White House hopeful Julián Castro called for the end of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Saturday ahead of a suspected operation to deport thousands of migrant families.
“I’ve said that instead of breaking up families, we should break up ICE,” the former Housing and Urban Development secretary said at the Netroots Nation conference in Philadelphia.
The comments come a day before the reported start of an ICE operation in several major cities across the country that would deport thousands of families living in the U.S. without documentation.
Read more at The Hill.
{Matzav.com}

The US House of Representatives approved a $733-billion defense policy bill on Friday, defying President Donald Trump’s veto threat by including provisions like a clampdown on funding for his planned wall on the border with Mexico.
The House passed its version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, by a 220 to 197 vote, without a single Republican voting in favor of the bill and after some of the most liberal Democrats opposed it as they pushed for a reduction in defense spending.
Republican opposition to the bill sets the stage for a stiff fight over its provisions later this year that could threaten Congress’ record of passing the NDAA annually for nearly six decades.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Friday to block U.S. President Donald Trump from militarily striking Iran.
The measure was added by a vote of 251-170 to a $733 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would prohibit the Trump administration from utilizing any taxpayer funds for military action “in or against” the regime unless the president gets explicit authorization from Congress, although it would not prevent Trump from retaliating if Iran were to strike on the United States.
The Senate rejected such a provision last month.
The NDAA passed 220-197.

A widespread power outage in the heart of Manhattan today shut down some of the city’s subways as iconic parts of midtown, including Times Square and Rockefeller Center, went dark.
Con Edison said it was working to restore power to 42,000 customers, mostly on the west side of Manhattan. The utility did not immediately respond to phone messages, and it was unclear when they expected power to return.
Saturday’s outage took place on the anniversary of a 1977 New York City outage in which most of the city lost power. The city was also part of massive power outage in 2003.

 

Vice President Pence on Friday called it an “outrage” to equate migrant detention facilities with concentration camps, pushing back on criticism of the crowded facilities at the southern border.
Pence made the remarks after visiting detention centers in Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border that the administration says show the strain immigration enforcement agencies are under.
“I hope first and foremost that we put to the lie this slander against Customs and Border Protection. People saying that families and children are being held in concentration camps is an outrage,” Pence told CNN.
“The Nazis killed people. Our Customs and Border Protection, as you heard today, are saving lives every day,” he added.

At least 26 people were killed in an attack on a Somalian hotel by suspected al-Shabaab fighters, according to a senior state official.
The dead included two Americans, a Canadian and a Briton, as well as three each from Kenya and Tanzania, Ahmed Mohamed Islam, the president of the country’s Jubbaland state, said Saturday. At least 56 other people were injured, including two Chinese, in the attack on the Cas-casey hotel in the port town of Kismayo, he said at a news conference.
“Four attackers stormed the hotel,” Islam said. “One blew himself up in the first place. One was caught alive in the security operations, while the other two were killed.”

A rocket fired from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip exploded in an open area in southern Israel on Friday night, causing no injuries or damage.
The launch occurred a day after the IDF mistakenly killed a Hamas operative who had been trying to prevent Palestinians from getting close to the Israel-Gaza border fence.
The IDF apologized for the incident, calling it a “misunderstanding,” yet Hamas still vowed revenge.
Due to the heightened tensions, the IDF has deployed extra Iron Dome aerial defense batteries in southern Israel.
On Friday afternoon, around 6,000 Palestinians violently confronted IDF troops along the border, throwing rocks, firebombs and explosive devices.
One IDF vehicle was damaged by a Molotov cocktail.

More than a dozen rabbis from the city of Elad near Tel Aviv issued an edict declaring all dogs bad and warning residents that keeping them will make them accursed.
The edict, dated to June 14, contains the signatures of all the Sephardic rabbis in Elad and the city’s chief rabbi, Mordechai Malka, the news site Bhol reported Friday. Most of Elad’s approximately 46,000 residents are charedi.
“We have heard and have seen that lately, a serious phenomenon has spread in our city Elad, in which young boys and children walk around publicly with dogs. This is strictly forbidden, as explained in the Gemara and by the Rambam, anyone raising a dog is accursed and especially in our city where many women and children are afraid of dogs,” the anti-canine edict states.

The head of Lebanon’s Tehran-backed Hezbollah said Friday that US ally Israel would not be “spared” if a war broke out between the United States and Iran.
“The first to bomb Israel would be Iran”, Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview broadcast on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television.
“Iran is able to bombard Israel with ferocity and force.”
But “Iran will not start a war, and I don’t think that the United States will go to war against Iran”, he added. “When the Americans understand that this war could wipe out Israel, they will reconsider. Our collective responsibility in the region is to work towards preventing an American war on Iran.”

The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Friday to add billions of dollars to a dwindling compensation fund for 9/11 workers, in legislation honoring a former New York City police detective who had beseeched Congress to take care of those sick or dying after laboring in toxic debris sites.
The House voted 402 to 12 in favor of the legislation, which was amended days ago to honor Luis Alvarez, a New York Police Department first responder who told lawmakers on June 11: “You all said you would never forget. Well, I’m here to make sure that you don’t.”
He died less than three weeks later.