ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE President Donald Trump is working with Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to make changes to their healthcare overhaul plan to ensure it has enough support to be approved by lawmakers, a White House spokesman said on Wednesday. “We’re obviously in talks with Speaker (Paul) Ryan, the entire leadership team over there … to get the best outcome based on feedback from […]
By Patricia Zengerle | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to confirm former Republican senator Dan Coats to be President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence and to approve Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster’s transfer to become his national security adviser. The vote was 85-12 to confirm Coats, who also served as ambassador to Germany under former President George W. Bush. Fifty-one votes were […]
The White House will propose large spending cuts on Thursday for the state department, public broadcasting and environmental programmes as part of its preliminary budget for the 2018 fiscal year. Administration aides call it an “America First” budget — with greater spending on defence, law enforcement and veteran affairs, as well as new education programmes that emphasise school choice. The last are a pet project of Betsy […]
By Dustin Volz | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The U.S. government on Wednesday unsealed charges against two Russian spies and two criminal hackers for allegedly pilfering 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, The indictments, announced at a news conference in Washington, represent the first time the U.S. government has criminally charged Russian officials for cyber offenses. The content of at least 30 million accounts were accessed as part […]
Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Nate Silver’s “March Madness” analysis is out and, knock on hardwood, he’s not picking Hillary Clinton. I know, I know. Cheap (jump) shot. It’s that time of year when FiveThirtyEight, the ESPN-owned politics and sports data site founded by Silver, […]
NBC coined the slogan “Must-See TV” more than two decades ago; tonight, MSNBC invented “hurry-up-and-wait” TV. In an excruciatingly delayed primetime media extravaganza that was reminiscent of Geraldo Rivera’s slow-as-molasses unveiling of Al Capone’s vault in 1986, Rachel Maddow used her show Tuesday night to release a portion of President Trump’s tax returns from 2005. In doing so, the broadcast became a cautionary tale about the dangers […]
By Yeganeh Torbati | OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is traveling to Asia this week accompanied by only one reporter, a White House correspondent from the Independent Journal Review (IJR), a digital news outlet founded in 2012 by former Republican political operatives. The IJR said in a statement late Tuesday the State Department last week offered one of […]
By Patricia Zengerle | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee said on Tuesday he plans to hold public hearings on possible links between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, although he did not say when they would take place. “It will happen,” Republican Senator Richard Burr told reporters after a closed committee meeting. Asked if he knew when, he said, “I don’t yet, […]
By Susan Heavey and Susan Cornwell | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON President Donald Trump and congressional leaders are weighing changes to their plan to dismantle the Obamacare health law, a White House spokesman said Tuesday, as Republicans defended their effort following an estimate that it would cause 14 million Americans to lose insurance next year. Press Secretary Sean Spicer said White House officials and leaders in the Republican-controlled U.S. […]
WASHINGTON Veteran U.S. diplomat Anne Patterson is out of the running to under secretary of defence for policy, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, depriving Defense Secretary Jim Mattis of his choice for his top policy adviser. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the officials said Patterson ran into resistance on Capitol Hill that might have made it hard for her to win confirmation by the U.S. Senate. The […]
By Simon Carraud and Brian Love | PARIS PARIS Francois Fillon’s troubled election campaign suffered yet another blow on Tuesday when magistrates put him under formal investigation on suspicion of embezzling state funds, a first for a presidential candidate in France. Election graphic – here With less than six weeks to go until the first round of voting, Fillon has been unable to draw a line under […]
Republicans are battling to save their new healthcare bill after Congress’s non-partisan watchdog said it would cause about 24m Americans to lose insurance and prompting fierce retaliation from the White House. On Tuesday, the Trump administration fought back against the Congressional Budget Office’s findings that the legislation, while reducing the budget deficit by $337bn, would cause an estimated 52m Americans to be uninsured by 2026. This compared […]
PARIS French presidential candidate Francois Fillon was put under formal investigation on Tuesday over misuse of public funds in the fake jobs scandal involving his wife, the prosecutor’s office said. The 63-year-old conservative candidate was put under formal investigation on suspicion of diverting public funds, complicity in misappropriating funds, receiving the funds and not declaring assets fully, a judicial source said. Fillon’s lawyer could not immediately be […]
Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org, Not long ago, a democratizing Turkey, with the second-largest army in NATO, appeared on track to join the European Union. That’s not likely now, or perhaps ever. Last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared Angela Merkel’s Germany to Hitler’s, said the Netherlands was full of “Nazi remnants” and “fascists,” and suggested the Dutch ambassador go home. What precipitated Erdogan’s outbursts? City […]
Authored by Thierry Meyssan via VoltaireNet.org, This article is a warning – in November 2016, a vast system of agitation and propaganda was set up in order to destroy the reputation and the authority of President Donald Trump as soon as he arrived in the White House. It is the first time that such a campaign has been scientifically organised against a President of the United States, […]
By David Lawder | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON Fourteen million Americans would lose medical insurance by next year under a Republican plan to dismantle Obamacare that would also reduce the budget deficit, a nonpartisan congressional research office said on Monday, throwing President Donald Trump and Republicans on the defensive as they press forward with replacement legislation. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office forecast that 24 million more people would be […]
By Yashaswini Swamynathan The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average were slightly lower on Monday as gains in financials shares – ahead of a widely expected interest rate hike – were weighed down by losses in drug stocks. The Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank’s policy-setting board, is expected to lift interest rates by a quarter point to 0.75 percent-1.00 percent after a two-day […]
FEC Vice Chairwoman Caroline Hunter, a Republican, concurred: “If Congress wants to hear from us, we’ll do whatever it takes to prepare, and we’ll be happy to answer their questions.” Walther might, however, have a few questions of his own for Congress, which has all but ignored an annual legislative wish list the FEC’s commissioners send members. Walther says he’s particularly interested in senators justifying their failure […]
By Mark Hosenball and Ayesha Rascoe | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON Two days before U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara was fired, President Donald Trump tried to call the high-profile New York prosecutor in what a White House official said was an effort to “thank him for his service and to wish him good luck.” But a U.S. law enforcement official said Bharara declined to take the call, placed on Thursday, […]
Speaker Paul Ryan on Sunday said he agrees with President Trump that 2018 will be a “bloodbath” for Republicans if Congress does not pass legislation repealing and replacing ObamaCare. “I do believe that if we don’t keep our word to the people who sent us here, yeah,” Ryan told CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” when asked if he agreed with Trump’s reported comments about the 2018 midterm […]
PARIS Francois Fillon’s party has apologised for tweeting a caricature of Emmanuel Macron, his main rival in the race to be France’s next president, that Fillon himself admitted was anti-Semitic. Fillon’s conservative The Republicans tweeted an image of the independent centrist Macron with a hooked nose, wearing a top hat and carrying a red sickle with which he was cutting a cigar. The image resembled anti-Semitic propaganda […]
Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. British reporter Iona Craig went to the al Ghayil, the Yemeni town stormed by Navy SEALs in the raid that President Trump says was a great success even as it claimed the life of the operator whose widow was honored […]
A new Congress bill could make it harder for workers to prevent employers from accessing their personal genetic and medical information. The bill could also increase the financial penalties for individuals who opt out of workplace wellness programs. The bill, proposed by Republicans, suggests that companies should gather genetic data from workers and their families more easily, and it was introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, […]
Even though Obama spent the waning days of his administration boasting about how he had managed to spend 8 years in the White House without a single ‘scandal’, current Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to have a slightly different view of how to define ‘scandal’. But perhaps Obama just “did not recall” some of the highly controversial efforts of his administration including the intentional IRS targeting of […]
