The Jim Bakker Show

U.S. GMO food labeling bill passes Senate

A customer picks up produce near a sign supporting a ballot initiative in Washington state that would require labelling of foods containing genetically modified crops at the Central Co-op in Seattle, Washington October 29, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Redmond

By Chris Prentice

(Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved legislation that would for the first time require food to carry labels listing genetically-modified ingredients, which labeling supporters say could create loopholes for some U.S. crops.

The Senate voted 63-30 for the bill that would display GMO contents with words, pictures or a bar code that can be scanned with smartphones. The U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) would decide which ingredients would be considered genetically modified.

The measure now goes to the House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass.

Drawing praise from farmers, the bill sponsored by Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas and Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan is the latest attempt to introduce a national standard that would override state laws, including Vermont’s that some say is more stringent, and comes amid growing calls from consumers for greater transparency.

“This bipartisan bill ensures that consumers and families throughout the United States will have access, for the first time ever, to information about their food through a mandatory, nationwide label for food products with GMOs,” Stabenow said in a statement.

A nationwide standard is favored by the food industry, which says state-by-state differences could inflate costs for labeling and distribution. But mandatory GMO labeling of any kind would still be seen as a loss for Big Food, which has spent millions lobbying against it.

Farmers lobbied against the Vermont law, worrying that labeling stigmatizes GMO crops and could hurt demand for food containing those ingredients, but have applauded this law.

Critics like Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, say the bill’s vague language and allowance for electronic labels for scanning could limit its scope and create confusion.

“When parents go to the store and purchase food, they have the right to know what is in the food their kids are going to be eating,” Sanders said on the floor of the Senate ahead of the vote.

He said at a news conference this week that major food manufacturers have already begun labeling products with GMO ingredients to meet the new law in his home state.

Another opponent of the bill, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, said it would institute weak federal requirements making it virtually impossible for consumers to access information about GMOs.

LOOPHOLES

Food ingredients like beet sugar and soybean oil, which can be derived from genetically-engineered crops but contain next to no genetic material by the time they are processed, may not fall under the law’s definition of a bioengineered food, critics say.

GMO corn may also be excluded thanks to ambiguous language, some said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) raised concerns about the involvement of the USDA in a list of worries sent in a June 27 memo to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

In a letter to Stabenow last week, the USDA’s general counsel tried to quell those worries, saying it would include commercially-grown GMO corn, soybeans, sugar and canola crops.

The vast majority of corn, soybeans and sugar crops in the United States are produced from genetically-engineered seeds. The domestic sugar market has been strained by rising demand for non-GMO ingredients like cane sugar.

The United States is the world’s largest market for foods made with genetically altered ingredients. Many popular processed foods are made with soybeans, corn and other biotech crops whose genetic traits have been manipulated, often to make them resistant to insects and pesticides.

“It’s fair to say that it’s not the ideal bill, but it is certainly the bill that can pass, which is the most important right now,” said American Soybean Association’s (ASA) director of policy communications Patrick Delaney.

The association was part of the Coalition for Safe and Affordable Food, which lobbied for what labeling supporters termed the Deny Americans the Right to Know, or DARK Act, that would have made labeling voluntary. It was blocked by the Senate in March.

(Reporting by Chris Prentice in New York; Additional reporting by Karl Plume in Chicago, Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles and Kouichi Shirayanagi and Eric Beech in Washington; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Ed Davies)

U.S. Republicans push back on Democratic gun control efforts

Handguns are seen for sale in a display case at Metro Shooting Supplies in Bridgeton, Missouri,

By David Morgan and Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. congressional Republicans on Tuesday resisted Democratic demands for a vote on gun-control measures and warned that some could face punishment for an unusual sit-in last month that tied up the House of Representatives for 25 hours.

With Democrats already rejecting a Republican gun bill and warning of further protests, the Republican-controlled House appeared to be heading for renewed discord over gun restrictions following the June 12 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

House Speaker Paul Ryan met for about 30 minutes on Tuesday with two Democrats who led the sit-in: Representatives John Lewis of Georgia and John Larson of Connecticut. The Democrats said they would ask Ryan for a vote on two Democratic-backed measures but left the meeting without speaking to reporters.

“The path ahead … will be discussed and determined by the majority in the coming days,” Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said later in a statement.

The measures sought by Democrats would expand background checks for gun purchases and allow the government to block gun sales to suspected extremists without first getting a judge’s approval.

Hours before the meeting, Ryan suggested a vote on the Democratic legislation was unlikely, telling a Milwaukee radio station: “The last thing we are going to do is surrender the floor over to these kinds of tactics when we know it’s going to compromise the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.”

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said separately that he and Ryan would meet this week with the chamber’s top enforcement official to talk about reports that some Democrats at the June 22-23 sit-in engaged in “intimidation” while carrying out their protest.

Ryan has announced that the House will vote this week on a measure intended to keep guns out of the hands of people the government suspects of involvement in violent extremism. But Democrats say the legislation is inadequate because authorities would have only three days to convince a judge that a gun sale should be blocked.

“Ninety-one people die each day from gun violence in this country and the best Speaker Ryan can muster is a meaningless bill,” said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi aide Drew Hammill.

Six people who said they lost family and loved ones to gun violence were arrested in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, after a protest demanding Congress reject the Ryan measure and vote on the Democratic measures.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by James Dalgleish and Peter Cooney)

Latest gun control bid falters in Congress, Democrat sit-in ends

Democrats walk out of Capitol Hill after failing the gun control law

By Richard Cowan and Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Another attempt at gun control faltered in the U.S. Congress on Thursday despite outrage at the Orlando massacre, as a proposed ban on firearms sales to people being monitored for links to terrorism barely avoided being killed in the Senate.

In a procedural vote, the Senate narrowly rejected an attempt to scrap the plan by Republican Senator Susan Collins to prevent guns getting into the hands of people on two U.S. government terrorism watch lists.

But the proposal looked short of the support it would need to advance through the chamber, and Republican leaders said the Senate would switch from debating gun control to other matters until at least after the July 4 holiday.

It was the latest setback for proponents of gun restrictions who have been thwarted for years on Capitol Hill by gun rights defenders and the National Rifle Association.

Frequent efforts at gun control have failed despite anger at mass shootings like the killings at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and in San Bernardino, California, last year.

“Eventually this problem will get addressed again one of two ways: We find a breakthrough, which I will seek, or there will be another terrorist attack which will bring us right back to this issue. I hope we can do it without another terrorist attack,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who supported Collins.

A few hours earlier, Democratic lawmakers ended a sit-in protest in the House of Representatives over guns.

Fueled by Chinese food and pizzas, dozens of them stayed on the House floor all night, at times bursting into the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” before giving up their protest after 25 hours.

“It’s not a struggle that lasts for one day, or one week, or one month, or one year,” said Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia and a key figure in the civil rights protests of the 1960s. “We’re going to win the struggle,” said Lewis, who led the House sit-in.

Dramatic protests by legislators are rare in the U.S. Capitol and the sit-in underscored how sensitive the gun control issue became after this month’s Florida attack, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Opinion polls show Americans are increasingly in favor of more restrictions on guns in a country with more than 310 million weapons, about one for every citizen.

ORLANDO ATTACK

After a gunman pledging allegiance to Islamic State fatally shot 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, some senators had seen resistance to gun restrictions softening because the issue had partly become one of national security.

But Collins’ measure received only 52 votes in the 100-seat Senate test vote, short of the 60 votes that would be needed for approval in future Senate procedural votes.

While her plan could be revived next month, it is unclear if she has the momentum to overcome pro-gun rights forces in Congress who argue that gun control measures in Congress have been too restrictive and trample on the constitutional right to bear arms. Four other gun control measures failed earlier this week.

Collins, a Maine lawmaker, wants to forbid gun sales to anyone on the U.S. government’s “No Fly List” for terrorism suspects or the “Selectee List” of people who receive extra security screening at airports.

Despite the lack of legislation, the gun debate has stirred passions. The House Democrats’ sit-in brought an outpouring of grass-roots activity.

Jennifer Hoppe, deputy director of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said that in less than 24 hours from Wednesday, about 130,000 calls were made from supporters of gun control to members of Congress.

First lady Michelle Obama backed the House Democrats’ protest.

“We have grieved for too many children and wept for too many families after shootings. Chicago. Tucson. Newtown. Charleston. Orlando. #Enough,” she wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

The Democrats were seeking votes on legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases, as well as measures to curb the sale of weapons to people on government watch lists

Republicans allied with the NRA gun rights group say that while they want to combat terrorism, they represent constituents who believe firmly in the constitutional right to bear arms.

“It’s a tough issue. For people like myself, who come from a hunting and fishing state, it’s pretty hard,” said Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Utah Republican who voted against Collins.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan, Timothy Ahmann, Timothy Gardner and Eric Walsh, Doina Chiacu; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Bill Trott and Peter Cooney)

Senate votes down proposal to expand FBI surveillance powers

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted down a Republican-backed proposal to expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s secretive surveillance powers after the mass shooting at an Orlando gay nightclub last week.

The measure followed the Senate’s rejection on Monday of four measures that would have restricted gun sales.

During Wednesday’s vote, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell switched his vote to ‘no,’ giving himself the opportunity to bring the measure up for consideration again as soon as later this week.

The legislation would broaden the type of telephone and internet records the FBI could request from companies such as the Google unit of Alphabet Inc and Verizon Communications Inc without a warrant. Opponents, including some major technology companies, have said it would threaten civil liberties and do little to improve national security.

The legislation before the Senate on Wednesday, filed as an amendment to a criminal justice funding bill, would widen the FBI’s authority to use so-called National Security Letters, which do not require a warrant and whose very existence is usually a secret.

Such letters can compel a company to hand over a user’s phone billing records. Under the Senate’s change, the FBI would be able to demand electronic communications transaction records such as time stamps of emails and the emails’ senders and recipients, in addition to some information about websites a person visits and social media log-in data.

It would not enable the FBI to use national security letters to obtain the actual content of electronic communications.

The legislation would also make permanent a provision of the USA Patriot Act that lets the intelligence community conduct surveillance on “lone wolf” suspects who do not have confirmed ties to a foreign terrorist group. That provision, which the Justice Department said last year had never been used, expires in December 2019.

The bill had been expected to narrowly pass but it fell two votes short of the required 60.

The future of the Senate proposal in the House of Representatives was also uncertain, given its alliance between libertarian-leaning Republicans and tech-friendly Democrats that has blocked past efforts to expand surveillance.

Privacy groups and civil liberties advocates accused Republicans this week of exploiting the Orlando shooting to build support for unrelated legislation.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, criticized Senate Republicans for “pushing fake, knee-jerk solutions that will do nothing to prevent mass shootings or terrorist attacks.”

Though Republicans invoked the Orlando shooting in support of the bill, FBI Director James Comey has said Omar Mateen’s transactional records were fully reviewed by authorities who investigated him twice for possible extremist ties.

Comey said there was “no indication” Mateen belonged to any extremist group and that it was unlikely authorities could have done anything differently to prevent the attack.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Bernard Orr)

Senate Republicans agree to vote on gun control: Democratic senator

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy ended a blockade of the Senate after nearly 15 hours on Thursday, saying Republicans agreed to hold votes on measures to expand background checks and prevent people on U.S. terrorism watch lists from buying guns.

Democrats stalled Senate proceedings on Wednesday in a bid to push for tougher gun control legislation following Sunday’s massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and spoke on the Senate floor through out the night.

Republicans, who currently have a 54-person majority in the Senate, have over the years blocked gun control measures, saying they step on Americans’ right to bear arms as guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

“When we began there was no commitment, no plan to debate these measures,” Murphy, of Connecticut, said during the 15th hour of the filibuster early on Thursday.

He said Democrats were given a commitment by the Senate’s Republican leadership that votes would be allowed on two measures on preventing gun sales to people on terrorism watch lists and expanding background checks.

“No guarantee that those amendments pass but we’ll have some time to … prevail upon members to take these measures and turn them into law,” Murphy said.

With Republicans and the National Rifle Association gun lobby under pressure to respond to the massacre, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would meet with the NRA to discuss ways to block people on terrorism watch or no-fly lists from buying guns.

The Senate had began discussions on legislation to ban firearm sales to the hundreds of thousands of people on U.S. terrorism watch lists. The Orlando gunman, who carried out the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, had been on such a list.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urged senators on Wednesday to offer ideas on how to prevent another attack like the one in Orlando.

Late on Wednesday Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said negotiations “were little more than a smokescreen by Republicans trying to give themselves political cover while they continue to march in lock-step with the NRA’s extreme positions.”

If Congress was to pass a gun control measure, it would mark the first time in more than 20 years that lawmakers agreed on how to address the hot-button issue. A ban on semi-automatic assault weapons, such as the one used in Orlando, had gone into effect in 1994 and expired 10 years later.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell; Writing Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Bill Trott)

Congress eyes $1 billion to aid at-risk families

Neonatal Therapeutic Unit at Cabell Huntington Hospital

By Duff Wilson and John Shiffman

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Key members of the U.S. Congress said Friday they had reached a compromise to shift more than $1 billion to try to keep struggling families together, including those with babies born dependant on opioids.

The proposal is driven in part by an opioid crisis that threatens thousands of families. The bill would allow mental health, substance abuse and parenting assistance whenever a child is deemed at “imminent risk” of entering foster care. The measure also offers support for relatives who unexpectedly assume responsibility for a child when a parent cannot.

Under current law, such funds may only be spent after a child enters foster care. A spokesman for the Child Welfare League of America, John Sciamanna, called the proposed change “a landmark…, potentially historic.”

The legislation involves more than $1 billion over 10 years. Related opioid bills have not included funding.

“This bill would make a historic shift in child welfare funding by offering a way for moms and dads to get help and treatment rather than pitching in only after children are removed from home,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

The bill is a compromise between four powerful members of Congress: Wyden; the Senate Finance committee’s Republican chair, Orrin Hatch of Utah; the Republican chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas; and the ranking Democrat on Ways & Means, Sander Levin of Michigan.

The plan offers “bipartisan solutions for families and children affected by the opioid addiction crisis,” Hatch said in a statement.

In December, a Reuters investigation revealed that at least 110 babies had died since 2010 after being born opioid-dependent and sent home with parents ill-prepared to care for them. No more than nine of the 50 U.S. states followed a federal law requiring them to help those newborns, the news agency found.

In response to the Reuters series, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asked all states to report by June 30 whether and how they are following the existing law, known as the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. In May, the House passed legislation to improve safety planning for children born dependent on opioid drugs.

Reanne Pederson of Devils Lake, N.D., one of the women portrayed in the Reuters series who accidentally smothered her newborn in bed while on drugs, said she was happy to hear about new funding possibilities.

“It’s important to me that moms who are struggling with addiction get help,” she said.

(Editing by Ronnie Greene)

U.S. lawmaker demands probe into missing State Dept. Iran video

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A senior Republican congressman on Friday asked the U.S. State Department inspector general to investigate why part of a 2013 public briefing that dealt with Iran nuclear talks was cut from a video before it was posted online.

The excised portion of the Dec. 2, 2013, briefing included a question about whether an earlier spokeswoman for the department had misled reporters about whether the United States was holding secret direct nuclear talks with Iran.

“In tampering with this video, the (State Department) Bureau of Public Affairs has undermined its mission to ‘communicate timely and accurate information with the goal of furthering U.S. foreign policy’,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce said in a letter to the inspector general, Steve Linick.

“This is all the more troubling given that the video in question dealt with hugely consequential nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Royce added in the letter, released by his office.

The State Department initially said it believed a “glitch” caused the gap but on Wednesday said an internal inquiry found it was a deliberate omission. However, it said no rules were broken because none existed governing the integrity of the briefing transcript and video. Rules are now being put in place.

On Thursday, a department spokesman said that the inquiry, carried out by the department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, had run into a dead end.

On Friday, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the department cannot use internal phone records to trace who requested the cut to the 2013 briefing video because it keeps such data for only 24 hours.

Separately, another congressional Republican, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, on Tuesday wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry asking for documents related to the edited video.

(Reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Congress has launched investigation into FED’s cyber security

The Federal Reserve building in Washington

By Dustin Volz and Jason Lange

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. congressional committee has launched an investigation into the Federal Reserve’s cyber security practices after a Reuters report revealed that the U.S. central bank had been hacked more than 50 times between 2011 and 2015.

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology on Friday sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to express “serious concerns” over the central bank’s ability to protect sensitive financial information.

The letter cited the Reuters report, which was based on heavily redacted internal Fed records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The redacted records did not say who hacked the bank’s systems or whether they accessed sensitive information or stole money.

“These reports raise serious concerns about the Federal Reserve’s cyber security posture, including its ability to prevent threats from compromising highly sensitive financial information housed on the agency’s systems,” said the letter, signed by House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, and Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican and chairman of the panel’s oversight subcommittee.

The Fed had declined to comment on the cyber breaches reported by Reuters on Wednesday.

The panel asked the Fed’s national cyber security team – the National Incident Response Team – to turn over all cyber incident reports in unredacted form from Jan. 1, 2009, to the present. It also asked for incident reports from the Fed’s local incident response teams.

Global policymakers, regulators and financial institutions have become increasingly concerned about the security of the international banking system after a string of cyber attacks against banks in Bangladesh, Vietnam and elsewhere linked to fraudulent transaction messages sent across the global financial platform SWIFT.

The probe into the Fed’s security practices followed a separate inquiry by the same committee into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s handling of the cyber theft of $81 million from one of its accounts held by the central bank of Bangladesh.

The committee said it has jurisdiction over the Fed’s cyber security because the panel is tasked with oversight of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency responsible for developing federal cyber security standards and guidelines, under a 2014 federal information technology law.

The panel also requested a “detailed description of all confirmed cyber security incidents” from 2009 to the present, all documents and communications referring or relating to “higher impact cases” handled by the Fed’s NIRT team, all documents and communications with the Fed’s Office of Inspector General related to confirmed cyber incidents, and an organizational chart detailing the Fed’s top cyber security personnel.

The committee requested a response to its inquiry by June 17.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz and Jason Lange; Editing by David Chance and Tiffany Wu)

House to weigh $622.1 million in new zika virus funding

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are seen at the Laboratory of Entomology and Ecology of the Dengue Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in San Juan, March 6, 2016.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republicans in the House of Representatives will try to pass legislation this week providing $622.1 million in emergency funds to fight the spreading Zika virus, far less than the Obama administration has been seeking.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers introduced the measure on Monday, according to a statement. The bill would offset the new spending by taking $352.1 million from an Ebola fund and another $270 million from a Department of Health and Human Services administrative account.

The Obama administration and health officials have expressed concerns in the past with taking money from Ebola programs to pay for Zika virus efforts.

President Barack Obama in February called for $1.9 billion in emergency funds that would not result in any government spending cuts elsewhere.

The House bill is also at odds with legislation being debated in the Senate. Competing proposals there would either give Obama the full $1.9 billion or at least $1.1 billion.

The Senate is expected to cast initial votes on the alternatives on Tuesday.

If the House and Senate approve competing versions they would have to reconcile their differences and pass one uniform bill before sending it to Obama for signing into law.

The mosquito-borne Zika virus has been linked to severe birth defects and other neurological disorders and is beginning to show up in warm climates in U.S. southern states such as Florida.

Of the $622.1 million proposed by House Republicans, $230 million would go to the National Institutes of Health to help support the development of vaccines to stop the spread of Zika.

Other funds would be contributed to global health programs, through the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, and for the development of rapid diagnostic tests.

(Reporting By Richard Cowan; Editing by Bernard Orr)

Senate negotiators zero in on Zika virus funding

An anti Zika virus kit, including a bug net, mosquito repellent, condoms, literature and anti mosquito dunks,

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate negotiators on Wednesday tried to reach a deal to provide more than $1 billion to battle the Zika virus that is feared will creep north into the United States with the onset of warmer weather, which breeds mosquitoes that could carry the disease.

Senior Senate Democratic aides said details were still being worked out, but votes could come by next week on whether to approve the new money.

In February, President Barack Obama requested $1.9 billion in emergency funds, but Republicans balked, with some arguing that $1.1 billion is more in line with what is needed. Many Republicans also want any Zika funds to be offset with spending cuts elsewhere.

These are among the details that still have to be worked out, according to aides.

Republican Senator Roy Blunt from Missouri and Democratic Senator Patty Murray from Washington, the two senior senators on an appropriations panel that oversees healthcare spending, have been trying to hammer out a deal.

An aide to Murray said in a statement: “Senator Murray is having conversations with Chairman Blunt and others about the path forward on emergency funding to respond to Zika.”

The aide said Murray still supports Obama’s $1.9 billion request.

Amid congressional inaction, the Obama administration shifted $589 million to help federal agencies prepare for Zika. Most of that money came from a fund to fight the Ebola virus and will have to be replenished, according to officials.

Senator Marco Rubio, however, is one Republican pushing for both immediate, emergency funding and longer-term money to be made available starting on Oct. 1 to battle the disease that can cause severe brain deformities in babies born of infected mothers and other illnesses.

“This is going to be an ongoing issue beyond this year,” Rubio said, adding, “We need to jump on it now.”

There are fears that Rubio’s home state of Florida could be the first place in the continental United States to get hit hard by Zika because of its tropical climate.

“For the first time, I’ve seen high-level conversations about a way forward here in the Senate and that’s a positive development,” Rubio said in a brief hallway interview with Reuters.

Republicans in the House of Representatives are still deeply divided over new funding for Zika, according to two senior aides.

(Reporting By Richard Cowan; Editing by Bernard Orr)

Sign up for Jim Bakker Show