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On October 14, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit formally blocked a trial court’s decision halting SB 8, a Texas law banning most abortions in that state.

But there are some important legal distinctions between the current challenge to SB 8, known as United States v. Texas, and the Court’s previous order in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson allowing SB 8 to take effect. Specifically, the Justice Department argues in its request for relief that the United States is allowed to sue Texas directly, even if private parties may not.

The new challenge from the DOJ argues that, at least in an unusual case such as this one, the United States should be allowed to sue the state of Texas — and that it should be able to do so specifically because no one else can. As Judge Robert Pitman, who briefly blocked SB 8 before his decision was stayed by the Fifth Circuit, summarized the DOJ’s argument, the United States should be allowed to step in when “(1) a state law violates the constitution, (2) that state action has a widespread effect, and (3) the state law is designed to preclude review by the very people whose rights are violated.”

when people have to meet each other in transactional settings — in stores, on airplanes, over the phone on customer-service calls — they are, in the words of Ms. Luna, “devolving into children.”

“People are just — I hate to say it because there are a lot of really nice people — but when they’re mean, they’re a heck of a lot meaner,”

“It’s like, instead of saying, ‘This really inconvenienced me,’ they say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ It’s a different scale of mean.”

More than five months after the fall of Kabul, the Afghan economy is on the brink of collapse, leaving millions of people at risk of extreme poverty or starvation. One major culprit: the US decision to halt aid to the country and freeze billions in Afghan government funds.

“virtually every man, woman and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty”

The organization is requesting more than $5 billion in aid to help the Afghan people, both inside the country and in refugee camps in bordering nations like Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

U.S. regulators on Wednesday signed off on extending COVID-19 boosters to Americans who got the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine and said anyone eligible for an extra dose can get a brand different from the one they received initially.

before more people roll up their sleeves, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will consult an expert panel Thursday before finalizing official recommendations for who should get boosters and when.

The latest moves would expand by tens of millions the number of Americans eligible for boosters and formally allow “mixing and matching” of shots — making it simpler to get another dose, especially for people who had a side effect from one brand but still want the proven protection of vaccination.

What began as a power struggle between a defiantly unvaccinated tennis star and a prime minister seeking a distraction from his own pre-election missteps has turned into something far weightier: a public stand for pandemic rules and the collective good.

Australians didn’t much like how their government had summarily canceled Mr. Djokovic’s visa at the airport. After all their lockdown obedience and vaccine drives, they were also unhappy about the celebrity athlete’s effort to glide into the country while skirting a Covid vaccination mandate.

Mr. Djokovic admitted that he had not isolated himself last month while he apparently suspected, and later confirmed, a Covid infection.

The London Underground is the oldest subway system in the world, so it might seem an unlikely source of innovation for one of the thorniest problems facing humanity in the 21st century: climate change.

While public transit is usually more environmentally friendly than other methods of travel, the Underground is playing a more direct role in a groundbreaking experiment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

The local council for the Borough of Islington in London has developed, planned and installed a way to provide heat and hot water for several hundred homes, a school and two recreation centers, all using otherwise-wasted thermal energy generated mostly by the electric motors and brakes of the Underground’s trains.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- The tsunami threat around the Pacific from a huge undersea volcanic eruption receded Sunday, but the massive ash cloud covering the tiny island nation of Tonga prevented surveillance flights from New Zealand to assess the extent of damage.

In Tonga it sent tsunami waves crashing across the shore and people rushing to higher ground.

The eruption cut the internet to Tonga, leaving friends and family members around the world anxiously trying to get in touch to figure out if there were any injuries. Even government websites and other official sources remained without updates on Sunday afternoon.

DALLAS — All hostages have been released safely from a synagogue in the Dallas-Fort Worth area following a more than 10-hour standoff, and the man responsible is dead, according to local and federal law enforcement officials.

The group of hostages were being held by a man demanding the release of a federal prisoner being held in North Texas who was convicted in 2010 of attempted murder in a terrorism-related case, officials said.

Around 9 p.m., the FBI's hostage rescue team breached the synagogue and rescued the hostages, Colleyville Police Chief Michael C. Miller said.

To her mother in South Korea, SuJin Kim is a failure: She’s over 30, single and not working for a big Korean corporation.

But to her millions of followers in Latin America, she has become a relatable friend and a teacher of all things Korean. In Mexico, where she lives, they know her, in fact, as “Chinguamiga,” her online nickname, a mash-up of the words for friend in Korean and Spanish.

Her success has been propelled not just by her ingenuity and charisma, but also by a wave of South Korean popular culture that has swept the world

“AI will steadily be delegated, and could — as it becomes more autonomous — usurp decision making and thinking from current humans and human-run institutions,” said Anthony Aguirre, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a founder of the Future of Life Institute, the organization behind one of two open letters.

“At some point, it would become clear that the big machine that is running society and the economy is not really under human control, nor can it be turned off, any more than the S&P 500 could be shut down,” he said.

Are there signs A.I. could do this?Not quite. But researchers are transforming chatbots like ChatGPT into systems that can take actions based on the text they generate. A project called AutoGPT is the prime example.

The political action committee, called Win It Back, has close ties to the influential fiscally conservative group Club for Growth. It has already spent more than $4 million trying to lower Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters in Iowa and nearly $2 million more trying to damage him in South Carolina

But in the memo — dated Thursday and obtained by The New York Times — the head of Win It Back PAC, David McIntosh, acknowledges to donors that after extensive testing of more than 40 anti-Trump television ads, “all attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective.”

“Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh states in the “key learnings” section of the memo.

While researchers at Google in 2019 claimed that they had achieved “quantum supremacy” — a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one — IBM’s researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named.

“We’re entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility,” said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum. “The era of utility.”

Present-day computers are called digital, or classical, because they deal with bits of information that are either 1 or 0, on or off. A quantum computer performs calculations on quantum bits, or qubits, that capture a more complex state of information. Just as a thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger postulated that a cat could be in a quantum state that is both dead and alive, a qubit can be both 1 and 0 simultaneously.

Massive prehistoric stone structures found in desert landscapes from Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan have baffled archaeologists for decades. Each can stretch for up to a few miles, and resembles a kite with tail strings in overall shape.Recent studies have built a consensus that the so-called desert kites were used to trap and kill wild animal herds. But how ancient hunters conceived — and perceived — these grandiose structures has remained a mystery. The kites, in their entirety, are “only visible from the air,” said Rémy Crassard, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “Even with our modern ways of envisaging our landscape, it’s still difficult for us archaeologists, scientists, scholars to make a proper map.”

Dr. Crassard and his colleagues were overjoyed in 2015 when they found two stone monoliths with precise depictions of nearby desert kites in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Engraved between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, these representations are by far the oldest known to-scale architectural plans recorded in human history, the team reported on Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. They also highlight how carefully planned the desert kites may have been by the ancient peoples who relied on them.

Haley asks, “Dr. King, would you care to comment upon the articulate former Black Muslim, Malcolm X?”King responds: “I have met Malcolm X, but circumstances didn’t enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views, as I understand them. He is very articulate, as you say. I don’t want to seem to sound as if I feel so self-righteous, or absolutist, that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. But I know that I have so often felt that I wished that he would talk less of violence, because I don’t think that violence can solve our problem. And in his litany of expressing the despair of the Negro, without offering a positive, creative approach, I think that he falls into a rut sometimes.”

That is not how King’s response appeared in the published interview. While the top part is nearly identical with the transcript, it ended in Playboy like this: “And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.”

What Haley appears to have done amounts to “journalistic malpractice,” Eig said.

At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them

What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.

“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.

How a Canadian college — in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic — became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.

Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labor shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.

The Canadian government said it was on track to host 900,000 foreign students this year, three times as many as a decade ago.

For years, opium has been the monster too big to slay. One Afghan government after another has pledged to stamp out opium production and trafficking, only to prove unable to resist billions of dollars in illicit profits.

But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the Taliban’s own 20-year insurgency.

The Taliban announced on April 3 that poppy cultivation had been outlawed, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.

David Kertzer has spent decades excavating the Vatican’s hidden history, with his work winning a Pulitzer and capturing Hollywood’s attention. A new book examines Pope Pius XII’s role in the Holocaust.

Over the last few decades, Mr. Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.

The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Mr. Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz.

A lot has changed for Omicron in just two weeks. At December’s onset, the variant was barely present in Europe, showing up in 1 to 2 percent of COVID cases. Now it’s accounting for 72 percent of new cases in London, where everybody seems to know somebody with COVID.

The same exponential growth is happening—or will happen—in the United States too, just in time for the holidays.

Here is some simple math to explain the danger: Suppose we have two viruses, one that is twice as transmissible as the other. (For the record, Omicron is currently three to five times as transmissible as Delta in the U.K.

There was low public support for war in Ukraine even before casualties began to mount. A long-running academic survey found in December that only 8 percent of Russians supported a military conflict against Ukraine, and only 9 percent thought that Russia should arm Ukrainian separatists.

Public anger over war can also increase elites’ perception that a leader is no longer an effective protector of their interests. And if the United States and Europe manage to impose effective sanctions on members of Mr. Putin’s elite coalition, that could make the war costly for them as individuals, as well as risky for Russia.

Elite dissatisfaction could affect his responsiveness to targeted sanctions, for instance, or the constraints he might face on resources for the conflict in Ukraine. It also could affect whether he has the political capital to stay the course if domestic opposition grows.