The relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.
What was once an uneasy governing alliance has curdled into a feud of mutual resentment and sometimes outright hostility, complicated by the position of Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine L. Chao, in Mr. Trump’s cabinet, according to more than a dozen people briefed on their imperiled partnership. Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense.
The rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell comes at a highly perilous moment for Republicans, who face a number of urgent deadlines when they return to Washington next month. Congress must approve new spending measures and raise the statutory limit on government borrowing within weeks of reconvening, and Republicans are hoping to push through an elaborate rewrite of the federal tax code. There is scant room for legislative error on any front.
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Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has fumed over President Trump’s regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules.Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times
The nation has split into political tribes. The culture wars are back, waged over transgender rights and immigration. White nationalists are on the march.
Amid this turbulence, a surprising group of Americans is testing its moral voice more forcefully than ever: C.E.O.s.
After Nazi-saluting white supremacists rioted in Charlottesville, Va., and President Trump dithered in his response, a chorus of business leaders rose up this past week to condemn hate groups and espouse tolerance and inclusion. And as lawmakers in Texas tried to restrict the rights of transgender people to use public bathrooms, corporate executives joined activists to kill the bill.
Americans across the country this weekend began a great, if brief, migration, rushing toward a swath of territory stretching from Oregon to South Carolina for a chance to witness a total eclipse of the sun.
By Sunday, roads in many states were jammed as a normally busy summer weekend was overtaken by eclipse mania. But some locations were spared along the 70-mile-wide path of totality, where, weather permitting, viewers on Monday will be able to see the moon completely block the sun for a few minutes. The total eclipse will be the first to touch the mainland United States in nearly four decades.
Wyoming transportation officials reported nearly 20 percent more vehicles on the roads compared with a five-year average for the third weekend in August. They cautioned that the state’s population of 600,000 could double with people heading for the zone of totality, which crosses the state.
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Cars lined up on Sunday to get into Grand Teton National Park outside Jackson, Wyo. People are flocking to the area in anticipation of viewing a total solar eclipse on Monday.Credit George Frey/Getty Images
Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84.
Mr. Gregory’s son, Christian Gregory, who announced his death on social media, said more details would be released in the coming days. Mr. Gregory had been admitted to a hospital on Aug. 12, his son said in an earlier Facebook post.
Early in his career Mr. Gregory insisted in interviews that his first order of business onstage was to get laughs, not to change how white America treated Negroes (the accepted word for African-Americans at the time). “Humor can no more find the solution to race problems than it can cure cancer,” he said. Nonetheless, as the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear, whites who caught his club act or listened to his routines on records came away with a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history.
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Dick Gregory in 2016. He believed that within a well-delivered joke lies power.Credit Brent N. Clarke/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
In a striking advance that helps open the door to organ transplants from animals, researchers have created gene-edited piglets cleansed of viruses that might cause disease in humans.
The experiments, reported on Thursday in the journal Science, may make it possible one day to transplant livers, hearts and other organs from pigs into humans, a hope that experts had all but given up.
If pig organs were shown to be safe and effective, “they could be a real game changer,” said Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at the United Network for Organ Sharing, a private, nonprofit organization that manages the nation’s transplant system.
There were 33,600 organ transplants last year, and 116,800 patients on waiting lists, according to Dr. Klassen, who was not involved in the new study. “There’s a big gap between organ supply and organ demand,” he said.
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Piglets whose genes were edited to remove retroviruses, which could help clear the way for pig organs to be transplanted to humans.Credit eGenesis
Investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, recently searched the Northern Virginia home of President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for tax documents and foreign banking records, a sign that the inquiry into Mr. Manafort has broadened, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The search was carried out at Mr. Manafort’s Alexandria, Va., home shortly after Mr. Manafort met with investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 25. In that meeting, Mr. Manafort answered questions and provided investigators with notes from a 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russians claiming to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Manafort’s spokesman confirmed that an F.B.I. raid had been carried out.
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Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last July.Credit Rick Wilking/Reuters
He slumped in a shabby white chair, his neck unnaturally twisted to the right. A cellphone rested inches away, as if he had just put it down. His unlaced shoes lay beneath outstretched legs, a morbid still life of what this town has become.
Israel Cisneros, 20, died instantly in his father’s one-room house. By the time the police arrived at the crime scene, their second homicide of the night, the blood seeping from the gunshot wound to his left eye had begun to harden and crack, leaving a skin of garish red scales over his face and throat.
This was once one of the safest parts of Mexico, a place where people fleeing the nation’s infamous drug battles would come for sanctuary. Now, officials here in Tecomán, a quiet farming town in the coastal state of Colima, barely shrug when two murders occur within hours of each other. It’s just not that uncommon any more.
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Tecomán is part of what was once one of the safest states in Mexico. Now bodies are a commonplace sight.Credit Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times
The 16-year-old lies on her side on a mattress on the floor, unable to hold up her head. Her uncle props her up to drink water, but she can barely swallow. Her voice is so weak, he places his ear directly over her mouth to hear her.
The girl, Souhayla, walked out of the most destroyed section of Mosul this month, freed after three years of captivity and serial rape when her Islamic State captor was killed in an airstrike. Her uncle described her condition as “shock.” He had invited reporters to Souhayla’s bedside so they could document what the terror group’s system of sexual abuse had done to his niece.
“This is what they have done to our people,” said Khalid Taalo, her uncle.
Since the operation to take back Mosul began last year, approximately 180 women, girls and children from the Yazidi ethnic minority who were captured in 2014 by the Islamic State, or ISIS, have been liberated, according to Iraq’s Bureau for the Rescue of Abductees.
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Souhayla, a 16-year-old girl who escaped the Islamic State after three years of captivity, at her uncle’s home in Shariya Camp, Iraq.Credit Alex Potter for The New York Times
These are dangerous days for Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s brain. A new book about the White House chief strategist portrays the president as the empty vessel into which Mr. Bannon poured his ideology and agenda, propelling the two of them into the White House. The book, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” by Joshua Green, a reporter who has known Mr. Bannon for years, is a best seller that gives Mr. Trump second billing. That’s made the empty vessel very angry.
Mr. Trump’s White House is drifting so dangerously that we find ourselves searching for ballast in unlikely places. There’s Jeff Sessions, who refused to resign his post as attorney general amid daily humiliations. The new chief of staff, John Kelly, got off to a good start by arranging the sacking of Anthony Scaramucci, the inept and mercifully short-lived communications director.
And then there’s — ready for this? — Mr. Bannon, the alt-right ideologue who’s emerged as one of the steadier hands on the ship. During the bile-filled, Breitbart-fueled campaign, Mr. Bannon encouraged Mr. Trump, who called him “my Steve,” to toss all convention overboard. Now, while Mr. Trump tweets and rages, and drifts aimlessly from one policy to the next, Mr. Bannon keeps a whiteboard in his office war room with a handwritten list of Mr. Trump’s campaign promises. Not many of these promises have been checked off. But what’s interesting is that Mr. Bannon is keeping such a list, and while it’s easy to disagree with a lot of the items on it, he at least seems to represent fealty to what Trump voters said they wanted.
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Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist.Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Congressional Republicans moved on Tuesday to defuse President Trump’s threat to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies, maneuvering around the president toward bipartisan legislation to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act.
Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the influential chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, announced that his panel would begin work in early September on legislation to “stabilize and strengthen the individual health insurance market” for 2018. He publicly urged Mr. Trump to continue making payments to health insurance companies to reimburse them for reducing the out-of-pocket medical expenses of low-income people.
In the House, two Republicans, Representatives Tom Reed of New York and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, teamed with Democrats to promote incremental health legislation that would also fund the cost-sharing subsidies.
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Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Patty Murray of Washington at the Capitol in July.Credit Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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