Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 150 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    Colonel Found Guilty of Sexual Harassment in Trial Seen as a Milestone

    The conviction is considered one of the first of its kind since Congress required the military to change how its legal system addresses sexual assault and harassment.A former Army battalion commander has been found guilty in a military court of sexually harassing a subordinate, one of the first cases of its kind brought after an overhaul of the military’s legal system that established sexual harassment as a criminal offense.The officer, Lt. Col. Herman West of Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a female officer in his command, making unwanted comments and touching her inappropriately. He faced additional charges over his treatment of other female officers at the base.A court-martial judge on Friday found him guilty of sexual harassment, conduct unbecoming of an officer and maltreatment. Colonel West, who had been removed from his leadership role in the battalion as a result of the case, was fined over $92,000 and received a written reprimand in his personnel file. The conviction is considered to be a felony-level offense.According to court documents, Colonel West used sexually suggestive language when talking with the officer in his command. The documents also said that he had unbuttoned his pants in front of her, in addition to the inappropriate touching.During a Friday afternoon sentencing hearing, Colonel West apologized to the victims. According to a local television station in Washington, he looked directly at the female officer at the center of the case and said, “My actions were despicable.” He added, “You’ve done nothing wrong.” The woman’s name has not been publicly released.Criminalizing sexual harassment in the military was part of a broader set of changes mandated by a bipartisan law passed by Congress in 2021, the largest overhaul in generations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (Previously, the military’s legal system did not specifically include sexual harassment as an offense, and prosecutors had to rely on other misconduct charges to bring criminal cases.) The changes also stripped commanders’ authority to decide whether to pursue charges in sexual abuse cases and other serious crimes, transferring that responsibility to specialized prosecutors.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

  • 163 Shares149 Views

    in Elections

    Man Gets 100 Years in Prison for His Role in 2020 Shooting Spree

    The rampage on Thanksgiving Day killed one person and injured several others in Nevada and Arizona.A Texas man has been sentenced to at least 100 years in prison for his part in a two-state shooting spree on Thanksgiving Day in 2020 that killed one person and wounded several others across Nevada and Arizona.The rampage began in the early hours of Nov. 26, 2020, when the man, Christopher McDonnell, 32, and two others started opening fire from their moving car at motorists outside Las Vegas in what prosecutors called a “mobile mass shooting.” Roughly 10 hours after it began, the spree ended when the car crashed along a highway near Bouse, Ariz., after a shootout with the police.On Friday, Mr. McDonnell, of Tyler, Texas, listened in a courtroom in Clark County, Nev., before his sentencing as victims and their relatives described how the eruption of random shootings that day had upended their lives.“I struggle every day,” said Kevin Mendiola, whose 22-year-old son, Kevin Mendiola Jr., was shot and killed during the spree outside a 7-Eleven in Henderson, Nev., about 15 miles southeast of Las Vegas.Mr. McDonnell pleaded guilty but mentally ill to nearly two dozen felony charges in October, including first-degree murder and multiple counts of firing a weapon at an occupied vehicle. All of the charges were filed in Nevada, and he does not face any in Arizona.At the hearing on Friday, Mr. McDonnell, his face tattooed to resemble a skull, read from a brief statement: “I take full responsibility for my own wrongdoings, and I appreciate the courts for administering justice.” Mr. McDonnell’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.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

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Elections

    Protestas han paralizado Bolivia. Esta es la razón

    La rivalidad entre el actual presidente Luis Arce y el expresidente Evo Morales ha ocasionado bloqueos que han afectado la circulación de productos de primera necesidad en el país.Las manifestaciones han sacudido Bolivia durante más de dos meses. Ha estallado una antigua rivalidad política, y los partidarios del presidente y de su principal oponente se han enfrentado en las calles. Las protestas han bloqueado la circulación de mercancías, agravando la escasez de combustible. Algunos bolivianos han hecho fila durante días para comprar gasolina.La agitación forma parte de un nivel amplio de malestar en toda la región andina de Latinoamérica. Ecuador, Perú y Colombia —vecinos de Bolivia por el oeste y el norte— se enfrentan a importantes niveles de agitación política, que provocan una intensa ira entre sus poblaciones.Detrás del descontento en Bolivia hay una ruptura en el seno del Movimiento al Socialismo, o MAS, un partido político de izquierda que ha dominado el panorama político del país durante dos décadas.El presidente de Bolivia, Luis Arce, y su antiguo mentor, el expresidente Evo Morales, se disputan el liderazgo del partido, y cada uno insiste que será el candidato del partido en las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año.El presidente Luis Arce participó en una ceremonia indígena el mes pasado en El Alto, Bolivia. Tanto él como Morales insisten en que serán el candidato de su partido en las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año.Aizar Raldes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe 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

  • 100 Shares179 Views

    in Elections

    Two Alvin Ailey Productions Head for the Light

    Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels” aspire to find higher ground at New York City Center.Dancers moving from being scorned to rocking their souls in the bosom of Abraham — this is the narrative arc of Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece, “Revelations.” And that redemptive passage into the light is the template that many choreographers for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater try to replicate.Very rarely does such a work escape the shadow of “Revelations” and the gravity of cliché. Ronald K. Brown did it in 1999 with “Grace,” and during the Ailey company’s current season at New York City Center, a 25th anniversary revival of that unfailingly spirit-lifting dance is successfully replacing “Revelations” in the closing spot of several programs. But “Grace” is an exception, whereas Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels,” the two works that debuted last week, are not.With “Finding Free,” Boykin, a beloved former member of the company, is at least attempting a slightly different approach with an Afrofuturist take. She and Jon Taylor have costumed the cast in long, sleeveless coats with giant lapels and upturned collars that frame their faces and make them look like something between sci-fi courtiers and private eyes. By the end, they have swapped the coats for diaphanous shifts that, like Al Crawford’s cathedral lighting, signify spiritual transformation.That transformation is aided by an original score, courtesy of the jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker, who plays it live in a quintet behind a scrim at the rear of the stage. (Boykin’s last work for the Ailey troupe, her “re-Evolution, Dream” also commendably used a commissioned score by a living jazz musician, Ali Jackson.) In the final section, Whitaker’s organ brings us to church with some funky gospel and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” has the dancers in diaphanous shifts that signal spiritual transformation. Paul KolnikBut the path to get there is awfully murky. The dancers mainly travel in a pack — shuffling, skittering, pivoting, jogging, lining up. One member after another leaves the flock, only to return. When they spin, the tails of their coats fly up, and they spin a lot. They walk portentously into the light. They also collapse, open their mouths in silent screams, crawl as if crossing a desert and writhe in anguish.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

  • 113 Shares109 Views

    in Elections

    On ‘S.N.L.,’ Luigi Mangione Is Busting Out All Over

    As Chris Rock hosts, the man charged in the UnitedHealthcare shooting dominates this week’s riffs on the news.The 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” continues to provide the show with opportunities to revive many of its long-running characters. Last week, it was the Church Lady; this week, it was Nancy Grace, the TV personality and frequently outraged true-crime commentator, who has been frequently impersonated on “S.N.L.” over the years by cast members including Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler.On this outing, Grace was played by Sarah Sherman as she commented on the outpouring of online support for Luigi Mangione, who was charged in the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson.“What is going on in this country?” Sherman declared. “Y’all, this man is not a sex icon, OK?”She added, “And yet, folks online are posting things like — am I reading this right? — ‘Luigi got that BDE.’ Really? I hope ‘BDE’ stands for Behavior Dat’s Evil.”Sherman went on to interview guests including Kenan Thompson, playing a regular customer at the Pennsylvania McDonald’s where Mangione was arrested.“Well, Nancy, I’ve been eating McDonald’s every day for three years,” Thompson said. “I got Type 10 diabetes. Blue Cross? Bitch, I got blue foot. You know what my health insurance plan is called? Hoping it goes away.”Asked if he had ever tried alternative medicine, Thompson replied in the affirmative, “When they tell me how much the procedure costs, I go, ‘what’s the alternative?’”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

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    When ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Gets the Anime Treatment

    “The War of the Rohirrim” is the latest and most high-profile anime adaptation of a Western franchise to hit screens big and small.When Warner Bros. approached the filmmaker Peter Jackson and his longtime screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens about making a new animated “Lord of the Rings,” Boyens at first had a hard time wrapping her head around the notion. But when studio executives suggested that the film could be told via Japanese anime — suddenly it clicked.They could tell a stand-alone story from J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices about the people of the kingdom of Rohan, which has now become “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” directed by Kenji Kamiyama. Jackson is one of the film’s executive producers and Boyens one of its producers.“It was that moment of form meeting the story,” Boyens said in a video call. She said she thought anime would be an appealing approach because “it’s a story that ultimately deals with the wreckage of war, and that’s something that Japanese storytelling on film has been really good at telling.”“The War of the Rohirrim” (in theaters) is the latest and most high profile anime adaptation of a Western franchise to hit screens big and small. In recent years there’s been “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” on Netflix, an anime version of the 2010 movie “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”; a “Rick and Morty: The Anime” for Adult Swim; and “Terminator Zero,” a show set in James Cameron’s “Terminator” universe, also on Netflix. Kamiyama also made an installment of “Star Wars: Visions,” a 2021 anime anthology featuring a galaxy far, far away on Disney+, as well as “Blade Runner: Black Lotus,” a co-production of Adult Swim and the anime streaming service Crunchyroll.BenDavid Grabinski, one of the creators of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” said in an interview that he sought to tap into some of the artistry of anime that “can feel fresh and different than a lot of the traditional animation coming out of the west.”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

  • 88 Shares129 Views

    in Elections

    My 500-Mile Journey Across Alaska’s Thawing Arctic

    Flames were leaping out of the forest beneath the float plane taking us deep into the remote interior of northern Alaska. Our destination was the glacial Walker Lake, which stretches 14 miles through Gates of the Arctic National Park.Nearly 100 miles from the nearest dirt road, Walker Lake is within an expanse of uninhabited tundra, scraggly boreal forests and the seemingly endless peaks of the Brooks Range in a wilderness bigger than Belgium. Once we arrived, we saw wide bear trails bulldozed through alder thickets and plentiful signs of moose and wolves.We had come here to begin a 500-mile journey that would take us in pack rafts down the Noatak River, believed to be the longest undeveloped river system left in the United States, and on foot, slogging the beaches of the Chukchi Sea coastline. Our goal was to get a close-up look at how warming temperatures are affecting this rugged but fragile Arctic landscape. Worldwide, roughly twice the amount of the heat-trapping carbon now in the atmosphere has been locked away in the planet’s higher latitudes in frozen ground known as permafrost. Now that ground is thawing and releasing its greenhouse gases.The fire we flew over was our first visible sign of the changes underway.While wildfires are part of the landscape’s natural regenerative cycle, they have until recently been infrequent above the Arctic Circle. But now the rising heat of the lengthening summers has dried out the tundra and the invasive shrubs that have recently moved north with the warmth. This is a tinderbox for lightning strikes. The fires expose and defrost the frozen soil, allowing greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere.I have slept more than 1,000 nights on frozen terrain while exploring the Far North. My first Arctic venture was in 1983, with a fellow National Park Service ranger in a tandem kayak on the Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic. We awoke one morning, startled by the sounds of a big animal running through low willows. It jumped into the river straight toward our tent — a caribou chased by a wolf. We were relieved it wasn’t a bear.I couldn’t help but feel unsettled, even reduced, by the immense sky and landscape. While the scale of it all seemed too much to process, the Arctic had captured my soul and I set out on numerous other trips across different places in the North.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

  • 113 Shares119 Views

    in Elections

    Don’t Cut an Agency So Vital to Our Health

    More from our inbox:Needed: More Maternity WardsRacial Inequities in the Overdose CrisisVet the Presidential CandidatesTech Tycoons in ChargeA building on the N.I.H. campus in Bethesda, Md. The agency comprises 27 institutes and has a budget of $48 billion.Hailey Sadler for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Long Government’s ‘Crown Jewel,’ Health Institute Is Becoming a Target” (news article, Dec. 3):Your article describes the National Institutes of Health as a “crown jewel” of the federal government based on its track record of success in driving medical and health research and innovation. The article also captures the longstanding bipartisan support for the agency and its work.When asked in a national survey we commissioned this year, Americans of all political persuasions expressed their support for federally funded research:Eighty-eight percent of Americans agree that basic scientific research is necessary and should be supported by the federal government.Some 62 percent would be willing to pay $1 per week more in taxes to support additional medical and health research.And 89 percent say it is important that the U.S. is a global leader in research to improve health.Continuing to treat the N.I.H. as a top national priority is a strategy that will spur new treatments and cures for the health threats facing our population. It will also drive U.S. business and job growth across the life science, technology, manufacturing and service sectors that in the end will keep us globally competitive.Mary WoolleyNew YorkThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of Research!America.To the Editor:The suggestion to cut infectious disease funding displays dangerous historical amnesia. Just as the 1918-20 flu pandemic killed millions of people globally, Covid-19’s emergence in 2020 demonstrated how quickly a novel pathogen can upend society. While vaccines helped curb Covid-19’s impact, we face an equally urgent crisis: antibiotic resistance.Currently, drug-resistant bacteria infect over two million Americans annually, causing more than 20,000 deaths. Without sustained funding and research, projections show antimicrobial resistance could cause 10 million annual deaths globally by 2050.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