obama administration.