First Run News

The civil war in Syria turned Mohammed Alhajali into a refugee. After making a dangerous crossing to Europe by sea, a friend said, he eventually found refuge in Britain. On Thursday, a charity said that Mr. Alhajali, 23, had died in the huge fire that ravaged the Grenfell Tower apartment building a day earlier. He was among the first victims to be identified.

LONDON — With the death toll from a horrific London fire rising and many residents still unaccounted for, Prime Minister Theresa May — under pressure from critics — on Thursday ordered a formal inquiry into the disaster that turned an apartment tower into a smoldering ruin. At least 17 people are known to have died in the blaze at Grenfell Tower, which began in the predawn darkness on Wednesday, but that figure is certain to climb, the authorities warned.

LONDON — For the fourth time in 12 weeks I marked myself safe on Facebook. In Britain. It was Wednesday morning, and Londoners had reason to be a bit optimistic. Borough Market, a lively bar and restaurant district near the Thames, was reopening, less than two weeks after terrorists dressed in fake suicide bombs went on a stabbing rampage.

WYOMING, Ohio — For more than a year, while their son Otto was a prisoner in North Korea, Fred and Cindy Warmbier knew nothing about his fate. Then, over the last week, the Warmbiers finally received some news: First, the family learned that Otto, a 22-year-old University of Virginia student, was gravely ill, and then that he would be coming home.

WASHINGTON — There is no foreign leader on whom President Trump has placed a bigger bet than China. Mr. Trump’s gamble was based on his calculation that Mr. Xi, the Chinese president, could put heavy pressure on China’s trade practices, and has said little about its adventurism in the South China Sea. But a growing number of Mr.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday will move to halt the historic rapprochement between the United States and Raúl Castro to change its repressive ways. Mr. Trump is expected to declare that the two-year-old Obama-era approach of engagement had amounted to a failed policy of appeasement.

WASHINGTON — The lawmakers trotted from their dugouts at Nationals Park, together in a near-summer air that never quite felt swampy, united in a certainty that the game must go on, just not exactly as it had before. A day earlier, on another ball field some seven miles southwest, a gunman had opened fire on members of the Republican congressional baseball team, striking four people — including Steve Scalise, the majority whip of the House of Representatives — who were there for a practice.

Alex Jones knows exactly whom he wants to blame for the Wednesday shooting on a Virginia baseball field: “the left” and its calls to violence. In a five-minute video produced by his conspiracy-laden website, InfoWars, Mr.