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The Senate on Wednesday gave final approval to a defense policy bill directing $895 billion toward the Pentagon and other military activities, moving over the objections of some Democrats who opposed a provision added late in the negotiations that would deny coverage for transgender health procedures for minors.The 85-to-14 vote, coming a week after a divided House passed the same measure, cleared the bill for President Biden’s signature.Most Republicans and many Democrats supported the measure, which provides a 14.5 percent pay raise to junior enlisted service members and a 4.5 percent pay raise for all other service members. It also expands access to meal assistance, housing and child care programs that benefit those in uniform.But several Democrats withheld their backing in protest of a provision preventing TRICARE, the military’s health care plan for service members, from covering “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for children under 18.The language, which would affect the gender-transitioning children of service members, was recently added to the measure at the insistence of Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who refused to bring a defense bill to the House floor without it, according to aides familiar with the negotiations.Twenty-one Democrats, led by Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, proposed an amendment to strip the provision from the bill, but the matter was never brought to a vote. Several of them took to the floor on Tuesday to lodge their objections.“It’s flat-out wrong to put this provision in this bill and take away a service member’s freedom to make that decision for their families,” Ms. Baldwin said, estimating that the provision could negatively affect as many as 6,000 to 7,000 military families.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…2mos2MO
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Monday that he would nominate former Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” E.P.A. rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.In particular, Mr. Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.In a statement, Mr. Trump said Mr. Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”Mr. Trump added that Mr. Zeldin would “set new standards on environmental review and maintenance that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”Perhaps more than many other federal agencies, the E.P.A. has been a particular target for Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C., according to multiple people involved in the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the transition.During his run for governor, Mr. Zeldin pledged to reverse New York’s 2015 ban on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock that environmental advocates say can contaminate groundwater. He also called for construction of more gas pipelines and a suspension of the state gas tax.
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Germany’s coalition government collapsed on Wednesday after Chancellor Olaf Scholz sacked his finance minister Christian Lindner, plunging the eurozone’s largest economy into political chaos hours after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.Scholz told reporters he would table a confidence vote in parliament on January 15, which most observers expect him to lose. That will pave the way for snap elections in March.Lindner’s sacking and the departure of his pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) from the government brings the curtain down on a deeply unpopular coalition that had become a byword for discord and acrimony.It leaves a void at the heart of Europe just as concern is growing in EU capitals over what a second Trump presidency will mean for transatlantic relations.Germany and the rest of Europe now face a long period of uncertainty they can ill-afford as they brace for a trade war with the US while trying to fend off a growing economic threat from China.In a blistering statement delivered in the chancellery, Scholz blamed Lindner for the breakdown of the government, calling him “selfish” and “irresponsible”. He said he “cared only about his own clientele and the short-term survival of his own party”.The trigger for Lindner’s dismissal was a dispute over next year’s budget. The three coalition partners — Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), Lindner’s FDP and the Greens — could not agree on how to plug a €9bn hole in spending plans ahead of a meeting of parliament’s budget committee next week.However, the conflict became overlaid with deeper ideological divisions over how to deal with Germany’s economic downturn and how much public debt the government is legally allowed to raise.Scholz said he had asked Lindner to agree to loosen Germany’s “debt brake”, a cap on new borrowing which is enshrined in the constitution and which the SPD and Greens have long wanted to reform.That would have allowed Germany to take on more debt and so boost its support for Ukraine, at a time when fears are growing Trump might cut aid to Kyiv once installed in the White House.Scholz said he had also proposed capping network charges to bring down energy prices for industrial companies, creating incentives for businesses to invest, and passing a package of measures to safeguard jobs in the car industry, which faces more competition from China.
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TOM COTTON is slated to be the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, putting “I think mass deportation is just talk, but the era of open borders will be over,” Scott McConnell, a co-founder of The American Conservative, wrote on X. In July a Mexican-born Trump backer told The Times, “Last time, he didn’t even finish the wall. What’s he going to do this time?”Now the answer is taking shape: He’s going to oversee a militarized mass roundup of the undocumented. On Sunday, Trump named Tom Homan, his former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as “border czar.”In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no undocumented immigrant would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in The Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest migrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…3 days3D
President Joe Biden announced a ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the US coastline on Monday in a move designed to bolster his environmental and climate legacy as he prepares to leave office.The order will protect 625mn acres of ocean on the US east coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coasts of Washington, Oregon and California, as well as portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, the White House said on Monday.“My decision reflects what the coastal communities, business and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said.The executive action will not prevent oil and gas companies obtaining leases in the central and western parts of the Gulf of Mexico, areas that produce almost 15 per cent of the nation’s oil supplies. Nevertheless, the move is expected to complicate the policy agenda of incoming president Donald Trump, who has vowed to “drill, baby, drill” and boost US oil production, even though it is already at a record level.The Trump transition team said it was a disgraceful decision designed to exact “political revenge on the American people” and the incoming president said he would immediately “unban” Biden’s prohibition on new offshore drilling.“I have the right to unban it immediately . . . we can’t let that happen to our country. It’s our greatest, it’s really our greatest economic asset,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview on Monday.Biden’s action will probably be challenged by the oil industry in court and face pushback from Republicans in Congress. But overturning the order could prove challenging and may require an act of Congress, according to legal experts.Biden is using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to protect the areas from drilling — the same mechanism which former president Barack Obama used previously to ban offshore drilling in some Arctic and Atlantic waters in 2016.In 2019, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by former president Donald Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawful.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…1 day1D
The Los Angeles Fire Department had its budget cut by a staggering $17.6 million this financial year, records show — as fire crews continue to battle out-of-control blazes ravaging the City of Angels.The drastic decrease in funding for the fire department was the second-largest cut to come out of embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass‘ 2024-25 fiscal year budget, according to city figures.The police budget, meanwhile, increased by $126 million, a graphic shared by LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia shows.Bass had initially wanted to cut the fire department by even more — a staggering $23 million.The details on Bass’ budget slashing resurfaced as the mayor faced widespread backlash Wednesday after it was revealed she was away in Africa for the Ghana president’s inauguration — even as wind-whipped wildfires turned parts of her city into an apocalyptic hellscape.In her absence, Bass found time to praise firefighters and other emergency crews for working “overnight to protect Angelenos affected by fires.”“Angelenos should be advised that the windstorm is expected to worsen through the morning and to heed local warnings, stay vigilant and stay safe,” Bass said in a post on X.
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