First Run News

MEXICO CITY — Gustavo López recognized the boy’s clothes first. His tiny frame, pulled from the wreckage, lay over the jagged pieces of what remained of the school. It was his 7-year-old son. He sat in shock for hours, quietly trying to maintain strength for his 9-year-old daughter, who had escaped the school unharmed.

MEXICO CITY — Gustavo López recognized the boy’s clothes first. His tiny frame, pulled from the wreckage, lay over the jagged pieces of what remained of the school. It was his 7-year-old son. He sat in shock for hours, quietly trying to maintain strength for his 9-year-old daughter, who had escaped the school unharmed.

“It must have been marvelous when the century was young,” Eve Babitz wrote of the Garden of Allah hotel in 1977. By the time Ms. Babitz — whose frothy, witty, cutting books about Los Angeles have gained a new cult following since being recently reissued — was writing about the famed Hollywood hotel, it had already been demolished, bulldozed in 1959 to make way for the Lytton Savings bank.

WASHINGTON — Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fly on private jets to attend routine public events instead of taking cheaper commercial airliners because he has an “incredibly demanding schedule,” his spokeswoman said Wednesday. Mr. Price, a physician and former Republican congressman from Georgia, chartered five work-related flights last week alone.

WASHINGTON — As President Trump’s voter integrity commission looks under rocks for possible voter malfeasance, its members might want to examine a presidential nominee awaiting confirmation by the Senate Finance Committee. Documents indicate that Jeffrey Gerrish, the president’s pick to be a deputy United States Trade Representative, moved from Virginia to Maryland last year, but opted in November to vote in the more competitive state of Virginia than his bright blue new home. The Senate Finance Committee, which has been considering Mr.

WASHINGTON — Nearly all of President Trump’s top national security officials have been the target of his ire, whether it was privately dressing down his attorney general, publicly disagreeing with his top diplomat or musing about exiling his national security adviser to

WASHINGTON — When Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, introduced Chuck Schumer to members of her caucus this month, she warmed up the room with a well-worn joke about her Senate counterpart: “You know they say the most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck and a camera.” Mr. Schumer’s love of the spotlight aside, it has been behind the scenes where “Chuck and Nancy,” as President Trump calls them, have forged what may be the most surprisingly potent partnership in Mr.

WASHINGTON — The health insurance industry, after cautiously watching Republican health care efforts for months, came out forcefully on Wednesday against the Senate’s latest bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, suggesting that its state-by-state block grants could create health care chaos in the short term and a Balkanized, uncertain insurance market. In the face of the industry opposition, Senate Republican leaders nevertheless said they would push for a showdown vote next week on the legislation, drafted by Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. That puts

Unemployment has fallen, and the stock market has soared. So why has the economic expansion since the recession been so tame, with sluggish productivity and, at least until recently, anemic wage growth? Economists say the answer, to some degree, can be found in a start-up slump — a decline in the creation of new businesses — and a growing understanding of what’s behind it. A total of 414,000 businesses were formed in 2015, the latest year surveyed, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.

HONG KONG — The top securities regulator in the United States said Wednesday night that its computer system had been hacked last year, giving the attackers private information that could have been exploited for trading. The disclosure, coming on the heels of a data breach at Equifax, the major consumer credit reporting firm, is likely to intensify concerns over potential computer vulnerabilities lurking among pillars of the American financial system. The Securities and Exchange Commission said in a statement that it was still invest