Politics

The Senate will "defer" its work on repealing and replacing Obamacare Majority leader Mitch McConnell said late on Saturday, as John McCain, 80, recovers from surgery to remove a blood clot above his eye Reuters reports. The health care reform bill, which is already neared collapse as senators Rand Paul and Susan Collins have already said they would oppose it, would fail without McCain's vote. With Democrats united in opposition, McConnell needs support from at least 50 out of 52 Republicans to pass the measure in the 100-member chamber.

When taxi and bus drivers take journalists into Syria via the Beirut-Damascus Highway these days, there's a common greeting that has become a kind of local tradition as the drivers pull into their Damascus area destinations.

Authored by Ruthie Blum via The Gatestone Institute,

Two weeks after Italy reacted with anger to Austria's deployment of troops and armored vehicles to the border between the two nations, while reactivating border controls at the Brenner Pass over concerns that Italy will be unable to handle the roughly 85,000 migrants and refugees who have entered the country so far in 2017, the Italian government has threatened to retaliate in way that assures an imminent migrant crisis as well as an escalation of tensions between the two EU nations.

Within hours of President Donald Trump’s return to the US following his Bastille Day visit to Paris as a guest of French President Emmanuel Macron, the Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to block a ruling by a federal judge in Hawaii that seeks to expand who can be let into the US under the narrower terms of the Trump travel ban.