Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Dr. Ronny Jackson, a Navy rear admiral who abandoned his nomination to be secretary of Veterans Affairs amid numerous allegations, will not return to the job of President Trump's personal physician, according to Politico.

In a written statement, Jackson said, "Going into this process, I expected tough questions about how to best care for our veterans, but I did not expect to have to dignify baseless and anonymous attacks on my character and integrity."

Tester, speaking to other media outlets, acknowledged that not all the allegations had been verified, but said they should be investigated. The White House released records that it says show the allegations were not true. The Secret Service said it has found no evidence of an alleged car accident involving drunken driving, one of the claims released by Tester.

Donald Trump began his presidency with a phone call to Australia that he used to complain about a deal made by his predecessor rather than trying to advance U.S. foreign policy. He won zero concessions while alienating a staunch ally.

he is openly showing the world that same petulant face.

Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for “peanuts,” only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!

A raft of retirements, difficulty recruiting candidates and President Trump’s continuing pattern of throwing his party off message have prompted new alarm among Republicans that they could be facing a Democratic electoral wave in November.

But the trends have continued, and perhaps worsened, since that briefing, with two more prominent Republican House members announcing plans to retire from vulnerable seats and a would-be recruit begging off a Senate challenge to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota despite pressure from Trump to run.

In the Camp David presentation, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) described scenarios to the president ranging from a bloodbath where Republicans lost the House “and lost it big,” in the words of one official, to an outcome in which they keep control while losing some seats. McCarthy outlined trends over recent decades for parties in power and spotlighted vulnerable Republican seats where Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Eight years ago, before the 2010 midterms swept the GOP to power, he had drafted a similar presentation with the opposite message for his party. Republicans hold the advantage of a historically favorable electoral map, with more House seats than ever benefiting from Republican-friendly redistricting and a Senate landscape that puts 26 Democratic seats in play, including 10 states that Trump won in 2016, and only eight Republican seats.

From the fifteenth century on, ethnic Armenians made up a significant minority group within the Ottoman Empire. They were primarily Orthodox Christians, unlike the Ottoman Turkish rulers who were Sunni Muslims.  Armenian families were subject to the and to heavy taxation. As "people of the Book," however, the Armenians enjoyed freedom of religion and other protections under Ottoman rule.

To make matters worse, other Christian regions began to break away from the empire entirely, often with aid from the Christian great powers. Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia...  one by one, they broke away from Ottoman control in the last decades of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

The Armenian population began to grow restless under increasingly harsh Ottoman rule in the 1870s.  Armenians started to look to Russia, the Orthodox Christian great power of the time, for protection.

A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections.

The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, said she would hand over the recordings if the United States granted her asylum. She faces criminal charges and deportation to Belarus after coming under suspicion of working in Thailand without a visa at a sex-training seminar in the city of Pattaya.

“If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know,” Ms. Vashukevich said on Monday. “I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.”

Several British newspapers were abuzz with the news former UKIP leader Nigel Farage backed another Brexit vote. The Guardian wrote of “hopes raised for second EU referendum.” The Daily Telegraph also led with Farage, with the headline: “Get ready for second Brexit vote.” The Financial Times featured a story on London bosses being told that “banks will be at heart of Brexit trade talks.” The Daily Telegraph reported on a crackdown on “illegal immigrants’” bank accounts. The Daily Mail ran a story on U.S. President Donald Trump canceling an upcoming visit to the U.K. “amid fears he won’t be made welcome.”

WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that it is "unfair" to call President Donald Trump a racist but said his recently reported controversial comments about immigrants from Haiti and African countries are unhelpful

I think it’s unfair to sort of paint him, ‘oh well, he’s a racist,’ when I know for a fact that he cares very deeply about the people of Haiti because he helped finance a trip where they would get vision back for 200 people in Haiti,” Paul said.

rump's reported comments this week came just as members of Congress have been feverishly working toward getting a compromise on immigration that would reconcile increased funding for border security with safety for recipients of DACA — the Obama-era program that allowed the children of undocumented immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” a way to stay in the country without fear of deportation.

When former president Bill Clinton traveled to North Korea in 2009 on a humanitarian mission to free two U.S. journalists, he delivered strict instructions to his team ahead of their meeting with dictator Kim Jong Il: “We’re not smiling.”

. “You build trust, don’t talk business, establish camaraderie and allow the Trump charisma to steep and marinate to soften them up.”

The two posed for a photo in the Oval Office with Trump proudly showing off the envelope — an image that White House aides promptly distributed to the public.

Trudeau seemed particularly aggrieved by the national-security grounds on which the Trump administration imposed the tariffs. He said Canada was America’s “most steadfast ally” in war and peace, calling the tariffs “an affront to the … thousands of Canadians who have fought and died alongside American comrades-in-arms.” But what he said next perhaps illustrates just how poor relations between the two neighbors have become.

“In closing, I want to be very clear about one thing: Americans remain our partners, friends, and allies. This is not about the American people. We have to believe that at some point their common sense will prevail,” he said in the type of language that successive U.S. administrations have used to describe recalcitrant regimes such as Iran. “But we see no sign of that in this action today by the U.S. administration.”

via Twitter, Trump added: “Canada has treated our Agricultural business and Farmers very poorly for a very long period of time. Highly restrictive on Trade! They must open their markets and take down their trade barriers! They report a really high surplus on trade with us. Do Timber & Lumber in U.S.?” (The U.S. has a $8.4 billion trade surplus in goods and services with Canada.)

On Sunday, administrators for Ravelry, a site for knitters, crocheters, designers and anyone dabbling in the fibre arts, said that they were making any expression of support for Trump and his administration in forum posts, patterns, on their personal profile pages or elsewhere permanently off limits. “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy,” the site’s administrators said in a post.

The Trump ban comes only months after political upheaval gripped the knitting and crochet community around issues of racial and cultural insensitivity. That debate was sparked by popular knitwear designer and blogger Karen Templer, who wrote in January about a planned trip to India, likening it, in her excitement, to visiting Mars. Many in the craft community objected to the characterisation, calling it othering and reductive.

Ravelry said its new policy was not banning participation from people who supported Trump, only expressions of that support.

Budget airlines such as Ireland’s Ryanair and British easyJet revolutionized European travel two decades ago, when they first started offering to scoot people across the continent for as little as $20 a flight. That mode of travel, once celebrated as an opening of the world, is now being recognized for its contribution to global problems.

Tourists have been spooked by the realization that one passenger’s share of the exhaust from a single flight can cancel out a year’s worth of Earth-friendly efforts

“Now, when people tell me why they are taking the train, they say two things in the same breath: They say they are fed up with the stress of flying, and they want to cut their carbon footprint,

The Greenlandic Perspective Survey tells us that 90% of Greenlanders accept that climate change is happening. More than that, it’s making them anxious and depressed.

we might be well advised to take their thoughts and feelings seriously. Where they go, we may very well follow.

To many it seems we already have one foot planted in an unbearably dystopian future. How long will it be before political systems collapse and we turn against one another in a frenzy for the last scraps of sustenance? (Or any other imaginable form of mass-inflicted horror?

About one-third of the food produced and packaged for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That equals 1.3 billion tons a year, worth nearly $680 billion

The figures represent more than just a disastrous misallocation of need and want, given that 10 percent of people in the world are chronically undernourished.

From 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are related to food lost during harvest and production or wasted by consumers

The coronavirus outbreak, which originated in China, has infected more than 550,000 people. Its spread has left businesses around the world counting cost

Here is a selection of maps and charts to help you understand the economic impact of the virus so far.

Big shifts in stock markets, where shares in companies are bought and sold, can affect many investments in pensions or individual savings accounts (ISAs).

President Trump has made rolling back environmental regulations a centerpiece of his administration, moving to erase Obama-era efforts ranging from landmark fuel efficiency standards and coal industry controls to more routine rules on paint solvents and industrial soot.

But all along, scientists and lawyers inside the federal government have embedded statistics and data in regulatory documents that make the rules vulnerable to legal challenges. These facts, often in the technical supporting documents, may hand ammunition to environmental lawyers working to block the president’s policies.

Trump administration loyalists see in the scientists’ efforts evidence that a cabal of bureaucrats and holdovers from previous administrations is intentionally undermining the president and his policies. And there can be little doubt that some career scientists are at odds with the president’s political appointees.But current and former federal employees who work on environmental science and policy say their efforts to include these facts are a civic and professional duty, done to ensure that science informs policy outcomes and protects the public. Some are trying to preserve regulations they spent years of their lives writing.

Dozens of lawmakers rushed back to Washington to thwart a stall tactic from Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

President Trump on Friday signed a sweeping $2 trillion measure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic

but not before a late objection from a lone rank-and-file Republican forced hundreds of lawmakers to rush back to the capital even as the virus continued to spread through their ranks.

On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy; four years after he opened his bar he stopped drinking completely. He didn’t see the problem.“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me.

on March 27, when Kristen got off the phone with her father, she called an ambulance. He was wheezing. His oxygen level turned out to be a dangerously low 70 percent. On April 9, he died of Covid-19. The following day, Artie Nelson, one of his longtime bartenders at JJ Bubbles, and also in his 70s, died of the virus as well.

the combination of being on a cruise ship — a proven petri dish for infections — and visiting a country with a full-blown outbreak is hard to ignore. But there was a way he might have avoided the trip, his daughter speculated. “If Trump had gone on TV with a mask on and said, ‘Hey this is serious,’ I don’t think he would have gone.”

President Donald Trump announced late Friday that he was replacing his acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, with Republican Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a shake-up in the top echelons of the West Wing just as the President confronts a growing public health crisis and girds for reelection.

Though Mulvaney had been a fixture of Trump's administration in various roles over the past three years, the President effectively lost confidence in him months ago, a combination of personality conflicts and frustration at his handling of the impeachment ordeal.

Trump offered the position to Meadows on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said. Mulvaney was on a personal trip and not at work Friday, two officials said. Some staffers found it odd that the acting chief of staff would leave Washington during such a critical time while the administration is dealing with the coronavirus crisis.

what to know to make your trip to the supermarket as safe as possible:

If you have to go to the store, touch as little as possible and sanitize all the stuff you buy when you get home.

most produce is placed on displays by hand — sometimes they’re gloved. But it’s safe to assume that if a piece of produce has been out, it’s been handled by at least 10 people.

Bolsonaro has continued to downplay the pandemic, despite more than 20 members of a delegation he recently led to the US becoming infected with Covid-19.

“It’s an excessive dose of medicine – and too much medicine becomes poison,” Bolsonaro said, rejecting criticism of his administration’s response. “I’m the manager of the team and the team is playing very well, thank God.”

Much of the fury has focused on Bolsonaro’s decision to pose for triumphant photographs and mingle with supporters outside the presidential palace last Sunday despite receiving medical advice to self-quarantine because of his possible exposure to the virus during a trip to meet Donald Trump in the US.