WASHINGTON — President Biden on Thursday announced the donation of millions of coronavirus vaccines to a group of African countries during a meeting with President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, which is contending with the pandemic and an unfolding humanitarian disaster in neighboring Ethiopia. The Biden administration’s donation of 17 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to the African Union came a month after Mr. Kenyatta publicly pleaded for more equitable vaccine distribution around the world. At a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the Kenyan president criticized the “asymmetry” of the vaccine supply, a clear reference to countries such as the United States that are administering booster shots instead of donating more vaccines to nations in need. During Mr. Biden’s first in-person meeting at the White House with a leader of an African country, Mr. Kenyatta thanked him for the donation while also suggesting it was not enough.

OSLO — The attacker who went on a rampage in a town in Norway killed his five victims using a “sharp object,” not a bow and arrow as had been widely reported, the Norwegian police announced on Monday. Espen Andersen Brathen, who confessed to the crime, did shoot arrows at people from a hunting bow during part of his attack last Wednesday in the town of Kongsberg, which also wounded at least three people. At some point in the rampage, the police said at a news conference Monday, he discarded the bow. But it was the rarity of the other weapon used in the attack that caught the world’s attention, and if the hunting bow did not cause any deaths, it was responsible for at least one injury, that of an off-duty police officer who was struck by an arrow.

She had used up her vacation days, and without paid sick leave, she worried about paying her rent and electricity bill if she took more time off. She and her baby ended up being fine, but Ms. Hayes, now an airline gate agent in Inkster, Mich., said that having paid leave would have allowed her to prioritize her health over her paycheck. Paid leave, a cornerstone of President Biden’s economic agenda, is one of the many proposals at risk of being scaled back or left out of an expansive social safety net bill that Democrats are trying to push through Congress. Mr. Biden’s initial $3.5 trillion plan called for providing up to 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents, caretakers for seriously ill family members and people suffering from a serious medical condition.

While conservationists were working diligently to restore damaged sea grass meadows elsewhere in the world’s oceans, it seemed ironic that in northern Vancouver Island’s sea grass habitat, which is much healthier than others in the world, the furry floaters would swoop in and dig for clams, dislodging the aquatic vegetation. Dr. Foster and her colleagues’ research shows that sea otters are like elephants of the eelgrass. Their disturbance, as they dig for clams and dislodge eelgrass roots, stimulates sexual reproduction among the vegetation. That sexual activity, in contrast to reproduction through natural cloning, boosts eelgrass genetic diversity and improves the resilience of the ecosystems in which both the otters and the eelgrass live.

Another way Bitcoin mining can be made more sustainable, some argue, is to use “stranded” or wasted energy, for example capturing the power of flare gas at oil patches to mint digital money. How else can Bitcoin help with wasted energy?De Vries: Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, but if it’s a use of energy that would otherwise be going to waste then it’s not really a problem. China recently banned Bitcoin mining because these Bitcoin miners were ultimately responsible for the revival of coal mines.

In the Second Crusade, the Muslim commanders defeated Western crusaders at Damascus, said Jonathan Phillips, a professor of the history of the Crusades at Royal Holloway, University of London. It makes sense that it was found in the sea, he said, because many battles were waged near beaches, where Christian soldiers landed and were sometimes attacked by Muslim forces. The general director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Eli Escosido, praised Mr. Katzin because “every ancient artifact that is found helps us piece together the historical puzzle of the Land of Israel.” Mr. Katzin was given a certificate of appreciation for good citizenship. At the time, Pope Gregory VIII tried to inspire Western Christians through “great emotional language” to retake Jerusalem from Muslims, but ultimately the Muslim army maintained control of the city, Dr. Cotts said.

LONDON — When President Biden met Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the White House last month, one of Mr. Biden’s advisers passed him a note reminding him to raise the issue of trade tensions over Northern Ireland. It is not clear what Mr. Biden told his British guest, but the president’s interest in Northern Ireland has not diminished since then. In recent days, unprompted, Mr. Biden asked his staff for an update on the negotiations between Britain and the European Union over trade arrangements in Northern Ireland. Mr. Biden’s deep political and familial ties to Ireland set him apart from his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, who was an avid supporter of Brexit and encouraged Mr. Johnson’s tangles with Brussels.

“You have blind people to thank for that,” said Catherine Kudlick, director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. The godfather of the book being read aloud through your smartphone headphones was Talking Books, the records developed in the 1930s in the United States for people with impaired vision as an alternative to Braille.I’ve been discussing the history of audiobooks with Dr. Kudlick, who calls herself “imperfectly blind,” and other experts because, well, I love listening to books. Audiobooks are a prime example of a technology developed by or for people with disabilities that has helped all of us.

The strength of the U.S. dollar and its role as the world’s reserve currency means that the United States can cut off countries, groups or individuals from much of the global financial system at its discretion. That has intensified efforts to find new ways to evade America’s sanctions, including by using digital currencies that do not flow through the traditional banking system. This year, the Biden administration is on a pace to impose 900 sanctions, which would tie for the third-highest total on record. Last month, the Biden administration cracked down on the growing problem of ransomware attacks, expanding its use of sanctions to cut off digital payment systems that have allowed such criminal activity to flourish and threaten national security.

Robert Haas, a financier who in his 50s used his wealth to go in a markedly different direction, becoming a published aerial photographer, and then in his 60s began collecting vintage and custom-made motorcycles and creating a Texas museum to display them, died on Sept. 28 in a hospital in Dallas. He was 74. The cause was a respiratory illness, said Stacey Mayfield, his companion and the director of the Haas Moto Museum & Sculpture Gallery in Dallas. Mr. Haas, who was known as Bobby, made his fortune in the 1980s.

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration is planning to allow Americans to receive a different Covid-19 vaccine as a booster than the one they initially received, a move that could reduce the appeal of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and provide flexibility to doctors and other vaccinators. The study found that recipients of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose shot who received a Moderna booster saw their antibody levels rise 76-fold in 15 days, compared with only a fourfold increase after an extra dose of Johnson & Johnson. is expected to authorize boosters of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines by Wednesday evening; it could allow the mix-and-match approach by then. The agency last month authorized booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for at least six months after the second dose.

MEXICO CITY — Statues of Columbus are being toppled across the Americas, amid fierce debates over the region’s legacy of European conquest and colonialism. Few have been more contentious than the replacement of a monument at the heart of Mexico’s capital, touching on some of the most intense disputes in the country’s current politics, including not just race and history, but also sex. After prolonged debate, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced Tuesday that the Columbus statue that once gazed down on Mexico City’s main boulevard will be replaced with a precolonial Indigenous figure — notably, a woman.

Russia exceeded 1,000 deaths in a 24-hour period on Saturday, for the first time since the pandemic began. Apathy and mistrust for the Kremlin has left only 42 million of Russia’s 146 million inhabitants fully vaccinated, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said last week, a rate well below other advanced countries.“Approximately 40 percent of Russians do not trust the government, and those people are among the most active who refuse the vaccines,” said the director of an independent polling operation. In August, one of its polls showed that 52 percent of Russians said they were uninterested in getting the vaccine.

Mr. Khalilzad, who long supported the vision of a more modernized, pluralistic and democratic Afghanistan, lamented in his letter that “the political arrangement between the Afghan government and the Taliban did not go forward as envisaged.”As the Taliban stormed through the country in August, capturing city after city, Mr. Khalilzad continued to negotiate with its leaders, urging them to negotiate a peaceful political transition and political power-sharing agreement with the Afghan government. After the Taliban captured Kabul, Mr. Khalilzad helped facilitate safe passage for American civilians and at-risk Afghans.A naturalized American citizen, Mr. Khalilzad had a lifelong personal investment in the country he first left for the United States as a high school exchange student.

The death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday from complications of Covid-19 has provided fuel for vaccine skeptics and opponents, who immediately seized on the news that Mr. Powell had been vaccinated to stoke doubts about the effectiveness of the vaccines. Mr. Powell received his second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in February, said Peggy Cifrino, his longtime aide. Mr. Powell had also undergone treatment for early stage Parkinson’s disease, she said. Although Mr. Powell’s death is a high-profile tragedy, scientists emphasized that it should not undermine confidence in the Covid-19 vaccines, which drastically reduce the odds of severe disease and death.

The strength of the U.S. dollar and its role as the world’s reserve currency means that the United States can cut off countries, groups or individuals from much of the global financial system at its discretion. That has intensified efforts to find new ways to evade America’s sanctions, including by using digital currencies that do not flow through the traditional banking system. This year, the Biden administration is on a pace to impose 900 sanctions, which would tie for the third-highest total on record. Last month, the Biden administration cracked down on the growing problem of ransomware attacks, expanding its use of sanctions to cut off digital payment systems that have allowed such criminal activity to flourish and threaten national security.

Under the practice, called payment for order flow, brokerage firms sell the right to execute retail investors’ trades to bigger trading houses, which make tiny profits on the difference between the buying and selling prices. This system has enabled Robinhood and other brokers to offer free stock trading, but critics say this is problematic: Retail brokers have an incentive to encourage more trading by individual investors, even though it may not be in their best interest. The S.E.C.’s report echoed that concern: “These payments can create a conflict of interest for the retail broker-dealer,” the report said. The practice was challenged in a proposed class-action lawsuit by retail investors against Robinhood, and some critics have suggested that the time had come to ban it.

SEATTLE — LinkedIn said on Thursday that it was shutting down its professional networking service in China later this year, citing “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements,” in a move that completes the fracture between American social networks and China. It will not have social networking features such as sharing posts and commenting, which have been critical to LinkedIn’s success in the United States and elsewhere. LinkedIn’s action ends what had been one of the most far-reaching experiments by a foreign social network in China, where the internet is closely controlled by the government. When LinkedIn expanded in China in 2014 with a localized service, it offered a tentative model for other major foreign internet companies looking to tap the country’s huge, lucrative and highly censored market.

LONDON — Politicians from across the political divide on Monday united in tribute to David Amess, the British lawmaker killed in a deadly assault last week that has heightened concerns about security arrangements for members of Parliament. Three houses in and around London have been searched by antiterror detectives but no clear motive has yet been disclosed for the assault. The authorities have not named the suspect, but British press reports identified him as Ali Harbi Ali, 25, a British national of Somali heritage and son of Harbi Ali Kullane, an adviser to a former prime minister of Somalia who currently resides in London. Addressing lawmakers in Parliament on Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told lawmakers that Mr. Amess “was taken from us in a contemptible act of violence, striking at the core of what it is to be a member of this House.” He said Parliament had lost a “patriot who believed passionately in this country, in its people, in its future,” and one of its “nicest, kindest, and most gentle individuals.”

The academy announced Monday that Ms. Hudson, 65, will step down at the conclusion of her current contract. In recent years under Ms. Hudson, the Academy has moved aggressively to expand and diversify its membership, a response to the #OscarSoWhite controversy that arose in 2015 after the group nominated only white actors for the Oscars. Since then, the Academy has swelled to 9,362 voting members from 6,446, 33 percent of whom identify as women and 19 percent coming from underrepresented communities.(When Ms. Hudson came aboard, Oscar voters were 94 percent white and 77 percent male.)

His administration has been calling on OPEC and its allies to boost production to help bring down rising oil and gasoline prices, even as it seeks to limit the growth of oil and gas production on federal lands and waters. That has created a big opportunity for state-owned oil companies that are not under as much pressure to reduce emissions, though some are also investing in renewable energy. In fact, their political masters often want these oil companies to increase production to help pay down debt, finance government programs and create jobs. Saudi Aramco, the world’s leading oil producer, has announced that it plans to increase oil production capacity by at least a million barrels a day, to 13 million, by the 2030s.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The F.B.I. and the State Department are working with the American Embassy in Haiti and with the local authorities to rescue a group of 17 missionaries and their children who were kidnapped in Haiti, White House and law enforcement officials said on Monday. The brazen attack, in which a Haitian gang captured 16 Americans and one Canadian working with the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, is the most recent example of the lack of security confronting Haiti, a nation where many feel violence and crime have spiraled out of control. Small, peaceful protests erupted across Haiti Monday morning, with groups taking to the streets and some burning tires and blocking roads with barricades, to demand a government response

Apple on Monday unveiled in an hourlong virtual event new MacBook computers powered by Apple-made processors and an updated model of its popular AirPods. Last year, Apple introduced a new line of computers with processors made by Apple with the assistance of a manufacturing partner, breaking its reliance on the chip maker Intel. The company said at the time that the new chip, called the M1, would make Apple devices faster and more power efficient. The new processors, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, power a new MacBook Pro that comes in a 14-inch and 16-inch model, starting at $2,000 and $2,500.

“It’s possible that the school district may not be all that happy with this because I think it gives us a window into the fact that they may not actually be treating ventilation as seriously as they should be,” Dr. Huffman said. Improving indoor ventilation reduces the concentration of these aerosols and the risk of infection in an indoor space, but there is no easy way for members of the public to measure the ventilation rate — let alone the accumulation of viral aerosols — in shared spaces.“Ideally there’d be some machine that cost $100 and it starts beeping if the virus is in the air,” said Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who is sending a carbon dioxide monitor to school with his son. Every time we exhale, we expel not just aerosols but also carbon dioxide; the worse the ventilation, the more carbon dioxide builds up in an occupied room.

Inflation is likely getting a temporary boost from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that the Biden administration ushered in early this year, new Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco research released on Monday suggested. The new paper comes down somewhere in the middle, finding that the spending had some effect on inflation but suggesting that it is most likely to be temporary. The economists estimated that it would add 0.3 percentage points to the core Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation index in 2021 and “a bit more” than 0.2 percentage points in 2022. Core inflation strips out volatile items like food and fuel.

Not even wizarding. After more than two decades as the official wizard of Christchurch, Ian Brackenbury Channell, 88, saw his $10,000 annual contract go poof last week, according to Stuff, a news site in New Zealand.“They are a bunch of bureaucrats who have no imagination,” Mr. Channell, known most commonly as the Wizard, said of the Christchurch City Council, according to Stuff. How does one become a paid wizard?

LONDON — When President Biden met Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the White House last month, one of Mr. Biden’s advisers passed him a note reminding him to raise the issue of trade tensions over Northern Ireland. It is not clear what Mr. Biden told his British guest, but the president’s interest in Northern Ireland has not diminished since then. In recent days, unprompted, Mr. Biden asked his staff for an update on the negotiations between Britain and the European Union over trade arrangements in Northern Ireland. Mr. Biden’s deep political and familial ties to Ireland set him apart from his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, who was an avid supporter of Brexit and encouraged Mr. Johnson’s tangles with Brussels.

MOSCOW — After Sofia Kravetskaya got vaccinated with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine last December, she became a pariah on the Moscow playground where she takes her young daughter.“They believed that if you were vaccinated, the virus is inside you and you’re contagious.”That skepticism, pollsters and sociologists say, is the main reason only one third of the country’s population is fully vaccinated, despite the availability of free inoculations. On Saturday, Russia exceeded 1,000 deaths in a 24-hour period for the first time since the pandemic began.

Nikolaj Hansson may be a self-described skateboarder at heart, but during the pandemic he developed a passion for tennis while playing on the courts in Faelledparken, Copenhagen’s largest park. Soon, Hansson — a veteran of the Danish design world, having worked as a communications consultant for Tekla Fabrics and Muuto — got to noticing, as any sartorially sensitive serve-and-volleyer must, the parlous state of tennis fashion, saturated as it is with “high-level performance brands,” in his words, with scant regard for style. So he stepped into the breach and developed his own brand, Palmes Tennis Society, a line of classic tennis wear for both on and off the court. But perhaps Palmes’s classiest vintage nod is its Leo vest, inspired by the sweater-vests of erstwhile tennis style icons like Björn Borg and Boris Becker.

The German media giant Axel Springer said on Monday that the editor of Bild, its powerful tabloid, had been removed from his duties after The New York Times reported on allegations that he had behaved inappropriately with women at the publication. The Times reported on Sunday on details of Mr. Reichelt’s relationship with a trainee, who testified during an investigation sponsored by the company that he had summoned her to a hotel near the office for sex and asked her to keep a payment secret. Mr. Reichelt had “not clearly separated private and professional matters, even after the compliance proceedings were concluded in spring 2021,” and had misled the company’s executive board on the subject, Axel Springer said in a statement. The company’s chairman and chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, praised Mr. Reichelt for his leadership but said retaining him had become impossible.

The National Association of Manufacturers took issue with the securities regulator for not enforcing a Trump-era rule that sought to rein in the firms that are hired by institutional investors to advise them on how to vote their shares. The Labor Department proposed rule changes yesterday that would make it easier for retirement plans to add investment options based on environmental, social and governance, or E.S.G., considerations. Reversing a Trump-era policy, the proposal not only permits pension plan administrators from considering these factors, but it may make it their legal duty to do so, especially as the economic consequences of climate change continue to emerge. factors to judge investments, said Marty Walsh, the labor secretary.

Malawi, the southern African nation bounded by Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, once fell prey to this lax law enforcement and became “one of the biggest wildlife trafficking hubs in Southern Africa,” said Dudu Douglas-Hamilton, head of counter wildlife trafficking at the Elephant Crisis Fund, a nonprofit group that supports conservation projects across Africa. But significant efforts on the ground to combat the country’s difficulties with poaching and trafficking have started to pay off, and the example Malawi is now setting may show other African nations how they can do the same. On Sept. 28, a judge in Lilongwe, the country’s capital, sentenced Yunhua Lin to as much as 14 years in prison for a variety of charges he was previously found guilty of: rhino horn possession and dealing, and money laundering. Investigators say Mr. Lin, a 48-year-old Chinese citizen, played a central role in turning Malawi into a wildlife crime hot spot.

MOSCOW — Russia plans to cease its diplomatic engagement with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Russian foreign minister said on Monday, in the latest sign of unraveling relations between Moscow and the West. And Moscow still maintains diplomatic relations with the individual governments in the alliance. The decision will end a post-Cold War experiment, never very successful, in building trust between Russia and the Western alliance, established decades ago to contain the Soviet Union, which officials in Moscow accused of later encroaching on former Soviet territory. By early next month, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, Russia will halt the activities of its representative office at NATO headquarters in Brussels and withdraw diplomatic credentials from emissaries of the alliance working in Moscow.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Small, peaceful protests erupted across Haiti Monday morning, with groups taking to the streets and some burning tires and blocking roads with barricades, to demand that the government restore security in a country where many feel violence and crime have spiraled out of control. The group that was kidnapped, missionaries working for the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, was taken by the 400 Mawozo gang, a growing menace in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The gang has increased its territorial control over the past year, while the government struggled to cope in the face of natural disasters and the assassination of the country’s president in July. By many estimates, about half of the capital is under the command of armed criminal groups, many of which use kidnappings to raise funds, sparing no one — not even children, priests or the poor.

The German media giant Axel Springer said on Monday that the editor of Bild, its powerful tabloid, had been removed from his duties after The New York Times reported on allegations that he had behaved inappropriately with women at the publication. The Times reported on Sunday on details of Mr. Reichelt’s relationship with a trainee, who testified during an investigation sponsored by the company that he had summoned her to a hotel near the office for sex and asked her to keep a payment secret. Mr. Reichelt had “not clearly separated private and professional matters, even after the compliance proceedings were concluded in spring 2021,” and had misled the company’s executive board on the subject, Axel Springer said in a statement. The company’s chairman and chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, praised Mr. Reichelt for his leadership but said retaining him had become impossible.

Inflation is likely getting a temporary boost from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that the Biden administration ushered in early this year, new Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco research released on Monday suggested. The new paper comes down somewhere in the middle, finding that the spending had some effect on inflation but suggesting that it is most likely to be temporary. The economists estimated that it would add 0.3 percentage points to the core Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation index in 2021 and “a bit more” than 0.2 percentage points in 2022. Core inflation strips out volatile items like food and fuel.