US Domestic News Roundup: FDA chief to meet e-cigarette makers amid crackdown; Boston Marathon bomber appeals conviction, death sentence

Following is a summary of current US domestic news briefs.

Bereaved Guatemalan mother hoped son would help family's U.S. entry

Between heavy sobs, Catarina Alonzo explained that when her husband left Guatemala to try to reach the United States, they hoped taking their 8-year-old son would make it easier for the pair to get in. Instead, the boy fell ill and died. Detained on the U.S. border, Felipe Gomez Alonzo died late on Christmas Eve in a New Mexico hospital a few weeks after setting off with his father, becoming the second Guatemalan child to die this month while in U.S. custody.

FDA chief to meet e-cigarette makers amid crackdown

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to meet top-level executives of e-cigarette makers, the agency's chief said on Thursday, hinting that some companies seem to be backing away from commitments related to youth's access to e-cigarettes. "There's no reason manufacturers must wait for FDA to forcefully address the epidemic. Yet some already appear to back away from commitments made to the FDA and the public," FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said https://twitter.com/SGottliebFDA/status/1078304963078574080 on Twitter.

More Americans blame Trump for government shutdown: Reuters/Ipsos poll

More Americans blame President Donald Trump than congressional Democrats for the partial U.S. government shutdown, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday, as the closure stretched into its sixth day with no end in sight. Forty-seven percent of adults hold Trump responsible, while 33 percent blame Democrats in Congress, according to the Dec. 21-25 poll, conducted mostly after the shutdown began. Seven percent of Americans blamed congressional Republicans.

Migrant boy who died in U.S. left Guatemala's migrant heartland

An eight-year-old Guatemalan boy who died in U.S. custody this week had trekked to the border with his father from a rural northwestern village, Guatemala's government said on Wednesday, following thousands of others who have made the area a hot spot of migration. Felipe Gomez Alonzo and his father, Agustin, 47, came from the municipality of Nenton in Huehuetenango province, said Guatemalan foreign ministry spokeswoman Marta Larra.

Winter storm cancels U.S. flights; injures airline passenger, crew member

A blizzard that has already canceled or delayed thousands of airline flights and injured a passenger and crew member on a commercial jet over the Dallas area could dump nearly a foot more snow in some states, forecasters said on Thursday. Parts of the U.S. Midwest and Southeast were being hit with the first wave of heavy snow and rain expected in the central United States through the weekend, said Marc Chenard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Tesla's Musk says cave rescuer's defamation case should be dismissed

Elon Musk, Tesla Inc's chief executive, asked a U.S. judge to dismiss a lawsuit by a British diver who helped rescue a boys soccer team trapped in a Thailand cave and said Musk defamed him by calling him a pedophile and child rapist. In a filing on Wednesday with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Musk's lawyers said their client's comments about Vernon Unsworth were free speech protected by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment even if they lacked any factual basis.

U.S. government advises workers on staving off creditors amid shutdown

As a partial shutdown of the U.S. government stretched into its sixth day, the agency that oversees the federal workforce offered advice on staving off creditors to the estimated 800,000 employees who could be affected by a lapse in pay. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) suggested furloughed workers could offer partial payments to mortgage lenders and posted on its website form letters they could use.

Suspect in California shooting in U.S. illegally, prompting Trump tweet

A suspect wanted in the shooting death of a California police officer was believed to be in the United States illegally, a county sheriff said on Thursday as President Donald Trump cited the manhunt in his push for a wall on the border with Mexico. Trump tweeted about the shooting on the sixth day of a shutdown of the federal government, which was triggered by his $5 billion demand, largely opposed by Democrats and some lawmakers in Trump's own Republican party, for the wall he wants to build.

How partial shutdown of U.S. government could play out

A partial U.S. government shutdown was widely expected to continue after Congress reconvenes on Thursday, with lawmakers split over President Donald Trump's demand for $5 billion in taxpayer funding for a proposed Mexican border wall. The Senate and the House of Representatives were set to meet at 4 p.m. EST on the sixth day of the shutdown and resume debating ways to end it. That will include Senate consideration of a measure already approved by the Republican-controlled House that meets Trump's wall-funding demand.

Boston Marathon bomber appeals conviction, death sentence

Lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Thursday asked an appellate court to overturn his conviction and death penalty sentence for helping carry out the 2013 attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260 others. Lawyers for Tsarnaev, 25, argued in a brief filed with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston that a lower-court judge's refusal to move the case to another city not traumatized by the bombings deprived him of a fair trial.

(With inputs from Reuters)