After weeks of several phone run-ins with world leaders, Mr. Trump committed to a longstanding agreement that the U.S. won’t recognize Taiwan diplomatically in a phone call with President Xi Jinping late Thursday.

Mr. Trump’s blunt style has posed a challenge for protocol-conscious Chinese officials wary of unpredictable turns in the conversation. In previous calls with leaders, Mr. Trump chided Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto over the country’s drug cartels and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee-resettlement agreement Australia reached with the Obama administration.

Chinese analysts said Mr. Trump’s change in rhetoric was inevitable. “Some things you don’t need to be anxious to respond with tits-and-tats for,“ said Zhang Ruizhuang, professor of international relations at Nankai University in Tianjin. ”Instead, give him some time, and let him slowly realize things on his own.”

In a series of interviews in March of 2014, Donald Trump singled out Russia as the United States' "biggest problem" and greatest geopolitical foe.

"He said it's a hell of a problem, and everybody laughed at him, including certain media, by the way,"

"We should definitely do sanctions," Trump said while promoting the Miss USA pageant.

The president of the European Parliament, a bit like the U.S. House speaker, has a sweeping ability to dictate the course of legislation that will affect the half-billion E.U. residents.

It is an easy institution to mock. Packed with 751 members, it cannot propose any legislation but can only give a stamp of approval to laws that emerge from the bureaucracy of the European Commission.

The presidency “is still one of the top five jobs that you can have in Europe,” he said. “It’s a big post and you need to respect it.”

Rex Tillerson hadn't been CEO of ExxonMobil very long when the late president Hugo Chavez made foreign oil companies in Venezuela an offer they couldn't refuse. Give the government a bigger cut, or else.

“It’s an example of an early-stage exploration opportunity that has the benefit of good fiscal terms.”

Gun control groups insist the government should take action to keep guns away from the mentally ill, citing the recent airport shooting in Fort Lauderdale.

This will affect “tens of thousands of harmless, law-abiding people,” who will lose a constitutional right without due process, according to the National Rifle Association, which also plans to ask the incoming Trump administration to take “corrective action” on the matter

“Everytown applauds the White House for a set of recent executive actions aimed at improving the gun background check system and giving law enforcement tools to combat gun trafficking,” Avore’s letter said. “Those actions included initiating this rulemaking process, which seeks to bring the SSA in line with the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 ('the NIAA') requirement that federal agencies submit prohibiting records into NICS.” 

Donald Trump's accusation that NATO is "obsolete" has led to "astonishment and agitation" within the alliance, Germany's foreign minister has said.

Trump used the interview to restate his doubts about NATO. "I said a long time ago that NATO had problems," he said in the interview.

NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu pushed back against the comments. "A strong NATO is good for the United States, just as it is for Europe."

In 1975, the Cold War was at its peak. I was a new tank lieutenant starting my career with a three-year assignment in US Army Europe. There were 250,000 US soldiers on the continent, and our job was patrolling the border fences between West Germany and the Warsaw Pact nations and defending Europe from Soviet aggression.

Russian adventurism in Ukraine, Putin's threat toward the Baltics and Poland, and an increased awareness by the Defense Department and Congress regarding the need for an increased US force presence in Europe has changed all that.

While long in the planning stage, the physical presence of this small force is welcomed by all the NATO countries as it reassures them of continued US support of the alliance. One soldier once told me "when tanks are on the ground, America means business."

The House on Friday passed a budget resolution allowing Congress to bypass a Democratic filibuster in the Senate if and when they vote to gut the health law. The vote was 227-198, with nine Republicans joining all the Democrats in opposition.

But the next step will be much harder—actually repealing the Affordable Care Act. House and Senate committees must draft and pass legislation in accordance with the budget resolution

“My colleagues, this experiment has failed. This law is collapsing as we speak,” Speaker Paul Ryan declared in a floor speech. “And we have to step in before things get even worse.

Mattis’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which convened today to consider his confirmation, raises doubts on that score

The strategic vacuum in which America’s endless wars drag on went unremarked upon.

On multiple occasions, Mattis referred to his determination to enhance the “lethality” of U.S. forces as if an inability to kill people and break things has hampered the effectiveness of U.S. forces. The problem is not a lack of lethality. It’s misguided policies based on a flawed understanding of what armed force can and cannot do, and when it should or should not be employed.

Mrs. May is scheduled to make a long-awaited speech on her plans on Tuesday, but the British weekend papers and Sunday news programs were briefed by Downing Street about the main lines of the policy, and some published selected quotations of what Mrs. May is scheduled to say.

She and her officials have made it clear that her two main priorities are ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over British law, and restoring British control over its borders and immigration, including from the European Union.

“If it proves necessary, we have said we will consider time for implementation of new arrangements,” he wrote. “We don’t want the E.U. to fail, we want it to prosper economically and politically, and we need to persuade our allies that a strong new partnership with the U.K. will help the E.U. to do that.”

Mr. Trump has made similar comments before. But the fact that he made them in a joint interview with two European publications — The Times of London and Bild, a German newspaper — and did so days before assuming the presidency alarmed European diplomats.

“They have sanctions on Russia — let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia,”

Mr. Trump was critical of Russia’s military intervention in Syria, including airstrikes in Aleppo that American officials say have hit hospitals and killed civilians, saying it had led to a “terrible humanitarian situation.”

Days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald J. Trump is engaged in a high-profile feud with some of the country’s most prominent African-American leaders, setting off anger in a constituency already wary of him after a contentious presidential campaign.

“I don’t think we have ever had a president so publicly condescending to what black politics means,” said Mark Anthony Neal, an African and African-American studies professor at Duke University.

Mr. Trump has also not made any public announcement of plans to commemorate Martin Luther King’s Birthday, a tradition observed by most Republican and Democratic politicians

Russia’s Defense Ministry dismissed allegations by the U.S. Air Force that its planes regularly fly too close to U.S. fighter jets, risking collision in the crowded skies above Syria.

“We have not heard similar complaints either from Gen. Corcoran or from representatives of his leadership in the Pentagon during regular videoconferences from the Russian Defense Ministry on issues of observing the memorandum on preventing incidents in Syrian airspace,” the Russian general said.

The U.K. could change its economic model if it isn’t granted access to trade in the European Union after it leaves the bloc, U.K. Treasury Chief Philip Hammond indicated in an interview with a German newspaper on Sunday.

It wasn’t clear what specific action Mr. Hammond was suggesting the U.K. might take and no one was immediately available at the Treasury for further comment.

Mrs. May has said the U.K. will seek to regain control over immigration from the EU and remove the country from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, fueling expectations that she intends to negotiate a clean break from the EU that would be incompatible with continued tariff-free access to European markets.

When Theresa May stands up Tuesday to make a major speech on Brexit, her words will be as closely scrutinized around the world as anything said by a British prime minister for many years.

By insisting that the U.K. would reclaim full control of its borders, ending the automatic right of EU citizens to live and work in Britain and by rejecting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the U.K., she implicitly ruled out British participation in the EU’s single market and customs union, committing herself to what has become known as a hard Brexit.

Besides, the political opportunities to stop the Brexit juggernaut once Mrs. May has formally triggered the start of the two-year window to negotiate an exit deal are likely to be limited.

One of Germany’s most influential politicians issued stern warnings about the dangers posed by protectionist economic policies and an assertive Russia seeking to undermine Western democracies, underscoring the risk of a rift between incoming U.S. President Donald Trump and an important ally.

America’s new president, who is to take the oath of office on Friday, told Germany’s Bild and London’s Times newspapers that he would start out trusting German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin in equal measure.

The German finance minister pointed to an instance in which Russian television falsely reported last year that a Russian girl in Berlin had been raped by migrants, prompting protests against Ms. Merkel’s refugee policy by Russian-speaking Germans across the country.

Rushing to meet his wife at St. Peter’s Square, Thomas Williams walked past priests in black cassocks and said that the only thing he missed from his own decades of wearing a priest’s collar was “a real sense of helping people very directly.”

“You know my history,” Mr. Williams, 54, said, referring to a past worthy of its own Breitbart headline. “I was looking to re-establish myself again.”

He said his time in the public eye had made him extra sensitive to inflicting harm and he lamented the “horrible” Breitbart commenters.

Britain’s impending departure from the European Union has spawned a cottage industry of Brexitologists.

Market reactions have been sudden and sharp. On Monday, the British pound fell more than 1% against the dollar as traders reacted to a Sunday television interview with the prime minister they read as a sign she would pursue a clear break with the EU.

After Mrs. May reiterated her stance on Monday, both sides interpreted her comments as a sign of support.

Utilities are closing U.S. nuclear-power plants at a rapid clip as they face competition from cheaper sources of electricity and political pressure from critics.

Nuclear plants everywhere are facing a powerful economic foe: fracking. The extraction technique has unlocked vast amounts of natural gas, making generating electricity from that fuel much less expensive and lowering power prices across the country.

Nuclear plants generated 20% of U.S. power in the last 12 months, following natural gas at 35% and coal at 30%, according to federal energy data. The remaining balance was 7% hydro, 6% wind and 1% solar.

A spokesman for the Kremlin dismissed an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community regarding Moscow’s alleged role in the U.S. elections as “amateur,” Russian news agencies said Monday.

U.S. intelligence officials released a report Friday leveling broad accusations against Russia for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and describing what it said were attempts by Moscow to carry out cyberattacks to undermine the elections.