Britain’s National Health Service delivered its first shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday, opening a mass vaccination campaign with little precedent in modern medicine and making Britons the first people in the world to receive a clinically authorized, fully tested vaccine.

At 6:31 a.m. Tuesday, Margaret Keenan, 90, a former jewelry shop assistant, rolled up the sleeve of her “Merry Christmas” T-shirt to receive the first shot, and her image quickly became an emblem of the remarkable race to produce a vaccine and the global effort to end a pandemic that has killed 1.5 million people worldwide.

British regulators leapt ahead of their American counterparts last week to authorize a coronavirus vaccine, upsetting the White House and setting off a spirited debate about whether Britain had moved too hastily, or if the United States was wasting valuable time as the virus was killing about 1,500 Americans a day.

The storms displaced hundreds of thousands of people, creating a new class of refugees with more reason than ever to migrate north and setting up an early test for the incoming Biden administration.

“This is where I live,” said Jorge Suc Ical, standing atop the sea of rocks and muddy debris that entombed his town. “It’s a cemetery now.”

The storms, two of the most powerful in a record-breaking season, demolished tens of thousands of homes, wiped out infrastructure and swallowed vast swaths of cropland.

Exacerbated by wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and extremely dry conditions, a fast-moving wildfire spread to more than 6,000 acres in Southern California on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of 25,000 residents, officials said.

Fire officials attributed the spread of the Bond fire to the winds.The blaze began as a house fire in Silverado, about 50 miles from Los Angeles, and quickly spread to the surrounding area, fire officials said. The cause was under investigation.

Chief Fennessy said that more than 500 firefighters were battling the flames and that more than 30 agencies were involved in the effort, which included fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.

Coins are everywhere until they’re nowhere, and at the moment they’re hard to find. By upending normal habits, the pandemic has dropped them out of circulation and accelerated a trend toward cards, apps and other cashless payments that could eventually make coins obsolete.

China has plans for a digital currency, and the U.S. Federal Reserve is doing “research and experimentation.” Facebook has a currency in the works, and Bitcoin’s evangelists are still preaching. Millions of Americans are skipping right over coins by paying with their phones — or shopping on them.

A funeral for cash has not yet been scheduled, but the pandemic has made it much easier to imagine a world without coins, and already reinvigorated the movement to get rid of pennies.

In November 2018, after a vote that did not matter enough to him to push conspiracy theories about the outcome, President Trump stood in the Rose Garden and delivered the hard truth.

On Monday, after the administrator of the General Services Administration formally designated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the apparent winner of the election, Mr. Trump blessed the move on Twitter while still vowing to move ahead with legal challenges.

Yet the president’s desperate gambit until this point has been so all-consuming, his aversion to losing so well known, that little attention has been paid to a knotty question underpinning it all: What, exactly, was he holding onto? Why fight so hard, and put the country through so much, to keep a position he has often not appeared to want?

Prosecutors declined to pursue many of the cases because they concluded the protesters were exercising their basic civil rights.

An English teacher at Marion C. Moore School at that time, Mr. Kaufmann was among more than 800 people swept up by the police in Louisville during the many months of demonstrations prompted by the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.

Now, more than five months later, as Mr. Kaufmann’s case and those of thousands of others finally land in courts across the United States, a vast majority of cases against protesters are being dismissed. Only cases involving more substantial charges like property destruction or other violence remain.

In addition to a deadly pandemic and a weakened economy, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will inherit one more challenge when he takes office in January: a toxic relationship with the world’s second-largest economy.

President Trump has placed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of products from China, imposed sanctions on Chinese companies and restricted Chinese businesses from buying American technology

The hard choices for Mr. Biden will include deciding whether to maintain tariffs on about $360 billion worth of Chinese imports, which have raised costs for American businesses and consumers, or whether to relax those levies in exchange for concessions on economic issues or other fronts, like climate change.

several Democratic lawmakers blamed Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter for a surge of hate speech and election disinformation after the election.

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called for tougher data privacy laws, changes to a law that gives the companies legal protection for content posted by users, and greater antitrust action.

“You have built terrifying tools of persuasion and manipulation — with power far exceeding the robber barons of the last Gilded Age,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Faced with a seemingly unstoppable surge in coronavirus infections, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households — a message sharply at odds with a White House eager to downplay the threat.

“The safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving this year is at home with members of your household,” said Erin Sauber-Schatz, who leads the agency’s community intervention and critical population task force.

More than one million new cases have been reported in the past week alone. “Amid this critical phase, the C.D.C. is recommending against travel during the Thanksgiving period,” Dr. Henry Walke, Covid-19 incident manager at the agency, said at a news briefing.

President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.

Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin.

Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.”

New research on the connection between climate change and winter drownings has found that reported drowning deaths are increasing exponentially in areas with warmer winters.

Some of the sharpest increases were in areas where Indigenous customs and livelihood require extended time on ice. Across the countries studied, children under the age of 9 and teenagers and adults between 15 and 39 were the most vulnerable to winter drowning accidents.

“I think there’s a disconnect between climate change and the local, everyday impacts,” Dr. Sharma said. “If you think about climate change in winter, you’re thinking about polar bears and ice sheets, but not about these activities that are just ingrained in our culture.

Blood samples from recovered patients suggest a powerful, long-lasting immune response, researchers reported.

How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study

Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.

Barack Obama’s former vice president will soon have his old job. But he sees deep divisions that no president alone can heal.

We spend a lot of time viewing our politics through a backward gaze. We base polling estimates on assumptions about previous electorates. We compare Joe Biden’s performance in rural areas with how Barack Obama fared in those same districts a dozen years earlier.

But what if this moment has no parallel in our recent past? What if it’s bigger than just shifting coalitions — a moment when our whole system of information, politics and governance is breaking down?

The brutality of settlers’ expansion into the Great Plains and American West has been drastically underplayed in popular myths about the founding and growth of the United States.Arguably the best-known of those myths is the story of the first Thanksgiving, a holiday Robert Magnan, who led the buffalo hunt at Fort Peck, does not observe. “Thanksgiving is kind of like Columbus Day for Native people,” he said. “Why would we celebrate people who tried to destroy us?”

It is now widely accepted that the story of a friendship-sealing repast between white colonists and Native Americans is inaccurate.

The holiday arrives in the midst of a national reckoning over race, and a global pandemic that has landed with particular force on marginalized communities of color. The crises have fueled an intense re-examination of the roots of persistent inequities in American life.