Category: US

Indeed, the killings have jolted an increasingly diverse city, where immigration, largely from Mexico and other Latin American countries, is a major source of population growth and integral to the city’s history. Immigrants from the Middle East, including Muslims and Christians from Lebanon and Syria, put down stakes in Albuquerque and other parts of New Mexico in the late 19th century.

The city gradually saw a new wave of Muslim immigrants in recent decades, with many coming to study at the University of New Mexico. A group of Muslim students came together in the mid-1980s to form the Islamic Center of New Mexico, which the three most recent victims attended.

Many in the city’s Muslim community come from Pakistan and Afghanistan, while others are from countries including India, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Sri Lanka. During the Trump administration, when concerns grew over bigotry directed against Muslims, officials passed a bill affirming Albuquerque’s status as an “immigrant friendly” city. It restricted federal immigration agents from entering city-operated facilities and city employees from collecting immigration status information.

At least 300 Afghan refugees have arrived in Albuquerque over the past year, bolstering a growing community reflected today by at least eight different places of worship for Muslims. Albuquerque strengthened outreach efforts through translators speaking Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto — languages ​​that officials have prioritized in recent days when sharing information about the killings.

Although Muslims in the United States faced violence and discrimination after Sept. 11 and during Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, the apparent serial nature of the attacks in Albuquerque — and the stubborn mystery of who is responsible — is uniquely disconcerting, said Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates, a civil rights group.

“I can’t think of any incident like this,” she said.

Ms. Waheed said it was concerning that the police in Albuquerque had apparently made a possible connection between the attacks only after three Muslim men were killed.

“This bill is just another bill that regulates abortion, which is baby murder, that it says if you do this, if you fulfill this requirement, you can still murder your baby,” Indiana state Rep. John Jacob said during the debate. “There is still time to turn back to God before it’s too late and repent, and I will still pray for repentance for this chamber.”

The latest Republican infighting on abortion could prove volatile for the party heading into a November election when the political winds are supposed to be at their back. In addition to hammering Democrats on inflation and the economy, many Republicans — especially in state legislatures — are turning on one another. It’s created a grueling situation for governors trying to bridge the divide between more moderate and conservative members of their party while demonstrating to voters they’re willing to act on abortion.

“What Republicans need to be concerned about is: What is their branding going to be? Not just on this — we’ve already seen an erosion in the suburbs on cultural issues that have helped the Democrats,” said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, who led the NRCC. “That’s the problem, when people get emboldened… it takes rational discussion off the table. That’s where we are.”

The vitriol has left some Republican legislators reeling, forced to defend their anti-abortion bona fides to constituents and friends.

In South Carolina, a Republican lawmaker promised to “call names in public” if any of his colleagues tried to “water … down” the state’s proposed abortion ban with exceptions.

And in West Virginia, a Republican lawmaker took to the Senate floor to eviscerate his colleagues’ bill to ban almost all abortions because it removed criminal penalties for doctors who perform the procedure and didn’t include strong enough reporting requirements for cases of rape and incest.

“We hear around here a lot that making legislation is like making sausage, and I’m going to tell you this right here is not the kind of sausage that you want to use for your biscuits and gravy,” said West Virginia State Sen. Robert Karnes. “This is a rancid sausage. It’s maggot filled — very little meat in this sausage, a lot of teeth and toenails, maybe. This is not a pro-life bill. This is a pro-abortion bill.”

For some, the whiplash feels absurd. In South Carolina last month, an ad hoc legislative committee briefly debated and then quickly would vote to table an amendment that have established misdemeanor possession penalties for abortion pills — indicating that criminal penalties for pregnant people are a third rail most Republican lawmakers still aren’t willing to touch.

But South Carolina Rep. Micah Caskey, who sits on the committee tasked with drafting a new abortion ban, said Republican lawmakers are increasingly feeling pressure to support more restrictive abortion proposals lest they lose the label “pro-life.”

“I view all of this with frustration and contemplate for the crayon-level discussion of our public discourse on this issue,” Caskey said. “I’m told that a year ago I was a crazy fanatic for supporting a six-week ban, and now the goal post has been moved such that if I don’t support a complete and total ban whatsoever that I’m not pro -life?”

The South Carolina proposal awaits a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, which Rep. John McCravy, the ad hoc committee’s chair, said could happen next week. West Virginia lawmakers have not scheduled a conference committee to reconcile the different versions of the anti-abortion bill that passed the House and Senate last month.

Republicans at the federal level are similarly split on how forcefully to address the issue.

Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision, former Vice President Mike Pence called for Congress to pass a national abortion ban. But the National Republican Senatorial Committee has urged candidates to tread lightly and stressed that it’s an issue now in the hands of state and local officials — a position that’s drawing the ire of anti-abortion advocacy groups.

“It’s disingenuous to say that you oppose all federal involvement in abortion because it’s already a federal issue,” argued Kristi Hamrick, spokesperson for Students for Life, which is lobbying lawmakers for a national abortion ban starting at six weeks of pregnancy. “Look at the Title X program, which gives funding to Planned Parenthood. Look at our foreign aid.”

Some Republicans fear a political backlash if they outlaw abortions — even with exceptions — particularly after Kansas voters last Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed their Legislature to ban the procedure. At the same time, they face pressure from an ascendant, hard-line anti-abortion advocacy community that has vowed not to let political leaders blink in a post-gnaws world.

“State and local politics have always been important for people to be engaged in, but some of them just forgot that fact,” Danielle Underwood, a leader of the Kansas amendment campaign and the group Kansans for Life, told POLITICO ahead of the vote.

Even states where trigger bans made abortion illegal shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling have not been able to sidestep the debate. In South Dakota, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem promised the day gnaws was overturned to call a special session to strengthen the state’s abortion ban — which some believe has loopholes leading to “covert abortions” — before saying it wasn’t necessary because the state is already “the most pro-life state in the nation.”

On Monday, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said he wouldn’t call a special session because Republicans don’t have the votes they need to pass a 12-week abortion ban, a reality he called “deeply saddening.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have largely unified around protecting access to the procedure and trying to paint Republicans as enemies of women’s rights. But there are divisions on the left as well.

Progressives want more aggressive action from the Biden administration — such as leasing federal buildings or land in red states to abortion providers, allowing people to bring abortion pills from Mexico and Canada, and directing the VA to provide abortions to all veterans and their dependents. But moderates, including some who say they’re personally opposed to abortion, are calling for simply restoring Roe.

The tension is on display in the Senate, where bipartisan bill led by Sens. Tim Kain (D-Va.) and susan collins (R-Maine) to encode gnaws has come under fire from progressives and abortion-rights groups who fear it would still allow states to enact too many restrictions.

But with no path to pass that or any other abortion-rights bill, Democrats’ internal split has lower stakes than that of their GOP counterparts, some of whom are in special sessions to debate abortion laws and know their actions are coming under greater scrutiny.

“It’s one thing to do it in practice. It’s another thing to do it for real. For all the energy and excitement and emotional expenditures around the heartbeat bill, there is absolutely a more concrete sense that what we do here is going to go into effect and be the law of the land in a way unlike the heartbeat bill,” Caskey said , referencing the six-week ban he supported last year.

So far, some of the most intense debates have focused around whether to permit abortions in cases of rape and incest. Only five of the 13 states — Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming — with trigger bans on the books when gnaws was overturned included rape or incest exceptions, highlighting how the Republican Party has moved away from supporting such exceptions.

During a Senate committee hearing on the Indiana bill, Indiana Right to Life General Counsel Courtney Turner Milbank lambasted the legislation as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” in part because of its rape and incest exceptions, and said it “utterly fails to limit abortions to even the exceptions that it purports to find acceptable.” In the end, the organization said it couldn’t fully endorse the legislation but lauded the House for “doing all they could to limit [the bill’s] exceptions.”

While the data shows these exemptions are rarely used and challenging to obtain, some anti-abortion lawmakers believe they can become loopholes unless there are stringent requirements to report the crime to law enforcement before the abortion. Others oppose such exceptions outright.

But those lawmakers are being met by colleagues who worry that without laws that make exceptions for rape and incest, voters, even those who nominally oppose abortion, will be cool to the party’s outreach — especially after the high-profile case of a 10-year -Old Ohio rape victim who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana earlier this summer for an abortion.

“I don’t think people are taking into consideration how their constituents feel about this bill,” said Indiana State Sen. Vaneta Becker, a Republican, who voted against the abortion ban. “I think it’s going to be an ongoing challenge for Republicans.”

Almost half of Indiana House Republicans joined Democrats to reject an amendment that would have removed rape and incest exceptions.

These debates are welcome, said Mallory Carroll, a leader with SBA Pro-Life America, who insists her movement is in a better place now, with anti-abortion lawmakers having heated debates on laws that can take effect now that gnaws is gone, than it was when legislatures were churning out bills everyone knew would be blocked in federal court.

“This is the messiness of democracy. This is the type of political discourse Americans have been denied under gnaws,” Carroll said. “Better this messy democracy than judicial overlords making decisions that take half a century to undo.”

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia told the United States on Monday it would not allow its weapons to be inspected under the START nuclear arms control treaty for the time being because of travel restrictions imposed by Washington and its allies.

Inspection conditions proposed by Washington created “unilateral advantages for the United States and effectively deprive the Russian Federation of the right to conduct inspections on American territory,” the Moscow foreign ministry said in a statement.

Russia remained fully committed to complying with all the provisions of the treaty, it added.

The United States and its allies including Britain and the European Union closed their airspace to Russian plans as part of a barrage of sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s decision to send its armed forces into Ukraine in February.

The New START Treaty, which came into force in 2011, caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.

US President Joe Biden said last Monday that his administration was ready to “expeditiously” negotiate a framework to replace New START, which is due to expire in 2026, if Moscow demonstrated its willingness to resume work on nuclear arms control.

But Russia’s mission to the United Nations said Washington had withdrawn from separate talks with Moscow on strategic stability over the Ukraine conflict, and needed to decide what it wanted.

The following day, the Kremlin said time was running out to negotiate a replacement for New START, putting global security at risk.

The conflict in Ukraine has raised political tensions to levels not seen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, with politicians in both Russia and the United States speaking publicly of the risk of World War Three.

Moscow says it was forced to intervene in Ukraine to defend Russian-speakers from persecution and avert a Western threat to use Ukraine to threaten Russia’s security. Kyiv and its Western allies say these are baseless pretexts for an imperial-style land grab.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey and John Stonestreet)

But the numbers behave with general assessments about the state of the House map from strategists of both parties, as well as the close results of the 2021 statewide elections in New Jersey and Virginia. Altogether, the tightening polls suggest that some super-blue seats could be in play in November, which would mean Democrats may have to expend precious resources there on defense — especially because they lack well-funded incumbents.

The most encouraging poll for Republicans came in Oregon’s new 6th District, where Republican Mike Erickson led Democratic state Rep. Andrea Salinas by 7 points, 47 percent to 40 percent, with 13 percent undecided. In a district that Biden won by nearly 14 points, his approval rating of him is underwater by 20 points. Republicans lead on a generic ballot by 7 points — a rough reality for a seat that Democrats drew to be safe.

Erickson, a supply chain logistics consultant, has poured some of his own money into the race: He raked in $1.1 million in the second quarter, compared to Salinas’ $800,000. The survey of 400 likely voters was conducted July 26-28 by Cygnal for the Erickson campaign and the National Republican Campaign Committee, contacting voters via live calls and text-to-web. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

Oregon has turned into a surprising pressure point for Democrats, who are defending three open seats in the state. The most at-risk district is the one that Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader lost in a May primary. Now, a more progressive Democrat is defending the turf against a credible GOP candidate in a seat Biden won by 9 points.

“Voters in historically blue seats are rejecting Democrats’ failed economic record of tax hikes, record-high prices, and a recession,” NRCC communications director Michael McAdams said.

Still, Democrats feel confident in their ability to retain these seats, citing Kansans’ recent endorsement of abortion rights at the ballot box as a sign that voters have sourced on the GOP and its agenda. And Democrats pushed back on the Republican poll of Oregon’s 6th District, citing internal Democratic polling from early July that found a tied race between Salinas and Erickson.

“Voters in Kansas just showed us how toxic the Republican brand is and now House Republicans are shaking in their boots because they’ve got to defend their anti-freedom MAGA agenda,” said DCCC spokesman Chris Hayden. “Democrats are the party of freedom, justice, and putting people over politics.”

Still, Republicans insist the fact that there are deep-blue districts hosting such close polling results show the political environment is continuing to move swiftly in their favor. In Oregon, they also see a path to contesting the retiring district Rep. Peter DeFazio is vacating along the western coast of the state.

A July 25-28 survey of 400 likely voters in DeFazio’s district found a 5-point race, with Democrat Val Hoyle leading Republican Alek Skarlatos, 46 percent to 41 percent, with 13 percent undecided. Skarlatos, a former National Guardsman who thwarted a terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train, is making a second run for the seat that Biden won by 13 points.

Biden is underwater in the district by 16 points, according to the poll, which was conducted by Moore Information for the Skarlatos campaign and the NRCC. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points and it surveyed 400 likely voters via live calls.

Meanwhile, a mid-July poll from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the top GOP super PAC, found Republican Erik Aadland trailing Democrat Brittany Pettersen by 2 points, 44 percent to 42 percent in an open seat anchored in the Denver suburbs, where Democratic Rep. Ed Perlmutter is retiring. Biden carried the district by 15 points in 2020.

For Republicans, the surveys are also an encouraging sign that they remain competitive in Democratic-leaning seats in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn. Roe v. Wade.

One recent survey of 400 likely voters in an open district in California’s Central Valley found Democrat Adam Gray leading Republican John Duarte by 4 points, 47 percent to 43 percent. Biden is underwater by 9 points (43 percent approval, 52 percent disapproval) in a district he carried by 11 points in 2020. The seat is open post-redistricting because Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.) is running in a more Democratic -friendly district nearby.

But that poll also included some good news for Democrats: They are leading on the generic ballot there, 46 percent to 43 percent, and Biden’s approval has ticked up at least somewhat. An internal Duarte campaign poll from May found Biden underwater by 13 points with his disapproval of him at 39 percent.

The live-caller survey was conducted Aug. 3-7 for the NRCC and the Duarte campaign. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

President Joe Biden was criticized on Twitter on Monday for appearing to admit that he does not know what is in the Inflation Reduction Act, legislation that his administration championed.

“What we’re doing today, what we passed yesterday, helping to take care of everything from health care to God knows what else,” Biden said during a speech in Kentucky after touring the state’s flood damage.

The legislation, which passed the Senate on Sunday on a party-line vote with Vice President Kamala Harris the tiebreaker, will increase taxes for nearly all Americans while adding 87,000 IRS agents and actually increase inflation in its first years, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Budget Model.

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Biden was slammed on Twitter for his remarks.

“‘God knows what else’ means whatever the far left wanted in the Bill and all the extra pork Manchin and Sinema needed to get to Yes,” tweeted Rep. Claudia Tenney, RN.Y.

“This is how Joe Biden describes the $$$ printing, inflation worsening, monster bill that Democrats passed yesterday…He doesn’t even know what’s in the bill,” former congressional candidate Robby Starbuck tweeted.

“Coming to a midterm near you,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha tweeted.

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Tommy Pigott, a rapid response director for RNC Research, tweeted, “Looks like even Biden knows his Bidenflation Scam would actually INCREASE inflation.”

“The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ will ‘take care of everything like health care and God knows what else’ is one heck of a Kinsley gaffe by @POTUS,” said Pluribus editor Jeryl Bier.

Many Democrats are refusing to pledge their support for a hypothetical Biden re-election bid, and the Real Clear Politics polling average shows Donald Trump leading Biden by three points.

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Biden’s polling remains low, including among Hispanics, only 19% of whom approve of his job as president, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll.

President Joe Biden has used the Defense Production Act, meant to order private industry to help in emergencies, a lot. Some say it’s to advance his political agenda.

• Biden’s Defense Production Act use is notable given how often he’s used it and for varied reasons.
• Some say he exercised the act to make up for his agenda stalling and administration oversights.
• The White House says he used the act to take “decisive actions” that “continue to deliver results.”

On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden took advantage of a special, wartime power to supercharge the US pandemic response, using a tool he would return to multiple times throughout his presidency.

In an executive order citing authority under the Defense Production Act, the new president directed his administration to secure masks, tests and other equipment in short supply. Biden soon ordered a 100-day White House review of American industry that concluded the act was a “powerful tool” that could be deployed beyond the pandemic and traditional military use.