Joe Biden, Turkey, Nipsey Hussle: Your Monday Briefing

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Good morning,

We’re covering President Trump’s plan to close the border with Mexico, a woman’s accusation against Joe Biden and the details of New York State’s $175 billion budget.

A border threat from President Trump

It would take “something dramatic” for Mr. Trump not to close parts of the U.S. border with Mexico this week, the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Sunday.

The president has also ordered the State Department to cut off aid to three Central American countries, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, saying they were not doing enough to stop migrants heading north. Last month, 76,000 people were apprehended crossing the border — an 11-year high.

Go deeper: Federal immigration officials appear to have emptied an outdoor enclosure in El Paso where hundreds of families of asylum seekers had been detained, after an outcry about conditions there.

Yesterday: Pope Francis said that those who close borders “will become prisoners of the walls that they build.”

Joe Biden is faced with a crisis over touching

The former vice president defended himself on Sunday after a former Nevada legislator, Lucy Flores, accused him of kissing and touching her during a Democratic campaign rally in 2014.

Mr. Biden, who is expected to announce a 2020 presidential campaign this month, issued a statement acknowledging that he had engaged in “expressions of affection” toward people but said, “not once — never — did I believe I acted inappropriately.”

The details: Here’s a look at Ms. Flores, her political career, and her more recent efforts to speak out about social justice, sexism and harassment.

Another angle: Several Democratic candidates are focused on attracting small donations to prove their grass-roots appeal, but they’re also privately courting major donors.

New York budget is lined with progressive initiatives

The State Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreed on Sunday to a $175 billion budget intended to change the way millions of New Yorkers commute, shop and vote.

The deal, which Mr. Cuomo hailed as “transformative,” includes a congestion pricing plan with a toll for vehicles traveling below 60th Street. How much it will be and which vehicles might be exempt have yet to be decided.

The details: Other provisions include a ban on many plastic bags, but not — as activists had hoped — measures to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Here are seven takeaways.

Hard questions after Midwest’s levees fail

The recent flooding has damaged hundreds of miles of levees, reigniting a debate that has gone on for generations: How should rivers be controlled, who gets to decide and how much protection should be given to those most vulnerable?

The levees are aging, subject to uneven regulation and, in many cases, were never designed to withstand the water levels seen in the past decade. Some residents said living and farming in their part of the region might not be viable much longer without major changes.

Quotable: “Every event seems like it’s higher,” one farmer in Missouri said. “It’s higher water. You build the levee higher. And the next time you build it higher. You can’t keep up with it.”

If you have 13 minutes, this is worth it

OxyContin and the Sacklers’ bottom line

Recent litigation over the sale and promotion of opioids takes aim at the Sackler family, whose network of trusts and companies include Purdue Pharma, the maker of the highly addictive opioid OxyContin. Above, the company’s corporate headquarters in Stamford, Conn.

Cases in New York and Massachusetts add detail to accusations that some Sacklers promoted the drug even after learning of its dangers. They also highlight a new element in the affair: how members of the family realized they could increase profits as the opioid crisis grew more lethal — by selling treatments for addiction.

Here’s what else is happening

Chinese drug limits: China announced today that it would treat all variants of the powerful opioid fentanyl as controlled substances, making good on a pledge that President Xi Jinping made to President Trump last year.

Brexit votes: Yes, again. The British Parliament is set to try today to find an alternative to Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for withdrawing the country from the European Union, which lawmakers rejected for a third time last week.

International elections: In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party was poised to lose mayoral races in the capital, Ankara, and in his hometown, Istanbul. A comedian was the leading candidate in the presidential election in Ukraine. And Zuzana Caputova was elected the first female president of Slovakia.

Rapper is killed: Nipsey Hussle, who had been nominated for a Grammy this year, was fatally shot in Los Angeles on Sunday.

Perspective: In an Op-Ed, the author Tina Brown says that “a new paradigm of female leadership is emerging,” shown by women such as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand.

N.C.A.A. basketball: In the women’s tournament, half of the Final Four field is set after Connecticut and Oregon advanced. The other two teams will be determined tonight. On the men’s side, Virginia will play Auburn and Michigan State will face Texas Tech.

What we’re reading: This article in The California Sunday Magazine. Our magazine writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner calls the piece, by her sometime colleague and “constant work wife,” Elizabeth Weil, a “moving, superbly reported story about a roving school bus (literally a school on a bus) in San Francisco” that helps people get a high school diploma.

Now, a break from the news

Smarter Living: Time management only gets you so far. The key to productivity, according to Adam Grant, a Wharton School expert, is attention management. “Prioritize the people and projects that matter, and it won’t matter how long anything takes,” he writes.

And we look at when helpful parenting crosses the line into helicoptering, or worse, snowplowing.

And now for the Back Story on …

100 years of the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus art school celebrates the centenary of its founding today.

The Modernist school (whose name inverts “Hausbau,” the German word for “house building”) was among the first to combine the teaching of crafts, design, architecture and fine art.

Walter Gropius, the architect who established the school in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, wrote in the Bauhaus’s program that the ultimate aim was the “unified work of art.”

He enlisted masters of various artistic disciplines, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Paul Klee, to join the faculty.