First Run News

Throughout Texas and Louisiana, Hurricane Harvey cleanup is underway. Florida, Georgia and the Caribbean islands are just starting to assess the damage from Irma, while the storm pushed north to flood Charleston, S.C. Hurricane Jose’s path is still uncertain, but one thing is true: If you’ve been hit by either of these — or any other storm — cleaning up can be a nightmare, and few resources tell you where to start. Storm cleanup is different from regular, and even heavy duty, cleaning.

Good morning. The New York Times is providing full free digital access to European readers through Sunday. Here’s what you need to know: • Jean-Claude Juncker, above, the president of the European Commission, laid out plans to simplify how the European Union is run. In perhaps the boldest proposal in his annual address to the European Parliament, Mr.

Michelle Jones was released last month after serving more than two decades in an Indiana prison for the murder of her 4-year-old son. The very next day, she arrived at New York University, a promising Ph.D. candidate in American studies. In a breathtaking feat of rehabilitation, Ms. Jones, now 45, became a published scholar of American history while behind bars, and presented her work by videoconference to historians’ conclaves and the Indiana General Assembly.

MOSCOW — The country does not exist, so it has neither an army nor any real citizens, though it has acquired a feisty following of would-be patriots online.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has imposed visa sanctions against four countries that have refused to take back citizens who were convicted of crimes in the United States and ordered deported, officials said on Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security said it notified the State Department that the governments of Cambodia, Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone had denied or unreasonably delayed accepting the return of convicts.

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin inquired about the use of a military plane for his European honeymoon last month, the Treasury Department confirmed on Wednesday, a disclosure that comes as he is already under scrutiny for taking a government plane to Kentucky before viewing the Aug. 21 solar eclipse. The Treasury Department said Mr.

WASHINGTON — Tim Scott, the lone black Republican in the Senate, delivered a pointed history lesson on America’s 300-year legacy of racism to President Trump on Wednesday in response to what he called Mr. Trump’s “sterile” response to the riots in Charlottesville, Va., last month. The president invited Mr. Scott, a conservative from South Carolina who had expressed disgust with Mr. Trump’s equivocal reaction to the white supremacist protests that left one woman dead, to the Oval Office for what Mr.

In his big new single-payer health care bill, Senator Bernie Sanders says he wants to turn the country’s health system into “Medicare for all.” But his bill actually outlines a system very different from the current Medicare program. The Sanders plan envisions changing Medicare in two important ways.

WASHINGTON — In one Senate office building, some of the leading lights of the Democratic Party gathered Wednesday to embrace what was once a proposal only of the far left: a huge expansion of Medicare, large enough to open the popular, government-run health program to all Americans. In another Senate office building, a smaller but equally adamant group of Republican senators stood together to take one last stab at dismantling the Affordable Care Act.

WASHINGTON — In one Senate office building, some of the leading lights of the Democratic Party gathered Wednesday to embrace what was once a proposal only of the far left: a huge expansion of Medicare, large enough to open the popular, government-run health program to all Americans. In another Senate office building, a smaller but equally adamant group of Republican senators stood together to take one last stab at dismantling the Affordable Care Act.