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ovation of the White House, but later becoming a much-loved figure.

"with the passing of Nancy Reagan, God and Ronnie have finally welcomed a choice soul home".

She will be buried next to her husband, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, the library said in a statement.

"Nancy Reagan once wrote that nothing could prepare you for living in the White House. She was right, of course. But we had a head start, because we were fortunate to benefit from her proud example, and her warm and generous advice. Our former first lady redefined the role in her time here."

"I am saddened by the passing of my stepmother Nancy Reagan... She is once again with the man she loved. God bless..."

"I remember Nancy as a noble woman who supported President Reagan and stood by his side. She will be remembered as a great friend of the State of Israel,"

She served as first lady of California during her husband's stint as California governor from 1967 to 1975 before moving into the White Ho

"I see the first lady as another means to keep a president from becoming isolated," she once said."I talk to people. They tell me things. And if something is about to become a problem, I'm not above calling a staff person and asking about it. I'm a woman who loves her husband and I make no apologies for looking out for his personal and political welfare."

"Prior to the funeral service, there will be an opportunity for members of the public to pay their respects at the Library."

"It is a very sad day," former Ronald Reagan Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein told NBC News. "Every time she was in the room, he was better, and every time he was in the room she was better. She brought a sense of class and dignity and elegance that everybody admired."

"We remain grateful for Nancy Reagan's life, thankful for her guidance, and prayerful that she and her beloved husband are together again," President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama said in a statement.

Barbara Bush, another influential former first lady, said in a statement: "Nancy Reagan was totally devoted to President Reagan, and we take comfort that they will be reunited once more. George and I send our prayers and condolences to her family."

Reagan was also a Girl Scout and named honorary president of the Girl Scouts as first lady. The Girl Scouts of America said in a statement that Reagan would be remembered for her "courage, confidence and character."

In lieu of flowers, Mrs. Reagan asked that contributions be made to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Foundation at www.reaganlibrary.com, Drake said.

While Ronald Reagan was governor of California from 1967 to 1975, Nancy Reagan worked with numerous charitable groups, and spent hours visiting veterans, the elderly, and the emotionally and physically handicapped.

"The movies were custard compared to politics," Mrs. Reagan once said.

When her husband became president of the United States, First Lady Reagan continued her interest in these groups continued, and arguably became best known for her "Just Say No" program fighting against drug abuse among youth.

When Ronald was shot in 1981 by a would-be assassin, Nancy rushed to his side immediately, and later endured his nearly decade-long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

In recent years she broke with fellow Republicans in backing stem cell research as a way to possibly find a cure for Alzheimer's.

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc

losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”

“Nancy Reagan was totally devoted to President Reagan, and we take comfort that they will be reunited once more,” said Barbara Bush, wife of Reagan’s vice-president and successor, in a statement. “George and I send our prayers and condolences to her family.”

The deal would allow the roughly 700,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program to stay in the country after the program ends in early March.

We have made it clear: We are not giving up our fight to protect America’s dreamers from the cruelty of deportation.”

The protesters demanded “a clean bill” — meaning that the Dream Act would get an up-or-down vote on its own without any language regarding border security attached. They “demanded” that Pelosi show a commitment to protecting “all 11 million” undocumented immigrants believed to be in the country.

“The Democrats are the ones who stopped their assault on sanctuary cities, stopped the wall, the increased deportations in our last bill that was at the end of April, and we are determined to get Republican votes to pass the clean DREAM Act,” she said. “Is it possible to pass a bill without some border security? Well, we’ll have to see. We didn’t agree to anything in that regard, except to listen and something that deals with technology or something like that – but nothing like a wall.”

The Democrats’ message, Schrier said, should be clear and simple: All vaccines are good. And the best thing American can do to protect themselves and their loved ones is to get a shot.

Pelosi spokesman Henry Connelly said the Speaker was simply reflecting concerns in her diverse caucus about whether minority communities were being treated equitably in the aggressive push to vaccinate all Americans.

That disparity has been attributed, in part, to the fact that the earlier Moderna and Pfizer vaccines each require two shots and colder refrigeration, complicating storage and distribution. That’s created additional barriers for getting the vaccine to poorer, historically underserved populations and rural communities.

Black people are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white people and nearly two times more likely to die from the disease; Hispanics are more than three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than whites and 2.3 times more likely to die. 

White people have been vaccinated for COVID-19 at two times the rate of Black people, according to a New York Times analysis. The figures are worse for Hispanics. 

The disagreement among Democrats comes during a pivotal moment in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic as states like Texas and Mississippi end their mask mandates and lift restrictions on businesses, and health experts worry about a surge in cases driven by COVID-19 variants.

Because the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot and regular refrigeration levels, some officials like New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) have ordered that shipments of that vaccine be prioritized for harder-to-reach Black and brown communities. 

But while Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an overall efficacy of about 95 percent in preventing moderate to severe disease, that number for the Johnson & Johnson version is just 66 percent — though experts point out the J&J vaccine was being tested after more contagious variants had begun spreading in the U.S., unlike the Pfizer and Moderna versions. 

That's led to some in those minority communities voicing concerns in recent days that they are being given a less-effective vaccine than more affluent, white communities.

Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), another CBC member, noted that those suspicions have historic roots, pointing to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — a deadly federal research project that targeted poor Black people in rural Alabama in 1930s — as evidence of the "painful history" of biomedical mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. 

Despite such reservations, the broad consensus in the caucus appears to favor efforts to maximize vaccinations in the shortest possible time, regardless which shot is available in a given community.

On Wednesday, Kelly is set to join Rep. Joyce BeattyJoyce Birdson BeattyDemocrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Black Caucus backs Biden's pick to head DOJ Civil Rights Division Sole GOP vote on House police reform bill says he 'accidentally pressed the wrong voting button' MORE (D-Ohio), head of the Black Caucus, in an online forum with medical experts designed to educate minority communities on best vaccine practices. 

Rep. Anthony BrownAnthony Gregory BrownOvernight Defense: Pentagon chief to press for Manchin's support on Colin Kahl | House Dems seek to limit transfer of military-grade gear to police Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy 140 lawmakers call for Biden administration to take 'comprehensive' approach to Iran MORE (D-Md.) said officials should monitor the distribution of vaccines to identify “patterns” that might indicate prejudices in the dispensation. But he’s also encouraging all of his constituents to get whatever vaccine is available first, and he highlighted the advantages of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, particularly in hard-to-reach populations like the homeless. 

Sessions spoke twice in 2016 with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, The Washington Post reported, but did not disclose this detail during his Senate confirmation hearing as attorney general, when asked about possible contacts between the Russian government and President Trump’s campaign. In a separate written questionnaire, Sessions denied being in contact with any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election.

One of the 20th century’s most popular presidents, Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because of his ability to deflect almost any controversy or criticism. But his wife was the “flypaper first lady,” as longtime advisor Michael Deaver once quipped, because nearly everything negative stuck to her.

“Reagan knew where he wanted to go,”

“but she had a better sense of what he needed to do to get there.”

Particularly tough-minded on the hiring and firing of key staffers and Cabinet members, she often played bad cop to his good cop, forcing difficult decisions that the famously easygoing chief executive was loath to make.

she also became a vocal advocate of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, which Bush opposed despite scientists’ belief that it could lead to cures for incapacitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Her good deeds were barely noticed. She championed the Foster Grandparent Program, a cause she would continue to promote in Washington. She took a special interest in Vietnam veterans, hosting emotional dinners for returning prisoners of war and sitting at the bedsides of young soldiers at the veteran’s hospital in Westwood.

During her husband’s second term in Sacramento, she raised $1 million from Republican donors to build a new governor’s mansion on a scenic site above the American River in nearby Carmichael.

“Virtually everything I did during that first year was misunderstood and ridiculed,” Reagan complained in “My Turn.”

“She was the personnel director of the Reagan operation, so to speak,”

She was widely credited with forcing the departures of several high-level administration figures, including Interior Secretary James Watt, Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler and two national security advisors, Richard V. Allen and William Clark.

Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said it was Democrats' responsibility to "rise above" the president's words and actions.

"I think our challenges as public leaders, all of us, is not to simply reflect and amplify that division but to find moments where we can work to heal some of our sharp divisions," Coons said. "It is a challenge for all of us in public life not to respond in kind to some of the things that the president does and says but to instead find ways to rise above it." .recirc_item:nth-child(5) { display: none; } #recirc_item_b65848e2-d4a2-4992-b707-9e7c445fc574 { display: none; } #recirc_item_b65848e2-d4a2-4992-b707-9e7c445fc574 ~ .recirc_item:nth-child(5) { display: list-item; }

“ton of 5.56 armor piercing ammo” and wanting to run over the Democratic leader. He texted one person saying he had planned to attend Wednesday’s rally near the Capitol, but had vehicle trouble. Authorities said he arrived after the rally.

A trailer that he had attached to his vehicle had three guns inside: a Glock 19, a 9 mm pistol and a Tavor X95 assault rifle. He also had hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Meredith, who told authorities he was traveling from Colorado, said he knew Washington has strict gun laws and so he put the weapons in his trailer.

In 2018, Meredith paid to install a QAnon billboard near his business, Car Nutz Car Wash, in Acworth, Georgia, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Meredith told the local news outlet that he erected the sign because he’s “a patriot among the millions who love this country.”

“I sincerely believe the New World Order, Cabal, Deep State ― whatever you want to call it ― wants society to devolve into a race war so that it’s much easier to take over,” he told a local reporter.

Another Alabama man arrested Thursday in Washington, D.C., was found carrying 11 Molotov cocktails in his pickup truck. A handgun, assault rifle and magazines were also found inside. When owner Lonnie Leroy Coffman, 70, returned to his parked truck, he was found armed with two additional handguns on him. None of the firearms were registered to him, federal authorities said.

In the July 2019 phone call, Trump asked Zelesnky, “But do us a favor” by investigating former US vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, over their dealings in the Eastern European nation.

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted last month to bring two articles of impeachment against Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to the Ukraine imbroglio.

But perhaps the defining image of this leisurely, stupid, and largely uninhibited affair came from the grinning, waving man who waltzed out of the House floor with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern.

If the House formally levies articles of impeachment against Trump, it will be a remarkable moment in American history. No president has ever been impeached twice, and while it’s unclear if the Senate would move to remove Trump from office, a growing number of Republicans have voiced support for seeing him out of power before his term is done.

Pence is said to oppose invoking the 25th Amendment, and he has been one of the president’s longest and most loyal supporters throughout his administration.

At least six people — four riot participants and two Capitol Police officers — have died in connection with the attack. 

A draft of the House Democrats’ impeachment articles leaked Friday, showing they planned to cite a speech Trump gave to his supporters in Washington, D.C., before the crowd turned toward the Capitol.“There, he reiterated false claims that ‘we won this election, and we won it by a landslide,’” the draft said. “He also willfully made statements that encouraged ― and foreseeably resulted in ― imminent lawless action at the Capitol.”

The image of someone carrying the flag of secession into the Capitol shocked lawmakers and the public alike. House Democratic Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on CNN that this specific flag was never formally adopted by the Confederacy, but has since been used by the KKK, neo-Nazis and various other white supremacist groups. 

“That is something that will stay with me,” Allred told the newspaper. “They set up a noose and scaffolding on the Capitol Hill. This event has to be a wake-up call.”

In addition, authorities in Pinellas County, Florida arrested Adam Christian Johnson, who they said was the man who appeared in viral photos carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. 

“I’ve spent my career fighting for the First Amendment and defending peaceful protest,” Mr. McConnell said in the statement. “I appreciate every Kentuckian who has engaged in the democratic process whether they agree with me or not. This is different. Vandalism and the politics of fear have no place in our society.”

the Senate would “begin a process” to consider bigger payments along with Mr. Trump’s other demands, which include investigations of his baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and the repeal of certain legal protections for tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter.

If Americans couldn't fully wrap their minds around the arcana of a phone call with the Ukrainian President or the complexities of Russian collusion, or follow the quibbling protests over what the meaning of the word "is" is, they could certainly follow the tragic events from the summer of 2020 up to January 6, which led to five people, including a police officer, losing their lives.

House managers laid them out methodically and holistically, revealing a deeply sinister, calculated plot to overthrow the government; overturn the election' harm or even kill Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers -- and assault any police officers who'd get in their way.

They brought brace knuckles, stun guns and other weapons. They went "hunting" in the halls looking for lawmakers to hurt

it's overwhelmingly clear that the instigator is Trump himself.

The dots were meticulously connected, linking Trump's incitement of his supporters in the months leading up to the November election to the insurrection at the Capitol. There was Trump in his own words, telling them to fight. There were his supporters in theirs, telling him they would.

With everything we now know -- and we don't even know it all yet -- it's clear this trial is not about politics. It's not about Republicans or Democrats.It's not about free speech, and whether we should lock someone up for saying things we don't like.It's about the near-overthrow of our government, the deaths of five people, the assault on our law enforcement, the unimaginable danger our elected officials, their staffs and in some cases their families were put in, and the clear-as-day connection to the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States. It's nothing less than the "crime of the century."

Black residents in Sumter make up a reliable Democratic base, while whites are often divided, as one local put it, between liberal “come heres,” like Habitat employees, and conservative, locally raised, “been heres.”

Before it fell away, Mr. Calhoun’s white progressivism had a homegrown flavor, steeped in Georgia’s history, countercultural currents and higher education system. He preached criminal justice reform and broadcast his support for Hillary Clinton.

Then came his abrupt turn, and a headlong descent into some of the darkest places in Georgia history. He peppered his social media posts with racial slurs, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “fake negro.” He saluted the Confederacy, and he seemed to thirst for civil war.

He was not an unlettered man: In his years at school, Mr. Calhoun had written a master’s thesis on the historiography of Napoleon’s peninsular war and had attended a law seminar in Belgium. His profile — a well-educated, white-collar white man — matched that of some of the other Georgians who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6

The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.

he began a law career in Americus, an old Confederate cotton town and the seat of Sumter County, about 140 miles south of Atlanta. Sumter has for decades played an important role in liberal Georgia’s sense of possibility. A multiracial Christian commune, Koinonia Farm, was founded there in the 1940s. Jimmy Carter lives in the tiny town of Plains, and the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, founded by a Koinonia family, is headquartered in Americus

while Mr. Calhoun’s politics had changed drastically, Mr. Lankford said, his personality had not.“He’s the same old banty rooster, just on the other side of the fence,” Mr. Lankford said.

Rev. Wright suggested that the racism deep at the root of Georgia’s history was still very much alive, even if white people, including some of those who saw themselves as progressive, did not want to admit it. “What President Trump did was allow it to bud and to grow,” he said. “A lot of people who had been suppressing it no longer felt that they had to suppress it.”

“I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”

His conversion was total. By the fall of 2020 he was posting about a looming “domestic communist problem” and the “rioting BLM-Antifa crime wave.” Of Joe Biden, he wrote: “Hang the bastard.”

Old friends were baffled, and some grew nervous. “I’ll be slinging enough hot lead to stack you commies up like cordwood,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter in October. Then, a few days later: “Standing by, and when Trump makes the call, millions of heavily armed, pissed off patriots are coming to Washington.”

After the election, Mr. Calhoun held a small gun rights rally in town, and the violent posts continued, with talk of civil war, mounting heads on pikes and showing the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar “what the bottom of the river looks like.” In December, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, found Mr. Calhoun buying a Confederate flag outside a Trump rally. “This is about independence and freedom,” Mr. Calhoun told the reporter, describing Trumpism and Southern secession as similarly justified fights against tyranny.

On Jan. 6, Mr. Calhoun’s posts showed he had made his way inside the U.S. Capitol with the mob. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door,” he wrote in one post. “Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”

A week later, federal agents arrested him at his sister’s house in Macon, Ga., where he had stockpiled two AR-15-style assault rifles, two shotguns, a handgun, brass knuckles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to the testimony of an F.B.I. agent.

After the 2016 election, an old friend, Bob Fortin, remembers Mr. Calhoun excoriating him for voting for Mr. Trump. “He cussed me out in his kitchen,” said Mr. Fortin, who said he later regretted his vote. “He made me feel like a complete ass.”

At Mr. Calhoun’s Jan. 21 court hearing in Macon, Charles H. Weigle, the federal magistrate judge, ruled that there was probable cause to believe that Mr. Calhoun had committed crimes when he stormed the Capitol.

A man who had committed such “extreme violence,” the judge said — who believed that it was his patriotic duty to take up arms and fight in a new civil war — constituted a danger to the community.The judge sent Mr. Calhoun back to jail.

Republicans have worried for months that Mnuchin isn't as fiscally conservative as they would hope in the talks. It's part of the reason that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear after the election that he was going to step in to negotiate and why Mnuchin has not played a visible role in weeks in these talks.

Still, a growing number of lawmakers from both parties are pushing to find some kind of deal. Tuesday morning, a bipartisan group of senators announced their own $908 billion proposal, which would be between the around $2 trillion package Democrats had pushed for earlier this year and above the $500 billion plan GOP senators discussed over the summer.

"It's not going make everybody happy but there's been an enormous amount of work done," Warner said. "It would be stupidity on steroids if Congress left for Christmas without doing an interim package as a bridge."