Aurelia Butler

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    Manchester Arena Bomber’s Brother Is Accused of Attack on Prison Guards

    Hashem Abedi allegedly stabbed the officers with homemade weapons inside a high-security prison.The brother of the terrorist who bombed an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, in 2017 was accused on Saturday of launching a violent attack inside a high-security jail where he was serving time for his own role in the concert bombing.The Prison Officers’ Association, a body representing prison staff across Britain, said the man, Hashem Abedi, 28, attacked three guards at Frankland Prison, a jail in County Durham in northeast England. The officers received “burns, scalds and stab wounds” during the attack, the association said.A statement from the organization said that Mr. Abedi “threw hot cooking oil over them then produced homemade weapons and proceeded to stab the officers.”A spokesperson for the country’s prison service said that, as of 4 p.m. on Saturday, one officer, a woman, had been treated for her injuries at a hospital and then had been discharged. Two male officers remained in the hospital.In 2020, Mr. Abedi was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 55 years for his part in the 2017 attack in Manchester. The Islamic State terrorist group claimed responsibility for the bombing, which was the deadliest terror attack in Britain since a series of bombings that struck public transport across London in 2005.Mr. Abedi was convicted of murdering the 22 victims who died in the blast after prosecutors said he was “just as responsible” as his brother, Salman Abedi, who died in the attack. British law did not permit a judge to give Mr. Abedi a life sentence without parole, because he was under the age of 21 at the time of the attack.In a statement about Saturday’s attack, the prison service said: “Police are now investigating, so it would be inappropriate to comment further. Violence in prison will not be tolerated, and we will always push for the strongest punishment for attacks on our hardworking staff.”The attack is being investigated by the Durham Constabulary, which said its inquiries were ongoing.Police officers on guard in 2017, a few days after 22 people were killed and dozens more injured in a bombing at Britain’s Manchester Arena during an Ariana Grande concert.Andrew Testa for The New York Times More

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    How Much Vaccination Stops a Measles Outbreak?

    <!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Just how many? To let you discover for yourself, we simulated an outbreak of a hypothetical disease, about as contagious as the flu. (A lot less contagious than measles.)–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>We’d like you to contain it. But first, some basics:–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–>Here’s a sick person in a […] More

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    At Least One Dead After Private Plane Crashes in Upstate New York

    The plane, a Mitsubishi MU-2B carrying two passengers, went down Saturday in the town of Copake close to the Massachusetts border, according to the authorities.A plane crashed in a field on Saturday near the town of Copake, N.Y., leaving at least one dead, according to the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office.The plane, a Mitsubishi MU-2B bound for Columbia County Airport near Hudson, N.Y., was carrying two passengers and crashed a little after noon, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.The aircraft went down near Two Town Road and did not damage any structures, Undersheriff Jacqueline Salvatore told reporters at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. Ms. Salvatore did not say how many people had been killed or if there were any survivors. The two passengers have not been identified.A private plane of the same model departed Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y., shortly after 11:30 a.m., flying north toward Hudson before turning east at about noon, according to the tracking site Flightradar24. Minutes later, the craft disappeared from the site near Copake, a small town bordering Taconic State Park near the Massachusetts border.That plane was registered to a company based outside Boston, according to F.A.A. records.Ms. Salvatore said that, in addition to officers from the sheriff’s department, personnel from the New York State Police and a local fire department responded to the scene. Law enforcement officials received a 911 call about the crash at around noon, she said.At that time, the weather in the area was mostly mild, with overcast skies and wind gusts up to 26 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service.Snow and moisture on the ground were hampering response efforts, Ms. Salvatore said.“It’s in the middle of a field and it’s pretty muddy, so accessibility is difficult,” she said.It was not immediately clear Saturday afternoon what had caused the plane to crash, Ms. Salvatore said, but local law enforcement planed to conduct interviews in the neighborhood to learn more.The F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety Board are also investigating the crash, according to the aviation agency’s statement.In November of last year, a small plane carrying a pilot and four rescue dogs crashed roughly 50 miles west of Copake, in a remote area of the Catskill Mountains. In June, five members of a family were killed about 40 miles northeast of Binghamton, N.Y., when their small plane crashed en route from Cooperstown to Georgia. More

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    Idaho Court Expands Abortion Ban Medical Exceptions

    In situations where a mother faces risk of death, the decision allows for abortions even when death isn’t imminent.A state judge in Idaho appeared to slightly broaden access to abortion there by ruling on Friday that an exception to the state’s ban does not require the woman to be facing impending death.Idaho’s ban, one of the strictest in the nation, prohibits abortion in almost all cases. One exception is when it is necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman. Judge Jason D. Scott ruled that abortions are allowed if a doctor deems that the woman is likely to die sooner without an abortion than she would otherwise — even if her death “is neither imminent nor assured.”The ruling, which kept the law in place, handed a partial victory to reproductive rights advocates and Idaho doctors who said the ban had forced them to wait for patients to reach the brink of death before they could act, or rush them out of state to get care elsewhere.“I feel very reassured” by the ruling, said Dr. Emily Corrigan, an Idaho obstetrician-gynecologist who is one of the plaintiffs. “I think there’s many, many more case scenarios where the patient’s condition would squarely fall within that exception.”Idaho’s attorney general, Raúl Labrador, who was one of the defendants, said in a statement that Idaho law has never required doctors to wait until a woman’s death is certain or imminent before providing an abortion. “While we still disagree with portions of the ruling, it confirms what my office has argued in courts from Boise to Washington, D.C. — that Idaho’s abortion laws are constitutional and protect both unborn children and their mothers,” he said.It was unclear on Saturday whether his office would appeal the decision.The Idaho judgment arose from a lawsuit filed in September 2023 by the Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of four women who said they had to leave the state to receive abortions after learning that they faced serious health risks or that their fetuses would not survive. The suit was joined by Dr. Corrigan, another physician and a family physicians’ organization.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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    Sudan Clinic Workers Killed in Zamzam Camp

    Relief International said nine employees were killed when gunmen stormed the Zamzam camp in El Fasher, in the western Darfur region.Sudanese paramilitaries killed the entire staff of the last medical clinic in a famine-stricken camp in the western region of Darfur, Sudan, as part of a broader assault that killed at least 100 people, aid groups and the United Nations said on Saturday.The assault on the Zamzam camp, which holds 500,000 people in the besieged city of El Fasher, was notable even by the standards of a civil war that has seen countless atrocities as well as accusations of genocide.Paramilitaries with the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., broke through the camp perimeter on Friday evening after hours of shelling. They then destroyed hundreds of homes and the camp’s main market before turning their attack on the camp’s last remaining medical clinic, according to Relief International, the aid group that runs the facility.Nine hospital employees were killed, including the head doctor, the aid group said in a statement on Saturday. “We have learned the unthinkable,” the statement said. “This is a profound tragedy for our organization.”Kashif Shafique, the group’s Sudan director, said in a phone interview that the aid workers — five medics and four drivers, his entire staff at the clinic — had been shot dead.Paramilitaries had warned the medics to leave the day before the attack, Mr. Shafique said. But they had to treat civilians wounded by shelling and, in any event, the main routes out of the camp were closed.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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    British Government Takes Control of Country’s Last Major Steel Mill

    London says it acted to prevent the plant’s Chinese owners from closing the plant, threatening jobs and national security.The British government moved swiftly on Saturday to take control of operations at the country’s last large crude steel producing facility, in what appeared to be a major step toward nationalizing the plant.In an unusual and dramatic move, the government had summoned lawmakers back from vacation on Saturday to approve the government’s emergency legislation.The government said it was acting to prevent the owners of the British Steel complex in Scunthorpe, a Chinese company called Jingye, from taking steps unilaterally to close the blast furnaces, potentially costing 2,700 jobs.“Steel is fundamental to Britain’s industrial strength, to our security and to our identity as a primary global power,” Jonathan Reynolds, the business and trade secretary, told Parliament on Saturday in introducing the legislation.Members of the Unite and Community unions marched in Scunthorpe on Saturday.Ryan Jenkinson/Getty ImagesDespite the interest in preserving steel making now, it has long been in decline in Britain. Crude steel output has fallen by about 50 percent over the last decade, according to UK Steel, a trade group.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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    Harvard Professors Sue Trump Administration Over Threat to Federal Funds

    Two groups representing Harvard professors sued the Trump administration on Friday, saying that its threat to cut billions in federal funding for the university violates free speech and other First Amendment rights.The lawsuit by the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard faculty chapter of the group follows the Trump administration’s announcement earlier this month that it was reviewing about $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives. The administration also sent the school a list of demands that it must meet if it wants to keep the funds.The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, seeks a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from cutting the funds.“This action challenges the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented misuse of federal funding and civil rights enforcement authority to undermine academic freedom and free speech on a university campus,” the lawsuit said.The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.The Trump administration has been on a campaign against elite universities that it views as being too lax on antisemitism. In a recent letter to Harvard, the administration said the school had “fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence.” Other top schools like Columbia and Cornell have also been targeted.Harvard did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday. In recent weeks, Alan Garber, the university president, has said that Harvard had spent “considerable effort” during the past 15 months addressing antisemitism, adding that there was still more work to be done.In a statement, Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard and general counsel of the AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter, said the administration’s policies are a pretext to chill universities and their faculties from engaging in speech, teaching and research that don’t align with President Trump’s views.“Harvard faculty have the constitutional right to speak, teach and conduct research without fearing that the government will retaliate against their viewpoints by canceling grants,” Mr. Crespo said.On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of protesters, including students, professors and even the mayor of Cambridge, braved the cold to protest against the Trump administration’s threat to cut Harvard’s funding. At a packed park in Cambridge, Mass., home to Harvard’s campus, they called on the university to lead the charge against the government’s crackdown on higher education.“Harvard possesses not just the resources to withstand the pressure,” said Mayor Denise Simmons of Cambridge, “but the moral obligation to do so.”Miles J. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass. More

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    Max Kozloff, Art Critic Who Became an Artist Himself, Dies at 91

    He wrote extensively about the New York art scene in the 1960s and ’70s, then shifted to become a prominent street photographer.Max Kozloff, a leading art critic who helped readers of The Nation and Artforum navigate the array of movements that followed Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s and ’70s, and who later became a well-regarded photographer in his own right, died on April 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.His wife, Joyce Kozloff, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.As a writer, Mr. Kozloff established himself early on. He became the art critic for The Nation in 1961, when he was a 28-year-old doctoral student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He became an associate editor at Artforum three years later and eventually became the editor.He wrote extensively about painting, especially those New York artists who were pushing beyond the waning dominance of Abstract Expressionism, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. And he tussled with older critics, especially Clement Greenberg, whose ideas he found too doctrinaire to be useful in a time of proliferating artistic movements.Though Mr. Kozloff was far from ideological, he was interested in the ways ideology and political context shaped artistic production.In perhaps his most famous essay, “American Painting During the Cold War,” published in Artforum in 1973, he argued that Abstract Expressionism, precisely because it claimed to exist outside of politics, served as a handmaiden of postwar American dominance, showing the world that a techno-liberal powerhouse could foster great art.As a student of photography, Mr. Kozloff was especially interested in what he considered street photography — seemingly random, spontaneous images of anonymous people engaged in mundane activities.University of New Mexico 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