United States

Trump may be traveling, but the bad news for the president never stops, and while we await tonight's daily "Russia collusion blockbusters" from the WaPo and the NYTimes, the president got some even more bad news after NBC reported that a Federal Appeals court has upheld the ban on Trump's travel plan.

As NBC explains, a Richmond, VA-based federal appeals court on Thursday refused to reinstate President Trump’s ban on nationals from six majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S., delivering a major blow to the Trump administration.

Social-media company Foursquare has crunched the data generated by its 50 million active monthly users and determined that America’s share of the international tourism market has fallen sharply since October.

According to data published on the company’s blog, visits by foreigners to the U.S.  started to decline in October, when they fell by 6% year-over-year. The decline has continued through March 2017, the latest month for which Foursquare has data, when visits declined by an astounding 16%.

Before heading to a NATO summit in Brussels where she would meet with President Donald Trump and a host of other world leaders, German Chancellor Angela Merkel indulged in an exercise of mutual praise with her “dear friend" former U.S. President Barack Obama as the pair appeared in public during a gathering at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate meant to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, the Associated Press reports.

In the first unofficial challenge to Beijing over China's domination of disputed waters in the South China Sea since President Trump took office, a US navy warship sailed within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built up by China in the South China Sea according to the WSJ.  The navy vessel, the USS Dewey, traveled close to the Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, among a string of islets, reefs and shoals over which China has territorial disputes with its neighbors.

The USS Dewey

The OPEC Vienna meeting has not officially concluded just yet, but moments ago a delegate told the WSJ and Reuters that the oil producing cartel had decided to do what had been widely telegraphed previously, and merely extend output cuts by nine months to March 2018. While the full quota breakdown has not been released yet, the cuts are likely to be shared again by a dozen non-members led by top oil producer Russia, while several nations like Iran and Nigeria will remain exempt from production caps.