Over the past few years, a California-based tech start-up has repeatedly made headlines for beating public health agencies at their own game.The start-up, Kinsa, which makes internet-connected thermometers, has routinely detected the spread of seasonal flu weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And when Covid hit last year, the company saw unusual spikes in fevers about 18 days before states recorded peaks in deaths.

Now, the company is putting its pandemic prognostication skills to a new test in a partnership with the New York City Department of Health. Over the coming months, Kinsa will distribute as many as 100,000 free smart thermometers through the city’s elementary schools and will make the resulting data available to local health officials.

The program is entirely voluntary, officials at both Kinsa and City Hall stress. Schools that opt into the program will send Kinsa’s brochures home to students’ families; if parents want to participate, they can download Kinsa’s app and order a free thermometer.

On Monday, the agency will rule on the drug, aducanumab, which aims to slow progression of memory and thinking problems early in the disease. If approved, it would be the first new Alzheimer’s medication since 2003 and the first treatment on the market that attacks the disease process rather than just easing symptoms.

Beyond the status of this particular drug, some experts worry approval could lower standards for future drugs — an especially important question at a time when public trust in science is teetering.

Debate centers on two never fully completed Phase 3 trials that contradicted each other. One suggested that a high dose could slightly slow cognitive decline; the other showed no benefit. Biogen says that given the need for Alzheimer’s medications, the single positive trial, plus results from a small safety trial and aducanumab’s ability to reduce a key protein, should justify approval.The F.D.A. typically follows advisory committee recommendations and usually requires two convincing studies for approval, but it has made exceptions, especially for severe diseases that lack treatments.

The final step to collect his millions was a good-will gesture: He needed to embark on a whirlwind tour to several countries, stopping first in São Paulo, Brazil, to pick up a small package of gifts for government officials.

Under the program, ICE officials share information with foreign law enforcement agencies when they learn about potential smuggling. But critics say the program does not do enough to warn unwitting drug mules that they are being duped; instead, U.S. officials in some cases are delivering vulnerable older Americans straight into the hands of investigators in foreign countries, where they can be locked up for years.

Since Operation Cocoon was created in 2013, information shared by ICE has led to more than 400 travelers being stopped by law enforcement at foreign airports, resulting in about 390 drug seizures. More than 180 of those stopped on suspicion of carrying narcotics were American citizens, and 70 percent of those were over age 60.

Talk of labor shortages is everywhere. That is to say, many economic commentators and policymakers have been bemoaning the supposedly alarming reports of a lack of workers to fill the jobs vital to the ongoing economic recovery. But there is always a chorus of employers complaining they can’t find the workers they need. We have to look beyond anecdotal reports to fully understand the data.

As we sift through the latest jobs report, which showed the economy gained 559,000 jobs in May, three key findings rise to the surface.

This is also true today. Wage growth decelerated in May in most sectors. And in the vast majority of sectors, wages are growing solidly but not fast enough to raise concern about damaging labor shortages, given that job growth is also strong. Further, we still have 7.6 million fewer jobs than we did before Covid and there are large employment gaps in virtually all industries and demographic groups

The 818-page bill would end partisan gerrymandering, tighten controls on campaign spending and ease voter registration. It would also force major-party candidates for president and vice president to release 10 years’ worth of personal and business tax returns and end the president’s and vice president’s exemption from conflict-of-interest rules, which allowed Mr. Trump to maintain businesses that profited off his presidency.

Under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to end debate and break a filibuster on policy legislation. Republican and Democratic Senates have chipped away at the filibuster, ensuring that most executive branch appointees and judicial nominees can be confirmed with a simple 51-vote majority.

That decision freed nine states, mainly in the South, to change voting laws without pre-approval from Washington. After the 2020 election, many of those states — and several others — jumped at the chance, powered by the false claim that voting in November was rife with fraud.

The Biden administration is counting on more than $3 trillion in tax increases on corporations and wealthy Americans to help pay for its ambitious jobs and infrastructure proposals. Republicans have expressed opposition to any rise in taxes and have warned that President Biden’s big spending plans are fueling inflation and will deter business investment. Business groups have complained that higher taxes pose a threat to the economic recovery and will put American companies at a competitive disadvantage.

“We think it’s a fair way to collect revenues,” Ms. Yellen said on her flight back to the United States from London after attending two days of meetings with G7 finance ministers. “I honestly don’t think there’s going to be a significant impact on corporate investment.”

It is unclear if Republicans will support the international tax agreement, particularly a decision to impose a new tax on big, multinational corporations — even if they have no physical presence in the countries where they sell those services. That part of the agreement was offered by the United States to put to rest a fight with European countries over their digital services taxes that would hit large American technology companies.

It is a legislative assault motivated by the failure of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and justified by baseless allegations about the legitimacy of his defeat. Mr. Trump and his supporters pursued indiscriminate lawsuits to overturn the results and then, urged on by Mr. Trump, some of his supporters stormed the Capitol to halt the completion of the election process. Now they are seeking to rewrite the rules to make it easier for Republicans to win elections without winning the most votes.

The new restrictions have a disproportionate impact on Black and other minority voters. There is little comfort in the fact that these rules are much less restrictive than those in the olden days. The Jim Crow regime was constructed gradually.

At least 13 states have joined Georgia in passing new restrictions. Among them are a Montana law that ends the practice of allowing voters to register on Election Day and an Iowa law that requires the state’s polling places to close one hour earlier.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on a case that could upend, in the name of religious freedom, 50 years of progress in the effort to provide better support for L.G.B.T.Q. children in the foster system. Such a decision would be a devastating setback for all children in foster care, and set a dangerous precedent that could have broad repercussions.

On any given day, there are over 400,000 children and adolescents in foster care in the United States. Trauma is built into the system. Children are typically removed from their families of origin because of reports of abuse or neglect, or because a guardian has died or been incarcerated. While there is no recent federal data on L.G.B.T.Q. young people in the foster care system, various studies, including one published in 2019 in the journal Pediatrics, show that L.G.B.T.Q. young people are over represented, with rates ranging from 24 to 34 percent.

As the journalist Michael Waters recently recounted in The New Yorker, with the rise of gay liberation, social workers in several states began placing L.G.B.T.Q. youth with lesbian and gay foster parents. This intervention was at once radical and pragmatic: While straight foster parents often rejected L.G.B.T.Q. young people, many lesbians and gay men were eager to step in. In some cases, as the legal historian Marie-Amelie George has shown, agencies actively reached out to L.G.B.T.Q. organizations for help.

For now, scientists are asking a lot of questions about Covid-19 booster shots, but they don’t yet have many answers.

Different pathogens affect our immune system in different ways. For some diseases, like the measles, getting sick once leads to lifelong protection from another infection. But for other pathogens, our immune defenses wane over time.

Some preliminary studies suggest that these markers — known as correlates of protection — exist for Covid-19 vaccines. Research is underway to find them.

For the first time, a woman had been elected vice president of the United States. A woman of color at that. But while that was certainly noted — there were the requisite headlines, the expected tweets — it wasn’t trumpeted as triumphantly as it could and should have been, because Donald Trump once again sucked up all the oxygen.

That’s why Nikki Haley, so covetous of the White House herself, denounced Harris for a tweet last Saturday in which Harris encouraged Americans to “enjoy the long weekend.”“Unprofessional and unfit,” Haley labeled it, because … nobody goes to the beach on Memorial Day? Nobody barbecues? It was as if Harris had done something truly damaging, like abetting a despot intent on subverting American democracy. Harris may have failed, in that one terse tweet, to mention the uniformed men and women who had died in service to the country, but she honored them in other contexts. As for Haley, well, there’s a musty saying that comes to mind. It concerns glass houses.

Those attacks coincide with the upsizing of the tasks that Biden has assigned her. Having asked her last March to work on stemming migration across the southern border, he identified her on Tuesday as the administration’s lead on voting rights. That’s huge. The issue is a defining one for many Democrats, a top legislative priority for the party and a furiously argued point of contention between them and Republicans.

Last fall and winter, the president of the United States attempted, with ineffectual strategy but violent consequences, to pressure Republicans to overturn an election that he quite clearly lost.

The first theory, held by many liberals and centrists and a few anti-Trump conservatives, is that we’re in a continuing emergency that will end in one of two ways: Either a Democratic Congress will enact far-reaching electoral reforms that decisively weaken the current G.O.P., or else Trump and his supporters will make a more effective and destructive bid to steal the 2024 election.

Under this theory, non-Trumpist Republicans should be speaking out constantly, in the model of Liz Cheney, against the threat Trump poses to democracy. The Biden White House should give up on bipartisanship and spend its capital trying to kill the filibuster and go big on voting rights. And Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema should be reminded daily that it will be their fault when the crisis comes.

But like the sports star, many of us have been stuck in situations that were detrimental to our mental health — at work or in our personal lives — feeling torn between societal expectations and self-preservation.

Her decision to avoid the press did not go over well with tennis officials. Ms. Osaka was fined $15,000, and the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments — the Australian, French and United States Opens, and Wimbledon — threatened to expel her from the French Open.

A survey of over 5,000 employees conducted last year by the advocacy group Mental Health America found that 83 percent of respondents felt emotionally drained from work and 71 percent strongly agreed that the workplace affects their mental health. While the respondents were not representative of the general population — they most likely found the survey when visiting the organization’s mental health screening tools — their responses show just how anxious some workers have become.

The coronavirus has now claimed the lives of 32 lawmakers in the Democratic Republic of Congo — more than 5 percent of its Parliament — the authorities say, a reflection of how the coronavirus continues to pose a widespread threat in some parts of the world even as others increasingly resume pre-pandemic behavior.

The toll of the outbreak in Congo is also rising as the country struggles to roll out Covid-19 vaccines, fight off other deadly diseases and grapple with the eruption of one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes.

The central African state has also struggled with its vaccination campaign. In early March, it received 1.7 million AstraZeneca shots from Covax, the global vaccine-sharing partnership.

“For the longest time, it was mainly displayed as an item that speaks about riches and world power,” said Valika Smeulders, who leads the history department at the Rijksmuseum. In 2013, one of the museum’s curators noticed the images on the lid, she added. “He saw that human beings were being purchased. That allowed us to look at the box in a new way, to relate it to the social history of slavery.”

From the 17th century through the 19th century, they enslaved more than a million people, according to the museum’s historians, buying them at trading posts the companies ran in Africa and Asia and transporting them en masse across oceans, creating large-scale forced migrations.

Slavery was forbidden in the Netherlands, but it was legal — and crucial to the profitable plantations — in Dutch colonies such as Brazil, Indonesia and Suriname. Goods produced by enslaved people for the companies included sugar, coffee, gold, pepper, tobacco, cotton, nutmeg and silver.

The investigation focuses on campaign contributions made by people employed by New Breed Logistics, the company in North Carolina that Mr. DeJoy led from 1983 to 2014, before he was appointed postmaster general a little over a year ago during the administration of President Donald J. Trump. Mr. DeJoy was a leading donor to Mr. Trump in the 2016 campaign.

Mr. DeJoy has received a grand-jury subpoena for information connected to the investigation, according to a person familiar with the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details related to the grand jury.

One day in October 2014, for example, 20 midlevel and senior officials at the company donated a total of $37,600 to the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who was running to unseat a Democratic incumbent. Each official wrote a check for either $2,600, the maximum allowable donation, or $1,000.

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday described systemic racism as a “left-wing myth” during a speech hosted by a Republican group in New Hampshire, adopting the racial politics of his former boss, President Donald J. Trump.

The speech illustrated the careful balance Mr. Pence is aiming to strike in squaring the rhetoric of the Republican Party under Mr. Trump while standing by his opposition to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Republicans have launched an energetic campaign in recent months aiming to dictate how historical and modern racism in America is taught in schools, and Mr. Pence indicated his support of efforts to ban critical race theory through legislation advanced in Republican-led states. Mr. Pence had previously targeted critical race theory in tweets and in his first speech in April after leaving office.

The fact that Mr. McGahn is talking to Congress at all is significant after a multiyear legal battle by the Trump Justice Department to block a subpoena for his testimony. That dispute ended last month when the Biden Justice Department, House Democrats and a lawyer for Mr. McGahn reached a compromise.

Under that deal, Mr. McGahn’s appearance may yield little in terms of new revelations. He testified behind closed doors and will have up to a week to review a transcript for accuracy before it is made public. He also may be questioned only about his involvement in matters that are described in the publicly available portions of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.Still, Mr. McGahn is likely to be asked to respond under oath to Mr. Trump’s public denial of events that were described in the report based in part on what Mr. McGahn told Mr. Mueller’s investigators, including that Mr. Trump had ordered him to have Mr. Mueller fired — a step Mr. McGahn said he refused to take.

While those who did have the right to ask questions, Mr. McGahn was questioned primarily by committee staffers. He was accompanied by his lawyer, William A. Burck.

At least three times in the past two months, those militias have used small, explosive-laden drones that divebomb and crash into their targets in late-night attacks on Iraqi bases — including those used by the C.I.A. and U.S. Special Operations units, according to American officials.

Iran — weakened by years of harsh economic sanctions — is using its proxy militias in Iraq to step up pressure on the United States and other world powers to negotiate an easing of those sanctions as part of a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Since late 2019, Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militias have conducted more than 300 attacks against U.S. interests, killing four Americans and about 25 others, mostly Iraqis, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment published in April. In the last year, a proliferation of previously unknown armed groups have emerged, some claiming responsibility for rocket attacks on U.S. targets.

Since March of last year, cruise ships carrying more than 250 people have been prohibited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from sailing in U.S. waters.

On May 25, Royal Caribbean became the first cruise line to receive approval from the C.D.C. to conduct simulated voyages, which are planned for its Freedom of the Seas ship starting from PortMiami in Florida in late June.

Several major cruise companies have already announced Alaska sailings starting in late July, which will require all passengers to prove that they are vaccinated. But in Florida, the cruise lines’ biggest U.S. departure point, recently enacted state law bans businesses from requiring proof of immunizations from people seeking to use their services.

The shockingly weak April number that confounded economists four weeks ago (originally reported as a gain of 266,000 jobs, now revised up to 278,000) looks like an aberration, not a major downshift in the pace of recovery.

If you average the last three months of job creation, employers are adding 541,000 positions a month. In a normal expansion, that would be great; it’s a higher number than was attained for even a single month in the recovery that began in 2009.

The number of people not in the labor force rose by 160,000, implying more people just said, “Forget it, I’m not even looking for a job.”