Category: Diets & Weight Loss

A Friday New York Times profile of Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, illuminates the longtime diplomat as not only socially savvy and eager to network, but also unwavering in his dedication to his home country and its president, Vladimir Putin. Peter Baker, the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent and co-author of the profile, joined Yahoo News Now on Friday to discuss Kislyak, who has been in the spotlight following revelations of his communications with various members of the Trump campaign and administration. Both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn have come under withering criticism for not disclosing their conversations with Kislyak.

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions says that he is willing to recuse himself “whenever it’s appropriate” amid growing bipartisan calls for him to do so. “I have said whenever it’s appropriate, I will recuse myself,” Sessions told an NBC News reporter early Thursday morning. During a tour of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford Thursday afternoon, President Trump expressed support for his embattled attorney general, saying he had “total” confidence in Sessions.

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In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump on Tuesday challenged divided lawmakers and a polarized nation to look past his turbulent early days in office and rally behind the “America First” vision of his history-making campaign. “A new national pride is sweeping across our nation,” Trump declared to a packed House of Representatives at the outset of the hourlong address. The entrepreneur stayed true to many of the core messages of his insurgent and profoundly nationalist candidacy — blaming immigration and global trade for a range of ills, expressing resentment at the burdens of America’s post-World War II global leadership, pushing for dismantling Obamacare — while dropping some of his most inflammatory rhetoric.

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As debate continues to swirl over the mission’s results, President Trump’s acknowledgment of a fallen soldier’s wife was the most emotional moment of his first congressional address. Carryn Owens, whose husband, Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, was killed in a Yemen raid last month, was moved to tears as Trump praised her husband’s sacrifice. “Ryan died as he lived,” said Trump.

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House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said today that Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the national security adviser fired by President Trump, may have done the country a “big favor” if he signaled to the Russian ambassador that sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama after the Russian cyberattack on Democratic Party officials would be lifted once President Trump took office. The comments by Nunes, a vocal defender of the Trump White House, seemed to be the strongest indication to date that Flynn may have sought to undercut Obama’s actions, giving private assurances to Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, that punitive measures just imposed by the then-president would go away under Trump.

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WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday received a package of options for escalating or transforming the war on ISIS, setting in motion a process that could lead him to expand the presence of American forces fighting the terrorist army on the ground. Defense Secretary James Mattis briefed top national security officials at the White House on the Pentagon-led proposal, which includes military recommendations but also proposals for how to starve the so-called Islamic State of funds and combat the group online, where it has recruited and radicalized perpetrators of attacks in Europe and the United States. It’s not clear when Trump will put his stamp on the undeclared war he inherited from his predecessor, a campaign that has rolled back the rampaging death cult in Iraq but has posted less significant gains in neighboring Syria.

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Former President George W. Bush said that the power of the presidency can be addictive and that an independent media is necessary to keep things in check. “I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” Bush said in a “Today” show interview Monday morning. “We need an independent media to hold people like me to account.”

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Donald Trump wasn’t watching the Oscars on Sunday night. Instead, the president hosted the Governors’ Dinner at the White House, the first major social gathering of his administration since the inaugural galas.

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U.S. Democrats elected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as chairman on Saturday, choosing a veteran of the Obama administration to lead the daunting task of rebuilding the party and heading the opposition to Republican President Donald Trump. Members of the Democratic National Committee, the administrative and fundraising arm of the party, picked Perez on the second round of voting over U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, a liberal from Minnesota. Following one of the most crowded and competitive party leadership elections in decades, Perez faces a challenge in unifying and rejuvenating a party still reeling from the Nov. 8 loss of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

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President Donald Trump began his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday with a lengthy rant railing against what he dubbed the “fake news.” After weeks of bad headlines, Trump suggested the “dishonest media” falsified stories about issues in his administration by using made-up sources. “And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake! Phony! Fake!” Trump said.

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British politician Nigel Farage heralded 2016 as the beginning of global populist revolution during a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md. In a speech titled “Brexit and What it Means for the World,” Farage, the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), said that future schoolchildren would study 2016 as the dawn of a new political era — ushered in by the so-called Brexit referendum in the U.K. and the election of President Trump in the U.S. “There is one year that every schoolchild will know, and that year is the year of 2016, because in 2016 we witnessed the beginning of a global political revolution and it’s one that is not going to stop.

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Vice President Mike Pence dismissed concerns Thursday about the pace of Republican plans to repeal and replace the health care law passed by Democrats under President Barack Obama, promising an “orderly transition” to a new system. It was the only comment by Pence in a 20-minute speech that went beyond boilerplate rhetoric and touched on challenges facing the new administration.

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