White House Weighing More Russia Sanctions

The leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are set to unveil a bipartisan resolution authorizing the use of military force overseas. The proposal would accelerate a debate that Congress has been reluctant to have, but that’s taking on new urgency after President Donald Trump ordered airstrikes on Syria. The resolution is expected to revisit the broad authorizations Congress approved in 2001 and 2002 for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of the $3.9 million Trump’ s committee spent in the first quarter of 2018, more than $834,000 went to eight law firms and the Trump Corp. for legal fees, according to new Federal Election Commission records filed Sunday. The biggest share of legal payments in the first quarter of this year– about $348,000– went to Jones Day, a law firm representing the campaign in the…

HOUSTON— Former first lady Barbara Bush is in“ failing health” and will not seek additional medical treatment, a Bush family spokesman said Sunday. “Following a recent series of hospitalizations, and after consulting her family and doctors, Mrs. Bush, now age 92, has decided not to seek additional medical treatment and will instead focus on comfort care,” spokesman…

The Republican National Committee has committed $250 million to a midterm election strategy that has one goal above all else: Preserve the party’s House majority for the rest of President Donald Trump’s first term. Facing the prospect of a blue wave this fall, the White House’s political arm is devoting unprecedented resources to building an army of paid staff and trained volunteers across more than two dozen states.

Experts say the scandal over Facebook user data misses a more fundamental question: Is the company really changing its relationship with users, or just tinkering with its insatiable appetite for data? Facebook’s latest round of privacy changes don’t address the core of its business model, which relies on users to share information that can be used to sell ads. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify to Congress starting Tuesday.

Syrian war monitors say government forces and their allies are on alert and taking precautionary measures at military bases across the country amid fears of a U.S. military attack. The measures come as President Donald Trump is threatening an imminent military strike against Syria, vowing to respond “forcefully” to Saturday’s apparent chemical weapons attack on civilians. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that as of Monday night, troops have been on a 72-hour alert.

WASHINGTON— President Trump on Monday denounced the suspected chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of people in Syria over the weekend as“ atrocious,” and said he will make a decision in the next 24 to 48 hours about whether to retaliate militarily as he did to a similar assault last year. Addressing Syria’ s patrons in Moscow and Tehran, Mr. Trump added:“ If it’ s…

SANTA FE— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told a group of mostly educators in Santa Fe on Friday that President Donald Trump’ s tax plan approved by a Republican Congress is nothing but a scam. The purpose, in Pelosi’ s words, is to warn the public that the GOP tax plan“ is a scam, a major scam and it’ s being presented as something that is supposed to be good for working…

President Donald Trump has instructed the U.S. trade representative to consider slapping $100 billion in additional tariffs on Chinese goods. The move comes a day after China issued a $50 billion list of U.S. goods including soybeans and small aircraft for possible tariff hikes in an escalating and potentially damaging dispute.

More than 300 women from the two major parties have filed candidacy papers so far to run for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a modern-day record for female candidates. The number is sure to grow, with filing deadlines still to come in about half the states. The wave is on both sides of the aisle, but the majority of women running for the House are Democrats, energized by policies of the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress.

Asian stock markets have rebounded from sharp losses triggered by escalating trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Tokyo stocks surged 1.5 percent Thursday and South Korea’s benchmark jumped 1.2 percent.

China’s threat to raise tariffs on U.S. goods could be a disaster for American soybean farmers but a boon to their Brazilian and Argentine competitors, European aerospace companies and Japanese whiskey distillers. Regulators picked products China can get elsewhere when they made a $50 billion list including soybeans and small aircraft targeted for possible retaliation in a spiraling technology dispute with Washington.

—For more than a year, Wall Street has largely ignored the unpredictability and chaos that has plagued Donald Trump’s administration, confident that the businessman-turned-president’s policies would juice the economy and that a team of mainstream advisers would keep more controversial proposals at bay. A triple whammy of tariffs, Twitter threats against…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify April 10 and 11 before Senate and House committees as his company grapples with the privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to President Donald Trump. But new federal rules for protecting data and privacy appear unlikely from the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress.

WASHINGTON— President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he expects to decide“ very quickly” whether to remove U.S. troops from war-torn Syria, saying their primary mission was to defeat the Islamic State group and“ we’ ve almost completed that task.”. In fact, as Trump addressed reporters at the White House, the top U.S. general overseeing the anti- IS campaign in Syria and…

Consumers getting financial assistance under the Affordable Care Act will pay lower premiums this year, even though the “list price” for their health insurance shot up.

U.S. officials have started actively planning for the likelihood that Donald Trump will announce next month the U.S. is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. No one knows exactly what would happen next, nor how Iran would respond. The planning is at an early stage but has taken on greater urgency as the clock ticks toward the mid-May deadline. Another catalyst is the anticipated arrival of two new Trump aides strongly opposed to the deal: Mike Pompeo and John Bolton

Trump administration officials say they’re crafting a new legislative package aimed at closing immigration “loopholes.” It comes following calls by the president for Republican lawmakers to immediately pass a border bill, even if it means using the “nuclear option” to muscle it through. In a series of tweets Monday, Trump called current U.S. immigration laws “an Obama joke,” accused Democrats of allowing “open borders, drugs and crimes” and warned Mexico to halt the “caravans” of immigrants.

The Trump administration says it is amenable to a White House meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That raises the prospect of the Russian president’s first visit in more than a decade even as relations between the two powers have eroded. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the White House was among “a number of potential venues” discussed in Trump’s telephone call last month with Putin.

BEIJING- China says it’s rolling out new tariffs on U.S. meat, fruit and other products as retaliation against taxes approved by President Donald Trump on imported steel and aluminum. China’s Customs Tariff Commission is increasing the tariff rate on eight imported U.S. products, including pork, by 25 percent. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a…

President Donald Trump’s federal tax overhaul is a short-term boon for most states, but Oregon is set to miss out. Instead of a bonus, Oregon faces a loss of $217 million in the two years after the overhaul goes into effect, the largest of any state that has revealed its predictions. Democrats created a plan to avoid losing hundreds of millions of dollars, but Republicans are using it to try to make political inroads in this deep blue state.

A federal judge Wednesday allowed Maryland and the District of Columbia to proceed with their lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of accepting unconstitutional gifts from foreign interests, but limited the case to the president’s involvement with the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

The president made that pledge a day after retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens expressed a different view.

“I am well aware that people are skeptical of me discussing the topic,” Mrs. Trump said at a roundtable discussion with technology industry leaders at the White House. Mrs. Trump convened the meeting with executives from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft and others to discuss the effects of technology on young people. As first lady, Mrs. Trump said, she receives “many…

President Donald Trump says Republicans are “going to win” in this year’s midterm elections _ and warns of dire consequences if they don’t. Trump made the prediction Tuesday during rah-rah remarks at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual March fundraiser. He says House Democrats are “way outside of the American mainstream.” And he warns that even if they “campaign as moderates,” they “always” wind up governing “like radicals.”

The White House is celebrating a birthday: President Donald Trump’s son, Barron, turned 12 on Tuesday. Barron is the youngest of the president’s five children, and is a sixth-grader at a private school in Maryland. There was no immediate word from the White House on how the president and first lady Melania Trump are marking the occasion.

At the meeting this week of the Federal Open Markets Committee, the first with Jerome Powell as chairman, the Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates by 25 basis points, renew its commitment to two more hikes of similar size in 2018, and reaffirm the plan to gradually reduce the size of its balance sheet. While the economic baseline will remain largely…

The Federal Reserve’s first meeting under Jerome Powell’s leadership will likely end Wednesday with an announcement that the Fed will resume its modest interest rate hikes. But investors will be most attuned to what Powell signals at his first news conference about whether and how he might steer the Fed’s policymaking differently from his predecessor, Janet Yellen. Will he, for example, be inclined to step up the pace of Fed rate hikes?

A former employee of a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm says the firm “took fake news to the next level” using data inappropriately obtained from Facebook. Chris Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, said Monday that the group ‘injected content’ all around a person to change their perception of what was actually happening.

Democrats face a conundrum in some midterm campaigns as the party tries to decide whether liberals, moderates or some combination are best to take on Republicans in territory won by Donald Trump in 2016. Recent upsets by Alabama Sen. Doug Jones and Pennsylvania congressional candidate Conor Lamb provide a model for a moderate tone and emphasis on economics. But some party liberals want more on everything from health care to gun regulations, even in Trump territory.

Vice President Mike Pence will outline the administration’s view on Latin America and the Caribbean next week in a speech that lays the groundwork for President Donald Trump’s April trip to South America. The White House said Pence would use his address to the Organization of American States to call on nations to increase pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to address the country’s humanitarian crisis, release political prisoners and hold free and fair elections.

Conservative pressure groups fired a warning shot Monday at members of Congress eyeing measures that would free up federal funding to stabilize Obamacare’s wobbly markets. Heritage Action and more than a dozen other organizations said attempts to subsidize extra-pricy customers with federal tax dollars or restore “cost-sharing” payments that…

The federal government recorded a budget deficit of $215.2 billion in February, up significantly from a year ago as the impact of the GOP tax cuts passed in December begin to surface. The Treasury Department reports that the February deficit was 12.1 percent higher than a year ago, reflecting in part a drop of $5 billion in individual withholding taxes paid last month compared to a year ago.

Tanks, however, will not appear in the Nov. 11 procession– as they could damage the streets of Washington, D.C.– but the event will include plenty of airplane flyovers, according to the office of Defense Secretary James Mattis, whose staff will coordinate the festivities. Trump was delighted by France’s Bastille Day celebration during a visit to Paris last July, and…

Idaho had been vetting plans that would impose annual limits on claims and set prices based on medical history- two things barred by the Affordable Care Act. The moved enraged Democrats and was viewed as a key test of how far red states could test the limits of President Obama’s law under President Trump, after Republicans failed to repeal it.

The Trump administration is committed to transforming the health care system into one that emphasizes value over marathon tests with hazy prices, while empowering consumers to find doctors and services the way they find restaurants on Yelp or Open Table, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told health insurers.

—They crowded around the White House conference table this past week, lawmakers from California, Connecticut, Texas and Florida, eager to share their state’s painful experience with gun violence. Despite a clamor for action in the wake of the Florida school shooting, a powerful group of vulnerable lawmakers— both Republicans and Democrats— have pointedly…

WASHINGTON Action on gun legislation skidded to a halt Thursday in Congress not for a lack of bipartisan proposals, but because President Donald Trump’s stunning shift on gun policy left some in his party confused, irritated and scrambling to figure out what to do next. Republicans squirmed over Trump’s call for stricter gun laws after the assault on a Florida…

WASHINGTON Ordering combative action on foreign trade, President Donald Trump declared Thursday the U.S. will impose steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, escalating tensions with China and other trading partners and raising the prospect of higher prices for American consumers and companies. Trump said firm action was crucial to protect U.S….

The White House is hosting an opioids summit to highlight Trump administration efforts to combat the opioid crisis. First lady Melania Trump is scheduled to open Thursday’s event at the White House. Officials from the departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, State, Justice and Homeland Security will provide updates on how they are tackling the epidemic.

A Massachusetts man has been charged with sending a letter with a white powder to Donald Trump Jr. that landed his wife, Vanessa, in the hospital. Daniel Frisiello, of Beverly, was arrested Thursday. He is expected to appear in federal court in Worcester later Thursday. It could not immediately be determined if he has a lawyer.

Elections on the calendar for developing economies around the world in 2018 may bring more volatility to emerging-market funds, which were some of last year’s biggest winners. Much attention is on elections in Brazil and Mexico, which are two of the larger components of many emerging-market funds.

White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal aides, is resigning. That’s according to a White House official briefed on her plans but not authorized to discuss them publicly. The news comes a day after Hicks was interviewed for nine hours by the panel investigating Russia interference in the 2016 election and contact between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

The White House is outlining its goals for prison reform with a focus on inmates’ re-entry into society and rehabilitation. Administration officials said Tuesday they are sending their principles to lawmakers for them to draw up legislation. They said they were not including sentencing reforms because they did not see a path forward at this time.