Aurelia Butler

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    How Rupert Murdoch Could Fight Back After a Big Legal Defeat

    Rupert Murdoch lost a bid to rewrite a family trust to give his son Lachlan control of his empire after he dies. But the nonagenarian media titan plans to appeal.Rupert Murdoch failed in his attempt to give sole control of his media empire to Lachlan, his eldest son.Emily Najera for The New York TimesMurdoch’s next move Rupert Murdoch has lost his bid to hand control over his media company to his elder son, Lachlan Murdoch, after he dies. A Nevada commissioner ruled against his attempt to modify the terms of a family trust that would have stripped three of his other children of their voting rights over his empire.The media mogul, who plans to appeal the ruling, is used to getting his way, The Times’s Edmund Lee writes for DealBook. Now what?A recap: Under the current arrangement, when Murdoch dies, four of his children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — will have an equal say in what happens next because they will inherit his voting shares.But Elisabeth and James have different political leanings from Lachlan and their father, and James has indirectly criticized how Fox News operates. The three siblings contested the attempts to change the trust.This was perhaps the last maneuver of Murdoch’s seven-decade career. The 93-year-old wanted to give Lachlan control over his news outlets — which include Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain — to maintain their right-leaning slant.Fox News stars have been instrumental in helping President-elect Donald Trump through his three presidential campaigns.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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    Protests in Kenya Demand Action Over a Spate of Brutal Murders of Women

    Almost 100 women have been killed in the span of three months, the police say. Rights groups want President William Ruto to declare femicide a national crisis.A university student was murdered, and her body dumped in a field. A long-distance Olympic runner died after she was severely burned in a gasoline attack. And a mother, her daughter and her niece were tortured and then killed, their mutilated bodies disposed of in different locations.A series of brutal murders in Kenya in recent months, documented by the police and human rights groups, has stunned a nation where anger over violence against women and girls has prompted nationwide protests. Calls are intensifying for the authorities to do more to stop the killings.The police say that 97 women were murdered from August to October this year, a staggering toll even in Kenya, where femicide has long been endemic. In July, sacks containing the body parts of women believed to have been murdered by a serial killer were discovered in a dump in the capital, Nairobi.On Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Nairobi, demanding that the government take action to stop the killings. Smaller protests also took place in other towns and cities across the country, human rights groups said.In Nairobi, police tear-gassed demonstrators who had been chanting, “Stop killing women” and, “Women have rights, too.” At least three activists, including the executive director of Amnesty International Kenya, were detained, according to a statement by several rights groups.The outpouring of rage reflected the helplessness felt by many women in Kenya, and the desire to get justice for those who have been killed.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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    Map: 5.8-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Nevada

    Shake intensity Note: Map shows the area with a shake intensity of 3 or greater, which U.S.G.S. defines as “weak,” though the earthquake may be felt outside the areas shown. The New York Times More

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    Luigi Mangione, Suspect in CEO Killing, Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise

    The suspect, Luigi Mangione, was an Ivy League tech graduate from a prominent Maryland family who in recent months had suffered physical and psychic pain.Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing, and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.Mr. Mangione, who faces a variety of charges related to the gun and fake ID, has not been charged in connection with the killing. But the authorities have said that he is a “person of interest” in the killing, and in the hours since his apprehension his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect has begun to come into focus.Mr. Mangione was in regular contact with friends and family until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering the effects of a painful back injury, friends said, but then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends: Had anyone heard from him?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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    NYT Crossword Answers for Dec. 10, 2024

    Brian Callahan and Geoffrey Schorkopf have their first Times collaboration.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTUESDAY PUZZLE — If your goal is to get better at solving crosswords, you might want to start by practicing a form of exercise named at 33D of today’s grid: HATHA YOGA. It’ll help you keep calm when you first open a Thursday or Sunday grid.On a more sincere note, though, I make the suggestion because hatha and other forms of yoga tend to involve inversions like shoulder stands, headstands and handstands. The benefits of these poses are manifold: Inversions can not only regulate mood and heart rate, but also give one a fresh vantage from which to see the world. What things look like upside down can be drastically different from how they appear right-side up.Today’s crossword, constructed by Brian Callahan and Geoffrey Schorkopf, is a perfect occasion for a few yogic inversions. Practicing one while solving may even help you spot the puzzle’s theme. Let’s flip the page together, shall we?Today’s ThemeWhen themed answers are nested inside other entries, constructors will often shade or circle the relevant squares. Here, a title for [Some movie set workers] (14D) doubles as a way to describe what we do by filling in the shaded squares. After solving the clues in which the squares appear, we have, from left to right: AYOG, TMILK, ORIM and EELK. Perfectly (in)coherent.The movie-set workers are MAKEUP ARTISTS — and if we read this title as three separate words, we get MAKE UP ARTISTS. At first, I thought this meant that we were inventing (i.e. making up) names for artists — doesn’t T Milk sound like a rap sibling of T-Pain? — but I doubted that this passed muster for a puzzle theme. Then I saw what was actually going on.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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    That Manhunt Photo Looks Like a Loved One. Do You Have to Tell?

    If someone you know is the subject of a nationwide manhunt and the authorities are desperately trying to learn the person’s name, are you under any legal obligation to come forward with it?The answer is, in a word, no.“There’s no legal duty to report,” said Rachel Barkow, a professor at New York University Law School. “That’s why they offer rewards, to try to entice people to do it.”The New York Police Department offered $10,000 for information about the killing of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan last week. The F.B.I. posted a $50,000 reward.Photos of the man with distinctive eyebrows wanted in connection with the killing were circulated by the police and viewed by millions of Americans, making it likely that at least a few people who saw them recognized the subject.Ms. Barkow said it can be illegal to harbor a wanted felon, and some people are mandated to report if they learn of certain crimes — like teachers who are required to report child abuse.There is also a federal offense called “misprision of felony,” which requires someone who has “knowledge of the actual commission” of a federal felony to report that felony to the authorities.But the killing of Mr. Thompson is likely to be prosecuted under New York State law, not federally, and New York has no such reporting requirement.In any event, knowing the identity of someone who is believed to have committed a crime is not the same as knowing that the person committed the crime. In such situations, average citizens — including the suspect’s family and friends — are free to keep their mouths shut.“We might have moral objections to people who don’t do things,” Ms. Barkow said, “but they’re not subject to criminal prosecution.” More

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    Trump Picks Strident Supporter for Civil Rights Post at Justice Dept.

    President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he would nominate Harmeet K. Dhillon, a California lawyer who has long championed Mr. Trump in public, in court cases and on social media, to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.In declaring his choice on social media, Mr. Trump said Ms. Dhillon “has stood up consistently to protect our cherished civil liberties.” He praised her legal work targeting social media companies, restrictions on religious gatherings during the pandemic and “corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”Ms. Dhillon has been a conservative activist so devoted to Mr. Trump that she was willing to attack not only Democrats but also fellow Republicans, including her ultimately unsuccessful challenge last year to the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee at the time.She was also the co-chairwoman in 2020 of a group, Lawyers for Trump, that challenged the results of that year’s presidential election.It is not unusual for Republican administrations to significantly scale back the work in the Civil Rights Division. In Ms. Dhillon, however, Mr. Trump has chosen a lawyer active in the culture wars whose firm specializes in championing the right’s causes.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Ms. Dhillon posted on social media. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by” Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s choice for attorney general.The division, which enforces voting rights laws, investigates police departments and brings charges for violations of people’s civil rights, is spending the final days of the Biden administration finishing as much work as possible on cases involving patterns or practices of police misconduct.Earlier on Monday, the division announced findings highly critical of the police department in Worcester, Mass. Such findings, however, may not amount to much, given that those investigations will soon be handed over to the Trump administration.During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department walked away from several high-profile cases involving misconduct by major city police departments, and lawyers who specialize in such cases have said they expect the second Trump administration to do much the same. More

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    Syrians, in Shock and With Some Unease, Celebrate the Fall of al-Assad

    A day after the regime of President Bashar al-Assad fell, civilians poured into the streets of Damascus, weeping in disbelief. Many sought word of relatives held in a notorious prison on the outskirts of the city.Syrian security checkpoints sat empty on Monday across Damascus. Abandoned tanks were scattered across the roads, along with stray pieces of military uniforms stripped off by soldiers when opposition forces stormed into the city a day earlier.Rebels with rifles slung over their shoulders drove around, many seemingly shocked at just how quickly they had ousted Syria’s long-entrenched president, Bashar al-Assad. Damascus residents, too, were walking around the city’s streets in a state of disbelief.Some rushed to a notorious prison on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital, desperate to find loved ones who had disappeared under Mr. al-Assad’s brutal reign. Others clambered on top of cars and screamed curses at the Assad family, words that days ago could have meant a death sentence.By day’s end, with Mr. al-Assad and his family having fled on a plane to his ally Russia, thousands of Syrians had converged at Umayyad Square in the city center to revel in the fall of the regime and their newfound, if uncertain, sense of freedom.“We’re shocked; all of us are just shocked,” one woman, Shahnaz Sezad, 50, said. “It’s as if we’re all coming back to life after a nightmare.”She watched, tears welling up, as a scene unimaginable just days ago played out in front of her. One rebel shouted into a microphone: “The Syrian people want to execute Bashar! The Syrian people want to execute Bashar!” A deafening “paw-paw-paw” of gunfire sounded as others shot into the air.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