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Trump Sides With Kavanaugh, Accusing Democrats of Timing Assault Charge to Delay Confirmation
Posted 2018-09-19T01:49:14+00:00 - Updated 2018-09-19T01:48:08+00:00

Trump Sides With Kavanaugh, Accusing Democrats of Timing Assault Charge to Delay Confirmation

President Donald Trump falsely charged Tuesday that Democrats had sought to time a sexual assault allegation against his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, to obstruct his confirmation, siding with the judge as he called for a swift process for airing the accusation on Capitol Hill. “I feel so badly for him that he’s going through this,” Trump said of Kavanaugh, who has been accused by Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist, of attempted rape at a party in Washington in the 1980s, when both were teenagers. “This is not a man that deserves this.” Kavanaugh has flatly denied the charge.

Sen. Rubio Attacks ‘Salt Bae’ Over Dinner With Venezuelan Leader

Video footage released Monday showed a performance like the one that launched Nusret Gokce to stardom. But within a matter of hours, Gokce, a celebrity chef better known as Salt Bae, had deleted the footage after Sen. Marco Rubio denounced him on Twitter. The three Instagram videos, preserved by The Miami Herald, show Gokce serving luxurious cuts of meat to President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, the authoritarian whose country’s economy and food supply have crumbled under his rule. Rubio also tweeted the phone Gokce’s restaurant in Miami “in case anyone wanted to call.”

Plan to Curb the Release of Methane Is Dropped

The Trump administration Tuesday effectively reversed a regulation designed to prevent methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases, from escaping into the atmosphere during oil and gas operations. In the long-expected move, the Interior Department finalized its new rule, replacing one proposed by former President Barack Obama in the final days of his administration that would have reduced leaking, venting and flaring of methane from drilling activity on federal and tribal land. The new regulation essentially reinstates the approximately 30-year-old guidelines that were in place when President Donald Trump won the 2016 election.

U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find

The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to congressional findings released Tuesday. The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year. Senate investigators said Tuesday the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018.

Brooklyn Diocese Pays $27.5 Million to Settle 4 Sex Abuse Cases

Four men who were repeatedly sexually abused as children by a religion teacher at a Catholic church in Brooklyn received a $27.5 million settlement from the Diocese of Brooklyn on Tuesday, in one of the largest settlements ever awarded to individual victims of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. The settlement comes two weeks after the New York state attorney general announced a statewide civil investigation into sex abuse within the Catholic Church and its cover-up by church leaders, and as Pope Francis faces intense pressure globally to take action against bishops and cardinals for their role in the abuse crisis.

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