Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA).

Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images

• Rep. Katie Porter of California is eyeing a potential 2024 Senate bid, according to Politico.
• Dianne Feinstein is up for reelection in 2024, but has not yet announced her intentions.
• Porter’s potential entry into the race would likely offer a huge burst of momentum for progressives.

Rep. Katie Porter of California — one of the most prominent progressive Democrats in the country — is eyeing a 2024 Senate campaign, according to a Politico report.

Porter, a third-term lawmaker who was reelected last November in her Orange County-anchored district, would boast strong name identification and ties to leading progressive groups if she chose to enter the race.

But at the moment, veteran Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein — a former San Francisco mayor who has served in the upper chamber since 1992 — could very well seek reelection.

Feinstein, now in her fifth term, is widely expected to retire after the upcoming 2024 cycle, but neither she nor her campaign have commented on her intentions.

Candidates who might compete against Porter in a potential open seat include Rep. Barbara Lee, a liberal icon who represents a district in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Rep. Adam Schiff, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who represents a Los Angeles-area district.

US House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy embraces Rep.-elect Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in the House Chamber during the fourth day of elections forSpeaker of the House at the US Capitol Building on January 06, 2023 in Washington, DC.

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• Marjorie Taylor Greene backed Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House Speaker. 
• MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said Greene broke her promise by doing so. 
• Lindell told the Daily Beast that the GOP should back Trump for speaker. 

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said GOP Rep-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene “broke her promise” by supporting US House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House. 

“I’m very surprised that the one — I won’t name her name but it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene — broke her promise,” Lindell said on the far-right Be Reasonable podcast on Thursday. 

Both are staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump. Lindell also told The Daily Beast that House Republicans should back former Trump for Speaker of the House, a position that does not require the occupant to be a sitting member of Congress. 

“It’s disappointing anyone that went for McCarthy because we need a different input to get a different output,” Lindell told The Daily Beast. “And that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

Lawmakers in the US House of Representatives went through a historic 15 rounds of voting to elect McCarthy to the House speaker position.

Greene has recently lashed out against other prominent GOP members in the hard-right Republican Freedom Caucus for not supporting McCarthy.

Insider previously reported that Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments last year, worked out a deal with McCarthy to be placed back on prominent committees if he wins. 

Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

• On Thursday, Bed Bath & Beyond announced it was considering filing for bankruptcy.
• A Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing would mean the company’s famous “Big Blue” coupons would be useless.
• The retailer could choose to honor the iconic coupons for a 30-day period, experts say.

Bed Bath & Beyond coupons could soon be useless if the company files for bankruptcy, so shoppers should cash in the well-known big blue coupons as soon as possible.

On Thursday, the New Jersey-based home goods retailer announced it was considering filing for bankruptcy amid recent struggles, according to a report from Insider. If the company chooses to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you won’t have much time to use your 20% off coupons before liquidation sales start.

If Bed Bath & Beyond moves forward, iconic big blue coupon program would come to an end, but there’s still a chance to shop for deals. The company may honor its famous oversized coupons for 30 days, a retail expert told CNN. 

“If Bed Bath & Beyond files for bankruptcy, the retailer might honor the 20% coupons for a 30-day period. After that, and especially if it starts closing stores and sets liquidation sales, creditors wouldn’t want to allow shoppers to tack on those 20% off coupons on top of 70% off liquidation prices,” Burt Flickinger of retail consultancy Strategic Resource Group told CNN.

The “Big Blue” coupons became recognizable for their uniquely huge sizes, but the retailer scaled back its savings program after business slowed in 2020, The New York Times reported.

If you’re planning one last use out of your coupons, supplies may not last at your local Bed Bath & Beyond. 

According to a report from Insider’s Ben Tobin, the company was out of nearly half of its inventory in December 2022 – almost 20% less than its availability rate in January the same year. 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California is pictured at the Capitol on January 7, 2023.

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

• Kevin McCarthy on Friday brushed off any concerns about fallout from the GOP leadership battle.
• “Because it took this long, now we learned how to govern,” the California Republican said.
• McCarthy clinched the House speakership early Saturday morning after a 15th ballot.

Shortly before the final roll call vote where Kevin McCarthy clinched the House speakership, the California Republican said that because of the protracted leadership battle, the GOP had “learned how to govern.”

While speaking with reporters at the Capitol on Friday evening, McCarthy dismissed any notion that the lengthy balloting process to secure his speakership was a prediction of GOP dysfunction in the 118th Congress.

“I think getting together and just finding the ability to — how we’re going to work together is new for us,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, we’re going to be more effective, more efficient, and definitely government is going to be more accountable.”

When McCarthy was asked about his outlook on leading the slim 222-member GOP majority, especially one with a deeply influential conservative bloc, the lawmaker said that the experience had been helpful to the party — despite a caucus size that will leave little room for error in the next two years.

“This is the great part,” he replied. “Because it took this long, now we learned how to govern. So now we’ll be able to get the job done.”

—Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 6, 2023

McCarthy was slated to claim the speaker’s gavel on Tuesday, Jan. 3.

However, the first few roll call votes shined a light on the lingering divisions within a party still reeling from their lackluster midterm results while also looking to 2024 — when President Joe Biden is expected to seek reelection and former President Donald Trump may once again be the GOP presidential nominee.

McCarthy on early Saturday morning eventually won the speakership over House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York after 15 ballots and a 216-212 vote.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro discussed binational investment and trade at a meeting in Caracas on Saturday, the Colombian government said.

The countries have renewed political ties since Petro took office in August 2022, reopening trade and promising to work together on issues including agriculture and management of borders.

Discussions at the meeting, the presidents’ second, centered on similar topics as when they first met in October – management of a newly re-opened border, efforts to increase trade and the peace talks that Bogota is holding with rebel group the National Liberation Army (ELN), Petro’s office said in a statement.

“We had a complete and very fruitful meeting. We have a clear joint work plan that will keep giving positive results for our countries,” Maduro said on Twitter.

The two men have previously said they could strengthen cooperation over Monomeros, a Colombia-based fertilizer producer which is owned by Venezuelan state chemical company Pequiven. Colombia’s finance minister has said his country may be open to buying Monomeros.

Venezuela is a guarantor country at Colombia’s talks with the ELN and hosted the first round of negotiations between the two sides, which ended in December.

Caracas broke off relations with Bogota in 2019 after Venezuelan opposition activists tried to send aid trucks from Colombia. Maduro’s government said it was a front for an attempted coup.

Previous governments in Bogota have accused Maduro of harboring Colombian rebel groups and criminals, accusations he has denied.

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Yet another “atmospheric river” of dense, moist tropical air will clobber California on Monday with rain and mountain snow – the fifth of the weather phenomenon since Christmas – even as the state was being pummeled by storms this weekend, forecasters said.

The current bout of heavy showers and gale-force winds swept into the northwestern corner of California late on Friday and spread southward into the San Francisco Bay Area and central coast on Saturday afternoon and will linger on Sunday, said David Roth a meteorologist from the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.

“But, oh no this is not over,” Roth added.

Another in the back-to-back parade of storm systems will hit on Monday and last through the middle of next week at least, affecting Los Angeles, Sacramento, up through the San Francisco Bay Area and toward Oregon.

“It’s going to get worse Monday,” Roth said, “We’re talking 3-to-6 inches (7.5 cm-15 cm) of rain, several feet of snow in the mountains … because the area is so saturated we could see flash floods, mudslides, rockslides and avalanches.”

Hillsides and canyons already stripped bare of vegetation by past wildfires are especially vulnerable to rock and mudslides according to forecasters.

In addition to heavy rains, up to 2 feet (60 cm) of snow was expected to fall by the end of Sunday in higher elevations of the Sierras, where accumulations of a foot to 18 inches (30 cm to 46 cm) or more were measured earlier this week.

Tens of thousands of homes and businesses have lost power in recent days and more than 34,000 remained without electricity on Saturday afternoon, largely in Mendocino County in northern California, according to tracking site Poweroutages.us.

It marked the third and strongest atmospheric river to strike California since early last week.

Howling winds uprooted trees already weakened by prolonged drought and poorly anchored in rain-soaked soil, taking down power lines with them and blocking roadways across the region.

An NWS weather alert on Saturday warned that the cumulative effect of successive heavy rain storms since late December could bring rivers to record high levels and cause flooding across much of Central California.

At least six people have died in the severe weather since New Year’s weekend, including a toddler killed by a fallen redwood tree crushing a mobile home in northern California.

The rapid succession of storms left downtown San Francisco drenched in 10.3 inches (26 cm) of rain from Dec. 26 through Jan. 4, the wettest 10-day stretch recorded there in more than 150 years, since 1871, according to the NWS.

Roth said “This isn’t close to being over,” and that the storm patterns will persist until the middle of January.

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(NewsNation) — Now that the drama of electing a new speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is behind us, the question many Americans are asking is, what’s next?

Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., secured the House speakership late Friday night in a 15th round of balloting, but not before tensions boiled over on the floor of the U.S. House.

“We have to focus on the economy, we have to focus, make our border secure,” McCarthy said after winning the vote. “We have much work to do.”

Rep. Dusty Johnson, R- S.D., said Republicans now have to act together.

“They want a Republican Party, a Republican House, that has its act together,” Johnson said. “We need to show them in the next few days we have our act together.”

Congress will soon be on to the business of legislating, but the prolonged fight around the speaker’s election raises questions.

Is this Republican-led house capable of governing?

It’s a concern even some Republicans themselves share.

“When you’ve got a five-seat margin, it’s not going to be easy,” Johnson said.

It took 15 rounds of voting for the party to unite behind a speaker this time around.

Tensions rose and last-minute fireworks ensued amid the House voting process, during which members literally had to be restrained on the House floor.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., got heated toward fellow Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida on Friday.

It was an episode that McCarthy said will only make his party more ready to govern.

“I really think by having the disruption now, I really built the trust with one another and learned how to work together,” McCarthy said.

On Monday, the new House will be sworn in and will have to vote on the rules that dictate how the chamber is run.

In order to win their vote for speaker, McCarthy agreed to the demands of a small group of ultraconservative Freedom Caucus Republicans, demands that are widely expected to weaken his speakership.

McCarthy’s rules concessions:

• One member can force a vote to remove the speaker
• Bills limiting government spending will be prioritized
• Bills will be posted publicly 72 hours before a vote
• More hardline conservatives will be on key committees

For important bills that have even wide, bipartisan support, McCarthy acknowledged, getting all his members to buy in will be a challenge.

“We have to think about and work on the bills with a microcosm of the conference before we start writing it,” McCarthy said. “That’s what we learned here.”

KYIV (Reuters) – Tears of joy streamed down worshippers’ faces as Ukraine’s main church celebrated a “return” to Kyiv’s Cathedral of the Assumption on Orthodox Christmas day, shortly after taking control of it from a rival church with alleged ties to Russia.

The golden-domed cathedral, of huge cultural and religious significance, sits on a high hill in the centre of Kyiv by the river Dnipro, and forms part of the 980-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, also containing chapels and administrative buildings.

It has become a focus of a bitter conflict between Ukraine’s Orthodox communities, triggered by Russia’s invasion.

Members of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Ukraine’s largest, piled into the cathedral’s ornate interior on Saturday, to hear the first ever Ukrainian-language service in the cathedral.

“During these days of festivities, with strong feelings we ask God: help us to defeat the enemy, who brought grief into our home. Help us to finally drive out the foreign invasion from the Ukrainian land,” said the OCU’s Patriarch Epifaniy I.

Vadym Storozhyk, a 50-year-old Kyiv city councillor, said the Christmas service meant to him a ‘return’ of a holy site under Ukraine’s control.

“30 years after renewing our history and gaining our independence — we return to our holy places, to our (spiritual) sources,” he said.

Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko, who attended the service with the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, posted a message on Facebook celebrating what he said was the end of three and a half centuries of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra’s “capture” by Moscow.

Ukraine’s Orthodox Church, in its various iterations, has been subordinate to Moscow since the 17th century.

Ukraine has about 30 million Orthodox believers, divided between different church communities. The war, now in its eleventh month, has led many Ukrainians to rally round the OCU, which they see as more pro-Ukrainian than its rival, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).

The UOC was officially under the wing of Russia’s Orthodox Church until May 2022 but announced a severing of ties due to the Moscow church’s support for the war.

President Vladimir Putin on Saturday praised the Russian Orthodox Church for supporting Moscow’s forces fighting in Ukraine in an Orthodox Christmas message and called it an important stabilising force in society.

Despite cutting ties, the UOC still faces allegations of pro-Russian views and direct collaboration with Moscow, which it denies, from Ukraine’s government and from much of Ukraine’s press and civil society. The UOC says it is the victim of a political witch-hunt by its enemies in government.

The UOC was evicted from the cathedral after its lease from the government expired.

The handover of the cathedral took many by surprise – an OCU priest, Vasyl Rudnytskyi, looked stunned as he walked towards the building’s gates amid the deafening pealing of bells.

“I didn’t even consider the possibility of this two weeks ago, or the fact that we would celebrate Jesus’ birth in such a meaningful place for the Ukrainian people,” he said.

The OCU was established in 2019 and recognised as Ukraine’s official branch of Orthodoxy by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Istanbul, the global head of the Orthodox Church.

That decision infuriated Russia’s Orthodox Church, as Istanbul had previously recognised the UOC, then under Moscow’s rule, as the legitimate Ukrainian church.

Some of the UOC’s clergy and many of its worshippers moved to the OCU, to the former organisation’s dismay. Both churches say the other is canonically illegitimate. Although the OCU soon had more worshippers than the old church, the UOC maintained control of over 12,000 churches, including the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra complex.

Ukraine’s government institutions and local press often refer to the UOC as the “Moscow Patriarchate”, a label the church rejects. A poll last August showed the UOC only retaining 20% of its worshippers from 2021, suggesting many had left it since the invasion, but the church told Reuters this data didn’t correspond to reality.

In a chapel on the monastery’s grounds, the UOC’s spokesman, Metropolitan Kliment, told Reuters the government’s actions were a “provocation intended to upset and humiliate millions of UOC worshippers.”

Lyudmyla, a 69-year-old worshipper, said she feared the government was biased against the UOC.

“I don’t like this. We need to be united not divided, right now. And this could lead to some kind of religious split (in our society),” she said.

The UOC’s monasteries and churches, including the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, faced a wave of searches by Ukrainian security forces and the police have announced a string of investigations.

Authorities said they found pro-Russian literature and Russian citizens being harboured on church premises, something the UOC denied.

Commissioner Roger Goodell said on Saturday in an open letter to National Football League (NFL) fans that he is “grateful for and humbled by” all who played a role in Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s ongoing recovery from cardiac arrest.

Hamlin collapsed on the field during a Monday night game in Cincinnati and had to have his heartbeat restored but began to wake up two days later and has had his breathing tube removed.

The 24-year-old Hamlin also surprised his team mates on Friday when he appeared on a video call during which he said “love you, boys,” flexed his biceps and flashed a heart symbol with his hands.

“Damar Hamlin’s inspiring progress over the past few days has lifted the spirits of the entire NFL and football fans across the country,” Goodell wrote in the open letter that was posted on the league’s website.

“While his recovery is just beginning, we thank the NFL medical personnel and the medical staffs from both teams whose emergency action quite likely saved his life.

“We are also grateful to the professionals at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center who tended to Damar and continue to oversee his care.”

Goodell also said players and coaches from all 32 NFL teams will wear “Love for Damar 3” T-shirts during pregame warmups in a show of support for Hamlin this weekend as the league’s regular season comes to a close.

Buffalo could still secure the top seed in the American Football Conference and coveted first-round bye if the Kansas City Chiefs lose to the Las Vegas Raiders later on Saturday and the Bills beat the New England Patriots on Sunday.

“I’m deeply hopeful that with his continued progress, there is a good chance Damar himself will be watching his teammates,” wrote Goodell. “We are grateful for and humbled by all who played a role as he continues on his road to recovery.”

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