The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday in favor of Germany in a dispute with Afghan civilians who challenged the country’s investigation into a 2009 attack on oil tankers in Afghanistan that killed as many as 90 civilians.

On the night of the attack, Sept. 3, 2009, Taliban fighters hijacked two tankers carrying NATO fuel and then got stuck on a sandbank in the Kunduz River, about four miles from the NATO base in the northern city of Kunduz.

A German Army investigation later determined that as many as 90 civilians had been killed. At the time of the attack, Germany was widely criticized by its partners in Afghanistan, and the events plunged the country into a bitter debate about the role of its military forces during peacetime.

The House passed a budget blueprint to allow the president’s $1.9 trillion plan to speed through Congress without Republican backing. But President Biden said he was open to negotiating the details.

Voting mostly along party lines, the House adopted a budget blueprint that included President Biden’s sweeping pandemic aid plan, laying the groundwork for Democrats to push it through, if necessary, on a simple majority vote, without Republican support.

“We need to act fast,” Mr. Biden told House Democrats on a private conference call, according to two people who attended. “It’s about who the hell we are as a country.”But Republicans expressed increasing skepticism that they could support the measure unless Mr. Biden significantly scaled back his proposal.

Two weeks after Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, enraged Donald J. Trump by saying that he considered the former president responsible for the violent mob attack at the Capitol, the two men met on Thursday for what aides described as a “good and cordial” meeting, and sought to present a united front.

McCarthy, in a speech on the House floor, said that the former president “bears responsibility” for the events of Jan. 6, when a throng of his supporters stormed the Capitol after a rally in which Mr. Trump urged them to “fight like hell” against his election defeat.

Aides to both men have been trying to broker a thaw between the two ever since, even as Mr. Trump has targeted other Republicans who criticized him more harshly for his role in the Capitol breach and voted in favor of impeaching him.

Biden's proposed bill, if passed, would remove the word "alien" from US immigration laws, replacing it with the term "noncitizen." It's a deliberate step intended to recognize America as "a nation of immigrants," according to a summary of the bill released by the new administration.

"illegal alien," long decried as a dehumanizing slur by immigrant rights advocates, became even more of a lightning rod during the Trump era -- with some top federal officials encouraging its use and several states and local governments taking up measures to ban it.

US code currently defines "alien" as "any person not a citizen or national of the United States."Officials in the past have pointed to the term's prevalence in US laws to defend their word choices.

The president’s proclamation, which would not take effect until Jan. 26, after Joe Biden assumes office, was part of a flurry of orders that Mr. Biden is likely to reverse.

President Trump on Monday ordered an end to the ban on travelers from Europe and Brazil that had been aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus to the United States, a move quickly rejected by aides to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said Mr. Biden will maintain the ban when he takes office on Wednesday.

“I agree with the secretary that this action is the best way to continue protecting Americans from Covid-19 while enabling travel to resume safely,”

President Trump formed the 18-member commission — which includes no professional historians but a number of conservative activists, politicians and intellectuals — in the heat of his re-election campaign in September, as he cast himself as a defender of traditional American heritage against “radical” liberals.

The commission’s report charges, in terms quickly derided by many mainstream historians, that Americans are being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery in its history.

“Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds,” the report says.

The director of the Indian Health Service has said that he will resign, giving President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. a chance to install new leadership at an agency that has drawn intense criticism for its failures to provide adequate care to tribal communities both before and during the pandemic.

April after leading the agency on an interim basis since 2017, said in a letter this week that his resignation would be effective Jan. 20.“It has been a sincere honor to have been entrusted to serve in this role,” he said in the letter, noting that his departure was typical during presidential transitions. “I believe the I.H.S. is more capable now than ever before of fulfilling our vision of healthy communities and quality health care systems through strong partnerships and culturally responsive practices.”

The Indian Health Service consists of 26 hospitals, 56 health centers and 32 health stations and provides care to 2.2 million members of the nation’s tribal communities. The hospitals, scattered across a dozen regions in the country, range in size from four beds to 133.

Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who spent weeks trying to reverse the results of the presidential election before changing his mind at the last moment, apologized on Thursday to Black constituents who felt he had attacked their right to vote.

“After decades of fighting for voting rights, many Black friends in Oklahoma saw this as a direct attack on their right to vote, for their vote to matter, and even a belief that their votes made an election in our country illegitimate,” he wrote,

Democrats in Congress have viewed Mr. Lankford as a rare, cooperative partner on voting rights, and his decision to join those Republicans seeking to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters — many of them Black citizens living in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — came as a surprise.

When Rudolph W. Giuliani was treating his efforts to carry out President Trump’s wishes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as a payment opportunity — he proposed a daily retainer of $20,000 for his legal services from the burgeoning Trump campaign legal fund — the president dismissed it and responded by demanding to personally approve each expense.

Even as he complains about Mr. Giuliani’s latest efforts as fruitless, the president remains unusually deferential to him in public and in private. “Don’t underestimate him,” Mr. Trump has told advisers.

But only up to a point. While Mr. Trump and his advisers balked at the $20,000 request weeks ago, it is unclear whether the president will sign off on Mr. Giuliani being paid anything other than expenses.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has chosen Dr. David Kessler to help lead Operation Warp Speed, the program to accelerate development of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, according to transition officials.

Dr. Kessler, a pediatrician and lawyer who headed the Food and Drug Administration during the presidencies of George Bush and Bill Clinton, has been a key adviser to Mr. Biden on Covid-19 policy and is co-chair of the transition team’s Covid-19 task force.

Dr. Kessler will join Operation Warp Speed at a critical time. Although the program is widely credited with making possible the development of two highly effective coronavirus vaccines in record time, it has been much less successful at actually delivering the shots to the public — a complex task it shares with numerous federal, state and local authorities.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. tapped David S. Cohen to return as deputy head of the C.I.A., placing an official who knows the agency well alongside the veteran diplomat he chose to lead it, the Biden transition team announced on Friday.

In talks with transition officials, Mr. Cohen outlined an ambitious agenda for the C.I.A. to bolster its work in critical areas, including global climate change and health issues.During the Obama administration, Mr. Cohen was involved in the C.I.A. assessment that Russia sought to intervene in the 2016 election to aid President Trump’s election.

Mr. Cohen, according to people familiar with his views, believes the government must go beyond election interference to also scrutinize how foreign powers may be trying to provide support or influence extremist groups.

The F.B.I. arrested two men on Sunday who were photographed in the Senate chamber clad in military-style clothing and holding zip ties

Larry Rendell Brock, was arrested in Texas on the same charges after he was allegedly identified as one of the people who broke into the Capitol. The department said in its statement that images of a person who appeared to be him showed Mr. Brock clad in “a green helmet, green tactical vest with patches, black and camo jacket, and beige pants holding a white flex cuff, which is used by law enforcement to restrain and/or detain subjects.”

Eric Gavelek Munchel, 30, was taken into custody in Nashville on one count of unlawfully entering a restricted building and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, the department said. One of the officials involved in the case said authorities also recovered several weapons at the time of his arrest.

President Trump on Sunday issued a proclamation ordering that the American flag at the White House and at all federal buildings and grounds be lowered in honor of two U.S. Capitol police officers who died after the violent riot by the president’s supporters at the Capitol on Wednesday.

The move came after the flags at the Capitol complex had been lowered in honor of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died from injuries he sustained engaging with the mob of Trump supporters who broke in and overtook the building. Another officer, Howard Liebengood, died by suicide over the weekend.

“I hereby order that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, January 13, 2021,

Mr. Trump became a celebrity through television, but Twitter had given him a singular outlet for expressing himself as he is, unfiltered by the norms of the presidency.

But as his campaign played out and his presidency began, Donald J. Trump, the master of the small screen, evolved gradually into a different character, @realdonaldtrump, whose itchy Twitter finger became many things at once: an agenda-setter for the day’s coverage, a weapon against his rivals, a way of firing aides and cabinet secretaries, a grenade he could throw at Republican lawmakers who had crossed him and reporters whose coverage he hated, a window into his psyche, and most of all, an unfiltered pipeline to his supporters.

his Twitter account yanked away from him permanently, President Trump faces the challenge, for both his remaining days in the White House and in a post-presidency, of how to thrust himself into the conversation on his own terms.

The big debates over political journalism in the Trump years were about morality: What began with arguments over whether the media should call something a “lie” or “racist” has now become: How do you cover a Republican Party that votes to overturn an election?

But an ambitious political news start-up hoping to tell the central story of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s years is, a bit like Mr. Biden himself, less concerned with those big questions

But nobody thinks politics is much fun anymore, and the notion of covering politics as an amoral sport has become repellent to Americans. The big legacy news operations — The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, in particular — became players in Trump’s reality program and were judged as much for their symbolic choices in tweets and headlines as for their reporting. But Politico and Axios, started by two other Politico co-founders in 2016, never quite became symbolic figures in Mr. Trump’s character universe, and generally steered away from trying to insert themselves into the self-referential theater.

As some recent archaeological studies suggest, women have been leaders, warriors and hunters for thousands of years. This new scholarship is challenging long-held beliefs about so-called natural gender roles in ancient history, inviting us to reconsider how we think about women’s work today.

There was nothing particularly unusual about the body — though the leg bones seemed a little slim for an adult male hunter. But when scientists analyzed the tooth enamel using a method borrowed from forensics that reveals whether a person carries the male or female version of a protein called amelogenin, the hunter turned out to be female.

While the Andean finding was noteworthy, this was not the first female hunter or warrior to be found by re-examining old archaeological evidence using fresh scientific techniques. Nor was this sort of discovery confined to one group, or one part of the world.

I met then-Senator Biden in the mid-1980s, when he was a member of the Judiciary Committee and I was covering the occasional judicial confirmation. By 1987, he was chairman of the committee, after the Democrats retook the Senate in the 1986 midterms. That summer, President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Biden, then 44 years old, was generally viewed — and by “generally,” I mean to include the capital’s newsrooms — as an amiable lightweight, a showboat in love with the sound of his own voice.

In concert with some liberal groups, but against the advice of some on his staff, he decided to focus the hearings on the constitutional right to privacy.

I’m doing everything I can to stay connected, to make an impact. So even now, amid Covid, I tell my story to schools and to audiences the museum organizes for me, by Zoom.

I was born in 1933 in a small town called Chodorow, now Khodoriv, about 30 minutes by car from Lvov, now Lviv, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine. We lived in the center of town in my grandfather’s house. The Russians occupied the town from 1939 to 1941, then the Germans from 1941 to 1944. My father was well liked in town by Jews and non-Jews. One day in early 1942, one of the guys came to him and said, “Moshe, it’s going to be a big killing. Better find a hiding place.” So my father built a place to hide in the cellar. My grandfather didn’t want to go. He was shot in the kitchen; we heard it.

Eventually, with the help of Stephanie’s 16-year-old son, they expanded the space a bit and added a way for the kids to look out. That is where I spent the next two years.

In effect, the health service was caught between the desire of one constituency to take control of its own health care and the need of another to keep a well-established hospital operating. In the end, it slashed services at the hospital in November, closing its inpatient critical care unit, women’s services and emergency room.

The closing of the hospital facilities comes as coronavirus cases rise across the state and hospital beds dwindle, forcing the leader of one of the tribes served by the hospital, Gov. Brian D. Vallo of the Pueblo of Acoma, to declare a state of emergency.

t was not hospital policy for patients to be told to wait in the parking lot for emergency care. He said the agency had requested more information on the situation but had yet to receive it.

With President Trump touching down in North Georgia on Monday to court white rural voters and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. rallying support from a diverse electorate in Atlanta, the high-stakes Senate runoffs are concluding with a test of how much the politics have shifted in a state that no longer resembles its Deep South neighbors.

That’s a marked change from the 2000 election, when George W. Bush won decisively in the Atlanta suburbs to win the state and Democrats still ran competitively with right-of-center voters in much of rural North and South Georgia.

After nominating a string of candidates for statewide office who they hoped would be palatable to rural whites, only to keep losing, Democrats elevated three candidates in the past two years whose views placed them in the mainstream of the national party and whose profiles represented the party’s broader coalition.