In the News

For months, a California congressman has been trying to get Obama administration officials to reconsider U.S. backing for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. And for months, he has been given the runaround.

Ted Lieu, a Democrat representing Los Angeles County, served in the Air Force and is a colonel in the Air Force Reserves. The brutal bombing of civilian areas with U.S.-supplied planes and weapons has led him to act when most of his colleagues have stayed silent.

Lawmakers are renewing their criticism of the United States’ support for a Saudi Arabia-led military campaign against rebels in Yemen’s civil war in the wake of a mounting civilian death toll.

The Saudis restarted their bombing campaign earlier this month after a United Nations-led peace process collapsed, and in the last week, they are alleged to have killed civilians in airstrikes that hit a school and a hospital, among others.

The U.S. military has withdrawn from Saudi Arabia its personnel who were coordinating with the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen, and sharply reduced the number of staff elsewhere who were assisting in that planning, U.S. officials told Reuters.

Fewer than five U.S. service people are now assigned full-time to the "Joint Combined Planning Cell," which was established last year to coordinate U.S. support, including air-to-air refueling of coalition jets and limited intelligence-sharing, Lieutenant Ian McConnaughey, a U.S. Navy spokesman in Bahrain, told Reuters.

During a rare trip to West Los Angeles last week, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the story of a 6-year-old boy from Southeast Asia whose family fled their homeland during the Korean War.

“The United Nations recognized that there were millions of displaced persons during and after the war that were fleeing their countries. They provided everything for resettlement,” Ki-moon told refugee families from Syria, Iran, El Salvador, Bosnia and Iraq during an Annenberg Foundation-sponsored event in Century City.

“They provided food, clothing, shelter. Everything.”

Members of Congress are pushing to block the sale of $1.15 billion worth of military equipment to Saudi Arabia as reports of civilian casualties continue to emerge from Yemen following strikes by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition.

Last week, the U.S. Department of State gave its preliminary approval for the sale of over 100 tanks, over 300 machine guns, scores of ammunition, and other land force weapons to Saudi Arabia.

A House Democrat is urging the Obama administration to stop assisting Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen following reports that its forces bombed a school.

“I have tried numerous times to work with the Administration to stop the United States from assisting Saudi Arabia in their indiscriminate killing of civilians in Yemen. But when Saudi Arabia continues to kill civilians, and in this case children, enough is enough," Rep. Ted Lieu (Calif.), who is also an Air Force Reserve colonel, said in a statement Monday.

The Drug Enforcement Administration on Thursday rejected a petition to loosen federal restrictions on the use of marijuana. In making the move, however, the DEA did allow for more facilities to grow marijuana for use in medical research.

While praising the decision to allow more marijuana to be grown, many lawmakers — Republican and Democrat alike — were dismayed at the DEA's determination that marijuana should remain in Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, the most strictly regulated category.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont led a chorus of critics after the Drug Enforcement Administration declined to allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes — the latest example of fast-changing politics in the war on drugs.

"People can argue about the pluses and minuses of marijuana, but everyone knows it's not a killer drug like heroin," Sanders wrote in a tweet, after the DEA announced that marijuana would remain a Schedule I drug with "no currently accepted medical use in the United States."