U.S. boosts military presence in the Middle East after Iran seizes tankers

The U.S. military is working with allies to send more ships and aircraft to the Middle East as Iran escalates its seizures of merchant tankers, the National Security Council announced Friday.

"Today, the Department of Defense will be making a series of moves to bolster our defensive posture in the Arabian Gulf,” NSC spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

The announcement comes after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized a Panama-flagged oil tanker called Niovi on May 3, as the ship was traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. The tanker left Dubai, and moved toward a UAE port when a dozen boats from the IRGC navy forced the tanker to head into Iranian waters.

Another incident occurred April 27, when the Advantage Sweet tanker ship belonging to the Marshall Islands was also seized after colliding with an Iranian boat, which injured several crewmembers, according to Iran’s state media.

Over the past two years, the IRGC has attacked or disrupted 15 tankers as tensions between Iran and the U.S. grow over the country’s nuclear program.

Kirby said he will “provide additional details on those reinforcements” within days. Washington will also be increasing is coordination with the International Maritime Security Construct, a group of 11 nations formed to help protect merchant shipping in the region.

The government of Iran has “no justification for these actions," said Kirby, adding that the U.S. “will not allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardize freedom of navigation in the Middle East waterways, including the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab.”

Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, also said in a statement that “Iran’s unwarranted, irresponsible and unlawful seizure and harassment of merchant vessels must stop.”

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/hsSDVgF
via IFTTT

Read More

Hodding Carter III, State Department spokesperson during Iran hostage crisis, dies at 88

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Hodding Carter III, a Mississippi journalist and civil rights activist who as U.S. State Department spokesperson informed Americans about the Iran hostage crisis and later won awards for his televised documentaries, has died. He was 88.

His daughter, Catherine Carter Sullivan, confirmed that he died Thursday in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Before moving to Washington in 1977, Carter was editor and publisher of his family’s newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Miss.

Carter had been co-chair of the Loyalist Democrats, a racially diverse group that won a credentials fight at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, unseating the all-white delegation by Mississippi's governor, John Bell Williams.

Carter’s campaign work in 1976 for Jimmy Carter, no relation, helped secure him a job as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. It was in this role that he was seen on television news during the 444 days that Iran held 52 Americans hostage.

When Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House in 1980, Carter returned to journalism as president of MainStreet, a television production company specializing in public affairs programs that earned him four national Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for documentaries.

Carter appeared as a panelist, moderator or news anchor at ABC, BBC, NBC, CNN and PBS. He also wrote op-ed columns for The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. He served twice on the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Carter later was named the John S. Knight Professor of Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland. In 1998, he became president of the John S. Knight and James L. Knight Foundation, based in Miami.

After leaving the foundation, he began teaching leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006. He wrote two books, “The Reagan Years” and “The South Strikes Back.”

Carter, an ex-Marine who exercised regularly, underwent surgery in 2012 to have a pacemaker installed to help control an irregular heart rhythm.

Progressive politics ran in his family. William Hodding Carter III was born April 7, 1935, in New Orleans, to William Hodding Carter Jr. and Betty Werlein Carter. They moved to Greenville, Miss., recruited by a group of community leaders to start a weekly newspaper that evolved into the Delta Democrat-Times.

His father's editorials about social and economic intolerance earned him a national reputation and undying enmity and threats from white supremacists. He also won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1946, for a series of editorials critical of U.S. treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

His mother, from a prominent New Orleans family, was a feature writer and editor who recalled sitting at home with a shotgun across her lap after receiving threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

Carter was the oldest of three sons. His brother Philip Dutarte Carter, reported for Newsweek and served as publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times and Vieux Carré Courier as well as financier of Gambit, a New Orleans weekly. Another brother, Thomas Hennen Carter, killed himself playing Russian roulette.

Hodding Carter III attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire before graduating from Greenville High School in 1953. He graduated from Princeton University in 1953 and married Margaret Ainsworth Wolfe. They had four children before divorcing in 1978.

Carter later married Patricia M. Derian, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who sought to transform U.S. foreign policy as President Carter's assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs.

After she died in 2016, Carter married again, in November 2019, to journalist and author Patricia Ann O’Brien after the two connected during a reunion at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/WE8Ikp7
via IFTTT

Read More

House GOP lays down its border marker as Trump-era migrant policy runs out

House Republicans passed a sweeping border bill Thursday after months of intraparty sniping, a symbolic victory achieved just hours before a Trump-era migrant expulsion policy expires.

The bill is stacked with long-sought GOP priorities, including restarting construction on the border wall and placing new limits on asylum seekers. Republicans still lost two of their own members — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and John Duarte (R-Calif.) — despite days of around-the-clock negotiations that resulted in multiple last-minute changes.

The legislation is dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Instead, several senators are focused on trying to find a narrow, bipartisan solution focused on the end of Title 42, a law that permits the U.S. to deny asylum and migration claims for public health reasons.

But Republicans view the ability to pass their larger legislation as a dual political win: a political cudgel they can use to whack Democrats and a showcase of hard-fought unity on a divisive issue. The party’s immigration priorities had sparked weeks of high-profile infighting earlier this year — when lawmakers had to punt more conservative asylum legislation that caused heartburn among some centrists — a storyline that has replayed several times since January as House GOP leaders maneuver around their four-vote margin.

“We all wanted to achieve the same thing, but we started off in very different places,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in an interview Thursday.

But, he added, with Title 42 expiring at midnight Thursday, “today made sense as the right date to do it because more people are focusing on the problem than I've seen in a long time. … Here you have Republicans coming together saying there is a way to fix it.”

No Democrats voted for the bill, which they labeled the “Child Deportation Act.” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued Republicans wanted to “weaponize and politicize the border as opposed to doing something meaningful about it.”

Thursday’s vote is the end result of months of negotiations that formally restarted in early March.

And they still faced last-minute pushback that sparked a hectic 48 hours of negotiating that at times called into question whether they could pass a bill at all, given their slim majority.

In the final days, agriculture-minded Republicans withheld support for the bill unless leaders walked back language mandating the use of E-Verify, which allows businesses to check employees’ immigration status. To appease those members, the legislation now includes a nonbinding provision that the Department of Homeland Security should “ensure any adverse impact” related to the agriculture sector are “considered and addressed” when implementing the requirements.

And to placate conservatives, GOP leaders changed a deal they had struck with Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) relating to a report about cartels, instead requiring Congress to “commission” a report that would include a national strategy on how to deal with them.

“That’s the numbers game they’re having to play,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) about the last-minute discussions with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Scalise and others. “If they pull something out, that is going to pull other people away.”

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/f5NhAIt
via IFTTT

Read More

FDA eases restrictions on blood donation for men who have sex with men

The FDA on Thursday finalized a long-awaited plan to loosen restrictions on blood donation by men who have sex with men. It will update risk-based individual questionnaires to help reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV.

Screening questions asked of prospective blood donors will still limit people who report having sex with a new partner, more than one partner in the past three months or anal sex in the past three months from giving blood.

The FDA said it “strongly believes” the new policy will not hurt the safety or availability of the nation’s blood supply.

Currently, men who have sex with men must abstain from sex for three months before giving blood. The new policy still limits people who have certain risk factors — such as a history of non-prescription injection drug use, those who have exchanged sex for money or drugs, or those who previously tested HIV-positive from donating.

It also limits blood donation by people who are taking medicine to prevent HIV infection, such as antiretroviral therapy, pre-exposure prophylaxis and post-exposure prophylaxis.

“The FDA has worked diligently to evaluate our policies and ensure we had the scientific evidence to support individual risk assessment for donor eligibility while maintaining appropriate safeguards to protect recipients of blood products,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

Background: The final guidelines are consistent with the draft policy issued in January, which proposed to ease restrictions on blood donation from certain men who have sex with men.

What’s next: The FDA says blood donation establishments “may now implement” the new policy, but it is unclear how long it will take for donation centers to revise questionnaires and procedures. The agency did not set a deadline for implementing the revised policy.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/Rl4vCg5
via IFTTT

Read More

Cities scramble to prepare for deluge of migrants following immigration change

It’s not just Texas that’s bracing for an influx of migrants this week.

Cities throughout the U.S. are preparing to receive busloads of people at potentially record numbers due to a pandemic-era immigration policy expiring on Thursday. U.S. officials have said they expect as many as 13,000 people a day to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, many seeking asylum. That’s more than double the current average.

The expected surge has local leaders warning that they’re not equipped to welcome them and pleading with the federal government to launch a national resettlement strategy. In Chicago, migrants are sleeping on the floors of police stations. New York Mayor Eric Adams, dealing with packed emergency shelters, intends to send newcomers to neighboring counties. Philadelphia has launched a fund for residents to donate to nonprofits providing services like food and shelter.

Republican Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are already preparing to transport migrants north before the policy change, a political stunt launched last summer by the Texas governor to send migrants to Democratic-led cities like New York and Washington.

“Cities have now been confronted with what is a federal government responsibility,” said Evan Dreyer, deputy chief of staff to the Denver mayor. “We are doing our best, but we need more help than we are getting right now.”

At midnight, the Biden administration is lifting a Trump-enacted policy known as Title 42 that allowed officials to turn away people at the border for years on public health grounds. Biden has been met with criticism from the right and left over his immigration approach: Republicans have blasted the president for being too weak on the border and Democrats blame the administration for making it too difficult for people fleeing violent countries in Latin America to apply for asylum.

Biden officials have said that they’re ready for the anticipated surge. But on Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that the change in policy does not mean that the border is open. He blamed the current situation on Congress for failing to act and allowing a “broken and outdated immigration system” to remain in place for two decades.

“Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States and to impose tougher consequences on those who choose not to use those pathways,” Mayorkas said at a press conference.

The days and weeks ahead “have the potential to be very difficult,” he added.

But outside of Washington infighting, the more pressing concern for local leaders is where to house the new arrivals, with some cities resorting to drastic steps, like converting police stations, churches and schools, with emergency shelters already full.

In Philadelphia, the most recent bus of migrants arrived early Wednesday morning. The city has been preparing for months by adding shelter capacity and case management support via contracted providers. Since November, Philadelphia has received over 800 asylum seekers and 26 buses.

“The situation is fluid, but we are preparing for the possibility of an influx of new arrivals and plan to continue welcoming people with dignity and respect,” said Sarah Peterson, communications director for the city. “We are a proud welcoming city; our diversity is our strength.”

Denver has already seen an uptick in arrivals over the past several days. To prepare for what is expected to be a much larger and sustained increase, city officials have curtailed who will be eligible to sleep in shelters. Denver is limiting asylum-seekers to a 30-day stay in city facilities. Now, Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration will only provide lodging to asylum-seekers who have what’s known as an alien registration number, an identification tag given to non-citizens by the federal government.

The end of Title 42 marks a major policy shift for how the Biden administration processes migrants at the border, including the pathway for seeking asylum. Under new rules, migrants claiming asylum must first seek refuge and be denied in another country before arriving in the U.S. They also must schedule an appointment at a U.S. border point of entry using an app.

To ease the strain on this side of the border, Biden officials are setting up processing centers in Guatemala and Columbia where people can apply before coming to the U.S.

More than 1,500 U.S. National Guard troops have been dispatched to the border to serve in administrative roles, not law enforcement.

Many mayors are frustrated by what they say is a lack of guidance from the Biden administration. In New York, Adams said his city has “been left without the necessary support to manage the crisis.”

“With a vacuum of leadership, we are now being forced to undertake our own decompression strategy,” he said in a statement last week.

That strategy involves sending more than 300 migrants to neighboring counties, a decision that those leaders have ripped over concerns about their own ability to take them in.

In El Paso, Mayor Oscar Leeser called for more guidance from the federal government, warning the city is confronting the "unknown." But he defended the White House as a good partner and said his team has been working with the administration very closely.

Leeser, a Democrat, said there are between 10,000 and 12,000 migrants waiting in Juárez to cross into the city. El Paso is rehabilitating vacant schools to temporarily house the asylum seekers.

Last year, the city used charter buses to transport migrants to major cities like Chicago and New York and relieve crowding in its full shelter system. The city is prepared to resume the practice with thousands of migrants expected to enter the country in the weeks ahead, but hasn't said when exactly it will resume.

“If we start getting 5 to 10,000 people a day, they’re all not coming to El Paso. They’re coming to the United States,” Leeser said. “And our job will be to continue to help our asylum seekers get to the next destination.”

Joe Anuta and Danielle Muoio Dunn contributed reporting.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/9TwOFVd
via IFTTT

Read More

Mayorkas: It’s a 'sad' and 'tragic' day when politicians bus migrants for political purposes

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it’s “both a sad and tragic day when a government official uses migrants as a pawn for political purposes,” after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent migrants to Washington on Thursday.

A bus of more than 30 migrants arrived Thursday at the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris less than 24 hours after a bus of 40 migrants arrived at the Naval Observatory. Last year, more than 100 migrants bused from Texas arrived at Harris’ residence in Washington on Christmas Eve in freezing temperatures.

The move comes as cities throughout the U.S. are preparing to receive busloads of people at potentially record numbers due to Title 42 expiring. Title 42 allowed officials to turn away people at the border on public health grounds.

The expected surge after Title 42 ends Thursday has local leaders warning that they’re not equipped to welcome them and pleading with the federal government to launch a national resettlement strategy.

Abbott has bused more than 13,000 migrants from his state to Democratic-led cities like New York City, Chicago and Washington, saying that Texas is ill-prepared to handle the massive influx of migrants crossing the border.

"Think about the contrast of what the president just said and what you've seen Secretary Mayorkas say when he repeatedly said the border is not open, the border is closed,” Abbott said on Fox News onThursday. “And it's nothing but a lie. The fact of the matter is the border has been open under the Biden administration, enticing people to come here illegally."

Abbott said Monday that Texas was preparing to bus “thousands more migrants in coming days.”

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/LxmPfzQ
via IFTTT

Read More

NYC sends first bus of asylum-seekers to suburbs despite backlash

NEW YORK — The administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams dispatched a bus of asylum-seekers to a town north of the city Thursday, marking the first time City Hall has successfully sent migrants to the suburbs as it deals with strains on its own social safety net.

On Thursday morning, a few dozen asylum-seekers were put on a coach bound for a hotel in Orange Lake, a hamlet with 10,000 residents about 70 miles north of the city in Orange County, according to City Hall.

“We are coordinating, explaining to our colleagues in the state that this is a statewide issue,” Adams said Thursday during an unrelated press briefing.

The moderate Democratic mayor drew a distinction between what the city is doing and the actions of Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who Adams has accused of sending busloads of migrants to the city without warning.

“We’re paying for [services]. We’re only taking volunteers. We are communicating with the officials up there on what we’re doing,” Adams said. “Some may not like it, but people can’t say we’re not communicating.”

Many of those colleagues, however, have found the city’s outreach lacking.

Republican Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus said in an interview Thursday he spoke with Adams a day earlier and asked for more information about the migrants who would be arriving and the services that would be provided. Ultimately, he urged the mayor to delay the move.

“We've had some very heated conversations between the mayor and myself,” Neuhaus told POLITICO Thursday. “Nothing nasty, but I said, 'Look it, this can be a real security problem if you bring these folks up here and we have zero information.’”

The reaction from Rockland County has been overtly hostile. Rockland County Executive Ed Day, who is also a Republican, has deployed police in anticipation of arriving asylum-seekers and at one point threatened to grab Adams by the throat.

“His thoughts and how he responded to this really shows a lack of leadership — I thought he was the Texas governor the way he acted," Adams said of Day.

On Tuesday, a judge granted a temporary restraining order barring a Rockland County hotel from hosting asylum-seekers, something Adams said Thursday he would fight in court.

Against this tense backdrop, county executives from across the state are expected to have a call with Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul later Thursday to discuss the city’s efforts to move migrants to other parts of the state.

“We're looking for some communication, coordination, clarification and good government partnerships,” said Mark Lavigne, spokesperson for the state Association of Counties. “This is a federal issue that is flowing downhill to the level of government that serves those most in need on the local level.”

The conversation is being driven by the situation in New York City. Adams said the city has run out of space to house arriving asylum-seekers after opening more than 120 emergency hotels and several larger Humanitarian Emergency Relief and Response Centers.

“I think it was Sunday, [New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Zachary Iscol] called me around 1 a.m. in the morning and said: We literally don’t have any more hotel space,” Adams said.

At the time, the city placed cots in a police facility gym. Going forward, it will be looking for more alternative settings to house large numbers of asylum-seekers in congregate settings including warehouses, a former military base in Brooklyn and the campus of a Queens psychiatric center.

With those situations in mind, Adams took the extraordinary step Wednesday of penning an executive order that suspends parts of the city’s right-to-shelter law, which drew immediate condemnation from the New York Civil Liberties Union. Under the new guidelines, for example, families with children could be housed in congregate settings instead of in a private room with a kitchen and bathroom. And while Adams called the decision to suspend parts of the law a difficult one, he argued it was born of necessity.

“When my son went to college in a dorm, he didn’t have his own kitchen and bathroom, and he still did a great job,” Adams said. “That's just not realistic: When you get [thousands of] people in your city, that you're going to find a place for kitchen and a bathroom.”

Since last year, more than 60,000 asylum-seekers have passed through the city, with nearly 38,000 currently in the administration's care, according to the latest numbers from City Hall. All told, officials expect the price tag for housing, shelter and other services to reach $4.3 billion by next summer.

Those numbers and the impending expiration of a border policy known as Title 42 have driven the mayor to pointedly criticize President Joe Biden over the White House’s handling of the crisis.

Yesterday, the mayor no longer appeared on a list of top Democratic surrogates supporting the president’s reelection campaign.

On Thursday, Adams said that he is a strong supporter of Biden’s campaign and the two are still close.

“Our relationship is a good one,” Adams said. “I think if you ask him, he’ll tell you: Eric is my guy.”

And he added that the president might want to keep some people around who can contradict him from time to time.

“You don’t want a friend who’s going to agree with you just to agree, you want a friend that’s going to be honest and candid,” Adams said. “I’ve made it clear, no matter what committee I’m on, there’s only one committee that means the most to me: the committee of the mayor of the City of New York.”

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/8uVo2Dc
via IFTTT

Read More