WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump will huddle with congressional Republicans, Cabinet secretaries and aides at Camp David this weekend to discuss their 2018 legislative priorities.
A long list of high-stakes topics are on the agenda, including the budget, infrastructure, immigration, welfare reform and the 2018 midterm elections.
“We’re going to Camp David with a lot of the great Republican senators, and we’re making America great again,” Trump said Friday afternoon as he left the White House for the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. He was joined Friday evening by Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, among others.
Republicans are beginning the new year with newfound optimism after finally scoring a win by passing the tax bill at the end of last year.
They face a pile of unfinished business that was punted into this year during the push on taxes. Just two weeks remain until a Jan. 19 government funding deadline, and there is little visible progress on several contentious issues, including a budget deal to boost spending on both the Pentagon and nondefense agencies and to extend protections for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
Talks are also expected to touch on a range of other issues, including the opioid epidemic and health care. And lawmakers are expected to hash out the order in which they plan to tackle two top White House priorities: a long-delayed infrastructure drive and welfare reform.
Senate Republicans are already dismissing a promised push by House conservatives to curb benefit programs like welfare and food stamps, and it’s unclear what agenda items would get the requisite Democratic support for success, particularly in the Senate.
Politics, too, is on the agenda, GOP officials say, with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., slated to lead a discussion on the political landscape for House Republicans, who are at risk of losing the majority they’ve held since 2011. McConnell, R-Kentucky, will do the same for the Senate, where GOP losses are possible, too, though many more Democratic incumbents are up for re-election.
The group will be joined Saturday by a number of top administration officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Trump, GOP lawmakers to take up 2018 agenda at Camp David
Trump, GOP lawmakers to take up 2018 agenda at Camp David
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
