First Run News

Opposition from France and Italy doomed a European Union vote on Thursday to reauthorize the world’s most popular weedkiller, glyphosate, a decision that came hours after Arkansas regulators moved to ban an alternative weedkiller for much of 2018. The decisions are a double blow to the agrochemical industry and particularly to the chemicals giant Monsanto. An appeals committee of European officials will convene this month, though, to weigh again whether to continue to allow glyphosate just weeks before its registration expires.

SAN JUAN, P.R. — A main power line that serves the northern half of Puerto Rico failed Thursday, knocking out electricity to seven cities that had only recently regained service and dealing a major setback to the island’s desperate efforts to regain normality. Seven weeks after Hurricane Maria completely disabled Puerto Rico’s power grid, the island was generating just 18 percent of its electrical capacity, returning service to where it had been two and half weeks ago.

NASA’s new heavy-lift rocket will not get off the ground until December 2019 at the earliest, and its maiden flight could easily slip to the middle of 2020, the space agency announced on Wednesday. The rocket known as the Space Launch System would succeed the Saturn 5 that took astronauts to the moon more than four decades ago.

Over the past 25 years, a university professor named Jaime Lara built an illustrious career in the academic world of sacred art history. He was a professor at Yale University for more than a decade, wrote five books and won more than a dozen prestigious awards and fellowships. Since 2013, he has been a professor of medieval and renaissance studies at Arizona State University. But through his rise, Mr. Lara has kept a secret. On Thursday, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn revealed that 25 years ago, Mr. Lara, then known as the Rev.

WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 people signed up last week for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, significantly beating the pace of prior years as consumers defied President Trump’s assertion that the marketplace was collapsing. In a report on the first four days of open enrollment, the Trump administration said Thursday, 601,462 people selected health plans in the federal marketplace, HealthCare.gov.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Jaron Lanier is the most unusual person I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of unusual people. A barefoot Buddha with dreadlocks, perched in a crazy fun house in the leafy hills of Berkeley, Mr. Lanier is a founding member of the digerati. The 57-year-old computer scientist, musician and writer has been christened the father of virtual reality. “I’m a professional illusionist,” he says. “In some ways, I might know more about making illusions than anybody.” Mr.

If what people do is any reflection of who they are, then Devin P. Kelley, who slaughtered 26 churchgoers on Sunday in Texas, surely was a madman. Before the atrocity, he had attempted to sneak weapons onto an Air Force base after making death threats to his superiors, according to a local police report. In 2012, he had escaped from a mental hospital in New Mexico to which he had been sent after assaulting his wife and fracturing his stepson’s skull. A video of the church killing reportedly shows Mr.

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. — The scene captured by video is almost too terrible to imagine, much less contemplate watching: seven minutes of gunfire as a black-clad gunman executes his victims — many of them small children — inside the First Baptist Church here. Lock the video up forever, some Texas residents and former law enforcement officials say.

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans who have struggled to accomplish much of anything are now fully invested in quickly pulling off one of the most difficult legislative feats of all — enacting a complicated rewrite of the federal tax code through a proposal littered with political land mines. With the Senate on Thursday unveiling its companion to the House tax overhaul, Republican leaders began carefully counting votes and calculating what it would take to secure a badly needed victory.

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans who have struggled to accomplish much of anything are now fully invested in quickly pulling off one of the most difficult legislative feats of all — enacting a complicated rewrite of the federal tax code through a proposal littered with political land mines. With the Senate on Thursday unveiling its companion to the House tax overhaul, Republican leaders began carefully counting votes and calculating what it would take to secure a badly needed victory.