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WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday said it would suspend oil drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that were issued in the waning days of the Trump presidency. #styln-signup { max-width: calc(100% - 40px); width: 600px; margin: 20px auto; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2; min-height: 50px; } #styln-signup.web { display: none; } #styln-signup + .live-blog-post::before { border-top: unset !important; } [data-feedpub-type="LIVE_BLOG"] #styln-signup, [data-feedpub-type="FACT_CHECK"] #styln-signup { border-bottom: none; }

Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to allow oil and gas drilling there for more than four decades, and issuing the leases was a signature achievement of the Trump White House.

“President Biden believes America’s national treasures are cultural and economic cornerstones of our country and he is grateful for the prompt action by the Department of the Interior to suspend all leasing pending a review of decisions made in the last administration’s final days that could have changes the character of this special place forever,” said Gina McCarthy, the White House domestic climate policy adviser.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration defended in federal court the Willow project, a huge oil drilling operation proposed on Alaska’s North Slope that was approved by the Trump administration and is being fought by environmentalists. Weeks earlier, it backed former President Donald J. Trump’s decision to grant oil and gas leases on federal land in Wyoming. Also this month, it declined to act when it had an opportunity to stop crude oil from continuing to flow through the bitterly contested, 2,700-mile Dakota Access pipeline, which lacks a federal permit.

The three decisions suggest the jagged road that Mr. Biden is following as he tries to balance his climate agenda against practical and political pressures.

As important, Mr. Biden is trying to avoid alienating a handful of moderate Republicans and Democrats from oil, gas and coal states who will decide the fate of his legislative agenda in Congress. Among them is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska for whom the Willow project is a top priority and who grilled Deb Haaland about it during Ms. Haaland’s confirmation hearing for interior secretary in February.Editors’ PicksSummertime … and the Sloganeering Is a Little AwkwardThe Murky World of Private Spies and the Damage They May Be DoingThey’ve Given $6 Million to the Arts. No One Knew Them, Until Now.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

Democratic state Rep. Melanie Stansbury will win the special election to represent New Mexico's 1st Congressional District, CNN projected Tuesday, securing the seat left vacant when Interior Secretary Deb Haaland joined the Biden administration.

The central New Mexico district, which includes most of Albuquerque, was considered favorable ground for Democrats

Democratic presidential nominees have won the district in every election since 2004. Joe Biden defeated then-President Donald Trump there by 23 percentage points last year.

The Biden administration Tuesday took its first steps toward reversing the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to oil drilling, by suspending leases issued in the final days of the Trump administration.

And on his first day in office, on Jan. 20, he directed the Interior Department to put a “temporary mortarium” on all oil and gas leasing activities in the refuge, and to review the environmental impacts of the Trump administration’s oil and gas program for the area. 

All activities related to the program — including the current leases — are suspended until the review is complete. The department will then decide whether the leases should be “reaffirmed, voided, or subject to additional mitigation measures,”

The US military has issued an apology after soldiers accidentally stormed a factory in Bulgaria that produces processing machinery for olive oil during a training exercise last month.

US soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had been practicing for days how to seize and secure the Cheshnegirovo decommissioned airfield in Bulgaria, training that included clearing bunkers across the airfield, according to a statement from the US Army Europe and Africa released Tuesday.

"they believed was part of the training area, but that was occupied by Bulgarian civilians operating a private business." No weapons were fired, the US military also said.

WASHINGTON — President Biden may be forced to hold a new lease sale for oil drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite his vows to slash fossil fuel pollution and his action this week to suspend Arctic drilling leases that had been awarded in the final days of the Trump administration.

Last month, the world’s leading energy agency warned that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to prevent the pollution they produce from driving average global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.

Mr. Parenteau and other legal experts noted that the Biden administration could find ways to delay or diminish the second auction of drilling leases. For example, while the law requires the Interior Department to hold an auction, it does not require that the agency actually award any leases, he said.

With just eight days until President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, law enforcement and local government officials in Washington, D.C., are implementing security measures that will make the historic transition of power look very different from those in the past.

Last week's events — in which insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol and pipe bombs were left at the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington — have heightened security fears for the swearing-in, with credible threats on the lives of Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris,

The inauguration will also take place against the backdrop of an ongoing FBI manhunt to track down Trump supporters who on Wednesday stormed the Capitol building and assaulted police. Investigators are also looking for the person or persons responsible for leaving pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC.

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a security failure, an intelligence failure — or both. How could security forces in the nation's capital be so swiftly and completely overwhelmed by rioters who stated their plans openly on a range of social media sites? President Trump had even tweeted on Dec. 19: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"

In a letter to the Justice Department, Bowser says "we are mindful" of events in 2020 — likely referencing the June 1 clearing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square by Park Police and other federal law enforcement that not answerable to the city.

And then there is the National Guard. In the 50 states and Puerto Rico, the Guard is under the command of the governor. In Washington, D.C., however, the Guard is under the command of the president, though orders to deploy are typically issued by the secretary of the Army at the request of the mayor.

China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday this year's Independence Day will feature a fireworks display atop Mount Rushmore, an event he would "try" to attend.

In May 2019, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem initially announced that the state and the Department of Interior had struck a deal to have the fireworks return to Mt. Rushmore beginning with the 2020 Independence Day celebration. The fireworks had been discontinued in 2009 due to concerns of a wildfire hazard in forests adjacent to the monument. Noem said advancements in pyrotechnics and a strengthened forest led to the decision to have the fireworks return to the site.

Brushing aside what he said were dubious environmental concerns that had previously prevented fireworks at the South Dakota landmark, Trump said he'd secured this year's show easily.Read More"What can burn? It's stone. Nobody knew why," Trump said of the concerns over the environment.

After a volcano exploded in Hawaii in May 2018, US scientists used drones to save a man from the lava: "Follow the drone," they said. He made it through the jungle.Drones save people. They also map terrain, survey land and inspect pipelines. The scientists use drones for these and other purposes on a daily basis, and they have bragged about their successes in the field.Many of the aircraft are made by Chinese companies, though. They are now grounded because of concerns about espionage.

the head of the federal agency, David Bernhardt, is apparently now worried that the drones could be used for espionage.

He is examining the agency's civilian drone programme in an effort to determine whether or not it should be continued. During this time, many of the drones are grounded, according to an agency spokeswoman, Melissa Brown.

rance is in theory a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality and people are free to believe, or not, in any God they wish. It is a nation, in its self image, that through education dissolves differences of faith and ethnicity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship.

This model, known as laïcité, often inadequately translated as secularism, is embraced by a majority of French people. They or their forebears became French in this way. No politician here would utter the words “In God we trust.” The Roman Catholic Church was removed more than a century ago from French public life. The country’s lay model supplants any deity.

Mr. Cadène, 39, runs the Laïcité Observatory as its “general rapporteur,” a weighty title for a young man

France is banning the far-right Turkish group Grey Wolves after a memorial to the Armenian genocide near Lyon was defaced with pro-Turkish slogans.

The Grey Wolves, an international organisation, is seen as allied to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It comes amid growing tensions between France and Turkey over a territorial dispute in Nagorno-Karabakh.

many of his policies are being cut down by the courts — even by Republican-appointed jurists who the administration had hoped would be friendly.

many of his policies are being cut down by the courts — even by Republican-appointed jurists who the administration had hoped would be friendly.

A second term, coupled with a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, could save some of his biggest environmental rollbacks.

President-elect Joe Biden has named six leaders of his foreign policy and national security teams, showing a continued push for historic firsts in his administration.

He's also set to name former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen as his treasury secretary

Yellen, 74, was the first-ever female Fed chair and would be the first-ever female head of the U.S. Treasury.

Two U.S. Park Police officers in Virginia were indicted Thursday on state manslaughter charges in a 2017 case in which they fired nine shots at close range into the car of a 25-year-old man, a prosecutor announced.

Each officer was indicted on single charges of manslaughter and reckless discharge of a firearm

If convicted, the officers, members of the U.S. Park Police, a unit of the National Park Service within the Interior Department, face up to 15 years in prison, he said.

The future of the Biden presidency, the terrain of the midterm elections and the fate of the Republican Party will all be shaped by a series of early battles unfolding on Capitol Hill.

The White House is standing firm behind Neera Tanden, its pick for budget director, though her nomination seems doomed. Aides to Joe Biden know this first big fight will help set the terms of the new President's relationship with Congress. Other bitter confirmation hearings are turning into early de-facto fights on the great issues of the Biden era, like climate change and expanding access to health care.

Republicans are meanwhile beginning to mobilize against Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid rescue package in the hope of billing it as an example of massive liberal overreach and winning a political payoff.

After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, he turned to a new project, publishing, in 1866, a book titled “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.”

“No one can read aright the history of America,” Pollard wrote, “unless in the light of a North and a South.” For all its bloodshed, he argued, the Civil War “did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights. … And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim and still assert them in their rights and views.”

Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending

Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency?

the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”