The White House abruptly dismissed a senior National Security Council aide on Friday after receiving reports that he had publicly laced into the president and his senior aides, including son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump at an event hosted by a Washington think tank.
The aide, Craig Deare, was serving as the NSC's senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Earlier in the week, at a private, off-the-record roundtable hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center for a group of about two dozen scholars, Deare harshly criticized the president and his chief strategist Steve Bannon and railed against the dysfunction paralyzing the Trump White House, according to a source familiar with the situation.
White House dismisses NSC aide after harsh criticism of Trump
Survey: Historians rank Obama 12th best president
Historians have ranked Barack Obama the 12th best president of all time, the highest rated since President Ronald Reagan, in a new C-SPAN survey released Friday.
Less than a month after exiting the White House, Obama received high marks from presidential historians for his pursuit of "equal justice for all" and for his commanding "moral authority," ranking third and seventh among all former presidents in each respective category. The 44th president also cracked a top 10 ranking for his "economic management" and public persuasion.
Mark Sanford has nothing left to lose. And he’s here to haunt Donald Trump.
None of this feels normal. The congressman greets me inside his Washington office wearing a wrinkly collared shirt with its top two buttons undone, faded denim jeans and grungy, navy blue Crocs that expose his leather-textured feet.
Nearing the end of our 30-minute interview, he cancels other appointments and extends our conversation by an hour. He repeatedly brings up his extramarital affair, unsolicited, pointing to the lessons learned and relationships lost. He acknowledges and embraces his own vulnerability—political, emotional and otherwise. He veers on and off the record, asking himself rhetorical questions, occasionally growing teary-eyed, and twice referring to our session as “my Catholic confessional.”
And then he does the strangest thing of all: He lays waste to the president of his own party.
Trump EPA nominee ordered to release emails with energy industry
An Oklahoma judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump's nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency to turn over thousands of emails he exchanged with or about the fossil fuel industry by next Tuesday, though he may already be confirmed for the position by then.
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, whose confirmation hearing for head of the EPA is scheduled for Friday, was ordered by Oklahoma County District Judge Aletia Haynes Timmons to fulfill public records requests for more than 3,000 emails by the Center for Media and Democracy.
TVNL Comment; The Senate vote should be postponed until the contents of the emails are revealed. But they will vote before Tuesday. Watch this space.
Yep. Pruitt was just confirmed. The swamp increases.
Poll: Trump's approval rating at 39 percent
President Trump’s approval rating is at 39 percent, according to a new poll.
The latest Pew Research Center poll released Thursday shows Trump at a historic low compared with prior presidents in their first weeks in office.
The poll found just 39 percent approve of his job performance while 56 percent disapprove.
Astronomers find 60 new planets, including a 'super Earth'
A group of international researchers hit the planetary jackpot by spotting 60 new planets, including a “super Earth.”
The team also found evidence of 54 other planets, bringing the total of new exoplanets to over 100, according to a statement from the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, which participated in the study.
It's too late to stop the senseless capture of Palestinian land
uttoned up against a biting wind, Khalil Tufakji, a 65-year-old Palestinian cartographer, points down from the Mount of Olives in the east of Jerusalem towards a huge wasteland – the last remaining space in the ring of Jewish settlements that surround the city.
This 35 sq km plot of West Bank land was confiscated several years ago and the settlement of Maale Adumim, now home to 40,000 people, was built on the south-eastern corner. But most of the plot still remains empty.
DuPont settles lawsuits over leak of chemical used to make Teflon
DuPont and Chemours Co have agreed to pay $671 million in cash to settle thousands of lawsuits involving a leak of a toxic chemical used to make Teflon, the companies said on Monday.
Shares of Chemours jumped 13 percent. The company said it would pay half of the settlement, although liability for litigation connected with the chemical was passed onto it when DuPont spun it off in 2015.
In addition, Jefferies analyst Alexander Laurence said the liability was $300 million below Wall Street estimates, and DuPont shares rose 1 percent.
Pakistan: Deadly bomb blast rips through Lahore rally
A powerful bomb blast on Monday ripped through a protest in the Pakistani city of Lahore, killing at least 11 people and wounding dozens, according to officials.
The explosion went off in Lahore's busy Mall Road during a rally attended by hundreds of pharmacists protesting against a new government law outside the provincial assembly building.
Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, a Pakistani Taliban-linked armed group, claimed responsibility for the attack, which also wounded at least 30 people, including media personnel covering the protest.
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