BY MIKE LILLIS, ARIS FOLLEY AND MYCHAEL SCHNELL |
House lawmakers are bracing for what could be a contentious battle over emergency spending in the wake of the wildfires that are tearing through Southern California — an unprecedented disaster that's already estimated to have caused more than $50 billion in damage in and around Los Angeles.
While both parties united quickly in December to provide more than $100 billion in emergency aid for hurricanes and other disasters, the wild card this time around will be President-elect Trump, who is already blaming California Democrats for the scale of the destruction.
The debate won't happen immediately. The fires are still raging; the ultimate price tag is yet unknown; and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says it has enough cash on hand to respond to a number of disasters around the country, including the California wildfires, in the near term. |
|
|
BY EMILY BROOKS AND TOBIAS BURNS |
Republicans who are pledging to withhold support for President-elect Trump's ambitious agenda if the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap is not raised are set to meet with the incoming president this weekend.
"I've been very clear from the start, I will not support a tax bill that does not lift the cap on SALT," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told reporters earlier in the week.
Republicans are plotting to push Trump's tax, energy and border priorities through a special party-line "reconciliation" process that bypasses the need to get Democratic buy-in but can only be used once or twice in a year. |
|
|
Ukraine is leaning into its efforts to hold onto the Russian territory of Kursk amid intense pressure from Russian and North Korean forces to take it back, apparently gambling that the region could be a valuable card in potential negotiations with Moscow.
After weeks of Russian and North Korean advances in Kursk, Ukraine launched a minor offensive on Sunday to push forces back and retain a grip on the roughly 300 square miles Ukrainian troops still hold.
With less than two weeks before President-elect Trump takes office with a promise to negotiate an end to the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to be doubling down on Kursk as both a strategic necessity and a bargaining chip, despite lingering questions about the operation's tactical value. |
|
|
Climate change is making the Western United States drier, which can fuel wildfires like those affecting Los Angeles.
With higher temperatures come parched landscapes full of vegetation that can accelerate and exacerbate blazes.
"Climate change has a way in which it dries the landscape out faster, keeping the landscape able to ignite and carry fire and that provides less resistance for a fire to spread," said John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist with the University of California, Merced. |
|
|
BY ALEX GANGITANO AND BRETT SAMUELS |
President Biden opted Friday to voluntarily take a host of questions from the press after delivering remarks on the day's job report, a speech that had been put on the White House schedule last minute. The White House has been peppered with questions recently over whether Biden would hold an end-of-term press conference but would not confirm as much. Biden seemed to hold such a mini-press conference after remarks from the Roosevelt Room around 6 p.m. Friday; he told the small press pool gathered that he'd take some of their questions. |
|
|
BY SHARON UDASIN AND ZACK BUDRYK |
An infernal barrage of blazes continues to ravage the Los Angeles metropolitan region, where the death toll has now risen to at least 10 individuals. While authorities have yet to identify precise causes for most of the fires, the Los Angeles Police Department apprehended one individual accused of sparking one of them. But what has become abundantly clear is that a mix of copious, dried-out vegetation and windy weather has fueled the flames and shocked an overtaxed water system. |
|
|
The Supreme Court will hear a case determining the fate of free preventive services under the Affordable Care Act. In a brief order issued Friday, the justices said they will consider whether members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force were constitutionally appointed. The Affordable Care Act requires insurers and group health plans to cover more than 100 preventive health services recommended by the task force, with no cost to patients. |
|
|
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Biden administration officials would "scream" and "curse" at his employees when they disagreed with the government's takedown requests over pandemic-related content. "These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse," he said on an episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" posted Friday. |
|
|
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) invited President-elect Trump to California on Friday amid a war of words between the two leaders over the Los Angeles area wildfires. "In this spirit of this great country, we must not politicize human tragedy or spread disinformation from the sidelines," Newsom wrote in a letter to Trump. "Hundreds of thousands of Americans–displaced from their homes and fearful for the future–deserve to see all of us working in their best interests to ensure a fast recovery and rebuild." |
|
|
OPINION | The Supreme Court is under great stress, if not in crisis. So says Chief Justice John Roberts in his annual report. In important respects, Roberts is surely correct. The public's trust in the court has slumped to catastrophic lows; individual justices are threatened with violence; the justices' family privacy has been upended by demonstrations at their homes; the Internet is flooded with misinformation about the court and the justices that provokes deep concern about safety and reputation. |
OPINION | These are the times that try Democratic souls. Don't be a winter warrior by giving up the fight against Donald Trump. Block out the frustration. Take a deep breath and follow my list of Democratic do's and don'ts to engage MAGA. First, don't underestimate Trump the way Democrats did to Ronald Reagan back in the day. Reagan had a lasting impact on American society after we dismissed him as a has been B-list actor. He was the granddaddy of trickle-down economics which proved deadly for the middle-class families who elected him. |
|
|
Israeli soldiers have raided Syrian border villages, prompting nervous residents to huddle in their homes. They have captured the country's highest peak, have set up roadblocks between Syrian towns and now overlook local villages from former Syrian military outposts. The stunning downfall of Syria's longtime leader, Bashar al-Assad, closed a chapter in the country's decade-long civil war. But it also marked the start of an Israeli incursion into the border region, which Israel has called a temporary defensive move to guarantee its own security. |
As Senate Democrats agonized over a looming vote that could boost deportations of immigrants living unlawfully in the U.S., the first Democrat to sponsor the Republican-led measure wasn't even in the room. Instead, Sen. John Fetterman (D) of Pennsylvania was meeting on Thursday behind a different set of closed doors with President-elect Trump's pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi. Television crews waited outside, eager to ask Fetterman about the news that he planned to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago, becoming the only Democratic senator so far known to meet with him after the election. "If somebody is shocked or freaked out if I'm going to take a conversation with the president, I'd like to remind you that I'm not just for Democrats—I'm for everyone," Fetterman said in an interview. After all, he said, "Most Pennsylvanians chose Donald Trump as our next president." |
Conservative lawmakers across the U.S. are pushing to introduce more Christianity to public school classrooms, testing the separation of church and state by inserting Bible references into reading lessons and requiring teachers to post the Ten Commandments. The efforts come as President-elect Trump prepares to take office pledging to champion the First Amendment right to pray and read the Bible in school, practices that are already allowed as long as they are not government-sponsored. While the federal government is explicitly barred from directing states on what to teach, Trump can indirectly influence what is taught in public schools and his election may embolden state-level activists. |
When Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) escalated his broadsides against the Chinese government over what he called a "grotesque campaign of genocide" against Uyghur Muslims, Beijing responded in 2020 with an extraordinary rebuke: banning the Florida Republican from the country. Afterward, Rubio not only accelerated his criticism — pushing legislation that banned imports from the Xinjiang region, where China allegedly operated enslaved labor camps — but also attacked Elon Musk's electric car company for opening a showroom in the region. "Right after President Joe Biden signed Sen. Rubio's Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law, @Tesla opened a store in #Xinjiang," Rubio tweeted in 2023. "Nationless corporations are helping the Chinese Communist Party cover up genocide and slave labor in the region." |
|
|
400 N Capitol Street NW Suite 650, Washington, DC 20001 |
© 1998 - 2025 Nexstar Media Inc. | All Rights Reserved. |
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment