Roughly 420,000 federal employees are working without pay, and another 380,000 have been furloughed and are temporarily out of a job. Although lawmakers have typically approved backpay retroactively after previous shutdowns, there is no guarantee a divided Congress would do so this time.

Source Article from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-freezes-federal-pay-as-shutdown-grinds-on_us_5c27d37de4b0407e90833219

When Melania Trump accompanied her husband President Trump to Iraq this week, it was the first time in more than a decade that a first lady of the United States had visited a war zone.

Trump also became the only first lady to have visited Iraq since the war began more than 15 years ago.

During the eight years of her husband’s presidency, Michelle Obama never traveled to a war zone, according to Mark Knoller, a veteran CBS White House correspondent widely respected for his copious and accurate record-keeping of White House activities and events. “Checked my records,” Knoller told the Washington Examiner. “Found no war zone trips by Mrs. Obama.”

Obama launched an initiative designed to help military families and got to within 600 miles of a war zone when she met with troops at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in November 2015.

Before the Trump visit to Iraq, the most recent visit to a war zone by a first lady was that of Laura Bush to Afghanistan in June 2008. The same day she was there, 11 police officers were killed in an ambush south of Kabul and three British soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber in Helmand province. Bush also went to Afghanistan in March 2005.

Hillary Clinton stayed away from war zones when she was first lady during her husband Bill’s eight-year stint at the White House. She did not visit troops during combat operations in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 but made a trip there in March 1996 after hostilities had ceased, along with her daughter Chelsea, then 16. Clinton faced ridicule in 2008 when she claimed she landed in Bosnia “under sniper fire,” even though news footage from the time showed her strolling on the tarmac and being read a poem by a small girl.

She visited Northern Ireland in 1995, after the IRA had called a ceasefire the previous year, and returned in 1998 after the IRA had called a second ceasefire. Clinton claimed she had been “instrumental” in brokering peace in Northern Ireland but Nobel Peace Prize winner Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey described this as “a wee bit silly.”

Clinton later visited Iraq on congressional delegations as a senator in 2003, 2005, and 2007. She visited Afghanistan as a senator in 2007 and several times during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Barbara Bush accompanied her husband, President George H.W. Bush, to visit American troops in Saudi Arabia during Thanksgiving in 1990, just before the start of the Gulf War, when coalition forces ejected Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt visited American troops in the Pacific theater for a month in 1943, even traveling to see wounded Marines on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Guadalcanal was bombed the night before she arrived and the night after she left, and she joined troops in a shelter when an air raid warning sounded.

This week, Trump said he had been worried that he was putting his wife in harm’s way. “I had concerns about the institution of the presidency,” he said. “Not for myself personally. I had concerns for the first lady, I will tell you.

“But if you would have [seen] what we had to go through in the darkened plane with all window[s] closed with no light anywhere — pitch black. I’ve been on many airplanes. All types and shapes and sizes. So did I have a concern? Yes, I had a concern.”

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/melania-trump-trip-to-iraq-was-first-war-zone-visit-by-a-first-lady-for-a-decade

WASHINGTON/BEIJING, Dec 29 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter on Saturday that he had a “long and very good call” with Chinese President Xi Jinping and that a possible trade deal between the United States and China was progressing well.

As a partial shutdown of the U.S. government entered its eighth day, with no quick end in sight, the Republican president was in Washington, sending out tweets attacking Democrats and talking up possibly improved relations with China.

The two nations have been in a trade war for much of 2018, shaking world financial markets as the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods between the world’s two largest economies has been disrupted by tariffs.

Trump and Xi agreed to a ceasefire in the trade war, deciding to hold off on imposing more tariffs for 90 days starting Dec. 1 while they negotiate a deal to end the dispute following months of escalating tensions.

“Just had a long and very good call with President Xi of China,” Trump wrote. “Deal is moving along very well. If made, it will be very comprehensive, covering all subjects, areas and points of dispute. Big progress being made!”

Chinese state media also said Xi and Trump spoke on Saturday, and quoted Xi as saying that teams from both countries have been working to implement a consensus reached with Trump.

“I hope that the two teams will meet each other half way, work hard, and strive to reach an agreement that is mutually beneficial and beneficial to the world as soon as possible,” Xi said, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Fish and seafood:live fish including ornamental fish, trout, eels, tuna, and carp; chilled or frozen meat of various types of trout, salmon, halibut, plaice, sole, albacore, tuna, herring, mackerel, cobia, swordfish, pollack, whiting, catfish, rays, and more; various types of salted or smoked fish; other seafood including various types of lobsters, crabs, shrimps, prawns, oysters, scallops, mussels, clams, squid, octopus, conchs, abalone, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins.

Mill products: flours including those form wheat, corn, buckwheat, rice, rye, other cereals, potatoes, and bananas; groats and meal of various types including wheat, corn, oats, and rice; malt; starches of wheat, corn, potato, and more

Ores, slag, and ash: ores of iron, copper, nickel, cobalt, aluminum, lead, zinc, tin, chromium, tungsten, uranium, titanium, silver, other precious metals, and others; slag, various types of ash.

Inorganic Chemicals: chemicals such as chlorine, sulfur; carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and silicon; acids including sulfuric, nitric, and more; various types of fluorides, chlorides, sulfates, nitrates, carbonates, and more.

Raw hides and leather: animal skins including cow, buffalo, sheep, goats, reptile; various types of leather made from cow, buffalo, sheep, goats, reptile; leather trunks and suitcases; leather handbags; CD cases; gloves including ski, ice hockey, and typical use; belts; fur clothing, incluidng artificial fur.

Ships and boats: sailboats; motorboats; canoes; yachts.

Assorted items: buttons; stamps; paintings; collections of zoological, botanical, mineralogical, anatomical, historical, archaeological interest; antiques of an age exceeding one hundred years




Having canceled his plans to travel to his estate in Florida for the holidays because of the government shutdown that started on Dec. 22, Trump tweeted, “I am in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come on over and make a deal.”

The Republican-controlled Congress was closed for the weekend and few lawmakers were in the capital.

The shutdown, affecting about one-quarter of the federal government including 800,000 or so workers, began when funding for several agencies expired.

Congress must pass legislation to restore that funding, but has not done so due to a dispute over Trump’s demand that the bill include $5 billion in taxpayer money to help pay for a wall he wants to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The wall was a major 2016 campaign promise of Trump’s, who promised then that it would be paid for by Mexico, which has steadfastly refused to do so. Trump has since demanded that U.S. taxpayers pay for it at an estimated total cost of $23 billion.

He sees the wall as vital to stemming illegal immigration, while Democrats and some Republicans see it as an impractical and costly project. The standoff over Trump’s demand for funding will be a test for Congress when it returns next week.

Trump tweeted on Saturday that the deaths of two migrant children this month who had been taken into U.S. custody after trying to cross the southern border were “strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies.”

It was unclear exactly which policies Trump was referring to, but his aides have referred to U.S. laws and court rulings – including laws passed with bipartisan support – that govern the conditions under which children and families can be detained as “loopholes” that encourage illegal immigration.

On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen visited Border Patrol stations in Texas after her agency instituted expanded medical checks of migrant children following the two deaths. She is also due to visit Yuma, Arizona, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Saturday.

In the interim, thousands of employees of federal agencies such as the Homeland Security, Justice, Commerce, Interior, Transportation, Agriculture and other departments were staying at home on furlough or soon to be working without pay.

For instance, members of the U.S. Coast Guard will receive their final paychecks of the year on Monday, the service said in a statement on its website on Friday after previously warning that payments would be delayed due to the shutdown.

“The administration, the Department of Homeland Security , and the Coast Guard have identified a way to pay our military workforce on Dec. 31, 2018,” the service website read.

That paycheck will be their last until the government reopens.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also said on Friday that it would resume issuing new flood insurance policies during the shutdown, reversing an earlier decision. (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati and Katanga Johnson in Washington; additional reporting by Lusha Zhang, Ben Blanchard and Ryan Woo in Beijing; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Daniel Wallis and Diane Craft)

Source Article from https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/12/29/trump-says-big-progress-on-possible-china-trade-deal/23629493/

President Donald Trump on Saturday tried to deny that his administration bears any blame for the deaths of children detained trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, even as his Homeland Security secretary was traveling in Arizona to meet with medical staff.

Trump tweeted Saturday that any deaths are “strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally.”

It marked his first public comments following the Christmas Eve death of 8-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo, the second Guatemalan child to die in government custody in three weeks.

Trump is claiming the “children in question were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is embarking on a tour of care facilities along the border.

The DHS says U.S. Border Patrol leadership has instituted more thorough medical screenings for migrants after the two Guatemalan children died this month in government custody.

More in-depth initial health exams will be performed and secondary medical screenings have been established, officials said.

A Homeland Security spokeswoman said in a statement that Nielsen was briefed on the new procedures Saturday in Yuma, Arizona, where she is continuing meeting with Border Patrol officials. She was in El Paso, Texas, on Friday.

An 8-year-old boy died Dec. 24 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Authorities there said that he was initially diagnosed with a cold but that an autopsy showed he had the flu. A 7-year-old girl died this month in El Paso.

Nielsen said the system is “clearly overwhelmed” and called on Congress to “address this humanitarian crisis.”

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-shirks-blame-migrant-child-deaths-federal-custody-n952976

The class of early contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination stands to be the most diverse candidate pool in US history, but that record alone might not be enough for progressives: some reportedly hope to see campaign staffs that reflect America’s racial and gender diversity too.

The New York Times’ Lisa Lerer and Alexander Burns have a rundown of the top Democratic senators who are getting ready to wade into the 2020 waters. Among them are California Sen. Kamala Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who have all begun the process of assembling their teams for a potential presidential run.

They won’t be the only candidates to possibly enter the crowded field, but this small group makes up one of the most inclusive groups to ever vie for the presidential nomination for any party. Three are women; two are people of color; all but one are under the age of 55.

Their diversity is a reflection of a record-shattering midterm election season, where women and candidates of diverse backgrounds won major victories and helped Democrats reclaim the House. But whether or not these potential candidates are shaping their staff to reflect their own diversity is another thing.

As Lerer and Burns report, some female Democratic strategists who had “hoped the diversity of the 2020 field would prompt more hiring of female and minority staffers for senior roles” are concerned by the number of men being considered for campaign manager posts:

“You have to have a diverse leadership team, and that, more than anything, is something that these campaigns have to be paying attention to,” said Anne Caprara, a Democratic operative who is now working as chief of staff to the incoming governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, after running his campaign. “When it comes to women and women of color, so many of them are going to want to see that the candidate is not just hiring women but really paying attention to them when they’re giving advice.”

According to the Times, Gillibrand, Warren and Harris are all expected to tap men to run their campaigns. The top contenders are all close or long-time aides to the female senators. Booker is still on the hunt for a campaign manager, and so far the shortlist has included mostly men.

It’s almost crazy to think that 2018 has barely come to a close and already potential candidates are jockeying for recognition as top-tiered contenders in what will inevitably be a crowded field of Democrats wanting to take down President Donald Trump.

And while no candidate has formally entered the race — it may be weeks before any formally announce exploratory committees — it’s clear they’re already feeling the pressure to come out as more diverse and inclusive than ever before.

An alternative to the typical crowded field of old, white men

For all the progressive excitement around minority and female candidates, in the (way too) early days of the 2020 season, white men still maintain a sizable advantage where it counts: with voters in early-primary states and deep-pocketed donors.

Then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke sparked a remarkable amount of energy within the Democratic base in his unsuccessful efforts to take Ted Cruz’s Texas Senate seat — energy that’s continued to fuel speculation he might mount a presidential bid in 2020.

The first 2020 polls of the season have some familiar faces out in front as early favorites. Former Vice President Joe Biden lead the pack with 32 percent support of Iowa Democrats; Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came in with 19 percent. That same Iowa poll ranked both Harris and Warren in the single digits.

As Vox’s Rachel Withers pointed out, it’s not surprising that in Iowa, old, established politicians like Biden and Sanders are early top contenders. Voters in the state — the first in the nation to actually say who they want to be president — said they wanted a candidate with experience and electability. But that experience means there’s extra emphasis on the old part of that description: Biden is 76 years-old, while Sanders is 77. If either runs and is elected in 2020, they’d be serving the majority of their presidency as an octogenarian.

The GOP has earned a reputation as the party of old white men, with their opponents saying they’ve done little over the last two years to keep the bigotry of their party leader in check. Now the bar is being raised for early candidates challenging him to put their money where their mouth is on calls for better inclusion.

Source Article from https://www.vox.com/2018/12/29/18160349/2020-democratic-hopefuls-under-pressure-diverse-teams

The Latest on the death of a boy whose Yemeni mother fought the Trump administration travel ban (all times local):

1:35 p.m.

Members of the Islamic community in central California are gathering at a mosque to mourn the death of a boy whose Yemeni mother fought the Trump administration travel ban to join him in the U.S.

The funeral Saturday for 2-year-old Abdullah Hassan in the farming community of Lodi comes a day after he died at a children’s hospital following months of treatment for a degenerative brain condition.

As part of Muslim tradition, a body must be buried within 72 hours of death. The child was expected to be laid to rest after the service.

Abdullah’s mother, Shaima Swileh, fought for over a year for a travel ban waiver to see her son. An advocacy group successfully sued, and she got to the U.S. a little over a week before her son died.

___

5:45 a.m.

The 2-year-old son of a Yemeni woman who sued the Trump administration to let her into the country to be with the ailing boy has died.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations announced Friday that Abdullah Hassan had died in an Oakland hospital. He suffered from a genetic brain condition.

The boy’s father brought him to the United States for medical treatment in October. His mother Shaima Swileh remained behind in their Egypt home. The boy and his father are U.S. citizens but Swileh is not.

Yemeni citizens are restricted from entering the United States under President Donald Trump’s travel ban. She applied for a waiver in 2017, but U.S. officials granted it only in December after the council sued.

Swileh held her son for the first time in the hospital on Dec. 19.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/us/the-latest-mourners-gather-for-boy-whose-mother-got-to-us

The 115th Congress appears to have given up, with both the House and Senate failing to reach a deal to end the ongoing government shutdown. This likely punts the showdown over the border wall to the 116th Congress where Trump will face off against a Democratic majority in the House. An agreement won’t be pretty, but it would be a good lesson for Trump and one that could set the stage for a productive two years to come.

With Democrats controlling a majority in the House, any new deal that lands on Trump’s desk will be unlikely to hold the funding Trump has demanded for the wall. Since Trump won’t let government remain shut down for the rest of his term, he will eventually need sign a deal to end the gridlock. This will be seen as a capitulation to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the likely new speaker of the House.

That’s not a good start for the new year. It also doesn’t help Trump convince his base that he is the man to stand up to Democrats and make good on campaign promises ahead of 2020.

[Interested in magazine content? Subscribe to the Washington Examiner’s print edition here ]

In the long term, however, handing an early victory to House Democrats may prove a necessary wake-up call on the reality of divided government.

The early realization that a Democrat-controlled House means more trouble than investigations and subpoenas might galvanize the president to sit down and make deals rather than simply making demands. Additionally, Trump could learn to better value Republican allies in Congress and listen to their advice about what is and is not possible. Indeed, had he followed that advice in the lead up to the holidays, the government would likely still be open with agreement on appropriations one final victory of Republican controlled government.

For conservatives, the president learning the difficult lessons of divided government early on and avoiding two years of gridlock would be an important step to victory in 2020. A track record of disagreement and stalemates, however, will fail to convince all but the staunchest supporters that Republicans and Trump are serious about governing.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/trump-is-headed-for-a-wake-up-call-on-reality-of-divided-government-thats-not-a-bad-thing

CLOSE

Some federal employees affected by the partial government shutdown are facing uncertainty as they return to work after the Christmas holiday. About 420,000 who are considered essential are working unpaid. (Dec. 26)
AP

WASHINGTON – Amid the current partial government shutdown, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to freeze pay for federal workers in 2019.

The move is consistent with Trump’s budget proposal and a notice to Congress in August, when he cited “serious economic conditions” in cutting pay to civilian workers. “We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” he said at the time.

Trump signed the executive order late Friday afternoon. The military would not be affected.

Trump and federal lawmakers are still collecting paychecks during the partial shutdown, but many federal workers are not. Congress generally votes to pay federal employees retroactively after shutdowns, but this one is expected to drag on into the new year as Trump pushes for funding for a wall across the southern border. 

(Trump donates his salary to different government programs.)

“This is just pouring salt into the wound,” said Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 employees at 33 federal agencies and departments. “It is shocking that federal employees are taking yet another financial hit. As if missed paychecks and working without pay were not enough, now they have been told that they don’t even deserve a modest pay increase.”

The Senate passed a 1.9 percent increase for federal workers, but the House did not act.

The new Congress could vote to give federal employees a raise. If Trump’s decision is allowed to stand, the pay freeze would affect about 2.1 million federal employees, including most of the executive branch, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union.

“We fully expect the new Congress to enact the modest 1.9 percent adjustment for all of 2019 which passed the Senate and received substantial bipartisan support in the last Congress,” said J. David Cox, AFGE’s president, in a statement.  “There is no economic or budgetary justification for the President’s freeze and lawmakers agree that federal pay must rise not only as a matter of decency, but also in order to help agencies attract and retain the federal workforce that America deserves.”

Most federal employees work outside the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, according to the latest numbers published by Governing magazine. Topping the list of states with largest share of federal employees: California (250,000), Texas (200,000), Virginia (178,000) and Maryland (147,000).

Contributing: Gregory Korte

 

Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/29/trump-moves-freeze-pay-federal-workers-amid-shutdown/2439801002/

WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter on Saturday that he had a “long and very good call” with Chinese President Xi Jinping and that a possible trade deal between the United States and China was progressing well.

As a partial shutdown of the U.S. government entered its eighth day, with no quick end in sight, the Republican president was in Washington, sending out tweets attacking Democrats and talking up possibly improved relations with China.

The two nations have been in a trade war for much of 2018, shaking world financial markets as the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods between the world’s two largest economies has been disrupted by tariffs.

Trump and Xi agreed to a ceasefire in the trade war, deciding to hold off on imposing more tariffs for 90 days starting Dec. 1 while they negotiate a deal to end the dispute following months of escalating tensions.

“Just had a long and very good call with President Xi of China,” Trump wrote. “Deal is moving along very well. If made, it will be very comprehensive, covering all subjects, areas and points of dispute. Big progress being made!”

Chinese state media also said Xi and Trump spoke on Saturday, and quoted Xi as saying that teams from both countries have been working to implement a consensus reached with Trump.

“I hope that the two teams will meet each other half way, work hard, and strive to reach an agreement that is mutually beneficial and beneficial to the world as soon as possible,” Xi said, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Having canceled his plans to travel to his estate in Florida for the holidays because of the government shutdown that started on Dec. 22, Trump tweeted, “I am in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come on over and make a deal.”

The Republican-controlled Congress was closed for the weekend and few lawmakers were in the capital.

The shutdown, affecting about one-quarter of the federal government including 800,000 or so workers, began when funding for several agencies expired.

Congress must pass legislation to restore that funding, but has not done so due to a dispute over Trump’s demand that the bill include $5 billion in taxpayer money to help pay for a wall he wants to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The wall was a major 2016 campaign promise of Trump’s, who promised then that it would be paid for by Mexico, which has steadfastly refused to do so. Trump has since demanded that U.S. taxpayers pay for it at an estimated total cost of $23 billion.

He sees the wall as vital to stemming illegal immigration, while Democrats and some Republicans see it as an impractical and costly project. The standoff over Trump’s demand for funding will be a test for Congress when it returns next week.

Trump tweeted on Saturday that the deaths of two migrant children this month who had been taken into U.S. custody after trying to cross the southern border were “strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies.”

It was unclear exactly which policies Trump was referring to, but his aides have referred to U.S. laws and court rulings – including laws passed with bipartisan support – that govern the conditions under which children and families can be detained as “loopholes” that encourage illegal immigration.

On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen visited Border Patrol stations in Texas after her agency instituted expanded medical checks of migrant children following the two deaths. She is also due to visit Yuma, Arizona, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Saturday.

In the interim, thousands of employees of federal agencies such as the Homeland Security, Justice, Commerce, Interior, Transportation, Agriculture and other departments were staying at home on furlough or soon to be working without pay.

For instance, members of the U.S. Coast Guard will receive their final paychecks of the year on Monday, the service said in a statement on its website on Friday after previously warning that payments would be delayed due to the shutdown.

“The administration, the Department of Homeland Security [DHS], and the Coast Guard have identified a way to pay our military workforce on Dec. 31, 2018,” the service website read.

That paycheck will be their last until the government reopens.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also said on Friday that it would resume issuing new flood insurance policies during the shutdown, reversing an earlier decision.

Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati and Katanga Johnson in Washington; additional reporting by Lusha Zhang, Ben Blanchard and Ryan Woo in Beijing; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Daniel Wallis and Diane Craft

Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-trade/trump-says-big-progress-on-possible-china-trade-deal-idUSKCN1OS0IL

When Melania Trump accompanied her husband President Trump to Iraq this week, it was the first time in more than a decade that a first lady of the United States had visited a war zone.

Trump also became the only first lady to have visited Iraq since the war began more than 15 years ago.

During the eight years of her husband’s presidency, Michelle Obama never traveled to a war zone, according to Mark Knoller, a veteran CBS White House correspondent widely respected for his copious and accurate record-keeping of White House activities and events. “Checked my records,” Knoller told the Washington Examiner. “Found no war zone trips by Mrs. Obama.”

Obama launched an initiative designed to help military families and got to within 600 miles of a war zone when she met with troops at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in November 2015.

Before the Trump visit to Iraq, the most recent visit to a war zone by a first lady was that of Laura Bush to Afghanistan in June 2008. The same day she was there, 11 police officers were killed in an ambush south of Kabul and three British soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber in Helmand province. Bush also went to Afghanistan in March 2005.

Hillary Clinton stayed away from war zones when she was first lady during her husband Bill’s eight-year stint at the White House. She did not visit troops during combat operations in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 but made a trip there in March 1996 after hostilities had ceased, along with her daughter Chelsea, then 16. Clinton faced ridicule in 2008 when she claimed she landed in Bosnia “under sniper fire,” even though news footage from the time showed her strolling on the tarmac and being read a poem by a small girl.

She visited Northern Ireland in 1995, after the IRA had called a ceasefire the previous year, and returned in 1998 after the IRA had called a second ceasefire. Clinton claimed she had been “instrumental” in brokering peace in Northern Ireland but Nobel Peace Prize winner Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey described this as “a wee bit silly.”

Clinton later visited Iraq on congressional delegations as a senator in 2003, 2005, and 2007. She visited Afghanistan as a senator in 2007 and several times during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Barbara Bush accompanied her husband, President George H.W. Bush, to visit American troops in Saudi Arabia during Thanksgiving in 1990, just before the start of the Gulf War, when coalition forces ejected Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt visited American troops in the Pacific theater for a month in 1943, even traveling to see wounded Marines on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Guadalcanal was bombed the night before she arrived and the night after she left, and she joined troops in a shelter when an air raid warning sounded.

This week, Trump said he had been worried that he was putting his wife in harm’s way. “I had concerns about the institution of the presidency,” he said. “Not for myself personally. I had concerns for the first lady, I will tell you.

“But if you would have [seen] what we had to go through in the darkened plane with all window[s] closed with no light anywhere — pitch black. I’ve been on many airplanes. All types and shapes and sizes. So did I have a concern? Yes, I had a concern.”

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/melania-trump-trip-to-iraq-was-first-war-zone-visit-by-a-first-lady-for-a-decade

The 115th Congress appears to have given up, with both the House and Senate failing to reach a deal to end the ongoing government shutdown. This likely punts the showdown over the border wall to the 116th Congress where Trump will face off against a Democratic majority in the House. An agreement won’t be pretty, but it would be a good lesson for Trump and one that could set the stage for a productive two years to come.

With Democrats controlling a majority in the House, any new deal that lands on Trump’s desk will be unlikely to hold the funding Trump has demanded for the wall. Since Trump won’t let government remain shut down for the rest of his term, he will eventually need sign a deal to end the gridlock. This will be seen as a capitulation to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the likely new speaker of the House.

That’s not a good start for the new year. It also doesn’t help Trump convince his base that he is the man to stand up to Democrats and make good on campaign promises ahead of 2020.

[Interested in magazine content? Subscribe to the Washington Examiner’s print edition here ]

In the long term, however, handing an early victory to House Democrats may prove a necessary wake-up call on the reality of divided government.

The early realization that a Democrat-controlled House means more trouble than investigations and subpoenas might galvanize the president to sit down and make deals rather than simply making demands. Additionally, Trump could learn to better value Republican allies in Congress and listen to their advice about what is and is not possible. Indeed, had he followed that advice in the lead up to the holidays, the government would likely still be open with agreement on appropriations one final victory of Republican controlled government.

For conservatives, the president learning the difficult lessons of divided government early on and avoiding two years of gridlock would be an important step to victory in 2020. A track record of disagreement and stalemates, however, will fail to convince all but the staunchest supporters that Republicans and Trump are serious about governing.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/trump-is-headed-for-a-wake-up-call-on-reality-of-divided-government-thats-not-a-bad-thing

House Republicans unceremoniously ended their investigation into the way the FBI and the Department of Justice handled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and the bias allegations against President Trump.

The House probe was led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee and sought to look into allegations that the FBI and the DOJ were biased against Trump during the 2016 presidential election and favored Clinton’s candidacy.

Two Republicans chairing the committees – Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Robert Goodlatte, R-Va. – said in a letter Friday that the DOJ must appoint a special counsel to investigate the “seemingly disparate treatment” of the investigations into Clinton’s use of private emails and Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

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The letter came less than a week before the Republicans formally lose control of the House to Democrats, while both Gowdy and Goodlatte are retiring from politics.

The Democrats have long criticized the Republican-led probe as a distraction from Mueller’s Russia investigation, with U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, taunting Republicans for their unceremonious end of the probe.

“This is how the House Republican effort to undermine Mueller by ‘investigating the investigators’ ends. Not with a bang, but with a Friday, buried-in-the-holidays whimper, and one foot out the door,” he wrote in a tweet.

But both Gowdy and Goodlatte reject criticism that their investigation undermined the Mueller probe.

“Contrary to Democrat and media claims, there has been no effort to discredit the work of the special counsel,” they said. “Quite the opposite, whatever product is produced by the special counsel must be trusted by Americans and that requires asking tough but fair questions about investigative techniques both employed and not employed.”

The lawmakers sent the letter to the Justice Department and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., saying that their investigation “revealed troubling facts which exacerbated our initial questions and concerns.” The House investigation didn’t produce a full final report of the panel’s findings.

Republicans say top FBI officials were biased against then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, pointing to Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI official who was ousted from Robert Mueller’s team and later from the agency after his anti-Trump text messages with his colleague and lover Lisa Page were revealed.

STRZOK, PAGE AND THE FBI TEXTING SCANDAL EXPLAINED

The pair exchanged more than 50,000 text messages throughout the 2016 presidential election, with many of them expressing anti-Trump sentiments. In one message, Page asked Strzok if Trump could become president, prompting his reply: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Goodlatte and Gowdy also refer to the report by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog earlier this year that claims Strzok’s anti-Trump text messages raise questions about the agency’s bias, while fired FBI Director James Comey repeatedly broke the protocol.

The lawmakers also stress in the letter that the probe into Clinton’s use of emails was too lenient and cleared her of any wrongdoing without sufficient inquiry into the controversy.

The letter urges Congress to continue the investigation, saying that “while Congress does not have the power to appoint a special counsel, Congress does have the power to continue to investigate,” and notes that “the facts uncovered thus far” merit the continuation of the probe.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republicans-unceremoniously-end-probe-into-fbi-doj-bias-against-trump-in-favor-of-clinton

A terminally ill boy whose Yemeni mother fought for more than a year to visit him after being barred from entering the U.S. by the Trump administration’s travel ban has died in hospital in California.

Abdullah Hassan, 2, had suffered from a genetic brain condition and died at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement released Friday.

“We are heartbroken. We had to say goodbye to our baby, the light of our lives,” Abdullah’s father, Ali Hassan, said in the statement.

Abdullah Hassan, 2-years-old at UCSF’s Benioff Chidren’s Hospital, Oakland.Courtesy Ali Hassan

“We want to thank everyone for your love and support at this difficult time. We ask you to kindly keep Abdullah and our family in your thoughts and prayers,” the 22-year-old added.

A funeral is scheduled for Saturday.

Hassan is a U.S. citizen and has family in Stockton, California but his wife, Shaima Swileh, is Yemeni.

The pair met in war-torn Yemen in 2016 before moving to Egypt. Hassan and Swileh wanted to move to the U.S., but as a Yemeni national Swileh was barred from entering the country under the Trump administration’s travel ban against people from some Muslim-majority countries.

When Abdullah’s health worsened, Hassan took him ahead to California for treatment and Swileh remained in Egypt where she continued to apply for a U.S. visa. As the couple fought for a waiver, doctors put Abdullah on life support.

“My wife is calling me every day wanting to kiss and hold her son for the one last time,” Hassan said, choking up at a news conference earlier this month.

CAIR launched a campaign to publicize the family’s plight and the State Department granted Swileh a waiver the next day to visit her dying son.

The 21-year-old mother arrived in San Francisco on Dec. 19.

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-year-old-whose-yemeni-mother-fought-u-s-visa-n952916

Braxton Moral is scheduled to receive a high school diploma from Ulysses High School and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. “It’s not as hard as you think; it’s just an efficient use of time,” he says.

Courtesy of Julie Moral


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Courtesy of Julie Moral

Braxton Moral is scheduled to receive a high school diploma from Ulysses High School and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. “It’s not as hard as you think; it’s just an efficient use of time,” he says.

Courtesy of Julie Moral

A 16-year-old is scheduled to graduate from high school in Kansas and Harvard University within the span of two weeks.

Braxton Moral, a senior at Ulysses High School, plans to attend the school’s commencement May 19, then the university’s ceremonies later in the month, reported The Hutchinson News.

“I’m not any different; I just do a little thing on the side,” he told NPR. “I try to play it down at high school because if I talk about it, it becomes a divide.”

Moral was born in Kansas, the youngest of four children. In some ways, he is just like any other teenager. He loves video games and movies. He plays tennis and goes to church.

But when he was 3 years old, he could “entertain people” at volleyball games by calculating the score’s difference in points, his mother, Julie Moral, told NPR. People also said he had a big vocabulary. Still, she didn’t notice that her son was gifted.

By second grade, he was getting bused to a different building with third- and fourth-graders for English and math, she said. Then he skipped the fourth grade.

As he got older, he started to become depressed. He was asking questions like, “Why do I exist?” and “What’s my purpose?” she said.

His parents took him to a community college for testing. “They thought the machine was broken,” his father, Carlos Moral, told The Hutchinson News. “He was like off the scale, beyond an associate’s degree.”

The Duke University Talent Identification Program told the family that Braxton needed to be challenged. Around age 11, he began Harvard University’s extension program, which “ideally serves” working professionals who can attend classes both on campus and online.

Braxton says he completes fall and spring college courses online, and began taking summer classes at the Cambridge, Mass., campus for the first time as he rose into his junior year. He spends a full, eight-hour day in high school but has permission to work on college assignments during a computer lab course.

He says he likes being on Harvard’s campus because “it feels like you’re in history,” with buildings that are older than the founding of the United States.

The hardest part, Moral says, is when high school finals crop up at the same time as Harvard’s finals.

The university pays half of his tuition, his mother says. “Because of his age and the fact that he doesn’t have a high school diploma, he couldn’t get regular scholarships or federal aid. We did get a couple Sallie Mae private loans to help ease the financial burden.”

Braxton is pursuing a bachelor of liberal arts in extension studies in government. He says he wants to attend Harvard Law School and, someday, become a politician.

For now, he most enjoys a Greek mythology course he is taking at Harvard — and weightlifting in high school. “It’s physical activity,” he says. “Any break you get from the classroom is a good one.”

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2018/12/28/680762928/16-year-old-set-to-graduate-from-kansas-high-school-and-harvard-university

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