A rare weather phenomenon called a derecho swept across Nebraska, Iowa, and parts of Wisconsin and Illinois on Monday, causing extensive damage with 100 mph winds. The storm knocked over trees, flipped vehicles, caused widespread property damage, and left hundreds of thousands without power as it moved into Indiana and Michigan. The powerful gusts knocked down the steeple of a church on the Wheaton College campus in Illinois. Workers were rescuing people from damaged cars and houses on Monday, but officials initially reported no fatalities.

President Donald Trump on Saturday took executive action to extend extra unemployment benefits, defer payroll taxes, pause student loan payments, and protect renters from eviction. He signed four executive orders enacting key provisions of a Republican economic stimulus plan the day after the White House and congressional Democrats failed to reach a deal. “This is not a perfect answer,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said on Friday.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his life in jail, but how he dies will depend on the jury in a new penalty phase trial, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found bias among the jurors who sentenced Tsarnaev for carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing with his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel Perry, a rideshare driver, didn’t know about an in-progress Black Lives Matter protest when he turned onto Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, on July 25, his attorneys said on Friday. Looking to correct what they called inaccurate news reports, they released a statement with Perry’s explanation of the events leading up to him shooting and killing a protester.

The COVID-19 tracking graph for Sedgwick County, Kan., looks like the steep incline at the beginning of a roller coaster. The city of Wichita and its surrounding county went from 143 active cases on June 1 to 2,442 on July 28, according to the Sedgwick County Health Department. By the third week of July, the percentage of people testing positive had soared to 12.8 percent from less than 2 percent on June 1, and the county’s top physician reinstated a ban on gatherings of 15 people or more.

Over the weekend, Hanna brought winds of 50 mph and more than 12 inches of rain to parts of South Texas and northeastern Mexico, areas also dealing with a surge of coronavirus cases. The storm made landfall on Saturday on Padre Island, Texas, south of Corpus Christi but weakened to a tropical depression by Sunday night. Although Hanna destroyed boats, flooded streets, and knocked out power, no deaths have yet to be reported on either side of the border.

About 350 armed African American militia members marched in Louisville, Ky., on Saturday to protest how the city has handled the killing of Breonna Taylor. In March, police shot Taylor while serving a no-knock search warrant at her home. The city fired one officer involved in the shooting but has not charged any of the police involved them with a crime. Members of a far-right militia also held a counterprotest in downtown Louisville on Saturday.