Republicans focused primarily on two politically charged investigations from the Trump era: a federal tax investigation into Mr. Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and the work of a special counsel, John H. Durham, to determine whether Obama-era officials erred in 2016 when they investigated Trump campaign officials and their ties to Russia.

Judge Garland has sterling legal credentials, a reputation as a moderate and a long history of service at the Justice Department. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., he worked as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington under President George H.W. Bush and was chosen by Jamie Gorelick, the deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, to serve as her top deputy.

Judge Garland was for the most part measured and even-tempered, but he became emotional when he described his family’s flight from anti-Semitism and persecution in Eastern Europe and asylum in America.

But Judith Chevalier, a Yale economist who chairs the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, said rules intended to improve seminars wouldn’t address the underlying problems that Dr. Modestino’s research revealed.

H-E-B issued a statement on Sunday saying that its focus was still on operations after the storm, noting that the weather had been “incredibly difficult” on its employees as well as the rest of the state.

Allegiances to brands are often about more than just the product; they can be a proxy for consumers to telegraph their stances on political or social issues. Yet H-E-B reflects another kind of virtue signaling, one that often supersedes race, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation: a display of Texan identity.H-E-B falls into a class of companies that Texans instantly identify with their state in a way that transcends commerce, particularly for expatriates outside state lines. There is Whataburger, the fast food chain; Blue Bell ice cream; and Buc-ee’s supersized convenience stores. Many a Texan in New York City has spotted an orange-striped bag from Junior’s Cheesecake and thought someone stepped on the E train with a Whataburger.

“That’s what we’ve come to expect of H-E-B,” Professor McAlister added. “It’s from the heart and they’re good at logistics. If their Texans need water, they can get it to them, because it’s their Texans who are thirsty.”

The shelves in many stores were light on inventory, if not entirely bare, especially for water. In a store packed with customers in the Las Palmas neighborhood of San Antonio, notices warned people could only take two gallons of water. “Limits are temporary and necessary for you and your neighbors to find the products you need,” a sign said.

Last year, Ms. Arceneaux was hired by St. Jude. She works with children with leukemia and lymphoma, such as a teenage boy she talked with recently.“I shared with him that I also lost my hair,” Ms. Arceneaux said. “I told him: ‘You can ask me anything. I’m a former patient. I’ll tell you the truth, anything you want to know.’ And he said, ‘Will you really tell me the truth?’ And I said yes.”

The sweepstakes is structured in a way that effectively limits the size of donations. One entry is free. A minimum donation of $10 buys 100 entries, and each additional dollar donated buys 10 more entries, up to $1,000 for 10,000 entries.

The fourth SpaceX seat will go to the winner of a contest sponsored by Mr. Isaacman’s company, Shift4, which sells credit-card-processing terminals and point-of-sale systems to restaurants and other businesses. The “Shark Tank”-like competition calls for entrepreneurs to design an online store using Shift4’s software and then post a video on Twitter describing their business.

The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head

The trigger appeared to be gun control. Mr. Calhoun had not always been obsessed with guns, friends said. But in the fall of 2019, some Democratic politicians began talking of ambitious new gun restrictions and it seemed to flip a switch. Mr. Calhoun said as much himself.“I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”

There are signs that, as with the China deal, the Biden administration wants to move on and negotiate a solution with Germany, to remove a major irritant with a crucial ally. That could include, some suggest, snapback sanctions if Moscow diverts supplies or halts transit fees to Ukrain

Like many developing countries, South Africa was relying on the relatively cheap and easy-to-store AstraZeneca shot — “the people’s vaccine,” as Ms. Taylor put it — to tamp down new outbreaks. When airport workers rolled vaccine crates out of the belly of an airplane last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa watched from the rain-soaked tarmac.

Because the trial participants in South Africa were relatively young and unlikely to become severely ill, it was impossible for the scientists to determine if the vaccine protected people from hospitalization or death. Immune responses detected in blood samples from vaccinated people suggest it could.

he B.1.351 variant has already spread beyond South Africa to neighboring countries, the United States and Britain. Scientists believe one of its mutations may make it harder for antibodies to grab onto the virus and keep it from entering cells.Among scientists’ worries is that the variant first detected in Britain has acquired the same mutation, known as E484K, in some cases.

Given the proven safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the hope that it might yet prevent hospitalizations and deaths from the new variant, Professor Venter said that health officials should consider offering it to anyone who wanted it.

Mr. Trump’s defense team will assert that his false statements about the election are protected by the First Amendment, and that trying a former president at all is unconstitutional.

The Times reviewed hundreds of hours of footage from Jan. 6 of protesters, including the rioters that stormed the Capitol, and found evidence of how they mimicked — and amplified — Mr. Trump’s words.

A number of the rioters have said they did what they did because they thought it was what Mr. Trump wanted them to do.

“You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution,” Mr. Raskin told the senators at the conclusion of the video. “That’s a high crime and misdemeanor. If that’s not an impeachable offense, then there’s no such thing.”

Already, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, has faced criticism for suggesting that Mr. Trump be given a pass for the events of Jan. 6.“Look, everyone makes mistakes, everyone is entitled to a mulligan once in a while,” Mr. Lee said on Fox News after the House managers’ arguments, using a golf term for a do-over.Senator

“I have no idea what he’s doing,” Alan M. Dershowitz, who served on Mr. Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial last year, said on the conservative television station Newsmax. “Maybe he’ll bring it home, but right now, it does not appear to me to be effective advocacy.”

Beyond the personal tensions, there is, of course, institutional antagonism. For some three decades, the N.L.D. was subject to crushing persecution at the hands of the Tatmadaw and the security forces; hundreds of the party’s members were arrested, tortured, killed or driven into exile.

At a minimum, the coup, being a major step backward, may undermine morale and cohesion among the troops. Decades of armed conflict with several ethnic groups have inflicted numerous casualties on ordinary soldiers. Desertion has been on the rise. Can the generals expect full compliance from the institution after the coup?

The siege of the Capitol wasn’t a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis. For years, he’s been telling us he wouldn’t accept an election loss. For years, he’s been urging his followers to violence, refusing to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the way. As he told Breitbart in 2019, in one of his characteristic threats, “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Under Trump, political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency was “hamstrung” in trying to investigate white nationalists. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base,” said Gomez.

Mr. Pompeo’s effort to leave no bridge unburned might stand him in good stead with primary voters, should he — as has been widely expected — seek higher office in the coming years. But selfishness at the expense of the national interest isn’t the mark of an honorable diplomat or a patriot.That sentiment appears to be shared in Mr. Pompeo’s State Department, where some officials are said to be keeping discreet clocks counting down the minutes until Secretary Pompeo is a private citizen once again.

If access to higher education presages stability, the prospects for women are dire. Although women in the United States now account for just over half of all bachelor’s degrees in all ethnic groups, Black women made up just 6 percent of graduates.In the United States and other rich economies, social scientists describe this phenomenon as an example of the “Matthew effect,” named for Matthew 25:29 in the Bible: “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.”

ttacking the Capitol was not patriotism, it was anarchy.”

One core feature of Trumpism is that it forces you to betray every other commitment you might have: to the truth, moral character, the Sermon on the Mount, conservative principles, the Constitution. In defeat, some people are finally not willing to sacrifice all else on Trump’s altar.

It’s a pure power struggle. The weapons in this struggle are intimidation, verbal assault, death threats and violence, real and rhetorical. The fantasyland mobbists have an advantage because they relish using these weapons, while their fellow Christians just want to lead their lives.

On the left, leaders and organizations have arisen to champion open inquiry, to stand up to the cancel mobs. They have begun to shift the norms.

Courage cannot be explained by a single variable. Politicians whose communities have suffered disproportionately from government tyranny may show disproportionate bravery in opposing it. Mr. Romney, like the Arizona Republican Jeff Flake — whose opposition to Mr. Trump likely ended his senatorial career — belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was once persecuted on American soil. In the fevered days after Sept. 11, the only member of Congress to oppose authorizing the “war on terror” was a Black woman, Barbara Lee.

“I want to stress that we are deeply concerned that this strain is more transmissible and can accelerate outbreaks in the U.S.

Covid cases and deaths have broken record after record across the country, with a peak number of deaths, 4,400, announced on Tuesday. At least 3,973 new deaths and 238,390 new cases were reported on Thursday, and the nation is nearing a milestone of 400,000 deaths.

The new variant, called B 1.1.7 was first identified in Britain, where it rapidly became the primary source of infections, accounting for as many 60 percent of new cases diagnosed in London and surrounding areas.

In the new report, C.D.C. scientists modeled how quickly the variant might spread in the United States, assuming about 10 percent to 30 percent of people have pre-existing immunity to the virus, and another 1 million people will be vaccinated each week beginning this month.

It’s not yet clear what makes the new variants more contagious. They share at least one mutation, called N501Y, that is thought to be involved. One possibility, researchers said, is that the mutation may increase the amount of virus in the nose but not in the lungs — potentially explaining why it is more contagious, but not more deadly.A higher amount of virus in the nose means anyone infected would expel more virus while talking, singing, coughing or even breathing, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle

The rift between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence has dominated their final days in office — not least because the vice president has the power under the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office with support of the cabinet. The House voted on Tuesday demanding that Mr. Pence take such action or else it would impeach Mr. Trump.

The clash is the third time in 20 years that a departing president and vice president came to conflict in their last days.

Mr. Pence ultimately discovered that loyalty to Mr. Trump only matters until it does not. Tension between the two had grown in recent months as the president railed privately about Mr. Pence.

When Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results were rejected at every turn by state officials and judges, Mr. Trump was told, incorrectly, that the vice president could stop the final validation of the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his role as president of the Senate presiding over the Electoral College count.

On Thursday, the day after the siege, Mr. Pence stayed away from the White House, avoiding Mr. Trump. The next day, he went in, but spent most of the day at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, where he held a farewell party for his staff.

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence plans to attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, then expects to divide time between Washington and Indiana, possibly starting a leadership political committee, writing a book and campaigning for congressional Republicans.

n many countries, there’s a perception that Facebook bases its actions on its business interests more than on human rights. In India, home to Facebook’s most users, the company has been accused of not policing anti-Muslim content from political figures for fear of upsetting the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party.

“Developments in our countries aren’t addressed seriously,” said Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a digital rights group in India. “Any takedown of content raises the questions of free expression, but incitement of violence or using a platform for dangerous speech is not a free speech matter but a matter of democracy, law and order.”