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 The United States is still reviewing a request for troops made by Haiti’s interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph to help secure key infrastructure after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Monday.

Psaki said Haiti’s political leadership remains unclear and that it was vital for the country’s leaders to come together to chart a united path forward.

Moise was shot dead early on Wednesday at his Port-au-Prince home by what Haitian authorities describe as a unit of assassins formed of 26 Colombians and two Haitian Americans. Haitian police said on Sunday they had arrested another key suspect.

Continue reading “White House does not rule out Haiti request for U.S. troops”

The Biden administration on Monday asked a federal appeals court to dismiss the Justice Department’s legal challenge to court rulings that barred a Trump-era effort to ban new downloads of Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok.

Last month, President Joe Biden withdrew a series of executive orders issued by former President Donald Trump in August that sought to ban new downloads of WeChat and TikTok and ordered a new review. The Commerce Department formally withdrew the orders that sought to bar the apps last month. The Justice Department said Monday that the government’s legal challenge was now moot.

A Texas natural gas marketer has sued a unit of Chevron USA Inc in Houston federal court, asking for nearly $85 million from the oil giant for failing to make natural gas deliveries during a deep freeze across the state in February.

In a complaint filed on Friday, Cailip Gas Marketing LLC located in Houston accuses Chevron Natural Gas of breaching a sales contract by delivering lower-than-agreed volumes of natural gas to a facility near Houston just as Winter Storm Uri knocked out power and sent natural-gas spot prices soaring.

Chevron did not immediately provide a comment. The complaint says that the San Ramon, California-based company has said force majeure excused the missed and incomplete deliveries.

Continue reading “Chevron hit with $85 mln lawsuit over gas deliveries during Texas freeze”

Declaring Lubbock a “sanctuary city” for the unborn, voters have approved a local ban on almost all abortions, and the Texas legislature is considering a law to bar the procedure as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Lubbock, home to some 260,000 people, is the 25th such “sanctuary city” – all but two in Texas – to have banned abortions in the last two years.

Drucilla Tigner, a policy and advocacy strategist for ACLU-Texas, said most other towns that have passed similar sanctuary city measures have populations of a few hundred or thousand, and often have no medical providers whatsoever, let alone one that provides abortions, as Lubbock does.

Continue reading “Texas city bans abortion, allows family to sue providers, helpers”

The U.S. Supreme Court stepped back into the heated debate over gun rights on Monday, agreeing to hear a challenge backed by the National Rifle Association to New York state’s restrictions on people carrying concealed handguns in public in a case that could further undermine firearms control efforts nationally.

The justices took up an appeal by two gun owners and the New York affiliate of the NRA, an influential gun rights group closely aligned with Republicans, of a lower court ruling throwing out their challenge to the restrictions on concealed handguns outside the home.

Lower courts rejected the argument made by the plaintiffs that the restrictions violated the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The lawsuit seeks an unfettered right to carry concealed handguns in public.

Continue reading “U.S. Supreme Court takes major case on carrying concealed handguns”