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WASHINGTON (AP) —
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham ended his 2016 campaign for president Monday, saying he remains committed to working to achieve security for the American people.
With just over a month to go until early voting begins, the South Carolina senator — the only candidate from one of the four early voting states — posted a video saying he was proud of his campaign, which he said was focused on the nation's security.
"You have honored me with your support. I believe we have run a campaign we can be proud of," Graham said. "We put forth bold and practical solutions to big problems about retiring our debt and fixing our broken immigration system. This has been a problem solvers campaign. However the centerpiece of my campaign has been securing our nation.
Having mustered little support in the polls, Graham's exit will not have an immediate effect on the race in the final stretch before the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary. But his decision could produce a ripple effect in his home state, which follows New Hampshire with a Feb. 20 primary. Some leading Republicans in South Carolina have remained uncommitted to this point out of loyalty to their senior senator, but now are free to take sides. Graham, too, could make an endorsement, though he's given no indication of when that might be.
Graham, 60, plunged into the contest in June on a platform of hawkish foreign policy and a declaration that newcomers need not apply for a job that offers no chance for "on-the-job training." At the time, anything was possible because none in the mob of GOP candidates was capturing a sizable base of support.
But over the summer, political neophytes Donald Trump and Ben Carson surged to the front of the pack and forced far better-known candidates, such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, to fight for support.
Graham, urged to run by 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain, won so little backing in national polls that he failed to qualify even for the undercard GOP debate in November.
An Air Force veteran and reservist, Graham is a foreign-policy hawk who has called President Barack Obama "a small-minded guy in big times." After the attacks on Paris that killed 129 people, Graham pushed for an authorization of military force against the Islamic State that would allow the U.S. to attack the groups' supporters anywhere, with no time limit.
Virtually every Republican candidate has blasted Obama as weak on foreign policy, but Graham was often the only would-be nominee who did not hedge when asked about whether he would deploy more ground troops. He stated from the outset of his campaign that more U.S. troops are needed, adding that "American soldiers will die in Iraq and eventually in Syria to protect our homeland."
But as he visited core GOP supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire, Graham did not back away from positions that separated him from the GOP's conservative base. In New Hampshire, Graham said he won't abandon his call for an immigration overhaul that includes both improvements in border security and a path to legal status for the millions of people living in the country illegally. "All I can say is that we need to fix immigration. It's a national security issue, it's a cultural issue and it's an economic issue. I am not going to give an inch on the idea."
Graham, a member of the conservative class that swept into control of the House in 1994 has, at times, joined Democrats on other high-profile votes. In October 2013, he voted for a deal that ended a partial government shutdown and raised the nation's borrowing limit.
He has panned conservatives who have been willing to let the government shut down if their demands aren't met, saying: "We're a right-of-center nation. We're not a right-ditch nation." Graham also supported both of Obama's nominees to the Supreme Court. "Elections have consequences," he explained.
WASHINGTON (AP) —
The Obama administration formally disclosed Tuesday that in the 2015 budget year, the U.S. deported the fewest immigrants since 2006.
The Homeland Security Department oversaw the deportation of about 235,413 people between October 2014 and September 2015. Over the same period, 337,117 people were arrested trying to cross the border illegally.
The Associated Press reported in October that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deported about 231,000 people through Sept. 28.
DHS has previously said the drop in deportations overseen by ICE is largely due to the decline in arrests at the border. Border arrests dropped about 30 percent from 2014 to 2015. The 2015 border arrests included roughly 79,800 people traveling as families and children traveling alone, mostly from Central America.
The overall total of deportations generally does not include Mexicans caught at the border and quickly returned home by the Border Patrol.
"Last year's removal numbers reflect this department's increased focus on prioritizing convicted criminals and threats to public safety, border security and national security," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement.
Roughly 136,700 convicted criminals were deported in the 2015 budget year. The share of criminal immigrants deported rose slightly from about 56 percent to roughly 59 percent from 2014 to 2015.
Obama's immigration policies have been alternately criticized as too harsh and too weak.
Immigrant advocates derisively dubbed the president the "Deporter-In-Chief" after ICE removed a record of more than 409,000 immigrants in 2012.
Meanwhile, Republicans have decried his policies as "back-door amnesty."
The questions of what to do with the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally and how to enforce immigration laws have been major topics in the 2016 presidential race. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has pledged to be "less harsh and aggressive" than Obama, while Republican Donald Trump has pledged to deport millions of people in the country illegally and build a wall along the Mexican border to stop future illegal immigration.
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Sudden cardiac arrest may not always be so sudden: New research suggests a lot of people may ignore potentially life-saving warning signs hours, days, even a few weeks before they collapse.
Cardiac arrest claims about 350,000 U.S. lives a year. It's not a heart attack, but worse: The heart abruptly stops beating, its electrical activity knocked out of rhythm. CPR can buy critical time, but so few patients survive that it's been hard to tell if the longtime medical belief is correct that it's a strike with little or no advance warning.
An unusual study that has closely tracked sudden cardiac arrest in Portland, Oregon, for over a decade got around that roadblock, using interviews with witnesses, family and friends after patients collapse and tracking down their medical records.
About half of middle-aged patients for whom symptom information could be found had experienced warning signs, mostly chest pain or shortness of breath, in the month before suffering a cardiac arrest, researchers reported Monday. The research offers the possibility of one day preventing some cardiac arrests if doctors could figure out how to find and treat the people most at risk.
"By the time the 911 call is made, it's much too late for at least 90 percent of people," said Dr. Sumeet Chugh of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, who led the study reported in Annals of Internal Medicine. "There's this window of opportunity that we really didn't know existed."
Importantly, a fraction of patients considered their symptoms bad enough to call 911 before they collapsed, and they were most likely to survive.
That's a reminder to the public not to ignore possible signs of heart trouble in hopes they're just indigestion, said University of Pittsburgh emergency medicine specialist Dr. Clifton Callaway, who wasn't involved in Monday's study but praised it.
"Chest pain, shortness of breath — those are things you should come in the middle of the night to the emergency department and get checked out," said Callaway, who chairs the American Heart Association's emergency care committee. "We strongly recommend you don't try to ride it out at home."
Previous heart attacks, coronary heart disease, and certain inherited disorders that affect heartbeat all can increase the risk of sudden cardiac arrest. People known to be at high risk may receive an implanted defibrillator to shock the heart back into rhythm. But cardiac arrest is such a public health problem that the Institute of Medicine last summer urged a national campaign to teach CPR, so more bystanders know how to help.
Monday's data from the Oregon Sudden Unexpected Death Study examined records for nearly 1,100 people ages 35 to 65 who suffered a cardiac arrest between 2002 and 2012.
For about a quarter of patients, researchers could find no information about whether they experienced symptoms — making it impossible to say just how common warning signs really are.
But of the remaining 839 patients, half had evidence of at least one symptom in the previous month, the study found. For most, the symptoms began within 24 hours of their collapse, although some came a week before and a few up to a month. Chest pain was most common in men, while women were more likely to experience shortness of breath. Other symptoms included fainting and heart palpitations.
Chugh had no way to determine symptom severity. But only 19 percent of patients called 911 about symptoms, mostly people with already diagnosed heart disease or who were having recurrent symptoms. Their survival was 32 percent, compared with 6 percent for other patients. Partly that's because a fifth of those 911 callers had their cardiac arrest in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Stay tuned: The study is just the start of more research to better predict who is at highest risk for cardiac arrest, and determine how to target them without panicking people who'd do fine with general heart disease treatment, Chugh cautioned.