WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans shrugged off rising mortgage rates and bought existing homes in January at the fastest pace since 2007. That has set off bidding wars that have pushed up prices as the supply of available homes has dwindled to record lows. Home sales rose 3.3 percent in January from December to a seasonally [...]
WASHINGTON — Michael Schwarz is a self-employed business owner who buys his own health insurance. The subsidized coverage “Obamacare” offers provides protection from life’s unpredictable changes and freedom to pursue his vocation, he says. Brett Dorsch is also self-employed and buys his own health insurance. But he gets no financial break from the Affordable Care [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — A smart trap for mosquitoes? A new high-tech version is promising to catch the bloodsuckers while letting friendlier insects escape — and even record the exact weather conditions when different species emerge to bite. Whether it really could improve public health is still to be determined. But when the robotic traps were [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — A jump in traffic fatalities last year pushed deaths on U.S. roads to their highest level in nearly a decade, erasing improvements made during the Great Recession and economic recovery, according to a leading safety organization’s report. Fatalities rose 6 percent in 2016, reaching an estimated 40,200 deaths compared to 37,757 deaths [...]
WASHINGTON — Republicans love cutting taxes, especially if they were authored by a president named Barack Obama. But as they push their wobbly effort to erase his health care overhaul, they’re divided over whether to repeal the levies the law imposed to finance its expanded coverage for millions of Americans. It’s a trillion-dollar dilemma — [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump told airline and airport executives Thursday that he is interested in privatizing America’s air traffic control system and improving the nation’s airports and roads, which he called obsolete. Trump also promised to roll back government regulations and said he will announce a plan in the next three weeks to [...]
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy could hamper long-standing U.S. intelligence-sharing partnerships as countries react to a president who seeks closer ties to Russia and is unafraid to offend American allies by cracking down on immigration or getting angry with friendly leaders. Veteran spies say intelligence relationships are built to weather storms between political [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pondering new restrictions on how the Environmental Protection Agency can use scientific data, congressional Republicans are seeking advice from the chemical and fossil fuel industries. House Science, Space and Technology committee chairman Lamar Smith this week accused the Obama administration of relying on faulty and falsified data to justify new regulations, such [...]
WASHINGTON — On the night Judge Neil Gorsuch was nominated to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, he was thinking about history. “The towering judges that have served in this particular seat on the Supreme Court, including Antonin Scalia and Robert Jackson, are much in my mind at this moment,” Gorsuch [...]
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has promised to revitalize America’s aging roads, bridges, railways and airports, but a plan put forward by his economic advisers relies on a transportation financing scheme that hasn’t been tried before and comes with significant risks. The plan was set out just before the election by billionaire leveraged buy-out specialist [...]