Midday Roundup: Obama rejects Keystone XL pipeline application

Keystone K-Oed. President Barack Obama is expected to announce today he is denying a Canadian company’s request to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast. The rejection ends a seven-year review of the project, which has become one of the best-known symbols in the debate over energy and climate change. The pipeline had bipartisan support in Congress, where Democrats from energy-producing states such as North Dakota joined with Republicans to push for its approval. Environmentalists organized a grassroots movement against it that reportedly had a big influence on Obama’s position. They oppose the pipeline because the oil it would transport is extracted in a process that releases greenhouse gases.

Escape from Egypt. Russia has agreed to halt all flights to Egypt as more and more governments acknowledge the possibility that a bomb planted by ISIS brought down a commercial airliner last weekend. “I think there’s a possibility that there was a bomb on board,” Obama told reporters Thursday, not long after U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron voiced support for the same theory by calling it “more likely than not.” Hundreds of British tourists are awaiting evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula, but Egyptian and U.K. authorities are haggling over flight times and what to do with tons of luggage the tourists will have to leave behind. Meanwhile, the Egyptian government is reeling from the heavy blow the incident has dealt to its burgeoning tourism economy. The crash of the Russian plane, operated by Metrojet, killed all 224 people onboard.

Uninvited. Fox Business channel is winnowing the field of participants before next Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate and has booted New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to the undercard slate. The upcoming debate will feature just the top eight polling candidates instead of 10 like in earlier contests, and the earlier debate, dubbed the “kiddie table” by the press, will feature four contenders. That means former New York Gov. George Pataki and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham have been cut from the debates altogether, since they don’t have enough support in the polls to make the top 12.

Family friction. Former President George H.W. Bush critiques his son’s vice president and secretary of defense in a forthcoming biography that brings to light tensions in the Republican Party’s most famous living family. In the biography, the 41st president says his son George W. Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” speech “might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything,” and disparaged former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld for being uncompromising and arrogant. George W. Bush publicly defended his colleagues in a statement Thursday. The fracture in the family could cause bigger problems for younger brother and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is counting on the stock of the Bush family name to raise funds for his presidential campaign.

Surprising find. A teen abducted at age 5 helped crack the case of his own kidnapping and is now in contact with the mother he hasn’t seen in 13 years. Julian Hernandez’s father fled with him from Alabama in 2002 after telling the boy’s mother he would take their son to preschool. The pair relocated to the Cleveland, Ohio, area, and Julian never knew of his abduction until he started applying for college. When his Social Security number didn’t match his name, a school counselor did some more research and found him in a missing children’s database.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.