SRN - US News

Bill and Lisa Ford to raise $10M for Detroit youth nonprofit endowments

Ten nonprofits serving young people in Detroit will get an unusual, lasting gift as part of a campaign started by Lisa Ford and her husband, Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Co.

The Fords, along with The Children’s Foundation, Tuesday announced their plans to raise at least $10 million to set up permanent endowments for ten nonprofits in the city alongside Ford’s investment in the refurbishment of Michigan Central Station, a long vacant train station in Detroit.

“Creating endowments for these ten youth serving organizations is really a way to say, ‘These organizations that serve tens of thousands of kids every day need to be here as long as that train station is,’” said Andrew Stein, president and CEO of The Children’s Foundation, which is based in Detroit and was established in part by proceeds from the sale of the Children’s Hospital of Michigan in 2011.

Endowments are funds a nonprofit can invest and the annual financial returns from those investments can go into the nonprofit’s budget. They are usually associated with major hospitals and universities — with Harvard University’s endowment famously reaching over $50 billion — rather than small community nonprofits. Detroit-area nonprofits may apply in June, when Michigan Central Station will reopen, and ten selected organizations will each receive $500,000 to launch an endowment.

The Children’s Foundation will manage the nonprofits’ endowments and offer them guidance and technical support over two years. The campaign will also match up to $500,000 that the nonprofits raise themselves, meaning each potentially could end up with $1.5 million to start an endowment.

Lisa Ford said the idea for creating endowments for youth nonprofits evolved out of their commitment to supporting a robust and vibrant future for the city and the automotive industry.

“I was just blown away by these people who had ideas and deep feelings about how to help children in Detroit,” she said, explaining that part of the satisfaction of the campaign was bringing in other donors. “The whole idea of Michigan Central is collaboration and inclusivity. So it wasn’t something we wanted to do by ourselves. We would never have thought of it that way.”

Ford was also inspired by the success of another fundraising effort she led in September to benefit a different Detroit children’s organization, The Children’s Center. That has put the campaign on a tight timeline to raise $10 million by June, which she said has actually been a boon in some ways.

“While that shocked a lot of people. It also allowed for us to say, you know, ‘We need an answer now,’” she said.

Endowments are relatively rare among charitable nonprofits, with only slightly more than 10% reporting to the Internal Revenue Service that they have one. Research from Todd Ely, associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, and his coauthors found that larger, older nonprofits and certain types like universities, hospitals, land trusts and arts institutions are more likely to have endowments. They lend organizations a stronger sense of financial credibility, Ely said, though they are not a panacea for all financial problems.

“You just have an organization that donors know isn’t going anywhere, and it feels like a fairly safe bet to support relative to many other nonprofits that might be operating more on a shoe string,” Ely said.

The main debate over endowments is whether the assets are more useful now or in the future, with some arguing philanthropic dollars should be used as quickly as possible. Others see endowments as a vehicle for generational equity, putting the power to direct funds into the hands of the nonprofit and its future leaders.

Different types of endowments also offer different tradeoffs. Meadow Didier, director of consulting for Nonprofit Finance Fund, recommends a type of endowment that allows the nonprofit’s boards and leaders to access the principle amount of the endowment when needed. A quasi-endowment, also called a board designated reserve fund, gives nonprofit leaders more flexibility than a permanent endowment, she said, though she praised any donor thinking about the long-term financial health of nonprofits.

Stein, of The Children’s Foundation, said the campaign is seeking input from community and foundations leaders in designing the application process and selection criteria, and that they intend to use a broad definition for the kinds of services eligible organizations might offer.

The foundation will convene a community panel to select the nonprofits, Stein said, emphasizing that the decision will not be made in a boardroom at Ford or by the foundation.

___

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


Over-the-counter birth control pill now available to Wisconsin Medicaid patients

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Medicaid recipients in Wisconsin will have access to the first over-the-counter birth control pill starting Tuesday, allowing them to easily receive contraceptive medication with no out-of-pocket costs or doctor’s prescription, Gov. Tony Evers announced.

Evers, a Democrat, promised in his State of the State speech in January that Opill would be available to people in the state’s Medicaid program known as BadgerCare Plus. It will start becoming available in some Medicaid-enrolled pharmacies on Tuesday and expand over the coming weeks, Evers said in a statement.

Evers said it was more important than ever to ensure access to the drug “as we see continued attacks on women’s reproductive freedoms here in Wisconsin and across our country.”

BadgerCare Plus currently covers over-the-counter daily oral contraception with a prescription from a provider. A new standing order from Evers will allow for Opill to be available without a prescription and with no out-of-pocket costs.

The suggested retail price from manufacturer Perrigo for a one-month supply is about $20.

The Food and Drug Administration in July approved the sale of once-a-day Opill without a prescription.

The availability of the pill to women nationwide, not just those on Medicaid, gives them another birth control option amid the legal and political battles over reproductive health, including the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. That ruling upended abortion access across the U.S.

Hormone-based pills have long been the most common form of birth control in the U.S., used by tens of millions of women since the 1960s. Until Opill’s approval, all required a prescription.

Opill is an older class of contraceptives, sometimes called minipills, that contain a single synthetic hormone, progestin. Minipills generally carry fewer side effects than more popular combination estrogen and progestin pills.


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


KEYWORD NOTICE – Sex trade to slavery: A UN agency says criminals reap $236B a year in profits from forced labor

GENEVA (AP) — Illegal profits from forced labor worldwide have risen to the “obscene” amount of $236 billion per year, the U.N. labor agency reported Tuesday, with sexual exploitation to blame for three-fourths of the take from a business that deprives migrants of money they can send home, swipes jobs from legal workers, and allows the criminals behind it to dodge taxes.

The International Labor Organization said the tally for 2021, the most recent year covered in the painstaking international study, marked an increase of 37%, or $64 billion, compared with its last estimate published a decade ago. That’s a result of both more people being exploited and more cash generated from each victim, ILO said.

“$236 billion. This is the obscene level of annual profit generated from forced labor in the world today,” the first line of the report’s introduction said. That figure represents earnings “effectively stolen from the pockets of workers” by those who coerce them to work, as well as money taken from remittances of migrants and lost tax revenue for governments.

ILO officials noted that such a sum equaled the economic output of EU member Croatia and eclipsed the annual revenues of tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung.

Forced labor can encourage corruption, strengthen criminal networks and incentivize further exploitation, ILO said.

Its director-general, Gilbert Houngbo, wants international cooperation to fight the racket.

“People in forced labor are subject to multiple forms of coercion, the deliberate and systematic withholding of wages being amongst the most common,” he said in a statement. “Forced labor perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the heart of human dignity.”

“We now know that the situation has only got worse,” Houngbo added.

ILO defines forced labor as work that’s imposed against the will of the employee and exacted under penalty — or the threat of one. It can happen at any phase of employment: during recruitment, in living conditions associated with work or by forcing people to stay in a job when they want to leave it.

On any given day in 2021, an estimated 27.6 million people were in forced labor — a 10% rise from five years earlier, ILO said. The Asia-Pacific region was home to more than half of those, while Africa, the Americas, and Europe-Central Asia each represented about 13% to 14%.

Some 85% of the people affected were working in “privately imposed forced labor,” which can include slavery, serfdom, bonded labor, and activities like forms of begging where cash taken in goes to the benefit of someone else, ILO said. The rest were in forced labor imposed by government authorities — a practice not covered in the study,

Some critics have railed against “modern day slavery” in places like the prison system in the U.S. state of Alabama.

ILO experts said that government-imposed forced labor was excluded from the report because of a shortage of data about it — even if estimates show nearly 4 million people were affected by it.

“The ILO certainly decries instances of state imposed forced labor wherever they occur, and whether that’s in prison systems or the abuse of military conscription or other forms or manifestations of state and post forced labor,” said Scott Lyon, an ILO senior policy officer.

While the report said just over one-fourth of the victims worldwide were subject to sexual exploitation, it accounted for nearly $173 billion in profits, or nearly three-quarters of the global total — a sign of the higher margins generated from selling sex.

Some 6.3 million people faced situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day three years ago — and nearly four in five of those victims were girls or women, ILO said. Children accounted for more than a quarter of the total cases.

Forced labor in industry trailed in a distant second, at $35 billion, followed by services at nearly $21 billion, agriculture at $5 billion and domestic work at $2.6 billion, the Geneva-based labor agency said.

Manuela Tomei, ILO’s assistant director-general for governance, told a conference launching the report in Brussels — where the European Union’s parliament is close to finalizing new rules aimed at cracking down on forced labor — that “no region is immune” to the practice of forced labor and all economic sectors are involved.

While countries including the United States were cited at the conference for efforts to fight forced labor, Tomei said the world was “far away” from U.N. goals to eradicate forced labor by 2030.

Valdis Dombrovskis, the executive vice-president of the European Commission, called the ILO findings “shocking and appalling.”

“Forced labor is the opposite of social justice,” he said. “Let me be very clear. Business must never be done at the expense of workers, dignity and labor rights.”


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


The average bonus on Wall Street last year was $176,500. That’s down slightly from 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — The average Wall Street bonus fell slightly last year to $176,500 as the industry added employees and took a “more cautious approach” to compensation, New York state’s comptroller reported Tuesday.

The average bonus for employees in New York City’s securities industry was down 2% from $180,000 in 2022. The slight dip came even as Wall Street profits were up 1.8% last year, according to the annual estimate from Thomas DiNapoli, the state’s comptroller.

DiNapoli’s office said the slight decline could be attributed to the compensation approach as more employees joined the securities industry.

Last year, the industry employed 198,500 people in New York City, which was up from 191,600 in 2022.

For 2023, the bonus pool was $33.8 billion, which is largely unchanged from the previous year.

The average Wall Street bonus hit a record high $240,400 in 2021, compared to a relative low of $111,400 in 2011.

Wall Street is a major source of state and city tax revenue, accounting for an estimated 27% of New York state’s tax collections and 7% of collections for the city, according to the comptroller.

“While these bonuses affect income tax revenues for the state and city, both budgeted for larger declines so the impact on projected revenues should be limited,” DiNapoli said in a prepared statement. “The securities industry’s continued strength should not overshadow the broader economic picture in New York, where we need all sectors to enjoy full recovery from the pandemic.”


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


Biden heads West to secure his standing in Nevada and Arizona

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is embarking on a three-day campaign swing aimed at shoring up his standing in the Sun Belt as part of an aggressive play to reenergize vital parts of his 2020 electoral coalition.

Much of Biden’s time on this trip this week, which includes stops in Nevada, Arizona and Texas, will be geared toward courting the Latino voters who helped power his coalition in 2020 and to emphasizing his pro-union, pro-abortion rights message.

The Democratic president’s first stop Tuesday is in Reno, Nevada, where he will meet with local officials and campaign volunteers in Washoe County before heading to Las Vegas to promote his administration’s housing policies.

Next he’ll travel to Phoenix for another campaign stop in a critical swing county paired with an event talking up what he has done to bolster the computer chip manufacturing sector.

Biden’s push with Latino voters this week, which includes the formal launch of the Latinos con Biden-Harris (Spanish for Latinos with Biden-Harris) initiative on Tuesday, is also part of the campaign’s broader efforts to put in place the infrastructure to re-engage various constituencies that will be critical to the president’s reelection. That effort is all the more crucial as key parts of Biden’s base, such as Black and Hispanic adults, have become increasingly disenchanted with the president’s performance in office.

In an AP-NORC poll conducted in February, 38% of U.S. adults approved of how Biden was handling his job. Nearly 6 in 10 Black adults (58%) approved, compared to 36% of Hispanic adults. Black adults are more likely than white and Hispanic adults to approve of Biden, but that approval has dropped in the three years since Biden took office.

Biden’s reelection campaign, along with allied Democratic groups, has opened offices in Washoe County and in specific areas of Las Vegas that aides said will help the campaign to target Black, Latino and Asian American voters.

Bilingual campaign organizers are already in place in Arizona, and the campaign has opened an office in Maryvale, a major Latino community in Phoenix. The campaign has hired more than 40 staffers in Nevada and Arizona.

Campaign officials believe that tuned-out voters are starting to pay attention to the reality of a rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump now that the two candidates have clinched their respective nominations. They’re trying to boost coalition-building efforts in battleground states now that the matchup is set, using the energy coming out of Biden’s State of the Union earlier this month to jolt their campaign momentum.

That includes, for example, ensuring that chapters are in place across college campuses so that students have a place to organize and that campaign offices are open and stocked with yard signs, campaign literature and other materials. Democrats are hoping that Trump and the GOP will struggle to catch up in key states.

The campaign has already established Women for Biden-Harris, an effort led by first lady Jill Biden to mobilize female voters who were a vital part of Biden’s winning coalition in 2020, as well as Students for Biden-Harris, which will focus on getting young voters organized and active. Latinos con Biden-Harris will formally launch at Biden’s Phoenix stop on Tuesday and include other campaign events, such as volunteer trainings and house parties, in other battleground states including Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin later this week.

“This isn’t stuff that you can just stand up. This is stuff that requires work,” Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for the Biden campaign, said in an interview. “It does require training. It does require making sure that your volunteers and supporters have what they need on the ground.”

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee dismissed dozens of staffers after new leaders closely aligned with Trump took over last week. Those let go include people who worked at the party’s community centers that helped build relationships with minority groups in some Democratic-leaning areas. The committee’s new leadership has since insisted that those centers will remain open.

The RNC, already strapped for cash, is also trying to bat away assumptions that it’ll pay for Trump’s ever-escalating legal bills as he faces multiple criminal cases.

Still, the Biden campaign and the broader Democratic Party are confronting their own struggles, despite their cash and organizational advantages. On top of Biden’s weaker job performance numbers, Democrats are seeing less support from key voting blocs come election time: While Biden won 63% of Hispanic voters in 2020, that percentage shrunk to 57% for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterms, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of the national electorate.

Despite the waning approval numbers, campaign officials say they are confident that once the contrast between the president’s agenda and Trump’s plans for a second term are presented to disillusioned members of Biden’s coalition, they will ultimately back the president.

“I can say this as a Latina, we always come late to the party. We like to make a grand entrance,” said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona. “I think that’s what you will see again because when it comes down to people making a real decision that is consequential to their future, the future of their children, the future of their communities, it’s not some random phone call from an anonymous pollster — I think that the Democratic coalition will come home.”

Alongside the campaign stops, the administration is pairing official White House events on matters that have particular significance in the two states. In Arizona, Biden will continue talking up a law he signed encouraging domestic manufacturing of computer chips, which has already spurred significant private investment in the state, especially in Phoenix.

And in Nevada, Biden will continue promoting a new housing proposal that would offer a mortgage relief credit for first-time homebuyers and a seller’s tax credit to encourage homeowners to offload their starter homes. The issue of housing is sure to resonate in Nevada, where home prices have nearly doubled since early 2016, according to Zillow, the online real estate marketplace.

“As the president has said, the bottom line is, we have to build, build, build,” said Lael Brainard, the director of the White House National Economic Council.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., stressed that Democrats cannot take the state — which has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004 — for granted, even as she dismissed some polling that shows Trump with an edge in Nevada.

“You got to be there talking to voters, particularly in Nevada,” Cortez Masto said. “It’s still small enough, it’s 3 million people, they expect you to show up, right? It’s a swing state. It’s very diverse. And people just expect that type of engagement, so they can decide for themselves.”

Biden’s three-day trip will wrap up in Texas, where he will host a trio of fundraisers in Dallas and Houston.

___

Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of President Joe Biden at https://apnews.com/hub/joe-biden.


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


US officials say pact with strategically key Pacific island nations underscores American commitment

BANGKOK (AP) — U.S. officials stressed Tuesday that newly-approved legislation providing billions of dollars in funding for three strategically important Pacific island nations is an important sign of American commitment, which comes amid warnings China is actively trying to pry them away from Washington’s sphere of influence.

The renewal of funds for the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau — known collectively as the Freely Associated States — had been held up for months by broader infighting in Congress over budgetary issues, even though they enjoyed widespread bipartisan support.

Leaders in the islands had warned that delays could have forced their governments to cut services, and swayed public opinion toward offers of investment from China.

Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr., who faces an election later this year, cautioned in a February letter that was made public that the Chinese Communist Party was seeking to take advantage of the American delay.

“Every day it is not approved plays into the hands of the CCP and the leaders here … who want to accept its seemingly attractive economic offers at the cost of shifting alliances, beginning with sacrificing Taiwan,” he wrote.

“The PRC has already offered to ‘fill every hotel room’ in our tourism-based private sector — ‘and more if more are built’ — and $20 million a year for two acres for a call center,” he wrote, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China.

While the $7.1 billion in aid, approved March 9 and to be spread over 20 years, is not a lot compared to other aid being considered by Congress — like $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — it makes up a significant portion of the small island nations’ budgets and is critical for health services, infrastructure projects, and education.

“We understand the past several months have been frustrating for, and uncertain for our friends in the Pacific,” said Taylor Ruggles, the State Department’s senior advisor for the implementation of the pact through which funds are allocated, known as the Compact of Free Association.

“We’ve heard their concerns about getting it done, and frankly we shared those frustrations.”

The new pact comes amid an American diplomatic push in the region, which gained new impetus when the Solomon Islands signed a security pact with China in 2022, a wake-up call that raised the prospect of Beijing establishing a naval foothold in the South Pacific.

“It was a top priority for this administration,” Ruggles said.

He said it was a sign of the COFA agreement’s importance that it was passed while other national security priorities are still stalled in Congress.

“This relationship really supports the security, stability, freedom and prosperity throughout the Indo-Pacific,” Ruggles said.

Under the COFA agreement, citizens of the three nations have the right to live and work in the U.S. among other benefits, while the U.S. provides for their postal service, national defense and uses their territory — a maritime area larger than the continental United States — for military installations and exercises.

The first COFA agreement was signed with the U.S. in the 1980s, and it has already been renewed once.

‘Strong ties between the United States and the Pacific islands form the foundation of our engagement and presence in the Pacific,” said Interior Department official Keone Nakoa in a call from Washington with reporters.

“The provision of 20 years of new economic assistance sends a clear signal of the United States’ commitment to the long, historic relationships we have held with the associated states.”

The Freely Associated States have a combined population of less than 200,000 spread across more than 1,000 islands and atolls, about 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) southwest of Hawaii.

In addition to Guam, the states give the U.S. military a forward presence in the Pacific, including a missile test facility in the Marshall Islands and a high-frequency radar system being built in Palau.

The countries have had strong ties to the U.S. since American forces liberated them from Imperial Japan in World War II, but China has been working hard to try and win influence, and also convince Palau and the Marshall Islands, which still recognize Taiwan, to change loyalties.

In February, the presidents of the three countries warned American congressional leaders that the delays in the COFA renewal had “generated uncertainty among our peoples” and created “undesirable opportunities for economic exploitation by competitive political actors active in the Pacific.”

The ties between the Freely Associated States and the U.S., however, are much deeper than strictly financial, Ruggles said.

“We have a really unique and special relationship with the Freely Associated States, arguably one of the closest relationships possible between sovereign nations,” he said.

“Their citizens serve in the U.S. military, they can travel and work freely in the United States, our military provides for the national defense — we’re as close as countries can be and this has been a longstanding relationship.”


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


Six former Mississippi police officers to be sentenced in federal assault case

By Brendan O’Brien

(Reuters) – Six former law enforcement officers who prosecutors say called themselves the “Goon Squad” are expected to be sentenced this week after they pled guilty last year to U.S. civil rights charges for brutally assaulting two Black men, including shooting one in the mouth.

In hearings starting on Tuesday in a U.S. District Court in Mississippi, the six white men could each face at least two decades in federal prison and hefty fines over several counts including deprivation of rights and obstruction of justice.

Five of the men were Rankin County sheriff’s deputies and one was a police officer in Richland, Mississippi.

According to federal prosecutors, the defendants – Brett McAlpin, Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Joshua Hartfield, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke – entered a home on Jan. 24, 2023, in Braxton, Mississippi, near Jackson, without a search warrant.

For nearly two hours, the officers physically and sexually assaulted Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker while screaming racial slurs at the handcuffed men, according to court documents.

Dedmon then stuck a pistol in Jenkins’ mouth in a “mock execution” that went wrong when he pulled the trigger, court records showed. Jenkins’ jaw was shattered and his tongue lacerated.

“Daniel has accepted responsibility for his actions and failures to act,” Opdyke’s attorneys said in a statement. He “has admitted he was wrong, and feels deep remorse for the pain he caused the victims.”

Attorneys for the other men were not immediately available for comment.

Each will have a separate sentencing hearing, starting with Elward and Middleton on Tuesday. Opdyke and Dedmon are scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday, and Hartfield and McAlpin on Thursday.

The guilty pleas in federal court in August were entered as part of a larger agreement that included guilty pleas to state charges. A date has not yet been set for the sentencing in the state case.

The men will serve their sentences in the two cases concurrently.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Donna Bryson and Bill Berkrot)


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


US Supreme Court considers appeal by convicted border drug ‘mule’

By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel

(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday is set to consider a California woman’s bid to overturn her conviction for smuggling drugs across the U.S.-Mexican border in a legal dispute over her defense that she acted unwittingly as a “blind” drug mule.

The justices will hear arguments in Delilah Guadalupe Diaz’s appeal after a lower court refused to exclude testimony by an expert witness who cast doubt on her claim that she did not know that methamphetamine valued at $368,550 was hidden in the door panels of the car she was driving.

The case tests how far law enforcement agents testifying as expert witnesses can go in telling a jury that defendants in certain drug trafficking cases generally have a “guilty mind.”

A jury in federal court in San Diego found Diaz guilty in 2021 of illegally importing the methamphetamine, a crime that required knowledge that she knew the drugs were in the car. Diaz was sentenced to seven years in prison.

People who smuggle drugs across borders, sometimes called “mules,” may do so for profit but also sometimes do it unwittingly, transporting illegal substances that were planted on them. These individuals are often called “blind” mules.

The justices will examine whether allowing such expert testimony violates the longstanding Federal Rules of Evidence governing the types of evidence allowable in legal cases.

Diaz’s lawyers have argued that the testimony in her case broke a rule barring expert witnesses from offering opinions on the “mental state” of defendants related to an alleged offense and whether they knew they were committing a crime.

Her lawyers said that allowing generalizations during a trial that suggest a defendant must be guilty is “grossly unfair,” undermining the jury’s duty to assess the defendant’s guilt.

U.S. District Judge Anthony Battaglia allowed the prosecution’s expert witness, a Homeland Security special agent, to testify that “in most circumstances, the driver knows they are hired.” The expert also told the jury that drug-trafficking organizations generally do not entrust large quantities of drugs to unknowing couriers.

In 2020, border inspectors ordered Diaz, a resident of Moreno Valley, California, to roll down a window of the Ford Focus vehicle she was driving and heard a “crunch-like” sound, later finding 56 packages containing more than 24 kilograms of pure methamphetamine. Diaz denied knowledge of the drugs.

She carried two cellphones – one locked that she could not open – and claimed that the car belonged to a boyfriend she had visited in Mexico whose phone number and residence she could not identify. The car also had a hidden GPS device.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected her appeal last year.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected by the end of June.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


In test of Trump’s clout, Ohio Republicans pick US Senate challenger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s sway over Ohio Republicans will be tested in the state’s U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, when they decide whether to nominate a political newcomer backed by the former president to challenge Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown in November.

Republicans are looking to erase Democrats’ 51-49 majority in the chamber, and face a geographical advantage as Democrats are defending a half-dozen seats in competitive states including Ohio.

The state backed Trump in its last two presidential elections, and he won by eight percentage points in 2020. Republicans also hold many major statewide elected offices, both chambers of the state legislature and the other U.S. Senate seat, which is occupied by J.D. Vance.

Trump, the Republican challenger to Democratic President Joe Biden, has endorsed Bernie Moreno, an entrepreneur, in the primary, appearing at a campaign rally for Moreno on Saturday.

Moreno, who began his business career by buying a car dealership before branching out to other industries, has also garnered endorsements from Vance and U.S. Representative Jim Jordan, another lawmaker from Ohio and the powerful chairman of the House judiciary panel.

Many observers blamed Republicans’ failure to capture the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections in part to poor performance by untested Trump-backed candidates including television personality Mehmet Oz, who lost his Senate contest in Pennsylvania to Democrat John Fetterman.

Nationally, Republicans have largely avoided messy Senate primary contests this year, as clear favorites emerged early on in competitive states. Ohio has been a prominent exception.

Ohio’s Republican primary has drawn significant interest. The primary alone has drawn $48.3 million in ad spending, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising.

While Moreno has held an edge in many of the polls, he faces stiff competition.

Matt Dolan, a state senator whose family owns Cleveland’s professional baseball team, is also seeking the nomination. Dolan has secured the endorsements of Mike DeWine, the state’s governor, and Rob Portman, the former U.S. senator for the state. Dolan’s backers say he is best positioned to take on Brown in the November election.

Frank LaRose, the Ohio’s secretary of state, is running for the seat too. Supporters of LaRose, who was endorsed by Trump in his run for secretary of state, say he has the most name recognition as a statewide elected official.

Brown, a moderate who heads the Senate banking panel, is running unopposed for the Democratic nomination.

(Reporting by Makini Brice; Editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


Biden heads to Nevada, Arizona with re-election push and housing pitch

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden travels to Nevada and Arizona on Tuesday to promote his affordable housing proposals and pitch his case for re-election in two political swing states that could prove critical to his bid to stay in the White House.

The Democratic president has been making stops in a host of battleground states since his State of the Union address earlier this month that criticized his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, and laid out ideas he hopes to implement if given a second term.

With worries about high rents and mortgage interest rates contributing to voters’ sour views about the economy, Biden will tout his administration’s latest proposals to make housing more affordable.

“The housing affordability crunch for renters and would-be homeowners has been years in the making, and the previous administration did not take action to address it,” White House economic adviser Lael Brainard told reporters on a conference call before the trip, placing blame on Trump for housing costs.

Trump has lambasted Biden for his economic policies and for presiding over inflation in multiple sectors of the economy that has stung voters nationwide.

Biden, Brainard said, would call on Congress to support investments to lower housing costs. Biden’s plan, which would require congressional passage, includes a $10,000 mortgage relief tax credit for first time home-buyers and a $10,000 tax credit for people selling “starter” homes in an effort to free up housing inventory at the lower end of the market.

His plan also calls for tax credits to build more housing units, efforts to fight “rent gouging by corporate landlords,” and an expansion of a low income housing tax credit program, according to the White House.

Congress is unlikely to pass major legislation in an election year, but the president’s discussion of the topic reflects his administration’s awareness of the impact it could have on his re-election hopes.

While in Nevada, Biden will also hold a campaign event with volunteers before traveling to Arizona, where he will make remarks at a Mexican restaurant in the Phoenix area and launch a group dedicated to engaging Latino voters, according to his campaign.

Biden campaign officials are working to mobilize minority voters, including Hispanics and Blacks, to help him win in what are expected to be close races in the swing states that will decide who prevails in the November election.

The president has faced anger from younger voters and Arab Americans over his support for Israel in its war against Hamas militants in Gaza, which generated a protest vote of “uncommitted” among Democrats in Michigan’s primary last month.

Arizona’s Abandon Biden campaign is urging voters in the state to vote for author Marianne Williamson in the Democratic primary, which is being held on Tuesday, since “uncommitted” is not an option there.

Biden won Arizona in 2020 by just 10,457 votes, and studies estimate that Muslims make up about 1% to 1.5% of the state’s population of nearly 8 million people.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)


Brought to you by www.srnnews.com


Townhall Top of the Hour News

Local Weather - Sponsored By:

CLINTON WEATHER

Local News

DeWittDN on Facebook