The U.S. has entered a disconcerting phase: Vaccines are rolling out quickly, but upticks in cases raise the prospect of a new surge.

In a rural stretch of Michigan along the shore of Lake Huron, coronavirus outbreaks are ripping through churches, schools and restaurants where the virus has infected line cooks and waitresses. For more than a week, ambulances have taken several hourlong trips each day to rush severely ill coronavirus patients to hospitals in Detroit, Saginaw or Port Huron, where beds in intensive-care units await.

President Biden, facing a rise in coronavirus cases around the country, called on Monday for governors and mayors to reinstate mask mandates as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of “impending doom” from a potential fourth surge of the pandemic.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, appeared to fight back tears as she pleaded with Americans to “hold on a little while longer” and continue following public health advice, like wearing masks and social distancing, to curb the virus’s spread.

“Please, this is not politics — reinstate the mandate,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “The failure to take this virus seriously is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place.”

As President Biden pushes to vaccinate as many Americans as possible, he faces deep skepticism among many Republicans, a group especially challenging for him to persuade.

A third of Republicans said in a CBS News poll that they would not be vaccinated — compared with 10 percent of Democrats — and another 20 percent of Republicans said they were unsure. Other polls have found similar trends.

Other supporters of Mr. Trump believe Democrats exaggerated the toll of the pandemic to hurt the former president.

Washington (CNN)Top Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner resurfaced on Sunday by penning a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the Middle East, his first public remarks since the end of the Trump administration and offering a potential indication into how he will seek to cement his own legacy and accomplishments.

Kushner, one of the most omnipresent officials in the Trump administration who was tasked with far-reaching responsibilities from Middle East peace to criminal justice reform, has maintained a low profile since leaving the White House, moving from Washington to Miami with wife Ivanka Trump on January 20.

"Right now, he's just checked out of politics,"

A 14-year-old suspect who was arrested in connection with the death of a 6-year-old girl in Indiana had a hearing Monday in juvenile court and was ordered detained, officials said.

the girl died from homicide by asphyxiation

teen is being held at a juvenile detention facility.

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson on Thursday invoked race in explaining his sense of safety during the January 6 Capitol riot, saying that he might have been concerned for his well-being had the protesters been affiliated with Black Lives Matter instead of being a largely White pro-Trump crowd

I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn't concerned,

Now, had the tables been turned -- Joe, this could get me in trouble -- had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned,"

Five Oklahoma City Police officers were charged with first-degree manslaughter in last year's fatal shooting of a 15-year-old armed robbery suspect who had already dropped his weapon, according to court documents filed Wednesday in Oklahoma County.

A sixth officer, who fired a less-lethal round, was not charged, the affidavit states.

The affidavit of probable cause filed by District Attorney David W. Prater alleges the officers "jointly, willfully, unlawfully and unnecessarily" killed the teenager "while resisting an attempt by the deceased to commit a crime or after such an attempt had failed."

American society is redrawing cultural norms and protections for citizens’ rights. It shouldn’t be a shock that sports is the most visible battleground.

But as we dream of a return to normalcy, what will we now expect from the games we love? A return to the mythical notion that sports should operate at arm’s length remove from the important issues of the day?

Then he zeroed in. We both did. We agreed that sports have become society’s prime cultural battleground for every hot-button social and political issue. No matter the subject — race, religion, sexuality, patriotism, the role of the police — the sports world is more powerful than ever as a venue for the often harsh hashing out of opposing views.

China is a major supplier of coronavirus vaccine, giving it enormous leverage in pandemic-ravaged nations. Brazil, recently hostile to the Chinese company Huawei, has suddenly changed its stance.

The Trump administration had been warning allies across the globe to shun Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, denouncing the company as a dangerous extension of China’s surveillance system.

With Covid-19 deaths rising to their highest levels yet, and a dangerous new virus variant stalking Brazil, the nation’s communications minister went to Beijing in February, met with Huawei executives at their headquarters and made a very unusual request of a telecommunication company.

The agency will help provide basic care as criticism mounts over the treatment of the increasing number of young migrants who have filled detention facilities at the southwest border.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist in processing an increasing number of children and teenagers who have filled detention facilities at the southwest border, as criticism mounts over the treatment of young migrants.

“A Border Patrol facility is no place for a child,” Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement on Saturday. “Our goal is to ensure that unaccompanied children are transferred to H.H.S. as quickly as possible.”

The undercount complicates President Biden’s decision on carrying out a complete withdrawal by May 1, as his administration tries to jump-start peace talks.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Facing a high-stakes choice and running out of time to make it, the Biden administration is wrestling with whether to follow through with a full withdrawal in the next seven weeks of the 2,500 American troops still in Afghanistan — except, as it turns out, that number is actually around 3,500.

A thousand troops may seem like a small number compared to the roughly 100,000 who were there at the height of the war. But the scope of the U.S. presence has become a contentious issue in Afghanistan — where the Taliban want the Americans gone, while the government’s beleaguered security forces rely on U.S. air support — and also in Washington.

Two Proud Boys accused of leading a mob to Congress followed a bloody path to get there. Law enforcement did little to stop them.

Now, Mr. Biggs, 37, and Mr. Nordean, 30, are major targets in a federal investigation that prosecutors on Thursday said could be “one of the largest in American history.” They face some of the most serious charges stemming from the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January: leading a mob of about 100 Proud Boys in a coordinated plan to disrupt the certification of President Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat.

“They committed violence in public, used videos of that violence to promote themselves for other rallies and then traveled across the country to engage in violence again,” said Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a former F.B.I. agent who worked undercover among right-wing groups. “How that didn’t attract F.B.I. attention is hard for me to understand.”

The intelligence agencies missed massive intrusions by Russia and China, forcing the administration and Congress to look for solutions, including closer partnership with private industry.

WASHINGTON — The sophisticated hacks pulled off by Russia and China against a broad array of government and industrial targets in the United States — and the failure of the intelligence agencies to detect them — are driving the Biden administration and Congress to rethink how the nation should protect itself from growing cyberthreats.

Both hacks exploited the same gaping vulnerability in the existing system: They were launched from inside the United States — on servers run by Amazon, GoDaddy and smaller domestic providers — putting them out of reach of the early warning system run by the National Security Agency.

The Capitol Police in the coming days will begin scaling back and in some cases removing fencing erected around the Capitol after the Jan. 6 riot, a Democratic aide familiar with the plans confirmed on Sunday, a visible milestone as Congress tries to return to normal.

Imposing and impenetrable, the fence has become a charged political symbol in the two months since the attack, barring most Americans from the seat of government and causing headaches for the thousands of staff members, journalists and lawmakers who work inside the Capitol. In recent weeks, lawmakers in both parties, wary about the message it sent the country, had been agitating for its removal and a broader reconsideration of the security posture.

The extraordinary measures were put in place as a result of one of the most stunning security failures in the history of Congress. A mob of thousands, egged on by President Donald J. Trump, succeeded in overrunning officers and storming into the Capitol building in a last-ditch effort to stop lawmakers from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory. Many of the invaders were armed and sent the vice president and members of the House and the Senate running for their lives. The attack left five people dead and more than 100 police officers injured.

Liberal politicians are denouncing the expansion of detention facilities and railing against the continued imposition of Trump-era rules intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus from immigrants. And advocates for families separated at the border during Mr. Trump’s administration are pressuring the president to move faster to reunite them.

The number of migrant children in custody along the border has tripled in the past two weeks to more than 3,250, according to federal immigration agency documents obtained by The New York Times, and many of them are being held in jail-like facilities for longer than the three days allowed by law.

And Republicans are already signaling that they plan to put the consequences of Mr. Biden’s immigration agenda at the center of their efforts to retake Congress in 2022.

WASHINGTON — The House impeachment managers opened their prosecution of Donald J. Trump on Wednesday with a meticulous account of his campaign to overturn the election and goad supporters to join him, bringing its most violent spasms to life with never-before-seen security footage from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

They played frantic police radio calls warning that “we’ve lost the line,” body camera footage showing an officer pummeled with poles and fists on the West Front of the Capitol, and silent security tape from inside showing Mr. Pence, his family and members of the House and Senate racing to evacuate as the mob closed in, chanting: “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”

“He told them to ‘fight like hell,’” Mr. Raskin added, quoting the speech that Mr. Trump gave supporters as the onslaught was unfolding, “and they brought us hell on that day.”

WASHINGTON — Triumphant over the signing of their far-reaching $1.9 trillion stimulus package, Democrats are now starting to angle for a major political payoff that would defy history: Picking up House and Senate seats in the 2022 midterm elections, even though the party in power usually loses in the midterms.

Republicans need to gain only one seat in the Senate and just five in the House in 2022 to take back control, a likely result in a normal midterm election, but perhaps a trickier one if voters credit their rivals for a strong American rebound.

They lost 63 House seats, and the majority, and were unable to fulfill President Barack Obama’s goals on issues ranging from gun control to immigration.

NASHVILLE — I’ve been keeping a collection of links to good news about the environment as a hedge against despair when so much of the news from nature is devastating. Rolling pandemics. The near annihilation of birds and insects. Even the end of sharks. In short, a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals,” according to a recent report in Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Creatures we thought we’d lost forever still have a chance. It’s true that we are in the midst of a mass extinction, with as many as one million species at risk of disappearing forever, but sometimes a tiny bit of happy news appears among the grim headlines.

Creatures we’ve never seen before keep turning up. New species, and previously unknown populations of rare species, are constantly being discovered: a bright orange bat with black wings in Guinea, a new clan of blue whales in the Indian Ocean, a new species of monkey in Myanmar, a spectacular green snake in India.

MEXICO CITY — The year 2022 will mark 200 years of official relations between Mexico and the United States. But before we’re able to celebrate this milestone, we must first work to safeguard freedom, democracy and the rule of law in Mexico under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s illiberal rule.

Mr. Biden would also do well to promote stricter gun laws to help stop the flow of guns from the United States. Mr. López Obrador, known as AMLO, in turn should dispel the uncertainty over Mexico’s energy sector, where new laws that strengthen the state-owned energy companies Pemex and C.F.E. and the use of fossil fuels, and that conflict with the U.S.M.C.A., have recently been passed.

Mr. Biden and Mr. López Obrador are both men of faith, and it was a good sign that symbols of the Mexican people, both religious and secular, were invoked in their meeting.

Last week, President Biden issued a robust endorsement of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, the most far-reaching pro-union legislation in decades, which would make forming unions easier and make it harder for companies to fight against unionization.

So far, he appears poised to deliver on his campaign pledge to “be the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen” — the sort of lofty promise made and later broken by recent presidents, Republican and Democratic alike.

“It’s really important that he portrayed labor not as a narrow constituency, but as a movement connected to his other priorities — that it’s a force for racial equality and gender equality.”