Each time, Mr. López Obrador has adopted a measured posture, urging dialogue and counting on mutual economic interest to prevail. And so far, his bet has paid off, as Mr. Trump has stepped back from his threats.
Mr. López Obrador said Friday that while his administration could employ “legal mechanisms” to forestall tariffs, he would eschew that tactic — for now.
“We want there to be dialogue, understanding, and that an agreement is arrived at without the need for a legal process,” he said. “What we want is to convince, persuade that free trade is convenient” to both countries.
Mr. López Obrador took office in December, promising a shift away from what he said was an enforcement-first migration policy and toward a more humanitarian approach.
During his first few months in office, detentions and deportations by the Mexican authorities fell sharply, even as the flow of migrants from Central America and elsewhere surged.
Initially, his administration largely accommodated the enormous migrant caravans that made their way north from Central America toward the American border, doing little to stop them from crossing Mexico’s highly porous southern border and allowing them to travel essentially unfettered across Mexican territory.
The economic relationship between the United States and China needs to change, Tony Ressler, a billionaire veteran of Wall Street, said Friday.
“The Trump administration is making some very important points about how we do business with China,” said Ressler, co-founder of private equity giants Apollo Global Management and Ares Management.
President Donald Trump, through tough talk and tariffs, has been trying to get China to stop what the White House considers unfair trade and business practices.
“We’re seeing some blunt objects help that readjustment,” Ressler said in a CNBC interview as rhetoric from Trump and Chinese leaders and costly reciprocal trade tariffs show no signs of easing.
However, Ressler said, “I’m not as worried as others. Because I think over time, reason will prevail.”
Beijing threatened on Friday to unveil an unprecedented list of foreign firms, groups, and individuals that it believes harm the interests of Chinese companies.
Earlier this month, Washington increased tariffs to 25% on $200 billion of Chinese goods, accusing Beijing of reneging on its previous promises to make structural changes to its economic practices.
That prompted Beijing to hit back with additional levies on the majority of U.S. imports worth $60 billion, due to take effect on Saturday.
“My experience with the Chinese is that they are sophisticated. They understand what’s best for China,” Ressler told “Squawk Box” co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview from a business conference in Atlanta.
Ressler, also principal owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, urged Trump and Chinese leaders to “lower the amount of noise” and focus more on substance. “Then you’ll see real progress,” he said.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has failed to form a coalition and will now have to be reelected once again. President Trump said there is enough turmoil in Israel.
President Trump said Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inability to form a government was “too bad,” because the Middle East has “enough turmoil.”
“It looked like a total win for Netanyahu, who’s a great guy, he’s a great guy,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn Thursday morning before heading to Colorado to deliver the commencement speech at the Air Force Academy.
“And now they’re [Israel’s] back in the debate state and they’re back in the election stage,” Trump said. “That is too bad. Because they don’t need this. I mean they’ve got enough turmoil over there, it’s a tough place.”
FILE – In this March 25, 2019 file photo, President Donald Trump smiles at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, after signing a proclamation at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Netanyahu missed a midnight Wednesday deadline to form a coalition government made up of his conservative Likud party and allied religious and nationalist parties after negotiations fell apart over military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. In response, the 120-member Israeli parliament, the Knesset, voted to dissolve, teeing up a new election for Sept. 17.
The dramatic political events took place hours before Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner visited Jerusalem to promote the administration’s Middle East peace plan, which could be losing steam as Israelheads toward an unprecedented second election in a calendar year.
Netanyahu said Thursday that Kushner gifted him an official State Department map, which was updated to incorporate the long-disputed Golan Heights as part of Israel.
In a bid to play down the political chaos and focus public attention on his foreign policy prowess – in particular, his close friendship with Trump – during a news conference in Jerusalem on Thursday Netanyahu whipped out Kushner’s map, on which the president had scribbled, “Nice.”
The White House upended decades of official U.S. policy in March when it recognized Israeli sovereignty over the territory, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and later annexed.
The September election means there are now no guarantees that Netanyahu’s Trump-friendly government will stay in power past the summer and any progress made with Kushner is at risk of being revoked by a new Israeli administration.
On Monday, as Netanyahu tried to put a coalition together, Trump tweeted that he hoped the Israeli leader could form a government in order to further strengthen ties between the countries.
“Hoping things will work out with Israel’s coalition formation and Bibi and I can continue to make the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever. A lot more to do!” Trump wrote.
The meeting between Netanyahu, Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s envoy for international negotiations, was scheduled ahead of a conference scheduled in Bahrain for next month that is designed to highlight the economic benefits of a potential Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Palestinians officials have cut off contact with the Trump administration, rejected the peace plan sight unseen and have urged Arab nations to boycott the Bahrain conference. Despite the boycott push, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have signaled they intend to participate.
A Trump administration official told Fox News on Thursday that the conference will go on as planned in late-June, and that the U.S. will release details of its peace plan at the appropriate time.
Fox News’ Barnini Chakraborty, Ben Evansky and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ted Cruz vowed on Twitter to work together on legislation banning members of Congress who leave office from lobbying.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ted Cruz vowed on Twitter to work together on legislation banning members of Congress who leave office from lobbying.
Alex Wong/Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images
“Let’s make a deal,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. “You’re on,” agreed Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
The two lawmakers who have often been at odds found common ground in a place that often highlights polarizing opinions: Twitter. That’s where Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez vowed to set aside their differences and work on new lobbying restrictions for lawmakers. Now an unlikely coalition is forming around their joint effort.
It started when Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Thursday morning that members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to become corporate lobbyists.
“At minimum there should be a long wait period,” she wrote. Ocasio-Cortez cited a statistic from Public Citizen, in which the advocacy group reported that among former Congress members who move to jobs outside of politics, nearly 60% start lobbying or otherwise influencing federal policy.
It didn’t take long for Cruz to chime in.
“Here’s something I don’t say often: on this point, I AGREE” with Ocasio-Cortez, Cruz stated. He went on to say that he has long called for a lifetime ban on former members of Congress becoming lobbyists.
“The Swamp would hate it, but perhaps a chance for some bipartisan cooperation?” he asked.
By early afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez said she would co-lead a bill with Cruz — if there were no “partisan snuck-in clauses, no poison pills.”
Cruz, who has previously argued with the freshman Democrat on Twitter, agreed.
At least one politician from each side of the aisle came forward to support the pact: Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, tweeted, “IN,” and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, offered to lead or co-sponsor a bill in the House.
Craig Holman, who lobbies on ethics, campaign finance and lobbying on behalf of Public Citizen, told NPR that it is “heartening” that Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez moved to bridge the deep partisan divide.
“I am not sure if Congress will be willing to adopt their proposed lifetime ban,” Holman said in an email. He added, “but the sheer fact of a left-and-right agreement that the revolving door is a grave problem that must be addressed is going to move the ball forward.”
Neither Cruz’s nor Ocasio-Cortez’s offices immediately responded to a question from NPR about whether their staffers had started to collaborate on potential legislation.
The so-called revolving door of Washington has been spinning for years. Dozens of former members of Congress have moved on to careers influencing the federal government on behalf of corporations, according to OpenSecrets.
Of the nearly four dozen lawmakers who left office in the wake of the 2016 election, “one in six became lobbyists,” The Atlantic has reported. The magazine said the number was even higher after the 2014 midterms, when “around one in four became lobbyists.”
In the executive branch, at least 187 political appointees of the Trump administration previously worked as federal lobbyists, ProPublica reported last year. And many of them were put into positions supervising the same industries for which they had once lobbied.
Senators who leave office cannot become lobbyists for two years, under a law that was adopted in 2007. In the House, representatives face a one-year cooling-off period.
“The difference was due to a reform effort led by then-Sen. Obama back during the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007,” Holman said of that effort. “We tried securing two years for both chambers, along with a ban on strategic consulting during that two-year cooling off period, but House committee chairmen revolted and struck down the revolving door restrictions for the House.”
US President Donald Trump’s newly threatened tariffs on Mexican goods could derail a trade agreement that took more than a year of intense and often bitter negotiations, and they have drawn backlash from both Mexico and at least one of Trump’s Republican allies.
The US, Canada, and Mexico agreed to the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement last year as an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Trump first signaled that he wanted to negotiate NAFTA in January 2017, but tense negotiations, threats of tariffs, and the danger that the US would pull out of the process entirely meant the three governments did not sign the agreement until this past November.
The sweeping trade deal would create changes for employees across the dairy and auto industries and affect labor unions and large corporations.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican who serves as the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and is typically a Trump ally, called Trump’s announcement a “misuse” of presidential authority and said the move could derail the USMCA, which has been ceremonially signed by the leaders of the three countries but still needs to be ratified by the three governments.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Thomson Reuters
He said the new tariffs, intended to force Mexico to stem illegal immigration into the US, “would seriously jeopardize passage of USMCA.”
“I support nearly every one of President Trump’s immigration policies, but this is not one of them,” he said in a statement.
Rufus Yerxa, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, said the tariffs would “essentially blow up USMCA,” The Washington Post reported.
The implementation of the new agreement still requires congressional approval in the US, but Democrats have not signaled full support for the deal, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaling concern with how it would be enforced and saying the Trump administration is moving forward too quickly.
Republicans have expressed concern that the deal doesn’t have enough support to get through Congress.
Trump said the 5% tariffs would take effect June 10.
Peña Nieto, Trump, and Trudeau at the ceremonial signing of the USMCA free-trade agreement. Reuters
Trump previously threatened tariffs of up to 25% on Mexican goods in April, saying he would do so “if for any reason Mexico stops apprehending and bringing the illegals back to where they came from.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at the time that the agreement was a “huge step forward.”
That decision was aimed at speeding up the passage of the USMCA at Congress.
But Mexico’s response to Trump’s new tariff announcement signaled new tensions, with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador writing in a letter that Trump’s “America First” policy was a “fallacy” and that issues like immigration could not be fixed with tariffs.
“‘America First’ is a fallacy because until the end of times, even beyond national borders, justice and universal fraternity will prevail,” he said.
He said “social issues are not resolved through taxes or coercive means.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Reuters/Edgard Garrido
He added that Mexico’s foreign minister would visit Washington on Friday in a bid to resolve the issue.
Trump said on Twitter that the tariffs “will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied, at which time the Tariffs will be removed.”
He said he was announcing them in light of the number of migrants crossing into the US from Mexico.
He warned that “if Mexico fails to act, tariffs will remain at a high level.”
In his letter, Obrador said Mexico was doing “as much as possible” to curb the number of migrants crossing through Mexico and into the US from Central America “without violating human rights.”
Blaming the officials for the failed summit, North Korea executed Kim Hyok Chol, the special envoy to the United States, and foreign ministry officials who carried out the working-level negotiations for the meeting in February, according to Reuters.
The regime accused them of spying for the United States.
Kim Yong Chol, who was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s counterpart for the meeting, was sent to a labor camp. Shin Hye Yong, the interpreter for Kim Jong Un, was also sent to a camp for political prisoners for undermining the North Korean leader.
The news comes after Trump repeated criticism of former Vice President Joe Biden from Kim Jong Un while visiting Japan during the Memorial Day weekend.
“North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal,” he tweeted.
He later tweeted he was standing up for “Sleepy Joe Biden.”
I was actually sticking up for Sleepy Joe Biden while on foreign soil. Kim Jong Un called him a “low IQ idiot,” and many other things, whereas I related the quote of Chairman Kim as a much softer “low IQ individual.” Who could possibly be upset with that?
President Donald Trump’s surprise vow to slap new tariffs on Mexican goods has an unintended consequence: It further undermines the chance of a trade resolution with China.
The U.S. is set to impose a 5% tariff on all Mexican imports from June 10, Trump first announced in a Twitter post Thursday night. The move came as a shock as the White House just took a formal step to kickstart approval of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement.
Trump’s 180-degree turn on one of U.S.’ largest trading partners is sending a ominous message to the international community that he can’t be trusted, Wall Street policy analysts said, adding that China, already skeptical of Trump’s reliability, is now less likely to sign a trade deal with him.
“We view this action as further deteriorating the U.S.-China trade fight. Chinese officials have stated their concern about the reliability of President Trump as a trading partner. These tariffs were announced the same day as significant advancement of the USMCA. If China does not believe a deal will stick, why negotiate?” said Ed Mills, public policy analyst at Raymond James, in a note.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Trump are set to meet at the G20 summit in Japan next month, but the Mexican tariffs put into further doubt that a “substantive” meeting is possible, Mills added.
“Trump’s readiness to hit a trading partner with new tariff threats soon after striking a trade deal will make China still more cautious about signing up to a deal that Trump then reneges upon, humiliating its leadership,” Krishna Guha, policy strategy analyst at Evercore, said in a note. “Beijing will remain open to talking, but this cannot help prospects for an early breakthrough at G20.”
U.S. stocks plunged on the new tariff threat and Chinese stocks were hit overnight as well.
“How can you trust Trump to honor a deal?” Chris Krueger, Washington strategist at Cowen said. “Mexico submitted USMCA this week for ratification…Trump’s signature trade achievement was moving downfield…and he just threatened Mexico … with unilateral tariffs on ALL Mexican goods exports to the U.S.”
China said Friday it will establish a list of unreliable entities of foreign companies and people that “seriously damage” the interests of domestic firms.
The intensifying trade tensions rattled the stock market this month, with all major indices on pace to post their first negative month of 2019. The S&P 500 has fallen more than 5% in May, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost more than 1,200 points.
Robert Mueller’s report makes the stirring claim that “a fundamental principle of our government” is that no person, not even the president, “is above the law.”
But the special counsel’s ultimate legacy may well be the exact opposite — because of his controversial decision not to say whether Trump committed criminal obstruction of justice.
“We concluded that we would not reach a determination, one way or the other, about whether the president committed a crime,” Mueller said in his statement Wednesday, reiterating his report’s explanation.
It was the punt heard around the world. It may have been the crucial turning point in the saga of the special counsel probe, and perhaps the decision most likely to have ramifications for future presidents. It effectively “removes the president from the scope of generally applicable criminal laws,” Cornell law professor Jens David Ohlin recently told my colleague Sean Illing.
Essentially, Mueller has laid out a model that federal prosecutors can investigate the sitting president for crimes, but that they should not make any conclusion about whether he committed a crime. In a sense, this does seem to place the president above the law.
To be clear — this was Mueller’s own choice. Yes, he did conclude that existing department policy prevented him from indicting a sitting president. But before the special counsel wrapped up his work, it was widely believed that he might still issue a judgment on whether Trump committed a crime.
He did not do so, and this “took some constitutional scholars and Justice Department veterans by surprise,” the Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman wrote Wednesday. Helderman quotes J. Michael Luttig, a former appellate judge and former Justice Department official, saying: “The fact that a president cannot be prosecuted does not foreclose a finding by a special counsel of whether a president committed a crime.”
Oddly, Mueller also went out of his way, both in his report and his statement, to opine that he did not have “confidence” that Trump didn’t break the law. And his legal analyses of certain incidents involving Trump sure seem to suggest he violated the law. But he refused to take the final step and outright come to a conclusion — something Attorney General William Barr has repeatedly said he expected the special counsel to do.
Mueller was also careful never to say that he couldn’t have issued a criminal finding about Trump. In the report, he writes several times that his office “determined” not to do this, and in his Wednesday statement he used the word “concluded.” Additionally, Barr proceeded to ignore this considereddecision not to decide, quickly issuing his own conclusion that, in his view, Trump didn’t violate the law.
Still, Mueller’s decision-making around the highest-profile criminal investigation into a president in decades is unmistakably important, and could be viewed as a model for similar future investigations to follow. So we deserve more transparency about how it came about.
Mueller’s reasoning for choosing not to say whether President Trump broke the law
For a report that’s 448 pages long, Mueller’s decision to end his investigation of Trump with a punt is somewhat under-explained.
The special counsel lays it out quickly in the introduction of his report’s second volume. First, he writes, he “accepted” the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel’s 2000 opinion that the department can’t indict a sitting president because it would undermine his capacity to carry out the work of the executive branch. Second, the report continues, the office determined that investigating the president “is permissible” anyway, to preserve evidence, and because the president wouldn’t have immunity from indictment after he leaves office. So far, that’s all as expected.
But then comes the punt. Though the office “considered” whether to evaluate Trump’s conduct under Justice Department standards about prosecution decisions, Mueller writes, it “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.”
And his main reason is a curious one — that it would be unfair to the president, because the fact that he can’t be charged means he can’t clear his name with an acquittal at trial.
Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought. The ordinary means for an individual to respond to an accusation is through a speedy and public trial, with all the procedural protections that surround a criminal case.
An individual who believes he was wrongly accused can use that process to seek to clear his name. In contrast, a prosecutor’s judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, offers no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.
Mueller reiterated this point in his statement Wednesday. “Beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness,” he said. “It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of an actual charge.” In the report, he refers to this as the “absence of a neutral adjudicatory forum” to review the report’s findings.
Mueller expresses another concern in the report as well — namely, that finding the president committed a crime in an internal report “could carry consequences that extend beyond the realm of criminal justice.” Specifically, it could “imperil the President’s ability to govern.”
So, Mueller said in his statement: “We concluded that we would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the president committed a crime. That is the office’s final position.”
Mueller’s move sets a worrying precedent
Even though Mueller made clear this was his own decision, it will inevitably set a precedent for future investigations into presidents — a problematic one.
If Mueller’s approach is taken as a model, the Justice Department can investigate to their heart’s content, but at the end of the day, they not only won’t indict a sitting president, but they won’t even say whether he broke the law.
It’s the very definition of special treatment, and would essentially remove one potential check on presidential wrongdoing from within the executive branch. It would mean the department charged with investigating and charging violations of federal law won’t assess whether one particular person, the president, violated federal law.
Mueller’s concern about “fairness” to the president, who would lack a forum to clear his name after being accused, is particularly odd.
“That is completely absurd,” Ohlin, the law professor, told Illing. “The president doesn’t have a courtroom to vindicate his innocence only because the DOJ has decided that his office makes him immune from indictment in the first place. It’s a piece of circular reasoning that removes the president from the scope of generally applicable criminal laws.”
The special counsel appears to realize the implications of this position, so in an apparent attempt to mitigate it, he does offer an opinion on Trump’s conduct — that it’s, well, not obviously innocent.
“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” Mueller writes in his report’s final paragraph.
Indeed, many who have read the report closely have remarked that its legal analysis often seems quite damning for Trump. Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic, for example, parsed the report’s language about several examples of Trump’s potentially obstructive conduct, with an eye toward whether it established all three legal elements of criminal obstruction of justice. For four examples, the report seems to do just that. Hundreds of federal prosecutors have also opined that Trump’s conduct as outlined in the report would merit charges if he wasn’t president.
But in the end, Mueller, the person who was charged with investigating whether the president of the United States violated the law, refused to outright make a judgment on whether he did. And if, in the future, Justice Department investigators are looking into a sitting president’s potentially criminal conduct, they might feel obligated to follow his example and do the same, rather than rocking the boat.
This wasn’t the obvious call — and Barr quickly made a different call
Again, Mueller did not conclude that he was prohibited from making a criminal finding about the president. He says he “considered” doing so. It’s just that he concluded that he wouldn’t.
This was far from a foregone conclusion, it certainly came as a surprise to me and others who have covered Mueller’s investigation for years.
Attorney General William Barr, for instance, testified that he was “frankly surprised” to learn this in March and that he “did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision.”
Indeed, Barr proceeded to do exactly what Mueller wouldn’t — evaluating the evidence and concluding that, in his view, it wasn’t sufficient to establish Trump committed a crime. So, in a sense, Mueller’s considered decision not to decide was immediately thrown out the window by his superior.
“The opinion says you cannot indict a president while he is in office,” Barr told CBS News this week. “But he could’ve reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity.”
Mueller may have had other reasons for restraint
Perhaps hanging over all this is the fact that, if Mueller had submitted a report to Barr concluding that Trump committed a crime, it would have initiated a crisis.
Mueller would have been the man who threw the Justice Department into turmoil, as the department would inevitably have struggled with how to handle such an explosive conclusion. (Remember that Barr was not legally obligated to make Mueller’s findings public.)
Once the news inevitably got out, Mueller would likely have become the man who lit the impeachment fuse. Congressional Democratic leaders are having enough difficulty holding off their base’s desire to impeach Trump as it is. An unambiguous conclusion from Mueller that Trump violated the law would have led to pressure that may well have been impossible for them to withstand.
It’s possible Mueller believes that’s a decision that should be made by Congress, not a Justice Department prosecutor. The House of Representatives is essentially the “prosecutor” in the impeachment process — they can vote to kick-start a trial in the Senate. He might have envisioned his job as limited to gathering evidence and presenting some analysis.
But when Mueller’s report does reference impeachment, he seems concerned about interfering with that process. A “criminal accusation against a sitting President,” he writes, could “potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.” (A footnote there makes clear he means impeachment). So essentially, Mueller has ceded the role of deciding whether the president committed a crime to Congress.
There may also have been features of the case itself that made Mueller prefer restraint. He didn’t establish an underlying conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to interfere with the election. And despite all his troubling obstruction evidence, he lacked an indisputable smoking gun example, like Trump outright telling witnesses to lie to investigators or destroying evidence.
But his decision really deserves more transparency and debate
In the end, Mueller’s decision not to make a criminal finding one way or the other may be the most crucial decision he made during his investigation — and we should really get more transparency about it.
When did the special counsel decide on this approach, exactly? What was the debate over it like? How close was he to going in a different direction? What sort of internal analyses were written on this topic? Was his decision based on the particular circumstances of this case, or would his reasoning apply to all similar investigations? Should the new standard be that the Justice Department never opines on whether the president has violated the law?
It’s understandable that Mueller doesn’t want to testify before Congress about uncharged individuals and uncharged conduct, as per Justice Department practice. But this is a process call that could have major consequences for future investigations of presidents, and accordingly deserves a good deal more review and debate.
Considering how consequential this decision may have been, the few paragraphs about this in Mueller’s report simply aren’t enough — nor are his brief remarks this week. His decision poses the risk that future investigations of presidents will be hamstrung from the start. So he should give a better explanation of why he made this call.
Shortly afterward, some American technology companies, including Google, said they would stop supplying Huawei. The American government has since granted Huawei a 90-day waiver, giving Chinese and American officials time to hammer out an agreement. The Trump Administration also is said to be considering putting Hikvision, a Chinese video surveillance company, on the list.
If Friday’s move is calculated to be a tit-for-tat strike back at American technology companies, Beijing will have ample targets. Major websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are blocked in China, and rules strictly control other businesses like online payments and cloud services.
Still, most American technology firms have a big presence in China. Both Google and Microsoft run sizable research and development operations in the country and their Android and Windows operating systems are ubiquitous on Chinese smartphones and computers. Google and Facebook likely pull in billions of dollars in advertising revenues from Chinese companies.
The vague announcement also opens the door to retaliation of other kinds, perhaps against individuals or companies who depend heavily on the Chinese market for selling their products. But China must be careful in how it retaliates, since many American companies are already reconsidering their dependence on the Chinese market and Chinese suppliers. If neither side backs off, the brinkmanship could permanently pull apart the supply chains that tie together the countries’ economies.
Mr. Gao, the ministry spokesman, said in the statement that the list would be aimed at those who block supplies and “take other discriminatory measures.”
Abortion rights supporters take part in a protest Thursday in St. Louis. A state license that allows a Planned Parenthood health center in Missouri to perform abortions could soon expire.
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Abortion rights supporters take part in a protest Thursday in St. Louis. A state license that allows a Planned Parenthood health center in Missouri to perform abortions could soon expire.
Jeff Roberson/AP
With hours to go before the expiration of a state license that allows a Planned Parenthood health center in Missouri to perform abortions, clinics in neighboring states say they’re preparing for an influx of additional patients.
“No one one knows what’s gonna happen in the next day or two, but we have to be ready for this clinic to be closed, and for patients to have nowhere else to go,” said Dr. Erin King, who runs a health center in Illinois across the river from the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis.
King said her facility, the Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Ill., has been hiring additional doctors and medical support staff for more than a year in preparation for the possibility that abortion could be restricted in Missouri. Illinois is one of several states considering legislation to expand abortion rights as states including Missouri work in the opposite direction, passing laws banning the procedure in the early stages of pregnancy.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson last week signed a law criminalizing most abortions after eight weeks. That law has yet to take effect, but the dispute between Planned Parenthood and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services over regulatory enforcement is threatening to shut down abortion services at Missouri’s last remaining clinic.
Parson said this week that Missouri health regulators have safety concerns about the clinic. Planned Parenthood officials say they’ve done all they can to comply, and accuse the state of arbitrarily enforcing regulations for political reasons. The two sides have been unable to reach an agreement, and Planned Parenthood has filed a lawsuit asking for a restraining order to prevent the center from being forced to stop offering the procedure.
Providers like King in neighboring states say they’re watching the situation and expecting to take additional patients from Missouri.
“[This] is happening much more quickly than any of us anticipated, so we’re really scrambling” to communicate with patients and open up additional appointments for abortions in the coming days, King said.
Michele Landeau of Gateway Women’s Access Fund, which helps Missouri women pay for abortions, said her organization is looking at ways to connect patients with clinics outside the state and help arrange for transportation, childcare, and other needs.
“People are confused, and they’re scared, and it’s pretty chaotic-feeling right now,” Landeau said.
Abortion providers in other neighboring states said they’re expecting additional patients from Missouri, and planning accordingly.
“We will do our very best to serve any women from Missouri that need to see us,” said Rebecca Terrell of CHOICES health center in Memphis, Tenn. “It may be that we have to add hours; we may have to open on a Saturday; we may have to make some changes, but we will make sure that everybody gets seen.”
In Wichita, Kansas, Julie Burkhart of the Trust Women clinic, said she would expect to see more patients from central, southern, and western Missouri if the St. Louis facility stops providing abortions. She said her facility might look at expanding its hours, but it would take time to hire, train, and license new staff members.
Abortion rights opponents have praised Missouri regulators’ scrutiny of the St. Louis clinic.
In a statement, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, said ending abortion services there “would be good news for health and safety.”
If the St. Louis clinic loses its license, some hospitals in the state could still offer the procedure, primarily for medical emergencies, Planned Parenthood officials say.
The New York Times is said to be cracking down on its reporters appearing on cable news shows it considers to be ‘too partisan,’ according to a new report.
The New York Times is reportedly blocking its reporters from appearing on liberal cable news programs such as MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “CNN Tonight” with Don Lemon because they’re “too partisan,” but critics think the Gray Lady needs to look in the mirror.
Vanity Fair reported that Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet is concerned that his reporters who appear on particular programs would be “perceived as being aligned” with the show’s far-left politics.
Media Research Center vice president Dan Gainor mocked the situation, essentially labeling the Times as hypocrites in the process.
“This isn’t a news story, it’s a sitcom plot. The nation’s most liberal paper is suddenly concerned that the wacky network filled on air with its employees might be too far left,” Gainor told Fox News. “The Times is liberal on the opinion and news pages on every major issue facing the nation — from abortion to taxes. Yet, MSNBC is even further left? Does anyone at The Times read their own paper?”
Conservative strategist Chris Barron echoed Gainor’s reaction to the Vanity Fair story.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this story,” Barron told Fox news. “Has anyone from the New York Times actually read the New York Times? If they want to avoid the appearance of overt partisanship they might try taking a look in the mirror first.”
“Has anyone from the New York Times actually read the New York Times? If they want to avoid the appearance of overt partisanship they might try taking a look in the mirror first.”
— Chris Barron
Fox News’ Sean Hannity said the Times is “scared” and has been “duped by the conspiracy TV media mob.” The “Hannity” namesake sarcastically asked, “Why would the New York Times not go on their favorite programs?”
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck called the report “one of the more peculiar and obviously ironic” media stories possible.
“There’s no denying that the [Times] is right about MSNBC primetime shows, as they are hotbeds for the Resistance, but if MSNBC is that home on TV, The New York Times is without a doubt their paper equivalent,” Houck told Fox News. “So while it’s nice they’re realizing something that a lot of us already know about how biased they are, it would behoove them to take care of matters in their own newsroom first.”
Rewire News editor-in-chief Jodi Jacobson thinks the Times “jumped the entire school of sharks,” while BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis said the report is “bad for the Times, for journalism, for an informed public, and just dumb.”
DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall feels differently, telling Fox News that it’s “wise” for the Times to carefully assess where its reporters appear as guests.
“News outlets such as the Times need to protect their more objective reporters from the appearance that they are playing a partisan role for a broadcast outlet’s benefit. The news industry already suffers from public perception that real reporters are agenda-driven, and trotting reporters into opinion shows just fuels that problem,” McCall said. “In a sense, partisan television interview shows want to use real reporters as props to borrow the credibility of direct news reporting to support their opinion angles.”
McCall feels that news organizations should just let their objective news stories speak for themselves without having to “trot out those reporters to engage in chit-chat” with partisan pundits.
The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump says he’s not happy about North Korea’s recent military tests. This comes at the same time says the U.S. sent an aircraft carrier group to the Persian Gulf because the Iranians “were threatening.” (May 9) AP, AP
North Korea executed its special nuclear envoy to the United States as part of a purge of senior officials over the failed summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper claimed Friday.
Kim Hyok Chol was executed by firing squad in March along with four other foreign ministry officials, the paper reported, citing an unidentified North Korean source.
North Korea neither confirmed nor denied the report. South Korea’s government was not able to confirm the claim. Previous media reports about the fate of North Korean officials who have fallen afoul of Pyongyang’s leader have proven to be false.
Chosun Ilbo is one of South Korea’s largest daily newspapers. However, it’s notoriously difficult to get information out of North Korea because it closely guards secrets.
Still, Chosun Ilbo reported Kim Hyok Chol and the other senior officials were shot after being accused of spying for the United States. The paper reported Kim Jong Un ordered the purge amid mounting dissatisfaction with the summit in Hanoi – the second time Kim and Trump met for face-to-face talks. In Vietnam, they failed to reach a deal because of conflicts over the White House’s call for complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.
Since then, amid a diplomatic standoff between Pyongyang and Washington, North Korea has resumed testing short-range ballistic missiles, ending a pause in launches that began in late 2017. The tests are viewed as a way for Kim to pressure Trump to ease sanctions without actually causing negotiations to collapse.
“North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me,” Trump tweeted during a recent trip to Japan.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked about the Chosun Ilbo report during a news conference in Berlin. He said Friday the U.S. was “doing our best to check it out.”
Kim has presided over high-profile purges since taking over as North Korea’s leader in 2011. Kim’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, at the time North Korea’s second most powerful man, was convicted of treason and executed in late 2013. And Rodong Sinmun, a North Korean newspaper, appeared to indirectly refer to the purge on Thursday.
“Acting like one is revering the leader but dreaming of something else when one turns around, is an anti-party, anti-revolutionary act that has thrown away the moral fidelity towards the leader and such people will not avoid the stern judgment of the revolution,” the paper said. “There are traitors and turncoats who only memorize words of loyalty towards the leader and even change according to the trend of the time.”
Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s sister, who regularly accompanies her brother at big events, has not been seen in public since the Hanoi meeting.
Chosun Ilbo also reported that Kim Yong Chol, Kim’s right-hand man and Pompeo’s counterpart at the Hanoi summit, has been sent to a labor and reeducation camp near the Chinese border. That claim, too, was not been independently verified.
A woman dressed in a traditional gown pays her respects at statues of late North Korean leaders, Kim Il Sung, left, and Kim Jong Il, in Pyongyang, North Korea, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. Unaware of reports his eldest son – and current leader Kim Jong Uns half-brother – was killed just days ago in what appears to have been a carefully planned assassination, North Koreans marked the birthday of late leader Kim Jong Il on Thursday as they do every year. Eric Talmadge, AP
Azalea, whose Korean name is “Dalle”, a 19-year-old female chimpanzee, smokes a cigarette at the Central Zoo in Pyongyang, North Korea Oct. 19, 2016. According to officials at the newly renovated zoo, which has become a favorite leisure spot in the North Korean capital since it was re-opened in July, the chimpanzee smokes about a pack a day. They insist, however, that she does not inhale. Wong Maye-E, AP
A picture released by the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling North Korean Workers Party, on Sept. 8, 2015, shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center front, and Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, second from right, a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and first vice-president of the Council of State, watching an art performance by the Moranbong Band and the State Merited Chorus in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Sept. 7, 2015. Bermudez led a Cuban delegation to North Korea to mark the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between North Korea and Cuba. Rodong Sinmun, European Pressphoto Agency
Men and women pump their fists in the air and chant “defend!” as they carry propaganda slogans calling for reunification of their country during the “Pyongyang Mass Rally on the Day of the Struggle Against the U.S.,” attended by approximately 100,000 North Koreans to mark the 65th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War at the Kim Il Sung stadium, Thursday, June 25, 2015, in Pyongyang, North Korea. The month of June in North Korea is known as the “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” and it’s a time for North Koreans to swarm to war museums, mobilize for gatherings denouncing the evils of the United States and join in a general, nationwide whipping up of the anti-American sentiment. Wong Maye-E, AP
North Koreans gather in front of a portrait of their late leader Kim Il Sung, left, and Kim Jong Il, right, paying respects to their late leader Kim Jong Il, to mark the third anniversary of his death, Wednesday Dec. 17 at Pyong Chon District in Pyongyang, North Korea. North Korea marked the end of a three-year mourning period for the late leader Kim Jong Il on Wednesday, opening the way for his son, Kim Jong Un, to put a more personal stamp on the way the country is run. Kim Kwang Hyon, AP
South Korea was also sending an 18-member rescue team from its national fire agency to Budapest on Thursday. It will be followed by a team of 15 rescue experts from the South Korean Navy and Coast Guard, Mr. Moon’s office said. The second team will include divers who had participated in rescue operations after the Sewol accident.
The Danube collision took place at 9:05 p.m., according to Col. Adrian Pal, a police official, and emergency responders arrived at the site shortly before 9:30 p.m.
“Based on our information, there were 35 people on board” the Hableany, he said, using the Hungarian name for the boat. “Two individuals were Hungarian, the captain and a crewman, and 33 were South Korean,” he added. “Of the 33, two were tour guides, and 31 were tourists.”
Survivors said on Thursday that they had been powerless to help others in the swiftly flowing river. “People were floundering in the water in the darkness, shouting for help, but I could do nothing,” a 31-year-old survivor identified only by the family name Chung was quoted as saying by the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
Another survivor, a 32-year-old woman identified only by her last name, Yoon, said the ship had capsized “in a split second” when it was hit by the larger vessel. “Those out on the deck were all thrown into the water, and those who were in the cabin below deck may not have been able to escape,” she said.
Seven people plucked from the river overnight had not been wearing life vests, most likely indicating that no one on the boat had any time to react before plunging into the frigid waters, officials said.
Hungary has seen an explosion in foreign tourism in recent years, with nearly 31 million guest nights recorded in 2018, an increase of more than one million compared with the previous year’s total, according to government statistics. Budapest, a capital known for its grand boulevards, thermal spas and baroque architecture, is one of Central Europe’s treasures and is the country’s biggest draw.
The city is divided by the Danube into the hilly Buda neighborhood on the west — adorned by a castle overlooking the river — and Pest to east, home to the Parliament building. The Margaret Bridge, which was built between 1872 and 1876, stretches more than 2,000 feet and connects the two sides of the city, along with a small island in the middle of the river.
Saudi Arabia‘s king has accused the kingdom’s key rival, Iran, of developing nuclear and ballistic missiles which threaten regional and global stability, telling regional leaders that action is needed to stop Iranian “escalations” following a series of attacks on oil assets in the Gulf.
The comments by King Salman Abdul Aziz came as Saudi Arabia on Thursday hosted in Mecca emergency meetings of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League to counter what it said was Iran’s growing influence.
A Gulf-Arab statement and a separate communique issued after the wider summit both supported the right of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to defend their interests after the attacks on oil pumping stations in the kingdom and tankers off the UAE.
But in a sign of regional tensions, Iraq, which has good ties with neighbouring Iran and the United States, said it objected to the Arab communique, which stated that any cooperation with Tehran should be based on “non-interference in other countries”.
‘Naked aggression’
Addressing Arab and Muslim leaders earlier, King Salman pressed the international community to “use all means to stop Iran from interfering in other countries’ affairs”.
He said Tehran’s actions threatened international maritime trade and global oil supplies in a “glaring violation of UN treaties”.
“This is naked aggression against our stability and international security,” the Saudi ruler told the gathered officials.
Iran’s “recent criminal acts … require that all of us work seriously to preserve the security… of GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries,” the king added.
In his opening remarks, Saudi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Assaf said the alleged sabotage of oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and drone attacks on a Saudi oil pipeline by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in recent weeks threaten the global economy and endanger regional and international security.
“We should confront it with all means of force and firmness,” he said.
An Iranian official was at the meeting where Assaf spoke.Tehran has denied any involvement in the attacks.
John Bolton, a top US security official, alleged on Wednesday Iranian mines were “almost certainly” used in the tanker operation. He provided no proof, however.
An Iranian official dismissed Bolton’s remarks as “a ludicrous claim”.
Qatar’s blockade
King Salman invited Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, whose country is home to the largest US military base in the region, to the Mecca summit.
Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser Al Thani attended the meeting instead, the highest Qatari official to visit the kingdom since Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt imposed a land, sea, and air blockade on the gas-rich nation in June 2017.
Video images of Thursday’s gathering showed Sheikh Abdullah shaking King Salman’s hand.
Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador the UN, told Al Jazeera the Qatari prime minister’s presence at the summit was an important step.
“The invitation has opened the door more than just a little bit. His [Sheikh Abdullah’s] presence there and the handshake is a sign that Saudi Arabia wants unity in the Gulf Cooperation Council and that unity is spreading,” said Pickering.
Analysts said the emergency summit will be watched closely for whether or not the Saudis will endorse Qatar as a mediator in the dispute with Iran the same way the US has.
Earlier this month, Al Jazeera reported that Qatar’s foreign minister had held talks with his Iranian counterpart in Tehran, aiming to defuse the escalating tensions in the Gulf.
“Washington seems to have bet on Doha to de-escalate by opening back channels with Tehran. The question is whether Saudi and especially UAE can agree on Doha as a mediator,” Andreas Krieg from King’s College London told Al Jazeera.
“The fact that the Saudis contacted the emir of Qatar directly suggests that the tension with Iran is taken very seriously in Riyadh. So, the kingdom is ready to build a broader-than-usual consensus on how to deal with Iran,” Krieg said.
Gulf states have a joint defence force under the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), but the 39-year-old alliance has been fractured by the Qatar blockade.
Tensions with Iran
Animosity has risen between the US and Iran after Washington pulled out of a multinational nuclear deal with Tehran, reimposed sanctions and boosted its military presence in the Gulf.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on a trip to Iraq this month that Tehran wanted balanced ties with their Gulf neighbours and had proposed signing a non-aggression pact with them.
One of the UAE’s main newspapers said in an editorial, which is usually state-approved, the offer was “bizarre”.
“No Mr Zarif. We are not buying your ‘nice neighbour’ routine,” said the front-page editorial in Gulf News daily.
Demonstrators gather during a protest vigil outside of the Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, D.C., Carol Whitehill Moses Center in January. | Zach Gibson/Getty Images
A drip, drip, drip of state restrictions has made abortion harder to obtain.
Abortion is still legal in the United States, but for women in vast swaths of the country it’s a right in name only.
Six states are down to only one abortion clinic; by the end of this week, Missouri could have zero. Some women seeking abortions have to travel long distances, and face mandatory waiting periods or examinations. On top of that, a new wave of restrictive laws, or outright bans, is rippling across GOP-led states like Alabama and Georgia.
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Both sides of the abortion battle are focused on the future of Roe v. Wade, but opponents have already won the ground game over the past decade, chipping away at abortion access.
The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority, about to wrap up its first term, has not yet taken up a case challenging Roe. Just this week it declined to reinstate an Indiana law, signed by Mike Pence when he was governor, that would have banned abortion on the basis of gender, race or fetal disability. But that’s no guarantee the court won’t take another look at the landmark 1973 abortion rights ruling.
But even without the high court, GOP-backed laws have added restrictions and obstacles, whittling away access. Since the start of the Trump administration, hostility to abortion in general and Planned Parenthood in particular has only intensified in statehouses around the country.
“We celebrate freedom in America. But I believe that my choice ends when another life begins,” Louisiana state Rep. Valarie Hodges said just before a fetal “heartbeat” abortion bill passed there.
Years of piecemeal state laws have left their mark. Mandatory waiting periods, travel, missed work and lost wages all make getting an abortion more expensive and more difficult, particularly for low-income women. Doctors and clinic staff have to face protesters, threats, proliferating regulations and draining legal challenges; clinics have closed. In remote parts of the midwest and south, women may have to travel more than 300 miles to end a pregnancy.
“This is a moment of seeing how all of these laws fly in the face of medicine and science and go against what we in the medical profession know, which is that any restriction on medical care by politicians will endanger people’s health,” Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen, a physician herself, said in an interview.
It’s intensified of late. Republicans in Alabama and other states have raced to enact laws that would almost completely ban abortion, sometimes without exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest. Eight states have enacted laws which, if allowed to go into effect, would ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as the sixth week of pregnancy, when many women don’t even know they are pregnant. (Missouri’s variant is eight weeks.) Alabama has gone even further, granting “personhood” and legal rights from conception.
Those laws may eventually reach the Supreme Court and test Roe, the 1973 decision that recognized women’s right to abortion. But those statutes aren’t what’s crimping access nationwide right now. That’s happened through a drip, drip, drip of lower-profile efforts that have created obstacles for pregnant women and led to a dwindling supply of doctors trained and willing to perform abortions.
Many of those laws were promoted as attempts to make abortion safer — though courts often disagreed and threw them out as unconstitutional barriers. Now, abortion opponents are openly talking about ending the practice altogether.
“The strategy used to be death by a thousand cuts,” said Colleen McNicholas, a physician based in St. Louis who also provides abortions in Kansas and Oklahoma. “They’re no longer pretending things are to promote the health and well-being of women, which is what we used to hear all the time. Now they’re being very bold and upfront.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that for many Americans, particularly for women in the middle [of the country] and the South, abortion is inaccessible,” she added.
Data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, shows that 788 clinics in the U.S. provided abortion services in 2014 — a drop of 51 clinics over three years. Since 2013about 20 clinics have closed just in Texas.
Further, one in five women would have to travel at least 43 miles to get to a clinic, according to a Guttmacher analysis from October 2017. In North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming, at least half of the women between 15 and 44 years old lived more than 90 miles from a clinic.
Six states — Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia — have only one clinic left that performs abortions, according to a recent analysis from Planned Parenthood and Guttmacher. Lawmakers in many of those states have pursued limits in when abortion can be allowed — such as fetal heartbeat laws or 15-week bans, though the laws have been blocked in court. Four of those states have also passed so-called trigger laws that would ban abortion immediately should the Supreme Court overturn Roe.
In Missouri, the sole clinic, which is in St. Louis, could close this week. On the surface, it’s a dispute with the state health department over licensing, safety and regulation, but the showdown comes just days after state lawmakers passed a ban on abortion after eight weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
“States have been marching down this path for a number of years. The restrictions that have passed previously have set the stage for the bans this year,” said Elizabeth Nash, Guttmacher’s senior state issues manager. “It’s counseling, it’s waiting periods, it’s abortion coverage in your health plan. It’s limits on abortion providers, such as unnecessary clinic regulations.”
“Missouri is the first and other states could be next,” Planned Parenthood’s Wen said on a recent call with reporters.
The ramifications of the anti-abortion movement’s sustained assault against Planned Parenthood are perhaps no clearer than in Texas, where lawmakers have passed dozens of restrictive laws, including mandatory ultrasounds, waiting periods and state funding restrictions.
The Supreme Court overturned another set of Texas restrictions in 2016 — but not before about 20 clinics shut down, many of which were never able to reopen. Providers retired, staff found other jobs and clinics had to start from scratch to get licensed and staff up. “All of those things take time and a significant amount of money,” said Kari White, an associate professor in Health Care Organization and Policy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an investigator with the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
Even though Texas permits abortions until 20 weeks — itself a cut-off point that conflicts with Roe v. Wade, although it hasn’t yet come to the Supreme Court — abortion access has sharply declined. That scenario is likely to play out in other conservative states, even if they don’t go as far as Georgia or Alabama.
More than half of Texas’ 41 abortion clinics closed or stopped performing abortions after the state passed legislation in 2013 that bundled several onerous restrictions, according to research from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. The average distance a woman had to travel one way for an abortion jumped to 35 miles from 15 miles. In rural parts of the state, drives of 100 miles or more to access care are not uncommon, according to the group.
The evaluation project found that while the number of abortions overall declined after the Texas law went into effect, the number of second-trimester abortions rose as women were forced to wait and travel longer distances. Currently only about 22 abortion providers, mostly in urban areas, are operating in Texas, a state with roughly 6.3 million women of reproductive age.
Low-income women are disproportionately affected by abortion restrictions, said Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, which helps women who can’t afford an abortion, which costs between $500 and $10,000 dollars depending on the point in pregnancy. The nonprofit was part of a group that challenged dozens of Texas abortion restrictions in court.
Calls to the group’s hotline have tripled over the past few years to 6,000 in 2018, but it only funded about 1,000 women last year, she said. Some of those women are undocumented immigrants, some are incarcerated and others have children but cannot afford to raise more.
Other costs mount — both in money and time, Conner said. Because Texas has a 24-hour waiting period between an initial consult and the abortion, women miss work and may have to pay for hotel rooms.
“There are fewer clinics to provide the services,” said Conner. “The few clinics that are left are in very high demand.”
Telemedicine could plug some gaps in care for women seeking abortion medication, instead of a surgical abortion. But there too access varies widely by geography. Some states ban telemedicine-facilitated abortions. Elsewhere, providers are using video-chat technology to dispense the medication. Seventeen states require licensed abortion providers to be physically present when administering abortion medication, which effectively is a ban on telemedicine, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Abortion medication is approved for use up to ten weeks into pregnancy, but under current FDA rules can only be dispensed at certain medical facilities, including abortion clinics.
Alternatives are being tested. In one FDA-reviewed study, clinicians can mail abortion medication directly to patients after a video chat. Study participants can go to any clinic for their screening and ultrasound, send the results to a participating abortion provider, and then video chat with that provider. If appropriate, the provider can decide to dispense the medication to the patient’s address, and the patient can take it at home.
Under this system, women don’t have to travel several hours just to pick up the abortion pills, Erica Chong, director of Gynuity Health Projects, told POLITICO. The Gynuity study has enrolled about 360 people across eight states since 2016; it builds on recent research concluding that telemedicine-facilitated medical abortions are just as safe for patients as the ones administered in-person.
Because it’s been reviewed by the FDA, the Gynuity trial is exempt from the dispensation limitation. The study operates in Maine, New York, New Mexico, Hawaii, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Georgia. Gynuity’s trial in Georgia began a few weeks ago, shortly before the state passed its “fetal heartbeat” law.
“With a lot of these bans, there’s going to be a long legal battle,” Chong said, explaining that she didn’t expect the new Georgia law, which bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected at about six weeks, to affect the study in that state just yet. But she noted that the recent spate of early abortion bans have alarmed patients, who are unsure whether their appointments are still legal.
Gynuity’s goal is to convince the FDA that dispensing abortion medication directly to women’s homes, or even to retail pharmacies, is safe and effective, and that restrictions on its dispensation should be eased, Chong said.
Outside the Gynuity trial, some providers across the country let patients drive to the facility closest to them and video chat a clinician located at another site. Planned Parenthood, for instance, lets patients in 14 states virtually consult with clinicians based elsewhere. Yet in many cases, the clinician must watch the patient ingest the pill on screen to comply with federal restrictions limiting where the medication can be dispensed. Women might still have to travel across state lines to access these services — and many don’t even realize these options exist.
“How’s a woman in Alabama going to know to go to a Georgia clinic to find services?” Chong said.
President Trump’s surprise announcement of an escalating series of new tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico is likely to upend hopes for early congressional action on his proposed North American trade deal and trigger economic upheaval on both sides of the border, according to trade analysts and business executives.
Business leaders reacted with dismay to Trump’s statement Thursday that he would impose a new 5 percent tariff on all goods from Mexico beginning June 10 to force the Mexican government to take more aggressive actions to prevent Central American migrants from crossing its territory en route to the United States.
And a prominent member of the president’s party, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, blasted Trump’s move as “a misuse of presidential tariff authority and contrary to congressional intent.” Implementing the tariffs, he said, would “seriously jeopardize passage” of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
If the administration determines that Mexican authorities have not done enough in response, the tariff would automatically jump to 10 percent on July 1 and then continue rising in 5 point increments at the start of each subsequent month until it reaches 25 percent on Oct. 1, according to a White House statement.
The tariffs could undermine an economic relationship that has been deepening for decades, and throw into chaos corporate and agricultural supply chains that have essentially worked in a system without tariffs since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico is on track to become the United States’ largest trading partner, ahead of China and Canada, according to census data through March.
The president’s announcement came after the White House appeared to be making headway with its push for ratification of the USMCA. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador earlier Thursday sent the accord to the Mexican Senate, asking it to convene a special session to pass it before September.
In this April 9 photo, trucks wait to cross the border with the United States in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Christian Torres/AP)
Trump has been pressing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to move forward with congressional approval, with the administration sending a formal statement of its plans to Capitol Hill hours before the abrupt tariff move.
Even by the standards of an unpredictable presidency, the announcement drew startled reactions from those involved in cross-border commerce.
Less than two weeks ago, the president agreed to lift 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Mexico, a move aimed at speeding ratification of the new trade deal by Congress. Senior Republicans, including Grassley, insisted on scrapping the levies before they would vote on the new deal.
Farmers in states such as Iowa had been among those hardest hit by Mexico’s retaliatory tariffs imposed to counter Trump’s metals fees.
The president’s new tariff increases would “essentially blow up USMCA,” said Rufus Yerxa, president of the National Foreign Trade Council. “The economic impact will be devastating on both sides of the border.”
Hardest hit would be Detroit’s automakers, which have spread their supply chains across North America since NAFTA.
Two-thirds of U.S. imports from Mexico are intracompany trade, parts that an American company uses to produce another product, according to Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities.
“Trade with Mexico is basically all about the supply chain, which essentially is all about cars,” Slok said.
At a news conference, Mexico’s deputy foreign minister for North America, Jesús Seade, said the suggested tariffs would be “disastrous” and promised that Mexico would respond “strongly.”
He called the announcement an “ice bath” for U.S.-Mexico relations but did not detail how Mexico might retaliate. Last year, Mexico responded to U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs with a set of retaliatory tariffs on products including pork, potatoes and whiskey.
Trump’s decision came just hours after López Obrador sent the new USMCA trade deal to Mexico’s senate to be ratified, saying it would lead to “more foreign investment.”
Seade said that the tariffs would be “impossible.”
Within 30 minutes of Trump’s tweet, the peso fell about 1.7 percent against the dollar. U.S. bond yields are also plunging, suggesting concerns about the economic impact of the tariffs.
The United States last year exported $265 billion in goods to Mexico, more than to China, Japan and Germany combined. The United States imported $347 billion in goods from Mexico.
Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican diplomat now with McClarty Associates, said the new tariffs would run counter to the existing North American Free Trade Agreement, which provides for mostly duty-free trade among the United States and its two neighbors.
“Why even have a trade agreement if it means nothing?” he said.
Trump said he imposed the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which grants the president sweeping authority to regulate commercial activity in the event of a crisis.
“IEEPA has a very broad scope, so a court challenge to the President’s action here would be tough,” said Simon Lester, a trade law expert at the Cato Institute. “The statute does give Congress the ability to block the president’s action through a joint resolution, but Congress hasn’t shown much willingness to act on these matters.”
The president’s tariff plan threatens to disrupt commerce with the country’s largest trading partner as the economy is slowing, imperiling his goal of steady 3 percent annual economic growth.
Tariffs on goods imported from Mexico would be paid foremost by U.S. companies in need of Mexican goods, and a significant share of those importers would likely pass on the higher costs to consumers.
Trump said the new tariffs would encourage companies in Mexico to “start moving back to the United States to make their products and goods,” leading to a “massive return of jobs back to American cities and towns.”
Others were less certain.
“It’s high risk and I’m having a hard time seeing the reward,” said Dan Ujczo, a trade attorney with Dickinson Wright.
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