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    Iowa state senate votes to allow children to work longer hours and serve alcohol

    In a pre-dawn session on Tuesday, the Iowa state senate voted to allow children to work longer hours and serve alcohol, the latest move by Republican-controlled statehouses to combat a labor shortage by loosening child labor laws.The Iowa bill would expand the number of hours that children under 16 can work from four to six a day, allow minors to work in previously prohibited industries if they are part of a training program, and allow 16- and 17-year–olds to serve alcohol with a parent’s permission.It passed the state senate by a vote of 32-17, two Republicans joining every Democrat in opposition. The vote took place just before 5am, after protests and delay tactics by Democrats.“We do know slavery existed in the past but one place it doesn’t exist, that’s in this bill,” said Adrian Dickey, the Republican responsible for shepherding the bill to passage, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.“It simply is providing our youth an opportunity to earn and learn, at the same timeframe as his classmates do, while participating in sports and other fine arts.”Democrats and labor advocates decried the bill, which they say will endanger children by allowing them to work in dangerous fields such as roofing, excavation and demolition.“No Iowa teenager should be working in America’s deadliest jobs,” said Zach Wahls, the senate minority leader. “Iowa Republican politicians want to solve the … workforce crisis on the literal backs of children.”Labor unions have held protests against the bill. Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor, said efforts to loosen child labor laws around the US were “a lazy way of dealing with the fact that certain states don’t have enough workers”.In March, the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed legislation to roll back child labor protections. Lawmakers in Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin are also considering loosening regulations.“Can we let kids be kids?” Wishman asked. “It was about 120 years ago when we decided that we wanted to make sure that kids spent the majority of their time in school and not in a workplace, and especially not in a dangerous workplace.”Wishman cited research that has found serious adverse effects for teenagers working more than 20 hours a week.“These legislators don’t care about that because it’s not their kids,” he said. “This law is intended for somebody else’s kids.” More

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    George Santos, Republican who lied in his first election, announces second run

    Disgraced Republican congressman George Santos, who has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé in his successful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, has announced he will stand for a second term representing his New York district.Santos, whose district is focused on New York City’s suburbs, is the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, as well as complaints alleging sexual harassment and campaign finance violations.Shortly after he admitted to lying during his election campaign last year, Santos stepped down from all House committees. He is expected to face many challengers in the Republican primary for the district, which leans Democratic.Santos was characteristically forthright in his re-election announcement, ignoring the multiple scandals that have repeatedly emerged in the US media that range from puppy theft to lying about being a producer on a Broadway musical about Spider-Man and making claims to have lost family in the Holocaust.“Since the left is pushing radical agendas, the economy is struggling, and Washington is incapable of solving anything, we need a fighter who knows the district and can serve the people fearlessly, and independent of local or national party influence,” he said in a statement.He added: “Good is not good enough and I am not shy about getting the job done.”Santos has long faced calls to quit from fellow New York Republicans and voters in his Queens and Long Island district. Democrats are hopeful they will be able to grab the seat. More

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    Republican donor pauses Ron DeSantis funding over abortion and book banning

    A top Republican donor said he had paused plans to fund Ron DeSantis’s expected presidential run because of the Florida governor’s “stance on abortion and book banning”.Thomas Peterffy, founder of Interactive Brokers, a digital trading platform, told the Financial Times: “I have put myself on hold. Because of his stance on abortion and book banning … myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.”Peterffy also noted that DeSantis “seems to have lost some momentum”.DeSantis has not declared a run but is widely expected to do so. He is the closest challenger to Donald Trump in polling of the Republican primary field but despite winning re-election in a landslide and signing into law a succession of hard-right policies, he has not closed on the former president.Last week, DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban. Nationally, Democrats seized on the move, threats to abortion rights having worked to Republicans’ disadvantage in numerous recent elections.DeSantis has also tried to remove books dealing with LGBTQ+ issues from Florida public schools, while other laws have loosened gun rights and targeted Black voters.After Peterffy’s intervention, the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, a leading voice on Trump and Republican electoral politics, noted: “A major donor finally goes on record with what has been a whisper: donors are getting worried.”But as Haberman also noted, Peterffy still gave himself “a lot of wiggle room to resume with DeSantis without fully breaking from him”.Peterffy said he still supported DeSantis in his fight with Disney, one of the largest employers in Florida, over LGBTQ+ rights.The company has pushed back against DeSantis over a “don’t say gay” law pertaining to the teaching of sexuality and gender in public schools.DeSantis retaliated by attacking Disney’s self-governing powers in the state. The entertainment giant responded, seeking to block the move.Petterfy said: “I think it’s insane that a company would take a stand on gender issues.”Nor did he say he would not support DeSantis at all.“I am more reluctant to back him,” he said. “We are waiting to see who among the primary candidates is most likely to be able to win the general, and then put all of our firepower behind them.” More

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    Lindsey Graham calls fellow Republican ‘irresponsible’ for defending Pentagon leaker

    Senator Lindsey Graham condemned his fellow Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene as “terribly irresponsible” on Sunday, after the far-right congresswoman defended the air national guardsman charged with leaking Pentagon intelligence documents.Speaking on ABC’s This Week show, Graham said the leaks had “done a lot of damage to our standing” and criticized “those who are trying to sugarcoat this on the right”.Taylor Greene, a known conspiracy theorist and election denier who was controversially named to the homeland security committee in January, had suggested on Thursday that Jack Teixeira, an airman in the air national guard who has been charged under the Espionage Act after allegedly leaking hundreds of secret defence documents, had been treated unfairly.“There are military members serving today from Georgia and other places who are less safe because of what this airman did,” Graham told ABC.“There is no justification for this, and for any member of Congress to suggest it’s OK to leak classified information because you agree with the cause is terribly irresponsible and puts America in serious danger.”Teixeira published at least 300 documents, according to reports, to the Discord messaging platform. Some of the documents included details on Ukraine’s defense capabilities, while others pointed to how US intelligence has infiltrated the Russian military and appeared to show US spying on close allies including Ukraine, South Korea and Israel.After Teixeira was arrested at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday, Taylor Greene said he had been targeted by the government.“Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, said on Twitter.“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”Other rightwing figures have also defended Teixeira, with Tucker Carlson, the influential Fox News host, praising him as someone who “told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine”.Asked about Greene’s comments on Sunday, Graham said: “What they’re suggesting will destroy America’s ability to defend itself.”“That it’s OK to release classified information based on your political views. That the ends justify the means. It is not OK. If you’re a member of the military intelligence community and you disagree with American policy and you think you’re going to be OK when it comes to leaking classified information, you’re going to go to jail. It’s one of the most irresponsible statements you can make,” Graham said.He added: “There is no justification for this. And for any member of Congress to suggest it’s OK to leak classified information because you agree with the cause is terribly irresponsible. And puts America in serious danger.”Teixeira was charged in federal court in Boston on Friday with the unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information, and the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents.Each charge under the act can carry up to a 10-year prison term, and prosecutors could treat each leaked document as a separate count in his indictment. More

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    Too many with access, too little vetting. Pentagon leaks were ‘a matter of time’

    Jack Teixeira, 21 years old, clean-shaven, with buzz-cut hair and proudly uniformed, is the face of America’s newest security threat, one it is struggling to resolve.The formidable US counter-intelligence infrastructure is adept at finding spies and rooting out whistleblowers. Teixeira, charged on Friday on two counts of the Espionage Act, is neither spy nor whistleblower.His family history is the epitome of conservative patriotism. His stepfather served in the same unit, the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard, and his mother, who worked for years for veterans’ charities, celebrated the fact that her son was following the same path. The young recruit was an observant Catholic, who would pray with other members of his online chat group.But Teixeira’s outlook had taken the same dramatic turn as much of American conservatism, becoming conspiratorial and distrustful of the very institutions earlier generations revered. Friends quoted in the Washington Post said he had come to regret joining up, as his view of the military dimmed.His motive for allegedly sharing hundreds of top secret documents among the 20 or so young men and teenage boys on the Discord gaming server he moderated, at least as he explained it to them, was to alert them to shadowy forces driving world events. He reportedly posted the documents, photographed unfolded and laid on his family’s kitchen counter alongside glue and nail clippers, without commentary or any apparent underlying logic.It seems to have been a way to cement his status as the leader of the group, a man of mystery and action. It was as inchoate as the video he reportedly shared with his group, Thug Shaker Central, (named in apparently ironic spirit after a variety of gay porn), in which Teixeira shouts antisemitic and racist slurs then fires a rifle.This was the young man, clearly still living out his adolescence, who was given one of the nation’s highest security clearances – “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” (TS/SCI) – so that he could do his job maintaining the sealed infranet system at Otis air base on Cape Cod, through which the nation’s most closely guarded secrets flowed.To get that level of clearance you must, in theory, be extensively vetted. The process takes months, as investigators trawl through your history and interview friends and colleagues. But vetting standards differ across agencies, and those of the air national guard may not be on a par with the CIA, yet the staff at both see the same documents.Other security arrangements at the Otis base also appear to have been lax. Teixeira is alleged to have first copied out text from secret documents and, then, in January, began to print them and take them home.“The breakdown in physical security here appears stark and serious,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specialising in national security, federal employment and security clearance, said. “The after-action review will absolutely need to assess where the process broke down by which no one noticed his removal of the records.”There is another problem with trying to filter out people like Teixeira: the elastic limits of first amendment free speech rights, in a country where what was once extreme is increasingly mainstream.The far-right Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene got Teixeira’s first name wrong on Twitter but hailed him as “white, male, christian, and antiwar”.“That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” Greene said.The Fox News talkshow host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira and complained the airman, arrested by armed FBI agents at his home and charged in a Boston court the next day, was being treated worse than Osama bin Laden, who was shot in the head by US special forces in his bedroom in 2011.The new Republican right views the state as an enemy when it is being run by Democrats or moderate conservatives. Part of the Trump legacy is a preference for foreign dictators over opponents in a democratic system. So weeding out enemies of the state within the intelligence and military community risks angering an increasingly significant and vocal part of the political arena.“It’s difficult to truly quantify the scope of the threat, and part of the problem is simply holding repugnant political views is not truly a security issue. It’s more of an HR issue,” Moss said. He added the vetting process was not “designed to flesh out the details of an individual’s personal political leanings”.“That’s deliberate: the government is largely forbidden from considering your political views in that context unless it implicates a separate concern [such as criminal conduct],” he said.The problem facing the vetters is magnified by the enormous scale of the numbers involved. According to the office of the director of national intelligence, there are more than 1.2 million government employees and contractors with access to top secret intelligence materials.Brianna Rosen, a former White House official, said that was a result of the 9/11 attacks, where some of the intelligence failings that allowed the hijackers to succeed involved a failure to share intelligence with law enforcement agencies.“It’s a double-edged sword because, in one sense, a lack of this kind of information sharing is, in part, what contributed to 9/11,” said Rosen, a senior fellow at Just Security, an online forum on security, democracy, foreign policy and rights. “As a result of all of these increased intelligence-sharing programmes, you do have a situation where there is a vast amount of people that have access to sensitive information that they probably shouldn’t have access to, and that may not have been vetted as thoroughly as they should have been.“It was really only a matter of time until something like this happened, which is why this is really a systemic problem that Congress and the Biden administration needs to address more closely.” More

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    Mike Pompeo says he will not run for president in 2024 election

    Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said on Friday that he will not run for president in the 2024 election.The devoted ally and defender of Donald Trump opted out of a contest that would have put him into competition with his former commander in chief.After saying he was weighing a run in January, the former Trump administration official and CIA director released a statement on the decision. “To those of you who this announcement disappoints, my apologies,” he said, calling it a personal choice.“And to those of you this thrills, know that I’m 59 years old. There remain many more opportunities for which the timing might be more fitting as presidential leadership becomes even more necessary.”Pompeo, who also spoke about his decision on Fox News on Friday, would have been the second former Trump cabinet member to enter the race to challenge the former president for the 2024 GOP nomination, joining former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, who announced her campaign in February. Former vice-president Mike Pence is also considering entering the race and has stepped up his travel and activity in early voting primary and caucus states.Where Haley and Pence have openly expressed differences with Trump, Pompeo has had no public split with the former president and hasn’t been rebuked by him, as many of his would-be rivals have. Pompeo recently referred to Trump as a “great boss”.The former congressman graduated at the top of his class from the US Military Academy in 1986 before spending five years on active duty, deployed for a time as a cavalry officer commanding tank movements along the border between Nato-backed western Europe and Soviet-occupied eastern Europe.The retired Army captain is a Harvard-educated lawyer who practiced law in Washington and founded two Wichita businesses – an aerospace firm and later a petroleum equipment manufacturer – before entering politics.Pompeo – a witty and sometimes gruff politician – easily won four consecutive terms in the US House representing southern Kansas. He sat on the House intelligence committee as well as the select committee investigating the deadly 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya.The 2018 withdrawal from the Iran deal and imposition of crippling sanctions have prompted death threats against Pompeo, who remains under 24-hour security protection provided by the state department.“I can’t tell you how heartwarming and humbling it has been when strangers have told me they pray that I run to defend our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage, our families and our country as the most exceptional in the history of civilization,” Pompeo’s statement said. More

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    ‘They created this’: are Republicans willing to lose elections to retain their abortion stance?

    Democrats have taken multiple actions in response to what they say is a “draconian” and “dangerous” decision by a federal judge in Texas threatening access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the US.Several Democratic governors have begun to stockpile doses of the drugs used in medication abortions. Nearly every Democrat in Congress signed onto an amicus brief urging an appeals court to stay the decision, while some called on the Biden administration to simply “ignore” the ruling, should it be allowed to stand. A group of House Democrats introduced a bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) final approval over drugs used in medication abortion.Their fury over the ruling has been met with relative silence from Republicans.Only a handful of congressional Republicans offered immediate comment on judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision last week to revoke the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Just a fraction of Republicans on Capitol Hill signed onto an amicus brief urging an appeals court to uphold the ruling. And among the party’s national field of Republican presidential nominees, just one – the former vice president, Mike Pence – unabashedly praised the decision.The starkly different reactions underscores just how dramatically the politics of abortion have shifted since last June, when conservatives achieved their once-unimaginable goal of overturning Roe v Wade.For decades, Republicans relied on abortion to rally their conservative base, calling for the reversal of Roe v Wade and vowing to outlaw the procedure if given the chance. But since the supreme court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, abortion has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats, galvanizing voters furious over the thicket of state bans and restrictions ushered in by the decision.Republicans have struggled to respond, lacking a unified policy on abortion in the nearly 10 months since the landmark decision.“Dobbs really did get Republicans, especially elected Republicans, running scared,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director at the conservative American Principles Project.Polling has consistently found a clear majority of Americans believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases, though partisan divisions have deepened over the years. A new survey released by the Pew Research Center this week showed that by a margin of more than 2 to 1, Americans believe medication abortion, which is at the center of the current legal battle, should be legal in their state.‘Let the states work this out’A post-Dobbs backlash fueled a string of victories for abortions rights, including in more conservative states, and powered Democratic victories in last year’s November midterm elections. And this month, just days before the Texas ruling on mifepristone, abortion rights were a dominant force in a liberal judge’s landslide victory in a key race for a Wisconsin supreme court seat.“It’s no surprise that GOP candidates are scared to tie themselves to a decision that is wildly out of step with what voters want,” Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice American told reporters this week. “They can’t be eager to repeat last week’s double-digit walloping of extremist judicial candidate, Dan Kelly, in Wisconsin.”In that race, Kelly’s opponent, judge Janet Protasiewicz, had effectively promised voters that if she won, flipping the ideological balance of the court from conservative to liberal, the new majority would overturn Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban.“People understood the stakes and they were ready to vote for Judge Protasiewicz,” said Timmaraju, whose group was active in the contest.Now, with the 2024 presidential election looming, an increasingly vocal group of Republicans are urging moderation on abortion, warning that the uncompromising positions of their party’s culturally conservative base risk alienating crucial swing voters.“This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of,” congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, said in a recent appearance on CNN.Mace, who considers herself “pro-life”, said her party had “not shown compassion towards women” since the fall of Roe. She has urged flexibility, pushing Republicans to expand access to contraception and include exceptions for abortions in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk or the fetus is no longer viable.Since June, Republican-led legislatures have charged ahead with new restrictions. More than a dozen states ban abortion, with several other Republican-led state legislatures considering new restrictions this session.On Thursday, the Florida legislature voted to prohibit abortions after six weeks – before many women realize they are pregnant – delivering a major policy victory for the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Hours later, DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president in 2024, quietly signed the ban into law with little fanfare, underscoring just how complicated the issue has become for Republicans.In Nebraska, the state legislature is in the process of debating a six-week ban. But even in the reliably conservative state, some Republican lawmakers are floating an alternative that would expand the window to 12 weeks, a sign that a ban any earlier in pregnancy could stoke public outcry.One option floated as a politically palatable “compromise” is a proposal by South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham that would implement a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.But the legislation divided Republicans and ultimately only attracted a handful of co-sponsors when he introduced it last year ahead of the midterms. Several Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, argued that limits on abortion should be set by the states.Asked whether he supported Graham’s proposal, Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina who this week formed an exploratory committee for a 2024 presidential run, said was “100% pro-life” but declined to answer the question directly. He clarified later that he would back a federal ban at 20 weeks of pregnancy.Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former UN ambassador who is running for the nomination, urged Republicans to seek consensus on the issue, asserting that she was “pro-life” but did not “judge anyone who is pro-choice”.“Let’s let the states work this out,” Haley said, according to the Des Moines Register. “If Congress decides to do it – but don’t get in that game of them saying ‘how many weeks, how many’ – no. Let’s first figure out what we agree on.”DeSantis has sought to position himself as a reliable ally of the anti-abortion movement, hoping his support of a six-week ban will appeal to social conservatives searching for an alternative to Trump in the early-voting states Iowa and South Carolina.Earlier this year, Trump, whose conservative supreme court appointees enabled Roe to be struck down, angered abortion opponents when he warned that abortion is a political liability for Republicans and blamed extremism on the issue for their lackluster performance in the 2022 midterms.‘Ostrich strategy’In the escalating legal battle over access to medication abortion, supreme court justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily halted a federal appeals court ruling that would have reimposed restrictions on mifepristone. The stay will expire on Wednesday while the court deliberate next steps.Reproductive rights advocates say the ongoing threat to medication abortion nationwide makes clear that Republicans never actually believed abortion was an issue best handled by the states, as Alito wrote in his 2022 decision overturning the federal right to abortion.“They are seeking a nationwide ban – but they are not going to stop there,” Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, told reporters this week. “We are already seeing attacks on birth control.”As a starting point, Schweppe believes social conservatives must be willing to compromise on a federal ban, possibly accepting legislation that falls well short of their long-held goal to end all abortions. He urged Republicans to adopt positions that are broadly popular with wide swaths of voters, including allowances for pregnancies that result from rape or incest, or when the health or life of the mother is at risk.“We have to be honest about where the fault lines lie,” he said. “Exceptions are what drives voter sentiment. That’s what Democrats are attacking us on.”Many leading abortion opponents blame recent losses on Republicans’ embrace of a so-called “ostrich strategy” – avoiding the topic or trying to change the subject – not their opposition to abortion.“Republicans have cowered in fear as the consultants and campaign advisors tell them not to talk about abortion,” Penny Young Nance, the chief executive and president of evangelical Christian group, Concerned Women for America. In the Wisconsin supreme court race, she said the conservative’s defeat was an example of what happens when Republicans are badly outspent and fail to “boldly” defend their position on an issue that has been a defining policy of American conservatism.“The winning strategy is to tell the truth about the left’s extremist position on the issue that is out of [sync] with the views of the American people,” Nance said in an email.As Republicans search for a path forward, Democrats, confident public opinion is on their side, are already preparing to make abortion a central theme of the coming election cycles.“Even though some in the GOP are trying to stay quiet about the Texas ruling, back home they’re still passing and signing abortion bans,” Timmaraju said.“They created this reality,” she added. “They cannot run away from it.” More