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| Thursday has been a wild day in Congress. |
| Congressional leaders have been jockeying all week between trying to avert a federal government shutdown and figuring out what's going on with the bipartisan infrastructure framework (BIF). Not to mention a ticking time-bomb on the debt limit. |
| They at least managed to prevent the shutdown from happening! |
| Hundreds of thousands of nonessential federal employees would have been furloughed beginning Friday if Congress hadn't acted. |
| Infighting jeopardizes BIF: Progressives and moderates within the House Democratic party are leading competing factions towards a showdown on Thursday. One side wants to delay the vote, while the other has been pushing to proceed. |
| It's Amy and Mabinty, with the news out of Washington. |
The chaos in Congress |
| Let's start with the good news: The House voted Thursday to join the Senate in extending funding for the federal government through Dec. 3, averting a midnight shutdown. |
| The bill now heads to President Joe Biden for his signature. |
| The House voted 254-175 to approve the bill that raced through both chambers in a few hours. The approval came quickly after Democrats dropped attempts to combine the measure with an increase in the amount the country can borrow. |
| The Senate had earlier voted 65-35 to approve the bill. |
| The not-so-good news (at least for Democrats): Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said the House should delay a Thursday vote on a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package. |
| "If it's pushed back two more weeks, it doesn't matter. It will pass. But it must pass in tandem" with a $3.5 trillion budget bill packed with progressive policies, said Sanders, who helped craft the budget bill. |
| "You think the world will collapse?" the Senate Budget Committee chairman asked. "Who decided that today was a pivotal day?" |
| The two wild cards on BIF: Sinema and Manchin. |
| Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's office said Thursday the president and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have known her budget priorities and concerns for weeks. |
| Sinema, a moderate Democrat from Arizona and a crucial vote in the divided Senate, said months ago she opposed the initial $3.5 trillion proposal by Senate Democrats. |
| Senator Joe Manchin, D-W.V., said Thursday that $1.5 trillion is the highest price tag he would support on Biden's social spending bill. |
| That is much lower than the $3.5 trillion Biden proposed and what progressives want for a bill that includes priorities, such as subsidized caregiving, childcare, pre-kindergarten and community college. |
Real quick: stories you need to read |
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How one journalist escaped from Afghanistan |
| When Kabul fell to the Taliban, Fatema Hosseini had only bad options. As a female journalist who'd worked for USA TODAY, she could stay and be killed or taken by the Taliban or she could run. But getting out seemed impossible. |
| Fearing the Taliban would ransack her home as they had her parents', she pulled a collage off her wall - photos of her and her friends eating ice cream, American song lyrics, and more. She dropped her memories into a bucket and burned them. |
| No one expected Kabul to fall so quickly, writes USA TODAY's world affairs correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard. But when it did, he knew he had to get Fatema out of there. |
| Her only way out was through the Hamid Karzai International Airport. |
| As chaos surrounded her at the Kabul airport, there were times Fatema thought she couldn't go on. She faced gunfire, a Taliban whip, tear gas and, horrifically, a sexual assault. Finally, she made it to the Ukrainian special forces and across the gate. |
| Fatema was one of thousands evacuated from Kabul. Her family lifted off from the Kabul runway minutes before the ISIS-K terrorists carried out a suicide bombing at the gate, killing at least 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. soldiers. Others weren't as successful. |
| Her harrowing and emotional escape from Afghanistan is a detailed account of the danger many journalists had to face and are still enduring in the country today. |
| While infrastructure week is playing out in Washington, Fat Bear week is happening across the country! 🐻 - Amy and Mabinty |
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