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President Joe Biden is preparing to call on Congress to suspend the federal gasoline and diesel taxes for three months. It's meant to ease financial pressures at the pump and reveals the political toxicity of high gas prices in an election year.
Administration officials say Biden wants to suspend the 18.4 cents-a-gallon tax on gas and 24.4 cents-a-gallon on diesel fuel. If the gas savings were fully passed along to consumers, people would save roughly 3.6% at the pump. Prices are averaging about $5 a gallon nationwide.
Lawmakers in both parties have been skeptical of the idea. The Democratic president also wants states to suspend their own gas taxes or provide similar relief.
Senate bargainers have reached agreement on a bipartisan gun violence bill. That potentially tees up congressional passage this week on an incremental but notable package that would stand as Congress’s response to mass shootings in Texas and New York that shook the nation.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted Senate approval later this week, and passage by the Democratic-led House could follow quickly. It would make background checks tougher for the youngest gun buyers and bolster spending for school safety and mental health programs, and bar gun ownership by romantic partners convicted of domestic abuse.
Officials say a commercial jetliner carrying 126 people caught fire after landing at Miami International Airport, though no serious injuries were reported. Airport officials say Tuesday's fire followed the collapse of the front landing gear on a Red Air flight arriving from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Afghanistan's state-run news agency reported a powerful earthquake struck a rural, mountainous region of the country's east, killing 1,000 people and injuring 1,500 more. Wednesday's quake was one of the deadliest in decades. Officials warned that the already grim toll may still rise. Information remained scarce on the magnitude 6.1 earthquake near the Pakistani border.
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders says it believes that a Ukrainian photojournalist and a soldier who was accompanying him were “coldly executed” in Russian-occupied woodlands in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine.
The bodies of Maks Levin and serviceman Oleksiy Chernyshov were found April 1 in woods north of the capital, Kyiv. Reporters Without Borders said it sent investigators back to the spot to investigate the circumstances of their deaths.
Visitors will return to a changed landscape in Yellowstone National Park on Wednesday as it reopens following record floods that reshaped the park’s rivers and canyons, wiped out numerous roads and left some areas famous for their wildlife viewing inaccessible possibly for months to come.