First Run News

It began as a crowd-pleasing tirade from President Trump to an overwhelmingly white, conservative crowd in Alabama. But even before dozens of N.F.L. players knelt in silent protest on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s remarks had spiraled into a national uproar over race, patriotism and free speech, with an unpredictable political trajectory. It is not yet clear whether most Americans are likely to sympathize with Mr. Trump, and his caustic scolding of the athletes, overwhelmingly black, who engage in certain forms of dissent, or with players who have pushed back against Mr.

WASHINGTON — Over the course of just 17 hours this weekend, President Trump assailed John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Stephen Curry, the National Football League, Roger Goodell, Iran and Kim Jong-un — the “Little Rocket Man.” And that was on his day off. While football players knelt, locked arms or stayed in their locker rooms during the national anthem in protest on Sunda

On three teams, nearly all the football players skipped the national anthem altogether. Dozens of others, from London to Los Angeles, knelt or locked arms on the sidelines, joined by several team owners in a league normally friendly to President Trump.

YABUCOA, P.R. — José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, stood in the middle of his flattened plantain farm on Sunday and tried to tally how much Hurricane Maria had cost him. “How do you calculate everything?” Mr. Rivera said. For as far as he could see, every one of his 14,000 trees was down. Same for the yam and sweet pepper crops. His neighbor, Luis A. Pinto Cruz, known to everyone here as “Piña,” figures he is out about $300,000 worth of crops.

WASHINGTON — The United States military said on Sunday that it had conducted drone strikes on an Islamic State training camp in Libya, killing 17 militants in the first American airstrikes in the strife-torn North African nation since January. A half-dozen “precision strikes” on Friday hit a training camp about 150 miles southeast of Surt, from which militants were moving fighters in and out of the country, stockpiling weapons and equipment, and plotting and conducting attacks, the Pentagon’s Africa Command said in a statement.

WASHINGTON — At the vast, windswept White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico earlier this year, nearly a dozen military contractors armed with laser guns, high-tech nets and other experimental systems met to tackle one of the Pentagon’s most vexing counterterrorism conundrums: how to destroy the Islamic State’s increasingly lethal fleet of drones. The militant group has used surveillance drones on the battlefield for more than two years.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is stepping up its pursuit of parents who paid to have their children illegally brought into the United States, according to people familiar with the matter. The effort, part of a widening crackdown on illegal immigration, is aimed at discouraging families from paying human smuggling organizations. As part of a new round of immigration sweeps, officials are targeting parents or other relatives who were deported, re-entered the United States and then had their children smuggled across the border.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a White House senior adviser, has used his personal email account to conduct official government business, his lawyer acknowledged on Sunday. The lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said that Mr. Kushner, using the personal account, had received or sent “fewer than a hundred emails” involving his White House colleagues over the first seven months of the administration. Mr. Lowell said the emails were all forwarded to Mr.

WASHINGTON — With time running short, the authors of the latest plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act shifted money in the bill to Alaska and Maine, which are represented by Republican senators who appear reluctant to support it. The revised version of the bill, written by Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, would provide extra money for an unnamed “high-spending low-density state,” a last-minute change seemingly aimed at Alaska and its holdout Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, who has yet to say how she will vote.

WASHINGTON — When President Trump gave a fiery campaign speech in Huntsville, Ala., on Friday evening, he drew a rapturous roar by ridiculing Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, as “Little Rocket Man.” Among diplomats and national security specialists, the reaction was decidedly different. After Mr. Trump repeated his taunt in a tweet late Saturday and threatened that Mr. Kim and his foreign minister “won’t be around much longer” if they continue their invective against the United States, reactions ranged from nervous disbelief to sheer terror. Mr.