America

    President Trump meets with Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress. Chuck and Nancy and Donald and Ivanka seemed to thoroughly enjoy their meeting at the White House the other day. Mitch and Paul, not so much. Does it really surprise anyone that President Trump betrayed the Republican leaders who have been trying their best to carry water for him on Capitol Hill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and is playing footsie with their Democratic rivals? It shouldn’t. One thing that should be blindingly obvious by now is that political loyalty, for the president, is a one-way street. Yes, McConnell and Ryan embarrassed themselves and squandered precious political capital in a long, fruitless attempt to repeal and replace ...

    The University of Utah Hospital, where a nurse was manhandled and arrested by police as she protected the legal rights of a patient, has imposed new restrictions on law enforcement, including barring officers from patient-care areas and from direct contact with nurses. Gordon Crabtree, interim chief executive of the hospital, said at a Monday news conference that he was deeply troubled by the arrest and manhandling of burn unit nurse Alex Wubbels on July 26. In accord with hospital policy and the law, she had refused to allow a Salt Lake City police officer to take a blood sample from an unconscious patient. Wubbels obtained a copy of the body cam video of the confrontation and, after consulting her lawyer, the hospital and police officials, released it last week. This wil...

    Barack Obama warned Donald Trump to uphold the rule of law and not undermine the international order in a newly revealed letter from the 44th US president to his successor. The former president gave Trump three key pieces of advice in a letter he left in the Oval Office when he departed the White House. The letter was published on Sunday by CNN. We’ve both been blessed, in different ways, with great good fortune,” Obama told his successor. “Not everyone is so lucky. It’s up to us to do everything we can [to] build more ladders of success for every child and family that’s willing to work hard. Turning to international relations, Obama told Trump, who had embraced isolationism throughout his campaign: American leadership in this world really is indispensable. He added: It’s ...

    First lady Melania Trump is either blissfully unaware of the heat she took last week for her “storm stilettos,” or she doesn’t care what people think. On Sept. 2, on their way to a second visit to hurricane-ravaged Houston, she once again strode with her husband across the White House lawn in sky-high heels. The Trumps departed from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., just before 10 a.m. Saturday en route to Houston. They’re returning to Texas for a second visit since the megastorm hit and will also visit neighboring Louisiana. One week after Harvey slammed into southeast Texas as a Category 4 hurricane, rescuers were still searching by air and boat for people trapped in flooded homes. On her first visit to Houston after the hurricane, the first lady took a lo...

    As it turns out, this colorless, flammable gas is arguably the most important petrochemical on the planet and much of it comes from the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast. Ethylene is one of the big reasons the damage wrought by Hurricane Harvey in the chemical communities along the Gulf of Mexico is likely to ripple through U.S. manufacturing of essential items from milk jugs to mattresses. Ethylene really is the major petrochemical that impacts the entire industry, said Chirag Kothari, an analyst at consultant Nexant. Texas alone produces nearly three-quarters of the country’s supply of one of the most basic chemical building blocks. Ethylene is the foundation for making plastics essential to U.S. consumer and industrial goods, feeding into car parts used by Detroit and diape...

    The United States flew some of its most advanced warplanes in bombing drills with ally South Korea on Thursday, a clear warning after North Korea launched a midrange ballistic missile designed to carry nuclear bombs over Japan earlier this week, the U.S. and South Korean militaries said. North Korea hates such displays of U.S. military might at close range and will likely respond with fury. Two U.S. B-1B supersonic bombers and four F-35B stealth fighter jets joined four South Korean F-15 fighters in live-fire exercises at a military field in eastern South Korea that simulated precision strikes against the North's "core facilities," according to the U.S. Pacific Command and South Korea's Defense Ministry. The B-1Bs were flown in from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam while th...

    As floodwaters receded and rescuers searched waterlogged neighborhoods for more potential victims, Houston officials began turning their attention to finding temporary housing for those in shelters and getting enough gasoline for people to fill up cars but also to the city's long-term recovery, which will take years and billions of dollars. Authorities raised the death toll from the storm to 39 late Thursday. And the latest statewide damage surveys revealed the staggering extent of the destruction. The Texas Department of Public Safety said more than 37,000 homes were heavily damaged and nearly 7,000 were destroyed, figures that did not include the tens of thousands of homes with minor damage. About 325,000 people have already sought federal emergency aid in the wake of Ha...

    First daughter and senior adviser to the president Ivanka Trump has earned a petty nickname among fellow West Wing aides: princess royal. That's according to a revealing Vanity Fair story out this week. After the first daughter briefly took President Trump's place at a conference table with world leaders at the G-20 summit last month, many were aghast, pointing out that no one elected her. (Though, as German chancellor Angela Merkel pointed out, it's not unusual for a delegate to take the place of a president at these events.) Excuse me, one former Trump adviser told Vanity Fair. This is not a royal family, and she's not the princess royal. But that's exactly what White House aides have taken to calling the first daughter - behind her back, of course. The story focused on ...

    Donald Trump has been criticised after saying that his heart goes out to the victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, despite failing to meet a single victim as he visited the disaster stricken state. After witnessing first hand the horror & devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!, the President posted on Twitter yesterday. But his message is a direct contrast to his actual visit where he delivered a rally-like speech and reportedly boasted of the amount of people who had turned out to hear his message. I will tell you, this is historic, it’s epic, he told a crowd during his visit. During the brief trip, he also failed to honour the memory of the 19 lives claimed by the disaster, and instead opted to deliver a b...

    First Lady Melania Trump walks on stilettos to board Air Force One en route to Texas to view the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey. Melania Trump is the kind of woman who travels to a flood-ravaged state in a pair of black snakeskin stilettos. Heels this high are not practical. But Trump is not the kind of woman who has to be practical. Heels this high are not comfortable. Comfort is not the point. Neither hers nor yours. Trump is the kind of woman who knows that when she walks from the White House to Marine One there will be photographers, and so she will dress accordingly. On this soggy Tuesday morning, she wore her stilettos with a pair of cropped black trousers and an Army-green bomber jacket. Her hair was nicely blown out, and she was wearing a pair of sunglasses thou...