Friday News Roundup - Domestic

Roger Stone, an informal adviser to President Donald Trump, has been indicted. The charges against Stone by special counsel Robert Mueller were a result of his involvement with WikiLeaks. That’s the organization behind the release of emails from the Democratic Party during the election.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering, according to the special counsel's office.

We’ll bring you the latest on this indictment, the first in several months by the Mueller probe.

After more than a month, the government shutdown is still happening. And about 800,000 federal workers are facing a second missed paycheck.

It has affected everyone from workers at the IRS to paid intelligence sources for the FBI to the civilian viewers of the National Zoo's Panda Cam.

Annie Karni, a White House correspondent for The New York Times wrote about the mood inside the administration:

On Tuesday, I spoke with someone intimately involved in the shutdown discussions. The person assured me that Mr. Trump was never, ever going to cave on the wall, and that there has been a silver lining to the shutdown, even as 800,000 federal workers are missing their second paycheck. This person said the shutdown has been an opportunity to make a national case about border security.

It sounds like pure spin, but there's something to that. In a White House where every major development is supplanted before its significance can be fully digested, the shutdown has overshadowed many things. James Mattis, the defense secretary, resigned over what he considered a rash decision to pull troops out of Syria. The Trump Foundation was forced to close amid allegations that the family was using it for personal benefit. The stock market lost more in a month than it had since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the shutdown has turned the White House into a one-issue building, and its reporters into a one-story crowd.

What will lawmakers do to end the shutdown? And what will happen to the thousands of government contractors who have not been guaranteed back pay?

In Los Angeles, a massive teacher strike ended this week. The deal includes a six percent raise for teachers, a reduction of class sizes and an agreement to hire 82 teacher-librarians over the next two years, according to The LA Times.

Now public school teachers in Denver are scheduled to walk out of classrooms. The Denver Post reports that the teachers and the district are about eight million dollars apart on compensation negotiations.

Will the labor movement in L.A. serve as a catalyst for teachers and organized labor around the country to demand change?

And the Supreme Court is back in session this week. The Washington Post reports “the justices largely avoided the high-profile controversies that have marked the court's work in recent years.”

But meanwhile, the court's conservative majority, fortified by Kavanaugh and Trump's other nominee, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, was at work.

It gave the Trump administration the green light to impose restrictions on transgender service members. The court answered the pleas of gun rights advocates by taking a case next term that could clamp down on local gun restrictions and give new definition to Second Amendment rights. And its four most conservative members — again, including Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — indicated they were eager to take on a case that could reexamine long-standing precedents and provide new protection for openly religious public employees.

We're recapping this busy week in the news.

Update: During the segment, it was stated that the president has offered citizenship to DACA recipients as part of his proposal to re-open the government. This is incorrect. He has offered to extend DACA for some recipients. Read more about this proposal here.

GUESTS

Katie Rogers, White House correspondent, The New York Times. @katierogers

Kimberly Adams, Senior reporter, Marketplace; @KA_Marketplace

Rajini Vaidyanathan, BBC correspondent and anchor for World News America; @BBCRajiniV

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

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