Gutting U.S.A.I.D. Was a Disaster. Here Is How to Move Forward.

We humans have settled in all sorts of precarious environments: parched deserts, barren tundra, high mountains. None are precarious in quite the same way as atolls, the tiny, low-lying islands that dot the tropics. As the planet warms and the oceans rise, atoll nations like the Maldives, the Marshall Islands…

John Whitmire, a moderate Democrat who has served in the Texas State Senate since 1983, won a runoff election on Saturday to become mayor of Houston, according to The Associated Press, defeating Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a prominent congressional Democrat, in the nonpartisan race. Mr. Whitmire had been considered a…

As one urban gardener after another beseeched Cherelle Parker to prevent the green spaces that they had spent years nurturing from being gobbled up by developers, she furiously took notes in her trademark spiral notebook and barely said a word. Eventually, Ms. Parker, the Democratic nominee for mayor, did address…