Republican Governor Rick Snyder, of Michigan signed a bill into law Friday requiring facilities where at least 120 abortions are performed annually to obtain a state license as freestanding surgical facilities. The change means patients will be required to seek counseling before getting an abortion. Snyder sent out a public release backing the legislation, which pro-choicers have deemed a “backdoor assault” on the right-to-choice. “This bill respects a woman’s right to choose while helping protect her health and safety, including making sure a pregnant person is not being coerced into a decision,” he said. President of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards disagrees, and said in a statement the bill “was meant to ban abortion in Michigan, and it was pushed through in a lame-duck session by legislators who were voted out of office because of their extreme views on women’s health.”
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With just five days to go, Senate leader Harry Reid is sounding off on the fiscal cliff, predicting that the national will take the dreaded fall on Jan. 1—and blaming John Boehner's "dictatorship" over the House for Washington's failure to come up with a plan. Meanwhile, President Obama is back in town from Hawaii and hitting the phones, dialing up Congress's four top leaders.
Four firefighters were shot yesterday—two fatally—after responding to an early morning fire in Upstate, N.Y., which appears to have been set as an ambush. Officials say the suspected gunmane, 62-year-old William Spengler, started shooting when the firefighters arrived, killing two, and injuring two others. Spengler was found dead on the scene, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. A motive for the crime is still unclear. Spengler had previously served 17 years for manslaughter in the death of his grandmother.
In a rare public statement by the CIA, acting director Mike Morell announced to agency employees that the new movie Zero Dark Thirty is a “dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts.” Morell expressed specific concerns with the film’s depiction of waterboarding as “crucial” to the hunt for Osama bin Laden and took issue with the appearance of only a few agents in the hunt. “The operation was a team effort-and a very large team at that,” he said. The CIA’s public affairs office did interact with Zero Dark Thirty’s filmmakers, but reportedly had zero control over the final product.
Time magazine named President Obama 2012 “person of the year.” The editors choose the honor for the person—or sometimes group—that is considered to have had the greatest impact during the past year. Last year, amid the Arab Spring uprising and Occupy Wall Street in the U.S., Time chose “the Protester.” The title doesn’t always come with honor, as the magazine has been known to pick those famous for notoriety, such as Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. This year, Time took a poll with six frontrunners, but Obama didn’t win that contest—readers chose Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea, instead.
Senator Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, died on Monday afternoon at age 88. Inouye had been hospitalized since early in December with respiratory problems, and died from respiratory complications. According to his Senate staff, his last word was “Aloha.” Inouye had served in the Senate for 50 years, since 1963, and was the longest-serving senator at the time of his death. Inouye was also the second longest-serving senator in U.S. history, after Robert Byrd. Inouye lost his right arm in World War II, and was later awarded the Bronze Star Medal of Honor.
Local police have announced that 27 total people were killed, 20 of them children, in a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday. The shooter is being reported as Adam Lanza, 20. His mother, Nancy, was a kindergarten teacher was reportedly killed at her home before her son went to Sandy Hook Elementary and opened fire on two classrooms of students. The school's principal and psychologist are among the dead. Police say the guns he used are thought to have been registered in Lanza's mother's name. Governor Daniel Malloy called it a "tragedy of unspeakable terms," and President Obama held a tearful press conference, extending his condolences and ordering flags to fly at half mast.
In a statewide poll of New Yorkers released Wednesday, 58 percent said they didn’t want the U.S. secretary of state and former senator to run for mayor in 2013. Clinton has said she will be pursuing a private life after she steps down in the Obama administration, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly called her earlier this year and encouraged her to run. Quinnipiac University polled 1,302 New Yorkers and had a margin of error of nearly 3 percentage points.
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While the relationship between the United States and Pakistan appears to be getting better, there’s clearly still a long way to go. A new report released Monday by the Pentagon blames Pakistan for undermining security in Afghanistan. The country is at fault for permitting safe havens for insurgents, and for failing to interdict explosive materials, the report claims. But as the U.S. prepares to pull troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, officials say the U.S. and its allies have succeeded in controlling Taliban advances and keeping casualties to a minimum.
For the last 30 years New York officials were warned of a storm of historic proportions that could flood the subways, create widespread power outages, and hit the Rockaways peninsula especially hard. A 2006 report read: “It’s not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City. It’s just a question of when.” But tight budgets meant the warnings went unheeded and as a result when Hurricane Sandy hit, many of the problems were dealt with on the fly. “I don’t know that anyone believed it,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told the Associated Press. “We had never seen a storm like this. So it is very hard to anticipate something that you have never experienced.”
New initiatives legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington aren’t cool with the federal government, the U.S. Attorney’s Office clarified in a statement released Wednesday. Even though Washington’s law allowing the possession of an ounce or less of marijuana is scheduled to go into effect December 6, “Regardless of any changes in state law … growing, selling, or possessing any amount of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.” The Department of Justice is still reviewing the legality of the marijuana initiatives that passed on Election Day.
*** Armey, the longtime conservative leader and former congressman, resigned as chairman of FreedomWorks Friday, in a split that appears to be less than amicable. FreedomWorks was a key organization in the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, owing much to Armey’s leadership. "The top management team of FreedomWorks was taking a direction I thought was unproductive, and I thought it was time to move on with my life," Armey said. Declining to go into specifics of what caused the rift with the organization he was so instrumental in fostering, Armey only said, "They were matters of principle. It's how you do business as opposed to what you do. But I don't want to be the guy to create problems."
The debate over the solution to the fiscal cliff continued today when Utah Senator Orrin Hatch released a strong criticism of Obama's plan for the crisis, calling it "a classic bait-and-switch on the American people.” President Obama, meanwhile, used his weekly radio address on Saturday to urge Americans to pressure the House to pass his plan to deal with the fiscal cliff, which House Speaker John Boehner reportedly rejected on Thursday. So what now? If no deal goes through by Dec. 31, a series of draconian spending cuts will automatically go into effect while the Bush tax cuts will expire. Here are a guide to the fiscal cliff talks and a discussion of what the fiscal cliff actually is.