Politics

President Obama and Gov. Rick Perry put aside partisan differences, at least briefly, this week to share a helicopter across Dallas and discuss securing the border. The president and the governor then sat down with a group of local officials and religious leaders who are preparing to shelter 2,000 immigrant children who've been housed in cramped detention facilities. 

Because of a 2008 law, thousands of children crossing into Texas illegally are not turned back right away. That’s because they must get an immigration hearing first – due to a federal law that passed with bipartisan support.

The legislation in wound through Congress in late 2007. A year later, President George W. Bush signed it into law. So why is it coming up now?

Committee members choosing a site for the 2016 Republican National Convention said repeatedly they’d make a business decision, not a political one.  But following the selection of Cleveland over Dallas Tuesday, those close to the negotiations said politics played a role.

Update: Gov. Perry will meet with President Obama, according to KUT's reporting partner the Texas Tribune. 

“Gov. Perry is pleased that President Obama has accepted his invitation to discuss the humanitarian and national security crises along our southern border, and he looks forward to meeting with the president tomorrow,” Perry spokesman Travis Considine told the Tribune in an email.

Original Post: President Barack Obama has offered to meet Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday to discuss the ongoing influx and detainment of unaccompanied Central American child immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

The Supreme Court has struck down a Massachusetts law mandating a 35-foot buffer zone around clinics that provide abortion services.

Backers of the legislation have said the law treats groups equally, requiring both supporters and opponents of abortion rights to maintain their distance from the clinics. But in a unanimous ruling Thursday, the justices found that the buffer zone infringes on the First Amendment rights of protesters.

From the law experts at SCOTUSblog:

Texas politicians are getting a close-up look at how border authorities are handling an influx of Central American immigrants – many of them children who came here without family members.

Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott got a tour Monday of one facility housing immigrant children after they’re processed near the border: Joint Base San Antonio, where children wait for judicial hearings or to be placed with relatives.

Both Abbott and Cruz blame the increase in immigrants on the Obama administration’s deferred action for childhood arrivals policy, which offered a delay of immigration proceedings for children brought to the U.S. before 2007.

An all-male panel of Mormon leaders has found a prominent member of the group Ordain Women guilty of apostasy and ordered that she be excommunicated from the church.

On its website, Ordain Women quoted from an email that Kate Kelly received informing her of the decision by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

Three journalists who work for the Al-Jazeera news network have been sentenced to prison terms — two lasting seven years and a third lasting 10 — by an Egyptian court. The three were accused of aiding terrorists, a term that in this case applies to the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

From Egypt's Ahram Online: