Scott Neuman

Updated at 9:23 p.m. ET

President Trump followed up a pair of divisive speeches over the holiday weekend on Monday by castigating NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag and calling on its only African American driver to apologize for "a hoax" involving a rope fashioned into a noose that the FBI later determined wasn't a hate crime.

Prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law says he has fled the city following the enactment of a new Beijing-sponsored crackdown on free expression, telling NPR that the new national security legislation amounts to a "complete destruction" of Hong Kong's autonomy.

The federal agency charged with preventing terrorist attacks and securing the border announced Wednesday that it would deploy personnel across the country to carry out President Trump's orders to protect statues and monuments from vandalism amid ongoing protests for racial justice.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said the department has established a Protecting American Communities Task Force to secure historic landmarks against "violent anarchists and rioters."

A judge in Minnesota has set a March 8 trial date for the four former police officers accused in the death of George Floyd.

At an omnibus hearing Monday, Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill said the trial date assumed that the former Minneapolis Police Department officers — Derek Chauvin, 44, who knelt on Floyd's neck and is charged with second-degree murder; J. Alexander Kueng, 26; Thomas Lane, 37; and Tou Thao, 34 — would be tried together, but he said that he expected motions to be filed by their attorneys for separate trials.

North Korea has pledged to redeploy troops into demilitarized areas near its border with South Korea, a day after it blew up a liaison office in a provocation that has markedly increased tensions between the two arch-rivals.

Brazil on Tuesday reported a national record of nearly 35,000 new coronavirus cases in a 24-hour period, even as the government has insisted that the outbreak is under control.

The health ministry added 34,918 new cases, but Brazilian media, in collaboration with state health departments, said the figure was probably undercounted by a few thousand. The ministry also announced 1,282 additional COVID-19 deaths, bringing the total to more than 45,000 since the pandemic began.

The Voice of America's two top executives stepped down Monday following Senate confirmation of President Trump's pick to run the agency that oversees the international broadcaster.

Paul Whelan, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in Moscow in 2018 on charges of espionage, has been found guilty in a closed trial and sentenced to 16 years in prison in a case that has strained relations between the two countries.

The verdict was read in a Moscow court on Monday as Whelan stood in the defendant's cage holding a sign that read "Sham trial!"

France's President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday a further easing of restrictions imposed after the COVID-19 outbreak, beginning with the full reopening of cafes and restaurants and the lifting of bans on travel from European countries.

France, which has been among the countries in Europe hardest-hit by COVID-19, with nearly 30,000 deaths, has nonetheless seen its daily count of new cases fall dramatically since a peak in mid-April.

Maria Ressa, the former CNN journalist who co-founded the Philippines' Rappler news site, has been convicted of cyber libel, a controversial charge that she has denied, maintaining that it's a politically motivated effort to silence independent journalism in the country.

Prosecutors in Sweden announced Wednesday the name of the man they believe gunned down Prime Minister Olof Palme more than three decades ago on a Stockholm street.

At a news conference in the capital, chief prosecutor Krister Petersson identified the likely assassin as Stig Engström, a graphic designer who was interviewed along with more than a dozen others who said they saw someone fleeing the scene immediately after the attack in 1986. At the time, Engström was briefly considered a suspect.

The American Civil Liberties Union says a federal judge has temporarily blocked the deportation of a 16-year-old Honduran boy in a case that challenges the Trump administration's recently enacted policy, based on federal health statutes, of expelling unaccompanied minors without due process.

The ACLU says the boy entered the United States alone last week and was scheduled to be deported Wednesday. According to the ACLU, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the D.C. Circuit blocked the deportation late Tuesday.

A judge in Richmond, Va., has issued a temporary injunction blocking removal of a massive statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee until a lawsuit seeking to halt the removal can be heard.

Amid nationwide protests calling for an end to police brutality against African Americans following the killing of George Floyd, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam last week ordered the statue removed "as soon as possible" and placed in storage.

The editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit, Adam Rapoport, has stepped down after an undated photograph of him dressed in a racially insensitive costume surfaced, as well as accusations of discrimination and lack of inclusiveness at the magazine.

The photograph, posted on social media, shows Rapoport and his wife, Simone Shubuck, at a Halloween party wearing stereotypical costumes meant to portray Puerto Rican dress. The photo was reportedly first posted to Shubuck's Instagram feed but has since been taken down.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the country has officially eradicated COVID-19 and will return to normal after the last-known infected person recovered.

Isolation and quarantine for those arriving from abroad will continue.

The announcement comes weeks after Ardern's government began easing up on restrictions after New Zealand all but eliminated community transmission of the new coronavirus.

The head of The New York Times editorial page, James Bennet, has resigned after he oversaw the publication last week of a controversial opinion piece by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that called for deploying federal troops to end unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd.

The newspaper on Sunday announced the resignation of Bennet, who became editor of the page in 2016. In a note to staff announcing the departure, publisher A.G. Sulzberger cited "a significant breakdown in our editing processes."

Retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, who resigned as President Trump's defense secretary nearly a year and a half ago over policy differences, has issued an extraordinary critique of the White House's handling of nationwide unrest, saying Trump has sought to divide Americans and warning against "militarizing our response" to the protests.

India's megacity of Mumbai is in the crosshairs of a tropical cyclone for the first time in well over a century, as a storm called Nisarga came ashore Wednesday in an area of the country already hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Severe Cyclonic Storm Nisarga was spinning wind gusts up to 75 mph as it made landfall south of Mumbai, which was experiencing heavy rainfall, according to the India Meteorological Department.

It's not often that Justin Trudeau is caught speechless.

But when the Canadian prime minister was asked what he thought of President Trump's actions to quash a wave of protests across the U.S., Trudeau paused before responding – for 21 seconds as the cameras recorded his awkward silence.

During a Tuesday news conference in front of his Ottawa residence, the prime minister fielded this question from a reporter:

Updated at 11:44 a.m. ET

One week after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis Police custody, demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism continued across the United States. Many cities imposed curfews, and President Trump again warned he would order active duty military forces to restore order if state and local governments, in his judgement, failed to do so.

Here are details of some protests around the country.

St. Louis

Updated at 10:33 a.m. ET

President Trump, in a conference call Monday with the nation's governors, threatened to deploy the U.S. military to restore order unless states hit by days of unrest "put down" violent demonstrations, urging leaders to "dominate" lawbreakers or risk looking like "a bunch of jerks."

NASA has selected three companies to develop the first vehicle in more than 50 years to put humans on the moon, with space firms run by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos among the competitors.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin says he's infected with the coronavirus, joining nearly 106,500 others in the country who have been similarly diagnosed.

Speaking during a videoconference with President Vladimir Putin that was broadcast Thursday on state-run Rossiya 24 television, Mishustin — who took over as prime minister from Dmitry Medvedev in January — told Putin that he had tested positive for the virus.

South Korea, which waged an early battle against COVID-19 after the disease emerged from China, said on Thursday that it had no new domestic cases for the first time since a surge nearly 10 weeks ago.

The country experienced its first case on Jan. 20, but didn't see infections ramp up until mid-February. They peaked on Feb. 29 with 909 daily cases and have been trending down ever since.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday that all city and county residents who want a coronavirus test can now get one for the first time since COVID-19 cases began appearing there in January.

The announcement, which makes Los Angeles one of the first major cities in the nation to offer free testing to all its residents, came on the same day that county health officials reported a surge in the number of new COVID-19 cases, which they attributed in part to more widespread testing.

The 2018 sinking of a duck boat on Missouri's Table Rock Lake that killed 17 people would likely not have occurred if the U.S. Coast Guard had acted on recommendations made after a similar tragedy more than two decades ago, NTSB investigators said Tuesday.

An effort by China to express solidarity with an Asian neighbor that is also battling the deadly coronavirus pandemic has not gone exactly to plan.

Last week, the Chinese Embassy in Manila posted a music video titled Iisang Dagat, or "One Sea" in Tagalog, the language commonly spoken in the Philippines. The reference is to the South China Sea, which lies between China and the Philippine archipelago.

Japan will begin allowing dentists to take nose and throat swab samples to test patients for the novel coronavirus, according to The Japan Times.

Japan currently conducts about 9,000 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for the virus daily, and the move for dentists with special training to administer the tests is aimed at relieving the burden on doctors and boosting capacity in hopes of reaching Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's goal of 20,000 per day.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has added several new symptoms to its existing list of symptoms for COVID-19.

The CDC has long said that fever, cough and shortness of breath are indications that someone might have the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. It has now added six more conditions that may come with the disease: chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell.