In the news today: Thousands of children adopted to the U.S. risk being deported; what polling on the presidential race can and can’t tell you; and abortion bans are top of mind for young women in North Carolina. Also, how to change up your Halloween party themes this year.
A headline in Thursday's Morning Wire overstated the number of guns officials said were found in a suspect's home. It should have said "over 120 guns" and has now been corrected. |
Buttons, whom the Associated Press is referring to only by her childhood nickname because of her legal status, sits for a portrait behind her baby photo. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
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Thousands of U.S. adoptees live in limbo without citizenship
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The United States has brought hundreds of thousands of children from abroad to be adopted by American families. But along the way it left thousands of them without citizenship, through a bureaucratic loophole that the government has been aware of for decades and hasn’t fixed. Some of these adoptees live in hiding, fearing that tipping off the government could prompt their removal back to the country the U.S. claimed to have rescued them from. Some have already been deported. Read more.
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A bill to help these adoptees has been introduced in Congress for a decade, and is supported by a rare bipartisan coalition. But it hasn’t passed. Advocates blame the hyper-partisan frenzy over immigration that has stalled any effort to extend citizenship to anyone, even these adoptees who are legally the children of American parents.
The modern system of intercountry adoption emerged in the aftermath of the Korean War. American families were desperate for children because access to birth control and societal changes had caused the domestic supply of adoptable babies to plummet. Adoption agencies rushed to meet intense demand for babies but there were few protections to ensure that parents were able to take care of them, and that they acquired citizenship.
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There is no government mechanism for alerting adoptees that their parents did not secure their citizenship. They usually find out by accident, when applying for passports or government benefits. One woman learned as a senior citizen, when she was denied the Social Security she’d paid into all her life. If they ask the government about their status, they risk tipping authorities off to them being here illegally.
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Will the polls be right in 2024? What polling on the presidential race can and can’t tell you
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The presidential race is competitive. That’s about as much as the national polls can tell us right now, even if it looks like Democrat Kamala Harris is down in one poll or Republican Donald Trump is up in another. But election-year polls can still be useful. Read more. |
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Even though polls are sometimes treated as projections, they aren’t designed to tell you who is likely to win. Voters’ opinions can change before Election Day and they often do. Horse race polls can only capture people’s viewpoints during a single moment in time and a margin that looks like one that could decide an election might not be a real difference at all.
National polls measure how voters all over the country are thinking about the election. But that’s not how the U.S. elects presidents. The Electoral College system means that presidential elections are functionally decided by a small number of states. So in some ways, looking at polls of those states is a better way to assess the state of the race. But state-level polls introduce their own challenges. They’re not conducted as frequently as national polls and some states get polled more often than others.
- When reporters at The Associated Press are covering the election, horse race polling numbers don’t take center stage. The reason for this is that the AP believes that focusing on preelection polling can overstate the significance or reliability of those numbers.
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Abortion bans are top of mind for young women in North Carolina as they consider Harris or Trump
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Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, tensions over abortion have only intensified, setting the presidential election up as a referendum on fundamental rights for tens of millions of women. In North Carolina, this presidential contest will reveal how much abortion access really matters and whether it’s enough to overcome misgivings about Harris on the economy, immigration and other matters. Read more.
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In a battleground state like North Carolina, where Donald Trump won 60% of the vote of white women in 2020, their allegiance could be strained by the state’s new 12-week abortion ban. If Trump’s support among white women in North Carolina drops closer to the group’s national average of 52% in 2020, he could find it difficult to earn the state’s 16 electoral votes again.
Vice President Kamala Harris could narrowly win if just a fraction of white women decide to support her instead of Trump, who took North Carolina with his narrowest margin of victory. Nearly 8 in 10 of North Carolina voters in 2022 who prioritized abortion backed a Democratic candidate statewide.
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Republicans, for the most part, are downplaying the subject as they think the inflated prices of everyday goods, housing and gas is a more pressing issue in the minds of voters. Abortion may resonate deepest with younger women, but they’re also a historically unreliable voting bloc, said Linda L. Petrou, a longtime Forsyth County Republican.
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A white Capiz skull and pearl-shell pumpkin arrangement. (John Bessler/Joni Cohen via AP) |
Some new twists for your Halloween parties
Throwing your own Halloween party is a great outlet for getting creative with the season, and it doesn’t have to be all monsters and mayhem. There are themes that bring a party mood and style to the table and the room, while still evoking Halloween’s mystery. |
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Please let us know what you think of this newsletter. You can sign up for more and invite a friend here. For news in real time visit APNews.com. - Sarah
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