First Run News

SAN JUAN, P.R. — A day after Hurricane Maria razed Puerto Rico, its ferocious winds smashing houses, hotels, cellphone towers and the island’s entire electrical grid, the fear and frustration were pervasive on Thursday. Power was out everywhere. Cellphones were mostly useless, forcing panicked residents to scramble for news from far-flung relatives. Much of the island’s water was undrinkable. Roads were carpeted in debris. And still the full scope of the damage was unknown.

For decades, Republicans have dreamed of taking some of the vast sums the federal government spends on health care entitlements and handing the money over to states to use as they saw best. Now, in an 11th-hour effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the party has come up with a way to repackage the funding for the law it loathes into a trillion-dollar pot of state grants. The plan is at the core of the bill that Senate Republican leaders have vowed to bring to a vote next week.

JOJUTLA, Mexico — The remnants of their life lay before them like some crude exhibit in a gallery of loss: a pink Bible, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, earthenware plates and enamel pots. Their home was gone, reduced to crumbled bits of adobe that now held a menagerie of odds and ends pulled from the wreckage after Tuesday’s earthquake, which leveled large parts of Jojutla, a town unaccustomed to earthquakes, and left at least 28 people dead.

The brain scan came as a surprise even to researchers who for years have been studying the relationship between brain disease and deaths of professional football players. Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end and a convicted murderer, was 27 when he committed suicide in April. Yet a posthumous examination of his brain showed he had such a severe form of the degenerative brain disease C.T.E.

The brain scan came as a surprise even to researchers who for years have been studying the relationship between brain disease and deaths of professional football players. Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end and a convicted murderer, was 27 when he committed suicide in April. Yet a posthumous examination of his brain showed he had such a severe form of the degenerative brain disease C.T.E.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to dismantle key Obama-era limits on drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional battlefields, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations. The changes would lay the groundwork for possible counterterrorism missions in countries where Islamic militants are active but the United States has not previously tried to kill or capture them. President Trump’s top national security advisers have proposed relaxing two rules, the officials said.

What do you get when you combine more than 100 heads of state, a few hundred chief executives and several thousand hangers-on in Midtown Manhattan? Besides a traffic jam, it is the United Nations General Assembly week in New York, also known as #UNGA. Or it’s the Concordia Summit. Or it’s Climate Week. Or it’s the Clinton Global Initiative, except now that event is gone, replaced this year by the inaugural Bl

UNITED NATIONS — It was hardly a surprise that Donald J.

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has responded to President Trump’s vow at the United Nations to “totally destroy” North Korea if it threatened the United States or its allies. His remarks, released on Friday by KCNA, the North Korean state news agency, were believed to be the first time a North Korean leader directly issued a statement to the world under his name. Here is the full text: The speech made by the U.S. president in his maiden address on the U.N.

SEOUL, South Korea — Responding directly for the first time to President Trump’s threat at the United Nations to destroy nuclear-armed North Korea, its leader called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” on Friday and vowed the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.” The rejoinder by the leader, Kim Jong-un, who is about half as old as Mr. Trump, 71, added to the lexicon of Mr. Kim’s choice of insults in the escalating bombast between the two. “A frightened dog barks louder,” Mr. Kim said in a statement, referring to Mr.