A girl at the center of the medical and religious debate over brain death has died after surgery in New Jersey, her mother said Thursday.

Nailah Winkfield said doctors declared her daughter Jahi McMath dead on June 22 from excessive bleeding and liver failure after an operation to treat an intestinal issue.

McMath was declared dead in December 2013 when she was 13 after suffering irreversible brain damage during routine surgery in California to remove her tonsils and a coroner signed a death certificate. Several specialists concurred after neurological tests.

Winkfield refused to accept the conclusion. She said her Christian beliefs compelled her to fight for continued care for her daughter, who she said showed signs of life through toe wriggles and finger movements.

Democratic voters in New York’s 14th Congressional District delivered a shock to the political system Tuesday night, rejecting the fourth-ranking member of the party’s House leadership, Representative Joseph Crowley, in favor of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders campaign organizer who has called for abolishing the nation’s immigration and customs enforcement agency.

In doing so, voters delivered a message to Democrats and Republicans across the country, and perhaps in Albany: The liberal base is fired up, showing up at the polls, and may be ignored only at great political risk.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is a vivid sign of the changing of the guard. In addition to more liberal immigration laws, she ran on a platform calling for Medicare for all and a federal jobs guarantee. She also talked about the housing crisis in New York City, an issue that resonates deeply with many voters here. Her district, which runs through Queens and the Bronx, is majority-minority, but its leadership has yet to reflect those changes. That’s something Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was able to capitalize on fluently, casting herself as part of a new generation of young, unabashedly liberal Democrats unwilling to wait their turn any longer.

Many told Ms. Ocasio-Cortez she was crazy for challenging Mr. Crowley, a 10-term incumbent who had ambitions to succeed the House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California. As chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party, Mr. Crowley, 56, was a kingmaker in New York City politics. At his annual holiday party, city officials were expected to perform karaoke, singing and dancing on the stage to a song of Mr. Crowley’s choosing.

He arrived 18 minutes late for a Saturday session on gender equality and did not bother putting his headphones on for translation when President Emmanuel Macron of France spoke. At some points, Mr. Trump closed his eyes in what people in the room took to mean he was dozing off.

But he came alive whenever trade was mentioned, mocking and insulting other leaders, particularly Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, according to the witnesses. Ms. Merkel was clearly not happy but largely kept quiet, evidently not wanting to provoke more conflict. Mr. Trump’s conversation was described by European officials as stream of consciousness, filled with superlatives but not following a linear argument.

The Paige Patterson scandal continues apace. Every new day brings with it a new revelation about just how terrible the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), his home denomination, really is for women. A few days ago, Al Mohler–one of the denomination’s biggest names–tried to cool that fire a little. Well, he only made it worse. Today I’ll show you what he said and why he probably said it. And I’ll show you how he’s likely only made the SBC’s position worse.

Al Mohler is one of the SBC’s biggest names. He’s been active in the denomination since before I even (briefly) joined it in the mid-1980s. Among a constellation of successes in right-wing Christianity, he’s been a president of the SBC’s flagship seminary (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), a big name in Focus on the Family, and a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW).

As a hardline Calvinist, he’s also one of the “chief architects” of the so-called “Conservative Resurgence,” which is the SBC’s name for the political takeover and complete domination of the denomination by hard-right fundagelicals. He and his fellow architects fought for years, but when they finished the fight, the SBC looked like it does today: authoritarian, utterly and completely regressive, focused single-mindedly on its quest for the sheer domination of American culture, and mercilessly, ruthlessly intolerant of dissenters within its ranks.

Under Al Mohler’s careful cultivation, the SBC shriveled and lost every single bit of whatever good spirit it had ever possessed. They stopped being evangelical and began being fundagelicals.

In one of the biggest settlements of its kind, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis plans to establish a $210 million trust fund for hundreds of victims of clergy sexual abuse, the archbishop announced on Thursday.

The plan is the result of a yearslong battle and arduous negotiations in one of the country’s most high-profile cases involving abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

If approved, the settlement will be the largest ever for a sex abuse case involving an archdiocese that has filed for bankruptcy protection and the second largest over all, said Terry McKiernan, co-director and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy sex abuse cases. (According to the website, the largest settlement, $660 million, was reached by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and 508 survivors in 2007.)