Jeff Sessions’ Standard

Jeff Sessions listens as President Donald Trump introduces him prior to being sworn in as the new Attorney General in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 9. Win McNamee/Getty Images The Washington Post is reporting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had two conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the runup to the 2016 election, when Sessions was a U.S. senator and a prominent Trump campaign surrogate.

India is about to install a new prime minister who is not a Gandhi, not a member of the Congress party, not a policy intellectual, and not a product of India’s westward-looking professional class. After a decade of increasingly stagnant Congress rule, India is heading into the great unknown. Narendra Modi had said a great deal about how he wants to change India’s economic policy — even if most of it is vague and hortatory. But he has said next to nothing about foreign policy.

As the U.S. government starts planning budget reductions that will slash everything from defense spending to health care to bridge repair, potential cuts worth around 0.00025 percent of the value of the deficit reduction agreed on in the recent $2 trillion deal appear to have garnered outsized attention: support to farmers’ markets. Those $5 million of subsidies are likely to disappear as part of cuts in the 2012 farm bill, and that is provoking much concern.