The White House will restrict travel from India starting at midnight on Tuesday, May 4, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced on Friday.
Driving the news: The Biden administration cited a steep rise in coronavirus cases in the country and the possible emergence of multiple variants.
President Biden’s first 100 days in office have been aggressive on policy, but subdued on style.
Biden, a 78-year-old former vice president and centrist senator who was far from the first choice of most progressives in the 2020 Democratic primary, has gone big on policy, seeking to reshape the economy and social safety net amid a historic pandemic.
He’s sought to undo former President Trump’s agenda, issuing executive actions from Day One to do away with his predecessor’s wall on the southern border and travel ban, among many other issues. Continue reading.
NEW YORK — The federal government said Tuesday it is making more than $8 billion available to build and improve the nation’s transmission lines as part of its efforts to improve America’s aging electric grid and meet President Joe Biden’s ambitious clean-energy goals.
The administration is also pledging to speed up a sluggish permitting process that has delayed the types of major transmission projects that are crucial to meeting Biden’s goals.
The president has said he wants the nation to produce 100% clean energy by 2035. But that goal faces massive hurdles. Those include an electric grid that has been pummeled by climate change and which needs enormous expansion to carry electricity from renewable energy sources to densely populated regions. Continue reading.
After four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims, the Joe Biden era has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard.
Among the most notable falsehoods of President Biden’s first 100 days in office was his claim — which he made three times — that Georgia’s controversial Republican-backed election law had shortened voting hours.
The claim was one of two uttered by Biden to earn the Fact Checker’s “Four Pinocchio” rating, reserved for whoppers — the other being his wildly off-base statement, borrowed from the campaign, that federal contracts “awarded directly to foreign companies” rose by 30 percent under President Donald Trump.
By the time President Biden’s aides gathered for their morning meeting on Monday, the juicy whopper of a mistruth making its way around the conservative ecosphere — that Biden’s climate plan would significantly limit America’s hamburger consumption — had officially entered mainstream public discourse.
Biden’s team looked for an opportunity to quickly debunk the falsehood. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted a CNN fact check titled, “No, Biden is not trying to force Americans to eat less red meat,” while several press aides tweeted a photo of a grinning Biden flipping burgers at a 2019 Iowa steak fry, along with the caption, “White House to the fact-challenged: where’s the beef?”
To White House aides, the wholly fictional Biden-will-ban-hamburgers story line was in part an amusing flare-up perpetuated by Republicans who have struggled to find ways to successfully attack the president. They joked privately that White House press secretary Jen Psaki should start her daily press briefing by eating a burger. Continue reading.
President Biden is tapping a Houston-area sheriff to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), again turning to local law enforcement beyond the Beltway to lead a major agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Ed Gonzalez has served as sheriff for Harris County, which includes the Houston metro area, since 2017 and previously spent 18 years with the Houston Police Department and served three terms on the Houston City Council.
Gonzalez has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s immigration policy and in 2017 terminated the county’s 287(g) agreement with ICE, ending the practice of allowing local officers to carry out some immigration enforcement. Continue reading.
It’s like a bad game of telephone.
The New York Post reported that a children’s picture book written by Vice President Harris was being handed out in “welcome kits” to young migrants at a shelter in Long Beach, Calif.
Fox News, which is owned by the same family as the New York Post, then amplified the story with its own version of the article. Continue reading.
President Biden on Tuesday is expected to sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 by March 2022.
At that time, the order will result in a 37-percent raise for federal contractors making the current contracting minimum $10.95, and setting their salary at over double the regular statutory federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009.
The move would affect hundreds of thousands of workers, according to a senior administration official. Continue reading.
The State Department is urging all Americans to leave India as the country grapples with a devastating wave of coronavirus cases that is pushing its health system to a breaking point.
In a level 4 travel alert, the highest level that can be issued by the State Department, the U.S. Embassy in India sounded the alarm over the availability of medical care and pressed Americans to take advantage of the daily flights that are available out of India back to the U.S.
“Access to all types of medical care is becoming severely limited in India due to the surge in Covid-19 cases. U.S. citizens who wish to depart India should take advantage of available commercial transportation options now. Direct flights between India and the United States are offered daily, with additional flight options available to U.S. citizens via transfers in Paris and Frankfurt,” the embassy said. Continue reading.
In the first seconds of his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Biden acknowledged the historic nature of the people who sat behind him.
“Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President,” he began. “No president has ever said those words from this podium. No president has ever said those words. And it’s about time.”
He was referring, of course, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — the only woman to have ever held that position — and Vice President Harris, the only woman and person of Black or Asian descent to ever have done so. It was a moment without equal in American history. Continue reading.
