Cleveland

With big spending cuts, Trump’s budget highlights clash of values

To the Trump team, the president’s budget proposal is rooted in unassailable values: respect for the people “who are actually paying the taxes,” as White House budget director Mick Mulvaney puts it. In President Trump’s $4.1 trillion fiscal 2018 budget plan, released Tuesday, that approach translates into deep cuts in social safety-net programs that Mr. Mulvaney suggests discourage work and hinder economic growth. To others, the values reflected in the Trump budget are no less than “Robin Hood in reverse” – take from the poor to give to the rich, in the form of tax cuts.

When the young are targeted, explaining terrorism to children

“It is going to bring reality to them,” says Ms. Hall-Newman, in a telephone interview from Manchester where she happens to be at a conference – and where she spent the weekend with her daughter. The suicide bomber is reported to be 22-year-old Salman Abedi, who was born in Manchester to parents who fled Libya's Qaddafi regime.

In Jordanian city hit by ISIS, old lessons on Christian-Muslim coexistence

When Islamic State jihadists seized the Crusader castle in the heart of this southern Jordanian city in December, Maher Habashneh had just one thing in mind. Braving stray bullets from a firefight playing out in the city center between ISIS and an alliance of security forces and city residents, Mr. Habashneh rushed to the home of Waddah Amarien, where he stood guard until his childhood friend returned from Amman early the next morning. Habashneh, an unemployed university graduate, is Muslim, Mr. Amarien is Christian.

As Taiwan debates gay marriage, advocates eye influence abroad

As bills to legalize same-sex marriage made their way through the legislature last year, Taiwan seemed poised for a blast of international limelight – not so common for the island of 23 million. For LGBT advocates throughout Asia, the proposed law promised to be an exciting “first” for the region. For a groundswell of Taiwanese, it also represented one more step in Taipei’s years-long strategy of compensating for its diplomatic handicaps with “soft power” strength, bolstering its image as a place open to social change – particularly in contrast to mainland China, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan.