Aurelia Butler

Katrina Armstrong is leaving the post a week after the university agreed to a list of demands from the White House.The interim president of Columbia University abruptly left her post Friday evening as the school confronted the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the Trump administration’s mounting skepticism about its leadership.The move came one week after Columbia bowed to a series of demands from the federal government, which had canceled approximately $400 million in essential federal funding, and it made way for Columbia’s third leader since August. Claire Shipman, who had been the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, was named the acting president and replaced Dr. Katrina Armstrong.The university, which was deeply shaken by a protest encampment last spring and a volley of accusations that it had become a safe haven for antisemitism, announced the leadership change in an email to the campus Friday night. The letter thanked Dr. Armstrong for her efforts during “a time of great uncertainty for the university” and said that Ms. Shipman has “a clear understanding of the serious challenges facing our community.”Less than a week ago, the Trump administration had signaled that it was satisfied with Dr. Armstrong and the steps she was taking to restore the funding. But in a statement on Friday, its Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism said that Dr. Armstrong’s departure from the presidency was “an important step toward advancing negotiations” between the government and the university.The statement included a cryptic mention of a “concerning revelation” this week, which appeared to refer to comments from Dr. Armstrong at a faculty meeting last weekend. According to a faculty member who attended, Dr. Armstrong and her provost, Angela Olinto, confused some people when they seemed to downplay the effects of the university’s agreement with the government. A transcript of the meeting had been leaked to the news media, as well as to the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the situation.Ms. Shipman, a journalist with two degrees from Columbia, is taking charge of one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities at an extraordinarily charged moment in American higher education.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

Harvard University has been under pressure by the Trump administration to follow directives related to diversity and combating antisemitism.Two of the leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the director and associate director, will be leaving their positions, according to two professors with direct knowledge of the moves.The department had been under criticism from alumni that it had an anti-Israel bias, and the university more broadly has been under intense pressure from the federal government to address accusations of antisemitism on campus.The director, Cemal Kafadar, a professor of Turkish studies, and the associate director, Rosie Bsheer, a historian of the Middle East, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Friday.The news was first reported by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. A spokesman for the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, James Chisholm, declined to comment, saying only that the matter was a personnel matter.David Cutler, the interim dean of Social Science, announced in an email on Wednesday obtained by The New York Times that Dr. Kafadar would be stepping down from his post at the end of the academic year.Dr. Cutler did not respond to a message late Friday.Faculty members who have spoken with both professors say each believe they were forced out of their posts.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

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the senior member of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, said on Friday that judges must remain “fearlessly independent” if the rule of law is to survive.Her remarks, made in a packed auditorium at Georgetown University Law Center, were at once cautious and forceful. She did not address particular controversies arising from the Trump administration’s actions testing the conventional understanding of presidential power, many of which appear likely to land at the Supreme Court. But she made plain that her observations about the fragility of the justice system addressed current events.She bemoaned, for instance, “the fact that some of our public leaders are lawyers making statements challenging the rule of law.”She was interviewed by the law school’s dean, William M. Treanor, who interspersed his questions with ones that had been submitted by students. He started the conversation by characterizing those questions, alluding to recent efforts by the Trump administration to punish major law firms and its battles with courts over its blitz of executive orders.“As our students prepare to join the legal profession, they are confronting genuine unsettling questions about the durability of that profession and of the law itself,” he said. “The most commonly asked question was the role of courts in safeguarding the rule of law.”Justice Sotomayor answered in general terms, citing reference works and experts. She said she had consulted with Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, a former member of the Supreme Court of Canada, about judges’ obligations, quoting her response: “They need to remain fearlessly independent, protective of rights and ensure that the state is respectful of both.”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

A federal appeals court on Friday allowed Elon Musk and his team of analysts to resume their work in helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, clearing the way for them to continue while the government appeals the earlier ruling.The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit came as the Trump administration was taking its final steps to effectively eliminate the agency after steadily chipping away at its staff and grant programs for weeks.The appeals court panel said that whatever influence Mr. Musk and his team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had over the process, it was ultimately agency officials who had signed off on the various moves to gut the agency and reconfigure it as a minor office under the control of the State Department.Earlier this month, Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland wrote that Mr. Musk, in his capacity as a special adviser to President Trump who was never confirmed by the Senate, lacked the authority to carry out what Mr. Musk himself described as a campaign to shut down the agency.Judge Chuang pointed to public statements by Mr. Musk in which he described directing the engineers and analysts on his team, known as DOGE, to do away with U.S.A.I.D., previewing his plans and announcing their progress along the way.On X, the social media platform he owns, Mr. Musk wrote in February that it was time for U.S.A.I.D. to “die,” that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down, and at one point that he had “spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”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

University officials said they had not been informed of the federal agents’ plans and called the situation “deeply concerning.”U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested a graduate student attending the University of Minnesota earlier this week, the school said Friday in a statement that called the situation “deeply concerning.”The student was taken into custody on Thursday at an off-campus residence, the school’s president, Rebecca Cunningham, said in the statement.“The university had no prior knowledge of this incident and did not share any information with federal authorities before it occurred,” the statement said.The university did not identify the student’s name, nationality or visa type. Jake Ricker, a university spokesman, said the student was enrolled in the Carlson School of Management.ICE officials did not immediately respond to a request for information about the case.The arrest follows other incidents in which ICE targeted international students or scholars at American universities. Three involved students at Columbia University. The other individuals ICE detained or sought to arrest attended Brown, Tufts, Cornell and the University of Alabama.Another case that drew consternation among civil liberties advocates involved Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident and recent graduate at Columbia University who had his green card revoked.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

<!–> [!–> <!–> [!–> Confirmed cuts* At least 49,110 Employees who took buyouts About 75,000 More planned reductions At least 171,080 <!–> –> <!–> –> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> Confirmed reduction so far, by agency [–> U.S. Agency for International Development More than 99% Voice of America (U.S. Agency for Global Media) More […] More

In Mississippi, a sheriff accused of staffing his family’s commercial chicken farm with inmates defended the practice, saying he always paid them.The Mississippi State Auditor’s office on Friday said it had launched an investigation into allegations that Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey had staffed his mother’s commercial chicken farm with jail inmates who were in his custody.The investigation follows an article published Thursday by Mississippi Today and The New York Times in which former inmates and a former deputy described working on the farm and using equipment and supplies bought with taxpayer money.“We’re all aware of the reporting,” said Jacob Walters, communications director for State Auditor Shad White. “We read the article, and Auditor White has ordered an investigation to begin yesterday morning, when we became aware of the story.”Mr. White’s office can investigate potential misuse of government resources and file lawsuits to recoup taxpayer money. It does not have the authority to file criminal charges, but Mr. Walters said the office had alerted federal prosecutors to the allegations.Sheriff Bailey did not respond on Friday to requests for comment.In a statement issued late Thursday to some local media outlets, officials at the sheriff’s department acknowledged that Sheriff Bailey had sent inmates from the Rankin County jail to work at his mother’s farm, but said the inmates were always paid.Mississippi State Auditor Shad White speaking at the Neshoba County Fair in 2022.Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayWe 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

A federal appeals court sided on Friday with President Trump’s drive to bring agencies with some independence more directly under his control, ruling that the president was within his rights to fire the heads of two administrative boards that review employment actions and labor disputes.The decision cripples one of the bodies that might stand in Mr. Trump’s way as he slashes and reshapes the government, an agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board that reviews federal employment disputes, just as it is deluged with cases from the firings of thousands of federal workers.It also effectively paralyzes the other body, the National Labor Relations Board, in another blow to unions the day after Mr. Trump moved to end collective bargaining agreements for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.More broadly, the decision was an endorsement of Mr. Trump’s expansive view of executive powers in a case that many legal observers believe is headed for the Supreme Court. A final ruling there could put agencies across the government that Congress intended to be separate from the White House under the president’s control.By a 2-to-1 vote, the ruling on Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed two district court decisions that had reinstated Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne A. Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board while their cases play out. Mr. Trump fired Ms. Wilcox in January and Ms. Harris in February. Both women argued that they had been improperly terminated.“The government contends that the president suffers irreversible harm each day the district courts’ injunctions remain in effect because he is deprived of the constitutional authority vested in him alone. I agree,” Judge Justin Walker wrote in the opinion. Judge Walker was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020. Judge Karen L. Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, also sided with the government.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