As the Pentagon weighs new troop deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border, Democrats in Congress are poised to usher in unprecedented scrutiny of a politically charged mission championed by Republican President Donald Trump.
Democratic Representative Adam Smith, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, will hold a hearing on Tuesday with Pentagon officials he hopes will shed light on the costs, scope and goals of a deployment that critics have derided as a political stunt.
U.S. officials told Reuters the border deployment, which has fluctuated in size over the past three months, could grow again by as many as 2,000 or more troops.
Smith is skeptical about sending U.S. troops to deal with a crisis he believes would be better handled by judges. He told Reuters his committee may consider future funding restrictions for such missions.
“It’s undeniable that we have a significant increase in asylum seekers,” Smith said.
“But that’s not so much a job for the military as it is: we need more judges. We need to process them (the asylum seekers) more quickly,” he said.
Smith will receive testimony on Tuesday morning from John Rood, under secretary of defense for policy, and Vice Admiral Michael Gilday, the director of operations at the Joint Staff.
It is the first oversight hearing by the committee since Democrats took over the majority of the House of Representatives this month, a sign of the issue’s importance.
The Pentagon first approved the high-profile deployment of active duty U.S. troops to the Mexico border in October, ahead of U.S. midterm congressional elections. It was embraced by Trump’s supporters, including Republicans in Congress.
However, critics assailed the deployment as a political stunt to drive Republican voters to the polls and scoffed at Trump’s comparisons of caravans of Central American migrants, including women and children, to an “invasion.”
MORE TROOPS?
There are now about 2,350 active duty U.S. troops involved in the U.S. border mission. Although the figure is down from a peak of about 5,900 in November, it has expanded in scope from basic missions such as stringing concertina wire.
The Pentagon confirmed earlier in January that U.S. forces had provided medical support to 80 migrants.
A new request by the Department of Homeland Security for additional U.S. military support approved by the Pentagon earlier this month could require a fresh increase in troops, officials said. Smith said he had not been briefed by the Pentagon yet on potential new troop deployments.
He said public scrutiny was one of the best tools available to his committee to influence Trump’s decisions, given that the Senate is still controlled by Republicans and that Trump won’t want to sign legislation unfavorable to his agenda.
“What we can do is try to shine a light on it, to make the case that this is a bad idea, drum up public pressure so the president will stop doing these things,” Smith said.
For example, Smith said he wants to know what Pentagon funds might be used if Trump makes good on his threat to declare a national emergency in order to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
He suggested his committee would also consider ways to introduce restrictions in next year’s budget legislation.
“That will be one of the chief things that my committee tries to do, is to put into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) strict restrictions on how money can be used,” Smith said.
Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Paul Tait
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has a problem: how to explain that the Fed may soon begin to taper its ongoing asset-shedding operation without looking like he’s hunkering down for a coming recession, or caving to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Not long ago, Powell expected to face this delicate communication test some time later in 2019, rather than at his news conference on Wednesday following the close of the Fed’s first policy meeting of the year.
But three things - an unexpected scarcity of reserves deep in the plumbing of Wall Street, overt public pressure from investors and the White House, and the Fed’s own decision to rethink its interest-rate hikes - are forcing the U.S. central bank to acknowledge the real possibility of hanging on to more bonds than originally planned.
“You cannot stop the rate-hiking cycle without communicating on the balance sheet as well,” said Thomas Costerg, senior U.S. economist at Pictet Wealth Management, in Geneva, Switzerland.
A bigger balance sheet could result in an across-the-board easing of market borrowing costs and the foreign-exchange value of the dollar, easing strains on emerging markets. It could also affect the Fed’s appetite for bond buying in the face of a future U.S. downturn.
For more than a year, the Fed has methodically trimmed its multi-trillion-dollar balance sheet - from nearly $4.5 trillion to about $4.1 trillion and falling - without much notice.
Instead, it has kept the world’s eyes trained on a series of interest-rate hikes which, according to careful messaging from policymakers in recent weeks, may have come to an end.
But late last year, prominent investors took to blaming the Fed’s balance sheet runoff for market volatility. To underline what they saw as the harmful restraining effects of the Fed’s reversal of its bond-buying stimulus, the program known as quantitative easing undertaken during the financial crisis to jump-start the economy, they dubbed the runoff “quantitative tightening.”
In December, Trump amplified that theme, tweeting that the central bank ought not to “make yet another mistake” and “stop with the 50 B’s” - a reference to the $50 billion maximum in bonds by which the Fed has been shrinking its portfolio each month, according to a plan it outlined and began in 2017.
A day after the tweet, when Powell said the run-off remained on “automatic pilot,” the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index delivered its worst 60-minute selloff in at least a year.
Two weeks later, when Powell stressed that the plan was actually flexible, the index delivered its best 60 minutes in at least a year.
Trump’s tweet exposed a dilemma for the Fed: though its 2017 plan divorced balance sheet policy from monetary policy, markets see a stronger connection. If the Fed is to stick to its guns on keeping the balance sheet from becoming a first-responder tool against economic ups and downs, Powell needs to keep that divorce on the books.
“I don’t think they’re going to stop,” said Chuck Self, chief investment officer at iSectors LLC, in Appleton, Wisconsin. “They want to get it down as low as they can without disrupting the economy.”
A CLEARER ROAD MAP
The central bank is indeed nearing the point at which it needs to adjust its balance sheet plan, not because of the state of the domestic economy, which appears strong, but because of the plumbing of short-term markets.
As the portfolio has decreased, banks have trimmed the reserves they keep at the Fed by even greater amounts, putting a strain on the Fed’s ability to control the short-term policy rate by which it steers monetary policy.
Economists had already speculated last summer that to deal with mounting scarcity of reserves, and the resulting upward push on interest rates beyond a target range, the run-off would need to end two years earlier and leave the Fed with $1 trillion more than it had envisioned.
For its part, the Fed aims to trim its portfolio to an unspecified level at which demand for reserves matches supply - though not to as low as the $900 billion it held before the 2007-2009 recession prompted it begin the purchases.
“It’ll be substantially smaller than it is now...but nowhere near where it was before,” Powell said on Jan. 10, framing any decision as a technical one and not a referendum on the overall policy stance.
Growing questions about the balance sheet may prompt Powell to sketch out a clearer road map for the asset holdings at his 2:30 p.m. (19:30 GMT) Wednesday news conference.
“They’ve got to get started on that,” Darrell Duffie, a professor at Stanford University’s graduate school of business, said of telegraphing the policy change. “They are not boxed in now, but the longer they wait, the more boxed in they’ll be.”
After raising rates gradually last year, the Fed is taking a wait-and-see approach to further tightening in the face of an overseas slowdown and market volatility.
But even if rates remain steady this year, the ongoing shedding of assets, including some $380 billion since October 2017, will continue to tighten financial conditions by making funding more expensive for banks.
In 2017, the Fed projected it would trim the portfolio until around 2022 when it would hold $2.3 trillion to $2.9 trillion in assets.
But minutes from the Fed's December meeting showed growing internal debate with policymakers mulling holding a larger "buffer" of securities than planned, or slowing the pace of run-off as the finish line approaches.
In mid-2018, economists at Deutsch Bank Securities were among those predicting the Fed would be forced to stop the process by early 2020 with about $3.7 trillion in assets.
The minutes, they wrote in a note, have “shifted the balance of risks” even more and convinced them that Powell will move to halt the portfolio run-off as early as the third quarter of 2019.
In a possible preview of Powell’s message, New York Fed President John Williams, a permanent voter on the Fed’s policy-setting committee, said on Jan. 18: “If circumstances change, I will reassess our choices regarding monetary policy, including the path of balance sheet normalization. Data dependence applies to all that we do.”
Reporting by Jonathan Spicer and Ann Saphir; Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Leslie Adler
French urban freeclimber Alain Robert was arrested on Tuesday, police said, after he scaled one of Manila's tallest towers in his latest high-risk ascent.
The 56-year old adventurer dubbed the "French spiderman" climbed the 47-storey GT Tower without safety equipment, leaving watchers on the ground staring in amazement.
AFP / TED ALJIBE The freeclimber was taken into custody when he reached the ground after the roughly two-hour climb up and down the building
"This is my path, this is my way of living. It is as important to me as eating, sleeping. I need that. It keeps me alive," he told reporters after completing the climb.
Police were less enthusiastic about the stunt and took him into custody as soon as he reached the ground after the roughly two-hour climb up and down the building.
He was being held on a charge of public disturbance and was awaiting a decision from prosecutors on bail.
Robert has scaled more than 100 structures without ropes or other safety equipment, setting a record for "most buildings climbed unassisted" according to Guinness World Records.
AFP / TED ALJIBE Robert has scaled more than 100 structures without ropes or other safety equipment
His successes include many of the world's tallest skyscrapers and iconic buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai -- where he used suction devices and a safety rope as it has no hand or footholds.
However in June he was foiled when he attempted to ascend a Seoul skyscraper, getting more than half way up the 123-storey Lotte World Tower before security forced him to abort.
Robert has suffered several severe falls while climbing and estimates his accidents have left him 66 percent disabled. He has been arrested numerous times for his exploits.
U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela’s state oil company are illegal and Russia will take all necessary steps to support the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying on Tuesday.
Lavrov said the sanctions amounted to an attempt by the United States to confiscate Venezuelan state assets, Russian news agencies quoted him as saying.
Reporting by Katya Golubkova; Writing by Christian Lowe; editing by John Stonestreet
A man who snatched a 19th-century painting off the wall in a busy Moscow museum and calmly walked out has been arrested, authorities said Monday.
The suspect took a Crimean landscape by Russian artist Arkhip Kuindzhi and carried it through a room filled with visitors on Sunday, footage aired on state television showed.
It is the second security incident to hit the capital's Tretyakov gallery in a year, after a visitor in May seriously damaged a painting of Ivan the Terrible.
The Russian interior ministry said a 31-year-old man was detained Monday in a village outside Moscow.
He admitted hiding it on a construction site from where it was recovered, a ministry statement said.
The painting, depicting the Ai-Petri mountain in Crimea, was completed between 1898 and 1908.
The ministry published a video of his arrest that showed armed police holding the man to the floor and recovering the painting, that appeared not to be damaged.
Russian Interior Ministry/AFP / Handout It's the second security incident to hit the capital's Tretyakov gallery in a year, after a visitor in May serously damaged a painting of Ivan the Terrible
Authorities said the man had previously been charged with drug possession and was currently not allowed to leave Russia. Police are working to establish if he had accomplices.
"At the time of the theft, the museum's security -- carried out by forces of the National Guard and the museum's security service -- was working normally," the gallery said.
"Security measures at the Arkhip Kuindzhi exhibition and all sites of the Tretyakov Gallery have been strengthened," it added.
The Kremlin on Monday said the gallery is "protected at a proper level" but added that "conclusions must be drawn".
It also praised authorities for recovering the painting.
"Thank God, thanks to the energetic efforts of our law enforcement officers, the painting was found quickly and efficiently," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The theft comes after a man slashed a painting by celebrated Russian artist Ilya Repin, depicting 16th-century Tsar Ivan the Terrible after he killed his son.
Police arrested a 37-year-old who used a metal pole to break the glass covering the picture, damaging the work in three places.
The gallery is currently hosting an exhibition with more than 120 Kuindzhi paintings that will run until February 17.
On its website, the gallery calls Arkhip Kuindzhi, who died in 1910, "one of the most memorable figures in Russian painting of the second half of the 19th century."
Accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman said in court on Monday that he will not testify in his own defense at his U.S. trial.
Guzman announced his decision after prosecutors rested their case against him in federal court in Brooklyn. After excusing the jury, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan asked Guzman directly whether he understood it was his decision, not that of his lawyers, to testify or not.
“Yes, but they counseled me about it and I agree with them,” Guzman answered.
Had Guzman, 61, testified, it would have provided a fitting climax to an already dramatic trial. However, Guzman’s decision was widely expected, as testifying would have exposed him to cross-examination by prosecutors.
Guzman was extradited to the United States in January 2017 to face charges that he trafficked massive quantities of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other drugs into the United States as leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Prosecutors have put more than 50 witnesses on the stand since the trial began in November, many of them former Guzman associates who have pleaded guilty to U.S. charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Their testimony has offered an unprecedented look at the inner workings of the Mexican drug trade.
Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Guzman’s lawyers, said in his opening argument in November that his client was framed by the cartel’s true leader, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, with the help of corrupt government officials.
Lichtman said on Monday he planned to call two U.S. law enforcement agents, whom he did not name, as defense witnesses on Tuesday morning. Lichtman had said in a court filing on Saturday that he wanted to call the agents to rebut testimony by two of the prosecution’s witnesses about their earlier statements to law enforcement.
Judge Cogan said prosecutors should expect to begin their closing argument on Wednesday morning.
The trial has also featured accusations of corruption against Mexican government officials, the most explosive of which was that former Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto took a $100 million bribe from Guzman. A spokesman for Pena Nieto has denied the allegation.
Alejandro Edda, the Mexican actor who plays Guzman in the Netflix television drama “Narcos,” made a surprise appearance in the courtroom gallery Monday. Guzman grinned broadly at Edda after his lawyers told him who he was.
Edda later told reporters outside the courthouse that the smile “shook” him.
Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; editing by Anthony Lin and Jonathan Oatis
A number of organizations, including ProPublica, have developed tools to let the public see exactly how Facebook users are being targeted by advertisers.
Now, Facebook has quietly made changes to its site that stop those efforts.
ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me have all noticed their tools stopped working this month after Facebook inserted code in its website that blocks them.
“This is very concerning,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. “Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising.”
For the past year and a half, ProPublica has been building a searchable database of political ads and the segments of the population advertisers are paying to reach. We did this by enlisting thousands of volunteers who installed a web browser extension. The tool shared the ads users see as well as Facebook’s details on why the users were targeted.
In a statement to ProPublica, Facebook said the change was meant to simply enforce its terms of service. (The Guardian also published a story Sunday flagging the change.)
“We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plugins to keep people’s information safe,” Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier said. “This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”
Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.
The latest move comes a few months after Facebook executives urged ProPublica to shut down its ad transparency project. In August, Facebook ads product management director Rob Leathern acknowledged ProPublica’s project “serves an important purpose.” But he said, “We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.” He said Facebook would soon “transition” ProPublica away from its tool.
Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.
Our tool regularly caught political ads that aren’t reflected in Facebook’s archive. Just this month, we noticed four groups running ads that haven’t been in Facebook’s archive:
After we contacted Facebook, the company canceled the ads and said it is “investigating why these particular ads weren’t classified as political so we can learn and update our protocols.”
Journalists in other countries — including those with impending elections like Canada, Ukraine, Guatemala and Israel — currently have no way to track political ads or targeting information. Facebook announced Monday that it plans to expand its archive to those countries this year and will debut a global tool “by the end of June.”
More than 16,000 people have participated in our project to collect and analyze political ads on the social media platform during the midterm elections this year.
See how political advertisers target you. Use this database to search for political ads based on who was meant to see them.
Facebook’s archive doesn’t disclose the targeting advertisers do by racial, ethnic, religious, partisan and other sensitive attributes. Some of those microtargeting categories have been used to affect the political process: For instance, Russian agents targeted many African-Americans during the 2016 election.
In an email, Facebook said it doesn’t plan to disclose sensitive targeting categories in its archive because doing so “could expose people’s information.” It didn’t elaborate on how that might happen.
The proposed Honest Ads Act, which is expected to be re-introduced in Congress this year, would require Facebook to publish “a description of the audience targeted by the advertisement.”
Facebook has also developed another tool that it says will allow researchers to analyze political ads more easily. That tool, called an API, is in “beta” and restricted to a few participants, including ProPublica, who had to sign a nondisclosure agreement about the data it provided.
One researcher with access said the API is not sufficient. It only allows searching by keyword, said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University who studies online political advertising. “You can only find ads about things that you already know you’re looking for,” Edelson said. “So any kind of emerging activity is potentially undiscoverable.”
What it all adds up to, said Knight First Amendment Institute senior attorney Alex Abdo, is “we cannot trust Facebook to be the gatekeeper to the information the public needs about Facebook.”
Here are the details of how our tool worked and what Facebook has done:
All Facebook users can find details about how they’re being targeted by clicking through a series of options on the site. Our tool, the Political Ad Collector, automated the process. Every time one of our over 16,000 participants in crowdsourcing project scrolled past an ad like this one ...
... our extension automatically captured the text and related picture. It also opened the ellipses on the top right of the ad, which leads to this menu:
From there, it read the information contained in “Why Am I Seeing This” and copied that to the database as well:
We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am I Seeing This” menu.
The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers — including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by your mouse. Clicks from your mouse are marked “isTrusted“ and those generated by computer code are not.
Facebook pointed out that other options, besides seeing the explanation for an ad’s targeting, exist behind that menu, like the ability to hide an ad or report it.
Facebook’s site does not make such a distinction between user or computer-generated clicks on other behaviors that have been abused by bad actors. For example, it is still possible to automatically like a page, watch a video or click through on an ad — loopholes exploited by bots and misinformation campaigns attempting to gain credibility or turn a profit.
When we asked Facebook why it does not use a similar filtering mechanism on other parts of the platform, it said it prevents “bot-like behavior” in other ways, including a collaboration with an effort to help take down an ad fraud ring.
This is not the first time Facebook has changed its code in a way that has broken our tool. For example, all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. Many of the participants in our project noticed the effects of this change because it caused some menus to pop open unexpectedly or the page to scroll to the top repeatedly. Nowadays, the disclosure says “SpSpSononSsosoSredredSSS.” Some of these changes were likely also intended to thwart ad blockers.
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The same new section of code that blocks our tool also sends a “log event” to Facebook, noting when an ad transparency tool is detected. Facebook says the change is meant to document “what percent of the traffic was from plugins that identify content without our permission versus Facebook users checking [Why am I seeing this] manually."
The United States has imposed sanctions on Venezuelan state-owned oil firm PDVSA, White House national security adviser John Bolton said on Monday.
“We have continued to expose the corruption of (Venezuelan President Nicolas) Maduro and his cronies and today’s action ensures they can no longer loot the assets of the Venezuelan people,” Bolton told reporters at a briefing on Monday.
Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Peter Cooney
Pope Francis said Monday celibacy for priests was a "gift to the Church" and not "optional", nixing the prospect of married men being ordained.
"Personally I think that celibacy is a gift to the Church," the pope told journalists aboard his plane returning to the Vatican from Panama.
"Secondly, I don't think optional celibacy should be allowed. No," he said.
The pope nevertheless conceded "some possibilities for far flung places", such as Pacific islands or the Amazon where "there is a pastoral necessity".
"This is something being discussed by theologians, it's not my decision," he said.
The Argentine pontiff has repeatedly said there is no doctrinal prohibition on married men becoming priests, and therefore the discipline could be changed.
Saint Peter, the church's first pope, had a mother-in-law, according to the bible.
Celibacy was imposed in the 11th century, possibly partly to prevent descendants of priests inheriting church property.
Some within the church believe it is time to join many eastern rite Catholic Churches in permitting married men to take the cloth. Married Anglican priests keen to convert to Catholicism have already been welcomed over.
The Vatican's number two, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, suggested in an interview last year that the church could "gradually look in depth" at the issue, while ruling out any "drastic change".
Some 60,000 priests have given up their vocation over the past few decades, often to marry.
Pope Paul VI's refusal to open the door to the use of the pill in the Swinging Sixties saw many priests abandon their calling.
Pope Francis suggested in 2017 that the church "reflect" on the question of ordaining "viri probati", married men of proven virtue, particularly in far-flung places where priests are thin on the ground.
The idea is likely to be on the table at a synod this year dedicated to the Amazon, an immense territory where clergy are scarce.
Sensing a possible shift in attitude, some 300 married, former priests in Italy sent a letter to Francis last year offering to take up the cloth once more should he need them.
Former New York City Mayor and current billionaire Mike Bloomberg knows all too well the pull of wanting to run as an independent for the White House – there were rumors he was considering running for President in 2008 and 2012, but he opted to not.
"I have never been a partisan guy — and it’s no secret that I looked at an independent bid in the past," Bloomberg, who has been a Democrat, Republican, and independent, writes. "In fact I faced exactly the same decision now facing others who are considering it," he said, presumably referring to Schultz.
"The data was very clear and very consistent. Given the strong pull of partisanship and the realities of the electoral college system, there is no way an independent can win. That is truer today than ever before," Bloomberg notes.
"In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the President. That's a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can't afford to run it now," he adds.
Bloomberg, who late last year re-joined the Democratic Party and may be considering a presidential run himself, says Democrats "must remain united, and we must not allow any candidate to divide or fracture us."
The U.S. economy took a hit from the 35-day partial federal government shutdown over President Donald Trump’s demand for border wall funding, but much of the lost ground will be made up now that 800,000 federal employees are back on the job, congressional researches said on Monday.
Overall, the U.S. economy lost about $11 billion during the five-week period, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said. But CBO expects $8 billion to be recovered as the government reopens and federal workers receive back pay.
The CBO said the cost of the shutdown will make the U.S. economy 0.02 percent smaller than expected in 2019. But researchers said more significant effects will be felt by individual businesses and workers, particularly those who went without pay.
The longest shutdown in U.S. history ended on Friday when Trump and Congress agreed to temporary government funding - without money for his wall - as the effects of the shutdown intensified across the country.
Trump had demanded that legislation to fund the government contain $5.7 billion for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which he says is necessary to stop illegal immigration, human trafficking and drug smuggling.
A committee of lawmakers from both parties hold their first open meeting on Wednesday as they try to negotiate a compromise on border security before the Feb. 15 deadline.
The CBO estimated the shutdown reduced gross domestic product in the last quarter of 2018 by $3 billion.
It said that in the first quarter of 2019, the level of real GDP is estimated to be $8 billion lower than it would have been, citing “an effect reflecting both the five-week partial shutdown and the resumption in economic activity once funding resumed.”
Trump said he would be willing to shut down the government again if lawmakers don’t reach an acceptable deal, but on Sunday expressed skepticism that such an agreement could be reached.
He also left open the possibility of declaring a national emergency to get money for the wall, an extraordinary move that Democrats and some Republicans have vowed to fight and that would likely face a court challenge.
Federal workers are expected to get paid this week for the five weeks of missed paychecks. Federal contractors and businesses that relied on federal workers’ business, however, face huge losses, although some lawmakers are pushing legislation to pay contractors back as well.
Reporting by David Morgan and Richard Cowan; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Grant McCool
President Donald Trump, fresh off an embarrassing loss on the shutdown and his wall to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is turning his attention from the Southern border to an entirely different topic: religion.
The President, desperate to shore up his rapidly dropping polling numbers, kicked off the week with a tweet aimed at the only segment of his base that is still sticking by him: Christian Evangelicals.
"Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible," Trump tweeted. "Starting to make a turn back? Great!"
It was not clear what he meant by, "Starting to make a turn back?" but presumably he meant toward God and religion.
In many if not most cases, "Bible Literacy classes" are just ways to get around the fact that public schools cannot use religion in class. By claiming to study the Bible as a work unrelated to the religion it preaches, some think they can sidestep the constitutional wall between church and state.
Trump may have been motivated by an article in last week's USA Today that reveals a "wave of 'Bible literacy' bills" are "emerging in state legislatures."
"Some of the lawmakers – and leaders of Christian groups supporting the bills – say they want to restore traditional values in schools and give students a chance to study the religious text deeply," USA Today notes.
Paying no attention to nearby divers, a killer whale and her calf hunting for food frolic in a snowy Norwegian fjord.
Their favourite meal, herring, abounds, but climate change means both predator and prey must increasingly migrate further north.
The clear and calm waters of Reisafjorden, in Norway's Far North, have in recent years become the winter playground of the Scandinavian country's killer whale population.
At three degrees Celsius (37 Fahrenheit), the cold water is perfect for the herring which, ahead of the spawning season in February and March, have fattened up and make a tasty dish for the hungry killer whales, also known as orcas.
As if they were performing an underwater ballet, the whales encircle a school of herring, forcing them up to the surface before slapping the water with their large tail fins to stun them.
AFP / Olivier MORIN A Humpback Whale slaps water in Northern Norway where climate change is pushing killer whales and their prey to migrate further north
"Then they all share the feast," eating only the best parts of the fish: the eggs, meat and semen, explains Pierre Robert de Latour, founder of the organisation Undersea Soft Encounter Alliance, on board a whale-watching vessel.
"It's food that's easy to hunt, available in great quantities, and very high in calories," he says.
But in the past 20 years, the herring migrated 300 kilometres (190 miles) north, leaving the Lofoten Islands in search of waters that remain under six degrees Celsius -- the temperature required for them to reproduce.
A FP / Olivier MORIN The Norwegian killer whales only occasionally feast on seals or smaller whales
The Norwegian killer whales, which only occasionally feast on seals or smaller whales, have followed the herring.
"We believe that the global warming which is responsible for the rising water temperatures has pushed the herring further north," said Robert de Latour.
"In the long term, they're going to move even further north. If the stocks were to diminish it would be an environmental catastrophe for whales, orcas, sea birds and cod," he warns.
- A whale nursery -
For now, the killer whale population along Norway's coast appears to be thriving.
AFP / Olivier MORIN Global warming, fishing and growing numbers of tourists who flock to the region for whale watching and diving pose a threat
Robert de Latour estimates their number at around 1,500, twice what it was two decades ago.
The area "is a real nursery, thanks to the abundant resources," he says.
Some researchers say there may even be up to 3,000 orcas in the region, which runs from Norway's northern mainland up to the Svalbard archipelago and along Greenland's eastern coast, which has become more accessible as its ice sheet recedes.
In addition to global warming, fishing and growing numbers of tourists who flock to the region for whale watching and diving pose a threat to the killer whales, says Robert de Latour.
AFP / Olivier MORIN Some researchers say there may even be up to 3,000 orcas in the region, which runs from Norway's northern mainland up to the Svalbard archipelago and along Greenland's eastern coast
But, notes Tore Haug of Norway's Institute of Marine Research in Tromso, "killer whales and fishing vessels targetting herring have co-occurred on the herring fishing grounds for decades," and that hasn't prevented the whale stocks from growing.
Ecotourism is booming in the region.
It's not unusual for several boats carrying dozens of amateur divers to converge in the same fjord, with both boats and divers coming within just a few metres (feet) of the giant mammals.
"Norwegian authorities aim to implement some recommended regulations of such activities," Haug said.
"Whale watching is a good way of raising awareness and educating people about these animals and their life in the oceans, but too much could cause some problems," said Robert de Latour, himself a nature guide.
Fifteen years ago, Hollywood's most famous killer whale died in a Norwegian fjord.
Keiko, a male orca captured in 1979 off Iceland around the age of two, spent most of his life in water theme parks before starring in the 1993 hit movie "Free Willy".
After a massive international campaign, Keiko was released into the wild in Iceland, before he headed for Norway -- one of the only countries in the world that hunts whales, albeit not killer whales. He died in December 2003, at the age of 27.
AFP / TED ALJIBE 
Russian Interior Ministry/AFP / Handout 
AFP / Olivier MORIN 
A FP / Olivier MORIN 
AFP / Olivier MORIN 
AFP / Olivier MORIN