In early GOP win on health care repeal, Congress OKs budget
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ascendant Republicans drove a budget through Congress on Friday that gives them an early but critical victory in their crusade to scrap President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
The vote trains the spotlight on whether they and Donald Trump can deliver on repeated pledges to not just erase that statute but replace it.
Demonstrating the GOP’s willingness to plunge into a defining but risky battle, the House used a near party-line 227-198 roll call to approve a measure that prevents Senate Democrats from derailing a future bill, thus far unwritten, annulling and reshaping Obama’s landmark 2010 law. The budget, which won Senate approval early Thursday, does not need the president’s signature.
“The ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act will soon be history!” Trump tweeted Friday in a dig at the statute’s name, the Affordable Care Act. Trump takes the presidential oath next Friday.
The real work looms in coming months as the new administration and congressional Republicans write legislation to erase much of the health care law and replace it with a GOP version. Republicans have internal divisions over what that would look like, though past GOP proposals have cut much of the existing law’s federal spending and eased coverage requirements while relying more on tax benefits and letting states make decisions.
Ordinary Cubans fret about end to US immigration policy
HAVANA (AP) — Ordinary Cubans worried Friday about the economic problems that could be caused for some people by the sudden end to a once-easy pathway to life in the United States, saying many people who already left the island to take advantage of the earlier American immigration policy could wind up back home with nothing.
President Barack Obama on Thursday ended the possibility of automatic legal residency for any Cuban who touches U.S. soil. Those people who were in the middle of trips to get to the United States could be the biggest losers, some Cubans said.
“There are people who have sold houses, renounced everything, and today they are in limbo,” said Leonardo Serrano, a 47-year-old who works for a firm that operates with private and government investment. “They won’t be able to get there, and when they return they won’t have anything.”
Average Cubans and opponents of the island’s communist leaders said they expected pressure for reform on the island to increase with the elimination of a mechanism that siphoned off the island’s most dissatisfied citizens and turned them into sources of remittances supporting relatives who remained on the island.
The repeal of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy went into effect immediately after a Thursday afternoon announcement. It followed months of negotiations focused in part on getting Cuba to agree to take back people who had arrived in the U.S.
Report says Chicago police violated civil rights for years
CHICAGO (AP) — The Justice Department on Friday laid bare years of civil rights violations by Chicago police, blasting the nation’s second-largest department for using excessive force that included shooting at people who did not pose a threat and using stun guns on others only because they refused to follow commands.
The report was issued after a yearlong investigation sparked by the 2014 death of a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a white officer. The federal investigation looked broadly at law enforcement practices, concluding that officers were not sufficiently trained or supported and that many who were accused of misconduct were rarely investigated or disciplined.
The findings come just a week before a change in administration that could reorder priorities at the Justice Department. Under President Barack Obama, the government has conducted 25 civil rights investigations of police departments, including those in Cleveland, Baltimore and Seattle. President-elect Donald Trump’s position on the federal review process is unclear. His nominee to be attorney general has expressed reservations about the system, especially the reliance on courts to bring about changes.
Asked about the investigation’s future, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said talks between the city and the government would go on regardless “of who is at the top of the Justice Department.”
Chicago officers endangered civilians, caused avoidable injuries and deaths and eroded community trust that is “the cornerstone of public safety,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Takata agrees to guilty plea, will pay $1B for hiding defect
DETROIT (AP) — Takata Corp. has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge and will pay $1 billion in fines and restitution for a years-long scheme to conceal a deadly defect in its automotive air bag inflators.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit announced the deal Friday, hours after it unsealed a six-count grand jury indictment against three former Takata executives who are accused of carrying out the scheme by falsifying and altering test reports that showed the inflators could rupture.
Takata inflators can explode with too much force, spewing shrapnel into drivers and passengers. At least 11 people have been killed in the U.S. and 16 worldwide because of the defect. More than 180 have been injured. The problem touched off the largest automotive recall in U.S. history covering 42 million vehicles and 69 million inflators. It will take years for the recalls to be completed.
“The risk that they allowed to happen is really reprehensible,” said Barbara McQuade, the U.S. Attorney in Detroit, whose office worked on the two-year investigation.
Under the deal, Takata will pay a $25 million criminal fine, $125 million to individuals injured by the air bags and $850 million to automakers that purchased the inflators.
Police: Woman kidnapped as newborn 18 years ago is alive
WALTERBORO, S.C. (AP) — Stolen from a hospital just hours after she was born, an 18-year-old woman finally learned her true identity and was reunited Friday with her birth family, by video chat. The woman she thought was her mother was charged with her kidnapping.
Thanks to DNA analysis, the 18-year-old now knows her birth name: Kamiyah Mobley. She’s in good health, but understandably overwhelmed, Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said at a news conference.
Police arrested Gloria Williams, 51, in Walterboro, South Carolina, where Mobley was raised in a small house with white vinyl siding and black trim, about 200 miles from the hospital where she was born. She will be extradited to Florida on charges of kidnapping and interference with custody, authorities said.
In Jacksonville, the young woman’s birth family cried “tears of joy” after a detective told them their baby had been found. Within hours Friday, they were able to reconnect by video chat.
“She looks just like her daddy,” her paternal grandmother, Velma Aiken of Jacksonville, told The Associated Press after they were able to see each other for the first time, on FaceTime. “She act like she been talking to us all the time. She told us she’d be here soon to see us.”
