“The problem is which Tren de Aragua members are in the U.S., where they are, how many there are,” Rísquez said. “That is not clear, and with all the latest events, this is becoming less and less clear.”
The trip to South Carolina includes meetings with business prospects, Moore said.“And people should get very used to me going all over the country bringing business back to Maryland, because that’s exactly what I plan on doing as long as I’m the governor of the state,” Moore said after a dedication in Annapolis for a memorial to former Rep. Parren Mitchell, the state’s first Black congressman.
In the third year of his first term, Moore plans to run for reelection next year in heavily Democratic Maryland. He says being the state’s governor during a challenging time has his full attention.That includes working to navigate the difficulties of dramatic federal downsizing under the Trump administration, which poses an outsized economic impact on Maryland. The state is home to a large number of federal workers toiling in the shadow of the nation’s capital — about 256,000 Marylanders received a federal W-2 in 2021, representing about 8% of taxpayers, according to an analysis by the state’s comptroller.Earlier this month, Maryland lost its
from the Moody’s economic rating agency. State officials had cited the rating for more than 50 years as a sign of strong fiscal stewardship that enabled the state to pay the lowest rates when it sells bonds to pay for infrastructure. Two other rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, have recently affirmed the state’s triple-A bond rating.Moore and other leading Democrats in the state blamed the Trump administration’s downsizing for the Moody’s downgrade.
The governor just had the most challenging legislative session of his tenure. Facing a $3.3 billion budget deficit, he worked with the legislature, which is controlled by Democrats,
that included about $2 billion in spending cuts throughout state government and about $1.6 billion in new revenues through tax and fee increases.China also has been tightening already strict controls on its personnel overseas, according to Chinese regulations, news reports and four people familiar with China’s bureaucracy who spoke on condition of anonymity so they could discuss a sensitive topic. In recent years, Beijing began strictly enforcing regulations that bar promotions for Chinese civil servants with spouses who acquired foreign citizenship and restrict diplomats from spending an extended period of time in one country, forcing some to return to China.
China’s foreign ministry and many other government bodies bar their officials and staff from sexual or romantic relations with foreign citizens, while members of the Chinese military or police are generally barred from leaving China altogether without express approval from their supervisors.Kang reported from Beijing.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Five Microsoft employees were ejected from a meeting with the company’s chief executive for protesting contracts to provide artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli military.The protest on Monday came after an investigation by The Associated Press