James Doubek

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is at the center of attention as the state and New York City have become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S.

And longtime observers say Cuomo's natural strengths: decisiveness, taking charge, listening to the experts and sticking to the facts — are playing well in a public health crisis.

"He's known as a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners kind of guy," says USA Today network reporter Jon Campbell, who has covered politics in Albany for nearly a decade.

President Trump celebrated his acquittal this week by lashing out at political rivals and firing two officials who testified before impeachment investigators about his involvement in the Ukraine scandal.

Updated at 8:23 p.m. ET

Basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna were killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday in Calabasas, Calif., the city's mayor has confirmed. Bryant was 41.

Updated 4:35 a.m. ET Monday

A man accused of stabbing and wounding five people at a rabbi's home in an Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County, New York, just as they were lighting candles for Hanukkah, pleaded not guilty on Sunday to five counts of attempted murder.

Police have identified the alleged attacker as Grafton E. Thomas, 37, of Greenwood Lake, N.Y. He is currently in custody on attempted murder charges and one count of burglary.

The old way to think about your dog's "human age" — the age in actual years times seven — is wrong. And researchers now have a new formula they think will calculate your dog's age more accurately.

Simply put, compared with humans, dogs age very quickly at first, but then their aging slows down, a lot.

Trey Ideker of the University of California, San Diego was part of a team of researchers that looked at aging on the molecular level.

Updated at 1 p.m. ET

President Trump says that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of the Islamic State, has been killed after a U.S. special operations mission targeted him in northwest Syria. Trump declared that U.S. forces have brought "the world's No. 1 terrorist leader to justice."

Describing a dangerous and daring nighttime raid, the president said after eight helicopters flew across Russian airspace, U.S forces located their target and blew a hole in a wall of Baghdadi's compound, fearing the main entrance was booby-trapped.

Dr. Carrie Jurney is on the board of an online organization that works to prevent suicides. It's called Not One More Vet.

This isn't a mental health support group for veterans — it's for veterinarians.

Police have identified 24-year-old white male Connor Betts from Bellbrook, Ohio, as the shooter who claimed nine lives and injured 27 others in Dayton, Ohio, early on Sunday morning.

Among the nine dead was the shooter's sister, Megan Betts, 22, said Lt. Col. Matt Carper at a news conference Sunday.

Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET Sunday

Southern California was hit by another big earthquake at 8:19 p.m. local time Friday, after a quake rattled the region a day before. The U.S. Geological Survey reported the magnitude as 7.1 with a shallow depth of about 10.5 miles.

It was centered near the same Mojave Desert site as the 6.4 quake on Thursday and near the small city of Ridgecrest.

Updated at 10:22 a.m. ET

President Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the third time on Sunday, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to step foot in North Korea before announcing that the two countries would look to revive stalled nuclear talks.

The meeting, held behind closed doors at the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas, lasted longer than Trump's initial stated plan of simply shaking hands.

Updated at 5:20 p.m. ET

The FBI says an "armed and dangerous" 18-year-old white woman obsessed with Columbine is dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Because of warnings about the Florida woman named Sol Pais, more than a dozen school districts in Colorado were closed Wednesday.

The 20th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings is Saturday.

The U.S. Air Force says it needs $4.9 billion in new funding over the next two and a half years to cover the costs of rebuilding two air bases hit by natural disasters.

About one-third of Offutt Air Force Base, in eastern Nebraska, was underwater earlier this month as flooding hit large swaths of the Midwest. And Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle was hit hard by Hurricane Michael in October.

Updated at 3:10 p.m. ET

A lone gunman carrying a .45-caliber pistol killed 12 people at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif., late Wednesday, authorities say. When the shooting started, the Borderline Bar & Grill likely held hundreds of people, drawn by the weekly "College Country Night."

The dead include Sgt. Ron Helus, a 29-year veteran of law enforcement who went into the nightclub within minutes of receiving an emergency call. As many as 15 people inside the bar were injured, and one person had a minor gunshot wound.

Days after President Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in a case relating to his coordination of hush money payments to two women who allege affairs with Trump, news emerged that a man who helped organize those payments has been granted immunity by prosecutors investigating campaign finance violations.

In a move it said was to address the large cost of entering a career in medicine, New York University's School of Medicine said Thursday that it will offer full scholarships to all current and future students in its doctor of medicine program.

NYU said it was the "only top 10-ranked" medical school in the U.S. to offer such a generous package.

Updated at 10:04 a.m. ET

More than 300 news publications across the country are joining together to defend the role of a free press and denounce President Trump's ongoing attacks on the news media in coordinated editorials publishing Thursday, according to a tally by The Boston Globe.

Updated at 8:34 p.m ET Saturday

The man who stole a plane with no one else on board from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport late Friday has been identified as Richard Russell, 29, according to two unnamed law enforcement sources. He flew the plane for about an hour before crashing into a forest on a nearby island.

Russell was a resident of Pierce County, Wash., and "acted alone," the Pierce County Sheriff's Department tweeted, describing him as "suicidal."

Updated at 11:14 a.m. ET Sunday

Four members of the trapped soccer team have been rescued from the flooded cave in Thailand where they had been trapped for more than two weeks, according to Thai Navy SEALS.

It's part of an effort to evacuate the 12 boys from the team along with their coach, in a rescue that has captured the world's attention, with reporters flocking to the scene and foreign divers arriving to assist.

Updated at 10:35 a.m. ET

A former diver with an elite Thai navy unit has died while taking part in operations to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach who have been trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand.

Saman Kunan was returning from an overnight mission placing oxygen canisters when he lost consciousness and died Friday morning, Thai navy SEAL commander Rear Adm. Arpakorn Yookongkaew told reporters Friday. Saman was helping with the rescue mission as a volunteer.

Activists in two separate protests against the Trump administration's immigration policies were arrested at the Statue of Liberty on Wednesday — one group unfurling a banner calling for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while in another act of defiance, a woman climbed the statue's base to protest immigrant family separations.

Authorities evacuated thousands of visitors from Liberty Island, where the statue stands, after a woman climbed to the statue's base around 3 p.m. and remained for several hours before police took her into custody.

The National Park Service has approved an initial request for organizers to hold a second "Unite the Right" rally, this time across the street from the White House in August — one year after white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Va.

In a victory for Amazon, the Seattle City Council voted to repeal a tax on the city's biggest businesses Tuesday, a measure designed to fund efforts to combat Seattle's large homeless population.

In a meeting punctured with shouting from activists, council members voted 7-2 to repeal the so-called "head tax," which would have raised about $47 million per year to fund affordable housing projects and to help the city's homeless population.

It was a sharp reversal from just last month, when the council voted unanimously to pass the tax and the city's mayor signed it into law.

The U.S. State Department has sent "a number of individuals" from the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China, back to the U.S. after screenings showed they may have been affected by mysterious health problems similar to what diplomats experienced in Cuba.

California is testing new digital license plates on vehicles — opening up new possibilities and raising new privacy concerns.

The digital plates use the same technology behind Amazon's Kindle e-book reader to display large letters and numbers, as any other license plate would. But the devices are also able to show ads and personal messages and send data about their locations.

Updated at 8:10 p.m. ET

NBC News says it has fired longtime Today host Matt Lauer following a complaint about "inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace."

Today co-host Savannah Guthrie read a statement on-air from NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack on Wednesday morning:

Updated at 4 a.m. ET Sunday

Police in the U.K. have now arrested two men in connection with the explosion on a train Friday that left dozens injured.

London's Metropolitan Police announced on Sunday morning that they arrested a 21-year-old man in the west London area of Hounslow late on Saturday night.

Earlier on Saturday police made what they said was a "significant arrest" of an 18-year-old man in relation to the investigation.

Updated at 1:30 a.m. ET Monday

At least two people have been killed as the Houston area continues to be inundated by torrential rain and catastrophic flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey, which officials called an "unprecedented" weather event that has left thousands of homes flooded, stranding some people and overwhelming rescue workers.