Congress Taking Aim At China Over Currency Valuation

Something is missing from the new Trump-backed year-end spending bill that Congress has to pass by midnight on Friday to prevent a government shutdown: Support for critical services for abused women and children. As I have reported for Mother Jones, there is a funding crisis facing the Crime Victims Fund, a pot of federal money established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act that supports domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide.

The city of Denver and partners including the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs have now identified every homeless veteran in the Mile High City and secured housing or a private shelter space for them, officials said Thursday. A handful of those people, however, have not accepted the offer to come inside. Speaking at the historic Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1 on Sante Fe Drive, Mayor Mike Johnston said the city had “ended the cycle of street homelessness for veterans in Denver.” It’s a milestone that city partners say was reached by harnessing extensive data collection and an expansion of the city’s shelter resources.

Colorado’s projected budget hole may not be quite as deep as originally projected, but economic forecasters warned Thursday that the state was still in for a difficult year. New state economic forecasts predict legislators will have about $250 million more in revenue they can use to put together the budget compared to earlier September projections.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been disqualified from the Georgia case against Donald Trump. The ruling, issued Thursday morning by a panel of the state’s appellate court, deals what could be a fatal blow to the one remaining bid to hold the incoming president criminally liable for trying to steal the 2020 election. Willis began the year as a Democratic superstar who had already secured several guilty pleas against Trump’s co-defendants in the sprawling Georgia RICO case—all while being bombarded with racist and misogynistic threats and abuse. But her legal efforts were derailed when lawyers for one of the remaining defendants, Trump aide Mike Roman, uncovered a romantic relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, the outside attorney she’d hired to manage the case.

On December 19, 2014, then-President Barack Obama signed the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act into law, establishing tax-exempt savings accounts of up to $100,000 for qualified disability expenses—including education, housing, transportation, health, and basic living expenses—for people whose disabilities began before age 26, without counting against the $2,000 Social Security Insurance asset limit. In the decade since, ABLE accounts have meaningfully improved the lives of over 160,000 people by giving them more financial independence.