Reuters US Domestic News Summary

Following is a summary of current US domestic news briefs. U.S. border officials don't share Trump's zeal for border wall: lawmakers

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials on Wednesday described a multi-pronged strategy for tightening the southern border with Mexico that did not focus mainly on a massive wall President Donald Trump demands, according to lawmakers who attended a classified briefing. A group of 17 Republican and Democratic members of the Senate and House of Representatives are trying to beat a Feb. 15 deadline for passing legislation to fund U.S. border security operations over the next eight months. New Mexico governor pulls National Guard troops from U.S.-Mexico border

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has ordered most of the National Guard troops deployed at the state's border with Mexico to withdraw, rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump's contention there was a border crisis. Most of the 118 National Guard troops deployed in the state will be withdrawn, Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, said in a statement late Tuesday. She called Trump's frequent declarations of an immigration crisis at the border a "charade." Man charged with kidnapping Wisconsin teen agrees to trial

The Wisconsin man charged with kidnapping a 13-year-old girl and killing her parents will face a criminal trial after he waived his right to a probable cause hearing on Wednesday. Jake Patterson, 21, handcuffed and wearing an orange jumpsuit, appeared in Barron County Circuit Court on Wednesday. He told the judge he understood the charges and waived his right to a preliminary hearing of the evidence against him. The proceeding lasted less than three minutes. Jury in third day of deliberations in 'El Chapo' trial

Jurors in the U.S. trial of accused Mexican drug cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman began their third day of deliberations on Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn. Guzman, 61, is accused of leading Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, which became one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world. He twice escaped from prison in Mexico, and will face the possibility of life in a U.S. prison if convicted. A year after high school shooting, Florida town still struggling

Signs that read “Parkland Strong” and “MSD Strong” still dot the well-manicured Florida town where a young gunman carried out the deadliest U.S. high school shooting on Valentine’s Day in 2018. But as the Feb. 14 anniversary of the massacre that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland approaches, students, teachers, parents and community leaders continue struggling to cope with the trauma. Pennsylvania hospital patient tests negative for Ebola

An unidentified patient who was kept in isolation at a Philadelphia hospital while being tested for Ebola has been confirmed as not infected with the deadly virus, a hospital spokesman said on Wednesday. "Conclusive testing has confirmed that the patient under evaluation at the Hospital University of Pennsylvania is not infected with Ebola virus," Greg Richter, a senior communications officer for the medical center, said in a written statement. Blackface, sex assault scandals shake top Virginia Democrats

Virginia's attorney general on Wednesday admitted he wore blackface at a college party, becoming the state's third high-ranking Democrat caught up in scandal since the release of a racist photo from Governor Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook. Attorney General Mark Herring said in a statement that he donned brown face paint at a party in 1980 to impersonate a rapper. Northam admitted last weekend to having worn blackface - a practice that dates to 19th century minstrel shows caricaturing slaves - in 1984 to impersonate Michael Jackson. On abortion, Trump agenda likely leads to Supreme Court, not Congress

President Donald Trump urged lawmakers in his State of the Union address to put new limits on abortion, but partisan division in the U.S. Congress means the Supreme Court likely will set the agenda on the divisive issue, as it has for decades. Bolstered by Trump's appointment of two conservative justices, the nine-member court could soon begin to pare back abortion rights, starting with a major case from Louisiana that is one of several similar pending appeals. Massachusetts manslaughter conviction upheld in teen texting suicide case

Massachusetts' top court on Wednesday upheld the manslaughter conviction of a woman accused of goading her teenage boyfriend into committing suicide in 2014 with text messages and phone calls, in a case that drew national attention to cyber-bullying. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed with a lower court's 2017 ruling on Michelle Carter, who prosecutors said urged her 18-year-old boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to kill himself in a parking lot about 60 miles (100 km) south of Boston. U.S. sues to block Philadelphia safe drug-injection site

The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday said it had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop a nonprofit in Philadelphia from opening what could become the nation's first supervised drug-injection site in an effort aimed at addressing opioid abuse. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, follows warnings by the Justice Department under Republican President Donald Trump that cities which seek to open so-called safe injection sites could face legal action.