THE VIETNAM VETS CHAPTER 862 19TH ANNUAL TET REUNION IS TAKING PLACE THIS WEEKEND…AS WE HEAR IN THIS REPORT FROM BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report…

THE DRIVER THAT STRUCK TWO ALIQUIPPA POLICE OFFICERS LAST WEEK HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED. BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO HAS AN UPDATE. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report…

Congress takes on immigration issue amid election pressures
By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate begins a rare, open-ended debate on immigration and the fate of the “Dreamer” immigrants on Monday, and Republican senators say they’ll introduce President Donald Trump’s plan. Though his proposal has no chance of passage, Trump may be the most influential voice in the conversation.
If the aim is to pass a legislative solution, Trump will be a crucial and, at times, complicating player. His day-to-day turnabouts on the issues have confounded Democrats and Republicans and led some to urge the White House to minimize his role in the debate for fear he’ll say something that undermines the effort.
Yet his ultimate support will be vital if Congress is to overcome election-year pressures against compromise. No Senate deal is likely to see the light of day in the more conservative House without the president’s blessing and promise to sell compromise to his hard-line base.
Trump, thus far, has balked on that front.
“The Tuesday Trump versus the Thursday Trump, after the base gets to him,” is how Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a proponent of compromise, describes the president and the impact conservative voters and his hard-right advisers have on him. “I don’t know how far he’ll go, but I do think he’d like to fix it.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., scheduled an initial procedural vote for Monday evening to commence debate. It is expected to succeed easily, and then the Senate will sort through proposals, perhaps for weeks.
Democrats and some Republicans say they want to help the “Dreamers,” young immigrants who have lived in the U.S. illegally since they were children and have only temporarily been protected from deportation by an Obama-era program. Trump has said he wants to aid them and has even proposed a path to citizenship for 1.8 million, but in exchange wants $25 billion for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall plus significant curbs to legal immigration.
McConnell agreed to the open-ended debate, a Senate rarity in recent years, after Democrats agreed to vote to end a three-day government shutdown they’d forced over the issue. They’d initially demanded a deal toward helping Dreamers, not a simple promise of votes.
To prevail, any plan will need 60 votes, meaning substantial support from both parties is mandatory. Republicans control the chamber 51-49 but GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona has been home for weeks battling brain cancer.
Seven GOP senators said late Sunday that they will introduce Trump’s framework, which they called a reasonable compromise that has White House backing. The group includes Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, John Cornyn of Texas and Iowa’s Charles Grassley.
Democrats adamantly oppose Trump’s plan, particularly its barring of legal immigrants from sponsoring their parents or siblings to live in the U.S. It has no chance of getting the 60 votes needed to survive. The plan will give GOP lawmakers a chance to stake out a position, but it could prove an embarrassment to the White House if some Republicans join Democrats and it’s rejected by a substantial margin.
Another proposal likely to surface, backed by some Republicans and many Democrats, would give Dreamers a chance at citizenship but provide no border security money or legal immigration restrictions. It too would be certain to fail.
Votes are also possible on a compromise by a small bipartisan group led by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. It would provide possible citizenship for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, $2.7 billion for border security and some changes in legal immigration rules. McCain and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., would offer legal status but not necessarily citizenship, and require tougher border security without promising wall money.
Trump has rejected both proposals.
Some senators have discussed a bare-bones plan to protect Dreamers for a year in exchange for a year’s worth of security money. Flake has said he’s working on a three-year version of that.
“I still think that if we put a good bill to the president, that has the support of 65, 70 members of the Senate, that the president will accept it and the House will like it as well,” Flake told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Underscoring how hard it’s been for lawmakers to find an immigration compromise, around two dozen moderates from both parties have met for weeks to seek common ground. So have the No. 2 Democratic and GOP House and Senate leaders. Neither group has come forward with a deal.
In January, Trump invited two dozen lawmakers from both parties to the White House in what became a nearly hour-long immigration negotiating session. He asked them to craft a “bill of love” and said he’d sign a solution they’d send him.
At another White House session days later, he told Durbin and Graham he was rejecting their bipartisan offer. He used a profanity to describe African nations and said he’d prefer immigrants from Norway, comments that have soured many Democrats about Trump’s intentions.
Trump made a clamp-down on immigration a staple of his 2016 presidential campaign. As president he has mixed expressions of sympathy for Dreamers with rhetoric that equate immigration with crime and drugs.
Last September he said he was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which lets Dreamers temporarily live and work in the U.S. Trump said President Barack Obama had lacked the legal power to create DACA.
Trump gave Congress until March 5 to somehow replace it, though a federal court has forced him to continue its protections.
The court’s blunting of the deadline has made congressional action even less likely. Lawmakers rarely take difficult votes without a forcing mechanism — particularly in an election year. That has raised the prospect that the Senate debate launching Monday will largely serve to frame a larger fight over the issue on the campaign trail.

Pennsylvania to require voting machines with paper backup
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM, Associated Press
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf on Friday ordered counties that plan to replace their electronic voting systems to buy machines that leave a paper trail — a safeguard against hacking — but his budget doesn’t include any money to fund the replacement of the state’s aging, increasingly vulnerable fleet.
The Democrat’s administration said the move to require that new systems include a paper backup will increase the security of voting systems and make balloting easier to audit.
“This directive will ensure that the next generation of the commonwealth’s voting systems conforms to enhanced standards of resiliency, auditability and security,” Acting Secretary of State Robert Torres said in a statement.
The state, however, is not requiring counties to discard their old equipment. The directive only requires them to buy machines with a paper backup if they decide to switch systems. Nor does the Wolf administration’s budget plan , released this week, include any new money to help counties replacing their aging systems.
Marybeth Kuznik, the founder and executive director of VotePA, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposes paperless electronic voting, said counties don’t have the money to buy new machines.
“The General Assembly needs to step up to the plate and budget for this,” she said.
Nevertheless, Kuznik, a longtime election judge outside Pittsburgh, called Friday’s order “a huge step forward for Pennsylvania, for better elections. Just huge.”
Pennsylvania is one of 13 states where most or all voters use antiquated machines that store votes electronically without printed ballots or other paper-based backups that could be used to double-check the vote, according to researchers at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
So-called direct-recording electronic machines make it almost impossible to know if they’ve accurately recorded individual votes or if anyone tampered with the count.
Election officials in 41 states plan to use the older machines in the 2018 midterm elections, the Brennan Center said this week. Most election officials surveyed by Brennan Center researchers said they lacked funds to replace machines that are more than a decade old.
The vast majority of Pennsylvania’s fleet of more than 20,000 voting machines record votes electronically and leave no paper trail, according to a 2014 tally by state election officials.
In 2006, voters filed suit against Pennsylvania to bar the use of paperless electronic voting machines, contending they were unreliable, lacked adequate safeguards against vote tampering and violated a state law requiring “a permanent physical record” of each vote.
The state Supreme Court dismissed the suit, saying the plaintiffs had not shown that direct-recording electronic machines are more susceptible to fraud or tampering than other kinds of voting systems.
Virginia banned the use of touch-screen voting machines in November’s gubernatorial contest over concerns the equipment could be hacked.
The federal government in September told election officials in at least 21 states, including Pennsylvania, that hackers targeted their systems before the 2016 presidential election, but at the time only Illinois reported that hackers had succeeded in breaching its systems.

By KATHLEEN RONAYNE, Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia — a #MeToo advocate — took a voluntary unpaid leave of absence Friday, a day after sexual misconduct allegations against her became public.
Garcia, a Democrat, chairs the Legislative Women’s Caucus and has been an outspoken ally of the anti-sexual harassment movement sweeping the California Capitol and the nation. She is accused of groping former legislative staff member Daniel Fierro in 2014, an allegation she denies. His claim is under a formal investigation, and Garcia said she is taking a leave to minimize distractions and avoid appearances of exerting influence.
“Upon reflection of the details alleged, I am certain I did not engage in the behavior I am accused of,” Garcia said in a statement. “However, as I’ve said before, any claims about sexual harassment must be taken seriously, and I believe elected officials should be held to a higher standard of accountability. ”
Fierro accused her of stroking his back, grabbing his buttocks and trying to grab his crotch in the dugout after a legislative softball game. An anonymous male lobbyist told Politico on Thursday that Garcia made a crude sexual remark and tried to grab his crotch at a May 2017 fundraiser.
Both the lobbyist and Fierro said Garcia appeared to be drunk at the time of the incidents.
Garcia, of Bell Gardens, was one of nearly 150 women to sign an open letter in October calling out a pervasive culture of sexual harassment at the Capitol and said that she herself has been the target of groping and inappropriate remarks by people in the building. She slammed two male colleagues accused of misconduct before both resigned last year, and she was featured in Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue on sexual harassment “Silence Breakers.”
“I refuse to work with (Assemblyman Bocanegra) and anyone who takes part in harassment or assault,” she tweeted in October after news that Bocanegra was disciplined for groping a colleague in 2009.
On Monday, she was one of the featured speakers at a Capitol rally in favor of legislation giving legislative staff members whistleblower protections for reporting sexual misconduct or other misbehavior.
Her outspokenness prompted Fierro to finally share his story in January with his former boss, Democratic Assemblyman Ian Calderon, the majority leader. Calderon reported it to the Assembly Rules Committee for an investigation.
“If the person leading the charge on it isn’t credible it just ends up hurting the credibility of these very real stories,” Fierro told the AP.
About two dozen sexual harassment allegations were made against Assembly lawmakers, staff and lobbyists in 2017 — the most within a single year since 2006 — and at least eight allegations are pending, according to documents released last week.
Fierro, of Cerritos, left the Assembly in 2016 and now runs a communications firm. Calderon, his former boss, is now the majority leader.

AN ALIQUIPPA WRITERS GROUP IS TRYING TO GET BACK ON TRACK. THAT WAS ONE OF THE TOPICS OF THIS WEEK’S ALIQUIPPA CITY COUNCIL MEETING. BEAVER COUNTY RADIO NEWS CORRESPONDENT SANDY GIORDANO WAS THERE. Click on ‘play’ to hear Sandy’s report….