Domestic travel and summer-home sales aren’t the only reasons Iceland’s housing market is bouncing back. Last fall, the newly appointed director of the Central Bank of Iceland’s financial stability department lowered market rates from 4.5 to 1.7 percent after the collapse of WOW Air. The resulting increase in first-time buyers — who now make up nearly 30 percent of the market — has breathed life back into the market, said Olafur Sindri Helgason, chief economist of Iceland’s Housing and Construction Authority. The low rates have helped keep Iceland’s housing market stable, but its future remains heavily dependent on its tourism industry.

“At the same time, GEDmatch’s, and eventually Verogen’s, response to our paper didn’t inspire much confidence that they were taking it seriously.” Other genealogy websites, he added, seemed more open to the researchers’ recommendations for improving security. But the breach exposed that behind the scenes, hidden by privacy settings, were all kinds of profiles of people who were not even real. The giveaway that the matches were not actual relatives was that their DNA was too good to be true, said Leah Larkin, a biologist who runs DNA Geek, a genealogical research company. People who managed profiles for many clients and relatives repeatedly found that these fake users somehow were displayed as close relatives across the unrelated profiles.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, memos from the league office had been titled “HIATUS.” The N.B.A. sent 97 of them to teams from March 12 through July 29, while the season was on an indefinite hold. ever envisioned when it began using the term, but there were also times in April and May when many around the league feared that the 2019-20 season would not resume. Friday marks one month since the 22 teams that qualified for the restart began arriving at Walt Disney World, and the steady flow of real games has spawned some optimism throughout the N.B.A.

Gross said he did not remember how he got the ammunition. Gross said. As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. Gross said.

BERLIN — When she returned to Germany last week from a vacation in Serbia, one of the first things Snjezana Kirstein did was to stop at a pop-up coronavirus testing center at Berlin’s Tegel Aiport. Whereas such tests can be hard to find in the United States, with unpredictable costs and results two weeks in coming, Ms. Kirstein was on her way in a matter of minutes after having her nose and throat swabbed. The test was not only swift, it was free. This week, Germany began requiring that same simple test for all citizens or residents, like Ms. Kirstein, and other travelers who enter the country from coronavirus “hot spots,” again making it a leader in using testing as a firewall against the spread of the virus.

Carlie Lawrence, 42, a fashion executive and mother of two from Manhattan, was facing the same fear that seemingly every parent of school-age children has these days: what if schools don’t open in the fall?Luckily for her, Ms. Lawrence and her husband, who works in finance, own a shingled, four-bedroom house in the Hamptons, where schools, she figured, may have a better chance at opening. So they registered their 5-year old twin sons at the public elementary school in East Hampton, and are planning to continue to live in their weekend home full-time.“The decision is driven by knowing that schools in New York City will not be able to offer a full-time, in-school option,” Ms. Lawrence said, “and visualizing what possibly will be a full year of two working parents, working from home, while being cooped up all day in an apartment with kids.”

But there is a historical precedent for students walking out of their fraternities and sororities. According to the historian Paul Cronin, these students faced off in a violent clash with a counterrevolutionary group calling itself the Majority Coalition, which consisted mainly of conservative athletes and fraternity brothers. One of those in the Majority Coalition is the current attorney general, William P. Barr, who belonged to the Sigma Nu fraternity. Fraternity and sorority dues, about 50 percent of which often go to the national organizations, are harder to justify.

In a statement released through the university, football players said they supported the decision, in part because “not enough is known about the potential long term effects of contracting” the virus.(The College Football Playoff, the competition that is the most lucrative and prominent of events involving fall sports, will not be affected by the decision.)The wave of news on Wednesday — the Big Ten announced that it intends to begin its football season on Labor Day weekend — comes at a moment when playing college football is increasingly problematic as the landscape within the sport mirrors what is happening nationally, with hot spots emerging and few signs that the pandemic is under control. Cases like this are what prompted a group of Pac-12 players — at least one from every school in the league except the University of Colorado — to threaten Sunday to opt out of the season unless more health and safety measures were put in place, along with other demands.

When a whistle stopped play with four minutes, 27 seconds remaining in the Rangers’ season-ending 4-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on Tuesday night, the TV broadcast cut to a shot of the longtime goaltender Henrik Lundqvist, sitting on the bench, arms folded, hair perfectly coifed because he had not played. Then the camera pivoted to the Rangers head coach, David Quinn, who, with his team down 0-2 in a best-of-five series, had elected to start the rookie Igor Shesterkin in Game 3 over Lundqvist, who backstopped the first two games of the series. Over 15 seasons with the Rangers, Lundqvist set franchise records in wins (449), shutouts (63) and playoff wins (61). But as this season progressed, and before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the regular season in March, Shesterkin, a 24-year-old Russian rookie, at times overshadowed the veteran Lundqvist.

Mehrdad Oskouei’s latest documentary, “Sunless Shadows,” is a startling, raw confrontation with Iran’s patriarchy.A poignant follow-up to his 2016 “Starless Dreams,” about teenage girls in a Tehran juvenile detention center, the new movie focuses on a group of adolescent girls and older women imprisoned for murdering male relatives.(Both documentaries are part of a virtual Oskouei retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, running Aug. The killers in “Sunless Shadows” are destigmatized.

EDMONTON, Alberta — It is said that hockey is the heartbeat of Alberta’s capital city. But Edmonton, a city of just fewer than a million people, persisted and the dogged effort paid off in early July when the league instead selected it and Toronto as the sites for postseason play.“We’ve had a great staff doing a ton of work,” said Bob Nicholson, the Edmonton Oilers’ chairman. On Saturday, 12 Western Conference teams will begin the qualifying round and round-robin seeding tournament at Rogers Place, the four-year-old arena that sits at the center of the city’s Ice District, a $2.5 billion (CAN) mixed-use sports and entertainment zone.

Earlier this week, the United States Census Bureau announced it would end its efforts to count the number of people living in the country on Sept. 30, a month earlier than anticipated. That could have severe consequences for the 2020 census, which has been hobbled by a pandemic that has made door-to-door data collection unsafe. Nearly 63 percent of U.S. households have responded to the census so far, and the bureau has offered few details of how it will meet the goal in a shortened time frame.“A big worry is that undercounting will be greater than it has been in past censuses,” Michael said.

The National Hockey League and its players’ union announced on Monday that the two groups agreed on a four-year extension to the current collective bargaining agreement, a pivotal decision that paves the way for hockey to resume play amid the coronavirus pandemic. The start of formal training camps is slated for July 13, with teams traveling to two hub cities starting July 26. players will participate after not playing in 2018, pending an agreement with the International Olympic Committee — and through a period of uncertainty until salary cap numbers and escrow percentages can be more definitively planned. The league reportedly selected Edmonton and Toronto as the two so-called hub cities that will host its proposed return to play, but is awaiting approval from the players’ union.

Over a three-month period dominated by the coronavirus pandemic and a slowdown in advertising, The New York Times Company for the first time reported quarterly revenue that owed more to digital products than to the print newspaper. As much of its staff worked remotely, The Times brought in $185.5 million in revenue for digital subscriptions and ads during the second quarter of 2020, the company announced on Wednesday. The Times has 6.5 million total subscriptions, a figure that includes 5.7 million digital-only subscriptions, putting it on a course to achieve its stated goal of 10 million subscriptions by 2025. In a statement, Mark Thompson, the chief executive, called the company’s shift from print revenue to digital “a key milestone in the transformation of The New York Times.”

Since April, the Trump administration has funneled $48 million into a program with the Mayo Clinic, allowing more than 53,000 Covid-19 patients to get plasma infusions. Doctors and hospitals desperate to save the sickest patients have been eager to try a therapy that is safe and might work. The only way to get convincing evidence is with a clinical trial that compares outcomes for patients who are randomly assigned to get the treatment with those who are given a placebo. Many patients and their doctors — knowing they could get the treatment under the government program — have been unwilling to join clinical trials that might provide them with a placebo.

It’s how, on Tuesday, I — accidentally — pierced the carefully crafted bubble the European PGA Tour had created to facilitate a six-stop swing in Britain as part of its remade 2020 season. It turns out that the European Tour’s health and safety procedures — a testing-heavy regimen described by the former world No.1 Lee Westwood as “military style, almost” — were nearly sabotaged by a third-party online travel website, which processed my prepaid booking for a two-night stay at the tour’s so-called bubble hotel in northeast England. The European tour believed it had sealed off the hotel, which is a pitch shot from the Newcastle International Airport and a short drive to Close House golf club, the site of this week’s British Masters.

JEFFERSON, Ga. — When Jennifer Fogle and her family moved from Indiana to Georgia 13 years ago, they settled in Jefferson, a small, handsome city an hour’s drive from Atlanta, because they had heard about the excellent schools. The teachers are passionate and committed, and the facilities rival those found at some private schools. But in recent days Ms. Fogle found herself uncharacteristically anxious, after learning that Jefferson City Schools planned to offer face-to-face instruction in the midst of a resurgent coronavirus pandemic that has seen thousands of new cases reported daily in Georgia. As other districts around the state delayed their back-to-school days or moved to all-remote learning, Jefferson school officials announced that they were sticking with their Friday start date, one of the earliest in the nation.

WASHINGTON — An hour before Dr. Anthony S. Fauci threw the first pitch at the season opener between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals, President Trump stood on the briefing room stage at the White House and declared that he, too, had been invited to throw out his own opening pitch.“Randy Levine is a great friend of mine from the Yankees,” Mr. Trump, referring to the president of the baseball team, told reporters on Thursday as Dr. Fauci was preparing to take the mound. There was one problem: Mr. Trump had not actually been invited on that day by the Yankees, according to one person with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s schedule. But Mr. Trump had been so annoyed by Dr. Fauci’s turn in the limelight, an official familiar with his reaction said, that he had directed his aides to call Yankees officials and make good on a longtime standing offer from Mr. Levine to throw out an opening pitch.

He had paid for business interruption insurance, a type of coverage that replaces a portion of a firm’s lost revenue when a disaster forces it to suspend operations, and was expecting his carrier, Michigan Insurance Company, to cover at least some of his losses. Since the pandemic hit the United States this year, thousands of business owners like Mr. Gavrilides have discovered that the business interruption policies they bought, and have been paying thousands of dollars in annual premiums to sustain, won’t pay them a thing — just as they are struggling through the biggest business interruption in modern memory. Now, many of them — from proprietors of gyms and dental practices to high-profile restaurateurs including Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters, the owner of Cheers in Boston and even a National Basketball Association team — are taking their insurers to court, hoping to force them to cover some of the financial carnage. So far, more than 400 business interruption lawsuits have been filed, according to insurance lawyers.

Today, we have a special newsletter to coincide with our DealBook Debrief call tomorrow with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The 1619 Project. Our guest on tomorrow’s DealBook Debrief, The Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, brought key ideas in the movement to the fore with the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, which she spearheaded. here for the discussion with Nikole about the role for business in addressing racial inequality at 11 a.m. Eastern. If you have questions you would like to ask her beforehand, send them to dealbook@nytimes. com.

NEW DELHI — In a moment of triumph that India’s Hindu nationalists had worked toward for years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday set the ceremonial cornerstone for a new Hindu temple at the site of a destroyed mosque in Ayodhya. As Mr. Modi sat cross-legged and chanted mantras in front of a Hindu priest on Wednesday, part of the elaborate groundbreaking ceremony for the temple, it was the fulfillment of a promise to his Hindu political base and an unmistakable milestone in his efforts to shift India’s secular foundations toward a more overtly Hindu identity. He performed Hindu rituals, such as offering holy water and putting a red mark on his forehead, alongside some of India’s most avowed Hindu nationalists. They included Yogi Adityanath, the firebrand Hindu monk turned chief minister of Uttar Pradesh State, and Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of the R.S.S., a Hindu supremacist group, whose members helped tear down the mosque that used to stand in Ayodhya.

Every swipe, tap and video viewed by TikTok users around the world — billions and billions of data points a day — is fed into giant databases, which are then used to train artificial intelligence to predict which videos will keep users’ attention. It could even mean using data gleaned from an entirely different ByteDance app — such as Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok — to inform what TikTok users are shown. Would an American TikTok algorithm, trained only on American users’ data, be less addictive?Karl Higley, a recommender systems engineer who previously worked at Spotify, said that without access to historical data — data about what TikTok’s users swiped, tapped and lingered on weeks or months earlier — a new, Americanized TikTok might essentially need to start from scratch.

A spokesman for United Airlines wrote in an email that the airline was deploying electrostatic spraying before “most flights.” Southwest Airlines wrote in an email that their aircraft are deep cleaned for six to seven hours every night. Similarly, American Airlines wrote in an email that the airline is “disinfecting high-touch surfaces at every turn with a solution similar to what some competitors use when electrostatically spraying the inside of aircraft.” In addition, American said it is performing electrostatic fogging with a disinfectant the airline claims provides seven days of protection against Covid-19.(The airline declined to disclose the name of the disinfectant.)A spokesman for JetBlue wrote in an email that the airline performs electrostatic spraying on longer turns or when the plane sits overnight.

Seattle’s expansion National Hockey League team will be known as the Kraken.“We have not defined what the kraken looks like, but you know it’s there from the eye,” said Jay Deutsch, a co-owner of the team, in a telephone interview.“The kraken is watching.”A kraken is a legendary sea monster of Norse mythology.

Tazhiana Gordon, describes herself as a messy, mixed-media kind of scrapbooker. In early June, in response to the killing of George Floyd by police and the national protests that followed, she broke from her usual social media posts of scrapbook pages filled with cheerful phrases and family photos. Instead, Ms. Gordon, 29, who is a nurse, wrote about joining the crowds in New York and her thoughts about the reckoning with Blackness the country must face. Though some of the loss could be attributed to the normal fluctuations of follower counts, she said, she suspects it was because she had simply said that Black Lives Matter.

Novavax, the little-known Maryland company that received $1.6 billion from the federal government to produce an experimental coronavirus vaccine, announced encouraging results in two preliminary studies on Tuesday. There are other vaccines that are further along with clinical trials, but Novavax’s stands out because it is protein-based — the same proven technology used for existing vaccines against diseases like shingles — which could make it safer and easier to manufacture in large amounts. Our colleague Carl Zimmer, a science writer and author of “A Planet of Viruses,” thinks there will be a number of coronavirus vaccines that will turn out to be safe and effective. India, China, and Russia, could all end up with their own successful vaccines, he said, and “there may be vaccines that are better for old people and other groups.”

A pair of explosions, the second much bigger than the first, struck the city of Beirut early Tuesday evening, killing at least 100 people, wounding more than 4,000 and causing widespread damage. The second blast sent a billowing, reddish plume high above the city’s port and created a shock wave that shattered glass for miles. On Wednesday morning, despite a huge search operation, dozens were still missing in the city, the capital of Lebanon on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The first blast may have been in a fireworks warehouse at the port.

For Jake Williams, nothing means success like wrack and ruin. Mr. Williams had studied business marketing in college before withdrawing and pursuing a full-time career as an urban explorer, researching and telling the stories of abandoned properties. The subjects of some of his more popular videos, like a former Days Inn hotel or an abandoned Walmart, are fairly mundane, but viewers are drawn out of morbid curiosity, he said.“I think when you see an abandoned place on the side of the road,” he said, “people will ask, ‘How’d that get there?’”

SAN FRANCISCO — Had President Warren G. Harding not been bedridden in those midsummer days of 1923, he might have left his eighth-floor suite at the Palace Hotel and headed to the southwestern edge of the city, where a new golf course named Lake Merced Golf Links was under construction. He had played golf only days before, in Vancouver, British Columbia. But Harding never left the Palace Hotel alive again.“Most historians rank Harding as the worst of all American presidents,” according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to presidential history.

Eddie Shack, a colorful, pugnacious wing who became a fan favorite at Maple Leaf Gardens playing for Toronto’s four Stanley Cup championship teams of the 1960s, and who remained in the public eye as a pitchman on Canadian television sporting a cowboy hat and flowing mustache, died on Saturday in Toronto. Shack’s death, at a hospital, was announced by the Maple Leafs. He scored the winning goal for Toronto in Game 5 of the 1963 Stanley Cup finals against Detroit, though he took no credit, saying the puck had caromed into the Red Wings’ net off his backside.“He was a powerful skater,” Darryl Sittler, the captain of the Maple Leafs in Shack’s last season with them, told The Peterborough Examiner of Ontario.

It was Dr. Farrell, one of a very small number of women then working as research chemists in Canada, who figured out how to safely produce vast quantities of virus in Medium 199. Her next task was to get enough machines built and to hire enough qualified staff to make not only enough virus for the tests in the United States, Canada and Finland, but also to create enough vaccine to inoculate all of Canada’s children. Variations of the Toronto Method were used until the 1970s to make polio vaccines, Dr. Rutty told me. Dr. Rutty, who is the expert when it comes to Canada’s role in polio research and who serves as the historian for Connaught’s successor company, Sanofi Pasteur Canada, said that frustratingly little is known about Dr. Farrell’s personal life.

But not all mosquitoes are equally responsible for devastating the human population by spreading disease. Out of thousands of species, only a few like to bite humans — and even within the same species, mosquitoes from different places can have different preferences. There are two subspecies of Aedes aegypti: one that prefers humans and one that prefers animals; most populations are a genetic mix. After sending the eggs to New Jersey to grow new colonies, and then tempting the insects with the sweet smells of human and of rodent, the researchers found that the more human-loving mosquitoes tended to come from areas with a dry climate and dense human population.

DAKAR, Senegal — A Nigerian terrorist group has executed five men — three of them aid workers — who disappeared while providing assistance in the northeastern state of Borno last month.A group allied with the Islamic State, Islamic State West Africa Province, or I.S.W.A.P., is thought to be behind the executions of the five men, all Nigerians. The men had been traveling between Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, the Nigerian region hardest hit by terrorist attacks, and the town of Monguno when they were kidnapped. One worked for Nigeria’s State Emergency Management Agency.

At least 78 people were killed and 4,000 injured, Lebanon’s health minister said. With the wounded still streaming into hospitals and the search for missing people underway, the toll was expected to rise. Hospitals were so overwhelmed that they were turning wounded people away. Prime Minister Hassan Diab said Wednesday would be a national day of mourning.

James Murdoch wants the world to know he is out of the family business. Once considered a potential successor to Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Murdoch on Friday resigned from the board of the newspaper publisher News Corp, severing his last corporate tie to his father’s global media empire.“My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” Mr. Murdoch, 47, wrote in his resignation letter, which News Corp disclosed in a filing shortly after the close of business on Friday. The two sides began discussing Mr. Murdoch’s departure from the News Corp board earlier this year, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The United States’ top health official, Alex M. Azar II, will lead a delegation on a trip to Taiwan, a rare high-level visit by an American official to the island that is likely to anger China and further fray ties between Beijing and Washington. No date was given for the visit to Taiwan, a self-ruled territory that is claimed by Beijing, but the health department billed it as an opportunity to strengthen economic and public health cooperation between the United States and Taiwan and to highlight Taiwan’s success in battling the coronavirus pandemic.“Taiwan has been a model of transparency and cooperation in global health during the Covid-19 pandemic and long before it,” Mr. Azar said in the department’s statement.“I look forward to conveying President Trump’s support for Taiwan’s global health leadership and underscoring our shared belief that free and democratic societies are the best model for protecting and promoting health.”

An enormous explosion sent shock waves across Lebanon on Tuesday, killing more than 70 people and injuring more than 4,000. The blast overturned cars and blew out windows miles away, and sent a giant mushroom cloud into the sky over the port of Beirut, the country’s capital. The blast rocked the city with the ferocity of an earthquake and was heard as far away as Cyprus, more than 100 miles away. Early Wednesday morning, rescue workers dug through the rubble searching for survivors as fires continued to burn, casting an eerie orange glow over the city.

One option under renewed consideration is for the Justice Department to drop its insistence that prosecutors be free to bring capital charges against the men, half of a cell of Britons called the “Beatles” by their captives because of their accents. Since the men were captured in early 2018, when Jeff Sessions was attorney general, the Justice Department has insisted that it be free to seek their execution.A chief obstacle to bringing the men to trial has been a need for evidence held by the British government. Britain has abolished the death penalty and a British court has blocked it from cooperating in capital charges.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Friday they were “extremely alarmed” by assertions that the American ambassador in Brazil had signaled to Brazilian officials they could help get President Trump re-elected by changing their trade policies. In a letter sent Friday afternoon, Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel demanded that the ambassador, Todd Chapman, produce “any and all documents referring or related to any discussions” he has held with Brazilian officials in recent weeks about their nation’s tariffs on ethanol, an important agricultural export for Iowa, a potential swing state in the American presidential election. The committee’s letter was sent in response to reports in the Brazilian news media this week saying that Mr. Chapman, a career diplomat, made it clear to Brazilian officials they could bolster Mr. Trump’s electoral chances in Iowa if Brazil lifted its ethanol tariffs. Eliminating tariffs would give the Trump administration a welcome trade victory to present to struggling ethanol producers in Iowa, where the president is in a close race with his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Delta has also said that it cleans planes between flights, tests all employees for the coronavirus and aggressively enforces a mask requirement. On Monday, it announced a partnership with Lysol’s parent company aimed at improving Delta’s cleaning practices. What does Delta hope to get out of working with Lysol?Through our survey data, we hear that our cabins are very clean, but one thing our customers say is, “The lavatories are very clean when we get on board, but how can you keep them clean throughout the flight?” And this is the first area that we are going to target with Lysol, coming up with a product that will help us maintain cleanliness during flight on board the airplane.