First Run News

WASHINGTON — A day after Republican leaders said that their tax overhaul plan would be released in just two weeks, the Republican chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee had a different message: not so fast. Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah sought on Thursday to temper anticipation that a fully developed tax plan would be ready for public consumption by the end of the month, insisting that his committee would use a bipartisan process to craft legislation.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said Thursday that the most important thing he could do during his tenure was to make the State Department more efficient, and in a lengthy letter to employees he promised that the efforts would yield significant savings. To his critics, his remarks and the letter outlining his proposals were simply more evidence of their contention that the former petroleum engineer is still acting like a corporate chief executive and not the nation’s chief diplomat. In the letter, Mr.

WASHINGTON — President Trump thrust himself back into the racial storms of Charlottesville on Thursday, repeating his charge that those who resisted the neo-Nazis and white supremacists were as much to blame as the alt-right crowds who marched on the Virginia college town. Mr. Trump was characterizing his side of a conversation on Wednesday with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, during which Mr.

WASHINGTON — Shortly after learning in May that a special counsel had been appointed to investigate links between his campaign associates and Russia, President Trump berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an Oval Office meeting and said he should resign, according to current and former administration officials and others briefed on the matter. The president attributed the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation — a move Mr.

WASHINGTON — Shortly after learning in May that a special counsel had been appointed to investigate links between his campaign associates and Russia, President Trump berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an Oval Office meeting and said he should resign, according to current and former administration officials and others briefed on the matter. The president attributed the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation — a move Mr.

TOKYO — Forty-one years ago, Antonio Inoki, one of Japan’s most popular professional wrestlers, faced off against Muhammad Ali in a bout that critics called a farcical publicity stunt. This week, some commentators leveled similar criticism at Mr.

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea fired another ballistic missile over Japan on Friday, a direct challenge to the United States and China just days after a new sanctions resolution adopted by the United Nations Security Council that was

WASHINGTON — President Trump kept the Iran nuclear deal alive on Thursday as a critical deadline lapsed, a sign that he is stepping back from his threat to abandon an agreement he repeatedly disparaged. He is moving instead to push back on Iran’s ambitions in the Middle East in other ways. Thursday’s congressionally imposed deadline, to renew an exemption to sanctions on Iran suspended under the 2015 deal, was significant because had the president reimposed economic punishments on Iran, he would have effectively violated the accord, allowing Tehran to walk away and ending the agreement.

A federal judge in Brooklyn on Thursday urged the Trump administration to extend its deadline for young undocumented immigrants to apply to stay in the United States under an Obama-era program that the White House recently promised to end. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that immigrants shielded from deportation by the program, which is known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, would have until Oct. 5 to reapply for protected status.

WASHINGTON — Senator Chuck Schumer had just finished outlining a new Democratic immigration proposal over a working dinner at the White House on Wednesday night when President Trump stopped him with a simple question: What is in it for me? Mr. Schumer, the schmoozy Senate minority leader, responded with a litany of what he saw as Mr. Trump’s presidential sins, according to two people with direct knowledge of the interaction.