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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached an “agreement in principle” to raise the nation's legal debt ceiling late Saturday as they raced to strike a deal to limit federal spending and avert a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/debt-ceiling-biden-mccarthy-default-negotiations-cb0646c6301f1df97211896897df3723">potentially disastrous U.S. default</a>.However, the agreement risks angering both Democratic and Republican sides with the concessions made to reach it. Negotiators agreed to some Republican demands for increased work requirements for recipients of food stamps that had sparked an uproar from House Democrats as a nonstarter.Support from both parties will be needed to win congressional approval next week before a June 5 deadline.The Democratic president and Republican speaker reached the agreement after the two spoke earlier Saturday evening by phone, said McCarthy. The country and the world have been watching and waiting for a resolution to a political standoff that threatened the U.S. and global economies.“The agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want,” Biden said in a statement late Saturday night. “That’s the responsibility of governing,” he said.Biden called the agreement “good news for the American people, because it prevents what could have been a catastrophic default and would have led to an economic recession, retirement accounts devastated, and millions of jobs lost.”McCarthy in brief remarks at the Capitol, said that "we still have a lot of work to do.”But the Republican speaker said: “I believe this is an agreement in principle that’s worthy of the American people.”With the outlines of a deal in place, the legislative package could be drafted and shared with lawmakers in time for votes early next week in the House and later in the Senate.<blockquote>Central to the package is a two-year budget deal that would hold spending flat for 2024 and impose limits for 2025 in exchange for raising the debt limit for two years, pushing the volatile political issue past the next presidential election.</blockquote>The agreement would limit food stamp eligibility for able-bodied adults up to age 54, but Biden was able to secure waivers for veterans and the homeless.The two sides had also reached for an ambitious overhaul of federal permitting to ease development of energy projects and transmission lines. Instead, the agreement puts in place changes in the the National Environmental Policy Act that will designate “a single lead agency” to develop economic reviews, in hopes of streamlining the process.The deal came together after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress that the United States could default on its debt obligations by June 5 — four days later than previously estimated — if lawmakers did not act in time to raise the federal debt ceiling. The extended “X-date” gave the two sides a bit of extra time as they scrambled for a deal.Biden also spoke earlier in the day with Democratic leaders in Congress to discuss the status of the talks.The Republican House speaker had gathered top allies behind closed doors at the Capitol as negotiators pushed for a deal that would avoid a first-ever government default while also making spending cuts that House Republicans are demanding.But as another day dragged on with financial disaster looming closer, it had appeared some of the problems over policy issues that dogged talks all week remained unresolved.Both sides have suggested one of the main holdups was a GOP effort to expand work requirements for recipients of food stamps and other federal aid programs, a longtime Republican goal that Democrats have strenuously opposed. The White House said the Republican proposals were “cruel and senseless.”Biden has said the work requirements for Medicaid would be a nonstarter. He seemed potentially open to negotiating minor changes on food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, despite objections from rank-and-file Democrats.McCarthy, who dashed out before the lunch hour Saturday and arrived back at the Capitol with a big box of takeout, declined to elaborate on those discussions. One of his negotiators, Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves, said there was “not a chance” that Republicans might relent on the work requirements issue.Americans and the world were uneasily watching the negotiating brinkmanship that could throw the U.S. economy into chaos and sap world confidence in the nation’s leadership.Anxious retirees and others were already making contingency plans for missed checks, with the next Social Security payments due next week.Yellen said failure to act by the new date would “cause severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests.”The president, spending part of the weekend at Camp David, continued to talk with his negotiating team multiple times a day, signing off on offers and counteroffers.Any deal would need to be a political compromise in a divided Congress. Many of the hard-right Trump-aligned Republicans in Congress have long been skeptical of the Treasury’s projections, and they are pressing McCarthy to hold out.Lawmakers are not expected to return to work from the Memorial Day weekend before Tuesday, at the earliest, and McCarthy has promised lawmakers he will abide by the rule to post any bill for 72 hours before voting.The Democratic-held Senate has largely stayed out of the negotiations, leaving the talks to Biden and McCarthy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has pledged to move quickly to send a compromise package to Biden’s desk.Weeks of talks have failed to produce a deal in part because the Biden administration resisted for months on negotiating with McCarthy, arguing that the country’s full faith and credit should not be used as leverage to extract other partisan priorities.But House Republicans united behind a plan to cut spending, narrowly passing legislation in late April that would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for the spending reductions.___Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Stephen Groves, Fatima Hussein, Farnoush Amiri, Seung Min Kim and videojournalist Rick Gentilo contributed to this report.

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The agreement risks angering both Democratic and Republican sides with the concessions made to reach it. 

President Biden, GOP Reach Tentative Deal To Raise Debt Ceiling, Avoid Calamitous US Default

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Memorial Day is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen service members, but it’s come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on anything from mattresses to lawn mowers.Auto club AAA said in a travel forecast that this holiday weekend could be “one for the record books, especially at airports,” with more than 42 million Americans projected to travel 50 miles (80 kilometers) or more. Federal officials said Friday that the number of air travelers had already hit a pandemic-era high.But for Manuel Castañeda Jr., 58, the day will be a quiet one in Durand, Illinois, outside Rockford. He lost his father, a U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam, in an accident in California while training other Marines in 1966.“Memorial Day is very personal,” said Castañeda, who also served in the Marines and Army National Guard, from which he knew men who died in combat. “It isn’t just the specials. It isn’t just the barbecue.”But he tries not to judge others who spend the holiday differently: “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?"1. WHAT IS THE OFFICIAL PURPOSE OF MEMORIAL DAY?It’s a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. military, according to the Congressional Research Service. The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence.2. WHAT ARE THE HOLIDAY'S ORIGINS?The holiday stems from the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members — both Union and Confederate — between 1861 and 1865.There’s little controversy over the first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day. It occurred May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom.The practice was already widespread on a local level. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday's birthplace.Yet Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traced its first observance to October 1864, according to the Library of Congress. And women in some Confederate states were decorating graves before the war’s end.But David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people, many of them Black, held a parade, heard speeches and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina.A total of 267 Union troops had died at a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. After the war, members of Black churches buried them in individual graves.“What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be first, if that matters,” Blight told The Associated Press in 2011.In 2021, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel cited the story in a Memorial Day speech in Hudson, Ohio. The ceremony’s organizers turned off his microphone because they said it wasn’t relevant to honoring the city’s veterans. The event’s organizers later resigned.3. HAS MEMORIAL DAY ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE OF CONTENTION?Someone has always lamented the holiday’s drift from its original meaning.As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focuses more on pomp, dinners and oratory.In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus — enslavement — when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.“We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers,” Douglass said.His concerns were well-founded, said Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Even though roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, the holiday in many communities would essentially become “white Memorial Day,” especially after the rise of the Jim Crow South, Railton said.Meanwhile, how the day was spent — at least by the nation’s elected officials — could draw scrutiny for years after the Civil War. In the 1880s, then-President Grover Cleveland was said to have gone fishing — and “people were appalled,” said Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon.By 1911, the Indianapolis 500 held its inaugural race on May 30, drawing 85,000 spectators. A report from The Associated Press made no mention of the holiday — or any controversy.4. HOW HAS MEMORIAL DAY CHANGED?Dennis said Memorial Day's potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I's end on Nov. 11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.An act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30th to the last Monday in May in 1971. Dennis said the creation of the three-day weekend recognized that Memorial Day had long been transformed into a more generic remembrance of the dead, as well as a day of leisure.In 1972, Time Magazine said the holiday had become “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.”5. WHY IS MEMORIAL DAY TIED TO SALES AND TRAVEL?Even in the 19th century, grave ceremonies were followed by leisure activities such as picnicking and foot races, Dennis said.The holiday also evolved alongside baseball and the automobile, the five-day work week and summer vacation, according to the 2002 book “A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness.”In the mid-20th century, a small number of businesses began to open defiantly on the holiday.Once the holiday moved to Monday, “the traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble,” authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran wrote.These days, Memorial Day sales and traveling are deeply woven into the nation's muscle memory. This weekend, 2.7 million more people will travel for the unofficial start of summer compared to last year — despite inflation, according to AAA.The Transportation Security Administration said it screened 2.66 million people at airport checkpoints on Thursday, about 2,500 more than last Friday, and the highest number since the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019. The Federal Aviation Administration had predicted that Thursday would be the busiest travel day of the holiday period, with more than 51,000 airline flights.Meanwhile, Jason Redman, 48, a retired Navy SEAL who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he'll be thinking of friends he's lost. Thirty names are tattooed on his arm “for every guy that I personally knew that died.”He wants Americans to remember the fallen — but also to enjoy themselves, knowing lives were sacrificed to forge the holiday.

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Members of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment also known as The Old Guard, place flags in front of each headstone for "Flags-In" at sunrise at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Thursday, May 25, 2023, to honor the Nation's fallen military heroes ahead of Memorial Day

The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence.

 Memorial Day: A Day Of Reflection And Remembrance, Unofficial Start Of Summer 

<a href="https://www.klove.com/news/positive-people">K-LOVE’s Positive People</a> – by Rafael Sierra, Jr. (complete podcast available) (more <a href="https://www.klove.com/news/positive-people">Positive People</a> stories)David Droll from Houston, Texas is committed to helping individuals experiencing homelessness get ahead in life. So, he co-founded <a href="https://hopebeyondbridges.org/">Hope Beyond Bridges</a>, caring for people who are not able to care for themselves.<blockquote>“To build trust, to build safety, to hear their story, to learn their name, and ultimately to be able to share the Gospel with them.”</blockquote><figure class="image text-center"><img src="https://cdn.corpemf.com/news/56971.jpg" alt="Hope Beyond Bridges volunteer feeding man experiencing homelessness"><figcaption>[Photo Credit: Hope Beyond Bridges Volunteer] Hope Beyond Bridges</figcaption></figure>For years, Dave didn’t think much or care for people in need. Until one day, while driving around the streets of Houston, God got his attention.<figure class="image text-center"><img src="https://cdn.corpemf.com/news/56972.jpg" alt="Hope Beyond Bridges volunteer feeding person in a wheelchair"><figcaption>[Photo Credit: Hope Beyond Bridges Volunteer] Hope Beyond Bridges</figcaption></figure>“God literally just changed my eyes to see the homeless and changed my heart to have a heart of compassion toward them,” says Dave. He believes “it was only God that could change my hard heart toward them,” to have a heart of compassion and a heart to love them the way God loves them.<figure class="image text-center"><img src="https://cdn.corpemf.com/news/56973.jpg" alt="Hope Beyond Bridges volunteers delivering food, supplies"><figcaption>[Photo Credit: Hope Beyond Bridges Volunteer] Hope Beyond Bridges</figcaption></figure>Hope Beyond Bridges works to reach the chronic homeless living under bridges, at intersections, in their camps, each week. Once they contact them, they “love on them, minister to them, bring them a warm meal,” and give them hygiene kits.<figure class="image text-center"><img src="https://cdn.corpemf.com/news/56974.jpg" alt="Dave Droll Hope, Beyond Bridges"><figcaption>[Photo Credit: Hope Beyond Bridges Volunteer] Dave Droll Hope Beyond Bridges</figcaption></figure>Click the full interview below<figure class="media"><oembed url="https://cdn.corpemf.com/news/56976.wav"></oembed></figure>

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Hope Beyond Bridges works to reach the chronic homeless living under bridges, at intersections, in their camps

Droll leads Hope Beyond Bridges, feeding and ministering to people living in the streets of Houston 

David Droll – Restoring Hope To People Experiencing Homelessness (+Podcast)

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Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease.

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Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease.

Lamentations 3:21-22 (NLT)

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