In August, 2014, planners in the northeastern Chinese city of Hunchun argued in state media that it should be included in the “One Belt, One Road” project, Beijing’s vision laid out the previous year of a new Silk Road across Asia to Europe. In 2015, the official Xinhua news agency ran stories about how Hunchun…
read moreAfter U.S. President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, Democratic members of Congress denounced the move and renewed calls for an independent investigation of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Democrats likened the dismissal to President Richard Nixon’s firing of an independent special prosecutor on October 20, 1973, during…
read moreMexico is embarking on a strategy to combat illegal pipeline thefts that includes going after those who purchase and deal in stolen fuel as well as the thieves, the country’s treasury secretary said Tuesday. Jose Antonio Meade said it’s a problem that costs Mexico somewhere between 15 billion and 20 billion pesos a year,…
read moreFour U.S. states filed a lawsuit Tuesday over President Donald Trump’s decision to restart the sale of coal leases on federal lands, saying the Obama-era block of the leasing program was reversed without studying what’s best for the environment and for taxpayers. The attorneys general of California, New Mexico, New York and Washington, all Democrats,…
read moreTwo U.S. lawmakers have reprimanded one of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members, Heath and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, for an HHS memo that appeared to restrict department employees from communicating directly with Congress. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, both Republicans, said in a letter to Price that the…
read moreThe U.S. economy won’t achieve the Trump administration’s 3 percent growth goal this year and not until all of its tax, regulatory, trade and energy policies are fully in place, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Tuesday. Ross also said trade enforcement actions would be a major tool to cut U.S. trade deficits, adding that…
read moreThe first federal appeals court to hear a challenge to President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban appeared unconvinced that it should ignore the Republican’s repeated promises on the campaign trail to bar Muslims from entering the country. An attorney for the president urged the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday to focus on…
read moreCambodia’s rapidly normalizing economy will receive an additional boost when it hosts the regional World Economic Forum (WEF) for the first time this week with business leaders looking for opportunities to diversify the country’s fledgling industries. American lawyer and chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia, Brett Sciaroni, said Cambodia’s economy remained the…
read moreU.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said sacred tribal lands he toured Monday in America’s newest and most hotly contested monument should be preserved but he questioned whether the monument designation was the right way to do it. Zinke’s aerial and ground tour of the Bears Ears National Monument was part of a review ordered…
read moreThe International Monetary Fund called on Asian economies to learn from Japan’s experience and act early to cope with rapidly aging populations, warning that parts of the region risk “getting old before becoming rich.” Asia has enjoyed substantial demographic dividends in the past decades, but the growing number of elderly is set to create a…
read moreMexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo will travel to Washington next week for talks about sugar exports, he told reporters on Monday, in an attempt to break an impasse that threatens to trigger tit-for-tat duties on sweeteners. U.S.-Mexican trade relations are already under strain as U.S. President Donald Trump seeks to renegotiate the North American Free…
read moreFormer U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Monday she would prefer that President Donald Trump not criticize judges and the media but that U.S. democratic institutions can withstand such comments. Speaking in an interview, Rice also described Trump as having a somewhat “transactional” view of foreign relations but she broadly endorsed his approach…
read moreA much-challenged temporary travel ban issued by President Donald Trump faced another day in court Monday, with federal appellate judges grilling lawyers on both sides to determine whether a suspension of the executive order will be upheld. An attorney for the government argued before a panel of 13 judges from the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court…
read moreThe Senate has confirmed Heather Wilson as secretary of the Air Force. Senators approved Wilson’s nomination 76-22, making her President Donald Trump’s first service secretary nominee to be approved by the GOP-led chamber. Trump’s choices for secretaries of the Army and Navy have been forced to withdraw from consideration. Trump’s second choice…
read moreProtests over jobs and development in southern and central Tunisia have halted production at or shut the fields of two foreign energy companies in a new challenge to the country’s Prime Minister Youssef Chahed. For Tunisia, a small oil and gas producer compared to its OPEC neighbors Libya and Algeria with national production at around…
read moreCanada escalated a trade dispute with United States by making threats Washington called inappropriate in part because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to secure support in a key region ahead of the country’s 2019 elections. Washington last month slapped tariffs on timber imports, prompting Trudeau to say he was considering a ban on…
read moreIt has been only six months since real estate developer Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States in one of the most divisive political campaigns in U.S. history. Trump has struggled to make major progress in his early months as president. One of those moments came last Thursday when Republicans narrowly…
read moreU.S. President Donald Trump, who already has won confirmation of a conservative jurist to the Supreme Court, is set to name more conservative judges to lower courts. Aides say 10 of the people on Trump’s list include five nominees for U.S. appellate courts, the next level down from the nation’s highest court, where judges often…
read moreAs one group of squealing, chanting students smack a ball into the pavement in a heated game of four square, another finishes an after-school writing lesson inside Circleville Elementary School. Later in the library, an instructor guides other students in a role-playing activity on how to handle criticism from a sassy friend. The children already…
read moreKatie Ryerson and her father took a train from their hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to Omaha, Nebraska, for her first Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meeting, a weekend the conglomerate’s billionaire chief Warren Buffett calls “Woodstock for Capitalists.” They were part of a crowd expected to top last year’s estimated 37,000. Shareholders filled the downtown CenturyLink…
read moreAn Airbnb host who was renting out her Trump Tower apartment is among the first to pay a fine to New York City under a law banning advertising listings for short-term rentals. The host and owner of the Trump Tower apartment, Yelena Yelagina, paid a $1,000 fine to the city. A city official…
read morePresident Donald Trump’s son denied Monday that he told a sportswriter that the family’s real estate business got money from Russia to fund golf courses. In an early morning tweet, Eric Trump said the account from writer James Dodson was “completely fabricated.” His assertion came hours before a new round of testimony on Capitol…
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