Republican U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called on Democratic President Joe Biden to agree to compromises and spending cuts, as the two remain deadlocked over raising the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling.

McCarthy spoke on Monday before Biden is set to give the annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, aiming to get ahead of the president and reinforce his role as the leading congressional negotiator.

The White House has said Biden will discuss federal spending cuts with Republicans, but only after the debt ceiling is lifted, while McCarthy has said Republicans will only lift the ceiling if Biden agrees to spending cuts. While the two sides disagree on the order of the subjects they are tackling, both say they will continue to talk.

“Mr. President, it’s time to get to work,” said McCarthy, whose Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives in November’s election.

“We must commit to finding common ground on a responsible debt limit increase. Finding compromise is exactly how governing in America is supposed to work, and exactly what the American people voted for just three months ago,” McCarthy said.

“Defaulting on our debt is not an option, but neither is a future of higher taxes, higher interest rates and an economy that doesn’t work.”

House Republicans want to use the debt ceiling, which covers the spending programs and tax cuts Congress previously approved, as leverage to push spending cuts, after two years of Democratic control of the House and the Senate.

Biden on Tuesday is expected to insist that raising the debt limit is not negotiable and U.S. lawmakers should not use it as a “bargaining chip,” his top economic adviser Brian Deese said on Monday.

“This bedrock idea that the United States has met all of its financial obligations for its existence as a country isn’t something that anybody should be using as a bargaining chip. It’s not a negotiable item,” Deese said.

Biden seemed to question McCarthy’s ability to keep Republicans in line last week, calling McCarthy “a decent man, I think,” but noting the concessions he made to become speaker in January. Those included changing a rule of the chamber to allow any member to call for a vote that would remove him, rather than requiring a majority from either party.

Despite what appears to be a standoff, McCarthy emerged from a meeting with Biden last week saying he believed the two could find common ground.

A day later, McCarthy told reporters that the president had agreed to meet again.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House had been in touch with McCarthy’s staff on next steps.

(This story has been corrected to change the headline to specify that McCarthy is seeking a compromise on the debt ceiling, and not debt ceiling cuts)

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Democrats and Republicans poured millions of dollars into state Supreme Court races in North Carolina and Ohio last fall, eyeing the seats as a crucial tool in advancing political power on issues such as redistricting, abortion and voting laws.

On Friday, Republicans reaped the first major reward, when the newly elected conservative majority on North Carolina’s top court agreed to revisit an earlier decision invalidating a Republican-backed redistricting map.

The move is a likely precursor to a ruling that gives the state’s Republican-controlled legislature the power to redraw the map to their advantage, legal and political experts say.

If Republicans are allowed to implement more partisan congressional lines, the result would flip three or perhaps even four Democratic seats just in North Carolina, enough to nearly double Republicans’ current narrow margin in the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s elections.

The state’s 14 districts are currently split evenly between the parties, after the November 2022 election took place using a more competitive map drawn by judges.

“We’re probably at a point where 11 Republican seats can be drawn,” said Michael Bitzer, a politics and history professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and the author of “Redistricting and Gerrymandering in North Carolina: Battlelines in the Tar Heel State.”

The court’s Republicans also agreed to rehear a case in which its previous Democratic majority had blocked a law requiring a photo identification to vote.

Ohio’s state Supreme Court issued more than a half-dozen 4-3 rulings last year tossing out Republican-favored maps on the grounds that they violated a constitutional provision prohibiting redistricting from favoring one party over another.

But after the retirement of the court’s chief justice, Maureen O’Connor, the swing vote for those decisions, and the election of Republicans for both open seats, most observers believe the court’s new majority is far less likely to stand in the way when the Republican-controlled redistricting commission redraws maps later this year.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they just went through the kabuki theater, and we actually end up with exactly the same maps,” Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, which campaigns against partisan redistricting, said of the commission.

In North Carolina, Republican candidates in November won two seats held by Democrats, wresting away the majority. Friday’s decision by the five conservatives earned a scathing rebuke from the two remaining Democratic justices.

“It took this court just one month to send a smoke signal to the public that our decisions are fleeting, and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench,” they wrote.

The court’s decision to rehear the issue, rather than wait for lawmakers to draw new maps that would then be subject to litigation, creates the appearance that the justices were acting out of “raw partisanship,” said Asher Hildebrand, a public policy professor at Duke University.

“To me, it removes all pretense that this was about fair-minded judicial review,” he said.

The office of the Republican state Senate leader, Phil Berger, did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling on Monday.

Last year’s Democratic majority on the court ruled that the state constitution outlawed gerrymandering, the process by which one party manipulates redistricting to entrench power. That decision led North Carolina Republican lawmakers to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in what has become one of the year’s most momentous cases.

In Moore v. Harper, the Republican legislators have asked the nation’s high court to embrace a once-fringe legal theory that would bar judges from exercising any oversight over lawmakers’ power to draw maps and institute election rules. Democrats and civil rights advocates have argued that the principle, known as the independent state legislature theory, would permit anti-democratic laws.

The North Carolina Supreme Court – whose previous decision gave rise to the U.S. Supreme Court case – could now choose to embrace the notion regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court eventually rules.

“We either get Moore v. Harper and it’s the Wild West everywhere, or we get a Republican state Supreme Court to overturn it and it’s just the Wild West in North Carolina,” Hildebrand said.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The number of Ecuadorians braving the trek north to Mexico in hopes of reaching the United States jumped exponentially last year amid a wave of violence and shrinking job opportunities at home, experts say.

“We’ve never seen violence like this before,” said Monica, a 30-year-old Ecuadorian in Mexico who fled after criminals threatened to kill her when she could not make extortion payments to continue selling food.

Murder rates in Ecuador leapt in 2022 to 25.32 per 100,000 people, up from 14.06 per 100,000 people the year before, according to police data.

“We want to go to the United States, we know that Mexico is not safe either,” Monica added, declining to give her last name.

Monica, like many other Ecuadorians, made at least part of the arduous journey on foot. She arrived in Mexico last week with her husband after traversing the dangerous Darien Gap connecting Colombia and Panama.

Migrants are increasingly staying in Mexico after being unable to reach the United States, while others are deported back to Mexico after crossing the border.

Last year, 22,156 Ecuadorians entered Mexico without proper documentation, according to immigration data, up from 1,384 in 2021.

Mexico extended a visa requirement last year for Ecuadorians, with the aim of deterring migrants from passing through the country to the United States.

But experts interviewed by Reuters say the visa requirement contributed to the jump in undocumented travel to Mexico, with rising violence also prompting people to leave.

Over the weekend, Ecuadorians turned out for local elections, though the process was marred by the murder of three candidates – the most recent on Saturday – and more than a dozen threats reported.

Authorities had accused nearly 30 candidates of possible ties to drug trafficking and illegal mining.

Meanwhile, human rights advocates are pushing for more nations whose residents are seeking to migrate to be included in a U.S. humanitarian program via a mobile application called CBP One.

“The migration issue over the last year – particularly for young people – is alarming,” said Flor Haro, president of Ecuador’s Family Without Borders Foundation.

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The thing about House Republican George Santos is that he’s such a cartoonishly over the top villain, you can’t even parody him. When it was first revealed that he’s falsified nearly every aspect of his personal and professional history, plenty of folks sarcastically asked if “George Santos” was even the con artist’s real name. Then it turned out Santos actually went by the name Anthony Devolder.

Now Santos seems to think he can make himself more popular by running into the arms of Donald Trump, even at a time when an increasing number of Republican political figures are trying to figure out how to move on from a fading and soon to be indicted Trump. Santos tweeted this: “Donald J. Trump will be the 47th POTUS.”

Let’s just say that it didn’t go well for him. Within the first several hours Santos’ tweet had received thousands of mostly negative replies. House Democrat Ritchie Torres fired back at both Santos and Trump, tweeting “The two of you have a higher chance of being indicted.”

Of course Santos may just be playing the fool in an attempt at distracting everyone from the very serious new sexual harassment allegations against him. At this point even House Republicans probably wish they could ditch this guy, if only because the endless negative headlines about serial liar Santos are making it difficult for House Republicans to gain any traction with the lies that they’ve been making up.

But if House Republicans were to expel George Santos, they would lose the seat temporarily for sure, and would probably lose it in a special election for the rest of the term. Given that it took Republicans fifteen rounds to install Kevin McCarthy as Speaker by just one vote, they can’t afford to expel Santos right now or it could throw their entire caucus into chaos. And so House Republicans are stuck with Santos’ endless negative headlines drowning out their own dishonest agenda, which frankly they deserve.

The post Everyone piles on as George Santos crashes and burns appeared first on Palmer Report.

The screams of people still trapped in the rubble filled the night early on Tuesday and relatives wept for their loved ones as the death toll in Turkey and in neighbouring northwest Syria rose to more than 3,700.

The magnitude 7.8 quake rippled through both countries early on Monday, toppling entire apartment blocks, wrecking hospitals, and leaving thousands more people injured or homeless.

Freezing winter weather hampered search efforts for survivors through the night into Tuesday.

Under a pile of rubble in the southern province of Hatay, a woman’s voice could be heard calling for help. Nearby, the body of a small child lay lifeless.

Weeping in the rain, a local resident who gave his name as Deniz wrung his hands in despair.

“They’re making noises but nobody is coming,” he said. “We’re devastated, we’re devastated. My God… They’re calling out. They’re saying, ‘Save us,’ but we can’t save them. How are we going to save them? There has been nobody since the morning.”

Temperatures fell close to freezing overnight, worsening conditions for people trapped under rubble or left homeless.

In Kahramanmaras, north of Hatay, entire families gathered around fires and wrapped themselves in blankets to stay warm.

“We barely made it out of the house,” said Neset Guler, huddled around the fire with his four children. “Our situation is a disaster. We are hungry, we are thirsty. It’s miserable.”

The earthquake, which was followed by a series of aftershocks, was the biggest recorded worldwide by the U.S. Geological Survey since a tremor in the remote South Atlantic in August 2021.

In Turkey, the death toll stood at 2,316, the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said, making it the country’s deadliest earthquake since an earthquake of similar magnitude in 1999 that killed more than 17,000. More than 13,000 were reported injured in Monday’s quake.

At least 1,444 people were killed in Syria and about 3,500 injured, according to figures from the Damascus government and rescue workers in the northwestern region controlled by insurgents.

Poor internet connections and damaged roads between some of the worst-hit cities in Turkey’s south, homes to millions of people, hindered efforts to assess and address the impact.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, preparing for a tough election in May, called the quake a historic disaster and said authorities were doing all they could.

“Everyone is putting their heart and soul into efforts although the winter season, cold weather and the earthquake happening during the night makes things more difficult,” he said. He said 45 countries had offered to help the search and rescue efforts.

In the Turkish city of Iskenderun, rescuers climbed an enormous pile of debris that was once part of a state hospital’s intensive care unit in search of survivors. Health workers did what they could to tend to the new rush of injured patients.

“We have a patient who was taken into surgery but we don’t know what happened,” said Tulin, a woman in her 30s, standing outside the hospital, wiping away tears and praying.

In Syria, the effects of the quake were compounded by the destruction of more than 11 years of civil war.

A top U.N. humanitarian official said fuel shortages and the harsh winter weather were also creating obstacles to its response.

“The infrastructure is damaged, the roads that we used to use for humanitarian work are damaged, we have to be creative in how to get to the people… but we are working hard,” U.N. resident coordinator El-Mostafa Benlamlih told Reuters in an interview via video link from Damascus.

In the government-controlled city of Aleppo, footage on Twitter showed two neighbouring buildings collapsing one after the other, filling streets with billowing dust.

Two residents of the city, which has been heavily damaged in the war, said the buildings had fallen in the hours after the quake, which was felt as far away as Cyprus and Lebanon.

Raed al-Saleh of the Syrian White Helmets, a rescue service in rebel-held territory known for pulling people from the ruins of buildings destroyed by air strikes, said they were in “a race against time to save the lives of those under the rubble.”

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Republican U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called on Democratic President Joe Biden to agree to compromises and spending cuts, as the two remain deadlocked over raising the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling.

McCarthy spoke on Monday before Biden is set to give the annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, aiming to get ahead of the president and reinforce his role as the leading congressional negotiator.

The White House has said Biden will discuss federal spending cuts with Republicans, but only after the debt ceiling is lifted, while McCarthy has said Republicans will only lift the ceiling if Biden agrees to spending cuts. While the two sides disagree on the order of the subjects they are tackling, both say they will continue to talk.

“Mr. President, it’s time to get to work,” said McCarthy, whose Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives in November’s election.

“We must commit to finding common ground on a responsible debt limit increase. Finding compromise is exactly how governing in America is supposed to work, and exactly what the American people voted for just three months ago,” McCarthy said.

“Defaulting on our debt is not an option, but neither is a future of higher taxes, higher interest rates and an economy that doesn’t work.”

House Republicans want to use the debt ceiling, which covers the spending programs and tax cuts Congress previously approved, as leverage to push spending cuts, after two years of Democratic control of the House and the Senate.

Biden on Tuesday is expected to insist that raising the debt limit is not negotiable and U.S. lawmakers should not use it as a “bargaining chip,” his top economic adviser Brian Deese said on Monday.

“This bedrock idea that the United States has met all of its financial obligations for its existence as a country isn’t something that anybody should be using as a bargaining chip. It’s not a negotiable item,” Deese said.

Biden seemed to question McCarthy’s ability to keep Republicans in line last week, calling McCarthy “a decent man, I think,” but noting the concessions he made to become speaker in January. Those included changing a rule of the chamber to allow any member to call for a vote that would remove him, rather than requiring a majority from either party.

Despite what appears to be a standoff, McCarthy emerged from a meeting with Biden last week saying he believed the two could find common ground.

A day later, McCarthy told reporters that the president had agreed to meet again.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House had been in touch with McCarthy’s staff on next steps.

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The U.S. Coast Guard on Monday imposed a temporary security zone in waters off South Carolina during the military’s search and recovery of debris from a suspected Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down.

The White House said the balloon’s flight over the United States had done nothing to improve already tense relations with China and its national security spokesperson dismissed Beijing’s contention that the balloon was for meteorological purposes as straining credulity.

Beijing condemned the shooting down of the balloon and urged Washington to show restraint over the episode. White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters: “Nobody wants to see conflict here.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a planned Feb.5-6 visit to China because of the balloon’s flight into U.S. airspace last week. It was shot down off the Atlantic Coast on Saturday.

Kirby said Blinken would seek to reschedule the trip when the time is right.

The trip to Beijing would have been the first by a U.S. secretary of state since 2018 as the United States and China have sought to mend ties that have been under severe strain over a range of disagreements, including U.S. attempts to block Chinese access to some cutting-edge technologies.

The United States was able to study the balloon while it was aloft and officials hope to glean valuable intelligence on its operations by retrieving as many components as possible, Kirby said.

China called the shooting down of the balloon an “obvious overreaction”.

“China firmly opposes and strongly protests against this,” Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng said in remarks to the U.S. embassy in Beijing posted on the ministry’s website.

U.S. officials have played down the balloon’s impact on national security, although a successful recovery could potentially give the United States insight into China’s spying capabilities.

Senior U.S. officials have offered to brief former Trump administration officials on the details of what the White House said was three China balloon overflights when Donald Trump was president. U.S. officials said those balloons came to light after Trump left office in January 2021 and was succeeded by President Joe Biden.

A senior U.S. general responsible for bringing down the balloon said on Monday the military had not detected previous spy balloons before the one that appeared on Jan. 28 over the United States and called it an “awareness gap.”

However, Air Force General Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command said U.S. intelligence determined the previous flights after the fact based on “additional means of collection” of intelligence without offering further details on whether that might be cyber espionage, telephone intercepts or human sources.

On Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said China learned that its balloon had drifted over the United States after being notified by Washington.

“The unintended entry of this airship (into the U.S.) is entirely an isolated, accidental incident. It tests the sincerity the U.S. has in improving and stabilizing bilateral relations and the way it handles crises,” she said.

Mao said another balloon, spotted over Latin America, was an unmanned civilian airship on a test flight that “severely deviated and unintendedly entered the space above Latin America because it was affected by the weather and because it has limited self-steering capability.”

On Sunday, Colombia’s military said it sighted an airborne object similar to a balloon after the Pentagon said on Friday that another Chinese balloon was flying over Latin America.

While calling for U.S. restraint, China has warned of “serious repercussions” and said it will use the necessary means to deal with “similar situations”, without elaborating. Some policy analysts said they expect any response to be finely calibrated, however, to prevent diplomatic ties becoming even worse.

Brokerage ING said in a Monday note that the incident could exacerbate the “tech war” and would have a negative near-term impact on China’s yuan currency.

“Both sides will likely impose more export bans on technology in different industries. This is a new threat to supply chain disruption, although the risk of logistical disruption from COVID restrictions has now disappeared,” it said.

“This new risk is more of a long-term risk than an imminent one,” ING said.

Armed with a wooden stick, a bucket and a headlamp, Philippine construction worker Johnny Manlugay hunts every night for the eggs of sea turtles on the pristine beaches of the northern province of La Union.

The 55-year-old can easily spot nesting sites, having been trained in his youth by his grandfather how to track the animals and their eggs, which his family traded at the time or ate.

But his egg-stealing days are over. Now Manlugay has turned his skills to helping protect marine turtles on the provincial beaches favoured by the endangered Olive Ridley species to build nesting sites.

“I’ve learned to love this work,” said Manlugay, who was accompanied by his two dogs. “We didn’t know poaching was illegal and that we should not eat turtle eggs and meat.”

He carefully transferred each egg into his pail, along with some sand from the turtle nests, to be turned over to the group spearheading a conservation programme on the beaches, Coastal Underwater Resource Management Actions (CURMA).

(For photoessay please click on: https://reut.rs/3JGCWE8)

All five species of sea turtles found in the Philippine archipelago – Green, Hawksbill, Loggerhead, Leatherback, and Olive Ridley – are endangered.

Slaughtered for their eggs, meat and shells, the turtles, or “pawikan” as they are called, also face threats from trade, hunting, habitat loss and climate change.

But the conservation effort established in 2009 has transformed sea turtle poachers into allies, offering incentives and training to help save thousands of turtles and keep their eggs from ending up in markets and on plates.

“We talked to the poachers, and it turned out poaching was just another means for them to earn a living,” said Carlos Tamayo, the programme’s director of operations. “They had no choice.”

Sea turtles lay 100 eggs to a nest on average, while the numbers of nests range between 35 and 40 each season, which runs from October to February.

Tamayo added that the figure had doubled during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. At a time when disease curbs kept people indoors, there was a rebound in many aspects of animal activity.

“Last season alone, for example, we had 75 nests and we released close to 9,000 hatchlings,” Tamayo said.

Volunteers receive 20 pesos ($0.37) for each egg collected, or four times what they might earn from selling them. The eggs are transferred to the programme’s hatchery to be reburied in protected areas.

Former poacher Jessie Cabagbag, who grew up eating turtle meat and eggs, said the extra income from egg collection went a long way for his family, which relies mainly on fishing for its livelihood.

“The incentives help us pay for our food and electricity bill. When I got lucky, I was able to save and use it to buy a tricyle which I use (to ferry passengers) when I could not go out to fish, so that’s another source of income,” he added.

Cabagbag, whose wife and seven-year-old son accompany him in patrolling the La Union beach of Bacnotan, has handed more than 1,000 eggs to CURMA since October.

“I stopped poaching when we underwent training and were taught that what we have been doing was illegal, and that these species of turtles are endangered,” said the 40-year-old.

Tourists flock to the spectacle of the blue-grey hatchlings scurrying madly down the sloping beach to reach the water after they are released.

The event inspired overwhelming joy in Cabagbag, he said.

“I am truly proud. Even our neighbours, they appreciate what I do, because it is not easy. I am happy that I get to contribute to the conservation of the ‘pawikan’.”

($1=54.6300 Philippine pesos)