Washington:

The leaders of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint meeting of Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced on Friday, though the date of the speech has not been set.

The letter inviting Netanyahu was signed by Johnson, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

It was first reported by The Hill news website.

Johnson had said the Israeli leader would soon address a joint meeting of Congress, amid heightened tensions with President Joe Biden’s administration over Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza.

The Republican speaker, a critic of the Democratic president’s Israel policy, had said he would invite Netanyahu whether or not congressional Democratic leaders signed onto the letter.

Netanyahu, who has long aligned himself with U.S. Republicans, in March addressed members of the party in the Senate via a video link, nearly a week after Schumer gave a Senate speech branding the prime minister an obstacle to peace and urging new elections in Israel.

Addresses to joint meetings of Congress by foreign leaders are a rare honor generally reserved for the closest U.S. allies or major world figures. Netanyahu has already given three such addresses, most recently in 2015.

This speech would make Netanyahu the first foreign leader to address joint meetings of Congress four times. He is currently tied at three with Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

 The Republican leader of the U.S. House of Representatives said on Tuesday he was close to inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address lawmakers even if the Senate’s Democratic leader did not go along.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters at the Capitol he had given Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer until Tuesday to sign a letter inviting Netanyahu to address a joint meeting.

“If not, we’re going to proceed and invite Netanyahu just to the House,” Johnson said.

Schumer confirmed that he was talking to Johnson. “I’m discussing that now with the speaker of the House and, as I’ve always said, our relationship with Israel is ironclad. It transcends any one prime minister or president,” Schumer told reporters at his weekly news conference.

The possible divide between the two parties over the issue underscored the politicization of Israel policy, months before a November presidential election in which Democratic President Joe Biden is running against Republican former President Donald Trump.

Republicans have criticized Biden for holding up a weapons shipment to Israel, although other U.S. arms shipments to the Middle East country remain in the pipeline.

Israel launched an assault on Gaza after Hamas militants attacked Israel in October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to the Gaza health ministry. Malnutrition is widespread and much of the coastal enclave’s population has been left homeless, while much of its infrastructure has been destroyed.

Biden’s handling of the war has sparked protests from many of his fellow Democrats and at college campuses across the U.S. Biden has urged Netanyahu to minimized civilian casualties in Gaza and has opposed a large-scale attack on Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah.

Netanyahu, who has long aligned himself with U.S. Republicans, in March addressed party members in the Senate via a video link, nearly a week after Schumer gave a Senate speech branding the prime minister an obstacle to peace and urging new elections in Israel.

Addresses to joint meetings of Congress by foreign leaders are a rare honor generally reserved for the closest U.S. allies, or major world figures. Netanyahu has already given such addresses three times, most recently in 2015.

That year, Republican congressional leaders invited Netanyahu to address a joint meeting without consulting Democratic then-President Barack Obama, as Netanyahu joined Republicans in opposition to Obama’s international nuclear deal with Iran.

Netanyahu would be the first foreign leader ever to address joint meetings of Congress four times. He is currently tied at three with Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington, United States:

The US House of Representatives on Saturday will vote on a major aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and on a possible ban of TikTok.

Here is a breakdown of the $95 billion package made up of four bills and some odd amendments that lawmakers are trying to attach to it.

Ukraine

The majority of funds in the package, nearly $61 billion, are earmarked for Ukraine’s war effort against the Russian invasion. President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pleading for this money for months, warning that “if Congress does not help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war.”

Washington is Kyiv’s main military supporter, but Congress has not passed a major aid package for its ally since December 2022 due to partisan squabbling. 

The bill introduced Wednesday would provide nearly $14 billion to train, equip and finance the needs of the Ukrainian army.

Ukraine would also receive $10 billion in “forgivable loans” for vital economic and budgetary support, including for the energy and infrastructure sectors.

The idea of a loan, rather than a grant, was suggested by former president Donald Trump, who believes the United States should stop handing out money without any payback. A “forgivable loan” can be partly or fully forgiven or deferred under certain conditions.

A large chunk of this money will also go to replenishing US military stockpiles.

The bill also authorizes the US president to confiscate and sell Russian assets in order to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, an idea that is also gaining traction with other G7 countries.

Israel

The United States’ historic ally Israel will receive $13 billion in military assistance as it fights Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

These funds will be used in particular to strengthen Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system.

More than $9 billion will be spent to address “the dire need for humanitarian assistance for Gaza as well as other vulnerable populations around the world.”

The measure, however, would prohibit any direct US funding of the UN crisis-hit Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA). Israel has accused some of the agency employees in Gaza of involvement in the shocking October 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas, which triggered the war.

Taiwan, TikTok

The bill would provide some $8 billion to counter China through investment in submarine infrastructure and boosting competition with Chinese projects in developing countries.

The bill also earmarks several billion dollars in weapons funding for Taiwan, a self-ruled island that is claimed by China.

It also includes a provision that would force TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance or face a nationwide ban in the United States.

Western officials have voiced alarm over the popularity of TikTok with young people, alleging that it is subservient to Beijing and a conduit to spread propaganda, claims denied by the company and Beijing.

Troll amendments

The massive package, a result of a delicate compromise between Democrats and Republicans, was met with backlash from the far-right wing of the Republican Party.

In protest, its members introduced a series of quirky provisions, which have generated some buzz but have no chance of being adopted.

Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene proposed an amendment to a foreign aid bill that would require members of Congress who vote in favor of providing aid to Ukraine to join the country’s military.

“If you want to fund the endless foreign wars, you should have to go fight them,” Greene, a hardline Trump supporter, said on the social media platform X. 

In response, Democrat Jared Moskowitz introduced his own amendment that would rename Greene’s office in Congress into “Neville Chamberlain Room” — a reference to the British prime minister who pursued a policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany, which ultimately failed to avert World War II.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that Kyiv will lose the war against Russia if the US Congress does not approve military aid to battle Moscow’s invasion.

Republicans in Congress have been blocking tens of billions of dollars in military assistance for Kyiv for months.

“It is necessary to specifically tell Congress that if Congress does not help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war,” Zelensky said during a video meeting of Kyiv-organised fundraising platform United24.

Zelensky said it would be “difficult” for Ukraine to “stay” (survive) without the aid.

He said that “if Ukraine loses the war, other states will be attacked.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dragged on for more than two years.

Kyiv said Sunday that a Russian strike on the town of Gulyaipole in the southern Zaporizhzhia region killed three people.

“Two men and a woman died under the rubble of their own private house, which was hit by a Russian shell,” the head of the region, Ivan Fedorov, said on social media.

Officials said another civilian, a woman, was killed in the city of Kupiansk, in the northeastern Kharkiv region that has seen increased attacks in recent months.

“A woman died under the rubble in an apartment on the fourth floor of a high-rise building,” Ukraine’s state emergency services said, adding that it was a residential building.

Authorities in the main city of Kharkiv said Russia launched another attack on Sunday, wounding five civilians, a day after a deadly attack there.

Russia, meanwhile, said it had destroyed 15 Ukrainian drones over its border Belgorod and Bryansk regions, reporting the death of a young woman.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said shrapnel hit a car with a family of six inside in the village of Shagarovka, some 35 kilometres (20 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, a girl died,” Gladkov said, without specifying whether she was a minor. “She died from her wounds on the spot.”

Gladkov said her father had a head wound and that two children were taken to hospital.

The Russian army said it had destroyed 12 Ukrainian drones over the Belgorod region and three over the Bryansk region — both territories have been regularly targeted by Kyiv.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The US Pentagon has said that they have found no evidence of UFOs or aliens in its 63-page “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).” In addition to noting that “most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification,” the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) found no evidence of any U.S. government investigation, research, or review panel verifying a “UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.” They said that there was “no evidence” that the government had encountered alien life, as per a report in BBC.

The Pentagon officials acknowledged that the public’s perception of alien visits will not be dispelled by their findings.”The proliferation of television programmes, books, movies, and the vast amount of internet and social media content centred on UAP-related topics most likely has influenced the public conversation on this topic, and reinforced these beliefs within some sections of the population,” the report said.

The report is a part of the US government’s extensive public examination of UFOs, or “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” Congress hearings and open discussions with NASA officials have been part of the study.

According to the researchers, there is a “particularly persistent narrative” that the government has secretly conducted alien research while recovering spaceships and alien corpses. The AARO further connected “circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence” to an incorrect allegation that the government is withholding from Congress claims of reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.

According to the report, “misidentification of never-before-seen experimental and operational space, rocket, and air systems, including stealth technologies and the proliferation of drone platforms” has been cited as a contributing factor in some of the UFO sightings claimed since the 1940s. The investigation said that the AARO has interviewed around thirty people, looked through both secret and unclassified records, and reviewed all government UAP investigations dating back to 1945.

Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said, “AARO assesses that all of the named and described alleged hidden UAP reverse-engineering programs provided by interviewees either do not exist; are misidentified authentic national security programs that are not related to extraterrestrial technology exploitation; or resolve to a disestablished program.”

David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, stated before a congressional committee in 2023 that he thought the US government had alien bodies and spacecraft. According to Mr. Grusch, he based his claims on records, papers, and discussions with coworkers.

The organisation added that rather than attempting to disprove any beliefs, they wished to “use a rigorous analytic and scientific approach” to the examination of past UAP investigations conducted by the government and allegations made by individuals who said that the government and contractors were hiding “off-world technology and biological material.”

The Senate on March 8 approved a $460 billion package of spending bills in time to meet a midnight deadline for avoiding a shutdown of many key federal agencies, a vote that gets lawmakers about halfway home in wrapping up their appropriations work for the 2024 budget year.

The measure contains six annual spending bills and has already passed the House. It now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. The White House said he would do so Saturday, and “agencies will not shut down and may continue their normal operations”.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are negotiating a second package of six bills, including defence, in an effort to have all federal agencies fully funded by a March 22 deadline.

“To folks who worry that divided government means nothing ever gets done, this bipartisan package says otherwise,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

He said the bill’s passage would allow for the hiring of more air traffic controllers and rail safety inspectors, give federal firefighters a raise and boost support for homeless veterans, among other things.

The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 75-22. The chamber laboured to get to a final vote just hours before the midnight deadline for the first set of appropriations bills. Lawmakers sought votes on several amendments and wanted to have their say on the bill and other priorities during debate on the floor. It was unclear midday if senators would be able to avert a short shutdown, though eventual passage was never really in doubt.

“I would urge my colleagues to stop playing with fire here,” said Sen. Susan Collins, the top-ranking Republican member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “It would be irresponsible for us not to clear these bills and do the fundamental job that we have of funding government. What is more important?”

The votes this week come more than five months into the current fiscal year after congressional leaders relied on a series of stopgap bills to keep federal agencies funded for a few more weeks or months at a time while they struggled to reach agreement on full-year spending.

In the end, total discretionary spending set by Congress is expected to come in at about $1.66 trillion for the full budget year ending September 30.

Republicans were able to keep non-defence spending relatively flat compared to the previous year. Supporters say that’s progress in an era when annual federal deficits exceeding $1 trillion have become the norm. But many Republican lawmakers were seeking much steeper cuts and more policy victories.

The House Freedom Caucus, which contains dozens of the GOP’s most conservative members, urged Republicans to vote against the first spending package and the second one still being negotiated.

Democrats staved off most of the policy riders that Republicans sought to include in the package. For example, they beat back an effort to block new rules that expand access to the abortion pill mifepristone. They were also able to fully fund a nutrition program for low-income women, infants and children, providing about $7 billion for what is known as the WIC program. That’s a $1 billion increase from the previous year.

Republicans were able to achieve some policy wins, however. One provision, for example, will prevent the sale of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China. Another policy mandate prohibits the Justice Department from investigating parents who exercise free speech at local school board meetings.

Another provision strengthens gun rights for certain veterans, though opponents of the move said it could make it easier for those with very serious mental health conditions like dementia to obtain a firearm.

”This isn’t the package I would have written on my own,” said Sen. Patty Murray, the Democratic chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “But I am proud that we have protected absolutely vital funding that the American people rely on in their daily lives.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said one problem he sees with the bill is that there was too much compromise, and that led to too much spending.

“A lot of people don’t understand this. They think there is no cooperation in Washington and the opposite is true. There is compromise every day on every spending bill,” Sen. Paul said.

“It’s compromise between big-government Democrats and big-government Republicans,” he added.

Still, with a divided Congress and a Democratic-led White House, any bill that doesn’t have buy-in from members of both political parties stands no chance of passage.

The bill also includes more than 6,600 projects requested by individual lawmakers with a price tag of about $12.7 billion. The projects attracted criticism from some Republican members, though members from both parties broadly participated in requesting them on behalf of their states and congressional districts. Sen. Paul called the spending “sort of the grease that eases in billions and trillions of other dollars, because you get people to buy into the total package by giving them a little bit of pork for their town, a little bit of pork for their donors”.

But an effort by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla, to strip out the projects mustered only 32 votes with 64 against. Murray said Scott’s effort would overrule “all the hard work, all the input we asked everyone to provide us about projects that would help their constituents”.

Even though lawmakers find themselves passing spending bills five months into the fiscal year, Republicans are framing the process as improved nonetheless because they broke the cycle of passing all the spending bills in one massive package that lawmakers have little time to study before being asked to vote on it or risk a government shutdown. Still, others said that breaking up funding into two chunks of legislation war hardly a breakthrough.

The first package now making its way to Mr. Biden’s desk covers the departments of Justice, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Interior and Transportation, among others.

Washington, United States:

The US Congress passed an 11th-hour funding bill Saturday to keep federal agencies running for another 45 days and avert a costly government shutdown — although the deal left out aid to war-torn Ukraine requested by President Joe Biden.

Three hours before the midnight Saturday deadline, the Senate voted to keep the lights on through mid-November with a resolution that had advanced earlier from the House of Representatives in a day of high-stakes brinkmanship on Capitol Hill.

The last-ditch “continuing resolution” was pitched by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as millions of public workers looked set to be sent home unpaid, upending government functions from military operations to food aid to federal policymaking.

Biden is set to sign the measure into law in the coming hours, with a White House official telling AFP the administration expects Republicans to allow a quick separate vote on Ukraine aid.

The shutdown crisis was largely triggered by a small group of hardline Republicans who had defied their own party leadership to scupper various temporary funding proposals as they pressed for deep spending cuts.

Saturday’s bill kept federal spending at current levels and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called the lower chamber’s vote “a complete and total surrender by right-wing extremists.”

But the result could end up costing McCarthy his job. The 21 hardliners had threatened to remove him as speaker if a stopgap measure they opposed was passed with Democrat support.

One of the group, Lauren Boebert, declined to say after the House vote whether she and her colleagues would try to force McCarthy out, but she was clearly unhappy with the outcome.

“There are too many members here who are comfortable doing things the way they’ve been done since the mid ’90s,” she told reporters. “And that’s why we’re sitting at $33 trillion in debt.”

McCarthy sought to convey confidence both about his own future and the prospects for securing a final agreement within the new timeframe.

“In 45 days we should get our work all done,” he said, while seeming to offer a hand to the hardliners, saying, “I welcome those 21 back in.”  

While the crisis highlighted Republican divisions, Jeffries held his caucus together, with only one member defecting in a protest of the lack of assistance to Ukraine.

‘No blank check’

Arming and funding Kyiv in its desperate war against the Russian invasion has been a key policy plank for the Biden administration and, while the stopgap is temporary, it does raise questions over the political viability of renewing the multibillion-dollar flow of assistance.

“This is enough to keep the government open, and I’m not going to shut the government down over foreign aid,” one House Democrat, Jared Moskowitz, told CNN.

McCarthy said Russia’s invasion was “horrendous” but insisted there could be “no blank check” for Ukraine.

“I have a real concern of what’s going to happen long term, but I don’t want to waste any money,” he said.

With tensions running high and Democrats poring over the text of McCarthy’s proposal, one of their lawmakers, Jamaal Bowman, triggered a fire alarm in a building housing congressional offices an hour before the House vote.

Bowman’s spokesman insisted it was an accident, but Republicans accused him of seeking to delay proceedings.

If Congress had failed to keep the government open, the closures would have begun just after midnight (0400 GMT Sunday) and would likely have bled into the following week, delaying salaries for millions of federal employees and military personnel.

A shutdown would have meant the majority of national parks, for example — from the iconic Yosemite and Yellowstone in the west to Florida’s Everglades swamp — shutting to the public from Sunday.

The stopgap measure buys legislators time to negotiate full-year spending bills for the rest of fiscal 2024.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s last-ditch plan to keep the federal government temporarily open collapsed in dramatic fashion Friday as a robust faction of hard-right holdouts rejected the package, making a shutdown almost certain.

Mr. McCarthy’s right-flank Republicans refused to support the bill despite its steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.

The White House and Democrats rejected the Republican approach as too extreme. The vote was 198-232, with 21 hard-right Republicans voting to sink the package. The Democrats voted against it.

Also Read | U.S. Congress moving into crisis mode, with government shutdown just days away

The bill’s complete failure a day before Saturday’s deadline to fund the government leaves few options to prevent a shutdown that will furlough federal workers, keep the military working without pay and disrupt programmes and services for millions of Americans.

A clearly agitated Mr. McCarthy left the House chamber. “It’s not the end yet; I’ve got other ideas,” he told reporters.

The outcome puts Mr. McCarthy’s speakership in serious jeopardy with almost no political leverage to lead the House at a critical moment that has pushed the government into crisis. Even the failed plan, an extraordinary concession to immediately slash spending by one-third for many agencies, was not enough to satisfy the hard right flank that has upturned his speakership.

Republican leaders planned to convene behind closed doors late Friday to assess next steps.

The federal government is heading straight into a shutdown after midnight Saturday that would leave 2 million military troops without pay, furlough federal workers and disrupt government services and programmes that Americans rely on from coast to coast. Congress has been unable to fund the agencies or pass a temporary bill to keep offices open.

The Senate was pushing ahead Friday with its own plan favoured by Republicans and Democrats to keep the government open while also bolstering Ukraine aid and U.S. disaster accounts. But that won’t matter with the House in political chaos.

The White House has brushed aside Mr. McCarthy’s overtures to meet with President Joe Biden after the speaker walked away from the debt deal they brokered earlier this year that set budget levels.

“Extreme House Republicans are now tripling down on their demands to eviscerate programmes millions of hardworking families count on,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

Ms. Jean-Pierre said, “The path forward to fund the government has been laid out by the Senate with bipartisan support — House Republicans just need to take it.”

Catering to his hard-right flank, Mr. McCarthy had returned to the spending limits the conservatives demanded back in January as part of the deal-making to help him become the House speaker.

His package would not have cut the Defence, Veterans or Homeland Security departments but would have slashed almost all other agencies by up to 30% — steep hits to a vast array of programmes, services and departments Americans routinely depend on.

It also added strict new border security provisions that would kickstart building the wall at the southern border with Mexico, among other measures. Additionally, the package would have set up a bipartisan debt commission to address the nation’s mounting debt load.

Ahead of voting, the Republican speaker all but dared his hold-out colleagues to oppose the package a day before Saturday’s almost certain shutdown. The House bill would have kept operations open through October 31.

“Every member will have to go on record where they stand,” Mr. McCarthy said.

Asked if he had the votes, Mr. McCarthy quipped, “We’ll see.”

But as soon as the floor debate began, Mr. McCarthy’s chief Republican critic, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, announced he would be voting against the package, urging his colleagues to “not surrender.”

The hard right, led by Mr. Gaetz, has been threatening Mr. McCarthy’s ouster, with a looming vote to try to remove him from the speaker’s office unless he meets the conservative demands. Still, it’s unclear if any other Republican would have support from the House majority to lead the party.

Mr. Gaetz said afterward that speaker’s bill “went down in flames as I’ve told you all week it would.”

He and others rejecting the temporary measure want the House to instead keep pushing through the 12 individual spending bills needed to fund the government, typically a weeks-long process, as they pursue their conservative priorities.

Some of the Republican holdouts including Mr. Gaetz are allies of Donald Trump, who is Mr. Biden’s chief rival in 2024. The former president has been encouraging the Republicans to fight hard for their priorities and even to “shut it down.”

The margin of defeat shocked even Republican members.

Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif., said, “I think what this does, if anything, I think it’s going to rally people around the speaker and go, hey the dysfunction here is not coming from leadership in this case. The dysfunction is coming from individuals that don’t understand the implications of what we’re doing here.’”

Mr. Garcia said, “For the people that claim this isn’t good enough, I want to hear what good enough looks like.”

Another Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a member of the Freedom Caucus who supported the package, suggested the House was losing its leverage with the failed vote: “We control the purse strings. We just ceded them to the Senate.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, criticised the proposed Republican cuts as hurting law enforcement, education and taking food out of the mouths of millions. She said 275,000 children would lose access to Head Start and make it harder for parents to work.

“This is a pointless charade with grave consequences for the American people,” Ms. DeLauro said.