President-elect Donald J. Trump released the following statement in response to a letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday made public a conciliatory holiday letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin and said the two countries can forge a constructive new relationship or “travel an alternate path.” Trump released the message, which was dated December 15, after reportedly shrugging off concerns he might trigger a nuclear arms race. In the note, Putin did not explicitly mention any disputes between Washington and Moscow, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, military aid to Syria’s Bashar Assad or alleged attempts to sway the presidential election.
University of Southern California neuroscientists are studying how political beliefs affect the way people process new information. Neuroscientists at the University of Southern California led a study that found people are less likely to change their minds on political issues than on apolitical ones when presented with contradictory data. Like religious beliefs, political opinions are intimately linked to how someone sees his or her own character and sense of community in a way that apolitical opinions simply are not, according to the researchers.
When asked to clarify his stance on expanding the United States’ nuclear arsenal, President-elect Donald Trump reportedly touted the possibility of an arms race — not unlike the ominous standoff between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. “Let it be an arms race, because we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump said Friday morning, according to “Morning Joe” co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.
Donald Trump tweeted about nuclear weapons on Thursday, and it went about as well as might be expected, with reporters hurriedly seeking explanations from his communications team, arms control experts puzzling over the president-elect’s cryptic words, and a fair amount of we’re-all-going-to-die-in-atomic-fire from Twitter users apparently not overfond of the incoming administration. “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” Trump wrote.
Phil Berger and Bob Rucho listen as a bill to repeal North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” is discussed on Wednesday. A deal to scrap House Bill 2 (HB2), the “bathroom bill” that’s caused tremendous tension in the Tar Heel State, fell apart Wednesday night in a raucous special session where state legislators hurled recriminations at each other — a microcosm of the state’s deeply divided politics. HB2, which passed in March, eliminates local antidiscrimination protections for gay and transgender people and legislates that people must use bathrooms that match their biological sex as indicated on their birth certificate.
Donald Trump declared Thursday that he still plans to “drain the swamp” of alleged Washington corruption, bluntly contradicting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s claim a day earlier that the president-elect had dumped that signature campaign slogan. Actually, we will always be trying to DTS,” Trump said on Twitter. Gingrich, whose conduct in the late 1990s earned him a historic bipartisan ethics reprimand, confessed in a short video posted on Twitter that he had “made a big boo-boo” on Wednesday when he said Trump was dumping the three-word rallying cry.
Asked Wednesday about the recent ISIS-inspired truck attack in Berlin, President-elect Donald Trump appeared to double down on his campaign plans to stop terrorism by temporarily banning immigration from Muslim countries and creating a “registry” of Muslim immigrants already in the United States. Trump ran on the idea that the United States can prevent terrorism by not letting Muslim immigrants into the country. America’s problem is homegrown.
A male passenger was removed from a JetBlue flight on Thursday morning after reportedly “berating” Ivanka Trump and her family shortly before takeoff at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. According to TMZ, the unruly passenger spotted the president-elect’s daughter in coach on the Florida-bound flight. “Your father is ruining the country,” the man told Trump, according to TMZ.
President-elect Donald Trump announced ExxonMobil chairman and chief executive officer Rex Tillerson as his nominee for secretary of state last week, casting aside several finalists, including former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, for the top Cabinet post.
Minutes after the report was released Thursday, Snowden’s chief lawyer, Ben Wizner, tweeted that the report was “petulant nonsense.” Snowden has adamantly denied such contacts, most recently this month in an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric. The panel’s newly declassified 33-page report, which is being released this morning, cites classified U.S. intelligence reporting to support its assertion of continuous contacts with Russian intelligence — an especially explosive charge in light of the current uproar in Washington over Russian interference in the U.S. election.
Kellyanne Conway, the Republican pollster and strategist who helped steady Donald Trump’s insurgent bid for the presidency, will officially join his White House team, serving as counselor to the incoming president. The move, announced by transition team early Thursday, ends weeks of intrigue about what Conway’s role might be in a Trump administration. The longtime strategist, who previously worked for Trump’s primary rival Ted Cruz and has advised other high profile Republicans including Newt Gingrich and Mike Pence, joined the campaign over the summer and was eventually tapped as his campaign manager in August during a particularly rocky period for the candidate, when even close allies believed Trump was on the path to defeat.
How many ways can you cover a year? With articles, interviews, videos, slide shows, blog posts, tweets — did we leave anything out? Well, yes, one thing: poetry. So here is Yahoo News’ take on the year that is ending, by our resident poet, Jerry Adler.
In which the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future teach the president-elect a thing or two.
Trump's ex-campaign manager says Avenue Strategies will back candidates “who support the Trump agenda” and help corporate clients “navigate” the new government.
President-elect Donald Trump emerged from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Wednesday afternoon to briefly address questions from reporters about this week’s deadly attacks in Europe. Trump was asked whether Monday’s violence in Germany and Turkey had caused him to “rethink or reevaluate” his plan to create a Muslim registry or a ban on Muslim immigration. “You know my plans,” Trump replied.
It has been just over a year since Dr. Harold Bornstein, President-Elect Donald Trump’s personal physician, released a now famous letter declaring that, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
Donald Trump fired up campaign crowds with a promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption. But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says the president-elect has soured on that populist rallying cry now that he has won the White House.
Forty-three days after winning the election and 29 days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump is still obsessing over the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. In a series of tweets early Wednesday, Trump claimed he would have campaigned “differently” had he not been focused on amassing the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency — and that he could’ve won the popular vote if he wanted to. “Campaigning to win the Electoral College is much more difficult & sophisticated than the popular vote,” Trump tweeted.
Bill O’Reilly used the “Talking Points” segment on his Fox News show Tuesday night to weigh in on the ongoing debate over the Electoral College, claiming those who’d like to see the system abolished are motivated by race. “This is all about race,” O’Reilly said. “The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with.
The FBI is reportedly reviewing the spate of harassing emails and tweets that have slammed residents of the small town of Whitefish, Mont., after the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer put out a cyberhit on several members of the Jewish community there last week. The call to “take action” against Jews in the small ski resort town was issued after Whitefish resident and property owner Sherry Spencer, mother of prominent white nationalist figure Richard Spencer, told the local ABC News affiliate earlier this month that mounting backlash over her son’s controversial political views had forced her to consider selling her property downtown.
President-elect Donald Trump characterized the gruesome truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin as part of a systematic campaign by Muslim extremists against Christians, fueling speculation that he views the war on terrorism as a clash of civilizations and not a conflict against extremists. “ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad,” Trump said.
An Alabama mayor’s chief of staff has apologized for cutting down a giant tree from a city park in Mobile so it could be used as a backdrop for President-elect Donald Trump’s “thank you” rally at a nearby football stadium. Colby Cooper, Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson’s top aide, admitted he was “overzealous” in fulfilling a request from Trump’s advance team ahead of Saturday’s event. The 50-foot cedar tree was cut down at the city’s Public Safety Memorial Park on Friday and taken to Ladd-Peebles Stadium, placed behind the podium was decorated with Christmas ornaments.
Tensions over Germany’s large migrant community reignited after authorities detained an asylum-seeker from Pakistan in connection with the deadly truck attack that killed at least 12 and injured nearly 50 at a bustling Christmas market Monday. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has faced criticism for opening Germany’s borders to more Middle Eastern refugees than any other European nation during the current crisis, said it must be assumed that the incident outside Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was a “terrorist attack” and was quick to acknowledge the possibility that an individual who entered the country under the guise of seeking refuge might be responsible. “I know that it would be particularly hard for us all to bear if it were confirmed that a person committed this act had asked for protection and asylum in Germany,” Merkel said on Tuesday.
President Obama’s decision this week to issue 78 Christmas season pardons — the most of his presidency — should have special meaning for veterans of the civil rights movement. Among the recipients was former Pittsburgh City Council member Sala Udin, a onetime Freedom Rider who was beaten up registering voters in 1960s Mississippi. “I’m ecstatic,” Udin emailed Yahoo News shortly after he got the call from his lawyer that his long-languishing bid for a pardon had finally been granted by Obama. After waiting patiently for years, Udin had all but given up hope.
First lady Michelle Obama says she has no plans to run for office after her family leaves the White House.