The "bomb cyclone" that swept through the Midwest this week has caused more than $1 billion of flood damage in Nebraska, the state's governor said Wednesday. At least three people have been killed in Nebraska and Iowa.

The enslaved man's name was Renty. His image adorns the cover of a Harvard publication that the university sells for $40.

Tamara Lanier says "Papa Renty" is the patriarch of her family. And in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, she says Harvard is using those photos without permission — and in so doing, profiting from photos taken by a racist professor determined to prove the inferiority of black people.

The U.S. Border Patrol is releasing asylum-seeking migrants who were recently apprehended in Texas' Rio Grande Valley without detaining them because officials say detention facilities are full to capacity.

The Border Patrol released 50 migrants on Tuesday rather than turn them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detention. Another 200 will have been released Wednesday, an official at Customs and Border Protection told NPR.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Thursday that the government will ban "military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles," in an attempt to head-off "the kind of horror and attack that we saw on Friday." She said the outlawed weapons will be listed on a website and are the type that were used in the attack on two mosques in Christchurch last week.

Aimee Rubensteen didn't have the luxury to take her time and get acclimated to her new job.

Immediately after starting last spring as South Florida's acquisitions curator for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Rubensteen began meeting weekly with Holocaust survivors and their family members.

"Time is running out," Rubensteen said. "Truly, the clock is ticking. We need to meet eyewitnesses as soon as possible, before they are no longer with us."

Members of Congress have not received a pay raise in a decade. So like most Americans, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., would like a raise.

"The cost of rent, childcare and other necessities has risen substantially in Washington and across the country in recent years, but members and staff pay and benefits have not kept pace with the private sector," Hoyer said last week at a hearing held by the new Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.