U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has maintained a hiring freeze at the State Department even though it was lifted for the rest of the federal government, a spokesman said on Thursday, as the agency begins to downsize before Congress approves funding cuts. Acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner confirmed that the hiring freeze would…
read morePresident Donald Trump likes to boast that he hires only the best people. But his personnel choices keep coming back to haunt him. One of the people Trump hired for the White House was working as a foreign agent while advising him during the election. His campaign chairman caught the Justice Department’s attention for similarly…
read morePresident Donald Trump plans to revive the hobbled Export-Import Bank of the United States, his office said, a victory for American manufacturers like Boeing and General Electric which have overseas customers that use the agency’s government-backed loans to purchase their products. Trump first told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday he would fill two vacancies…
read moreMexico is mobilizing to resist President Donald Trump’s policies in ways that range from the sensible to the strange. Mexican negotiators are hammering out a trade deal with Europe in a bid to reduce reliance on U.S. markets following Trump’s pledge to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and his efforts to stop companies…
read morePresident Donald Trump has declared: “I am my own strategist.” That would seem to bode poorly for his actual strategist, Steve Bannon. And Trump now appears to be publicly distancing himself. In an interview with The New York Post, the president said “I like Steve” and called his adviser “a good guy”’— but one who…
read moreIt was one of the most exclusive tickets in town: Only 800 were made available, and those lucky enough to score one were told they would have to show photo ID at the gate, where they would be issued a wristband and a number. No signs bigger than a sheet of notebook paper allowed, so…
read morePresident Donald Trump said Wednesday that his administration would not label China a currency manipulator, backing away from a campaign promise, even as he said the U.S. dollar was “getting too strong” and would eventually hurt the economy. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump also said he would like to see U.S.…
read moreThe FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of Carter Page, an adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump, because the government had reason to believe Page was acting as a Russian agent, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Page is among the Trump associates under scrutiny as the FBI and congressional…
read morePresident Donald Trump told a group of chief executives Tuesday that his administration was revamping the Wall Street reform law known as Dodd-Frank and might eliminate the rules and replace them with “something else.” At the beginning of his administration, Trump ordered reviews of the major banking rules that were put in place after the…
read moreUnited Airlines saw its stock price decline by 4 percent or more after a viral video showing a passenger being dragged off a flight and injured sparked outrage in the U.S. and several nations. One airline analyst says he has never seen such a “parade of incompetence.” …
read moreIf Democrats thought it was hard to stop President Donald Trump’s first U.S. Supreme Court nominee, it promises to be even tougher for them if he gets to fill another vacancy, potentially to replace the most influential justice, Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy, a conservative who sometimes sides with the court’s liberals in key cases such as…
read moreHundreds of detainees at an immigration holding center in Washington state began refusing meals in a hunger strike to protest conditions at the facility and delayed immigration hearings, activists said on Tuesday. A group of about 100 detainees at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, refused their lunches on Monday, with 300 others joining…
read moreThere were audible gasps in the White House press room Tuesday when spokesman Sean Spicer appeared to forget about the Holocaust in asserting that the Syrian military’s use of sarin gas on civilians exceeded the atrocities of Nazi Germany. With Spicer’s credibility already strained, opposition Democrats and others began calling for the White House press…
read moreJust one week ago, U.S. President Donald Trump stood before a crowd of construction workers and made the same promise he did hundreds of times during his presidential campaign. “I’m not, and I don’t want to be president of the world,” Trump told the trade union conference in Washington. “I’m president of the United States,…
read moreSouth Asian migrants powering the construction boom in oil-rich Gulf countries are often illegally made to pay for their own recruitment, adding to hardships of poor working conditions and wages, according to an investigation released Tuesday. Millions of migrants seeking a way out of poverty by working in Gulf nations from Qatar to the United…
read more“No one should ever be treated this way,” reads part of a new public statement issued Tuesday by United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz, following Sunday’s incident when a passenger was bloodied after being dragged off an overbooked United airliner at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. “I continue to be disturbed by what happened on this flight,” the…
read moreChina Southern Airlines has flown its inaugural Guangzhou to Mexico City flight, via Vancouver, the first route operated by a domestic Chinese carrier to the Latin American nation, the Mexican government said on Tuesday. China’s interest in Mexico, including tourism and investment, has been on the rise in recent years. In 2016, 74,300 Chinese tourists…
read morePresident Donald Trump says he gave his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping an ultimatum in their meeting last week: Solve the North Korea crisis and you’ll get a good trade deal. Trump tweeted Tuesday, “I explained to the President of China that a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them if they…
read moreIndustrial air pollution causes nearly 3.5 million deaths a year, and international trade is shifting some of the harmful effects from consuming nations to producing nations, according to a study in the journal Nature. The authors say high consumption in the United States and Western Europe harms health in manufacturing countries such as China,…
read moreDonald Trump Jr., rumored to be eyeing a move to follow his father’s footsteps into politics, will not be a candidate for governor of New York next year but is not ruling out a possible run for office in the future. The younger Trump, in an interview Monday with The Associated Press, categorically denied any…
read moreOne issue that President Donald Trump’s hard-line supporters care most about is immigration. While the president has signed three executive orders on the subject, he has said nothing about the so-called dreamers, undocumented young people who were brought to the U.S. as children and protected under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program or…
read moreU.S. President Donald Trump declared Tuesday that “North Korea is looking for trouble” with its nuclear weapons development program and implored China to help rein in Pyongyang. Trump, in a pair of comments on his Twitter account, said, “If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without…
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