In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Biden last night called for investment in infrastructure, education, child care and scientific research, describing them as programs that would “propel us into the future” and allow the U.S. to win a global competition with China. Highlights from our coverage are here.

Hours before, Biden announced the third blockbuster domestic funding proposal of his presidency. The three proposals add up to about $6 trillion and reflect an ambition to restore the federal government to the role it had played during the New Deal and the Great Society.

Biden also laid out his broader foreign-policy and domestic agenda and described his decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 as a way to make good on his promise to end America’s “forever wars” even as he warned that the U.S. still faced other threats around the world.

Firsts: Biden kicked off his address to Congress with a string of words that no American president had ever said before: “Madam Vice President and Madam Speaker.”

Quote: “America is moving — moving forward — and we can’t stop now,” the president said. “We’re in a great inflection point in history. We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back better.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence service said it would keep tabs on members of the coronavirus denier movement because they posed a risk of undermining the state.

The increasingly aggressive movement — fueled in part by wild conspiracy theories — has moved beyond criticizing lockdown measures and hygiene rules to taking on the state itself, its leaders, businesses, the news media and globalism, to name a few targets.

Over the past year, demonstrators have attacked police officers, defied the civil authorities and, in one widely publicized episode, scaled the steps of Parliament.

Connections: In announcing the decision, intelligence officials noted the movement’s close ties to extremists like the Reichsbürger movement, a network of groups that refuse to accept the legitimacy of the modern German state.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In other developments:

Britain’s Electoral Commission is investigating whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson used funds from a Conservative Party donor to supplement his annual budget of 30,000 pounds ($41,600) for upgrading his official quarters, which are above the offices at 11 Downing Street.

Questions about his apartment makeover are only one of several issues dogging the prime minister. Johnson is also accused of making callous statements about imposing another lockdown and giving wealthy businesspeople unusual access to government contracts.

The prime minister claimed that attacks from opposition parties were an effort to deflect attention from the government’s successful rollout of coronavirus vaccines, which he predicted voters would reward in regional elections on May 6.

Details: Johnson denied reports that he had said he would rather let “the bodies pile high in their thousands” than impose a third lockdown. But he acknowledged that he had expressed deep frustration, saying that “they were very bitter, very difficult decisions for any prime minister.”

Despite tens of billions of dollars in U.S. and NATO spending to build the Afghan security forces, officials and militia commanders across Afghanistan told The Times that they were unprepared to face the Taliban, or any other threat, on their own.

As the U.S. prepares to withdraw its troops, grave shortages of ammunition and supplies plague security forces. Pay is low, recruitment is dwindling, and corruption abounds.

Michael Collins, above, who piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia 60 miles above Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they became the first humans to walk on the moon, has died at 90.

A growing movement within French theater is reclaiming the work of forgotten female artists, writes Laura Cappelle, a critic based in Paris. This is a lightly edited excerpt.

Around 150 women had professional careers as playwrights in prerevolutionary France, between the 16th and 18th centuries. But if you would have guessed a number close to zero, you’re not alone. For decades, the default assumption has been that deep-seated inequality prevented women from writing professionally until the 20th century.

Now, a growing movement within French theater is reclaiming those artists’ forgotten work and reviving a lost concept along the way: le matrimoine, the feminine equivalent of patrimoine — translated as patrimony, or what is inherited from male ancestors, and used as a catchall term to describe cultural heritage. By way of matrimoine, artists and academics are pushing for the belated recognition of women’s contribution to art history and the return of their plays to the stage.

Matrimoine is no neologism. “The word was used in the Middle Ages but has been erased,” said the scholar and stage director Aurore Evain. In 2013, she started the annual Days of the Matrimoine, a festival that runs alongside the Days of the Patrimoine, a national celebration of France’s cultural heritage.

That visibility is now affecting younger generations of scholars and artists, like Julie Rossello Rochet, a playwright who completed a doctoral dissertation last year on her 19th-century predecessors. Studying their work helped her process the unease she felt as a young writer, she said: “I kept hearing, ‘Oh, it’s so rare, a woman who writes for the stage.’ Actually, it isn’t.”

Match roasted salmon with radishes and peas for a quick and satisfying springtime dinner.

Tender and exuberant, “Best Summer Ever” is a high school musical whose cast is largely disabled. The effect is a feeling of amazing warmth and camaraderie.

In “Jackpot,” Michael Mechanic details how the ultrarich live and argues that inordinate wealth “harms us all” — including the ultrarich themselves.



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