A utility company acknowledged on Thursday that its equipment appeared to have started the largest wildfire in Texas’ recorded history, a blaze that began last week and went on to burn more than 1 million acres in the state’s Panhandle region. Xcel Energy, an electric and gas company that operates in a mostly rural part…
In a pair of filings this month, news organizations asked a federal judge in Washington to allow live television coverage of the trial of President Donald J. Trump on charges that he conspired to undermine the 2020 election. They face a distinctly uphill fight. A federal rule of criminal procedure stands in their way, and…
Federal agents arrested a record number of migrant families who crossed the southern border illegally in August, two officials with preliminary data said, highlighting the Biden administration’s most prominent immigration challenge after rolling out new border policies this spring. The roughly 91,000 migrants who crossed together as families exceeded the 84,486 such crossings recorded in…
WASHINGTON — Just hours after formally kicking off his re-election campaign, President Biden appeared on Tuesday before a crowd of union supporters chanting “four more years” to outline his case for a second term. In his telling, unsurprisingly, the record sounds pretty good — more jobs, more roads and bridges, more clean energy, more opportunities…
WASHINGTON — The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights logged a record number of discrimination complaints in the past year, the latest indicator of how the social and political strife roiling the country is reverberating in the nation’s schools. Nearly 19,000 complaints were filed to the office in the last fiscal year — between Oct.…
The Transportation Security Administration intercepted a record number of guns at airport security checkpoints this year, the agency said on Friday, prompting it to increase the maximum fine for firearm violations. The move comes amid surges in air travel and gun sales across the country. The agency said that it had stopped 6,301 guns —…
The groundbreaking ceremony in October for the Hyundai electric vehicle plant under construction outside Savannah should have been a moment for bipartisan bonhomie, with the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and a Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, both shoveling dirt to begin the largest economic development project in the state’s history. Instead, in this hyperpartisan…
Joel Gindo thought he could finally own and operate the farm of his dreams when a neighbor put up 160 acres of cropland for sale in Brookings County, S.D., two years ago. Five thousand or six thousand dollars an acre should do the trick, Mr. Gindo estimated. But at auction, Mr. Gindo watched helplessly as…
Beto O’Rourke set a new Texas fund-raising record for state office with a $27.6 million haul over four months in the governor’s race, his campaign announced on Friday, saying that it had outpaced Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent, in the tightening contest. But the campaign of Mr. Abbott, who still holds a cash-on-hand advantage…