The Manhattan district attorney’s office cited a lack of evidence in deciding not to prosecute 31 of the 46 people charged in the takeover of Hamilton Hall.Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, last week dropped most of the 46 cases against pro-Palestinian demonstrators charged in the April 30 siege of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University because prosecutors had little proof that the cases would stand up at trial.There was limited video footage of what took place inside the campus building, Doug Cohen, a spokesman for the district attorney, said in a statement. The protesters wore masks and covered security cameras, preventing prosecutors from identifying those who had barricaded the doors and smashed chairs, desks and windows during the 17-hour occupation.The district attorney announced the decision to drop 31 of the 46 cases during a court hearing on Thursday. Apart from trespassing, a misdemeanor, proving any other criminal charges would be “extremely difficult,” Mr. Cohen said. For similar reasons, prosecutors also dismissed charges against nine of the 22 students and staff members at City College who were arrested inside a campus building and charged with burglary during a protest that took place on the same night as the arrests at Hamilton Hall. Six other people who were arrested outside the building still face criminal charges: Five were charged with second-degree assault, a felony, and another was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree, a misdemeanor. The protests on April 30 grew out of a weekslong encampment on Columbia’s South Lawn that ignited similar demonstrations at college campuses across the country and resulted in hundreds of arrests. As the academic year drew to a close, protesters called on Columbia to divest from Israel, among other demands, sometimes clashing with counterprotesters or with the police.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

As Dr. Sreyleak Luch drove to work the morning of Feb. 8, through busy sunbaked streets in Cambodia’s Mekong river delta, she played the overnight voice messages from her team. The condition of a 9-year-old boy she had been caring for had deteriorated sharply, and he had been intubated, one doctor reported. What, she wondered, could make the child so sick, so fast?“And then I just thought: H5N1,” she recalled. “It could be bird flu.”When she arrived at the airy yellow children’s ward at the provincial hospital in Kratie, she immediately asked the child’s father if the family had had contact with any sick or dead poultry. He admitted that their rooster had been found dead a few days before and that the family had eaten it.Dr. Luch told her colleagues her theory. Their responses ranged from dubious to incredulous: A human case of avian influenza had never been reported in their part of eastern Cambodia. They warned her that if she set off the bird flu warning system, many senior government officials might get involved. She risked looking foolish, or worse.Anxious but increasingly certain, Dr. Luch phoned the local public health department, located just across the street. Within minutes, a team arrived to collect a sample from the child, Virun Roeurn, for testing in a lab.By then, Virun’s distraught parents had lost faith in the hospital. They demanded that he be sent by ambulance to the capital, Phnom Penh. His flu swab sample traveled with him.Virun died on the journey. At 8 p.m., Cambodia’s National Public Health Laboratory confirmed Dr. Luch’s suspicion: He had died of highly pathogenic avian influenza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The search in Manitoba uncovered possible human remains from two victims of a serial killer, a devastating case that spotlighted an epidemic of violence against Indigenous women in Canada.The authorities in the western Canadian province of Manitoba said on Wednesday that they had found what could be the remains of two Indigenous women murdered by a serial killer, a possible breakthrough in a case that has devastated local communities and brought to the fore the issue of violence against Indigenous women in Canada.During a search of the Prairie Green Landfill near Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, experts “identified potential human remains in the search material,” the provincial government said in a statement.The families of the two victims, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, had been notified and visited the site, it said, adding that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other agencies would take over the investigations.Between March and May 2022, Jeremy Anthony Michael Skibicki, then 35, killed four Indigenous women, all from the Winnipeg area. He was arrested in December the same year. He had expressed support for the far right on social media, filling his Facebook page with white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic comments.Last year he was sentenced to 25 years in prison without parole for the first-degree murders of Ms. Myran, who was 26 when she was killed; Ms. Harris, who was 39; Rebecca Contois, 24; and an unidentified woman whom First Nations elders called Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, which means Buffalo Woman.Donna Bartlett, grandmother of Marcedes Myran, with her great-granddaughter in Winnipeg last year.Sebastien St-Jean/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome of Ms. Contois’s remains were recovered in a separate landfill in 2022, but the remains of the unidentified woman, Ms. Harris and Ms. Myran were never found.The latter two women were killed within days of each other in early May 2022, the authorities said at the time. Both were from Long Plain First Nation, a reserve about 55 miles west of Winnipeg, and had been reported to the police as missing.Ms. Harris’s and Ms. Myran’s families, friends and communities had mounted a relentless fight to persuade the authorities, both local and federal, to permit and to fund a thorough search for their remains in Prairie Green Landfill, where GPS evidence suggested they had likely been dumped.The Canadian government had resisted the landfill search, citing costs and technical difficulties.In 2022 the homicide rate of Indigenous women and girls in Canada was more than six times higher than that of their non-Indigenous counterparts.Cambria Harris, the daughter of Ms. Harris, who has led the fight for the recovery of her mother’s and Ms. Myran’s remains, asked for privacy. “I would like this time to grieve in peace,” she said on a social media posting.Jorden Myran, a sister of Ms. Myran, did not respond to a written request for comment. More

Strikes overnight killed nearly 100, seven of them in Rafah, as officials said there had been momentum on a deal to free some Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.Intense bombardment of a Gaza Strip city filled with refugees flattened a large mosque and killed or wounded scores of people on Thursday as Israel repeated its intention to push into the area with ground forces if Hamas does not release hostages before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.Nearly 100 people were killed across the enclave from Israeli strikes over the past day, the Gazan health authorities said Thursday, bringing the total death toll after almost 20 weeks of war to nearly 30,000.Around half of the Gaza Strip’s population of 2.3 million people are crammed into the southern city of Rafah along the border with Egypt, where the strike on the mosque occurred Thursday. Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reported that at least seven Palestinians had been killed overnight in Rafah and dozens more wounded.Israel’s preparations for an invasion of that area come as diplomats raced to forestall it, with Ramadan set to begin around March 10.President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk, met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday for “a good couple of hours,” focusing on whether negotiators could “cement a hostage deal” according to a White House spokesman. Talks last week in Cairo for a hostage deal failed when Mr. Netanyahu withdrew his negotiators, accusing Hamas of refusing to budge on what he called “ludicrous” demands and pledging to press on with Israel’s offensive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

When he was governor of California, Ronald Reagan popularized what became known as his 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. In a party riven with factions, divided in the 1960s between liberals, moderates and conservatives, the 11th Commandment worked to limit the damage caused by internecine battles.Watching Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House — a historic moment that came a mere nine months after he was chosen as speaker on the 15th ballot — makes Reagan’s commandment seem like a relic of a party that no longer exists. And it doesn’t exist. It hasn’t for a long time.To understand what’s happening now, you first have to understand what happened to the party in the years after Reagan left office. The eat-your-own politics that has come to define the Republican Party began to form almost as soon as Newt Gingrich became speaker in 1995, the first Republican to hold that position in 40 years.As speaker, he quickly ran into trouble with a faction of his party that would brook no compromise. The True Believers, as they were sometimes known, made it their mission to make Mr. Gingrich miserable. In the process, they helped transform the speakership, once a position of great influence, into a career-ender for Republicans. This is the atmosphere that the new speaker of the House, whether it is the current Republican nominee, Steve Scalise, or someone else, will enter.This is hardly what Mr. Gingrich or his successors would have anticipated. The Republican wave of 1994 that brought Mr. Gingrich to power did more than flip control of the House: It signaled the end of the right’s war for control of the Republican Party. Though some moderates remained in the party, the right had won the ideological war that had raged for the previous 30 years. Republican liberals were a thing of the past; Republican moderates were a dying breed. It was time to reap the harvest.Yet the right’s victory did not end the infighting; it accelerated it. As an ideological principle, the big-tent idea of embracing Reagan Democrats foundered. It wasn’t long before it devolved into a far more cramped vision: calling any relatively moderate party member a RINO, a Republican In Name Only. The term, which first appeared in print in 1992, ushered in a new age of purity politics. The RINO charge was particularly popular among the True Believers, a group made up of around 30 or 40 Republican representatives, including newly elected House freshmen like Joe Scarborough and Lindsey Graham.While they had supported Mr. Gingrich for speaker in 1995, they harbored serious concerns about his conservative commitments. He had, after all, worked with Democrats behind the scenes as minority whip to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and the crime bill in 1994, which included an assault weapons ban. He had also insisted that the Contract with America, the party’s signature platform for the midterms — an agenda meant to nationalize congressional elections and put a new generation of more conservative Republicans in power — exclude some of the True Believers’ top priorities, like abortion and school prayer.So nearly as soon as Mr. Gingrich picked up the speaker’s gavel, the True Believers began to grumble: “They believe that he has sold them out time and time again,” a congressional aide told National Journal early in 1995. Mr. Gingrich learned the hard way that even radical tactics would not appease the Republicans to his right. After initiating a government shutdown that was, at the time, the longest in American history, he got stuck.The shutdown was deeply unpopular, and the public (rightly) blamed Republicans for the impasse. The only way out was to strike a deal with the Democrats. But 15 of the True Believers said no. A nonfunctioning government suited them just fine; after all, wasn’t that the end goal of their antigovernment politics?A furious Mr. Gingrich struck a deal without them, but his capacity for retribution was limited. He snubbed Helen Chenoweth, a holdout running for re-election in Idaho, by canceling a planned appearance at the last minute (admittedly weak tea, though he was a strong fund-raiser and she was in a tight race). That did little to stop Ms. Chenoweth and others from pushing forward with other schemes, including efforts to orchestrate the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1997, long before news broke that he had lied about his sexual relationship with a White House intern. Mr. Gingrich begged the True Believers to stop talking about impeachment in the lead-up to the 1996 election, worried that it would only solidify the party’s obstructionist reputation. But in early 1997, they were back at it, eventually dragging Mr. Gingrich and the rest of the conference to their position.In the midst of all this, the True Believers sought to oust Mr. Gingrich from his speakership, convening back-room meetings and brokering covert deals that eventually failed. But a few years later, after voters handed Republicans the biggest midterm defeat for an opposition party since 1934, Mr. Gingrich was out. Not just out of the speaker’s office — out of the House altogether. Discussing his resignation with other Republican leaders, Mr. Gingrich put his finger on the problem: “I’m willing to lead but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals.”For the next several years, the “cannibals” were largely quiet, having sated themselves with Mr. Gingrich’s ouster. Dennis Hastert, the next Republican speaker, would set a record, serving the longest term of any Republican speaker (and then becoming the first former speaker to be convicted, sentenced and serve a term in prison for a criminal case). But as the party continued to radicalize in the Obama era — as the right-wing Republican Study Committee gained further-right-wing competitors in the Tea Party and the House Freedom caucuses — the speakership became a dicier proposition. John Boehner faced repeated coup attempts, and he resigned in disgust in 2015. Paul Ryan, who reluctantly took his place, lasted just over three years before leaving office at 48, an age when most members are just getting started.Despite the sudden departures of Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan, the speakership still held appeal in 2023. Mr. McCarthy had been jockeying for the gavel for years, hungry for the power and prestige he could wield. The caucus he sought to lead, however, had changed. Where Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan had commanded significant majorities that allowed rebellions to brew without boiling over, Mr. McCarthy came into office with a whisper-thin majority that empowered a small bloc of Republicans to lord their power over him.The holdouts who denied Mr. McCarthy the speakership for days and days (a brutal battle that played out in embarrassing fashion in front of the C-SPAN cameras), as well as those who stripped him of the speakership, also had more diverse sources of power than previous House members. Though Mr. McCarthy had a reputation as a prodigious fund-raiser, the holdouts could leverage their social media and online fund-raising to bypass traditional sources of money and messaging.In an era of weak parties, when both Democratic and Republican politicians can outsource the work parties once did to other institutions, party leaders have fewer tools for disciplining their members. But it is Republican members who have decided that, as they need their party’s infrastructure less and less, they can exert more and more power over its leaders.Mr. McCarthy’s removal from office makes clear why that is. His nine-month tenure as speaker was a period of never-ending humiliation, his weakness constantly on display. His ouster turned out to be both unprecedented and unsurprising — unsurprising precisely because House Republicans have been in a state of endless internal revolution for the past 30 years. That revolution has radicalized the Republican Party, pulling it further and further to the right, while producing novel instruments of destruction. In other words, the eight Republicans who ousted Mr. McCarthy transformed the speakership even further: from a powerful position that Republican leaders willingly walked away from when it became too much of a headache, to a weak, even ignominious role that could be yanked away at any moment.Though only a few Republicans were responsible for toppling Mr. McCarthy, this spirit of rebellion now defines the party. The 11th Commandment is a distant memory. Which means that if Steve Scalise does pick up the gavel as speaker, he will not be ascending to the heights of power; he will be submitting, instead, to an unpredictable, uncontrollable group of rebels that holds his fate in its hands.Dr. Hemmer, the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” is an associate professor of history and the director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. More