Good Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
_____________________
• Stocks and financial markets soared on Thursday after President Trump decided to renew trade talks with China in the coming weeks. Investors seized on the development as a sign that both sides could still find a way out of an economically damaging trade war, but there is still little sign of tangible progress.
• During the CNN climate forum on Wednesday night, presidential candidates emphasized how climate change disproportionally hurts marginalized communities, acknowledging that the people most severely affected by climate change are often those with the least resources to respond.
• At the forum, Senator Kamala Harris of California said she had sued Exxon Mobil as state attorney general. That drew the attention of fact checkers.
• After rampaging across the Bahamas and brushing off the Florida coast, Hurricane Dorian began pounding the coastal Carolinas on Thursday. Read updates about the storm here.
• The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled a long-awaited plan to end federal control of two mortgage giants that were bailed out by taxpayers during the 2008 financial crisis and return them to the private sector, unwinding a last vestige of the financial crisis.
• The Pentagon is diverting $62.6 million from building Fort Campbell’s new middle school to build Mr. Trump’s border wall, so 552 students at the Army base along the Kentucky-Tennessee border will continue to cram into an aging building.
• Three former Blackwater security contractors were sentenced on Thursday to roughly half of their original 30-year prison terms for the deadly 2007 shooting of unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square.
• Mr. Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the former N.B.A. great Jerry West. It’s the second time in two weeks that Mr. Trump has honored a long-retired white basketball player from a league whose players are now overwhelmingly black.