In the News
WASHINGTON ― Republican leadership in the House of Representatives moved Tuesday evening to quash a bill that would end U.S. support for the brutal Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen.
On the first day of their post-election lame-duck session, House Republicans decided to block a vote on whether the US should support Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen, three congressional sources say.
Democrats' House takeover and shifts in the Senate landscape are bound to shift Congress's tech and cyber policies. Here's a rundown.
Pushing on Privacy
For starters, you can expect the debate over online privacy to grow louder in the coming months, according to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. Khanna listed personal privacy and data security among the party's top tech priorities at a Washington Post event on Thursday. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., separately indicated privacy could become a key issue for the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the upcoming congressional term.
A Democratic congressman from California is looking to the past to bring more tech jobs to middle-Americans in the future.
Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents a tech-heavy district that includes Silicon Valley, plans to introduce a bill that would establish a grant program to build up tech-related education opportunities in the middle of the country – in an effort to help the area transition to innovation-based economies.
A Silicon Valley lawmaker has a plan to bring big tech jobs to middle America – an idea he traces to Abraham Lincoln and believes may help his party defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
Since his arrival in Congress two years ago, Ro Khanna, a California Democrat whose district includes the headquarters of Apple, Intel and Yahoo, has made several visits to Trump country: Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio and other states. He says he is on a mission to find ways of bridging America's deep digital – and political – divide.
The US will no longer refuel Saudi aircraft conducting strike missions over Yemen, US and Saudi officials said Friday.
The decision to halt refueling warplanes from Saudi Arabia and its allies bombing rebels in Yemen was hailed Friday by Democrats and other longtime supporters of curtailing the Pentagon's support for what they consider an unlawful use of American forces that has contributed to a humanitarian disaster. But they also called on President Donald Trump and members of Congress to take additional steps -- including cutting off arms and ending the sharing of targeting information -- to further extricate the U.S. military from involvement in Yemen's civil war.
The United States' "war on terror" in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq has directly killed at least 480,000 people since 2001, according to a new report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University. This is an increase of 113,000 over the last count, issued just two years ago.
Why it matters: After their victory in the midterms, House Democrats will try to advance a national security strategy emphasizing restraint and accountability for the costs of the war on terror. This new body count signals that, far from diminishing, the war is only intensifying.
Tuesday night, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives.
Already they've promised a raft of ambitious domestic shifts. Those will be hard enough without control of the Senate or the presidency. But look beyond the country's borders, and things get tougher.