U.S. halts avocado and mango inspections in a Mexican state after 2 USDA employees attacked, detained
CBSN
The United States has halted inspections of avocados and mangoes in Mexico's Michoacán state following the attack and detainment of two U.S. Department of Agriculture employees, according to U.S. officials.
The workers with the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service were recently attacked while carrying out their work inspecting avocados, and have since been released, U.S. ambassador Ken Salazar said in a statement Tuesday.
His statement gave no further details on the incident. He said the inspections will be suspended until the safety issues have been resolved.
For nearly two decades, there's been an effort to change the way the U.S. has always elected its presidents by creating a workaround to the Electoral College, the indirect popular election process that's been used in every American presidential election in history. A collection of states is now a little closer than it was four years ago to choosing a president by popular vote, after Maine signed legislation in April to join the effort.
President Biden's administration is planning to soon issue a regulation to cement the sweeping asylum restrictions it enacted at the southern border over the summer, two U.S. officials told CBS News, describing changes that would make it far less likely for the strict rules to be lifted in the near future.
Toward the end of June 2018, condemned inmates at Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama received slips of paper that gave them the choice to decide how they would prefer to die. There were two options: lethal injection, the default method, which Alabama had been accused of botching in the prison's execution chamber; and nitrogen hypoxia, an experimental alternative that the state, facing political pressure to carry out death sentences despite a tally of mistakes, had recently authorized.