WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency had sufficient authority and information to issue an emergency order to protect residents of Flint, Michigan, from lead-contaminated water as early as June 2015 — seven months before it declared an emergency, the EPA’s inspector general said Thursday.
The Flint crisis should have generated “a greater sense of urgency” at the agency to “intervene when the safety of drinking water is compromised,” Inspector General Arthur Elkins said in an interim report.
Flint’s drinking water became tainted when the city began drawing from the Flint River in April 2014 to save money. The impoverished city of 100,000 north of Detroit was under state control at the time. Regulators failed to ensure water was treated properly and lead from aging pipes leached into the water supply.
MIAMI – President Barack Obama on Thursday defended his namesake health care program, long a target of Republicans and recently criticized by some Democrats, saying millions of Americans “now know the financial security of health insurance” because of the Affordable Care Act.
“It’s worked,” he said, even while allowing that the program isn’t perfect. “No law is.”
Obama chalked up the Republican criticism to “nothing more than politics” and GOP envy that “a Democratic president named Barack Obama passed the law. That’s just the truth.”
He called on both parties to set aside the “political rhetoric” and “be honest about what’s working, what needs fixing and how we fix it.”
Obama said repealing the law, as congressional Republicans repeatedly have failed to do, won’t solve the problem “because right off the bat repeal would take away health care from 20 million people” and affect millions of other health care consumers.
BEIJING –Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced that his country is separating from the U.S. in a speech before a Beijing economic forum on Thursday, after handing China a major diplomatic victory, agreeing to resume dialogue on their South China Sea territorial dispute following months of acrimony.
The rapprochement between the two Asia nations could widen a political rift between the United States and the Philippines, whose recently elected leader has made no secret of his antipathy for America and ordered an end to joint maneuvers between their militaries.
“Your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States ... both in military and economics also,” Duterte said. His remarks were met with applause, but Duterte was not more specific.
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said Duterte’s remarks were “inexplicably at odds with the very close relationship we have with the Filipino people as well as the government there on many different levels, not just from a security perspective.”
Associated Press
