Aurelia Butler

Karen Dunn, who is preparing the vice president for next week’s clash, has trained Democrats for debates in every election since 2008. Her approach, as Hillary Clinton put it, is “tough love.”Vice President Kamala Harris has never met or spoken with former President Donald J. Trump, but the woman running her debate preparations has spent a lot of time thinking about how to respond to what Republican nominees say during an onstage clash.That outside Harris adviser, Karen L. Dunn, a high-powered Washington lawyer, has trained Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates for debates in every election since 2008.She is described by candidates she has coached and other people who have worked with her as a skilled handler of high-ego politicians. By all accounts, she possesses the rare ability to tell them what they are doing wrong and how to fix it — and how to inject humor and humanity to sell themselves to voters watching the debate.“It’s a combination of tough love,” Hillary Clinton, whom Ms. Dunn helped prepare for presidential debates in 2008 and 2016, said in an interview on Thursday. “She’s unafraid to say, ‘That’s not going to work’ or ‘That doesn’t make sense’ or ‘You can do better.’ But she also offers encouragement, like, ‘Look, I think you’re on the right track here’ and ‘You just need to do more of that.’”The emergence of Ms. Dunn as the leader of Ms. Harris’s debate team comes at a critical moment in both the presidential race and Ms. Dunn’s professional life.When she is not preparing top Democrats for debates — in addition to her four previous cycles of involvement at the presidential and vice-presidential level, she has worked with Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Cory Booker of New Jersey — Ms. Dunn is a top lawyer for some of America’s leading technology firms.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

Some N.F.L. players called Brazil dangerous ahead of the league’s first game in South America on Friday. Statistics show their home city is deadlier.“I do not want to go to Brazil.”To National Football League executives, who have worked for years to bring Friday night’s opening-weekend game to Brazil, the comment from Philadelphia Eagles player Darius Slay on his podcast last week had already gotten off to a bad start.Then it got worse.“They already told us not to leave the hotel,” he continued. “The crime rate is crazy. You know what I’m saying? I’m like, N.F.L., why do you all want to send us somewhere with a crime rate this high?”He had told his family to stay home, he added, and hoped he would make it home safely. Because “boy, they’re talking about it is crazy down there.”Slay was not the only Eagles player concerned. AJ Brown, a wide receiver, told reporters he planned to stay in his hotel room after the team had given players a long list of “don’t do’s” for Brazil. The list included “a lot, honestly,” he said. “Even as simple as just walking down the street with your phone in your hand.”What the Eagles staff apparently did not mention: Philadelphia is far deadlier than São Paulo.Last year, São Paulo registered 4.2 murders per 100,000 people, one of the lowest rates in Brazil. In Philadelphia, the murder rate was six times as high, at 26.1 per 100,000 people, even surpassing the murder rate of 23.1 across Brazil, according to the Homicide Monitor, a database of government statistics from the Igarapé Institute, a research institute that studies security.Philadelphia Eagles players arriving at São Paulo International airport on Wednesday. The team was reportedly given a long list of “don’t do’s” for Brazil.Andre Penner/Associated PressWe 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 father of the 14-year-old accused of killing four people at his Georgia high school was arrested and charged on Thursday with two counts of second-degree murder in connection with the attack, the state’s Bureau of Investigation said.The father, Colin Gray, 54, was also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, officials said at a news conference on Thursday night.The charges against Mr. Gray are “directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, the bureau director, said at the news conference. He declined to provide details, including what evidence had given the authorities probable cause to charge Mr. Gray in the attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga.Earlier on Thursday, Charlie Polhamus, the teenager’s maternal grandfather, said he believed his grandson was responsible for what happened, but he also cast some of the blame on the tumult in the teenager’s home life with his father, who had split from Mr. Polhamus’s daughter. “My grandson did what he did because of the environment that he lived in,” Mr. Polhamus said. When investigators looking into an online threat spoke to Mr. Gray last year, he said he had been teaching his son, then 13, about hunting and guns to divert his attention from video games. The teenager denied making the threat to “shoot up a middle school” and claimed his account on the social media platform Discord had been hacked, according to a transcript of the May 2023 interview.Mr. Gray told the investigator that he had often discussed “all the school shootings, things that happen.” He also suggested that he had emphasized the dangers of using a firearm.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 excessive heat worldwide suggests the full year will also be a record-breaker, according to Copernicus, the E.U. agency that tracks global warming.The summer of “brat,” the Paris Olympics and political conventions may be winding down, but the heat in 2024 is still going strong.The southwestern United States’ sizzling triple-digit temperatures this week mark the tail end of the hottest summer on record, according to a new European climate report.“We know that the warming of the planet leads to more intense and extreme climate events, and what we’ve seen this summer has been no exception,” said Julien Nicolas, a climatologist with the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that published the assessment on Wednesday.Since 2018, the agency has been combining data like weather observations from balloons and satellites with computer models that simulate temperature and precipitation to get a picture of what’s happening around the world. It pairs that picture with past weather conditions reconstructed back to 1940 to compute a global average temperature.June and August were the hottest June and August on record, according to the models, while July is not quite as clear.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in the United States, found that this July was three-hundredths of a Celsius degree hotter than July 2023, while Copernicus determined it was a few hundredths of a degree cooler than last year. For all practical purposes, that created a virtual tie, according to Karin Gleason of NOAA, speaking recently about her department’s findings.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

Adrian Johnson opens our solving weekend.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — Let’s talk about stacks. But not just any stack; I want to talk about crossword stacks.Crossword stacks occur when constructors deftly pile entries on top of one another. There’s nothing unusual about that on the surface — the whole point of an American-style crossword is that the entries touch one another — but stacks are different. The entries are mostly the same length. Stacks should contain entries that are lively, and crossing answers should, at the very least, avoid junky fill or crosswordese.That’s not as easy as it looks. If you’ve ever tried to solve a crossword puzzle, you’ve no doubt run into an unfillable spot, or at least a spot where you try to rationalize to yourself that of course there is something called a qvorsk. Everyone knows that word, right?Adrian Johnson, who constructed today’s crossword, built a triple stack in the center of his grid, and not only does it work well, but it stretches across the entire puzzle. Let’s see if his stack fits our standard without spoiling any of the entries. Remember that this is all subjective, but the following is my opinion.Are all three entries lively? Yes, they are. 39A and 40A may sparkle a bit more than 32A, but then again I’ve always been a sucker for verbalizations.Does the stack contain any junk or crosswordese? Not to me. All of the crossing entries are pretty interesting, and there are no obscure words, abbreviations or acronyms. The answer at 37D is about as close to junk as these Down answers get, but I don’t think it crosses the line into crosswordese.There was a mercifully brief period in the early 2010s when a group of constructors decided to compete informally to see whose stacks were the largest. The winner was Joe Krozel, who holds the New York Times record with a quintuple stack that left all those puny quadruples in the dust. Of course, stacks can run Down as well as Across, and there were 13 quadruple-doubles, where each grid contained four sets of stacked 15-letter entries (two Across and two Down), but that’s really getting into the weeds.These days, stacks have assumed what I consider their appropriate place in puzzle making: They are nice if they are well executed, but I don’t necessarily go looking for them. I did appreciate Mr. Johnson’s stack, though.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

Two brothers from Nigeria helped run an online sextortion operation that prosecutors said resulted in the death of a high school student.A federal judge in Michigan on Thursday sentenced two brothers from Nigeria to 17 and a half years in prison for their roles in a social media sextortion scheme that claimed more than 100 victims across the United States and resulted in the death of a high school student.The brothers, Samuel Ogoshi, 24, and Samson Ogoshi, 21, who each pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy to exploit minors, will be on supervised release for five years after completing their prison terms, prosecutors said in a news release.The brothers, who are from Lagos, Nigeria, were extradited to the United States from Nigeria in August 2023 after they were indicted in November 2022.The extradition marked a new chapter in cooperation with Nigerian authorities in extraditing perpetrators of this kind of scam. Last month, the Justice Department announced the extradition of two other Nigerian nationals on similar charges in Pennsylvania.A third defendant in the case, Ezekiel Robert, is pending extradition from Nigeria, prosecutors said.The brothers were sentenced in a case involving a popular relatively new scam the authorities call financial sextortion, in which scammers pose as young women on social media and send flirty messages to young men and teenage boys before soliciting nude photographs that they then hold as ransom.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

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Thursday capped two days of crisscrossing Pennsylvania, talking up Vice President Kamala Harris’s experience, taking shots at former President Donald J. Trump and making his now familiar pleas to voters that they fight for freedom with optimism.“Look, it would be easier if we didn’t have to do this. It would be easier if these guys wouldn’t undermine our system, if they wouldn’t lie about elections, if they wouldn’t put women’s health at risk. But they are, so it’s a privilege for us to do the fight,” he said in Erie, Pa., where he stumped from a stage at the edge of Presque Isle Bay before hundreds of cheering supporters waving “Coach” and “Kamala” signs.The appearance was one of several events that Mr. Walz used to blitz the local media airwaves and fire up Democratic volunteers with the Midwestern dad charm that his party is banking on to help draw white working-class voters. Mr. Walz, and his daughter, Hope, hit several cities in counties that went for Mr. Trump in 2016 — stung by fading American manufacturing and a difficult economy.The shooting this week at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., added urgency to his message at the Erie rally and at local Democratic offices, where he stressed it was in voters’ power to elect leaders willing to pass gun-safety laws, tackle climate change and ensure freedom in health decisions.“I say it as a gun owner; I say it as a veteran; I say it as a hunter: none of the things we’re proposing infringes on your Second Amendment right. But what does infringe upon this is our children going to school and being killed,” he said at a Harris-Walz field office in Erie. “It is unacceptable, and it doesn’t have to be this way. So we end that with our votes. We end it with a vision of a better America.”Onstage later, he recalled sitting with the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut when he was still a member of Congress and a cardholder of the National Rifle Association. “I think about it — today, my son, this week, started his senior year of high school,” Mr. Walz said. “And it’s bittersweet for me because those killed at Sandy Hook would have been entering their senior year, too.”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 concern over restrictions on some payments raises uncertainty on whether a landmark agreement on compensating athletes can be reached and approved.A federal judge on Thursday rejected a key element of a proposed $2.8 billion settlement of an antitrust lawsuit against the N.C.A.A. and the major athletic conferences, throwing into uncertainty an agreement that had been largely seen as ushering in a new era in college sports.The judge, Claudia A. Wilken, said in a hearing that she was troubled by a provision that would restrict payments to athletes from booster-run collectives, groups of donors that funnel millions of dollars to athletes at schools they support. Although the proposed agreement would allow schools to pay their athletes up to about $20 million per year, she thought some athletes would make less money under the new deal.“Some people getting large amounts will no longer be able to get them,” she told lawyers for the N.C.A.A. and the plaintiffs, essentially a group of thousands of athletes, who had come to an agreement in the lawsuit House v. N.C.A.A. “That’s my concern.”But Rakesh Kilaru, the N.C.A.A. lawyer, said there would be no deal without a provision that allowed the N.C.A.A. to prohibit third-party payments that they saw as pay-for-play compensation under the guise of fair-market endorsement deals.“For us, it’s an essential part of the deal,” he said.Judge Wilken also expressed reservations about another key component of the deal: capping the amount that schools could pay athletes. She also told Mr. Kilaru and the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Jeffrey Kessler and Steve Berman, to report back to her in three weeks with a revised agreement. If they could not, she would be prepared to set a trial date in the case, which charges that the N.C.A.A. and the five major conferences withheld name, image and license revenue.This is a developing story. Check back for updates. More