But that is about the only conclusive finding in the classified intelligence report, the officials said. And while a forthcoming unclassified version, expected to be released to Congress by June 25, will present few other firm conclusions, senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.

The report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerg

Navy pilots were often unsettled by the sightings. In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

A little more than four minutes into Barnard Kemter’s speech at a Memorial Day service organized by the American Legion post in Hudson, Ohio, an unusual thing happened: His microphone was silenced.

The two organizers who have been called upon to resign, Cindy Suchan-Rothgery and James Garrison, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

But in an interview this week with The Akron Beacon Journal, Ms. Suchan-Rothgery acknowledged that she or Mr. Garrison — she did not specify — had turned off Mr. Kemter’s microphone for two minutes. She told the newspaper that Mr. Kemter’s narrative “was not relevant to our program for the day” and that the “theme of the day was honoring Hudson veterans.”

In April, federal health agencies recommended that practitioners pause administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after a half-dozen women developed a rare blood clotting disorder about two weeks after vaccination.

Coronavirus vaccinations can cause enlarged lymph nodes in the armpit that will show up as white blobs on mammograms. This type of swelling is a normal reaction to the vaccine and will typically occur on the same side as the arm where the shot was given, said Dr. Geeta Swamy, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and a member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’s Covid vaccine group. It usually lasts for only a few weeks.

Based on all of the reassuring evidence to date, when it comes to fertility or pregnancy, “there are no known safety concerns with the vaccine,” said Dr. Sigal Klipstein, a reproductive endocrinologist in Chicago who is a member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Covid-19 Task Force.

The budget proposal released by the Biden administration last week calls for almost $5 trillion in new spending over the next decade — that is, outlays in excess of its “baseline” estimate of the spending that would take place without new policies. Some of the extra money would be borrowed, but most of it — $3.6 trillion — is supposed to come from new revenues.

President Biden has, however, repeatedly promised not to increase taxes on households making less than $400,000 a year.

The unserious critique is the claim that raising taxes on corporations and high incomes would cripple the economy. Assertions that prosperity depends on keeping taxes at the top low have been refuted by experience time and time again — most recently in the failure of the Trump tax cuts to deliver the promised immense investment boom.The only reason the obsession with low taxes for the rich retains any influence is that keeping this zombie shambling around serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy. So let’s not waste time on it.

But for all my study, I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla.

Instead, in my history classes, I learned that Britain’s Stamp Act helped lead to the Boston Tea Party, that “we” were a free people because the Declaration of Independence said “all men are created equal.” That the Whiskey Rebellion started over a tax on whiskey. That the Articles of Confederation and the Alien and Sedition Acts were cockeyed. Rightfully, Sacco and Vanzetti, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and the Wright Brothers had their time in my classes. Our textbooks told of the Louisiana Purchase; the Johnstown, Pa., flood; the great San Francisco earthquake; and George Washington Carver’s development of hundreds of products from the common goober.

The truth about Tulsa, and the repeated violence by some white Americans against Black Americans, was systematically ignored, perhaps because it was regarded as too honest, too painful a lesson for our young white ears. So, our predominantly white schools didn’t teach it, our mass appeal works of historical fiction didn’t enlighten us, and my chosen industry didn’t take on the subject in films and shows until recently.

A military drone that attacked soldiers during a battle in Libya’s civil war last year may have done so without human control, according to a recent report commissioned by the United Nations.

The weapons systems, it said, “were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability.”

Human-operated drones have been used in military strikes for over a decade. President Barack Obama for years embraced drone strikes as a counterterrorism strategy, and President Donald J. Trump expanded the use of drones in Africa.

The era of supersonic commercial flights came to an end when the Concorde completed its last trip between New York and London in 2003, but the allure of ultrafast air

travel never quite died out.

Boom, which has raised $270 million from venture capital firms and other investors, said it planned to introduce aircraft in 2025 and start flight tests in 2026. It expects the plane, which it calls the Overture, to carry passengers before the end of the decade.

The Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City forcefully attacked their opponents’ records and ethics in starkly personal terms on Wednesday night, tangling over how they would address growing concerns over rising violent crime and the city’s economic recovery.In their first in-person debate of the campaign, the eight leading contenders battled over crime, justice and the power of the police, questions of education and charter schools and, in the debate’s most heated moments, the issue of who is qualified to lead the nation’s largest city.

The candidates took the stage at a moment of extraordinary uncertainty in the race, even as the contest nears its conclusion.

Those three candidates all have distinct bases, but they are in direct competition over some moderate white voters, and Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams have both criticized Ms. Garcia in recent weeks in a sign of her emerging strength — and a sharp departure from their previous friendly postures toward her.

Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to her role with a list of demands. She wanted to be a generalist, in large part to learn the political rhythms of a president she was still getting to know. In the first few months of her tenure, some of her portfolio assignments were just that: assignments.

Back in Washington, the president’s announcement has not clearly illuminated a path forward for Ms. Harris, whose involvement in the issue stands to become her most politically delicate engagement yet. Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the farthest-reaching elections overhaul in a generation, including a landmark expansion of voting rights that is faltering in the Senate.

“The work of voting rights has implications for not just one year down the road or four years down the road but 50 years from now,” Symone Sanders, the vice president’s senior adviser and press secretary, said in an interview on Wednesday.

It includes eight parties, drawn from the hard right, the left and the center — and one Arab party. A more intuitive governing coalition would have comprised only of parties on the right, which together hold a slim majority of Israel’s Parliament.

Netanyahu — like Trump, his ally in global affairs — is the subject of serious allegations of abuse of government. Prosecutors indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges in 2019, and the trial has been delayed partly because of Covid-19 restrictions.

His attempts to fend off the charges and remain in power have left many Israelis worried about a collapse in judicial independence and the rule of law, much as Democrats were anxious about Trump’s norm-breaking, as David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explained to me. But there is also a big difference: While Republicans have overwhelmingly stood by Trump, a meaningful number of Netanyahu’s ideological allies have chosen to break with him.

It was a breach of the secrecy at the heart of the I.M.O., a clubby United Nations agency on the banks of the Thames that regulates international shipping and is charged with reducing emissions in an industry that burns an oil so thick it might otherwise be turned into asphalt. Shipping produces as much carbon dioxide as all of America’s coal plants combined.

Next week, the organization is scheduled to enact its first greenhouse gas rules since Paris — regulations that do not cut emissions, have no enforcement mechanism and leave key details shrouded in secrecy. No additional proposals are far along in the rule-making process, meaning additional regulations are likely five years or more away.

So if the I.M.O. does not curb shipping emissions, it is unclear who will. And for now, the agency is not rushing to change.

August Vollmer has been hailed by many in law enforcement as the father of modern American policing. He has also been criticized for pioneering the militarization of the police and espousing the racist theories of eugenics. What’s rarely talked about, however, is that he began his tenure as the head of the police department of Berkeley, Calif., in 1905 by forcing all of his deputies to resign — arguably a kind of early experiment in abolishing the police. He eventually replaced them with college-educated people, hoping they would usher in a new, progressive era in policing.

Today, as governments and citizens contemplate the future of local law enforcement, it’s worth remembering that reshaping American policing is not some shocking new idea from the radical left.

Meanwhile, Mr. Vollmer systemized the practices of policing and built in accountability. He mandated that his officers create written records of their work (the first that the city ever kept) to measure their progress in reducing crime. He popularized the idea of crime labs, where officers could study evidence using science — an idea that rapidly spread to other departments, along with his record-keeping methods. And his department partnered with social organizations for at-risk youth, such as the scouts and Boys’ Club

For some of these critics, it’s the reason so many young people — adopting the view of Black Lives Matter activists — believe police violence is a problem. For others, it explains why the quality of academic research is in decline, as fanciful ideas concocted on American college campuses like intersectionality and post-colonialism supposedly flourish. To others still, it’s why people can’t speak their mind anymore, suffocated by the threats of “cancel culture.”

Instead of devoting time to the day’s top news stories, hosts tend to prefer dissecting micro-scandals that are more or less indecipherable to audiences outside the country, with chyrons capturing guests’ provocations seconds after they’re uttered.

Such concerns, however animating for those perennially anxious about France’s secular identity, would not ordinarily dominate a country’s attention. But they’ve been elevated into national issues because leading politicians have chosen to play along — and not just those from the right-wing opposition. High-ranking members of En Marche have joined these skirmishes and, in some cases, actively opened new fronts in the culture wars themselves.

What’s different this time is the acquiescence of Republican elites. The Big Lie about the election didn’t well up from the grass roots — it was promoted from above, initially by Trump himself, but what’s crucial is that almost no prominent Republican politicians have been willing to contradict his claims and many have rushed to back them up.

olitical scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. This is often described as an ideological movement, although given the twists and turns of recent years — the sudden embrace of protectionism, the attacks on “woke” corporations — the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power.

The field I know best, economics, contains (or used to contain) quite a few Republicans with solid academic reputations. Like just about every academic discipline, the field leans Democratic, but much less so than other social sciences and even the hard sciences. But the G.O.P. has consistently preferred to get its advice from politically reliable cranks.

he meeting is expected to focus heavily on preventing nuclear escalation. Geneva was also the site of the 1985 summit between Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, and Ronald Reagan, also focused on the nuclear arms race.

But Mr. Biden is also expected to use the summit to raise the issues he talked about with Mr. Putin on the telephone recently, just before the United States announced a new series of financial sanctions against Russian officials and financial institutions.Those include the prosecution and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader that Mr. Putin’s intelligence services attempted to kill with a nerve agent. And Mr. Biden plans to focus on the rising tide of cyberattacks directed at the United States, starting with SolarWinds, a sophisticated entry into network management software used by most of the United States’ largest companies and by a range of government agencies and defense contractors.

For Mr. Biden, the encounter will come after two successive meetings with allies, first the Group of 7 allies — a group the Russians had been part of for several years when integration with the West seemed possible — and NATO allies.

The fatal shooting of Mr. Wright was a personal reminder of how my own traffic stop by the police might have gone much differently, but for those seconds when my friends’ whiteness and then my own class privilege were revealed; how unfairness is both arbitrary and tiered.

Consider how the thousands of large multiracial protests led to relatively modest changes compared to the lofty, paradigm shifting possibilities originally floated. Support for Black Lives Matter waxed only to wane months later. Confederate monuments were removed, but a new racialized Lost Cause took hold: the attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, which countless prominent Republicans falsely claim was stolen by a “woke mob” cabal, their elected allies and a diverse electorate.

rotest leaders didn’t march last summer to widen the trend of Black Lives Matter signs in tree-lined progressive neighborhoods, where Black neighbors are often conspicuously absent because of classist zoning laws. While many cultural shifts have been welcome, it’s not clear that people were protesting for things like greater demographic variety in the ads, magazine covers or entertainment that we consume.

A paradox emerged. The larger the foundation became, the less anyone seemed willing to ask tough questions about its secretive management structure or its penchant for giving money to lucrative pharmaceutical and credit card companies such as Mastercard, despite the fact that giving away billions to wealthy corporations set an unusual and troubling precedent in the philanthropic sector.

It wasn’t until five years later that the mainstream media took much interest in criticizing the Gates Foundation, sparked by investigative journalist Tim Schwab’s important reporting on conflicts of interest there.

Before then there was mostly silence. If large investment banks were seen as “too big to fail” in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, mega-foundations were too big to scrutinize.

No vaccine provides perfect protection, and so-called breakthrough infections after coronavirus vaccination are rare and unlikely to lead to serious illness. Federal health officials have told fully vaccinated people they no longer need to wear masks or maintain social distance because they are protected, nor do they need to get tested or quarantine after an exposure, unless they develop symptoms.

he numbers suggest that the vaccines are highly effective and generally working as expected. On May 1, the agency decided to investigate only the most severe breakthrough infection cases, while still collecting voluntary reports on breakthrough cases from state and local health departments.

The change was announced quietly on the agency’s website this month, with a statement that the switch “will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance.”

What is receiving considerably less attention, however, is that not everyone who is vaccinated will develop antibodies, and many of those who don’t are at high risk for the most severe consequences of Covid-19. As a kidney transplant recipient, I am one of those people.

Vaccinated people may still catch and transmit the virus, which for most people isn’t dangerous, but the situation is different for the immunocompromised. The New York-Presbyterian and Columbia University team reports that some fully vaccinated transplant patients who contracted the coronavirus required hospitalization, and one was intubated.

In 2016, more than 4 percent of the U.S. population reported being told by a health professional that they were immunocompromised in some way. While studies show some are able to develop antibodies, the future for many of us is uncertain.

Perhaps most significant, each of these factions are bunched together in a state powered by a handful of corporations that are increasingly uneasy with the culture-war politics that define Trump Republicanism.

In the next year and a half, Ms. Sanders will road-test Trumpism in state politics as she runs for governor in a state the former president carried by 27 points last year. She will initially face a longtime friend and former aide to her father, the state’s Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who unsuccessfully pleaded with Mr. Trump not to endorse Ms. Sanders.

In separate interviews, they said they would not compete with one another in the same race. “I’m convinced that even in Arkansas, Trump and Trumpism is a slow-sinking ship,”