Dueling Senate bills

would end shutdown

in different ways

WASHINGTON — Senate leaders agreed to hold votes this week on dueling proposals to reopen shuttered federal agencies, forcing a political reckoning for senators grappling with the longest shutdown in U.S. history: Side with President Donald Trump or vote to temporarily end the shutdown and keep negotiating.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., set up the two showdown votes for Thursday, a day before some 800,000 federal workers are due to miss a second paycheck.

One vote will be on his own measure, which reflects Trump’s offer to trade border wall funding for temporary protections for some immigrants. It was quickly rejected by Democrats. The second vote is set for a bill approved by the Democratic-controlled House reopening government through Feb. 8, with no wall money, to give bargainers time to talk.

Both measures are expected to fall short of the 60 votes needed to pass, leaving little hope they represent the clear path out of the mess. But the plan represents the first test of Senate Republicans’ resolve behind Trump’s insistence that agencies remain closed until Congress approves $5.7 billion to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. For Democrats, the votes will show whether there are any cracks in the so-far unified rejection of Trump’s demand.

Democrats on Tuesday ridiculed McConnell’s bill, which included temporarily extended protections for “Dreamer” immigrants, but also harsh new curbs on Central Americans seeking safe haven in the U.S.

Families keep trying to cross border, wall or no wall

McALLEN, Texas — Maria Orbelina Cortez says she fled El Salvador for the U.S. after her husband attacked her and knocked a pan of scalding oil onto her youngest son’s head.

After quietly planning for months, she took the 3-year-old boy and his two brothers and headed north without telling her husband. As she spoke in the yard of a Catholic Charities shelter in South Texas, the boy played nearby. He had a hairless scar on top of his head in the shape of a jagged, capital “T.”

“I will always feel culpable,” said Orbelina, 30. “Always.”

President Donald Trump’s push for a $5.7 billion wall — a demand that triggered the longest government shutdown in history — is unlikely on its own to stop families with stories like Orbelina’s, who are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border by the thousands each month.

The Trump administration wants to use that money to construct more than 200 miles of border wall. Most of those miles would likely go in South Texas, where more people cross illegally than anywhere else.

Venezuela’s invigorated opposition take streets

in crucial test

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela’s re-invigorated opposition faces a crucial test today as it seeks to fill streets nationwide with protesters in an appeal to the military and the poor to shift loyalties that until recently looked solidly behind President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government.

The protests have been called to coincide with a historic date for Venezuelans — the anniversary of the 1958 coup that overthrew military dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. Government supporters are also expected to march in downtown Caracas in a rival show of strength.

The competing demonstrations will come after a whirlwind week that saw an uprising by a tiny military unit, fires set during protests in poor neighborhoods and the brief detention by security forces of the newly installed head of the opposition-controlled congress.

For much of the past two years, following a deadly crackdown on protests in 2017 and the failure of negotiations ahead of last May’s boycotted presidential election, the coalition of opposition parties has been badly divided by strategy and ego battles as millions of desperate Venezuelans fled the country’s hyperinflation and widespread food shortages. But buoyed by unprecedented international criticism of Maduro, anti-government forces have put aside their differences and are projecting a united front.

Their leader this time, taking the reins from a long list of better-known predecessors who have been exiled, outlawed or jailed, is Juan Guaido, the new president of the National Assembly who was dragged from an SUV just over a week ago by intelligence agents but quickly released amid an international outcry.

Trump, others agitated by Giuliani’s performance

NEW YORK — Rudy Giuliani’s latest media blitz, which was filled with a dizzying array of misstatements and hurried clarifications, agitated President Donald Trump and some of his allies, who have raised the possibility that the outspoken presidential lawyer be at least temporarily sidelined from televised interviews.

Trump was frustrated with Giuliani, according to three White House officials and Republicans close to the White House who were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations. The president told advisers that he felt his lawyer had obscured what he believed was a public relations victory: the special counsel’s rare public statement disputing portions of a BuzzFeed News story that Trump instructed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie before Congress.

The president told confidants that Giuliani had “changed the headlines” for the worse and raised the possibility that Giuliani do fewer cable hits, at least for a while, according to the officials and Republicans.

Several of Trump’s influential outside allies also have begun expressing reservations about Giuliani. Some members of this informal network of advisers, whom the president frequently calls from the White House residence, urged Trump in recent days to bench Giuliani — but most stopped short of suggesting he be fired, according to four White House officials and Republicans close to the White House.

Trump has not expressed an inclination to dismiss Giuliani.

Buttigieg joins 2020 presidential race

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Democrat Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is forming an exploratory committee for a 2020 presidential bid, according to a video and email announcement obtained by The Associated Press.

“The reality is there’s no going back, and there’s no such thing as ‘again’ in the real world. We can’t look for greatness in the past,” Buttigieg says in a video that includes before-and-after footage of South Bend, a Rust Belt city once described as “dying.”

“Right now our country needs a fresh start,” he says.

Buttigieg has touted his work to improve his city of 100,000 residents as he’s prepared for an improbable jump from local politics to a presidential campaign. He’s also said Democrats could benefit from a new generation of leaders as they try to unseat President Donald Trump in 2020.

He’s expected to travel to Iowa next week to meet with voters in the nation’s first caucus state, followed by stops in New Hampshire.

Brexit awakens old fears

in Northern Ireland

LONDON — Northern Ireland’s wounds are deep: Bloody Sunday, Enniskillen, Belfast’s sectarian killings of Catholics and Protestants by paramilitaries on both sides and British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary shootings and crackdowns.

Time has not completely healed the hatred, distrust and fear of those caught up in the decades-long conflict that killed more than 3,700 people and largely ended with the 1998 peace accord. Now, Brexit’s intense focus on the future of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has prompted worries of new violence.

Fears that the dark days of “The Troubles” could be back have been fanned by a recent explosion and hijackings in Northern Ireland’s second largest city, Londonderry — also known as Derry. The New IRA (Irish Republican Army) is suspected in the violence.

Also not helping: Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government has been suspended for two years because of a dispute between the main Protestant and Catholic political parties.

Here’s a look back at the conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland and spilled into Britain’s mainland, the peace that followed and the possibility that the tinderbox might ignite again.

Adoptee deported by US sues S. Korea, agency

SEOUL, South Korea — Adam Crapser lives in limbo, a stranger in South Korea, the country of his birth.

Forcibly separated from his wife, children and friends in America, he is isolated by language and culture, left alone to navigate this sprawling city he’s been expelled to four decades after being sent to adoptive parents in Michigan at age 3.

Crapser was abused and abandoned by two different sets of adoptive parents in the United States then deported after run-ins with the law because none of his guardians filed citizenship papers for him. He told The Associated Press in an interview that he has struggled in South Korea with intense anxiety and depression, even as he searches for answers about why his life has become defined by displacement.

That search has led him to file a landmark lawsuit against South Korea’s government and a private adoption agency, the Seoul-based Holt Children’s Services, over what Crapser calls gross negligence regarding the way he and thousands of other Korean children were sent to the United States and other Western nations without accounting for their future citizenship.

The 200 million won ($177 million) civil suit, which was described exclusively to the AP ahead of its expected filing Thursday by Crapser’s lawyers in a Seoul court, exposes a dark side of South Korean adoptions, which exploded as a business during the 1970s and ‘80s when many children were carelessly and unnecessarily removed from their families.