Aurelia Butler

The work stoppage has forced a cancellation of the Verdi Requiem performances.Amid the San Francisco Symphony’s financial troubles, the orchestra’s chorus members on Thursday went on strike, forcing a cancellation of the upcoming performances of Verdi’s Requiem.More than 150 musicians and patrons joined the chorus on picket lines, which started Thursday evening in front of Davies Symphony Hall, just before the Verdi concert was to begin.“Management has repeatedly failed to show how targeting the Symphony’s internationally acclaimed Choristers will solve their alleged financial issues,” said Ned Hanlon, the president of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the chorus union members. “We urge management to immediately return to the bargaining table and work toward a real solution that honors the work of these dedicated artists and gets everyone back to creating beautiful music.”Matthew Spivey, the orchestra’s chief executive officer, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. He recently told The New York Times that the orchestra has been “living beyond our means,” having struggled for years with deficits, a shrinking donor base and the decline of the old subscription model of season tickets.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the symphony’s music director, declined through a spokesman to comment.Despite the orchestra’s endowment fund, valued at about $315 million — one of the largest of any ensemble in the United States — the union has said that management pushed “for unsustainable and disproportionate cuts to the Chorus.” More

Democrats had argued that Ms. Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, was ineligible because the party had failed to submit a required statement.The Supreme Court said on Friday that it would not restore the Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, to the Nevada ballot in the coming election. Democrats had challenged her eligibility, saying her party had submitted flawed paperwork.The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is typical when it acts on emergency applications. There were no noted dissents.The Nevada Supreme Court ruled this month that the Green Party’s failure to submit a sworn statement required by state regulations meant that its candidates could not appear on the ballot. The party acknowledged the lapse but said it had relied on instructions from a state election official.The party was represented in the Supreme Court by Jay Sekulow, who has served as a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump.In response to an inquiry from the party in July, an official sent what she said were the required forms, saying “please use the documents attached to begin collecting signatures.”The party submitted the required number of signatures, and election officials placed its candidates on the ballot after they verified a sampling of the signatures. The Nevada Democratic Party sued, saying the Green Party had failed to supply a sworn statement that the signatures were believed to be from voters registered in the counties in which they lived.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 planned “explosion event” in Los Angeles by the artist Cai Guo-Qiang left several injured and others shaken.The Getty museum this week found itself having to apologize for the “explosion event” by the artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum after it left several people injured by falling debris and many others shaken by the sound and smoke.“We’re aware of a few people who were hit by some kind of falling debris, and it was really loud, and we’re really sorry there were people who were freaked out by how loud and smoky it was,” Katherine E. Fleming, the president of the Getty Trust, said in a telephone interview, adding that appropriate procedures had been followed for stadium events and that city officials had been notified in advance.The fireworks display on Sept. 15 — which the Getty had said in an earlier news release would “recall the myth of Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods” — marked the start of PST Art, a $20 million, Getty-funded museum collaboration which this year is focused on art and science.The Getty did not specify how many people were injured or to what extent. “Unfortunately, pieces of debris fell on some people. We know a few of them required first aid,” a spokeswoman told The Art Newspaper in an email. “Of course this is distressing to us, and we have expressed our concern to the people for whom we have contact information.”Calls to the Los Angeles Fire Department and police were not immediately returned.Some people in the area were also highly disturbed by the loud noise. “It sounded like bombs dropping in the neighborhood,” one resident told CNN.Carol Cheh, a Los Angeles arts writer, added that in the “times that we live in” it was understandable that people were rattled. “Here we are setting off massive explosions with a ton of smoke and no explanation in a major city,” she said.For Cai’s show, “WE ARE,” more than 4,000 people on the stadium’s playing field watched fireworks shells on bamboo sticks explode with drone-launched pyrotechnics overhead, a type of fireworks that began to be approved this year. Cai narrated the event from a podium on the sidelines with an A.I.-assisted translator.Cai, who designed the pyrotechnics for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, had worked on the Los Angeles display with an artificial intelligence program developed by his studio. “I’m thinking about a celebration of the hopes and successes of the human civilization,” he told The Times in July, “and I’m having A.I. play a role as my collaborator to help tell the story.” More

Attorneys for 37 women said they would sue Harrods, the luxury department store, over the rape and sexual assault they say its former owner committed.Lawyers representing dozens of women who have detailed harrowing allegations of sexual assault by Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, said on Friday that they would launch a civil case against the luxury British department store for allegedly enabling his abuse.At a news conference on Friday, a day after a bombshell BBC documentary and podcast laid out a pattern of sexual violence and rape of female employees during the time that Mr. al-Fayed owned the store, lawyers for at least 37 women said Harrods had “acquiesced to” an unsafe environment that had failed the alleged victims. About 20 of those women looked on from the audience.Mr. al-Fayed, who died last year at 94, was a billionaire tycoon who owned the iconic store from 1985 to 2010.“We will say it plainly, Mohamed al-Fayed was a monster,” said Dean Armstrong, one of the lawyers, adding, “But he was a monster enabled by a system, a system that pervaded Harrods.”Mr. al-Fayed was “enabled by unsafe systems of work which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and, we say, facilitated during his chairmanship,” Mr. Armstrong said.Harrods, which is now owned by the state of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, issued a statement shortly after the documentary was released on Thursday, saying it was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”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

Donald J. Trump’s advisers knew they had a problem in North Carolina. What they were frantically trying to learn was how big it would be.Word had reached the former president’s high command on Thursday that a “bad” story was coming about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican running for governor in the must-win state of North Carolina.Mr. Trump’s inner circle was not in possession of the full details before the story was published on CNN’s website, but they knew the bar for what would qualify as a “bad” story for Mr. Robinson was high. The candidate had already quoted a statement attributed to Adolf Hitler and mocked the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting, and Mr. Trump’s advisers had recently started seeking distance from Mr. Robinson.The Trump team had heard the CNN story had something to do with pornographic websites and the phrase “Black Nazi,” according to two people with direct knowledge of the internal discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.Former President Donald J. Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Israeli American Council National Summit.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesIt didn’t help that at the same time they were waiting on the self-identifying Nazi story to come out, Mr. Trump was attending events in Washington, D.C., designed to promote his support for the state of Israel and the Jewish people. It also didn’t help that just months ago the former president had praised Mr. Robinson, who is Black, as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”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

The Georgia State Election Board is set to vote on Friday on a package of nearly a dozen rules that would change the way elections are conducted amid growing pressure from almost every level of Georgia state government advising the board that it is operating outside of its legal authority.The rules under consideration include conservative policy goals like introducing hand-counting of ballots and expanding access for partisan poll watchers. The proposals come just 45 days before the election, after poll workers have been trained and ballots have been mailed to overseas voters.On Thursday, the attorney general’s office took the rare step of weighing in on the proposed rules, saying they “very likely exceed the board’s statutory authority.”The fight comes as the election board is under increasing pressure from critics already concerned that it has been rewriting the rules of the game in a key swing state to favor former President Donald J. Trump, including potentially disrupting certification of the election if Mr. Trump loses in November. Last month, the board granted local officials new power over the election-certification process, a change that opponents say could sow chaos.Elizabeth Young, a senior assistant attorney general, characterized five specific new election proposals as either exceeding the board’s legal reach or as an unnecessary redundancy, including the hand-counting proposal.“There are thus no provisions in the statutes cited in support of these proposed rules that permit counting the number of ballots by hand at the precinct level prior to delivery to the election superintendent for tabulation,” Ms. Young wrote in a letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “Accordingly, these proposed rules are not tethered to any statute — and are, therefore, likely the precise type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do.”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

Nigel Farage, a Trump ally and Brexit champion, thinks his Reform U.K. party can become a major political force. At a conference on Friday, he will explain how.A week ago, he was the keynote speaker at a glitzy Chicago dinner for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with a history of denying climate science, where the top tables went for $50,000.On Friday, it was back to the day job for Nigel Farage, the veteran political disrupter, ally of Donald J. Trump and hard right, anti-immigrant activist whose ascent has alarmed both of Britain’s main political parties.In a cavernous exhibition center in Birmingham, in England’s West Midlands, Mr. Farage is set to address supporters of his upstart party, Reform U.K., at its first annual conference since its success in Britain’s July general election. He is expected to lay out a plan to professionalize the party and build support ahead of local elections next year.His ambitions are clear. But the jet-setting lifestyle of Mr. Farage, 60, whose visit to Chicago was his third recent trip to the United States, underscores the question hanging over Reform U.K.: Does its leader have the ability and appetite to build the fledgling party into a credible political force?Mr. Farage, a polarizing, pugnacious figure, is one of Britain’s most effective communicators and had an outsized impact on its politics for two decades before finally being elected to Britain’s Parliament in July. A ferocious critic of the European Union, he championed Brexit and helped pressure Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 referendum.“A fairly strong case can be made that Nigel Farage has been the most important political figure in all the elections of the last decade,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.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

Testing procedure, and perhaps the judge’s patience, the former president’s team sought to short-circuit a process to consider how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.For more than a year, lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have employed aggressive tactics in defending him against two federal indictments.But late Thursday night, the lawyers tested the boundaries of normal legal process — and perhaps the patience of the federal judge overseeing the case in which the former president stands accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election defeat.They used what was supposed to have been a procedural request for more information from prosecutors to demand that the judge strike the charges altogether — or at least remake the carefully considered schedule she set this month for pursuing next steps in the proceeding.“This case should be dismissed,” the lawyers wrote in the first sentence of their 30-page motion to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. “Promptly.”While that sort of blunt assertion might not have been surprising in a filing that was actually meant to seek dismissal, Judge Chutkan had requested only that the lawyers weigh in on a procedural question. They were supposed to provide her with their arguments as to why she should force federal prosecutors led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to give them more discovery information about the charges their client is facing.And yet, as they have done in other cases Mr. Trump is facing, the lawyers sought to repurpose the filing to their client’s own ends, employing the same type of combativeness expressed by Mr. Trump in discussing the charges against 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