Biden and Trump score decisive wins in Louisiana primaries: Latest updates

A partial government shutdown was averted on Saturday when President Joe Biden signed a $1.2 trillion federal spending package, just hours after Congress passed the long overdue legislation.

“This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted,” the president said, in a statement. “But it rejects extreme cuts from House Republicans and expands access to child care, invests in cancer research, funds mental health and substance use care, advances American leadership abroad, and provides resources to secure the border that my Administration successfully fought to include. That’s good news for the American people.”

The White House said that Biden signed the legislation at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he is spending the weekend.

In a revealing court filing on 18 March, lawyers for Donald Trump said that he has tried to get help from at least 30 companies who can post a bond in excess of $454m after he lost a civil fraud trial in New York earlier this year.

But none of them could, and now he faces the “practical impossibility” of coming up with the money before the state’s imminent deadline to enforce the judgment against him, according to his attorneys.

The extraordinary circumstances also raise the prospect of the GOP’s presidential nominee being a convicted felon on the hook for tens of millions of dollars he doesn’t have when voters cast their ballots in November.

Mr Trump also cannot get rid of debts obtained by fraud by filing for bankruptcy.

Vice President Kamala Harris toured on Saturday the bloodstained classroom building where the 2018 Parkland high school massacre happened, then announced a program to assist states that have laws allowing police to temporarily seize guns from people judges have found to be dangerous.

Harris saw bullet-pocked walls and floors still covered in dried blood and broken glass left behind from the Feb. 14, 2018, attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 14 students and three staff members and wounded 17.

The halls and classrooms inside the three-story structure remain strewn with shoes left behind by fleeing students and wilted Valentine’s Day flowers and balloons. Textbooks, laptop computers, snacks and papers remain on desks. She was told about each victim who died.

“Frozen in time,” Harris said repeatedly about what she saw. She was accompanied on the tour by victims’ family members, some of them pushing for more spending on school safety and others for stronger gun laws.

Harris, who leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, said there are lessons to be learned from Parkland, both for stopping school shootings before they happen and mitigating them with measures such as making sure classroom doors don’t lock from the outside as they did at Stoneman Douglas. She pointed out that shootings are a leading cause of death for children and teenagers.

“We must be willing to have the courage to say that on every level, whether you talk about changing laws or changing practices and protocols, that we must do better,” Harris said.

John Bowden reports from Washington, DC:

On Friday, the former representative for northern Nassau County, New York, posted on Twitter that he would “no longer be part of the Republican Party” after the GOP’s “embarrassing showing in the [H]ouse”.

Mr Santos was referring to the GOP majority passing legislation to avert a partial government shutdown without deep spending cuts that conservatives had called for.

And no, filing for bankruptcy is not a way out…

Democratic lawmaker Jared Moskowitz is increasingly working to turn the GOP’s impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden into a spectacle as the evidence gathered by his committee appears to still lack the votes to pass even the hardline Republican-held House of Representatives.

No, really. Vice president to the man who called him “Little Marco”…

Despite promises that the Republican National Committee would not be paying Donald Trump’s long list of legal bills, the GOP’s chief fundraising arm appears ready to do just that.

An invitation to a fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida next month shows that the Save America political action committee – largely serving as the bank for the former president’s legal team – will get a big chunk of the proceeds.