Aurelia Butler

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    Severe Storms Threaten Parts of Oklahoma and Texas

    There was an enhanced risk for severe thunderstorms in parts of Texas and Oklahoma on Sunday, forecasters said. They warned of hail of up to three inches in diameter and of winds up to 80 miles per hour.Severe thunderstorms threatened parts of the Southern Plains on Sunday, where damaging winds, hail larger than baseballs and a few tornadoes were expected, forecasters warned.The storms were expected to develop starting by the middle of Sunday afternoon. Forecasters expressed the greatest concern for parts of central and northeastern Texas into central and southwestern Oklahoma.The Storm Prediction Center issued a level 3 out of 5 risk — or an enhanced risk — for severe weather for these areas on Sunday, warning of the possibility of hail of up to three inches in diameter and winds up to 80 miles per hour.Parts of the lower Mississippi Valley and the Deep South were also expected to face rounds of severe weather, including strong damaging winds and hail, as the storms move east into Sunday night.A couple of tornadoes were also possible on Sunday, especially for northeast Texas into southwest Oklahoma.The Weather Prediction Center issued a level 3 out of 4 risk for flash flooding through Monday, focused on central Oklahoma into northwestern Arkansas.The potential for thunderstorms was expected to continue on Monday, with large hail and damaging winds still the primary concerns. The highest risk will be across north and central Texas and into parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.Large hail, some possibly bigger than golf balls, and damaging winds will be likely over central and western Texas.Farther east, Alabama, Mississippi and parts of Louisiana may also experience scattered strong storms later on Monday afternoon, though the storm threat is expected to be lower in these regions.John Pike, a forecaster at the Weather Service office in Norman, Okla., on Saturday called the weather “quite typical” for the lower Great Plains where spring thunderstorm activity usually peaks in May. More

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    Why Is This Supreme Court Handing Trump More and More Power?

    Since taking his second oath of office, President Trump has been on a firing spree. In violation of numerous laws or longstanding presidential practice (or both), he has ordered the removal of many high-level officials who normally retain their positions regardless of who is in the Oval Office.Some of these high-level officials have successfully challenged their removal in the lower courts. But on Thursday, in a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority inside the executive branch.The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the unsigned order noting concerns about the “disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.”In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority.Over the last four months, the legal world — and the country — has been plunged into chaos, and the Supreme Court bears a heavy dose of responsibility. Many of it decisions involving the presidency — including last year’s on presidential immunity — have enabled the president to declare himself above the law. The court’s latest order both enables the consolidation of additional power in the presidency and risks assimilating a “move fast and break things” ethos into constitutional law.No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president’s ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.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

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    Seeing a Tide of Fascism: Flee or Fight?

    More from our inbox:West Point Book BanCooperation on the Environment To the Editor:Re “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.” (Opinion video, nytimes.com, May 14):As a British historian and the author of a book on totalitarian Russia and the fall of Communism, I am worried that there have been too few coherent warnings of the isolationism and the threats to American democracy posed by the Trump administration — until I saw this eloquent video.Here in France there is talk of demanding that the Statue of Liberty — that beacon of freedom given to the United States by this country — be returned to Europe. As a child of a diplomatic family living in Communist Bulgaria in the 1960s, I witnessed directly the fear that a totalitarian state can induce in a population.I worry for America, and I desperately hope that it can reverse the tide of fascism threatening the independence of its universities, courts and admirable media. This video clearly lays out the challenges posed to the United States, which we Europeans have for so long respected and admired.Myles SandersonParisThe writer is the author of the book “Secret Service in the Cold War.”To the Editor:What Profs. Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley say is undeniably true: The United States is rapidly descending into fascism.Why, then, are they leaving the country? Why aren’t they staying and resisting along with the millions of people who are marching on the streets and refusing to submit?Why aren’t they staying here in solidarity with those who have been unjustly imprisoned and deported, those who have lost their jobs and those who are at risk of losing health care and basic services? Do they think that appearing in a video from The New York Times is sufficient?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

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    Teachers Saved My Life. Why Do We Treat Them So Poorly?

    I have attended commencements of all kinds throughout my career, and I can tell you that some of the best are in prisons.Over and over, I have spoken at these commencements with incarcerated men and women who acknowledge the awful choices or stupid mistakes they made, the strangers or loved ones they hurt, yet emerge from prison renewed through higher education. While 95 percent of the people incarcerated will come home one day, they often return to the same cycles that led them to prison in the first place. Through college coursework, they are able to reflect on their past, develop a clearer vision for their future and gain the skills to contribute to their families and communities.One student told me that pursuing college while incarcerated was the first time he had moral and academic credibility with his family. The potential for higher education in prison to change lives is the reason that I worked to expand these programs when I was the U.S. secretary of education and president of a national education civil rights organization, and do so now as chancellor of the State University of New York.I believe so deeply in the transformative power of education because teachers saved my life.When I was 8 years old, in October of 1983, my mother died suddenly from a heart attack. It was indescribably devastating. I then lived alone with my father, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s until he died when I was 12. During those years with my father, no one outside our home knew he was sick, and I didn’t know why he acted the way he did.Some nights he would talk to me; some nights he wouldn’t say a word. Other nights he would be sad or angry, or even violent. Home was scary and unstable, but I was blessed to have New York City public schoolteachers who made school a place that was safe, nurturing, academically rigorous and engaging.If not for Allan Osterweil, my teacher in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at P.S. 276 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, I would be in prison or dead. Amid the darkness of my home life, Mr. Osterweil gave me a sense of hope and purpose. In his classroom, we read The New York Times every day. We learned the capital and leader of every country in the world. We did productions of Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll.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

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    A Fringe Movement

    We explain the ideology behind a recent attack.The attack on a Palm Springs, Calif., fertility clinic last week surfaced some unsettling ideas. Guy Edward Bartkus, the 25-year-old suspect, had posted an audio clip explaining why he wanted to blow up a place that makes babies. “I would be considered a pro-mortalist,” he said before detonating his Ford Fusion, killing himself and injuring four others. “Let’s make the death thing happen sooner rather than later in life.”Investigators called it “terrorism” and “nihilistic ideation.” Trump administration officials called it “anti-pro-life.”Bartkus was indeed espousing an extreme ideology. But it belongs to a larger intellectual movement, still fringe for now, that is slowly gaining adherents. My colleagues Jill Cowan, Aric Toler, Jesus Jiménez and I have spent the past week reporting on what experts call “anti-natalism.” Hundreds of thousands follow accounts and podcasts about it. It holds that procreation is immoral because the inevitability of death and suffering outweighs the odds of happiness. Today’s newsletter explains.The ideaThe calculus is ancient — to be or not to be?A South African philosopher’s 2006 treatise, “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence,” popularized the idea in its modern form. “You’re stuck between having been born, which was a harm, but also not being able to end the harm by taking your own life, because that is another kind of harm,” the author, David Benatar, told us.This perspective draws partly on utilitarianism, a discipline of philosophy that asks how to achieve the most good for the greatest number. But even there, anti-natalism is seen as marginal. Besides Benatar, “I don’t know any other philosophers who share it,” said Peter Singer, an influential utilitarian.Online, however, anxieties including climate change and artificial intelligence have given it traction — as has the yearning for connection, even among people with antisocial tendencies. Scores of anti-natalist discussion boards, influencers and podcasts now debate whether all creatures should stop reproducing, or just humans.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

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    How the Ravages of Age Are Ravaging the Democratic Party

    Now is the time for the Democratic Party to get serious about its oldsters problem.The furor over President Joe Biden’s cognitive issues is not going away any time soon. On Tuesday it bubbled up in the California governor’s race, when one candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, accused two other Democrats eyeing the governor’s mansion — former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra — of participating in a “cover-up” of Mr. Biden’s fading fitness in office.“Voters deserve to know the truth. What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Mr. Villaraigosa fumed in a statement, spurred by tidbits from the new book “Original Sin,” which chronicles the efforts of Mr. Biden’s inner circle to conceal his mental and physical decline. Mr. Villaraigosa called on Ms. Harris and Mr. Becerra to “apologize to the American people.”Is Mr. Villaraigosa, who is 72 himself, exploiting the orgy of Biden recriminations for political ends? Probably. Does he have a point? Absolutely. Team Biden deserves much abuse for its sins. That said, last week also reminded us that the Democrats’ flirtation with gerontocracy is not confined to a single office or branch of government when, on Wednesday, the House was shaken by the death of Representative Gerry Connolly.Mr. Connolly, a 75-year-old lawmaker from Northern Virginia, had been in poor health. On Nov. 7 last year, two days after his re-election to a ninth term, he announced he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would undergo treatments. Even so, in December he won a high-profile contest against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. The race was seen as a struggle over the future of the seniority system that has long shaped how Democrats pick committee leaders. Despite concerns about his health, seniority carried the day. On April 28, he announced that his cancer had returned and that he would not seek re-election next year. Less than a month later, he was gone.Washington being Washington, his death was greeted with sadness but also with chatter about the political repercussions in the narrowly divided House. It was not lost on Beltway pundits that if Democrats had had one more “no” vote in their deliberations over President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Republicans would have had to sway another of their holdouts to ram it through the House last week.Mr. Connolly was the third House Democrat to die in recent months, after the deaths in March of Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner, both septuagenarians. All three seats are vacant for now. Axios pointed out that eight members of Congress have died in office since November 2022. All were Democrats, with an average age of 75.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

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    Knicks vs. Hicks: Let Us Praise Old-Fashioned Contempt

    The camera lingered on Celebrity Row at Madison Square Garden — Timothée Chalamet slack-jawed, Martha Stewart blinking in disbelief, Jimmy Fallon rubbing his temples after his “Tonight Show” the previous night had portrayed Indiana as a state of nobodies. It was Game 1 of the Knicks-Pacers N.B.A. Eastern Conference finals. The Pacers had erased a five-point deficit in the final half-minute, Tyrese Haliburton tied the game with a shot from somewhere near Hoboken and overtime sealed a 138-135 Indiana win.For Hoosiers, the joy was double-distilled: We stole a playoff game and, for one delicious moment, annulled the celebrity cachet of New York. Across Indiana living rooms, cheers erupted. Vindication felt deep, as if Haliburton’s improbable shot proved something fundamental about their home.In Game 2 on Friday night, the Pacers struck again. The teams play for a third time in Indianapolis Sunday night and the Knicks travel confidently, armed with a 5-1 road record this postseason. One stolen game could rewrite the story: Edge, spite and possibility all share the same charter flight.This giddy clash — Hicks versus Knicks, cornfields versus concrete — revives a rivalry that shaped the N.B.A.’s most combustible decade. Between 1993 and 2000 the two teams met six times in the postseason, each series a low-scoring trench war where elbows flew and apologies never arrived.“We just beat the hell out of each other,” the former Pacer Sam Mitchell was quoted recently as saying. Reggie Miller’s eight points in nine seconds in ’95, the choke sign directed at Spike Lee, Patrick Ewing’s thunderous scowls and Larry Johnson’s four-point play in ’99 still live in grainy VHS glory. No championships emerged from that theater, yet the games became folklore because they dramatized two competing claims on the soul of basketball: Indiana’s small-town romance — think Hoosiers and Larry Bird — versus New York’s big-city swagger.The rivalry is back. Both clubs now rank among the league’s top 10 offenses, flicking up threes instead of throwing forearms. Haliburton dribbles like a jazz solo; Jalen Brunson answers with piston-quick layups. The bruises are fewer, the pace faster, yet the cultural tension endures — and that is to be celebrated.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

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    Bruce Springsteen Will Never Surrender to Donald Trump

    Since the 1980s Bruce Springsteen has been writing songs that emphasized, even romanticized, a polyglot vision of America and what it means to be an American. That vision is, broadly speaking, an updated version of New Deal America: one that recognizes not only the dignity and pride of honest labor but also the importance of respecting our differences, whether they are based on culture, gender, ethnicity or race. It’s a vision of unity summed up in the phrase that in past concert tours Mr. Springsteen has used to close out the show: “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.” And when Mr. Springsteen says “everybody,” he means everybody — including undocumented migrants and border patrol agents, unwed mothers, distant and irresponsible fathers, Black victims of police brutality and the cops who (regret) shooting them, emotionally scarred Vietnam vets and Southeast Asian war refugees trying to make America their new home.The 1980s also saw the rise of an alternative vision of America: one that sought to tear down what was left of the New Deal. Its exemplar was Donald Trump, then a tacky developer and a tabloid fixture. It was based on the idea that could be summarized as: I win only if everybody else loses. Today Mr. Trump is president, and full of petty rage at Mr. Springsteen for daring to criticize him at the opening show on his current European tour.Nothing irks Mr. Trump quite as much as the disrespect of a fellow celebrity. But it’s more than that. Mr. Springsteen, 75, and Mr. Trump, 78, are in many respects two opposing faces of modern America as it was built and performed by their generation. They offer their fan bases a promise of entirely different futures.Just as Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign sought to make (his) America great again, Mr. Springsteen’s current Land of Hope and Dreams Tour is a nod to his idea of another, more generous vision. The lyrics to the song of the same name offer up an idealistic vision of inclusion with a train packed with “saints and sinners,” “losers and winners,” “whores and gamblers” and “lost souls.” It promises, “Dreams will not be thwarted” and “faith will be rewarded” with “bells of freedom ringing.” It may also be a reference to Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration celebration, where he sang the same tune.Introducing “Land of Hope and Dreams” as the first song on the tour’s opening night in Manchester, England, Mr. Springsteen told the crowd that the United States was “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration” that has “no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”Mr. Trump heard this as a challenge. The president threatened an “investigation” into Mr. Springsteen’s support for Kamala Harris and blustered on Truth Social that this “Highly Overrated … not a talented guy” was “Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.” Later he put out a fake video in which he hits Mr. Springsteen with a golf ball.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