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Business leaders are predicting a dramatic unraveling of regulations on everything from overtime pay to power-plant emission rules as Donald Trump seeks to fill his cabinet with determined adversaries of the agencies they will lead.

The president-elect’s pick Thursday to head the Labor Department, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, is an outspoken critic of the worker-pay policies advanced by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s choice for the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a primary architect of legal challenges on President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations.

Other cabinet nominees critical of regulations advanced under Mr. Obama include Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, financier Wilbur Ross Jr. at the Commerce Department and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. All will require Senate confirmation.

Those picks suggest the Trump administration, backed by a Republican Congress, is determined to advance labor, environmental and financial regulatory policies more favorable to many American corporations, though not all will back his proposals. Business leaders say all Americans stand to benefit from a lighter touch that would boost profits, growth and hiring, particularly for small and midsize businesses.

“If government can stimulate business to hire more, rather than vilify us, that’s going to be a better milieu,” said Andrew Berlin, CEO of Chicago-based Berlin Packaging LLC, which makes glass and plastic bottles for consumer products.

“The continual onslaught of regulation over the last eight years—that probably has been pretty much our No. 1, overall concern as manufacturers,” said Jason Andringa, CEO of the Vermeer Corp., a Pella, Iowa-based maker of construction and farm machinery. “That there may be some relief from that is very appealing to us.” CONTINUE AT SITE

If the Jill Stein recount were a car, it would be on fire in a ditch while being swarmed by angry snakes.

The failed Green Party candidate raised $7.2 million for presidential recounts that have so far increased Trump’s lead in Wisconsin and made a convincing argument why Detroit shouldn’t be allowed to participate in elections after the ballots on the books didn’t match voting machine printouts in 59% of the precincts. Stein may end up having to pay the entire cost of the Michigan recount and is struggling in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile 42% of Clinton voters believe the recount will show she won.

They’re going to be very disappointed.

The recount follies are just one of a number of clumsy efforts to deny Trump the White House.

There’s the faithless elector drive which has so far signed up one Republican faithless elector who immediately got a New York Times op-ed. That’s something McCain couldn’t even swing when he was running for president. Too bad the Electoral College has 538 members. And so far the tactic of harassing electors with phone calls, emails and death threats isn’t getting Hillary Clinton any closer to victory.

4.6 million people, who have never read the Constitution or anything longer than a Tweet, signed a Change.org petition titled, “Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President.” It’s easy to mock these desperate outbreaks of soreloserdom. But the larger agenda isn’t to find 50 million ballots in a dumpster to make Jill Stein president or to have a bunch of faithless electors take John Kasich to the White House.

It’s about delegitimizing Trump.

The left doesn’t begin with policy critiques of Republican presidential candidates. Instead it accuses them of being temperamentally unfit for the office and illegitimately elected. The anti-Trump playbook is just the anti-Bush playbook with a little dust on the cover and a few more page creases. Bush was a cowboy who stole the election. Trump is erratic and stole the election. The rest is just elaboration.

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Linda McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) cofounder and former CEO, to head the Small Business Administration in his Cabinet, his transition team announced Wednesday.

“Our small businesses are the largest source of job creation in our country,” McMahon said in a statement. “I am honored to join the incredibly impressive economic team that President-elect Trump has assembled to ensure that we promote our country’s small businesses and help them grow and thrive.”

As administrator, McMahon will spearhead the federal government’s efforts to work with small businesses and entrepreneurs across all 50 states. The 68-year-old executive was a major Trump donor during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Along with her husband Vince, McMahon founded WWE in 1980 and gradually built the wrestling company into a publicly-traded, $1 billion brand. McMahon left the company in 2009 to enter politics, running unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012.

“Linda has a tremendous background and is widely recognized as one of the country’s top female executives advising businesses around the globe,” Trump said in a statement. “She helped grow WWE from a modest 13-person operation to a publicly traded global enterprise with more than 800 employees in offices worldwide. Linda is going to be a phenomenal leader and champion for small businesses and unleash America’s entrepreneurial spirit all across the country.”

Steve Chabot (R-OH), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, applauded McMahon’s nomination in a statement.

WASHINGTON—Donald Trump has picked retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security in his new administration, people familiar with the decision said Wednesday.

The move would put a military commander who directly supervised U.S. operations in Central and South America in charge of one of the president-elect’s signature platforms: securing the border between Mexico and the U.S.

Gen. Kelly would become the second retired Marine general to join Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Both he and retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, the choice for defense secretary, must be confirmed by the Senate.

Mr. Trump also has tapped retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser. And he is considering whether to nominate Adm. Michael Rogers to be the director of national intelligence, and retired Army Gen. David Petraeus as secretary of state, although there are several candidates for that post.

In addition to Gen. Mattis and Gen. Kelly, the chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Dunford, also is a Marine and will be in that post through most of 2017.

Gen. Kelly’s last job was as chief of the U.S. Southern Command, the division that oversees U.S. military activities south of Mexico, including Central America, South America and the Caribbean. As Southern Command chief, Gen. Kelly focused on homeland-security issues, because his post involved monitoring drug trafficking and other illicit smuggling activity south of the U.S.

Gen. Kelly’s views on immigration and tightening the border were likely to have appealed to Mr. Trump. Before retiring, Gen. Kelly testified that the border between Mexico and the U.S. was too loose. “The border is, if not wide open, then certainly open enough to get what the demand requires inside of the country,” he said during congressional testimony.

Mr. Trump has vowed to erect barriers between the U.S. and Mexico, despite controversy and criticism about the potential cost. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump traveled earlier this year to Mexico and met with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. CONTINUE AT SITE

BETHESDA, Md.—National Cancer Institute researchers have produced an immune-cell therapy that for the first time successfully targeted a genetic mutation involved in causing tens of thousands of gastrointestinal cancers.

The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, focused on only one patient whose metastatic colon cancer was completely reversed. But that patient’s unusual story may hold promise for many others, doctors said. The therapy targets a gene mutation estimated to drive more than 50,000 new cases of GI cancers in the U.S. each year, including about 90% of often-lethal pancreatic cancers and 45% of all colorectal cancers.

The NCI laboratory is headed by famed immune-therapy researcher Steven A. Rosenberg, the chief of surgery at the cancer institute. He has previously published landmark findings showing that immune therapy has effectively treated many patients with metastatic melanoma, as well as those with blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. The technique also proved successful in a bile-duct cancer case reported in 2014. NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health, which is based here.

Targeting the commonly-occurring family of cancer-driving genes known collectively as RAS has been a kind of Holy Grail in oncology. Mutations in the subset of RAS genes known as KRAS are believed to be a driving force in most pancreatic cancers, which have a bleak survival rate, and in nearly half of colorectal cancers, the No. 2 cancer killer in the U.S. after lung cancer. In this case, the targeted mutated gene is known as KRAS G12D and is the most common of the KRAS gene mutations.

“We report the regression of metastatic colon cancer,” wrote the researchers, headed by Dr. Rosenberg and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Eric Tran. The researchers calculated that tens of thousands of patients annually could potentially be eligible for this treatment.

Dr. Rosenberg said that while the therapy depends on each patient’s own immune cells, it is potentially transferrable to many other patients because of receptors in the patient’s immune cells that grab onto the cancer. These anti-KRAS receptors can be widely used as a treatment, he said.

“This is truly exciting,” said Axel Grothey, a Mayo Clinic oncologist. “At this point in time I consider the presented data as an intriguing proof of principle that cellular immune therapy can be used to target cancer cells with specific molecular alterations. That alone is important and could represent a game-changer in the future.”

“This is really important,” said Leonard Saltz, chief of gastrointestinal oncology at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “It isn’t changing treatment today, but it may change it tomorrow.” He expressed caution because this is just one case, but said, “This is a terrific translation of elegant science into a real benefit for this patient, so in that respect it’s very exciting.” CONTINUE AT SITE