Workers make a toffee-like sweet cake called “dodol,” one of the traditional delicacies served during Chinese New Year celebrations in Tangerang, on the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia; a member of Iraqi rapid response forces fires a rocket launcher during a battle with Islamic State militants in the district of Yarimja in southern Mosul, Iraq; and the world’s oldest giant panda “Basi” in captivity eats specially-made cake during its 37th birthday at Strait Panda World in Fuzhou, Fujian Province of China. (AP/Reuters/Getty Images) These are just a few of the photos of the day for January 18, 2017. See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Tumblr.
In the hourlong question-and-answer session, Obama also defended the news media, which Trump likes to bash, and listed the political and social issues that would lead him to speak out after he leaves the White House to his successor. There were no questions about Syria, North Korea or the Iran nuclear deal.
President Obama concluded his final press conference as commander in chief the same way his began his candidacy for the office — with a message of hope for the United States’ future. The last question posed to Obama in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the West Wing of the White House concerned a popular speech his wife, first lady Michelle Obama, gave in October that put the stakes of the U.S. presidential election in personal terms.
On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president of the United States, celebrities bring their star power to a rally in front of Trump International Hotel and Tower to protest the incoming president-elect.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, said Wednesday that she hopes to be part of a national security team that will “educate” Trump, and that she wants to change Trump’s mind about the importance of the organization. “I will show him that the U.N. matters," she said.
Speaking Wednesday at his final White House press conference, President Obama offered a reminder of the racist history behind some U.S. voting restrictions. President Obama speaks during his final presidential news conference. In recent years, a number of Republican-controlled state governments have instituted restrictions like those requiring voters to carry identification.
President Obama says his priorities after leaving the White House are to write, spend time with his family and take some time for quiet reflection. “I’m still a citizen and I think it is important for Democrats or progressives who feel that they came out on the wrong side of this election to be able to distinguish between the normal back and forth, ebb and flow of policy,” Obama said Wednesday during his last press conference in Washington as president. Among them, the president said, are “systematic discrimination,” voter suppression, “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press” and the targeting of so-called DREAMers, or children who immigrated into the country illegally with their parents.
At his final press conference as president of the United States, Barack Obama defended his controversial decision this week to commute convicted leaker Chelsea Manning’s sentence. Obama was asked if he feared that commuting her sentence might send a message that leaking classified information might send the wrong message to groups like WikiLeaks. The Obama administration has accused Russian hackers of sharing information with WikiLeaks to interfere in the U.S. election.
Pressed by Democratic senators for his views on the causes of climate change, the Trump administration’s choice to run the Environmental Protection Agency insisted at his confirmation hearing Wednesday morning that his “personal opinion” was “immaterial” to how he would do his job. Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee questioned Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt closely on his history of suing the agency he has been nominated to lead, his statements questioning mainstream climate science and his close ties to the oil and gas industries. Republicans were much friendlier, mostly lamenting the impact of regulations on fossil-fuel industry jobs, something Pruitt promised to take into account.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said President-elect Donald Trump is disturbed by President Obama’s decision to commute the prison sentence of convicted leaker Chelsea Manning. “I think the president-elect is troubled by this action,” Spicer said during a Wednesday news conference at Trump’s presidential transition team headquarters. Spicer was also asked if Trump wanted to see WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange make good on a promise to allow himself to be extradited to the United States if Manning was given a deal.
Former President George H.W. Bush said and his wife, Barbara, are bowing out of attending Donald Trump’s inauguration, saying in a note to the president-elect that he might not survive it.
President-elect Donald Trump is known to have an itchy Twitter finger, and says he plans to continue his use of the social media platform after he takes the oath of office. The survey, conducted Jan. 12 to 15, found a vast majority of Democrats (89 percent) have a negative view of Trump’s use of Twitter. In November, Trump said he would be “very restrained” in his use of Twitter as commander in chief, but will reserve the right to use it as a “method” to combat what he perceives as negative stories about him.
During his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, Secretary of Commerce nominee Wilbur Ross admitted that he’d recently fired one of his household employees upon discovering that this person was an undocumented immigrant.
"With and without an exclamation. ‘Keep America Great,’” Trump said. Trump told the Washington Post that he didn’t intend to reveal the presumptuous plan in the interview.
Barack Obama has reached the end of his consequential eight-year presidency. As the nation's first African-American commander in chief and his wife prepare to leave the White House behind, Yahoo News takes you through his two terms - the exultation over the raid that killed Osama bin laden, the heartbreak of the massacre of children in Newtown, the tumultuous implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the controversial Iran nuclear deal, the outreach to Cuba, and many other signal moments and policies. There are also many quiet, behind-the-scenes snapshots, family time with first lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia, or the unforgettable photo of the little boy who asked to touch the president's hair.
It goes something like this: The president-elect of the United States tweets something no president-elect has ever said, and certainly never tweeted, before. All of this raises a number of questions as this president-elect becomes president: Is his unfiltered spew of thought really unprecedented? Just before the controversial nomination of Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., to head the Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, Trump tweeted that flag burning should be illegal.
On impulse I turned into the driveway of what the whole block had taken to calling “the Trump House,” walked up the front steps and rang the bell. Chris Fresiello — the man who’d put up the Trump signs, and applied the Trump bumper stickers to his pickup and hung the Trump flag — invited me in for what became a two-hour chat. It took us a while to reschedule — there were nearly 10,000 comments to go through — but we did so this week to talk about everything from the names people feel free to call each other online to whether Donald Trump means what he says, and whether that matters.
Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos listens to Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., before testifying on Capitol Hill on Jan. 17, 2017, at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Education, indicated that she is open to radically rethinking the federal government’s role in education on issues from sexual assault cases on college campuses to cutting federal support for the nation’s public schools in a contentious confirmation hearing Tuesday evening. Democratic senators repeatedly pressed DeVos to spell out her specific vision for the Department of Education, but the education activist and billionaire from Michigan kept mostly to generalities, outlining a broad vision of school choice in which parents could use state money to send their kids to private or charter schools.
Retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright. President Obama gave a full pardon Tuesday to retired Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, who was convicted of lying to the FBI during an investigation into a leak about American efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. The pardon followed an intense lobbying campaign on behalf of Cartwright that included expressions of support, relayed by Cartwright’s lawyer, from former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, according to sources familiar with the effort.
Impoverished Indian children watch a performance as part of advocacy against child labor in Allahabad, India; women loyal to the Houthi movement parade to show support to the movement in Sanaa, Yemen; and dogs are blessed by a priest outside San Anton Church in the neighborhood of Churriana in Malaga on the day of Saint Anthony, Spain’s patron saint of animals. These are just a few of the photos of the day for January 17, 2017. See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Tumblr.
President Obama has commuted the 35-year prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, paving the way for the Army intelligence analyst turned high-profile leaker to be freed on May 17, the White House announced Tuesday. Manning was on a list of 209 commutations and 64 pardons released Tuesday, though they may not be Obama’s final acts of clemency before he leaves office at midday on Jan. 20. Edward Snowden’s name was not on the list.
President-elect Donald Trump told a radio interviewer in October 2015 that he had met Vladimir Putin “one time … a long time ago” and that he “got along with him great” — a statement that conflicts with his later denials during the campaign that he had ever met or spoken with the Russian president. The newly surfaced audiotape, uncovered by a political opposition-research group, could fuel new questions about the precise nature of Trump’s past relations with the Russian president — a subject about which he has made multiple contradictory comments. It was released just hours after Putin, speaking from Moscow, denounced officials in the Obama administration as “worse than prostitutes” for circulating “nonsense” personal allegations about Trump that were allegedly collected by Russian intelligence.
Astronaut Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to walk on the moon, died Jan. 16, 2017. Cernan was one of 14 astronauts selected by NASA in October 1963. In May 1969, he was the lunar module pilot of Apollo 10, the first comprehensive lunar-orbital qualification and verification test of the lunar lander.
President Obama will fail to keep one of his most high-profile promises — closing the detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the White House acknowledged on Tuesday. “At this point, I don’t anticipate that we will succeed in that goal of closing the prison, but it’s not for a lack of trying,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his final media briefing. “The only reason it didn’t happen is because of the politics that members of Congress of both parties, frankly, played with this issue,” Earnest said with just two full days left in Obama’s term.
Outgoing White House press secretary Josh Earnest tore into President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, Georgia Rep. Tom Price, amid a report that the Republican congressman bought stock in a medical company, then introduced legislation that would have directly benefited the company. “This is a very narrow, specific company that dealt with implants — hip and knee — and the legislation specifically affects implants.