First Run News

The Trump administration has a new opportunity to target the funding of Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions.  The Department of Health and Human Services Department (HHS) will soon set the terms for obtaining grants under Title X, a federally funded family planning program long reviled by conservatives. Officials within HHS who have been critical of Title X in the past now have the opportunity to reshape the program to fit the anti-abortion views of the administration.   Teresa Manning, the deputy assistant secretary of the office of population affairs at HHS, which over

Nebraska's approval of the Keystone XL pipeline was a key step in supporters’ years-long fight to build the controversial project. But the decision raised fresh questions about the future of the pipeline, which is still many regulatory and legal decisions away from the getting the final green light. Here's what to watch as the debate over the $8 billion, 830,000-barrel-per-day Keystone XL pipeline moves forward.   Developers need more permits Nebraska's decision Monday to approve the pipeline route was a landmark moment in the Keystone saga, but it’s not the final time regulat

President Trump said Friday that he turned down being named Time's "Person of the Year" after the magazine only told him he "probably" would be selected. The magazine did not respond to The Hill's request for comment, but it did tweet a short statement saying it "does not comment on our choice until publication." Trump was previously named Time's 2016 "Person of the Year" last December. 

President Trump on Friday announced that he is appointing Office of Management and Budget Director MORE as acting director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), setting up a potential fight over the agency's future.  Earlier Friday, CFPB head Richard Cordray announced that he was stepping down at the end of the day and elevated his chief of staff, Leandra English, to deputy director. Cordray, the first and only director the agency has seen since it wa

The unofficial start of the holiday shopping season was this week, when many national retailers opened their doors and offered major sales.

Jennifer Gammell has not sat out Black Friday for 19 years — not when she was traveling over the holiday weekend, or living paycheck to paycheck as a young single mother, or even when some of the bargains online began to look more enticing than the doorbuster deals being offered in stores. The experience has changed over the years. Early on, it was just her and her son Kyle, now 23, waiting in line for discounts (and, sometimes, free toy penguins) at the local Mervyn’s.

There are 422 living trees for every human on Earth — 3.04 trillion overall — and during a couple of weeks each fall, a person can feel plainly outnumbered. Is it possible that a trillion of those trees have deposited their leaves in the front yard? And why are so many of them still green? That global tree census comes from a 2015 study in the journal Nature. And reading its methodology in full — biome-level validation estimates! predictive regression models!

There are 422 living trees for every human on Earth — 3.04 trillion overall — and during a couple of weeks each fall, a person can feel plainly outnumbered. Is it possible that a trillion of those trees have deposited their leaves in the front yard? And why are so many of them still green? That global tree census comes from a 2015 study in the journal Nature. And reading its methodology in full — biome-level validation estimates! predictive regression models!