US House set to pass defense bill opposed by Obama
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Republican-led House of Representatives is on track to pass a nearly $612 billion defense policy bill, a measure that usually garners bipartisan support but this year has drawn a veto threat from President Barack Obama and angered a Shiite cleric in Iraq.
A vote is expected Friday on the bill to fund the U.S. military. Obama has issued several veto threats since Republicans took full control of Congress in January.
Overall, the House bill authorizes $515 billion in spending for national defense and another $89.2 billion for the emergency war-fighting fund for a total of $604.2 billion. Another $7.7 billion is mandatory defense spending that doesn't get authorized by Congress. That means the bill would provide the entire $611.9 billion desired by the president, but he still opposes it.
Obama and Democratic lawmakers are against the measure because it ignores automatic spending caps imposed by Congress in 2011 to address federal deficits, the result of a prolonged partisan battle over federal spending. The bill increases defense spending by padding the emergency war-fighting fund, which is not affected by the caps. Democrats argue that the Republicans want to ignore spending caps when it comes to funding the military, but wants to adhere to them when it comes to other domestic spending.
The White House is pushing back against a host of provisions of the bill, including one that would make it harder for Obama to close the military prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
On Ukraine, it calls for arming Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-backed separatists, a move the Obama administration has so far resisted.
We are now closing the live blog for today. Here is one last Crimea-related update from RFE/Rl's news desk before we go. Don't forget that, until we resume again tomorrow, you can follow all our latest Ukraine news reports here.
Crimea's prosecutors are seeking more than four years in prison for a man accused of attacking a Ukrainian security officer in Kyiv during the February 2014 protests in Kyiv against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Natalya Poklonskaya, prosecutor-general of the Ukrainian territory that was annexed by Russia last year, asked a court in Simferopol to convict local resident Oleksandr Kostenko and sentence him to four years and three months in prison, her office said on May 14.
Prosecutors on the Black Sea peninsula have charged Kostenko with intentionally inflicting bodily harm on the security officer during the so-called "Euromaidan" protests.
The court is scheduled to hand down its verdict on May 15.
The alleged crime took place more than a month before Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014, which a majority of UN member nations consider illegal.