The Biden administration is trying to persuade other nations to approve a global minimum tax as it works to curb profit shifting and raise corporate taxes in the United States.

Such a pact has been elusive for years, as countries like Ireland sought to keep taxes as low as possible in order to attract global investment. But the Biden administration has made securing a global minimum tax a priority as it looks to raise corporate taxes domestically to help pay for a sweeping expansion of the nation’s infrastructure.

She scrapped a Trump administration proposal that would have essentially allowed American technology companies to opt out of new global digital tax rules. And last month, the Treasury Department said it would support a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent, which was lower than the 21 percent that other countries believed the United States was demanding.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has instructed state officials to end contracts with the Biden administration for shelters in the state that hold migrant children and teenagers who have been arriving alone, in record numbers, to the southwest border.

The order could affect thousands of migrant children waiting to be united with family members or other sponsors in the United States

If the governor actually implements the order, it could displace more than 4,000 children,”

Former President Donald J. Trump has removed himself entirely from the internet.

Still banned from Twitter and Facebook, and struggling to find a way to influence news coverage since leaving office, Mr. Trump decided on Wednesday to shutter his do-it-yourself alternative, a blog he had started just a month ago called “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.”

The site, which cost a few thousand dollars to make and was put together for Mr. Trump by a company run by his former campaign manager Brad Parscale, was intended to be an online hub for supporters to see statements issued by the former president and communicate with him.

Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, who gained national attention for her stalwart defense of the state’s electoral system in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, announced on Wednesday that she was running for governor, portraying herself as a pragmatic leader who does not back down in the face of criticism and threats.

Ms. Hobbs has repeatedly condemned the partisan recount as a dangerous threat to democracy and has assigned observers to track problems with the process.

A campaign video announcing her run opens by referring to the attacks and death threats that she has faced in the wake of the election — including armed protesters showing up at her home.

Researchers found that sharp declines in food shortages, financial instability and anxiety coincided with the two most recent rounds of payments.

In offering most Americans two more rounds of stimulus checks in the past six months, totaling $2,000 a person, the federal government effectively conducted a huge experiment in safety net policy. Supporters said a quick, broad outpouring of cash would ease the economic hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Skeptics called the policy wasteful and expensive.

The study does not address the critics’ main complaints, that the spending swelled the deficit, that much of the money went to economically stable families who did not really need it and that the checks were part of a pattern of aid over the last year that left some people with less incentive to find jobs. Some analysts say hardship would have fallen anyway as a result of job growth and other safety net programs.

Being racist is not who you are but what you do/don’t do and what you say/don’t say in the moment, and in response to racist policies.

To understand racism, we must grasp the marriage between racist ideas and racist policies.

Dr. Kendi urged a new vision and role for philanthropy—one that challenges discriminatory policies and actively works to dismantle racial inequities.

In Loudoun County, Va., a group of parents led by a former Trump appointee are pushing to recall school board members after the school district called for mandatory teacher training in “systemic oppression and implicit bias.”

And across the country, Republican-led legislatures have passed bills recently to ban or limit schools from teaching that racism is infused in American institutions.

Republicans have focused their attacks on the influence of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education. The concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.

After killing a Republican-sponsored bill to restrict voting in the state, Democrats vowed to oppose any efforts to revive it. Republicans pledged to pass it in a special legislative session.

AUSTIN — The battle among Texas lawmakers over a bill that would impose some of the strictest limits in the nation on voting access escalated Monday as Democrats and Republicans vowed that they would not back down over a highly charged issue that has galvanized both parties.

suggested he would withhold pay from lawmakers because of their failure to pass the bill.

With new coronavirus cases dropping to below 20 a day, Israel on Tuesday retired its Green Pass system and will now allow equal access to restaurants, sports events, cultural activities and the like to vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens.

For now, the only remaining pandemic restriction inside the country is a requirement to wear masks in closed public spaces, although that, too, is under discussion by health officials. The main efforts to control the coronavirus are now centered on restrictions for travel in and out of Israel, based on testing and quarantine. Strict limitations remain on the entry of people who are not Israeli citizens.

About 81 percent of Israel’s adult population has been fully vaccinated, but about 2.6 million children under 16 are still not eligible, out of a total population of just over nine million. Up to a million people have chosen not to be inoculated, despite Israel’s enviable supply of vaccine doses.

It was here that Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for around 18 months in the late 19th century because of his homosexuality, and this was the inspiration for his grimly realistic portrayal of life behind bars, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

“You feel goose bumps going in there,”

“There are not many literary figures whose life as well as their work plays a part in the national story, and indeed in the international story,” he said. “We are fascinated by his rise and by his fall and, because of the extraordinary change in attitudes to homosexuality over the century, he also has a place in social history. What we get in Reading Gaol is that transition from triumph to tragedy.”

“For our generation, children aren’t a necessity,” said Mr. Huang, a bachelor in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. “Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”

The announcement was meant to encourage couples to make more babies, but men like Mr. Huang say they would rather remain childless — even going under the knife to ensure it.

Housing agents offer apartments that cater to childless couples. Bedrooms once pitched as future nurseries are being converted into home gyms.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday said it would suspend oil drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that were issued in the waning days of the Trump presidency. #styln-signup { max-width: calc(100% - 40px); width: 600px; margin: 20px auto; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2; min-height: 50px; } #styln-signup.web { display: none; } #styln-signup + .live-blog-post::before { border-top: unset !important; } [data-feedpub-type="LIVE_BLOG"] #styln-signup, [data-feedpub-type="FACT_CHECK"] #styln-signup { border-bottom: none; }

Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to allow oil and gas drilling there for more than four decades, and issuing the leases was a signature achievement of the Trump White House.

“President Biden believes America’s national treasures are cultural and economic cornerstones of our country and he is grateful for the prompt action by the Department of the Interior to suspend all leasing pending a review of decisions made in the last administration’s final days that could have changes the character of this special place forever,” said Gina McCarthy, the White House domestic climate policy adviser.

After China said it would allow couples to have three children, the state news media trumpeted the move as a major change that would help stimulate growth. But across much of the country, the announcement was met with indignation.

For many ordinary Chinese, the news about the policy change on Monday was only a reminder of a problem they’d long recognized: the drastic inadequacy of China’s social safety net and legal protections that would enable them to have more children.

“I recommend you first fix the most basic problems with maternity rights and the discrimination women will inevitably face in the workplace, and then encourage them to have children,” read the most popular comment under an article about the policy change by Xinhua, the state news agency.

President Biden on Tuesday issued a presidential proclamation recognizing June as Pride Month, vowing to fight for full equality for the L.G.B.T.Q. community to be codified into law.

Mr. Trump’s silence came as his administration rolled back a 2016 regulation that mandated health care as a civil right for transgender patients under the Affordable Care Act.

Biden-Harris Administration has taken historic actions to accelerate the march toward full L.G.B.T.Q.+ equality.”

The battle among Texas lawmakers over a bill that would impose some of the strictest limits in the nation on voting access escalated Monday as Democrats and Republicans vowed that they would not back down over a highly charged issue that has galvanized both parties.

Despite the Democrats’ success Sunday night, Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature, and would be favored to pass a voting bill in a special session. Mr. Abbott has not said when he would reconvene the Legislature; he can do so as early as Tuesday, but may wait until late summer, when he had planned to recall lawmakers anyway to manage redistricting.

ut he said he believed the bill would ultimately pass, if not in the next special session, then in another after that. “It’s going to be heavily debated and contested,” he said. “But at the end of the day, during a special session, I think we’ll get it done.”

While fighting continued for an 11th day, it appeared to ease as the two sides indicated that they could soon reach an agreement.

Since the start of the conflict 11 days ago, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 200 Palestinians, including over 60 children, according to the Gaza health ministry. The Israeli military said that more than 130 of those killed were combatants. Hamas rocket attacks have killed more than a dozen people in Israel, including two children, according to the Israeli authorities.

The shape of a possible cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel started to come into clearer focus on Thursday, even as diplomats and Middle East experts cautioned that the last moments before any agreement are fraught with risk and uncertainty.

The prosecution is presenting its closing arguments in Mr. Chauvin’s murder trial, arguing: “This was not policing” and “it was unnecessary.”

“George Floyd is not a threat, he never was. He was not resisting — he was just unable to comply,” the prosecution says. The ability to comply is something that comes up time and again in fatal police encounters — was the person autistic? deaf? Under the influence? The Minneapolis Police Department policy specifically requires officers to consider a suspect's ability to comply when they’re assessing whether the person is resisting.

Throughout this closing argument, as the prosecution attacks his actions and his character, Derek Chauvin has been doing the same thing that he has done throughout the trial: taking copious notes on a legal pad.

INDIANAPOLIS — The authorities were searching for a motive on Friday after a gunman stormed a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis late Thursday, fatally shooting eight people and injuring at least seven others in a fast-moving, chaotic scene that emerged as the latest mass shooting to rock the nation in a matter of weeks.

The violence in Indianapolis comes only weeks after back-to-back mass shootings last month at spas in the Atlanta area and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., drawing renewed attention to America’s deep-seated problems with gun violence and evoking both exhaustion and grief.

Officials used a common word — “another” — to define the tragedy. “This is another heartbreaking day and I’m shaken by the mass shooting at the FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis,” Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana said on Twitter. Mayor Joe Hogsett of Indianapolis condemned the “horrific news of yet another mass shooting, an act of violence that senselessly claimed the lives of eight of our neighbors.”

President Biden, calling gun violence in the United States “an international embarrassment,” took a set of initial steps on Thursday to address the problem, starting with a crackdown on the proliferation of so-called ghost guns, or firearms assembled from kits.

The most substantive of the steps was directing the Justice Department to curb the spread of ghost guns. Kits for these guns can be bought without background checks and allow a gun to be assembled from pieces with no serial numbers.

Mr. Biden said he wanted the department to issue a regulation within a month to require that the components in the kits have serial numbers that would allow them to be traced and that the weapons be legally classified as firearms, with the buyers subjected to background checks.

Without coming right out and saying it, President Joe Biden seems ready to let lapse a May 1 deadline for completing a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Orderly withdrawals take time, and Biden is running out of it.

“Just in terms of tactical reasons, it’s hard to get those troops out.” Tellingly, he added, “And if we leave, we’re going to do so in a safe and orderly way.”

“The most prudent course of action feels like a six-month extension and an attempt to get the Taliban truly meeting their promises — essentially permitting a legitimate ‘conditions based’ withdrawal in the fall.”