News of the earthquake in North Korea is reported at the Seoul railway station in South Korea on Saturday.

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News of the earthquake in North Korea is reported at the Seoul railway station in South Korea on Saturday.

Ahn Young-joon/AP

Numerous scientific agencies on both sides of the Pacific detected an earthquake Saturday near the site where North Korea set off a hydrogen bomb earlier this month, at first prompting speculation of another weapons test, before a consensus appeared to emerge that the tremor was a natural occurrence.

Xinhau, China’s official news agency, said the country’s seismic service registered a 3.4 magnitude event that it originally viewed as “likely caused” by an “explosion.” Later, the China Earthquake Administration revised its estimation, saying the quake was not a nuclear detonation.

South Korea’s presidential office said in a statement that a handful of its government agencies “still maintain [the quake] was natural and not from an explosion.” The president’s office did add that “analysis is still ongoing so we will keep you posted.”

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, through its executive secretary, tweeted Saturday that the activity was “unlikely man-made.”

The United States Geological Survey was neutral in its assessment on the cause of the tremor, which it recorded as a 3.5 magnitude quake, saying in a statement that it could not “conclusively confirm at this time the nature (natural or human-made) of the event.”

For reference, the U.S. agency recorded a 6.3 magnitude quake after North Korea’s hydrogen bomb test on Sept. 3, its sixth of a nuclear weapon.

Saturday’s seismic activity came on the same day China announced it would limit trade with the North, reducing its fuel exports to its neighbor and banning all textile imports. On Thursday, the U.S. unveiled its own set of economic sanctions targeting North Korea.

The quake also caps a week in which President Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un exchanged increasingly bellicose insults toward each other and follows a threat on Thursday by the North to carry out a significantly more dangerous nuclear test.

In comments to reporters in New York, North Korea’s foreign minister said his country’s leader is considering whether to demonstrate his ability to detonate a nuclear warhead aboard a missile sent above the Pacific Ocean.

So-called atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons were banned by the U.S., the then-Soviet Union and many of the world’s nations in a 1963 treaty, though China conducted the last such test known worldwide in 1980.

Atmospheric tests of nuclear-armed missiles, as NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel reported, are dangerous for a host for reasons, including the potential for sending nuclear fallout in unpredictable patterns and, if a test were to be administered by North Korea, in the direction of the U.S.

Until now, the North has not tested its missiles and nuclear weapons together, opting instead to fire them separately — the missiles above ground and the nuclear weapons below.

After a week in which through tweets and a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Trump introduced the derogatory nickname “Rocket Man” for Kim into international news coverage and left open his prerogative to “totally destroy” North Korea, the president gave no ground on Friday in his public standoff with his adversary’s leader.

During a campaign rally for Alabama Sen. Luther Strange, Trump lashed out against Kim, telling the crowd, “we can’t have madmen out there shooting rockets all over the place.”

“Rocket Man should have been handled a long time ago,” he continued amid cheers from the audience. “He should have been handled a long time ago by Clinton — I won’t mention the Republicans, right — by Obama.”

The president assured those in attendance, without details, that he would defend the U.S. against any offensives launched by North Korea: “I can tell you one thing, you are protected, OK? You are protected. Nobody’s going to mess with our people.”

A day earlier, Kim reacted to Trump’s provocative speech at the U.N. by equating the U.S. president to “a frightened dog” and a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard,” employing an obscure insult for someone declining into senility.

President Trump has picked fights with two of the nation’s most popular professional sports leagues, setting off a Twitter war with top athletes who were quick to fight back in an extraordinary display of political trash-talking with thinly veiled racial undertones.

Even National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell jumped into the fray Saturday, criticizing Trump for “divisive comments” as some players responded on social media with much harsher language.

The battle began Friday night, when Trump publicly criticized African American football players, following an example set last season by quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who have been kneeling during the national anthem to protest the nation’s racial disparities.

Trump urged NFL owners to fire the players and encouraged fans to walk out of games in their own protest.

“The Trump administration will ensure that the people who travel to the United States are properly vetted and those that don’t belong here aren’t allowed to enter,” said Jonathan Hoffman, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the department.

Mr. Trump must still approve the new plan, but it appears to be similar to the kind the president tweeted about a week ago.

“The travel ban into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more specific,” Mr. Trump wrote after a crude bomb exploded on a London Underground train last Friday.

Mr. Trump’s original ban blocked all travel to the United States by refugees as well as nationals of seven countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Iraq was later deemed to have improved its screening of potential travelers and was taken off the banned list.

The ban — put in place just days after the president’s inauguration and without advance notice — caused chaos at airports around the country and prompted a torrent of criticism from immigrant rights activists, lawmakers in both parties, business executives, academic leaders and diplomats from around the world.

A furious legal assault on the president’s travel ban delayed its implementation for months, as federal judges agreed with immigrant rights groups that the original ban unconstitutionally targeted a particular religion or exceeded the president’s statutory authority to block immigration. In June, the Supreme Court allowed the travel ban to take effect, with some significant restrictions, while the justices consider the merits of the case.

The changes to be announced this weekend could have a profound impact on the court case, complicating the review by the justices and potentially making parts of the case moot even before the oral arguments, which are scheduled for Oct. 10.

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The original travel ban included restrictions on the entry into the United States of refugees from around the world. The new rules do not appear to alter the limits on refugees, leaving that question open for the Supreme Court to decide.

The justices are likely to seek new input from lawyers for the government and for the groups challenging the travel ban before arguments begin.

Mr. Trump and his national security officials have argued from the beginning that the travel ban was intended to give the government time to ensure that terrorists are not able to enter the United States using travel documents for people on vacation or seeking temporary employment.

Critics accused the administration of basing threat assessments of travelers solely on the religion of the majority of people who lived in the nations identified by the executive order.

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Facebook is fighting through a tangled morass of privacy, free-speech and moderation issues with governments all over the world. Congress is investigating reports that Russian operatives used targeted Facebook ads to influence the 2016 presidential election. In Myanmar, activists are accusing Facebook of censoring Rohingya Muslims, who are under attack from the country’s military. In Africa, the social network faces accusations that it helped human traffickers extort victims’ families by leaving up abusive videos.

Few of these issues stem from willful malice on the company’s part. It’s not as if a Facebook engineer in Menlo Park personally greenlighted Russian propaganda, for example. On Thursday, the company said it would release political advertisements bought by Russians for the 2016 election, as well as some information related to the ads, to congressional investigators.

But the troubles do make it clear that Facebook was simply not built to handle problems of this magnitude. It’s a technology company, not an intelligence agency or an international diplomatic corps. Its engineers are in the business of building apps and selling advertising, not determining what constitutes hate speech in Myanmar. And with two billion users, including 1.3 billion who use it every day, moving ever greater amounts of their social and political activity onto Facebook, it’s possible that the company is simply too big to understand all of the harmful ways people might use its products.

“The reality is that if you’re at the helm of a machine that has two billion screaming, whiny humans, it’s basically impossible to predict each and every possible nefarious use case,” said Antonio García Martínez, author of the book “Chaos Monkeys” and a former Facebook advertising executive. “It’s a Whac-a-Mole problem.”

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy, said in a statement: “We work very hard to support our millions of advertisers worldwide, but sometimes — rarely — bad actors win. We invest a lot of time, energy and resources to make these rare events extinct, and we’re grateful to our community for calling out where we can do better.”

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When Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, nobody could have imagined its becoming a censorship tool for repressive regimes, an arbiter of global speech standards or a vehicle for foreign propagandists.

But as Facebook has grown into the global town square, it has had to adapt to its own influence. Many of its users view the social network as an essential utility, and the company’s decisions — which posts to take down, which ads to allow, which videos to show — can have real life-or-death consequences around the world. The company has outsourced some decisions to complex algorithms, which carries its own risks, but many of the toughest choices Facebook faces are still made by humans.

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“They still see themselves as a technology middleman,” said Mr. García Martínez. “Facebook is not supposed to be an element of a propaganda war. They’re completely not equipped to deal with that.”

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Even if Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg don’t have personal political aspirations, as has been rumored, they are already leaders of an organization that influences politics all over the world. And there are signs that Facebook is starting to understand its responsibilities. It has hired a slew of counterterrorism experts and is expanding teams of moderators around the world to look for and remove harmful content.

On Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Facebook that the company would take several steps to help protect the integrity of elections, like making political ads more transparent and expanding partnerships with election commissions.

“We will do our part not only to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, but also to give everyone a voice and to be a force for good in democracy everywhere,” he said.

But there may not be enough guardrails in the world to prevent bad outcomes on Facebook, whose scale is nearly inconceivable. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s security chief, said last month that the company shuts down more than a million user accounts every day for violating Facebook’s community standards. Even if only 1 percent of Facebook’s daily active users misbehaved, it would still mean 13 million rule breakers, about the number of people in Pennsylvania.

In addition to challenges of size, Facebook’s corporate culture is one of cheery optimism. That may have suited the company when it was an upstart, but it could hamper its ability to accurately predict risk now that it’s a setting for large-scale global conflicts.

Several current and former employees described Facebook to me as a place where engineers and executives generally assume the best of users, rather than preparing for the worst. Even the company’s mission statement — “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” — implies that people who are given powerful tools will use those tools for socially constructive purposes. Clearly, that is not always the case.

Hiring people with darker views of the world could help Facebook anticipate conflicts and misuse. But pessimism alone won’t fix all of Facebook’s issues. It will need to keep investing heavily in defensive tools, including artificial intelligence and teams of human moderators, to shut down bad actors. It would also be wise to deepen its knowledge of the countries where it operates, hiring more regional experts who understand the nuances of the local political and cultural environment.

Facebook could even take a page from Wall Street’s book, and create a risk department that would watch over its engineering teams, assessing new products and features for potential misuse before launching them to the world.

Now that Facebook is aware of its own influence, the company can’t dodge responsibility for the world it has helped to build. In the future, blaming the monster won’t be enough.

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The Trump administration on Friday withdrew Obama-era guidance on how schools should respond to sexual violence complaints, giving them flexibility to use a higher standard of evidence when judging sexual misconduct cases.

The action followed through on a pledge Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made on Sept. 7 to replace what she called a “failed system” of civil rights enforcement on matters related to campus sexual assault. In her view, the government failed under President Barack Obama to find the right balance in protecting the rights of victims and the accused.

[DeVos vows to shift enforcement on campus sexual assault]

Under Obama, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights had declared in 2011 that schools should use a standard known as “preponderance of the evidence” when judging sexual violence cases that arise under the antidiscrimination law known as Title IX.

Common in civil law, the preponderance standard is lower than the “clear and convincing evidence” threshold that had been in use at some schools. Victim advocates viewed the April 2011 letter as a milestone in efforts to get schools to heed the longstanding problem of campus sexual assault, punish offenders and prevent violence.

Now, under President Trump, the Office for Civil Rights is declaring that schools may use either standard while the government begins a formal process to develop rules on the issue.

“This interim guidance will help schools as they work to combat sexual misconduct and will treat all students fairly,” DeVos said in a statement. “Schools must continue to confront these horrific crimes and behaviors head-on. There will be no more sweeping them under the rug. But the process also must be fair and impartial, giving everyone more confidence in its outcomes.”

Friday’s action formally withdrew the civil rights office’s “Dear Colleague” letter of April 4, 2011, and a follow-up statement of “Questions and Answers” that was issued on April 29, 2014.

In a news release, the department said the interim guidance would require schools to address sexual misconduct that is “severe, persistent or pervasive,” and conduct investigations in a fair, impartial and timely manner. Schools will be allowed to have informal resolution to cases, through mediation, if appropriate and if all parties agree.

Laura L. Dunn, a lawyer with D.C.-based SurvJustice, said the department’s actions will allow colleges to give an unfair edge to the accused in sex discrimination cases. “This is simply unlawful, to flip a civil right on its head,” Dunn said in a statement. She said the department had acted beyond its authority.

Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in Philadelphia, which opposed the 2011 letter, praised the development. “It’s a great day for fundamental fairness on campus,” Shibley said. He called it a “necessary but not sufficient step,” acknowledging that colleges retain control over their internal misconduct rules and proceedings.

Oklahoma City Police Capt. Bo Mathews told reporters on Wednesday that Sanchez was shot after approaching officers while holding a metal pipe.

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Oklahoma City Police Capt. Bo Mathews told reporters on Wednesday that Sanchez was shot after approaching officers while holding a metal pipe.

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Police in Oklahoma City on Tuesday night fatally shot a deaf man who they say was advancing toward them with a metal pipe as witnesses yelled that the man was deaf and could not hear them.

It’s the fifth officer-involved shooting in the city this year, according to the Oklahoma City Police Department.

Officers were responding to a hit-and-run accident around 8:15 p.m., Capt. Bo Mathews, the police department’s public information officer, told reporters Wednesday. A witness of the accident told police a vehicle involved went to a nearby address.

Lt. Matthew Lindsey arrived at the address and encountered 35-year-old Magdiel Sanchez, who was on the porch holding a 2-foot metal pipe with a leather loop in his right hand. Lindsey called for backup and Sgt. Christopher Barnes arrived.

Magdiel Sanchez is pictured in an undated photo. Witnesses said they told officers Sanchez was deaf and he couldn’t hear their orders.

Courtesy of the Sanchez family via AP

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Courtesy of the Sanchez family via AP

Magdiel Sanchez is pictured in an undated photo. Witnesses said they told officers Sanchez was deaf and he couldn’t hear their orders.

Courtesy of the Sanchez family via AP

Police ordered Sanchez to drop the weapon and get on the ground, Mathews said. Both officers had weapons drawn — Lindsey had a Taser and Barnes a gun. Sanchez came off the porch and was walking toward Barnes.

“The witnesses also were yelling that this person, Mr. Sanchez, was deaf and could not hear. The officers didn’t know this at the time,” Mathews said.

Both officers fired their weapons at the same time when Sanchez was about 15 feet away from them; more than one shot was fired, the police captain said.

Emergency Medical Services Authority personnel pronounced Sanchez dead at the scene.

“In those situations, very volatile situations, when you have a weapon out, you can get what they call tunnel vision or you can really lock into just the person that has the weapon that’d be the threat against you,” Mathews told reporters.

“I don’t know exactly what the officers were thinking at that point, because I was not there. But they very well could not have heard, you know, everybody yelling, everybody yelling around them.”

“We were screaming that he can’t hear,” witness Julio Rayos told The Oklahoman. Rayos told the paper that Sanchez had developmental disabilities and didn’t talk.

“The guy does movements,” Rayos told The Oklahoman. “He don’t speak, he don’t hear, mainly it is hand movements. That’s how he communicates. I believe he was frustrated trying to tell them what was going on.”

Neighbor Jolie Guebara told The Associated Press that Sanchez “always had a stick that he would walk around with, because there’s a lot of stray dogs.”

She heard five or six gunshots before seeing police outside, she told the AP. She lives two houses from where the shooting happened.

Barnes is being placed on paid administrative leave.

It’s being investigated by the department’s homicide unit as a criminal case, as all officer-involved shootings are, Mathews said. The investigators will provide their findings to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office, which will decide whether the shooting was justified. Then the police department’s internal affairs will investigate.

Some of the department’s officers wear body cameras, but neither of the two police officers at the scene were wearing them at the time.

Sanchez had “no criminal history that I could locate,” Mathews said. The car involved in the hit-and-run was driven by Sanchez’s father and Magdiel Sanchez was not in the car at the time.

The two officers are white and Sanchez was Hispanic, Mathews said.

Protests over police shootings, especially of black men, have been ongoing around the country since 2014. Sanchez is the 712th person to be shot and killed by police in the U.S. so far this year, according to a Washington Post database.

Just this past weekend, protests erupted in St. Louis over the acquittal of a white police officer who was charged with murder of a black man in 2011. They continued on Wednesday as protesters shut down a suburban St. Louis mall.

Law enforcement officers in Oklahoma have faced charges multiple times in recent years.

In May a jury acquitted a white former Tulsa police officer, Betty Jo Shelby, who shot and killed unarmed black motorist Terence Crutcher in 2016 while he was walking away with his hands up. That verdict sparked protests.

In 2016, a former volunteer reserve deputy in Tulsa was convicted of second-degree manslaughter after the 2015 shooting of an unarmed black man who was on the ground. He said he meant to use a Taser instead of a gun.

And a former police officer in Oklahoma City was convicted in early 2016 of multiple rapes and sexual assaults.

“I’m sorry he doesn’t understand. Under Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson, more people will have coverage.”
–Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), interviewed on CNN’s “New Day,” Sept. 20, 2017

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel attacked Cassidy over the health-care repeal plan crafted by Cassidy and Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.),  Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) as a last-ditch effort to replace the Affordable Care Act. Kimmel asserted, among other things, that the proposed law “will kick about 30 million Americans off insurance.”

Firing back, Cassidy flatly stated that “more people will have coverage…. There are more people who will be covered through this bill than under the status quo.”

As always with health-care policy, this is complicated stuff. But let’s dig through the code words and see whether Cassidy’s claim holds up to scrutiny.

The Facts

Starting in 2020, the Cassidy-Graham bill would reallocate funding now devoted to the Affordable Care Act exchanges and the law’s expansion of Medicaid and give it to states in the form of block grants. States in theory would have great flexibility to create their own health-care systems, though only two years to do it.

The block grants would grow according to an index lower than general inflation — not according to how many people are covered or what diseases they have — so the total pot would grow more slowly than under current law. All funding would be terminated by 2027, unless Congress acted at the time to continue it.

One of the big problems faced by previous GOP repeal plans was scorekeeping by the Congressional Budget Office, which assessed how many people were projected to have health insurance coverage under the proposal compared to current law. Invariably, tens of millions fewer people were projected to have health insurance.

Presumably, this is where Kimmel gets his 30 million figure — from previous CBO scores of eliminating the ACA without a real replacement. But he repeated “kicked off” language, often used by Democrats, that The Fact Checker has previously found to be misleading. The CBO has a lot of faith in the power of the individual mandate, so it negatively scored proposals that eliminated the mandate.

Some of the people who would be uninsured would choose not to have insurance, because they had decided to obtain coverage only to avoid a penalty. So they are not being kicked off but leaving of their own accord.

Still, CBO has generally estimated that just one year after the individual and employer mandates are repealed, 15 million to 18 million fewer Americans would have health insurance. So that would be a steep hole that Cassidy-Graham would have to climb out of as its provisions were implemented.

The Cassidy-Graham bill has not been scored by the CBO, which says it is unlikely to produce a comprehensive report before Sept. 30 — when Senate rules mean Republicans can no longer pass a bill with just a simple majority.

So how does Cassidy know that under his bill, “more people will have coverage” even though federal health-care funding will be reduced significantly in many states under current law?

Spokesman Ty Bofferding said the United States spends more than twice as much per person as countries in Western Europe — all of which have universal health-care systems — so it was reasonable to believe better outcomes were possible with fewer dollars.

“We expect when states are free of structural regulation, the American people will see innovative ideas,” he said. “No CBO coverage score is available for the bill yet, however this legislation has far more enrollment incentives than previous repeal-and-replace attempts, so we expect improved coverage.”

Given the spending reductions in the bill, many health-care experts found this logic to be highly dubious. Yet no credible analyst has been willing to venture an estimate on coverage because no one knows how states would react.

For instance, the respected health-care consultant Avalere concluded that California would face a 13 percent shortfall ($78 billion between 2020 and 2026) under Cassidy-Graham compared to current law. But in theory, the state could decide to create a single-payer system that could cover everyone, so that would certainly increase coverage. In fact, the trade group for insurance companies — America’s Health Insurance Plans — opposes the bill in part because it could “build a bridge to single-payer systems.”

The bill also has incentives for states to focus on the U.S. population with income at 50 to 138 percent of the federal poverty line ($24,600 for a family of four), as block grant funding would be allocated according to the level of insurance coverage in that income range. States might then alter essential benefit rules to offer skimpy, low-premium plans for everyone else in the individual insurance market. No one knows if such plans would meet the CBO’s definition of “comprehensive coverage,” but if they did, then in theory it could lead more people to buy such insurance.

But at the same time, other states may just take the federal money and use it to fund existing state health programs. That would do little to expand coverage.

“It is a difficult analysis, given that it is hard to predict how states will respond to the new flexibility afforded them in the bill,” said Caroline Pearson, senior vice president of Avalere. “Overall, we do believe that lower federal funding will reduce coverage nationally, but specific impacts will vary by state.”

Similarly, Manatt Health, a unit of a national law firm that advises states on health-care issues, concluded that “the legislation could create significant fiscal and political pressure on state policymakers” as the federal funds were reduced over time. Only 16 states would initially experience an increase in funding under the bill, according to the Avalere analysis, while over time a per capita cap in Medicaid funding would begin to squeeze, especially in the second decade after passage.

“We struggled mightily with the challenge of estimating coverage losses and ultimately concluded it was impossible to do, at least to the standards we hold ourselves to in our work,” Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said in an email. The coverage levels “will quite literally depend on what each of the fifty states do (and don’t do) with the block grants they would receive.”

But he added: “I think it’s a very high bar to argue that federal funding to states will be cut by $160 billion (other estimates are higher) between 2020 and 2026 (forget whether it ends in 2027 or not) and coverage will stay the same or increase. Nobel Prize in economics for whomever pulls that one off.”

The Pinocchio Test

Regular readers of The Fact Checker know that the burden of proof falls on the person making the claim. Cassidy has provided little evidence to support his claim of more coverage, except that innovation would flourish and help bring down costs and expand coverage. That’s certainly possible, but it would be more plausible if his proposal did not slash funding to such an extent.

Kimmel’s claim that 30 million fewer Americans will have insurance may be a high-end estimate. But already, in 2019, CBO calculations suggest at least 15 million fewer Americans would have insurance once the individual and employer mandates are repealed. Much of that decline might be by choice, but Cassidy insists the gap will be filled and then exceeded in 10 years. Unlike Cassidy, no prominent health-care analyst is willing to venture a guess on coverage levels — but the consensus is that his funding formula makes his claim all but impossible to achieve.

Given the lack of coverage estimates by the CBO or other health-care experts, Cassidy’s claim does not quite rise to Four Pinocchios. But it certainly merits a Three.

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Rescue personnel work at the scene of Enrique Rebsamen School, which collapsed when an earthquake struck on Tuesday. Workers have been able to communicate with a girl who’s alive — but trapped in the rubble.

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Rescue personnel work at the scene of Enrique Rebsamen School, which collapsed when an earthquake struck on Tuesday. Workers have been able to communicate with a girl who’s alive — but trapped in the rubble.

Marco Ugarte/AP

A strong earthquake that hit Mexico City and other central areas has killed at least 245 people, officials say. Search teams are working feverishly to find any survivors who were trapped — including at least one girl who’s among students caught when the quake turned their school to rubble.

The girl, 12, has been able to communicate with emergency crews, and she has wriggled her fingers for them through the wreckage. She was located alive in the debris of the Enrique Rebsamen School, south of the capital. The building collapsed during Tuesday’s 7.1-magnitude quake.

After visiting the site, NPR’s Carrie Khan reports:

“It is a heartbreaking scene. Hundreds of volunteers and rescue personnel have flooded to this neighborhood around the school … all are emotionally drained, tired, but just holding on to hope they can reach some of the children alive … under all that rubble.

“One wing of the school, three stories just pancaked in the powerful quake. One right on top of the other, making the rescue effort and chances of survival very difficult.

“But the volunteers keep coming …with hard hats and fluorescent vests. They’re removing the rubble with picks, shovels, their hands…whatever they can. And dozens more are taking in donations, feeding the rescuers, just wanting to be there and do something for those children either dead or trapped in the building.”

Rescue workers have spent hours trying to free the girl and anyone else who might have survived. In addition to heavy rubble that sits precariously in the debris pile, the effort has been frustrated by heavy rain that fell overnight.

The girl’s name is Frida Sofia, a doctor who’s working with the rescue team tells the Associated Press. The doctor added that the girl says there are several other children near her who are also alive.

The name Frida Sofia became a top-trending term on Twitter — but there are questions over whether it’s the girl’s name. Media outlets in Mexico have reported it, especially after journalist Joaquín López-Dóriga tweeted it. But teachers say there’s no student at the school with that name — and El Universal reports that a rescuer used the name as a way to communicate with the girl.

All the same, El Universal’s main headline on Thursday reads, “The hope of Rebsamen is called ‘Frida.'”

Authorities say they’ve pulled dozens of survivors from damaged buildings. But Mexico City’s Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera says more than 35 buildings collapsed, from offices and apartments to schools.

Mexico City’s metro service says it’s allowing people with rescue tools — picks, shovels and mallets — to ride on its vehicles. And for the second day, the service is free.

“President Enrique Pena Nieto has declared three days of mourning for victims of the quake,” Carrie reports. “Schools in the capital and surrounding affected states remain closed until Monday.”

Rescuers, firefighters, policemen, soldiers and volunteers look for survivors in a flattened building in Mexico City on Thursday, as part of a widespread search for people who lived through a strong earthquake.

Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images

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Rescuers, firefighters, policemen, soldiers and volunteers look for survivors in a flattened building in Mexico City on Thursday, as part of a widespread search for people who lived through a strong earthquake.

Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images

In Mexico City and outlying areas — including the city of Jojutla, in Morelos state, where many houses and buildings were reduced to rubble — soldiers, police, firefighters and volunteers have alternated between working to find survivors and undergoing pauses of total silence, as rescuers call out for anyone who’s still alive to respond.

“While many eyes are on the earthquake effects in Mexico City, this town of 20,000 people was crumbling,” James Fredrick reports from Jojutla for NPR. “Its old abode buildings were no match for the 7.1 quake.”

Jojutla Mayor Alfonso de Jesus Sotelo “says 2,000 buildings are damaged, 300 of those totally collapsed; 16 people have died, including four children,” Fredrick says.

“Definitely this loss is unsustainable,” Sotelo says. “We are out of control, being able to correct or absorb the cost that’s involved.”

If initial reports and relief efforts seemed to focus on Mexico City, Fredrick reports, “A day later that has changed: Hundreds of young volunteer rescue workers line up to clean rubble. Donated bottles of water and canned food pile up all over the town.”

In Puebla, where the epicenter of the quake was located in the western part of the state, Gov. Antonio Gali gave a grim account of the losses on Thursday morning.

“We have 43 dead and 117 injured,” Gali told FORO TV. He added, “We have 9,772 affected homes and 1,632 total losses.”

If you are not as hip as Hillary Clinton, then you may have been slightly confused by her claim on CBS’s “Late Show” on Tuesday night that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a habit of “manspreading” when she would meet with him during her tenure as secretary of state.

Manwhating? Clinton didn’t provide a definition, and her demonstration wasn’t quite accurate (probably because she was trying to be somewhat tasteful).

So, please allow me to mansplain manspreading to you. (If you don’t know what mansplaining is, then you are not even as hip as Merriam-Webster.)

Manspreading does not involve splaying one’s arms, as Clinton did when talking to Stephen Colbert; a manspreading man splays his legs, while seated, to occupy as much space as possible and draw attention to his, uh, manhood.

Here’s the top definition of manspreading in the indispensable Urban Dictionary, submitted by a user who goes by “mugoloo”:

A term used by Third-Wave Feminists to describe men who spread their legs — particularly on subway trains — to make room for their genitalia. However, when women set large purses and shopping bags next to them and take up another seat, it goes unnoticed and is generally dismissed because men are disgusting pigs and penises are bad!

That’s a little bit hurtful, mugoloo.

For the record, Clinton showed she does know that manspreading is a lower-body gesture when she elaborated on her experience with Putin, in “What Happened,” the election reflection book she released last week:

President Obama once compared Vladimir Putin to a “bored kid at the back of the classroom.” “He’s got that kind of slouch,” Obama said. When I sat with Putin in meetings, he looked more like one of those guys on the subway who imperiously spreads their legs wide, encroaching on everyone else’s space, as if to say, “I take what I want” and “I have so little respect for you that I’m going to act as if I’m at home lounging in my bathrobe.” They call it “manspreading.” That was Putin.

When you think about it, manspreading helps explain two radically divergent views of the way Clinton has handled her election defeat. She writes in “What Happened” that sexism contributed to her loss, but critics at right-leaning publications such as the National Review, the Washington Examiner and the New York Post reject her premise and say that she is just making excuses and looking for discrimination where none exists.

Similarly, some men say the term manspreading is an invention of feminists with persecution complexes, and claim that the act is not an attempt to strike a dominant posture but rather an innocent effort to stay comfortable.

Here’s an alternative definition in the Urban Dictionary, supplied by “Meninistsagainstfeminists”:

Another way for women to start a big issue with men.

Of course, it is hard to dismiss manspreading as an imaginary aggression when it is accompanied by an overt display of sexism — as in Putin’s case. Clinton told Colbert about one meeting with Putin in which the Russian leader pointed to a large map and “started telling me he’s going here to tag polar bears.”

“And then he says to me, ‘Would your husband like to come?’ ” Clinton recalled.

What Putin’s legs said with subtlety, his mouth said explicitly.

The latest Senate Republican drive to dismantle the Affordable Care Act would sharply reduce federal spending on health insurance and cause 34 states to lose such funding, according to an analysis that details the checkerboard of winners and losers the plan would create.

The analysis by Avalere Health, a Washington-based health policy consulting firm, forecasts that federal money devoted to Medicaid and private insurance subsidies would shrink by $215 billion between 2020, when the plan would begin, and 2026, the last year money is provided in the Cassidy-Graham bill. Among states, the analysis shows, the greatest erosion of aid would occur in those that have had the greatest insurance gains under the ACA by expanding their Medicaid programs.

States with relatively low medical costs, skimpy Medicaid benefits and no program expansion would win out. Texas would gain more than any state — $35 billion from 2020 through 2026.

On the other hand, states with higher-priced medicine and generous benefits for their low-income residents — such as California and New York — would lose billions of dollars.

But it is not only the largest states that would win or lose. Virginia, which has always had tight Medicaid benefits and eligibility rules, would gain $3 billion, while Maryland, a Medicaid expansion state with more Medicaid benefits, would lose $13 billion.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) listens during a September news conference about the health-care plan he and other Republican senators are pushing to upend major elements of the Affordable Care Act. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

This redistribution of federal money would be the biggest effect of the new Senate Republican plan, Avalere officials said as they released the report Wednesday morning.

The analysis is part of a wave of predictions on the impact of the starkly conservative measure, sponsored by GOP Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.). The bill has given Republicans’ years-long quest to abolish much of the ACA a surprising new chance two months after a dramatic failure of other Senate legislation had made any effort appear moribund.

The Graham-Cassidy measure would kill central features of the 2010 law, including its insurance subsidies, coverage requirements for individual Americans and large businesses, and health benefit requirements for plans sold in ACA marketplaces. Instead, in a devolution of unprecedented scale, a smaller amount of health-care money would be redistributed around the country as block grants for much of the coming decade, with states having great freedom on how to spend it.

The plan also would transform the federal role in Medicaid for traditional recipients, ending the program’s half-century tradition as an open-ended entitlement in which the government gives each state a fixed share of whatever its costs for the program are. Instead, federal aid would be converted to a per-person cap — a method that does not adjust as easily over time to expensive improvements in medical care or to possible economic downturns in which low-income people flock to the program.

The analyses of the impact of such massive changes — a liberal think tank produced a forecast earlier in the week, and two more by another health-policy group and a major trade association are expected by Friday — have assumed outsize significance because the Senate GOP is trying to speed toward a vote before the expiration of special budget rules on Sept. 30 that would allow them to pass the bill with a simple majority and no Democratic votes. This quick deadline means that much of the debate is occurring before Congress’s nonpartisan budget scorekeepers have time to issue an official forecast of the legislation’s impact. Their score is expected next week.

The Avalere predictions also help to explain the worries of a bipartisan group of 10 governors, who urged the Senate’s leaders on Tuesday “not to consider” the Graham-Cassidy bill. All four GOP governors who signed onto the letter to the Senate’s majority and minority leaders — including John Kasich (Ohio) and Brian Sandoval (Nev.), plus the one independent, Bill Walker (Alaska) — come from states that expanded their Medicaid programs under the ACA and would lose the most under the measure’s reshuffling of federal money.

In a separate sign of some state officials’ worry about the prospect of losing aid, Louisiana Health Secretary Rebekah Gee sent a letter to Cassidy saying the bill “singles out Louisiana for disproportional cuts to our Federal funding.” She also noted “the specter” of a state waiver process that could eliminate protections for individuals with preexisting medical conditions or complex and costly illnesses.

“This would be a detrimental step backwards for Louisiana,” wrote Gee, who posted her letter on Twitter on Tuesday. Avalere’s analysis estimates that Louisiana would lose $8 billion from 2020 to 2026 under the bill.

And the latest Republican proposal has unnerved some major insurers in states that stand to lose the most.

Andrew Dreyfus, president and chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, said in a statement Wednesday that his company has “serious concerns” about both the bill’s Medicaid cuts and “provisions that would allow states to remove protections for those with pre-existing conditions.”

“The bill would destabilize state insurance markets,” said Dreyfus, who noted Massachusetts could lose more than $5 billion in federal funding by 2026.

The political fault lines between winners and losers became even more vivid late on Tuesday, when 15 Republican governors signed their own letter endorsing the bill. Led by Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who had a role in designing the legislation, this group includes five governors from states that chose to broaden Medicaid benefits to low-income adults earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

Among governors critical of the Graham-Cassidy plan, a major concern are the steep cuts that would occur in federal Medicaid allocations. Not only would a per-capita cap be imposed on states, but restrictions would limit how they could spend the money on their expanded Medicaid populations.

The fact that the bill would bar states from taxing health-care providers to fund their Medicaid programs poses a problem for several governors as well.

The boldness of the plan — and the extent to which it would free states from the ACA’s rules — has startled even some Republicans in recent days. “It’s not about health policy any more,” said one former senior GOP congressional staffer. “This is about, in the Senate particularly, they need a vote. They were getting their rear ends hammered by the president and their base. It’s about, ‘Are we winners or losers?’ ”

The forecast Avalere issued on Wednesday does not include any predictions on its effect on the number of Americans with health insurance. The firm’s staff are now trying to produce rough coverage estimates. The forecast due next week from the Congressional Budget Office also may not include that information, even though the CBO typically calculates the impact on coverage along with budgetary consequences of health-care legislation.

But the coverage effect is tricky to assess because each state would gain the ability to establish its own rules to replace federal regulations created under the ACA. The ACA regulations most at risk are those limiting the premium differential that insurers can charge older customers compared to younger ones, requiring specific health benefits and blocking insurers from charging more for people with preexisting conditions.

The Avalere report also notes that the bill would lead to a “fiscal cliff” when funding ends in 2027, leaving it to a future Congress to decide whether to extend the legislation.