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Across the country, state and local officials, frustrated by what they described as a lack of leadership in the White House and an absence of consistent guidance from federal agencies, took steps on their own to prepare for the pandemic and protect their communities. In some cases, these actions preceded federal directives by days or even weeks as local officials sifted through news reports and other sources of information to educate themselves about the risks posed by the coronavirus.

With scant information about the virus and no warnings against large gatherings, cities such as New Orleans moved ahead in February with massive celebrations that may have turned them into hotspots for the virus.

“The leader in global pandemics and protecting the United States starts at the federal level,” said Nick Crossley, the director of emergency management in Hamilton County, Ohio, and past president of the U.S. Council of International Association of Emergency Managers.

Under fire for differences in amenities for its men's and women's basketball tournaments, the NCAA revealed an upgraded weight room Saturday for players participating in the women's college basketball tournament in San Antonio. What had been a single small rack of dumbbells has now been replaced with a larger space with more equipment, including a variety of bars, racks and stands.

The facilities were upgraded overnight after the organization was widely criticized by players, coaches and fans alike.

NCAA President Mark Emmert said in an interview on Friday with reporters. "This is not something that should have happened, and should we ever conduct a tournament like this again, will ever happen again.

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead of apparent natural causes Saturday on a luxury resort in West Texas, federal officials said.

According to a report, Scalia arrived at the ranch on Friday and attended a private party with about 40 people. When he did not appear for breakfast, a person associated with the ranch went to his room and found a body.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery said he was among those notified about Scalia's death.

In a little over a year, the number of clinics that provide abortions in Texas fell to 20 from 41, and watchdogs say that as few as six may be left by September.

Many clinics closed because of a requirement that doctors at those clinics obtain hospital admitting privileges within a certain radius of the clinic, and many doctors couldn't comply.

The requirement took effect last November. This week marks the first anniversary of the state law that started it all.

Gov. Doug Ducey, the Arizona Republican, didn’t mince words Wednesday shortly after he learned that President Biden was tapping Vice President Harris to oversee the effort to resolve the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ducey, who was in Tucson, told reporters that Harris is "the worst possible choice" for the job. He also said that Harris’ selection is evidence that Biden has trivialized the situation. He said Harris just "flat out" doesn't care.

It notified Congress on Wednesday that it will open a new 3,000-person facility in San Antonio and a 1,400-person site at the San Diego convention center. HHS is also opening a second site in Carrizo Springs and received approval from the Defense Department Wednesday to begin housing teenagers at military bases in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas.

Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”

That is the stark reality facing Ms. Harris as she assumes responsibility for expanding the same kind of aid programs that have struggled to stem migration in the past. It is a challenge that initially frustrated her top political aides, some of whom viewed the assignment from Mr. Biden as one that would inevitably set her up for failure in the first months of her tenure.

Her allies worried that she would be expected to solve the entire immigration crisis, irked that the early reports of her new duties appeared to hold her responsible for juggling the recent surge of children crossing the border without adults.Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.

Mr. Parscale, President Trump’s former campaign manager, was angry after he was demoted last summer, and wanted out of politics. That didn’t last long. He is starting a new political data company.

Now he is turning to real estate and plans to buy houses and flip them, he said in an interview this month, something he said he was good at. He is also restarting his political consulting firm, Parscale Strategy, and trying to kick off a start-up called Nucleus, to process and analyze data for conservative politicians.

Once a midlevel marketing executive in San Antonio, Mr. Parscale rose to the president’s inner circle and was hailed, somewhat hyperbolically, as the tech genius whose social media savvy won Mr. Trump the 2016 election. Mr. Parscale became expert in making the Trump campaign messages — sometimes gut-churning and cruel, other times patriotic and nostalgic — go wildly viral, and his dark humor seemed in tune with Mr. Trump and his meme-making fan base.

During a private equity boom in 2007, his group acquired Univision for $13.7 billion in a bidding war orchestrated by the company’s largest shareholder and former chairman, A. Jerrold Perenchio. Mr. Perenchio, a onetime Hollywood agent, saw the potential of Spanish-language television in 1992, when he bought Univision for just $500 million.

Univision, which was started in 1955 as a local San Antonio TV station, is now a sprawling media empire based in New York, reaching nearly 100 million television households across the United States.

“We’re seen as a Spanish-language broadcaster that mostly competes with Telemundo,” the company’s chief executive, Randy Falco, said. “But in my view, we should be competing with the English-language networks because increasingly we will have an audience that will surpass them.”

There are a few obvious lessons from this debacle. “All the important people say so” is not, it turns out, a good way to decide on policy; groupthink is no substitute for clear analysis. Also, calling for sacrifice (by other people, of course) doesn’t mean you’re tough-minded.

What this suggests is that the turn to austerity had truly catastrophic effects, going far beyond the jobs and income lost in the first few years. In fact, the long-run damage suggested by the Fatás-Summers estimates is easily big enough to make austerity a self-defeating policy even in purely fiscal terms: Governments that slashed spending in the face of depression hurt their economies, and hence their future tax receipts, so much that even their debt will end up higher than it would have been without the cuts.

countries that seem to have largely recovered from the crisis, like the United States, are far poorer than precrisis projections suggested they would be at this point. And a new paper by Mr. Summers and Antonio Fatás, in addition to supporting other economists’ conclusion that the crisis seems to have done enormous long-run damage, shows that the downgrading of nations’ long-run prospects is strongly correlated with the amount of austerity they imposed.

A top Army commander on Monday ordered that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl face a court-martial on charges of desertion and endangering troops stemming from his decision to leave his outpost in 2009, a move that prompted a huge manhunt in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan and landed him in nearly five years of harsh Taliban captivity.

According to Sergeant Bergdahl’s defense lawyers, the Army lawyer who presided over the preliminary hearing also recommended that he face neither jail time nor a punitive discharge and that he go before an intermediate tribunal known as a “special court-martial,” where the most severe penalty possible would be a year of confinement.

Monday’s decision rejecting that recommendation means that Sergeant Bergdahl now faces a maximum five-year penalty if ultimately convicted by a military jury of desertion, as well as potential life imprisonment on the more serious charge of misbehavior before the enemy, which in this case means endangering the troops who were sent to search for him after he disappeared.

Trump: ‘I love war’

The Benettons made occasional, bipartisan political donations but those did not explain the company’s influence. Autostrade could perform perfectly legal favors for politicians, like modernizing a stretch of local highway.

Several scholars say the skewed relationship resulted in a case of “regulatory capture,” the political scientists’ term for the situation when a watchdog bends to the interests of a company it is supposed to supervise.

When a center-left government took power in 2006, Autostrade’s contract came under scrutiny. The government blocked the company from selling itself to Abertis, a Spanish toll road operator, then signaled that Autostrade needed to be reined in

It's like the presidential campaign never ended. And that may be just the way Bernie Sanders, with an eye towards elections to come, wants it.On a cloudy day in central Texas, the former candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination - the dishevelled septuagenarian who gave Hillary Clinton a scare in the 2016 primaries and became a progressive political star - was back in top form.

"In Trump we are living in unprecedented times," Mr Sanders said in Austin. "I think we have the least qualified person to be president in the United States - perhaps in the history of the United States. The way we defeat Trump is for every person in this room and all of us to get involved in the political process in a way that we have never done in modern history in this country."

The Sanders movement flexed its muscles against the political establishment in Texas, and on Friday night in San Antonio, Mr Sanders declared the revolution "alive and well".

There are few historical guides. It is hard to think of a precedent for a president who endorses violence against political foes, sees the Justice Department as his own personal prosecutor, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” tears children from parents, brags of multiple sexual assaults, threatens to lock up his opponents, enthuses about war crimes, “falls in love” with the foulest dictator on the planet, refuses to divest of personal holdings in office, lambastes allies, treats the Treasury as a casino, actively endorses the poisoning of the environment, destabilizes NATO, baits minorities, lies incessantly, and oversees a resurgence of the white nationalist right. Any single gesture in any one of these areas would have been political death for most previous presidents

White anxiety and discomfort in the face of mass immigration is not going to disappear. As I argued last week, it will likely intensify. The global pressures that suppress wages are not waning. The despair in so much of left-behind America cannot be blotted out indefinitely with fentanyl. The collapse of local communities is not going to turn around overnight, and automation is unstoppable. Fear of change is correlated to the pace of change, and the latter shows no sign of deceleration

this new alignment is organized less around policy or the role of government, than on the feelings of security and confidence in the modern world. And in our current crisis, the closed, fixed, fearful view of the world is, understandably, in the ascendant

António Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, will be the next UN secretary general, after the security council agreed he should replace Ban Ki-moon at the beginning of next year.

In a rare show of unity, all 15 ambassadors from the security council emerged from the sixth in a series of straw polls to announce that they had agreed on Guterres, who was UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade, and that they would confirm the choice in a formal vote on Thursday.

The abrupt end to the UN leadership race came as a surprise. Many observers had expected the selection process to go on late into October as the major powers struggled to promote their favourite candidates.

“The big thing that I think defines the struggle for the party is that a bunch of people want to define it by what we’re against, and a bunch want to define it around what we’re for,” observed GOP strategist Kevin Madden. “Right now, it’s about 70-30, with the ‘against’ crowd winning.

GOP strategists and leaders argue that you have to look beyond the bomb throwers and reality-TV-type characters to find the folks who’ll take Republicans forward.

ask around, and party players are happy to hold forth on their favorite comers. Some are seen as having White House potential, while others are regarded as better suited for long-term congressional or state leadership

This early work is critical to campaigns trying to build a support base for election day. But this year, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it nearly impossible to register new voters.

just 504 people registered in March as Covid-19 restrictions went in to effect. By comparison, more than 7,200 voters registered the month before.

“When I called my city clerk’s office, she said, ‘Well, once Covid-19 is over, you can register to vote,’” said Olivia Zink, the executive director of Open Democracy, a civic action group. It could be several more months before offices fully reopen.

American Catholicism, he argued, echoing the article’s thesis, “has become different than mainstream European Catholicism and mainstream Latin American Catholicism,” and has fallen “into the hands of the religious right.”

The authors of the article argue that American evangelical and ultraconservative Catholics risk corrupting the Roman Catholic faith with an ideology intended to inject “religious influence in the political sphere.” They suggest that so-called values voters are using the banners of religious liberty and opposition to abortion to try to supplant secularism with a “theocratic type of state.”

The main point of the article, he said, was the pope’s argument that religion in the service of politics or power is ideology, and that the manipulation of anxiety for political ends risks rendering the church a “sect of the pure.”