First Run News

CHICAGO — The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill. In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, and began composing essays. Looking up from her laptop, Masuma Khan, then 11 years old, said her essay explored how schooling in ancient Athens differed from her own.

The standing ovation shook the Renée Fleming, the star soprano, had just bid farewell to one of her signature roles — the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” — closing an important chapter in a storied career that has taken her from opera to far wider fame. Her final performance as the Marschallin — which was beamed live to cinemas around the world as part of the Met’s popular Live in HD series — came at a moment of transition for Ms. Fleming, 58.

This was not, let’s be honest, the best week to be Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. He started on Monday buffeted by questions about Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Sally Q. Yates, the former acting attorney general. On Tuesday, it fell to him to make the initial announcement that James B. Comey had been terminated as F.B.I. director.

Summer is just around the corner, and, for many, that means it’s time to take fitness goals up a notch. If that sounds like you, here some of The Times’s best fitness guides to get you started — and motivated: • The nine-minute strength workout. • Yoga for everyone (or if you want to mix things up, yoga to make you strong). •

VANG VIENG, Laos — Along the jungle-covered mountains of Laos, squads of Chinese engineers are drilling hundreds of tunnels and bridges to support a 260-mile railway, a $6 billion project that will eventually connect eight Asian countries. Chinese money is building power plants in Pakistan to address chronic electricity shortages, part of an expected $46 billion worth of investment. Chinese planners are mapping out train lines from Budapest to Belgrade, Serbia, providing anothe

PARIS — In the aftermath of a historic presidential election, France’s politics are in upheaval. A generation of political leaders has been swept aside. New ones are emerging.

This was a blockbuster week for the White House press briefing, already daytime television’s big new hit. Now the question is if the show gets renewed. Its most avid viewer, President Trump, casually floated the notion on Friday that the briefings — a Washington ritual for decades — had finally jumped the shark. “Just don’t have ’em,” the president said in

WASHINGTON — The premonition came in a Winston-Salem conference room, on an otherwise happy election night in 2004, before Richard M. Burr of North Carolina had even declared victory in his bid to join the Senate. News outlets had begun calling the race. A watch party was waiting for him. But his mind was elsewhere, at least for a moment. “He said, ‘I hope they don’t put me on the Intelligence Committee,’” recalled Paul Shumaker, a top strategist for Mr. Burr who sat with him to follow the returns. “‘It’s hard enough to sleep at night the way it is.’” Mr.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has never shown any reluctance to sacrifice a surrogate to serve a short-term political need, so he apparently did not think twice this week about exposing a series of staff members to ridicule as he repeatedly shifted his explanation for firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. Mr.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — President Trump, an often profane New Yorker who emerged last year as an unlikely champion for evangelical Christians, was rewarded with some sanctuary by the conservative faithful at Liberty University on Saturday after a brutal week in Washington. Mr.