First Run News

President Trump on Wednesday unleashed one of his most inflammatory strings of tweets since his inauguration, stoking anti-Islamic fervor by posting a series of videos first publicized by a far-right, anti-Muslim leader from Great Britain that outraged political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. The president also resurfaced unfounded allegations that NBC News host Joe Scarborough was somehow involved in the death of an intern who worked in his old congressional office, giving new ammunition to critics who say he traffics in conspiracy theories. The reaction from the media and the politic

President Trump’s latest Twitter controversy is reverberating across the Atlantic, complicating U.S. relations with one of its most stalwart allies, the United Kingdom. The president's sharing of anti-Muslim videos from a leader of a fringe ultranationalist party in Britain early Wednesday ignited an instant firestorm on social media. Trump was criticized by Muslim groups and liberals in the U.S., including Sen.

President Trump on Wednesday urged British Prime Minister Theresa May to focus on terrorism rather than on him. His tweet follows May's condemnation of Trump’s Wednesday retweets of videos purporting to show violence committed by Muslims.  “Theresa @theresamay, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom.

The Senate voted to begin debate on its tax cut bill Wednesday, edging Republicans closer to their first major legislative victory under President Trump as they seek to finish the chamber’s work on the measure by the end of the week. Senators voted 52-48 to take up the House-passed legislation, which is being used as a vehicle for the Senate bill. GOP Sens. MORE (Ariz.) all said they would agree to start debate before it began, despite various worries about the legislation. In another sign of GOP momentum, Sen.

WASHINGTON — Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said on Wednesday that the country’s economic expansion had broadened and strengthened, and that she expected the growth to continue. Ms. Yellen’s upbeat assessment, delivered to the Joint Economic Committee, is likely to reinforce expectations the Fed will raise its benchmark interest rate in mid-December.

SAN FRANCISCO — The last-minute evidence quickly mounted. A letter and an email full of damning claims. Apps that sent self-destructing messages. A payment of $4.5 million to an employee who threatened to be a whistle-blower — and an additional $3 million to his lawyer. In two days of testimony that ended Wednesday in Federal District Court in San Francisco, Uber lawyers had to defend what a federal judge has described as an effort to withhold evidence from an intellectual-theft trial.

A man’s startling decision to have a co-worker hold on to his gun, and the co-worker’s instinct to alert a police officer, ended a killer’s reign of terror in Tampa, Fla., the police said on Wednesday, after arresting a man and charging him in four fatal shootings committed on the streets of a quiet residential neighborhood. The accused gunman, Howell Emanuel Donaldson III, 24, has no prior criminal history, and even after interviewing him, investigators have no idea why he carried out the four apparently random, unconnected killings, Chief Brian Dugan of the Tampa police said. Mr.

North Korea’s latest intercontinental ballistic missile test has provoked understandable alarm, particularly among Americans worried about the threat. But many analysts reacted with something closer to grizzled stoicism, greeting the launch as dispiriting but unsurprising confirmation of North Korea’s capabilities and intentions.

WASHINGTON — When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis declared on Tuesday that North Korea now had the missile capability to “threaten everywhere in the world, basically,” he hinted at a long-running debate inside the United States government: Can the same strategy that worked against the Soviet Union — mutually assured destruction — also work against a far smaller adversary? The answer is yes, of course it can, if the problem is defined as keeping Pyongyang from unleashing a surprise attack on the continental U

Two of the Republican senators who have stepped forward to block the party’s dash toward a tax overhaul say they are withholding their support to stick up for Main Street.