Biden signs $1.2 trillion funding package after Senate’s early-morning passage ended government shutdown threat

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Saturday signed a $ 1.2 trillion package of spending bills after Congress had passed the long overdue legislation just hours earlier, ending the threat of a partial government shutdown. “This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted,” Biden said in a statement. “But it rejects extreme cuts from House Republicans and expands access to child care, invests in cancer research, funds mental health and substance use care, advances American leadership abroad, and provides resources to secure the…

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Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing

Why would the most notoriously cash-strapped man in America waste money on frivolous lawsuits? On Monday, Donald Trump—whose lawyers recently announced that he can’t come up with the money to post a $ 454 million bond in his civil fraud case—fired off yet another suit against a news organization that reported facts he didn’t like. The targets this time are ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who Trump alleges defamed him by stating that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll. The case looks like a…

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Why These Women Chose to Have 5 or More Kids

Why do some women choose to have large families? As the American birth rate declines, academic Catherine Ruth Pakaluk decided to look at the 5% of American women who are outliers, and who have five or more children. With a colleague, she interviewed 55 of those women, and shares their reasons and experiences in her new book, “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.” These women share openly about how having a large family has affected their careers, their identities, and their marriages. Listen to the full interview…

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Axios: MoveOn Endorses Summer Lee and Andy Kim in First Congressional Endorsements

Read the Axios story here and 2024 election memo here Washington, D.C. – Today, MoveOn Political Action announced its endorsements of Representative Summer Lee (PA-12) for reelection and Representative Andy Kim for the New Jersey U.S. Senate seat. These are the group’s first primary endorsements in 2024. As The New York Times reported in January, MoveOn launched its $ 32+ million 2024 election program to mobilize millions of young surge voters to protect our freedoms and our democracy from Donald Trump and MAGA extremists. MoveOn is focusing on working to…

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Amid safety concerns, AFGE urges Congress to increase Bureau of Prisons funding

Union officials are urging Congress to provide more funding to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. BOP has spent years struggling with staff attrition, and safety and security issues. The American Federation of Government Employees said the fiscal 2024 budget for BOP, as part of the recent government funding deal, would only worsen the agency’s current 40% staffing shortage. And AFGE warned that a 38% cut to funding for facility maintenance would make federal prisons more dangerous environments for both employees and inmates. (BOP needs more funding, not Less, to address…

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