First Run News

MADRID — A raging forest fire in central Portugal this weekend killed more than 60 people, including at least 30 motorists who were trapped in their cars when the flames enveloped a stretch of road. The fire, which was still burning on Sunday afternoon, has brought “a dimension of human tragedy that we cannot remember,” Prime Minister António Costa said during a visit to the scorched area around Pedrógão Grande. The initial deadly blaze started on Saturday, and the flames s

More than a decade after Yvette Harris’s 1997 Mitsubishi was repossessed, she is still paying off her car loan. She has no choice. Her auto lender took her to court and won the right to seize a portion of her income to cover her debt. The lender has so far been able to garnish $4,133 from her paychecks — a drain that at one point forced Ms. Harris, a single mother who lives in the Bronx, to go on public assistance to support her two sons. “How am I still paying for a car I don’t have?” she asked. For millions of Americans like Ms.

As an American destroyer cruised off the waters of Japan in clear weather after 2 a.m. Saturday, only a few dozen of the crew of 350 were likely to be awake: standing watch, keeping the engines running, manning the bridge. Then, Navy officers with decades of experience at sea say, there were probably minutes of sheer terror aboard the Fitzgerald before the collision with an enormous container ship that killed seven sailors. “My guess is they suddenly saw the lights of the other ship coming toward them and tried to veer off,” said retired Adm. James G.

Representatives of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, have quietly contacted high-powered criminal lawyers about potentially representing him in the wide-ranging investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, according to three people briefed on the matter. Some of Mr. Kushner’s allies have raised questions about the link between his current lawyer, Jamie S. Gorelick, and Robert S.

WASHINGTON — A member of President Trump’s legal team said on Sunday that the president was not under investigation by the special counsel looking into Russia’s election-year meddling, contradicting Mr. Trump’s assertion in a Friday morning tweet that he is a subject of the widening inquiry. The denial on Sunday by Jay Sekulow, one of several personal lawyers Mr. Trump has hired to represent him in the Russia case, is the latest of many examples in which the president’s aides and lawyers have scrambled to avert a public-relations mess created by Mr.

WASHINGTON — When President Trump made his first major decision on the war in Afghanistan, he did not announce it in a nationally televised address from the White House or a speech at West Point. Instead, the Pentagon issued a news release late one afternoon last week confirming that the president had given the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, the authority t

When I was 10 years old, whispers spread around my school in suburban Washington, D.C. -- there had been a shooting in the Capitol. The nuns tried to keep the news from us, since several of us were children of the men (and it was almost entirely men) who served there. Even then news spread, and we were terrified. We children of congressmen knew each other well, went to school together, played in each other’s houses. Our fathers represented opposing political parties and we would sometimes go at it in history classes, or during a campaign season.

The attorneys general of Washington, D.C., and Maryland filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday against President Donald Trump, alleging he violated the Constitution by allowing his businesses to accept payments from foreign governments. Karl Racine, the attorney general for Washington, D.C., and his Maryland counterpart, Brian Frosh, who are both Democrats, said their suit was born out of concern for upholding the Constitution. "We are a nation of laws, and no one, including the president of the United States, is above the law," Racine said at a press conference. The lawsuit, first repo

A vaguely worded statement released by the President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice. "Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories attributed to anonymous ‘officials,’ particularly when they do not identify the country – let alone the branch or agency of government – with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated," read the statement from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. "Americans should

President Trump this morning lashed out at reports that he is being investigated for firing former FBI Director James Comey last month. "I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!