Sen. Ted Cruz ‘enthusiastically’ endorses Donald Trump for president: ‘This race is over’
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz endorsed Donald Trump for president Tuesday night and called for the country to unify behind the Republican frontrunner. “I am proud to endorse Donald Trump for President of the United States,” Cruz said on “Hannity.” “I look forward to supporting him enthusiastically.” Cruz, who fiercely battled Trump in the 2016 election primaries, argued that the results of the Iowa caucuses showed there is only one viable Republican nominee. “[Iowa] was a dominating victory for Donald Trump: I’ve got to say, there’s no place like the Iowa caucuses. I know it intimately. The men and women of Iowa, they take their responsibility incredibly seriously. They scrutinize the candidates,” Cruz said. TRUMP TEASES FUTURE ROLE FOR RAMASWAMY AT NH RALLY: ‘HE’LL BE WORKING WITH US FOR A LONG TIME’ “It’s an amazing process, and I’m a big believer in letting democracy play out. Well, last night it played out, and I got to say Trump’s victory was across the board… Congratulations to President Trump on that dominating victory,” Cruz said. “And at this point, I believe this race is over.” Trump earned 51% of the votes in the Iowa caucuses on Monday, claiming a 30-point victory over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who slightly secured second place over Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The Texas senator said that Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses showed that the former president’s candidacy is “compelling.” “I’m a big believer we need to let the process play out: It did. And the results last night: 51% [of the vote, which included] 98 counties – that’s compelling. And at this point, I think the contrast needs to be on substance and policy and records [versus Biden],” Cruz said. TRUMP ATTENDS DEFAMATION DAMAGES TRIAL STEMMING FROM E. JEAN CARROLL LAWSUIT AFTER WINNING IOWA CAUCUSES Cruz noted he is also a top senatorial election target for Democrats as he seeks a third term in the November election. “I wear that as a badge of honor,” he said of continuing to receive the ire and attention of Democrats as his re-election approaches. “If you are a left-wing Democrat, after Donald Trump, there’s nobody in the country you want to beat more than me. And Chuck Schumer has made clear I am his number one target in the country,” Cruz continued. “The Democrats are going to spend $100 million this year trying to beat me and trying to flip Texas blue. Now, that ain’t going to happen.” CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Trump also picked up an endorsement from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., another former 2016 primary competitor, on Sunday. Fox News’ Charles Creitz contributed to this report.
Ted Cruz endorses Donald Trump for president
The Republican U.S. senator threw his support behind the former president during a Fox News appearance.
Remains of 2800-year-old settlement found in PM Modi’s village Vadnagar
Professor of Geology and Geophysics at IIT Kharagpur, Dr Anindya Sarkar said the study of deep archaeological excavation at Vadnagar also indicates that the rise and fall of different kingdoms during this long 3,500 years.
U.S. Supreme Court hears Texas case that could change how states compensate landowners for their property
Landowners north of Houston are seeking compensation from the state after a highway project led to flooding on their properties.
Trump teases future role for Ramaswamy at NH rally: ‘He’ll be working with us for a long time’
Former President Trump is already teasing a potential role on his team for former GOP rival Vivek Ramaswamy at a New Hampshire rally on Tuesday following Monday’s Iowa caucuses. Just one day after suspending his own presidential campaign, Ramaswamy appeared alongside Trump in Atkinson and expressed his full support for the GOP frontrunner. As Ramaswamy wrapped up his comments, several Trump supporters could be heard chanting “Veep!” VIVEK RAMASWAMY ENDS PRESIDENTIAL BID FOLLOWING IOWA CAUCUSES “Wow! How was that? Pretty good, right?” Trump reacted to Ramaswamy’s remarks. “He’s a fantastic guy. He’s got something that’s very special because he started off with a zippo and he ended up very strong. He did a great job. I was actually surprised when he called because he was doing well. And it’s an honor to have his endorsement.” “He’s going to be working with us and he’ll be working with us for a long time,” Trump added before the crowd broke out in cheers. The biotech entrepreneur himself reacted to the comments on social media, writing “America-First. One movement. Indivisible.” It is unclear whether Trump alluded to a possible position for Ramaswamy in his presidential campaign or a hypothetical Trump administration. When asked by Fox News’ Jesse Watters after the rally if he would serve as vice president, Ramaswamy responded by saying “I want to serve this country any way I can.” TRUMP WINS IOWA, FOX NEWS DECISION DESK PREDICTS DESANTIS WILL TAKE SECOND PLACE Ramaswamy threw his support behind Trump after a disappointing turnout at the Iowa caucuses where he placed a distant fourth with roughly 8% of the vote while the former president shattered contested primary records with 51% support. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley finished second and third with 21% and 19% of the vote respectively, both are continuing to campaign in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Ramaswamy is urging both of them to drop out of the race and help rally behind Trump ahead of the general election. As Trump alluded to at the rally, Ramaswamy entered the race with virtually zero name recognition, outlasting several big-name Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former Vice President Mike Pence. While the Iowa caucuses didn’t go his way, it wasn’t because Ramaswamy didn’t put the effort in. His campaign touted that he had completed the “Full Grassley” twice, meaning he had visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties at least two times. And he held more campaign events than any other candidate running in the Hawkeye State.
Jagannath Heritage Corridor project in Puri to open for public today: All you need to know
Schools in Odisha will also remain shut today in view of the inauguration of the Srimandir Parikrama Project. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has declared a government holiday in the state to witness the grand opening of the corridor.
India, China clashed twice near LAC after 2020 Galwan incident, new details reveal
The citations, read out at an investiture ceremony by the Army’s Western Command last week, provided brief details of how the Indian troops responded firmly to the aggressive behaviour by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers along the LAC.
Georgia House GOP eyes 9-figure preschool spending hike
Top Republicans in the Georgia House want to boost funding for its prekindergarten program by more than $100 million, raising teacher salaries, providing money for building classrooms and spending more on operations. “We’ve got to continue to up our game,” House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, a Milton Republican who led a study of Georgia’s prekindergarten program for 4-year-olds. Republican House Speaker Jon Burns of Newington and Jones said Tuesday that they would seek to implement recommendations in the current legislative session, although Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t budget for most of them. Jones said leaders would ask Kemp to increase spending or they would seek money from elsewhere in the budget. GEORGIA GOV. KEMP PROPOSES $11.3M TO OVERHAUL LITERACY EDUCATION The governor’s office declined to comment. It’s one of a series of proposals nationwide to boost spending on child care and early education, months after a pandemic-era federal boost in subsidies expired. Georgia uses lottery money to offer preschool to any 4-year-old whose parents want it, funding classes for 84,000 children statewide. Enrollment has only partially recovered since the pandemic, to about 73,000 last year. But officials say it’s a struggle to hire teachers, in part because of low state-paid salaries. “We have a lot of providers or even public schools that have the kids, they’re ready and willing, they want to enter our pre-K class and they can’t find a teacher,” said Early Care and Learning Commissioner Amy Jacobs, who oversees the program. About 2,700 children are on waiting lists statewide, though Jones said she believes more children could be served. She said better funding would encourage more public school districts to offer classes while bolstering the sometimes-thin finances of private operators. Right now, half the classes statewide are provided by public districts and half are provided by private child care operators. “We have too few offerings to serve the needs of all parents who want to avail themselves of public pre-K,” Jones said. Kemp agreed to the group’s top recommendation, to cut class sizes from 22 back to 20, proposing almost $11 million for his budget beginning July 1. Class sizes would fall over four years, costing $43 million annually once complete. But Jones and Burns are also calling for higher preschool teacher salaries. Jones said it’s important to increase the salary of assistant teachers from $20,190 now to $25,741, because an assistant teacher “would make more working full-time at Target.” They also propose boosting pay for lead teachers to match what the state pays for K-12 teachers. The combined salary increases would cost $31 million annually. Jacobs said she believes many prekindergarten teachers are leaving for K-12. There, they get not only a higher state salary but typically a significant local supplement atop that. When I talk to teachers, we definitely hear about teacher pay,” Jacobs said, “And the second issue we hear from teachers is we need reduced class size, we need to go back down to 20.” MASSACHUSETTS GOV. HEALEY PUSHES CHILDCARE SPENDING UNDER NEW PROPOSAL A report released by Jones also calls for increasing the startup grant for a new preschool classroom from $8,000 to $30,000 to pay for furniture and materials and for providing $15,000 per classroom once every five years to “refresh” materials. Jones also wants to provide transportation money for all pupils. Those operational boosts would cost about $15.5 million per year. For the first time, House leaders also want to fund new classroom construction, letting public schools use an existing pool of state money and giving private providers money to lease spaces. The private lease money is estimated to cost $23 million a year. Jones said she believes Georgia’s lottery generates enough to cover the expansion, without cutting other spending on college scholarships and prekindergarten. The lottery last year generated a $269 million surplus after spending $400 million on prekindergarten and $1 billion on college assistance. That surplus could narrow this year, after lawmakers agreed with Kemp’s plan to boost HOPE scholarships. The lottery is legally required to maintain a $737 million reserve but currently has nearly $2.2 billion in the bank. That surplus hasn’t gotten as much attention as the $10.7 billion in spare cash Georgia has in its main bank account, but some Democrats have eyed the lottery’s extra cash as a way to offer need-based financial aid for college students.
GOP power broker Vos threatens to take Wisconsin redistricting case to Supreme Court
Wisconsin’s powerful Republican Assembly leader said Tuesday that he hopes the liberal-controlled state Supreme Court adopts new constitutional legislative boundary maps, even as he slammed proposals from Democrats as “a political gerrymander” and threatened an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court tossed Republican-drawn maps, long considered among the country’s most favorable to the GOP, and ordered new maps that do not favor one party over another. It said if the Legislature doesn’t adopt maps, the court will. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Republicans have approached Democrats about passing new maps in the Legislature, but “we have not gotten a warm reception to that idea.” WISCONSIN REPUBLICANS WOULD MAINTAIN MAJORITY IN PROPOSED LEGISLATIVE MAPS, BUT WITH REDUCED DOMINANCE “We are ready, willing and able to try to engage in that process,” Vos said at a news conference. Democratic Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer questioned Vos’ sincerity. “We are always open to conversations with our colleagues, but have yet to be convinced that Republican Legislators are serious about passing a fair and representative map, especially given the extreme gerrymander they submitted to the court on Friday,” she said in a statement. Wisconsin is a purple state, with four of the past six presidential elections decided by less than a percentage point. But under legislative maps first enacted by Republicans in 2011 and then again in 2022 with few changes, the GOP has grown its majorities to 64-35 in the Assembly and 22-11 in the state Senate. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the maps passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021, leading the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court to adopt the maps that are currently in use. The court has since shifted to liberal control, and it threw out the maps last month. In a 4-3 ruling, the high court said the current maps were unconstitutional because not all districts were comprised of a contiguous territory. Some districts included areas that weren’t connected to the whole. Republican and Democratic lawmakers, along with Evers, a conservative Wisconsin law firm, a liberal law firm that brought the redistricting lawsuit, a group of mathematics professors and a redistricting consultant submitted new proposed maps on Friday. The map submitted by Republicans would maintain the current 64-35 GOP majority, while other maps would narrow it to as little as a one-seat Republican edge, according to an analysis by Marquette University Law School research fellow John D. Johnson Vos dismissed the maps submitted by Democrats, saying they would move too many boundary lines and force incumbent lawmakers to run against one another. He called them “nothing more than a political gerrymander.” EMBATTLED WISCONSIN ELECTIONS CZAR IS LEGALLY HOLDING POSITION, JUDGE RULES In the 2022 election, Wisconsin’s Assembly districts had the nation’s second-largest Republican tilt behind only West Virginia, according to an Associated Press statistical analysis that was designed to detect potential gerrymandering. Republicans received less than 55% of the votes cast for major party Assembly candidates, yet they won 65% of the seats. The submitted maps are being reviewed now by two consultants hired by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They will submit their report by Feb. 1, which will include their recommended maps. “My hope is that the court, in any fair reading, rejects the maps that were submitted which have large partisan bias and either has maps drawn by the professors, if they go that route, or ultimately we’ll have to go to the (U.S.) Supreme Court and demonstrate the huge political nature of what they’ve done, ” Vos said. When asked when such an appeal would be filed or what it would argue, Vos declined to say. “Our goal is not to rush to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Vos said. “We want to try and have a map that meets the constitution.” Republicans have indicated that they would argue that there were due process violations. Vos has also suggested that the appeal would argue that liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who called the current maps “rigged” and “unfair” during her run for office, should not have heard the case. She sided with the three other liberal justices in ordering new maps.
Wisconsin Senate fires state utility regulator in another blow to Democratic Gov. Evers
Republicans who control the Wisconsin state Senate voted Tuesday to fire a state utility regulator because he supports setting energy rates according to customers’ ability to pay and opening up the solar energy sector. The Senate voted 21-11 to reject Public Service Commissioner Tyler Huebner’s confirmation. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers appointed him to the commission in March 2020 and again in March 2021. Huebner previously served as executive director of RENEW Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization that advocates for renewable energy. The commissioner is the latest in a line of gubernatorial appointees the Senate has fired over the last five years as Republican lawmakers chafe under the Evers administration. Democratic Sen. Brad Pfaff — who served as Evers’ agriculture secretary until the Senate fired him in 2019 — argued that Huebner is one of the brightest minds in renewable energy and accused Republicans of trying to cripple state government. WISCONSIN REPUBLICANS WOULD MAINTAIN MAJORITY IN PROPOSED LEGISLATIVE MAPS, BUT WITH REDUCED DOMINANCE Rejecting Huebner’s confirmation “is not something you should be doing so you can be bragging about it to your base,” Pfaff said. “It sends a signal it doesn’t matter what your background is. It doesn’t matter your qualifications, your hard work … what matters is the political party and who appointed you.” Republican Sen. Julian Bradley, a member of the Senate’s utilities committee, said the vote wasn’t political, pointing out that the Senate has confirmed scores of Evers appointees since the governor took office. The Senate voted 27-5 on Tuesday to confirm Commissioner Summer Strand, whom Evers appointed in March 2023, after firing Huebner. Bradley said on the Senate floor that Huebner supports setting energy rates based on a customer’s ability to pay rather than usage, a concept known as income-based rates. State law doesn’t allow the PSC to take that approach, Bradley said, but Huebner insists it does. The senator dubbed that activism. Republican Sen. Van Wanggaard, another member of the Senate utilities committee, said in a statement after the vote that Republicans also were upset that Huebner voted in December to allow property owners to lease panels from a solar power company at lower rates than what an electric utility might charge. Utilities have generally opposed such deals and Wanggard said the Legislature hasn’t approved them. He added that the PSC in 2021 ordered utilities to provide workplace diversity data in annual reports without any authority to do so and he found Huebner to be evasive during meetings. Huebner said in a statement that he was proud of the decisions he made to “balance safety, reliability, and affordability.” Evers issued a statement saying the vote “defies justification and logic.” “These are qualified, hard-working Wisconsinites we’re talking about,” Evers said. “They should be celebrated for service and experience, not bullied, vilified, and fired simply for doing their jobs.” Meanwhile on Tuesday, Evers appointed Kristy Nieto, administrator of the commission’s Division of Energy Regulation and Analysis, to replace Chairperson Rebecca Valcq, who announced earlier this month that she plans to leave the agency in early February. Evers first appointed Valcq in 2019. All the changes leave the three-member commission with one vacancy heading into the spring. Senate Republicans have voted to reject multiple appointees’ confirmation since 2019, beginning with their refusal to confirm Pfaff. Last September they voted to reject Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, but Attorney General Josh Kaul won a court ruling nullifying the rejection. In October, Republicans rejected eight more Evers appointees, including Joseph Czarnezki, a Democratic member of the elections commission who abstained from voting on whether the commission should reappoint Wolfe. The move resulted in a deadlock that prevented Wolfe’s reappointment from legally reaching the Senate, angering Republican who have vowed to oust Wolfe. Also among the eight appointees who lost their jobs were four members of the state Department of Natural Resources Board. They angered Republicans by hedging on whether a new wolf management plan should include a hard population cap.