White House pulls back from

shutdown threat over wall funds

WASHINGTON — The White House today appeared to inch away from forcing a partial government shutdown over funding for a southern border wall, with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying there are “other ways” to secure the $5 billion in funding that President Donald Trump wants.

It was the first sign of a potential White House counter offer as the clock ticks down toward Friday’s midnight deadline to fund the government.

“At the end of the day, we don’t want to shut down the government,” Sanders said on Fox News. “We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration.”

Trump’s $5 billion is far more than the $1.3 billion Democrats have offered, which is not for Trump’s promised wall along the southern border with Mexico, but fencing and other security measures.

Sanders pointed to one bill, likely referring to the Senate’s bipartisan appropriation measure for the Department of Homeland Security, which provides $26 billion, including $1.6 billion for fencing and other barriers. It was approved by the committee in summer on a bipartisan vote.

A partial shutdown risks disrupting government operations and leaving hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed or working without pay over the holiday season. Costs would be likely in the billions of dollars.

Trump signs order to

create US Space Command

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump launched the Pentagon’s new Space Command today, an effort to better organize and advance the military’s vast operations in space that could cost as much as $800 million over the next five years.

Trump signed a one-page memorandum authorizing the Defense Department to create the new command. Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Vice President Mike Pence said, “a new era of American national security in space begins today.”

The goal is to set up a command to oversee and organize space operations, accelerate technical advances and find more effective ways to defend U.S. assets in space, including the vast constellations of satellites that American forces rely on for navigation, communications and surveillance. The move comes amid growing concerns that China and Russia are working on ways to disrupt, disable or even destroy U.S. satellites.

The new order is separate from the president’s much touted goal of creating a “Space Force” as an independent armed service branch, but is considered a first step in that direction. The memo provides little detail on what will be a long and complicated process as the Defense Department begins to pull together various space units from across the military services into a more coordinated, independent organization.

According to one U.S. official, the command would pull about 600 staff from existing military space offices, and then add at least another 1,000 over the coming years. The roughly $800 million would mainly cover the additional staff. The costs for the existing staff would just transfer to the new command, but that total was not immediately available.

Trump administration

moves to ban bump stocks

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration moved today to officially ban bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, and has made them illegal to possess beginning in late March.

The devices will be banned under a federal law that prohibits machine guns, according to a senior Justice Department official.

Bump stocks became a focal point of the national gun control debate after they were used in October 2017 when a man opened fired from his Las Vegas hotel suite into a crowd at a country music concert below, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The regulation, which was signed by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Tuesday morning, will go into effect 90 days after it is formally published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen on Friday, the Justice Department official said.

People who own bump stocks will be required to either surrender them to the ATF or destroy them by late March.

Surgeon general warns

of teen risks from e-cigarettes

WASHINGTON — The government’s top doctor is taking aim at the best-selling electronic cigarette brand in the U.S., urging swift action to prevent Juul and similar vaping brands from addicting millions of teenagers.

In an advisory today, Surgeon General Jerome Adams said parents, teachers, health professionals and government officials must take “aggressive steps” to keep children from using e-cigarettes. Federal law bars the sale of e-cigarettes to those under 18.

For young people, “nicotine is dangerous and it can have negative health effects,” Adams said in an interview. “It can impact learning, attention and memory, and it can prime the youth brain for addiction.”

Federal officials are scrambling to reverse a recent explosion in teen vaping that public health officials fear could undermine decades of declines in tobacco use. An estimated 3.6 million U.S. teens are now using e-cigarettes, representing 1 in 5 high school students and 1 in 20 middle schoolers, according to the latest federal figures.

Separate survey results released Monday showed twice as many high school students used e-cigarettes this year compared to last year.