Federal

The U.S. Department of Agriculture terminated a $240,000 purchase contract with Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods that had been awarded under the Trump administration’s agricultural trade bailout program, a move taken at the company’s request, a department spokesman told Reuters. The move comes weeks after Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, one of the country’s biggest farm states and the biggest hog-producing state, slammed Smithfield for receiving what he said was aid from the USDA that was meant to help American farmers hurt by China’s trade tariffs. [node:read-more:link]

The Republican-controlled House passed a bill to drop legal protections for gray wolves across the lower 48 states, reopening a lengthy battle over the predator species. Long despised by farmers and ranchers, wolves were shot, trapped and poisoned out of existence in most of the U.S. by the mid-20th century. [node:read-more:link]

A U.S. appeals court in California ruled that President Donald Trump's administration must continue DACA, a program that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants.The ruling represented another legal defeat for Trump over DACA.DACA offers protections to roughly 700,000 young adults, mostly Hispanics, who entered the country as children. [node:read-more:link]

The Animal Welfare Institute has sued USDA for failing to mandate third-party audits of food label claims such as “humane” and “sustainable.” The animal activist group, in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accuses USDA of an unreasonable delay in responding to the organization’s 2014 petition for rulemaking. The petition asked the agency to require independent certification of animal raising claims including “animal compassionate” and “raised with care.” [node:read-more:link]

A senior Environmental Protection Agency administrator responsible for nine southeastern states has been indicted by an Alabama grand jury on charges he conspired to violate ethics laws, reportedly in connection with a messy bribery scandal that has links to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and has roiled local politics. The Alabama Ethics Commission announced that a grand jury had indicted Onis “Trey” Glenn, the EPA official, and Willie Scott Phillips, his former business partner, on a variety of state ethics charges. [node:read-more:link]

Vietnam’s lawmaking body, the National Assembly, unanimously ratified a landmark 11-country deal that will slash tariffs across much of the Asia-Pacific.One of the region’s fastest growing economies, its status cemented by strong exports and robust foreign investment, the Southeast Asian nation is believed to be among the largest beneficiaries of the trade deal.The ratification makes Vietnam the seventh country to have passed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the National Assembly said in a statement. [node:read-more:link]

 A new report says the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement will expand U.S. agricultural exports by $450 million, but those gains will be negated by retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico against the U.S. The study, “How U.S. Agriculture Will Fare Under the USMCA and Retaliatory Tariffs,” says retaliatory tariffs will cause U.S. [node:read-more:link]

The pending confrontation is tragic, considering the U.S. tradition of win-win outcomes for immigrants like me and the nation that receives our creative energy and industry.The results are indisputable. Fed by a steady stream of the world’s outcasts — the tired, poor and tempest-tossed masses memorialized on the Statue of Liberty — the United States has emerged as the world’s No. [node:read-more:link]

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Seaboard Corp. announced the pork processor has agreed to pay just over $1 million in a civil settlement that concludes an investigation into alleged employment of unauthorized workers from 2007-2012. The government investigated whether Seaboard’s Guymon, Okla., plant hired and employed unauthorized workers and failed to properly complete employment eligibility forms. [node:read-more:link]

Two Eastern Oregon ranchers have volunteered to test a new strategy aimed at preventing further conflicts between wolves and livestock. [node:read-more:link]