A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – President Trump says Congress won’t vote on an Obamacare replacement after the 2020 election, pushing an issue which has surged back into the forefront and that Democrats were eager to make a campaign issue into the distant future.

Even as he punted in the short term, Trump predicted that making next year’s general election a referendum of sorts on Obamacare, without the risk of yet another failed healthcare reform vote on Capitol Hill, will help Republicans pick up additional seats in the House and Senate.

“Everybody agrees that ObamaCare doesn’t work,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets Monday evening. “Premiums & deductibles are far too high – Really bad HealthCare! Even the Dems want to replace it, but with Medicare for all, which would cause 180 million Americans to lose their beloved private health insurance. The Republicans………are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare.” [ Source: Washington Examiner (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Congress hit a logjam Monday in the months-long quest to deliver aid to disaster-wrought states after President Donald Trump jumped into the fray with complaints that too much federal cash is flowing to Puerto Rico.

The Senate shot down test votes on two competing plans for delivering at least $13 billion in aid to communities hit by hurricanes, wildfires and catastrophic flooding in recent months. Senators voted 44-49 in rejecting the Republican proposal and 46-48 in shooting down the version the Democratic-led House passed in January.

While it is unclear what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will decide to do now with the stalled bill negotiations are expected to continue behind the scenes as lawmakers work to strike a compromise that would send billions of dollars in relief to many of their states. [ Source: Politico (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Senate Republicans this week are poised to make good on a monthslong threat to change the rules in order to speed up confirming President Trump’s judicial nominees.

A vote to advance a measure could take place as early as Tuesday and comes after months of delay tactics employed by Senate Democrats eager to slow Trump’s effort to seat new federal judges.

The Senate rules change would slash debate time from 30 hours to two hours for district court judges as well as sub-Cabinet level executive branch nominees. [ Source: Washington Examiner (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Researchers at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore Lab have created a new kind of 3D printer that could potentially manufacture living human organs.

Normal 3D printers work by building up thin layers of melted plastic to create solid objects, but it’s hard to get intricate designs to hold their form.

So, design engineers at Cal and Lawrence Livermore Lab got the idea of making 3D objects the same way a CT scan creates 3D images: by hitting a patient with X-rays from many different directions. [ Source: CBS SF Bay Channel 5 (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The U.S. government is considering additional sanctions against Iran that would target areas of its economy that have not been hit before, a senior Trump administration official told reporters on Monday.

The official said the administration aimed to follow through with new sanctions around the first anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and several world powers, which President Donald Trump announced last May.

“The more we can do around the anniversary, the better,” the official said, while adding that it takes time to put such sanctions together and that the U.S. Treasury Department was working on them. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Black Hawk military helicopter flew over Iowa, giving a senior U.S. agriculture official and U.S. senator an eyeful of the flood damage below, where yellow corn from ruptured metal silos spilled out into the muddy water.

And there’s nothing the U.S. government can do about the millions of bushels of damaged crops here under current laws or disaster-aid programs, U.S. Agriculture Under Secretary Bill Northey told a Reuters reporter who joined the flight.

The USDA has no mechanism to compensate farmers for damaged crops in storage, Northey said, a problem never before seen on this scale. That’s in part because U.S. farmers have never stored so much of their harvests, after years of oversupplied markets, low prices and the latest blow of lost sales from the U.S. trade war with China – previously their biggest buyer of soybean exports. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Israeli defense officials on Monday warned that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad appeared to be planning to conduct a large-scale terror attack on the Gaza border in order to derail ongoing cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, according to two Hebrew media reports.

The unnamed officials told Palestinian affairs correspondents from the Ynet news site and Channel 12 television station that members of the Iran-backed group had been seen conducting “suspicious activities” near the security fence over the past day.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is the second-most powerful terror group in the Gaza Strip, after the coastal enclave’s de facto rulers, Hamas, though it is believed to have a slightly larger arsenal of rockets and mortar shells, mostly locally manufactured varieties based on Iranian designs. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Colorado legislature on Monday passed a “red flag” bill that would allow those deemed a threat to have their firearms seized, despite opposition by most of the state’s sheriffs and threats of legal challenges.

Both chambers of the Democratic-controlled General Assembly approved the measure, sending it to the desk of Governor Jared Polis, also a Democrat, who has indicated his support for the measure.

If signed into law, Colorado would become the 15th state to enact similar legislation, also called Extreme Risk Protection Orders, according to a statement from statehouse Democrats. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Nearly 235,000, or some 38 percent of all U.S. bridges, need repair, replacement or major rehab, according to an analysis of federal data by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

The association combed through the Department of Transportation 2018 Bridge Inventory database to find that the number of structurally deficient bridges — those considered to be in poor condition according to the Federal Highway Administration — dropped just 1 percent from 2017, to 47,052 out of a total of 616,087 U.S. bridges. But the pace of improvement has slowed to the lowest point since the group began doing this analysis five years ago.

“The total inventory of structurally deficient bridges is down by about 567, which is a very slow pace compared to what we’ve seen in previous years,” said Alison Premo Black, the association’s chief economist who conducted the analysis. “At that pace, it would take over 80 years to repair or replace those bridges, which is just a ridiculously long time.” [ Source: CNBC (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Israel Defense Forces and American military on Sunday completed a four-week air defense exercise that saw the deployment of the United States’ most advanced missile defense system in Israel for the first time.

On March 4, the US European Command (US EUCOM) deployed the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, along with approximately 250 officers and soldiers, in southern Israel.

Since then, some 150 Israeli Air Force personnel, mostly reservists, have trained alongside their American counterparts, learning how to work with the THAAD system, which is designed to intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, and integrate it into Israel’s air defense array, according to Col. Guy Amosi, deputy commander of the IAF’s Megiddo unit, which led the joint exercise. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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