The media and the White House went wild after Alan Shipnuck from Sports Illustrated reported that President Trump called the White House a "real dump" in front of his golf buddies in Bedminster.
In a podcast on GOLF.com, Shipnuck and colleague Micheal Bamberger talked about how they dealt with the White House's pushback, which included Hope Hicks calling them to to say: "That's a lie and needs to be retracted."
Where they heard it: Shipnuck told Hicks that Trump made the comment in front of eight or nine members and staffers of the club, and he had heard the story from two or three sources during the U.S. Women's Open in July.
CNN's Jim Acosta and top White House advisor Stephen Miller got into a shouting match at the daily press briefing on Wednesday, and partisan media quickly took sides.
Why it matters: This fight is just one more vivid example of the ongoing war between the Trump administration and main stream media as well as the vicious partisanship surrounding the Trump presidency. As usual, left-leaning media sites rushed to praise Jim Acosta as a hero and criticize Stephen Miller, while right-leaning media companies ran headlines mocking Acosta or cheering on Miller.
After publicly facing off with President Trump's senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, Wednesday over the administration's latest push to reduce legal immigration and simultaneously implement a merit-based system, CNN's Jim Acosta said he thinks he came out on top:
"I think what you saw unfold in the briefing room is that he [Miller] really just couldn't take that kind of heat and exploded before our eyes."
"It's not often you're accused of a cosmopolitan bias from someone who went to Duke University wearing cufflinks in the White House briefing room," Acosta later said on CNN.
Context: During yesterday's WH press briefing, Acosta asked whether the administration was favoring immigration from English-speaking countries. Miller shot back, "Your cosmopolitan bias is showing."
The world's second largest exporter is gearing up to compete with California's Tesla, by building its own advanced battery plant, Bloomberg reports. The wire quotes Holger Gritzka, a former steel executive who says he is organizing a consortium of 17 Germany companies to collaborate in mass-production of advanced lithium-ion batteries, to power electric vehicles and store sustainably-sourced energy.
Why it matters: The group has already won the favor of the German government, which is supplying subsidies for the project, reflecting that Germany sees mastering the technology as a national priority. China, which already has the lead in lithium-ion battery production, has also made advanced battery production a priority, lavishing government assistance on the industry. The U.S., too, is in the race, continuing to see the dividends of a $2.4 billion federal investment in lithium-ion technology in 2009, when Obama administration economic stimulus legislation seeded the U.S. advanced battery industry from scratch.
"Wall Street, Climbing Sharply, Skips Washington's 'Soap Opera,'" a New York Times front-pager by Nelson Schwartz: "[A ]market surge based on political hopes has been replaced by one more firmly grounded in the financial realm."
"None of the soap opera in Washington matters," said Frank Sullivan, chief executive of RPM International, a Cleveland-based maker of specialty coatings and sealants like Rust-Oleum. "Nobody in business cares about who talked to who in Russia."
"Besides steady economic growth or less regulation, investors ... have been encouraged by the loose reins of central banks like the Federal Reserve ... Inflation ... remains tame."
Why it matters: "Dow Hits 22000, Powered by Apple ... another milestone in the long bull market as investors bet that a resurgent global economy can offset lukewarm U.S. growth," per Wall Street Journal's Akane Otani and Ben Eisen.
Bank stocks reached highs not seen in close to 10 years on Tuesday, as investors piled into a financial services sector set to benefit from continued deregulation and rising corporate profits.
Data: S&P Dow Jones Indices; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios
Of the 2000 points the Dow Industrials have risen so far this year, more than a quarter came from the surge of a single company — Boeing, whose shares are up 53% in 2017. That Boeing juggernaut has contributed about 580 points to the Dow's 2017 rise, per the WSJ's Justin Lahart.
The Dow pushed through the symbolic 22,000 barrier today, carried by a 6.9% rise in Apple's shares that added 60 points to the index of the biggest 30 industrial companies.
Apple — with a 35% overall share price increase so far in 2017 — is also responsible for about 350 of the Dow's approximately 2000-point rise.
McDonald's shares — up 29% this year — have contributed 227 points to the Dow surge.
Workers with skills in virtual reality were the hottest thing on the U.S. job market in the last quarter, even though the technology has yet to break into mainstream use, per Bloomberg's Isabel Gottlieb.
U.S. government data compiled by Upwork, the website matching free-lancers and employers, showed that company billings for VR projects surged 30 times over the second quarter last year. VR is starting from a small base — just 106 free-lancers listed it as a skill in the second quarter last year, compared with more than 2,500 in 2017 — but the growth in demand for VR workers suggests that companies see much potential ahead.
Artificial intelligence skills were big, too, holding three of the top 10 spots for the fastest-growing demanded skills. They were natural language processing at No. 2, neural networks at No. 5 and image processing at No. 8.
