First Run News

BAY CITY, Tex. — “I’m gonna mash ’em out.” Ryan Ashcraft spotted some cattle loitering in standing water under a clump of trees and came out of a long, sweeping curve in his small helicopter to drop toward a clearing so narrow it seemed the blades might give the treetops a haircut — and potentially send Mr. Ashcraft and his passenger on a one-way trip to the afterlife. Mr. Ashcraft, 22, dipped toward the cattle and then pulled up sharply and hovered; the maneuver made the blades produce a sharp POP-POP-POP-POP-POP.

THE SONGS WE KNOW BEST
John Ashbery’s Early Life
By Karin Roffman
Illustrated. 316 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

Here is a selection of poems by John Ashbery, who died Sunday. They were chosen by Gregory Cowles, The New York Times’s poetry editor, and Andrew Epstein, an Ashbery expert at Florida State University. Some of Mr. Ashbery’s most famous poems are thousands of words long, and they are not included here.

John Ashbery, a poet whose teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early-21st-century American literature, died on Sunday at his home in Hudson, N.Y. He was 90. His husband, David Kermani, confirmed his death. Mr.

WASHINGTON — When Congress returns to Washington on Tuesday after a monthlong summer recess, Americans may witness something rare and strange on Capitol Hill: a glimmer, ever so faint, of bipartisanship. After eight months of legislative dysfunction and gridlock, Hurricane Harvey appears to have brought Republicans and Democrats together around the most basic of congressional duties: aiding Americans whose lives and homes have been wrecked by a natural disaster, and keeping the government open. With parts of Texas and Louisiana underwater, shelters overflowing and the search for survivors stil

Even by the standards of the Trump era, one of the more unusual departures from recent Washington practice came in June, in a case before the Supreme Court involving worker rights. The Trump administration felt so strongly on the issue — that employers can force workers to forfeit their rights to bring class-action lawsuits — that it reversed the government’s position, something that has rarely happened in a

JACKSON, Mich. — Anita-Maria Quillen blended a strawberry-banana shake, tucked high heels into a Louis Vuitton bag and fired off last-minute requests at her little boys and their sitter. She stepped out her door in flip-flops, where a waiting Chevy Tahoe would take her to a business fair near Detroit. The auto parts company Ms. Quillen has owned and run for six years, Diversified Engineering & Plastics, was profitable, but only because she had aggressively cut costs. She had whittled the payroll to 78 employees from 130.

President Trump is strongly considering a plan that would end the Obama-era program that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, but only after giving Congress six months to come up with a potential replacement for the popular initiative, according to three administration officials briefed on the discussions. Officials working on the plan stressed that Mr. Trump could still change his mind, and some key details had not yet been resolved.

a nuclear blast on Sunday was a big advance from its previous five tests because it had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb. But some experts suspect the North may have tested a “boosted” atomic bomb. How are a hydrogen bomb and a regular atomic bomb different? And why would that matter to the United States and its allies?

WASHINGTON — While the world agonized over the huge nuclear test in North Korea this weekend, President Trump aimed his most pointed rhetorical fire not at the renegade regime in Pyongyang, but at America’s closest partner in confronting the crisis: South Korea. In taking to Twitter to accuse Seoul of “appeasement,” Mr.