Health bill teeters on the brink as House OK’s budget bill
Health bill teeters on the brink as House OK’s budget bill
WASHINGTON (AP) — Their health care bill teetering on the brink, House Republican leaders and President Donald Trump intensified their already-fierce lobbying Wednesday to save the long-promised legislation, agreeing to changes that brought two pivotal Republicans back on board.
Democrats stood firmly united against the health bill, which could come up for a vote as early as Thursday. But they generally applauded a separate $1 trillion-plus spending measure to keep the government running, which passed the House on a bipartisan vote of 309-118.
On the health care front, Reps. Fred Upton of Michigan and Billy Long of Missouri emerged from a White House meeting with Trump saying they could now support the bill, thanks to the addition of $8 billion over five years to help people with pre-existing conditions.
“Today we’re here announcing that with this addition that we brought to the president and sold him on in over an hour meeting in here with him, that we’re both yeses on the bill,” Long told reporters. The potential defections of Upton and Long over the previous 48 hours had emerged as a possible death knell for the bill, and with it seven years’ worth of GOP campaign promises to repeal and replace Democrat Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
“‘We need you, we need you, we need you,’” Long described as the message from a president eager for a win after spending more than 100 days in office without a single substantive congressional accomplishment, save Senate confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.
‘Really bad’ or ‘catastrophic’: Comey defends Clinton choice
WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Wednesday that revealing the reopening of the Hillary Clinton email probe just before Election Day came down to a painful, complicated choice between “really bad” and “catastrophic” options. He said he’d felt “slightly nauseous” to think he might have tipped the election outcome but in hindsight would change nothing.
“I would make the same decision,” Comey declared during a lengthy hearing in which Democratic senators grilled him on the seeming inconsistency between the Clinton disclosure 11 days before the election and his silence about the bureau’s investigation into possible contacts between Russia and Trump’s campaign.
Comey, offering an impassioned public defense of how he handled the election-year issues, insisted that the FBI’s actions in both investigations were consistent. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI cannot take into account how it might benefit or harm politicians.
“I can’t consider for a second whose political futures will be affected and in what way,” Comey told the senators. “We have to ask ourselves what is the right thing to do and then do that thing.”
Persistent questions from senators, and Comey’s testimony, made clear that the FBI director’s decisions of last summer and fall involving both the Trump and Clinton campaigns continue to roil national politics and produce lingering second-guessing about whether the investigations were handled evenly.
Le Pen and Macron come out swinging in high-stakes TV debate
PARIS (AP) — In a heated, high-pressure primetime TV debate, French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron warned of “civil war” if his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen is elected, saying Wednesday that her hard-line plans to combat Islamic radicals would play into their hands. She painted him as subservient to Islamic extremism, saying: “They control you.”
The barbed exchange over France’s fight against terrorism characterized the ill-tempered tone of the debate. Both candidates sought to land damaging blows, in a clash of styles, politics and personalities that highlighted their polar-opposite visions and plans for France.
Le Pen painted the former banker and economy minister as a servant of big business and finance, and declared herself “the candidate of the people, of the France that we love.”
Saying that Islamic extremists must be “eradicated” in the wake of repeated attacks since 2015, Le Pen charged that Macron wouldn’t be up to the task.
“You won’t do that,” she charged.
Venezuela’s Maduro starts constitution rewrite amid protests
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Thousands of protesters were met with plumes of tear gas in Venezuela’s capital Wednesday, just miles from where President Nicolas Maduro delivered a decree kicking off a process to rewrite the troubled nation’s constitution.
Surrounded by top-ranking socialist officials, a combative, riled-up Maduro told supporters dressed in red outside the National Electoral Council that the constitutional assembly was needed to instill peace against a violent opposition.
“I see congress shaking in its boots before a constitutional convention,” he said, referring to the opposition-controlled legislature.
A short distance away, national guardsmen launched tear gas at demonstrators who tried marching toward the National Assembly.
“The repression has started,” said Miguel Pizarro, an opposition congressman, as clouds of white tear gas swirled near him. “That’s how those who want to maintain a dictatorship with violence act.”
Trump on Mideast peace: ‘We will get it done’
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite bleak prospects for success, President Donald Trump promised on Wednesday “to do whatever is necessary” to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
At a White House meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Trump pledged to reinvigorate the stalled Mideast peace process that has bedeviled his predecessors and said he would serve as “a mediator, an arbitrator or a facilitator” between the two sides. “We will get it done,” Trump confidently told Abbas.
“I’m committed to working with Israel and the Palestinians to reach an agreement,” Trump said. “But any agreement cannot be imposed by the United States or by any other nation. The Palestinians and Israelis must work together to reach an agreement that allows both peoples to live, worship, and thrive and prosper in peace.”
The source of Trump’s optimism was not immediately apparent. He offered no details about his effort or how it would be any different from attempts over the past two decades during which former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all tried and failed. Palestinian officials said after the meeting that Trump had not raised any specific proposals to restart negotiations.
Asked what distinguishes Trump’s plans from previous attempts, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said merely: “The man is different.”
Army photographer captures her own death in mortar explosion
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — The U.S. Army published the final photo of a combat photographer who captured on camera the blast that killed her in an accidental mortar explosion in Afghanistan nearly four years ago. The Army’s professional journal says the image illustrates how women are increasingly exposed to dangerous situations in the military.
The photograph of Spc. Hilda Clayton was published Monday in Military Review.
“Clayton’s death symbolizes how female soldiers are increasingly exposed to hazardous situations in training and in combat on par with their male counterparts,” Military Review wrote.
Clayton snapped the picture during a live-fire training exercise on July 2, 2013 in the Laghman Province, Afghanistan. The blast also killed four Afghan National Army soldiers. One of them was a photojournalist Clayton had partnered with to train.
Military Review noted that the explosion happened during a critical moment in the war, when it was important for U.S. and Afghan forces to work in partnership to stabilize the country.