“This legislation is about giving the backbone of this nation — the essential workers, the working people who built this country, the people who keep this country going — a fighting chance,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. He said he looked forward to signing what he called a “historic piece of legislation” on Friday at the White House.

While Republicans argued the plan, whose final cost was estimated at $1.856 trillion, was bloated and unaffordable, surveys indicate that it has widespread support among Americans, with 70 percent of Americans favoring it in a Pew Research Center poll released this week.

Democrats fast-tracked their own measure through the House and Senate without pausing to court Republican support. They stayed remarkably united in doing so, with just one Democrat, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, voting against the final measure.

“This is the most consequential legislation that many of us will ever be a party to,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said at a news conference after the bill’s passage. “On this day, we celebrate because we are honoring a promise made by our president, and we join with him in promising that help is on the way.”

“I’m not going to vote for $1.9 trillion just because it has a couple of good provisions,” he later told reporters.

Economists widely agree that the $787 billion stimulus law that resulted, which attracted scant Republican support anyway, was too small to address the crisis, and Democrats lost the House in the following midterm elections.

“The American people are going to see an American comeback this year,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, “but it won’t be because of this liberal bill.”

The stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients.

Buying insurance through the government program known as COBRA would temporarily become a lot cheaper. COBRA, for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, generally lets someone who loses a job buy coverage via the former employer. But it’s expensive: Under normal circumstances, a person may have to pay at least 102 percent of the cost of the premium. Under the relief bill, the government would pay the entire COBRA premium from April 1 through Sept. 30. A person who qualified for new, employer-based health insurance someplace else before Sept. 30 would lose eligibility for the no-cost coverage. And someone who left a job voluntarily would not be eligible, either.

There would be a big one for people who already have debt. You wouldn’t have to pay income taxes on forgiven debt if you qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation — for example, if you’ve been in an income-driven repayment plan for the requisite number of years, if your school defrauded you or if Congress or the president wipes away $10,000 of debt for large numbers of people. This would be the case for debt forgiven between Jan. 1, 2021, and the end of 2025.

“There are few leadership roles in the federal government that have greater responsibility for setting environmental goals and climate policies than the Environmental Protection Agency,” said Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware and chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Mr. Regan, he said, “is the person for the job at this critical moment.”

Mr. Regan will be the first Black man to serve as E.P.A. administrator.

Those potentially overlapping authorities have already provoked criticism from Republicans, some of whom voted against Mr. Regan’s confirmation because they said they did not know who is truly in charge of the administration’s climate and environment policy.

“Mr. Regan has plenty of experience,” Senator McConnell said. “The problem is what he’s poised to do with it.”

“I really liked meeting and getting to know Michael Regan,” Senator Capito said. “He is a dedicated public servant and an honest man.”

The Clean Power Plan rule met resistance at the Supreme Court, but the Trump version was struck down altogether.

It’s not uncommon for a vaccine to forestall severe disease but not infection. Inoculations against the flu, rotavirus, polio and pertussis are all imperfect in this way.

The research available so far on how well the vaccines prevent transmission is preliminary but promising. “We feel confident that there’s a reduction,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida. “We don’t know the exact magnitude, but it’s not 100 percent.”

a study in Scotland conducted tests every two weeks, regardless of symptoms, on health care workers who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Investigators found that the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing infection was 70 percent after one dose, and 85 percent after the second.

“If the case numbers are zero, it doesn’t matter whether it’s 70 percent or 100 percent,” said Zoe McLaren, a health policy expert at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, referring to vaccine effectiveness.

Mask-wearing policies also will depend on how many unvaccinated people remain in the population

“Are you wearing a mask to protect yourself from severe Covid, or are you wearing a mask for public health?” Dr. Klein said. “It’s right to do your part in the community beyond yourself.”

The volunteer effort can sometimes feel like a full-time job, even though Ms. Phillips is already a high school teacher. “There are many moments where we’re like, ‘You know we’re just regular people, right?’” Ms. Phillips said.

“It is a slap in the face to every New Yorker that took to the streets and the polls demanding an end to the secrecy shrouding N.Y.P.D. abuse,” s

And last month, a federal appeals court rejected a last-ditch legal challenge from police unions, which argued that releasing the records would put officers in danger and harm their careers.

Before the secrecy law was repealed last year, New York was one of more than 20 states that did not make police disciplinary records public.

Critics said, however, that the database presented only a sliver of the universe of misconduct allegations, obscuring the full picture. The profiles of some notable officers known to have been disciplined in the time period covered by the data show no record of those charges.

The city announced plans to publish disciplinary summaries proactively online last summer, after the Legislature removed the law. Police unions, joined by those representing firefighters and corrections officers, sued in federal court and won a temporary delay.

Susan Hutson, New Orleans’s independent police monitor since 2010, said the scope of the records being released in New York is “ahead of the game,” and other cities would be paying attention.

“This is the first case in the nation to seek a constitutional right to an anti-racist education,” said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers suing the city and state.

In the Detroit case, a federal court found last year that the district had been so negligent toward the educational needs of students that children had been “deprived of access to literacy.” The court then declared that public school students had a constitutional right to an adequate education. The plaintiffs later reached a settlement with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to fund more literacy programs in the Detroit public schools.

The city’s gifted and talented classes for elementary school students are about 75 percent white and Asian-American, and there are relatively few gifted programs located in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. White students, who make up just 15 percent of the overall district, are starkly overrepresented in selective middle and high schools.

“We absolutely think that all students across the country have a right to an anti-racist education,” Ms. Savage said, noting that the extent of New York’s segregation made it a “particularly powerful place” to bring the lawsuit.

The plaintiff’s request for relief includes the elimination of selective admissions processes for all grade levels, which would amount to the most dramatic change to the city’s school system in decades.

This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.

On Monday, lawmakers were briefed on the findings of the security assessment that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested in the wake of Jan. 6. Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the task force, recommended a variety of permanent enhancements. These include beefing up the Capitol Police force, in terms of increased staffing, improved training, enhanced authority for its leadership and a new emphasis on intelligence work; creating a quick-reaction force to be on call 24-7 to handle imminent threats; installing a retractable fencing system; and adding protections for rank-and-file members of Congress at home and while they are traveling and back in their districts.

“They were the ones that floated March 4,” she said. “They were also the ones in the last two weeks saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s a false flag. It’s not QAnon that’s going to do anything on March 4. It’s a false-flag operation by antifa to make us look bad.’”

“And it’s a community in which there’s an idea, rather like an improv group, to say, ‘Yes, and’ — not, ‘No, but,’” Kleinfeld said. “If someone throws out an idea, others are encouraged to build on it. That suggests a long life, a durability.”

As three women stepped forward with claims of sexual harassment and other unwanted advances by Mr. Cuomo, the most visible governor in America effectively went dark.

Now he is at the whims of often-fickle public opinion, fuming legislators and investigations.

As the allegations unfolded, Mr. Cuomo’s team denied wrongdoing and issued statements, but a number of leading lawmakers in Albany and Washington did not hear from the governor on the matter.

Indeed, the public outcry and the dearth of vocal defenders illustrate both the complexities of the problems Mr. Cuomo faces and how little he has invested in building mutually respectful relationships in politics. As with other New York politicians in times of extreme crisis, it is a dynamic that is haunting him now.

“When the investigation concludes, Democrats, I believe, will coalesce around doing the right thing,” Mr. Jacobs said. “We have to let the chips fall where they may, but I don’t see the value in a rush to judgment. I only see the potential cost.”

Both India and China maintain medium-size nuclear arsenals, which have traditionally been seen as the ultimate deterrent. But neither side believes that the other would risk a nuclear exchange in response to bloody disputes over the Line of Actual Control, an ill-defined border demarcation where long-running disputes have escalated into deadly conflicts by increasingly nationalistic governments.

Until recent years, China’s focus had been on information theft. But Beijing has been increasingly active in placing code into infrastructure systems, knowing that when it is discovered, the fear of an attack can be as powerful a tool as an attack itself.

authorities found “suspicious activity” that suggested the intervention of a state actor.

But Mr. Yadav declined to elaborate, saying the investigation’s full report would be released in early March. Nitin Raut, a state government minister quoted in local reports in November blaming sabotage for the Mumbai outage, did not respond to questions about the blackout.

“The issue is we still haven’t been able to get rid of our dependence on foreign hardware and foreign software,” General Hooda said.

“I would really question whether that’s a true Trump supporter or a true conservative.”

The Washington Times, a right-wing newspaper, published an online article shortly before 2:30 p.m. claiming that a facial recognition firm had identified antifa activists in the crowd at the Capitol.

From 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., the antifa falsehood was mentioned about 8,700 times across cable television, social media and online news outlets, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company.

Snopes, the online fact-checking outlet, had already debunked the false antifa narrative — but its story attracted only 306 likes and shares on Twitter at the time, an indication of how difficult it is for fact-checking efforts to gain traction over the original falsehood.

At the first presidential debate in September, seen by 73 million people, Mr. Trump said “somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.” (In the same answer, Mr. Trump declined to condemn the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group that has endorsed violence.)

Of the 290 people who have been charged in the attack, at least 27 are known to have ties to far-right extremist groups like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys.

Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted.

Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.

The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t

Similarly, once climate change can no longer be ignored, Republicans may tighten their embrace of fossil fuels rather than admitting decades of policy error.

“When people are presented with a crisis like in Texas, they often grasp for stability,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told me. “This is something the right is good at — they offer the security of tradition, of the familiar.”

Texas kept its grid disconnected from the regional grids so it didn’t have to follow federal regulations. In a world of aggressive climate action, it’s easy to imagine more states, and countries, receding from compacts and multilateral institutions because they don’t like the new rules, or the loss of sovereignty. Indeed, America just experienced this dance as President Donald Trump withdrew us from the climate accords, before President Biden signed us back up. A global crisis that demands cooperation and even sacrifice will be fertile soil for nationalists and demagogues.

“The president’s intention, as is the intention of this government, is to recalibrate our engagement with Saudi Arabia,”

Nearly three weeks ago, at the State Department, Mr. Biden ordered an end to arms sales and other support to the Saudis for a war in Yemen that he called a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.”

The Trump administration issued sanctions against 17 Saudis involved in the killing. But the administration never declassified the findings

“Even the Trump administration found itself forced to take action” against the other 17, Ms. Whitson said.

“The message to the Saudis has to be to get rid of this guy,” she said.

At the time, Mr. Trump described his action as a way to protect Americans, millions of whom lost their jobs as the threat of the coronavirus shut down the economy.

“By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important,” Mr. Trump said. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”

Critics of Mr. Trump accused him of using the pandemic as an excuse to further advance his agenda of severely restricting immigration.

An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute at the time estimated that the policy could affect as many as 660,000 people.

In his legislation, the president would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

the inauguration platform they had been diligently assembling was wrecked: sound systems and photo equipment irreparably damaged or stolen, two lanterns designed and built by the eminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 19th century ripped from the ground, and blue paint tracked all over the stone balustrades and into the hallways.

“At this rate, counseling and consultation services in 2021 would increase by 65 percent over 2020 and by 200 percent as compared to more typical recent years,”

Since the siege, congressional aides have reported trouble sleeping and feeling anxious, claustrophobic, angry and depressed. Lawmakers have requested additional resources to support the mental health needs of employees in response to surging demand.

Ms. Cheney also assailed the “America First” foreign policy Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress had championed, calling the ideas behind them “just as dangerous today as they were in 1940 when isolationists launched the America First movement to appease Hitler and prevent America from aiding Britain in the fight against the Nazis.”

“Isolationism was wrong and dangerous then and it is wrong and dangerous now,” she said.

Her comments were in sharp contrast to those made by her fellow House Republican leaders.

From 2008 to 2012, she served as ambassador to Liberia, before moving on to become the director general of the Foreign Service for about a year.

Despite the warm response Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s nomination received from diplomats and former State Department officials, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill showed some concern.

an optimistic speech she had given in October 2019 on Africa’s relationship with both China and the United States.

The speech conspicuously lacked criticism of China’s human-rights record or pattern of predatory-lending practices in developing countries desperate for investment.

“If you look at what I have done prior to that,” she said, “there is no question that I am not at all naïve about what the Chinese are doing and I have called them out on a regular basis,” which included her sharp criticism of China at other points in the hearing.

Aside from China, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield will have to more broadly strengthen America’s presence at the United Nations, which was scaled back as the Trump administration pursued an “America First” style of diplomacy that devalued multilateral institutions.

as well as the payment of $130,000 in hush money during the 2016 campaign to Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress whose stage name is Stormy Daniels.

if legal costs related to hush-money payments were claimed as a tax write-off, or if money from Russia ever moved through Mr. Trump’s bank accounts. The absence of that level of detail underscores the potential value of other records that Mr. Vance won access to with Monday’s Supreme Court decision.

Numerous claims by Mr. Trump of generous philanthropy fell apart upon examination of his tax returns,

And such dire numbers were not an anomaly. Mr. Trump’s many golf courses, a core component of his business empire, reported losses of $315.6 million from 2000 to 2018, while the income from licensing his name to hotels and resorts had all but dried up by the time he entered the White House. In addition, Mr. Trump has hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, much of which he personally guaranteed, coming due in the next few years.