Mexico opened the possibility Friday of receiving non-Mexican migrants deported by the United States after initially saying they would push President-elect Donald Trump to return other nationalities directly to their countries of origin.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her daily press briefing that in cases where the U.S. would not return migrants to their countries “we can collaborate through different mechanisms.” She did not offer details, but Mexico could limit it to certain nationalities or request compensation from the U.S. to move the deportees from Mexico to their home countries.

“There will be time to speak with the United States government if these deportations really happen, but we will receive them here, we are going to receive them properly and we have a plan,” she said. Sheinbaum had prefaced her comments by saying Mexico is not in favor of them.

Trump has promised to begin massive deportations. Critics have observed that there will be logistical challenges to significantly ramping up from the already high deportation numbers.

The deportations would be immediately felt in northern Mexico’s border cities, which struggle with high levels of organized crime and where non-Mexican migrants would make easy targets for kidnapping and extortion.

In December, Sheinbaum had said she planned to ask Trump to deport non-Mexicans directly to their home countries.

Honduras threatening to expel U.S. military

Honduras’ president threatened to push the U.S. military out of a base it built decades ago in the Central American country should President-elect Donald Trump carry out mass deportations of immigrants living illegally in the United States.

The response by President Xiomara Castro of Honduras on Wednesday was the first concrete pushback by a leader in the region to Trump’s plan to send back millions of Latin American citizens living in the United States.

The threat came as Castro and Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, also called a meeting of foreign ministers later this month to address the deportation issue.

“Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military arena,” Castro said.

“Without paying a cent for decades,” she added, “they maintain military bases in our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras.”

Winter storm taking aim at Central Plains

A strong winter storm accompanied by arctic cold is poised to bring “significant wintry weather” this weekend to about a dozen states across the middle of the country, from the Central Plains to the mid-Atlantic, according to the Weather Prediction Center, with forecasters warning that some places may get their heaviest snowfall in a decade or more.

The storm is expected to bring a nasty mix of sleet, snow and freezing rain that is expected to disrupt travel and daily life with road closures, flight delays and power outages beginning Saturday and lasting through Monday.

As the storm moves on, arctic air is predicted to settle in its wake, as some of the most frigid temperatures of the season are expected to linger for days.

Some state officials were already gearing up for the worst on Friday.

In Missouri, the governor put the National Guard on standby, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia declared a state of emergency, days ahead of the storm’s arrival, and urged people to avoid traveling Sunday.

Feds propose rules on cleaner hydrogen

The Biden administration released long-awaited final rules Friday for a tax credit that will send billions of dollars to producers of cleaner hydrogen.

The new rules drew cautious praise from environmental groups, who said they would likely reduce planet-warming emissions but included loopholes that could still reward producers of dirty hydrogen.

The administration is trying to ramp up hydrogen production to displace fossil fuels as an energy source for sectors of the economy that emit massive greenhouse gases, yet are difficult to electrify, such as long-haul transportation and industrial manufacturing, including steel-making.

Most hydrogen today is made from natural gas, contributing to climate change. But hydrogen can also be made by splitting water with solar, wind, nuclear or geothermal electricity, yielding little if any planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Feds sanction Chinese firm over hacking

The U.S. Treasury on Friday sanctioned a Beijing-based cybersecurity company for its alleged role in multiple hacking incidents targeting critical U.S. infrastructure.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control hit Integrity Technology Group Inc. with sanctions Friday morning, for conducting multiple hacks against U.S. victims, including incidents attributed to Flax Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored campaign that targets U.S. critical infrastructure.

The sanctions come a few days after Treasury reported that Chinese hackers remotely accessed several U.S. Treasury Department workstations and unclassified documents in a major cybersecurity incident.

The Treasury Department said it learned of the problem on Dec. 8, when a third-party software service provider, BeyondTrust, flagged that hackers had stolen a key “used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support” to workers.

Bob Menendez lawyers urge light sentence

Lawyers for former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez are urging a judge to be lenient at his sentencing later this month for his conviction on bribery charges, saying the ordeal has made him a “national punchline” despite a lifetime of good deeds that have saved lives.

Late Thursday, the lawyers wrote to the judge who will sentence him to say that the Democrat’s positive actions through an unusual life spent overcoming hardships should weigh in his favor. Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 29.

The 71-year-old Menendez was convicted in July of 16 corruption charges brought by prosecutors who asserted that he used his power in the Senate to do favors that benefited three New Jersey businessmen.

Two of the businessmen were convicted along with him while a third pleaded guilty to charges and testified at the trial.

His wife faces trial next month on many of the same charges after her case was delayed so she could be treated for breast cancer.

Feds to oversee Georgia county jail

The U.S. Justice Department announced Friday that it has entered into a court-enforceable agreement with Georgia’s most populous county after finding that violence and filthy conditions in county lockups violated the constitutional rights of people held in jail.

The proposed consent decree must still be approved by a judge but would resolve problems found by Justice Department investigators, the agency said in a news release.

The Justice Department in July 2023 opened a civil rights investigation into jail conditions in Fulton County, citing violence, filthy living quarters and the in-custody death of a man whose body was found covered in insects. That investigation found that jail officials failed to protect detainees from violence, used excessive force and held them in “unconstitutional and illegal conditions.”.

The jail will also stop using isolation for vulnerable people at risk of self harm and will facilitate the provision of adequate special education services to children with disabilities held in the jail, the consent decree says.

Manhattan congestion pricing plan cleared

New York’s plan to charge most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan’s congested business districts cleared a crucial hurdle Friday when a federal judge denied New Jersey’s emergency request to stop the new tolling program before it starts.

New York officials said they intended to move ahead with the long-planned and much-debated congestion pricing program beginning Sunday.

But a lawyer for New Jersey indicated Friday evening that he intended to try to appeal the judge’s ruling before Sunday.

“We respectfully disagree with the trial court’s decision not to halt New York’s congestion pricing program before it goes into effect on Sunday,” said Randy Mastro, the lawyer.

Similar tolling systems are used in London, Stockholm and Singapore to reduce traffic and climate-warming vehicle emissions and to generate revenue. But New York’s program would be the first of its kind in the United States, and it has been the source of at least 10 legal challenges and subjected to repeated delays.

— From news services