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WASHINGTON — In 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations signed hours after his inauguration, President Biden moved swiftly on Wednesday to dismantle Trump administration policies his aides said have caused the “greatest damage” to the nation.

Mr. Biden has signed an executive order appointing Jeffrey D. Zients as the official Covid-19 response coordinator who will report to the president, in an effort to “aggressively” gear up the nation’s response to the pandemic. The order also restores the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group Mr. Trump had disbanded.

With an executive order, Mr. Biden has bolstered the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects from deportation immigrants brought to the United States as children, often called Dreamers. Mr. Trump sought for years to end the program, known as DACA. The order also calls on Congress to enact legislation providing permanent status and a path to citizenship for those immigrants.

What idea of America does Joe Biden call us to unite around? It’s the old one. As Walt Whitman understood, America was founded mostly by people fleeing the remnants of feudalism, the stratified caste societies of Europe.

On the right, we have white supremacy, an effort to perpetuate America’s racial caste system, and Christian nationalism, an effort to define America in a way that erases the pluralism that actually exists.

Today we have homegrown feudalism

So his decision on Tuesday to join all but five Republican senators in voting to toss out the House’s impeachment case against Mr. Trump as unconstitutional seemed to be less a reversal than a recognition that the critical mass of his party was not ready to join him in cutting loose the former president. Far from repudiating Mr. Trump, as it appeared they might in the days after the Jan. 6 rampage at the Capitol, Republicans have reverted to the posture they adopted when he was in office — unwilling to cross a figure who continues to hold outsize sway in their party.

He made clear to associates in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack that he viewed Mr. Trump’s actions around the riot as impeachable and saw a Senate trial as an opportunity to purge him from the party. In a letter to colleagues, Mr. McConnell signaled he was open to conviction, a stark departure from a year before when he had declared that he was not an “impartial juror” in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial and guided him to acquittal.

Mr. McConnell remains eager to move beyond Mr. Trump. While his House counterpart, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, was set to meet Mr. Trump on Thursday in an effort to repair his relationship with the former president, the Senate leader gladly told reporters he had not spoken to Mr. Trump since Dec. 15, after Mr. McConnell congratulated Mr. Biden as the president-elect. He has told allies he hopes never to talk to Mr. Trump again.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin on Wednesday warning of a continued threat from domestic violent extremists.

Countries invent stories and myth in order to make sense of trauma, too. One reason the scars of the Civil War have never fully healed is that we’ve never, as a nation, agreed on a single narrative about what it was all for.

Now we are engaged in a great debate about the lessons and meaning of the Trump era. To progressives like me, the past four years have been a period of mendacity, incompetence, racism and — in the end — insurrection. The wounds are fresh.

When I saw Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sworn in, I felt, briefly, as if all the injuries of the past four years might, with time, recede. As Michael Gerber, editor of American Bystander, so poignantly noted on the day of the inauguration, “As a person with a disability, it’s just nice to have a president who won’t make fun of me.”

The success of the Olympic Football Tournament intensified FlFA's wish for its own world championship. Questionnaires were sent to the affiliated associations, asking whether they agreed to the organisation of a tournament and under what conditions.

Following a remarkable proposal by the Executive Committee, the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam on 28 May 1928 decided to stage a world championship organised by FIFA. Now, the organising country had to be chosen.

These arguments were decisive. The FIFA Congress in Barcelona in 1929 assigned Uruguay as first host country of the FIFA World Cup ™. The other candidates had withdrawn.

It was Perry who led the U.S. delegation to Ukraine when newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was inaugurated back in May

The call triggered the whistleblower complaint from an intelligence officer and led to allegations that Trump abused his power for personal political gain.

Trumpism, Perry warned, was "a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued."

Pontius Pilate is a man many Jews and Christians love to hate. For Christians, the Roman governor of Judaea played a central role in the execution of Jesus around A.D. 30, while for Jews he was a callous ruler who set the stage for the rebellion that led to the destruction of Jerusalem four decades later. But a new discovery suggests that Pilate also spent a good deal of time and money embellishing the famous city that drew Jewish pilgrims as well as visitors from around the Roman Empire.

The latest coins discovered beneath the paving stones date to around A.D. 31. The most common Jerusalem coins from the first century were minted after 40, “so not having them beneath the street means the street was built before their appearance, in other words only in the time of Pilate,” says Donald Ariel, a coin expert with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

During a ceremony last June inaugurating part of the tunnel, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman dismissed these concerns. The project, he said, “confirms with evidence, with science, with archaeological studies that which many of us already knew, certainly in our heart: the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people.” And, if the science proves correct, it was a despised Roman who helped make it a city renowned across the empire for its holy sites and monumental architecture.

Stephen Schwarzman, an informal adviser and donor to President Donald Trump, is hosting a fundraiser with Sen. Mitt Romney in support of several Republicans colleagues seeking reelection, according to two people with knowledge of the event.

Helping Romney bolster his standing in the party as he attempts to cement his position as a self-described "renegade Republican" during an impeachment inquiry is notable because of Schwarzman's support for Trump. Since the 2016 election, Schwarzman has donated a total of about $850,000 to Trump's inauguration and political action committees, based on records compiled by CNN and the Center for Responsive Politics.

Romney also took a shot at Trump's character in an interview with The Atlantic where he criticized Trump for "berating another person, or calling them names, or demeaning a class of people, not telling the truth."

President Donald Trump has reversed his plan to invite world leaders to attend an official government summit at his Florida golf course, but still says it would have been a fine thing to do -- though many say it would have violated the Constitution. As with so many of Trump's actions in office, it falls into uncharted territory -- no one really knows.

The Constitution has a rule against Presidents taking gifts. It's called the emoluments clause, and it's supposed to guarantee that America's top executive and commander in chief isn't swayed by gifts from foreign or domestic government officials.

Those were official gifts given to officials. Less clear is whether the Trump's decision to hold a massive G7 summit at Trump National in Doral, Florida, in June, is accepting gifts. Certainly the Trump Organization will benefit from the President's decision. And clearly there are ethical concerns about him using his office to help his own properties. Read more about those issues here.

“The Case for Nationalism” is not really a Trump book, Lowry writes, though it was, he admits, “occasioned by him.” Lowry says he became interested in the subject after the president’s inaugural address and now wishes to acknowledge the “power and legitimacy” of Trumpian nationalism

his brief for nationalism can be vague, facile and inconsistent, built on a selective reading of argument and history.

Nowhere are those shortcomings more evident than in his sanitized interpretation of the nationalism emanating from the White House.

in his own administration, after a week of damaging public hearings.

Mr. Holmes told impeachment investigators that he had overheard the president ask the ambassador, Gordon D. Sondland, about Ukrainian investigations into his political rivals, a consequential detail in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

“I guarantee you that never took place,” Mr. Trump said. He added that he barely knew Mr. Sondland, a wealthy hotelier from Oregon who contributed $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee. In his own testimony, Mr. Sondland corroborated Mr. Holmes’s account.

Costa Rica is in the top 5 of countries that are leading the way into renewable resources. It might seem small but it has a really big environmental impact. Since 2014 the country’s energy has been coming from 99% renewable sources, and it has been running on 100% renewable energy for over two months twice in the last two years. Then, since June 2017 they have been set on eradicating single-use plastic by 2021. The first be the first country in the world to do this. And most recently, in the summer of 2018, the country announced its aims to become completely carbon-neutral by the year 2021 – The first completely carbon-free country in the whole world.

Since the 1980s, the government recognized that nature is Costa Rica’s strongest asset and has therefore made every effort to protect it: including, among other things, zoo closures, reforestation, and establishing protected areas (25% of the total surface area of the country). “With its rich biodiversity, Costa Rica has also demonstrated far-sighted environmental leadership by pursuing reforestation, designating a third of the country protected natural reserves, and deriving almost all of its electricity from clean hydro power.” – Joseph Stiglitz

The plastic dilemma came next. So, last year on World Environment Day the country announced its new national plan to eradicate all single-use plastics by 2021. From that day on, plastic has to be replaced by alternatives that are 100% recyclable or biodegradable and not petroleum-based.

A growing number of lawmakers -- including from Democratic leadership -- are calling for President Donald Trump to be removed from office either through impeachment or the 25th Amendment to the Constitution after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put out a statement Thursday denouncing the "insurrection" at the Capitol "incited by the President," and saying, "This President should not hold office one day longer."

"I join the Senate Democratic leader in calling on the Vice President to remove this President by immediately invoking the 25th Amendment," Pelosi said.

This willful act of forgetting — compounded by the myth of American innocence — has shown itself to be dangerous on a variety of counts. For starters, it allowed many Americans to view the president’s insistence that he had won an election in which he was actually trounced, and his simultaneous embrace of right-wing extremism, as political theater that will pass uneventfully from the stage when Joe Biden is inaugurated.

The resulting invasion of the government — which has thus far reportedly taken at least five lives — should make clear to everyone that the potential for political violence is a proverbial river of gasoline, waiting for a demagogue like Mr. Trump to drop the lighted match.

Mr. Cruz’s analogy was dishonest on its face, given that there is no valid dispute about electoral votes today. But by bringing up 1876, the senator unwittingly pointed to the ancestry of the voter suppression practices in which his party is heavily invested. The 1876 election, as the historians Rachel Shelden and Erik B. Alexander noted this week in The Washington Post, was riddled with bloodshed and intimidation. White terror organizations targeted African-Americans throughout the South in the run-up to Election Day. In the Black stronghold of Hamburg, S.C., the authors write, “hundreds of gun-toting whites from South Carolina and nearby Georgia descended on the town, executing members of the militia and ransacking Black homes and shops.”

Kamala Harris' forthcoming appearance in American Vogue has sparked criticism for appearing casual and "washed out," with the Vice President-elect's team blindsided by the magazine's choice of cover

A source familiar with discussions said Harris' team believed the cover would feature her posing in a light blue suit against a gold background.

CNN's source said that Harris team had expected this outfit to be used as the main cover photo, with the more casual attire appearing inside the magazine. The same source said the Harris team has asked for a new cover, though the print version of the magazine went to press in mid-December.

Trump has said he won’t be at the inauguration — but Democrats are hoping that by Jan. 20, he won’t even be president anymore.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid out a specific plan last night to seek President Trump’s removal from office

The next 10 days will be momentous for the whole nation, but for the G.O.P. in particular. The party is in chaos; as it gropes its way forward, here are three big factors that are likely to shape its direction.

President Donald Trump has managed to use his remaining time in office to act as a political wrecking ball while the country is still being ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump, who had been spouting false claims of voter fraud for months, launched several failed lawsuits in an attempt to challenge the election results in key swing states, and also contacted state legislatures to try to persuade them to intervene on his behalf

While the President has been unsuccessful in his efforts to overturn the election, he may have succeeded in sowing distrust among many in our democracy, fanning the flames of the toxic political atmosphere and likely making governing that much more difficult for President-elect Joe Biden.

Trump administration has scheduled a last-ditch oil and gas lease sale for Wednesday that could lead to drilling in one of the country’s last great wild places.

If my grandfather were alive today, I’m confident he would be critical of the Trump administration’s effort to open the refuge to oil and gas development. In his farewell address in 1961, he warned against such shortsighted thinking: “As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.”

I urge President-elect Joe Biden to take immediate action after his inauguration on Jan. 20 to halt the leasing process and suspend all oil activities and operations in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. By doing so, he will restore in the American people the faith that their leaders will preserve the most magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas in North America for generations to come.

citing the risk of further incitement of violence and closing off one of his main communication tools following the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his followers.

pressure on the platforms to do more to prevent additional violence.

Twitter had initially suspended Mr. Trump from posting on a temporary basis that Wednesday night, saying his tweets had violated its policies. The social-media company allowed him to resume posting on Thursday. Facebook Inc., FB -0.44% which temporarily suspended Mr. Trump’s account after the riot, said Thursday that it would extend that action indefinitely—and at least through the end of Mr. Trump’s term. Many critics of the president had called on Twitter to take more severe action as well.