by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : The US government is a day away from a shutdown as lawmakers and the White House feud over immigration.
Congress faces a Friday deadline to pass a stopgap measure that would fund federal agencies until next month, BBC reported on Wednesday.
Democrats want the bill to include protections for immigrants who entered the US illegally as children.
Hopes of a bipartisan deal were scuttled last week after US President Donald Trump’s alleged use of a crude term during White House negotiations.
Neither Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House, nor Democrats want to be blamed for a federal shutdown with crucial mid-term elections looming in November.
House Republicans are attempting to entice Democrats to vote for the continuing resolution by including a provision to extend the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip) for six years.
Chip, which provides healthcare for nine million children, is near the top of Democrats’ wish list.
The House of Representatives could vote on the measure as early as Thursday, and if it passes, the bill would go to the Senate.
At least some Democratic votes are needed to pass the budget measure ahead of Friday’s deadline.
However, the Republican proposal could also face opposition among their own hardline rank-and-file in the House.
Republicans hope a provision in the bill to eliminate a tax on expensive health plans could appease conservative lawmakers.
Democrats want the bill to include protections for around 700,000 undocumented immigrants who came to country as children, known as “Dreamers”.
Trump last year ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), the programme that allowed Dreamers to stay in the US.
The US president gave a deadline of March 5 for Congress to come up with a solution.
The Republican president had signalled he was ready to make a deal to help the Dreamers in return for funding on border security, including a wall along the US border with Mexico.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : The White House expressed its support for a short-term spending bill proposed by House Republicans, in a bid to avoid a government shutdown by Friday if the US Congress fail to pass a funding bill for the federal government.
“We do support the short-term C.R.. However, it’s not our first choice,” said White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders.
As a stop-gap measure, the proposed short-term spending bill will fund the US federal government through February 16. It includes a six-year reauthorisation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which Democrats have demanded, Xinhua reported.
The federal government is running on its third temporary spending bill since the fiscal year of 2018, which began on October 1, 2017 and is set to expire on January 19.
“We’d still like to see a clean funding bill, a two-year budget deal,” said Sanders.
US Congress is now discussing a two-year budget deal. However, there still is large gap between Republicans and Democrats over immigration.
Democrats said they won’t support any spending bill that does not include protections for young people who were brought to the US illegally as children and will lose their protected status in March. While Conservative Republicans supported legislation that would cut government spending except for defense.
“The president certainly doesn’t want a shutdown. And if one happens, I think you only have one place to look, and that’s to the Democrats, who are holding our military and our national security hostage by trying to push through other policies that have nothing to do with the budget,” Sanders said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Washington : The US has announced that it will withhold more than half of the funding it provides for a UN agency that supports Palestinians, about two weeks after President Donald Trump threatened to pull funding for the group.
Washington will withhold $65 million out of its scheduled $125 million payment to the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides humanitarian aid, education, social services and medical care to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, CNN reported.
Trump had said that the US could cut aid if Palestinians rejected peace efforts with Israel.
The decision drew condemnation from Palestinians and praise from Israel. The UN officials expressed deep concern and refugee groups worried about the humanitarian impact, particularly the potential for further destabilisation of a region already reeling from conflict in Syria.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Tuesday that the move had nothing to do with “punishing” the Palestinians for their refusal to enter into negotiations with Israel, or their decision to push for a UN vote that resulted in global condemnation of the US decision to unilaterally recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
“This is not aimed at punishing anyone,” Nauert said on Tuesday as she outlined the Trump administration’s decision to release $60 million in funding for the agency, while indefinitely withholding another $65 million.
The decision came two weeks after Trump complained that Washington receives “no appreciation or respect” in return for its aid.
“The move will have devastating consequences for vulnerable Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, including hundreds of thousands of refugee children in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria,” said Jan Egeland, former Norwegian Foreign Minister and former UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “very concerned” about the impact on the region.
Nauert said the money was being withheld because the US would like to see reforms at UNRWA and added that Washington would also like to see other countries contribute more to the relief agency, which was founded in 1949 after the Arab-Israeli war, to deal specifically with Palestinian refugees.
PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi slammed the decision to withhold the funds, saying it targeted “the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people”, adding that it “will generate further instability throughout the region”.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, praising the move said: “UNRWA has proven time and again to be an agency that misuses the humanitarian aid of the international community and instead supports anti-Israel propaganda, perpetuates the plight of Palestinian refugees and encourages hate.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : A US trade panel has voted to continue anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duty probe against Chinese aluminium products despite Beijing’s strong dissatisfaction with the move.
“There is a reasonable indication that a US industry is materially injured by imports of common alloy aluminium sheet from China… subsidised and sold in the US…,” the US International Trade Commission (USITC) said on Friday.
As such, the US Commerce Department would continue its probe with its preliminary anti-subsidy duty determination due in February and on anti-dumping due in April, the USITC said.
China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOC) had expressed strong dissatisfaction with the “self-initiated” US Commerce Department’s probe launched in November 2017.
It was the first time in 25 years that the US government had launched such investigations without a request from a US company or industry, Xinhua news agency said.
China would take all necessary measures to defend the rights of its own enterprises, Wang Hejum head of MOC said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : Far from its intended effect, the “Muslim ban” on January 27 last year that barred individuals from seven predominately Muslim countries from entering the US for 90 days, generated public opposition to the policy, according to a new study.
Within a day of Trump’s decree, thousands of protesters flooded airports around the country in opposition to what was quickly deemed a “Muslim ban” and by March 6, the order had been formally revoked, said political scientists.
According to him, visible resistance to the order in the immediate aftermath of its signing may have produced a rare shift in public opinion that resulted in mass opposition to Trump’s policy.
The shift was caused by “an influx of information portraying the ban as being at odds with egalitarian principles of American identity and religious liberty,” said Loren Collingwood, Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of California-Riverside; Nazita Lajevardi of Michigan State University and Kassra A. R. Oskooii of the University of Delaware.
The findings, published in the journal Political Behavior, suggest the bounty of information that surfaced after the order went into effect — information that painted the ban as deeply un-American and in fact “incompatible with American values” — contributed to a broad-based increase in opposition to it.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers compared the results of two surveys of the same 311 people — one conducted just days before the order’s announcement, and the other in the two weeks after.
They found that among those respondents, more than 30 percent moved against the ban in the interim.
Those who shifted most radically, meanwhile, were “high American identifiers.”
Such respondents were shown to consider their status as Americans who belong to one nation to be a defining element of their identities.
Media coverage of anti-ban demonstrations, the researchers noted, often depicted protesters “shrouded in American flags,” visually linking the concept of more inclusive immigration policies to American egalitarianism.
The movement against the ban also benefited from the outspokenness of various news commentators and publications, many of whom were quick to criticise the order by characterising it as antithetical to core American ideals.
The findings suggest that American identity can be “primed” to produce shifts in public opinion. It also demonstrates that public opinion may be more malleable than previously thought.
—IANS
