The practice of creating a will to dispose of your assets dates to ancient Greece. The will as most people know it in the United States can trace its form to 17th-century British law.

As consumers, we all have “secret scores”: hidden ratings that determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive. A low score sends you to the back of the queue; high scores get you elite treatment.

NEW YORK — Ahead of a potential Democratic presidential run, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York on Sunday reversed his long-standing support of the aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy that he pursued for a decade and that led to the disproportionate stopping of black and…

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sharpened the focus of Democrats’ impeachment case against President Donald Trump on Thursday, accusing the president of committing bribery when he withheld vital military assistance from Ukraine at the same time he was seeking its commitment to public…

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Frantic parents texted with teenagers barricaded in classrooms. Others offered shelter to students fleeing their high school in this sleepy suburb north of Los Angeles on Thursday. It was the latest example of a wrenching sequence that has become a recurring nightmare…

Nearly 35,000 people in the United States are dying each year from drug-resistant infections, public health officials said Wednesday, an alarming problem that New York state underscored by revealing it had found one particularly new and virulent fungus in 64 hospitals and 103 nursing homes.

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives opened historic impeachment hearings on Wednesday and heard a senior American diplomat reveal startling new testimony that drew President Donald Trump closer to the center of the effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

For five years, Sunil Solankey, a retired captain in the Indian army, had run the 20-room Four Sight Hotel in a New Delhi suburb. Business was steady, but he longed to make the establishment a destination for lucrative business travelers.

ISTANBUL — Behind President Donald Trump’s accommodating attitude toward Turkey is an unusual back channel: a trio of sons-in-law who married into power and now play key roles in connecting Ankara with Washington.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnin…

HONG KONG — On a Hong Kong street corner, a young protester found himself staring at the end of an angry police officer’s handgun. He was shot.

ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — The Russians were hard to miss. They appeared suddenly last year in Madagascar’s traffic-snarled capital, carrying backpacks stuffed with cash and campaign swag decorated with the name of Madagascar’s president.

President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who came to power more than a decade ago as part of a leftist wave sweeping Latin America, resigned Sunday after unrelenting protests by an infuriated population that accused him of undermining democracy to extend his rule.

Michael R. Bloomberg is actively preparing to enter the Democratic presidential primary and is expected to file paperwork this week designating himself as a candidate in at least one state with an early filing deadline, people briefed on Bloomberg’s plans said.

WASHINGTON — The top American diplomat on the ground in northern Syria has criticized the Trump administration for not trying harder to prevent Turkey’s military offensive there last month — and said Turkish-backed militia fighters committed “war crimes and ethnic cleansing.”

FLINT, Mich. — Nakiya Wakes could not understand how her toothy-grinned 6-year-old had gone from hyperactive one school year to what teachers described as hysterical the next. Then, in 2015, the state of Michigan delivered a diagnosis of sorts: Wakes’ neighborhood’s water — which her son, Ja…

BANGKOK — The denunciations have swirled through Thailand’s gilded palaces with the rhetorical extravagance of a Shakespearean history.

Democrats won complete control of the Virginia government for the first time in a generation Tuesday and claimed a narrow victory in the Kentucky governor’s race, as Republicans struggled in suburbs where President Donald Trump is increasingly unpopular.

WASHINGTON — A critical witness in the impeachment inquiry offered Congress substantial new testimony this week, revealing that he told a top Ukrainian official that the country likely would not receive U.S. military aid unless it publicly committed to investigations President Donald Trump wanted.

BAGHDAD — It started quietly a month or so ago with scattered protests. Those steadily expanded until last week more than 200,000 Iraqis marched in Baghdad, raging against the Iraqi government and a foreign occupier — not the United States this time, but Iran.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot a way forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy.

Dan Gagne has been a plumber for three decades, but it has been years since he held a wrench.

The scientist at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was hardly discreet. “Here is the bones and meet of what you want,” he wrote in a misspelled email to researchers in China.

HOUSTON — A surge of oil production is coming, whether the world needs it or not.