Farmers and grain traders are nervous that China might retaliate by slowing imports of U.S. beans or by erecting trade barriers to them. Chinese officials in February said they would investigate whether the U.S. subsidizes sorghum exports to the country after the Trump administration slapped tariffs on goods like solar panels that are manufactured by Chinese companies.

the world’s largest soybean processor, said in February that he hoped tension between Washington and Beijing dies down. “It’s better that calm minds figure out good things,” he said. “There is a lot of noise and some disruptions in the supply chains coming out of the U.S.”

U.S. farmers hoping to tap that market are growing more soybeans than ever. Many planted soybeans in fields long used for corn and wheat after prices for those grains dropped in recent years. Soybean acreage is on track to match corn this year for the first time in 35 years.

That was in early 2017. It wasn’t until recently, after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, that Ms. Hales would learn that Black4Black and “partner” groups, including BlackMattersUS, were among hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts set up by a pro-Kremlin propaganda agency to meddle in American politics, Facebook records show.

The fake directory is one example of the elaborate schemes that Russian “trolls” have pursued to try to collect personal and business information from Americans, the Journal has found. Leveraging social media, Russians have collected data by peddling niche business directories, convincing activists to sign petitions and bankrolling self-defense training classes in return for student information.

which also owns Instagram, said the company allows users to find out whether they have “liked” or “followed” any Russia-backed accounts through an online tool..

Private lenders are pushing to break up the government’s near monopoly in the $100 billion-a-year student-loan market.

The banking industry’s main lobbying group, the Consumer Bankers Association, is pressing for the government to instate caps on how much individual graduate students and parents of undergraduates can borrow from the government to cover tuition. That would force many families to turn to private lenders to cover portions of their bills. While that could mean lower interest rates for some, it could constrain funding to households with blemished credit histories.

At stake is potentially billions of dollars in new business for private lenders, a group currently dominated by SLM Corp. , better known as Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo & Co., and Discover Financial Services .

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump is pushing his staff to draft a proclamation as soon as Thursday that would begin implementing his proposed tariffs on aluminum and steel, White House officials said, despite concerns from trade partners and lawmakers over the sweeping nature of the proposa

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that it was possible the White House would issue waivers for certain countries but that no decisions had been made by Mr. Trump. Speaking to lawmakers on Tuesday, Mr. Mnuchin said that Mexico and Canada probably would be exempted from the tariffs if a new North American Free Trade Agreement is negotiated.

Mr. Mnuchin has publicly supported the tariffs but has privately argued in favor of more targeted measures. That has put him alongside National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, who said Tuesday he would resign from the White House after Mr. Trump blindsided his senior staff by announcing the tariffs last week.

SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told a visiting South Korean delegation that he was willing to hold talks with the U.S. about giving up nuclear weapons and normalizing relations with Washington, officials in Seoul said Tuesday.

North Korea’s government issued no statement of its own on Tuesday. On Monday, state media there said Mr. Kim had exchanged “in-depth views on the issues for easing the acute military tensions” on the Korean peninsula.

On Tuesday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted: “Possible progress being made in talks with North Korea. For the first time in many years, a serious effort is being made by all parties concerned.

We didn’t appreciate having a government that was relatively honest and free of venality until we had one riddled with corruption. And we didn’t know how wildly irresponsible Republican criticisms of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were until the GOP fell silent in the face of abuse after abuse from President Trump. Obama was “not presidential” for wearing a tan suit? Benghazi? Really?

Ryan said he did not run the committee, thus pushing away an obligation to act. Imagine that: A House speaker who uses all of his prerogatives to push through his own priorities claims utter powerlessness in the face of a runaway committee chairman.

how Trump springs new policies with little preparation and changes his views news cycle to news cycle; how ill-prepared Trump and many of his aides were for the rigors of the White House; and how recklessly they cast aside norms and rules aimed at preventing conflicts of interest and sleaze.

As part of an effort to protect young “dreamers” from deportation in exchange for border wall funding, Trump convened a bipartisan meeting at the White House in January.

“It really suggests that his effectiveness is compromised as long as his word is unreliable.” Trump’s style poses challenges for members of both parties, observers say.

Fresh uncertainty about where Trump stands on guns came Friday as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders fielded questions from reporters about whether the president remains committed to a proposal to raise the age to purchase rifles and shotguns to 21 from 18 — an idea opposed by the NRA.

In Texas-sized congressional primaries, most GOP candidates run toward Trump

In several crowded Texas congressional primaries Tuesday, Republican candidates have decided that the best way to stand out is to stand squarely in Trump’s shadow — a campaign strategy that has been only slightly scrambled last week by the president’s sudden embrace of gun control and protectionist tariffs.

Isaac’s “Make America Like Texas” message is calibrated to couple Trump’s charisma to the more traditional Lone Star brand of small-government conservatism: “When I talk to people that move to Texas, I say, ‘Welcome to Texas, vote accordingly,’ because it’s not a mistake,” he said. “Our model works

Boko Haram’s abduction of more than 100 Nigerian schoolgirls last week is sending political shock waves through a key U.S. counterterrorism ally in Africa as President Muhammadu Buhari weighs whether to seek re-election.

won 2015 elections on a campaign to defeat the Islamist insurgency and liberate more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls, whose 2014 abduction prompted a global outcry.

The kidnapping of 110 girls from the Dapchi Government Girls Science and Technical College in northeastern Yobe state has emboldened his critics, who draw parallels to the Chibok abductions and the potential political fallout in Africa’s most-populous nation and biggest economy.

BERLIN—Germany’s Social Democrats agreed to prolong their unpopular ruling coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, ending a period of political uncertainty unprecedented in the country’s recent history.

The vote lifted the last hurdle for Ms. Merkel to start her fourth, and likely last, term as leader of Europe’s largest economy nearly half a year after an inconclusive general election left the country without a clear ruling majority.

Party officials said a new government would now be formed by March 14, replacing the caretaker administration that has govern the country since last September.

like that Jack in the Box ad that appears whenever you get near one, in whichever app you have open at the time—and as popular apps harvest your lucrative location data, the potential for leaking or exploiting this data has never been higher.

Every time you say “yes” to an app that asks to know your location, you are also potentially authorizing that app to sell your data.

They aim to compile a complete record of where everyone in America spends their time, in order to chop those histories into market segments to sell to corporate advertisers.

The structure was one of the first new pieces of a border wall put in place since the start of a lengthy construction project in February just west of the border crossing in downtown Calexico, a small, mostly Hispanic farming town.

Mr. Kim said the roughly $18 million project was funded by Congress last year. He said the project happens to be getting under way in the midst of Mr. Trump’s continuing effort to build a wall along the Mexican border. “We want to make sure everyone knows what it is and what it isn’t,” Mr. Kim said.

California has become a flashpoint in the debate over the president’s immigration policies, including his proposal to build a wall. The state has sued the administration multiple times challenging its immigration policies.

Rob Goldman, defended Facebook’s response and argued the Russians bought ads to exploit social divisions, not primarily to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election, say people who heard his remarks.

ddress Russian manipulation and suggested there were “easy” solutions to the problem that included a better-educated population. He said influencing the election wasn’t the “main goal” of the Russian ads, which some in Washington interpreted as contradicting the indictment.

Facebook’s executive team was alerted to the potential Russian manipulation efforts in a Dec. 9, 2016, memo from the company’s security team, say people familiar with the memo. But the company waited nine months before publicly saying that Russian manipulation had occurred.

resident Xi Jinping is counting on a gathering of nearly 3,000 lawmakers to show unequivocal support for his bid to govern China indefinitely by setting aside a decades-old safeguard against despotic rule.

Mr. Xi has steadily dismantled the model of collective leadership that started taking shape in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping. Seeking to prevent a return to the Mao-era concentration of power, Deng’s administration set a constitutional cap of two presidential terms in 1982 and established clearer divisions of duties between party and state.

r, the party proclaimed Mr. Xi as its greatest living theorist and gave him a second five-year term without naming a likely successor—a signal of his plans to stay in power for the long haul.

President Trump has been talking up a new strategy in the nation’s struggle against the opioid epidemic: imposing the death penalty on drug dealers, just as they do in Singapore and Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines.

“You have to have strength, and you have to have toughness — the drug dealers, the drug pushers are, they’re really doing damage, they’re really doing damage,

Some countries have a very, very tough penalty — the ultimate penalty — and by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do.

Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.

In Venezuela, children are dying. People are starving and being persecuted. What they’re getting from us is a door in the face.

Nowhere is the crisis more acute than here in Colombia, where 3,000 troops are fanning out across the 1,400-mile border to contain an influx of Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy and an increasingly repressive socialist regime.

The smartphone-wielding students of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School told the story of the shooting they survived by broadcasting what they saw to the world.

Those same students also were bombarded with horrific images, through those same phones, sometimes while still hiding in classrooms.

During the shooting, having a phone was a double-edged sword. You had access to information, what was happening in real time in terms of where the shooter was

Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ

He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.

he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,

Markets fell after President Donald Trump announced planned tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, an effect that was exacerbated by what the move symbolizes fo

When a key economic input suddenly becomes scarce, &nbsp;it’s called a supply shock: It pushes costs up and economic activity down.

This helps explain why markets have responded so badly to President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum. Like a geopolitical shock that reduces the supply of oil, it’s bad for both inflation and growth.

A company in Liechtenstein built the world’s fastest roller coaster, part of a niche industry combining innovation with no economies of scale

ABU DHABI—The world’s fastest roller coaster, which can reach 149 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds, is at an amusement park called—what else?—Ferrari World, in Abu Dhabi.

The tiny alpine principality, sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, is one of a handful of European countries that dominate the niche business of producing roller coasters.