Aurelia Butler

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    The Sunday Read: ‘How Analytics Marginalized Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers’

    Listen and follow ‘The Daily’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioOne day at Wrigley Field in Chicago last May, Paul Skenes was pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, carving out a small piece of baseball history in his second big-league game. He struck out the first seven batters he faced. By the end of the fifth inning, he had increased his strikeout total to 10. More impressive, he hadn’t allowed a hit.Over the past two decades, analysts have identified a treasure trove of competitive advantages for teams willing to question baseball’s established practices.Perhaps the most significant of competitive advantages was hidden in plain sight, at the center of the diamond. Starting pitchers were traditionally taught to conserve strength so they could last deep into games. Throwing 300 innings in a season was once commonplace; in 1969 alone, nine pitchers did it. But at some definable point in each game, the data came to reveal, a relief pitcher becomes a more effective option than the starter, even if that starter is Sandy Koufax or Tom Seaver — or Paul Skenes.There are a lot of ways to listen to “The Daily.” Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Frannie Carr Toth, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, and Krish Seenivasan. More

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    Inside the Urgent Fight Over the Trump Administration’s New Deportation Effort

    The push to deport a group of Venezuelans raises questions about whether the government is following a Supreme Court order requiring that migrants receive due process.On Thursday evening, lawyers helping Venezuelan immigrants most at risk of being removed under an 18th-century wartime powers act received an ominous alert: U.S. immigration officials were handing out notices at a detention facility in Texas, informing migrants that they were considered enemies under the law and would be removed from the country.“I am a law enforcement officer authorized to apprehend, restrain and remove alien enemies,” read the notice, a copy of which was filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union. “Accordingly, under the Alien Enemies Act, you have been determined to be an alien enemy subject to apprehension, restraint and removal from the United States.”The notice said the migrant could make a phone call but did not specify to whom. The single-page notice also did not mention any way to appeal the order.The Supreme Court ruled this month that migrants must receive advance notice that they are subject to removal under the rarely invoked wartime powers law — and that they must have an opportunity to challenge their removal in court.News of the notices being handed out at the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, warning of impending deportations prompted a flurry of legal actions by the A.C.L.U. on Friday in several courts. Early Saturday, the Supreme Court stepped in with unusual speed, ruling that no flights could depart.“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the court said. It is unclear when the justices will make a ruling on whether deportation flights can continue.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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    Trump Administration Asks Justices to Reject A.C.L.U. Request to Pause Deportations

    Trump administration lawyers urged the Supreme Court in a court filing Saturday afternoon to reject an emergency request to temporarily block deportations of Venezuelans under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to “dissolve” the administrative stay they had issued early Saturday that blocked the deportations while they considered the application, and to allow lower courts to weigh in before intervening further in the case.The deportations remain paused while the justices consider the matter. In emergency applications, the Supreme Court can act at any time.In his filing, Mr. Sauer called the request by lawyers for the migrants that the justices step in “fatally premature” and argued that they had “improperly skipped over the lower courts.”He said that the government had provided advance notice to detainees subject to imminent deportation and that they “have had adequate time to file” claims challenging their removal. Mr. Sauer added that the government had agreed it would not deport any detainees with pending claims.The 17-page court filing came hours after a rare overnight ruling by the justices, who in a one-page, unsigned order had blocked the Trump administration from deporting the migrants.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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    Mother and Son, 8, Found Dead in Bronx Home With Daughter, 4, Left Alone

    It was not immediately clear how long the two had been dead or how long the younger daughter had been surviving alone in the apartment.A mother and her 8-year-old son were found dead inside their Bronx apartment on Friday night, along with her 4-year-old daughter, who was alive and alone, according to the police and the woman’s family.The woman, 38, whose name has not yet been publicly released but who was identified by her family on Saturday as Lisa Cotton, was discovered at around 8:30 p.m. after the police received a 911 call requesting assistance at her apartment in the Wakefield neighborhood.Upon arrival, police officers found Ms. Cotton and her son — who, according to his uncle, had a disability that inhibited him from walking or eating solid foods — lying unconscious in the apartment, as well as the 4-year-old girl, who was awake.Emergency medical workers arrived shortly after the police and pronounced Ms. Cotton and her son dead, the police said. They transported the girl to the Montefiore Medical Center in Wakefield, where she was in stable condition on Saturday.It was not immediately clear how long Ms. Cotton and her son had been dead before they were discovered, or how long her younger daughter had been surviving alone in the apartment.Neither Ms. Cotton nor her son showed any obvious signs of injury when they were discovered, according to a law enforcement official. The police said the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner was investigating the cause of death on Saturday.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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    Small Plane With 4 Aboard Crashes in Illinois

    The authorities said they were conducting a “fatal aircraft investigation” but did not provide details about the number of people who died.A small plane with four people on board crashed in a field beside a roadway in rural Illinois on Saturday morning, officials said.The authorities did not say how many people died in the crash, but the Illinois State Police said that it was “an active and ongoing fatal aircraft investigation.”The plane crashed around 10:15 a.m. in Trilla, which is about 65 miles south of Champaign. Airplane debris was scattered on the roadway, which was closed several hours after the crash, the State Police said.The plane, a single-engine Cessna 180, crashed about a dozen miles from Coles County Memorial Airport in Mattoon, Ill., the Federal Aviation Administration said.The F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating. It was unknown whether anyone on the ground was injured.“We keep those impacted by the plane crash in our thoughts today,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said on social media. “Thank you to the first responders who rushed to the scene.”In the last week, small plane crashes have killed at least nine people.On Friday night, a small plane crashed into a river in eastern Nebraska, killing three people on board, officials said. On April 12, a small twin-engine plane crashed in a muddy field in New York, killing all six people on board.Flying remains the safest mode of transportation, experts say, but an unusual spate of crashes involving commercial airliners at the start of the year has raised travelers’ anxieties about flying. More

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    An Urgent Supreme Court Order Protecting Migrants Was Built for Speed

    There are sculptures of tortoises scattered around the Supreme Court grounds. They symbolize, the court’s website says, “the slow and steady pace of justice.”But the court can move fast when it wants to, busting through protocols and conventions. It did so around 1 a.m. on Saturday, blocking the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.The court’s unsigned, one-paragraph order was extraordinary in many ways. Perhaps most important, it indicated a deep skepticism about whether the administration could be trusted to live up to the key part of an earlier ruling after the government had deported a different group of migrants to a prison in El Salvador.That unsigned and apparently unanimous ruling, issued April 7, said that detainees were entitled to be notified if the government intended to deport them under the law, “within a reasonable time,” and in a way that would allow the deportees to challenge the move in court before their removal.There were indications late Friday that the administration was poised to violate both the spirit and letter of that ruling. Lawyers for the detainees said their clients were given notices that they were eligible to be deported under the law, the Alien Enemies Act. The notices were written in English, a language many of them do not speak, the lawyers said. And they provided no realistic opportunity to go to court.The American Civil Liberties Union, racing against the clock, filed its emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday evening — Good Friday, as it happened — and urged the court to take immediate action to protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action.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 Timeline of the Trump Administration’s Use of the Alien Enemies Act

    In the 36 days since President Trump invoked a powerful wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of gang membership, a complex and high-risk legal battle has played out in the federal courts.The Supreme Court has weighed in twice, issuing orders limiting the government’s use of the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The court’s latest order, which came around 1 a.m. on Saturday, blocked the deportations of Venezuelans held in Texas hours after the American Civil Liberties Union said the Trump administration was preparing to expel them without due process.At times, the Trump administration has been accused of disregarding judicial orders as it proceeds with its immigration policies and deportation efforts, deepening legal scholars’ concern that the country could be facing a constitutional crisis.Here is a timeline:March 14: The Trump administration issued an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act, but the order was not immediately made public. The proclamation said that the government was targeting the violent Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua, which it said was threatening an invasion of the United States. The Alien Enemies Act allows the government to detain and expel immigrants age 14 or older without a court hearing when the United States is invaded or at war. It is the fourth time the law has been invoked in American history.March 15: Fearing that the Trump administration was preparing to immediately expel Venezuelans in custody without hearings, the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking to block the president from invoking the law. The same day, the administration published the executive order. In a hastily scheduled virtual hearing, a federal judge in Washington, James E. Boasberg, was told by the A.C.L.U. that planes were leaving the United States with Venezuelans. He ordered the government not to deport anyone under the law and to return any planes that had already taken off, “however that’s accomplished.”March 16: On social media, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, published a video of men being led off a plane in handcuffs and taken into a prison in his country. Mr. Bukele posted an article about Judge Boasberg’s order and wrote, “Oopsie… Too late.” The Trump administration insisted it did not violate Judge Boasberg’s order. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement that federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over the president’s handling of foreign affairs.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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    Barbara Lee Wins Oakland Mayor’s Race in Her Return Home

    The former congresswoman, a progressive Democrat, campaigned on a promise to unite residents in the beleaguered California city. Her challenger, Loren Taylor, conceded on Saturday.Barbara Lee, a progressive lawmaker known for her lone vote against military force after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, won the mayor’s race in Oakland, Calif., less than four months after she retired from a decades-long congressional career.Oakland, a city of about 436,000 residents across the bay from San Francisco, has struggled to bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, and frustrated voters last year recalled Mayor Sheng Thao after she had served less than two years in office. Ms. Lee, 78, was seen in the city as a trusted and experienced voice who could stabilize Oakland and help guide it out of crisis.Her rival, Loren Taylor, a former member of the City Council who ran as more of a moderate, conceded on Saturday after a dayslong vote-counting process. Mr. Taylor, 47, had gained traction with his detailed plan for improving Oakland, and appealed to voters who said they were increasingly fed up with crime and governance problems in the city.In the latest vote tally, Mr. Taylor trailed Ms. Lee by more than 4,700 votes, a gap that is unlikely to be closed by the remaining ballots. Mr. Taylor has received 45 percent of the vote and Ms. Lee 50 percent.After Mr. Taylor’s concession, Ms. Lee said she would address the most pressing problems in Oakland, working to unite a deeply divided city. “I accept your choice with a deep sense of responsibility, humility and love,” she said in a statement. Mr. Taylor said he hoped that Ms. Lee would fulfill her commitment to bring Oakland together by listening to those who had voted for 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