Elections

Hanh Huynh carves out a place for himself.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming with, well, me. Deb Amlen has stepped out for the week, and in her absence I have the pleasure of writing the Wordplay column for today’s crossword, constructed by Hanh Huynh.Regular solvers may remember Mr. Huynh for his New York Times debut last year. He constructed a Thursday puzzle that featured a dastardly rebus, and to this day it remains the only grid I can remember having really and truly given up on (thankfully, not when I was meant to write the Wordplay column). Mr. Huynh seems to be feeling more charitable toward us this time around — his theme doesn’t require quite as much head-scratching to figure out. But don’t get comfortable: It’s still a Thursday crossword if I’ve ever seen one.Shall we take the lid off and see what’s inside?Today’s ThemeHave you taken a deep, calming breath? Good. Now I can tell you that this puzzle contains a rebus that works differently in Down and Across entries.Whenever I’m faced with a Thursday puzzle, I use my crossings to see whether I can identify some added trickery. My hackles go up especially when there are symbols in the grid — like the circles in this one, for example.Let’s begin our investigation at 21-Across: The “Longtime judge on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and ‘America’s Got Talent’” should be SIMON COWELL. But his name is 11 letters long, and there are 13 squares to be filled. At 9-Down, the “Popular backyard game” appears to be a five-letter word. But bocce doesn’t work with the crossings, and CORNHOLE doesn’t fit … or does it?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

13-301, 13-302, 13-303, 13-304, 13-701, 13-702, 13-703, 13-801, 13-804, 13-811,
13-2313, and 13-2314.
COUNT 7
FORGERY, A CLASS FOUR FELONY
From on or about November 3, 2020 and continuing through on or about
January 6, 2021, with intent to defraud, KELLI WARD (001), TYLER BOWYER
(002), NANCY COTTLE (003), JACOB HOFFMAN (004), ANTHONY KERN (005),
JAMES LAMON (006), ROBERT MONTGOMERY (007), SAMUEL MOORHEAD
(008), LORRAINE PELLEGRINO (009), GREGORY SAFSTEN (010), MICHAEL WARD
(011),
falsely made, completed or altered a written instrument and/or
offered or presented, whether accepted or not, a forged instrument or one that
contained false information, to wit: one of two certificates of votes for President
Donald J. Trump and Vice President Michael Pence, filed by the Arizona
Republican electors with the Archivist of the United States, involving, but not
limited to, the acts described in Section II, in violation of A.R.S. §§ 13-2002(A)(1) &
(A)(3), 13-301, 13-302, 13-303, 13-304, 13-701, 13-702, 13-703, 13-801, 13-804,
13-811, 13-2313, and 13-2314.
10
110 More

Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic.In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience having turned squalid and absurd, he could no longer paint it for audiences as heroic. So how could his protagonist be a hero?The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it. If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.That would seem to be quite a trick, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, perhaps more relevantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while also worrying about his mental health. He makes jokes that aren’t. He gets excited over all the wrong things. Rain coming? He called it.Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much more attention; in Heidi Schreck’s smooth, faithful yet colloquial new version, his first words, naturally, are complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”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

An Arizona grand jury has charged 18 people involved in the scheme to create a slate of false electors for Donald Trump, including 11 people who served as those fake electors and seven Trump allies who aided the scheme.Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, announced the charges on Wednesday, and said the 11 fake electors had been charged with felonies for fraud, forgery and conspiracy.Beyond the fake electors themselves, high-profile Trump affiliates have been charged with aiding in the scheme: Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb and Mike Roman.Those charged over their roles as false electors include two sitting lawmakers, state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern. The former Arizona Republican party chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, have been charged, as has Tyler Bowyer, a Republican national committeeman and Turning Point USA executive, and Jim Lamon, who ran for US Senate in 2022. The others charged in the fake electors scheme are Nancy Cottle, Robert Montgomery, Samuel Moorhead, Lorraine Pellegrino and Gregory Safsten.The indictment says: “In Arizona, and the United States, the people elected Joseph Biden as president on November 3 2020. Unwilling to accept this fact, defendants and unindicted co-conspirators schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep unindicted co-conspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters. This scheme would have deprived Arizona voters of their right to vote and have their votes counted.”Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes, a close margin in the typically red state that immediately prompted allegations of voter fraud that persist to this day. The state has remained a hotbed of election denialism, despite losses for Republicans who embraced election-fraud lies at the state level.Trump has not been charged in the Arizona case.The indictment refers to Trump himself as “unindicted co-conspirator 1” throughout, noting how the former president schemed to keep himself in office, and how those around him, even those who believed he lost, aided this effort.Some involved have claimed they signed on as an alternate slate of electors in case court decisions came down in Trump’s favor, so they would have a backup group that could be certified by Congress should Trump prevail.But, the indictment says, the defendants intended for these false votes to pressure former vice-president Mike Pence into rejecting the slate of accurate electors for Joe Biden during the electoral college vote-counting on 6 January 2021. Pence did not declare Trump the winner, use these fake electoral votes, or otherwise delay the official count.Arizona’s charges are the latest turn in the fake electors saga. Seven states saw similar schemes, but two states – New Mexico and Pennsylvania – hedged their language in their documents enough to prevent prosecution.Democratic attorneys general in Michigan and Nevada have indicted Republican fake electors in their respective states. In Georgia, three of 16 fake electors were indicted as part of a wide-ranging racketeering indictment against Trump and allies. The remaining were given immunity for helping in the district attorney’s investigation.In Wisconsin, the fake electors acknowledged Biden’s win as a way to settle a civil lawsuit over the issue.Mayes’ investigation fell behind other states because she narrowly won office in 2022, and her predecessor, Republican Mark Brnovich, had not pursued the line of inquiry. She had confirmed the investigation in early 2023.The investigation – along with a host of other disagreements – have put Mayes at odds with Arizona’s Republican-led legislature, which started a committee to investigate Mayes and her office over concerns she was working beyond her authority as attorney general.In a video on Wednesday, Mayes said the investigation was “thorough and professional” and would provide justice for the plot to overturn the state’s electoral votes.“I understand for some of you today didn’t come fast enough, and I know I’ll be criticized by others for conducting this investigation at all,” she said. “I will not allow American democracy to be undermined – it’s too important.”Hugo Lowell and Sam Levine contributed reporting More

Jared Jeridore, who worked near a Queens school, was arrested after complaints about him led the police to have an officer pose as a teenage girl, officials said.A Queens man who worked as a school crossing guard was charged on Wednesday with attempted rape and other crimes after he tried to lure an undercover police officer he believed to be a 14-year-old girl into a sexual act, officials said.The charges against the man, Jared Jeridore, included attempted use of a child in a sexual performance, attempted dissemination of indecent material to minors and official misconduct, Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, said.“Young people need to be able to trust the adults who are charged with keeping them safe,” Ms. Katz said in a statement. “This defendant is accused of violating that trust with someone he thought was a teenager.”Mr. Jeridore, 24, of Jamaica, made an initial appearance before Judge Julieta Lozano of Queens Criminal Court on Wednesday. She ordered him to return to court in June. A lawyer for Mr. Jeridore did not immediately respond to a request for comment.School crossing guards are part-time Police Department employees who earn $18 an hour. Mr. Jeridore, who worked near a school in Jamaica, was suspended from his job after being arrested on Wednesday and subsequently resigned, a police spokeswoman said. It was unclear how long he had been a crossing guard.The undercover investigation began after underage individuals complained about Mr. Jeridore to the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, according to a criminal complaint.On the morning of March 28, the complaint says, an undercover officer posing as a 14-year-old girl met Mr. Jeridore at a Jamaica intersection about a block from a secondary school. The complaint does not name the school but lists an address that belongs to York Early College Academy.On April 18, the undercover officer and Mr. Jeridore exchanged Instagram screen names, according to the complaint. That afternoon, the complaint says, they walked together from the same intersection to a nearby bus stop, and Mr. Jeridore interlocked his arm with the officer’s.Around 11:30 that night, Mr. Jeridore and the officer had a video call, the complaint says. Mr. Jeridore, believing the officer was 14 and soon to turn 15, asked her to join him in a sex act, according to the complaint.Over the next several days, Mr. Jeridore sent messages via Instagram to a second officer who was posing as the first one, the complaint says. In the messages, he described the sexual interactions he hoped to have and sent the officer nude photos and sexually explicit video, according to the complaint.On Tuesday, the complaint says, Mr. Jeridore called the first undercover officer several times and asked her to meet him at a local hotel to have sex. Officers arrested Mr. Jeridore when he arrived, according to the complaint. More

Days of heavy rains have pummeled parts of Kenya, leaving at least 32 dead, 15 injured and more than 40,000 people displaced, according to officials. They said that flooding had killed nearly 1,000 farm animals and destroyed thousands of acres of crops, with more rain expected across the country.The rains began in March during what is known in the country as the “long rains,” but precipitation intensified over the past week, according to the Kenya Meteorological Department.In Nairobi, where some of the heaviest rain has fallen, more than 30,000 people have been displaced, according to the United Nations. On Tuesday, 18 people, including seven children, were stranded, and later rescued, in Nairobi after heavy rain, the Kenya Red Cross Society said.Edwin Sifuna, a senator in Nairobi County, said on social media that the local government there was “clearly overwhelmed,” and he called on the federal government for help.“The situation in Nairobi has escalated to extreme levels,” he wrote in a post that included video of people stranded on rooftops surrounded by floodwaters.The rains were not expected to subside over the next few days, according to the Kenya Meteorological Department, which had rain in the forecast for parts of the country, including Nairobi, through Monday.Here are photos of the flooding:Daniel Irungu/EPA, via ShutterstockA man crossing a flooded river on a pipeline in Mathare, a neighborhood of slums in Nairobi where many live in tin shacks.Daniel Irungu/EPA, via ShutterstockA man swimming through floodwaters to try to rescue people stranded in their homes in Ngondo Village in Mathare.Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesResidents of Mathare tried to salvage goods from their homes.Daniel Irungu/EPA, via ShutterstockResidents of Ngondo Village tried to clear muddy water from their homes.Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPeople clung to buses and trucks to avoid flooded roadways in Nairobi.Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDozens of people in Mathare were stranded in their homes after heavy rains.Monicah Mwangi/ReutersFlooding caused widespread damage in Nairobi.Patrick Ngugi/Associated PressPeople in the Githurai area used a boat to get through floodwaters.Thomas Mukoya/ReutersFlooding in a settlement in Machakos County inundated entire roadways.Thomas Mukoya/ReutersFrom a bridge, two men watched the swollen Athi River near Nairobi. More

Federal prosecutors are examining the consulting company’s role in helping “turbocharge” the sale of painkillers like OxyContin.The Justice Department is investigating McKinsey & Company, the international consulting giant, for its role in helping drug companies maximize their sale of opioids.The investigation is led by the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Massachusetts and the Western District of Virginia in coordination with the department’s civil division in Washington, according to two officials familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity.Since 2021, McKinsey has agreed to pay about $1 billion to settle investigations and lawsuits across the United States related to the firm’s work with opioid makers, principally Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. McKinsey recommended that Purdue “turbocharge” its sales of the drug in the midst of the opioid crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. McKinsey has not admitted any wrongdoing.News of the criminal investigation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.The investigation has been underway for several years. Endo, a pharmaceutical company that hired McKinsey to advise on the sale of the opioid Opana, said in a regulatory filing that it received a subpoena in December 2020 from the Western District of Virginia seeking information about McKinsey. The New York Times reported on the existence of that subpoena in 2022. Last year another opioid maker, Mallinckrodt, said it received a grand jury subpoena from the same U.S. attorney’s office but did not mention any connection to McKinsey.Federal prosecutors are also looking into whether McKinsey obstructed justice in its handling of records, according to The Journal.By 2018, senior McKinsey consultants were growing increasingly worried that they might be held to account for their opioid work. On July 4 of that year, Martin Elling, a leader in the firm’s pharmaceutical practice, made a decision he would later regret. He sent an email to Arnab Ghatak, a senior partner, asking whether they should eliminate documents and emails connected to opioids.Mr. Ghatak replied: “Thanks for the heads up. Will do.”Both men were fired after The Times reported in 2020 about the existence of the emails.It isn’t unusual for criminal investigations like this to go on for many years, especially ones involving two U.S. attorneys’ offices, the Justice Department and possibly state agencies as well, Rick Mountcastle, a former federal prosecutor, said.He led a criminal investigation into Purdue Pharma that resulted in the company’s guilty plea in 2007 to having misled regulators, doctors and patients about the dangers of OxyContin. “It is a huge monster bureaucracy that moves at a very slow pace,” said Mr. Mountcastle, who was not a source confirming the existence of the investigation.McKinsey made about $86 million over many years advising Purdue Pharma. The bulk of that work took place after Purdue’s guilty plea. In 2019, McKinsey said it would no longer advise clients on opioid-related business.Ramiro Prudencio, a spokesman for McKinsey, declined to comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department had no comment on the case. More

Last year was called the year of Ozempic, though it was also a year of Ozempic backlash and Ozempic shortages, which could persist for years. Even so, we appear very far from a peak for GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, which are powered by a molecule called semaglutide, and Mounjaro, which uses its cousin tirzepatide. It seems possible to imagine a future in which almost everyone is taking some variety of GLP-1 drug, and with a pretty good reason to do so.Probably, you have heard about the game-changing impact of such drugs on obesity, a condition that affects 40 percent of Americans and increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and hundreds of other comorbidities. Patients on Ozempic and Wegovy can lose 15 to 20 percent or more of their weight in a little over a year, and if they stay on the drugs, the weight tends to stay off. That may not sound like a monumental effect, but consider that on average, an obese 210-pound man who loses 20 percent of his body mass generally passes quickly through the overweight stage all the way to a normal weight.If anything, though, we’ve probably talked too much about cosmetic weight loss and Hollywood vanity — and certainly made too many comparisons to fen-phen, Botox and Viagra. The GLP-1 drugs have been shown to cut risk of heart attacks, strokes and death from coronary disease by 20 percent among overweight and obese patients, presumably through the salubrious effect of weight loss, though the researchers can’t yet say for sure. Semaglutide has been shown to eliminate or reduce the need for insulin among those with recent-onset Type 1 diabetes. In a clinical trial of people with Type 2 diabetes and moderate to severe kidney disease, the drug reduced the risk of kidney disease progression and cut the death rate from cardiovascular and kidney-related causes by 24 percent — such a clear result that the trial was ended early. Semaglutide has reduced fatty liver deposits in patients with H.I.V. and nonalcoholic steatotic liver disease. It has normalized the menstrual cycles of those with polycystic ovary syndrome. (It has also, somewhat mysteriously, seemed to produce a wave of unintended pregnancies among women taking birth control, at least if TikTok videos are to be trusted.)Studies have shown promise in treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s with GLP-1 drugs, perhaps by regulating insulin levels and reducing inflammation, and the drugs may yet prove useful in treating many other conditions made worse by chronic inflammation. Some studies have found large decreases in the risk of depression and anxiety; others found smaller but still positive effects. There are potential applications for schizophrenia and neurological dysfunction, thanks to the role that insulinlike hormones like GLP-1 play in the development of the central nervous system and the way semaglutide reshapes the brain’s chemical reward system. It seems to bend the curve on alcoholism and drug addiction and curb other addictive behaviors, as well — compulsive shopping and sex addiction, gambling and nail biting, smoking and skin picking. A compulsive nation has stumbled into what looks like a treatment for compulsion and one that happens to protect against some of the country’s biggest killers and curb some of its most pervasive pathologies and inner demons.Americans love to dream of miracle drugs, but hardly anything ever seems to fill the bill. True, semaglutide has arrived with real questions trailing like bunting: Much of the weight loss is from lean muscle mass, which isn’t ideal, and there are reasons to worry over the possibility of thyroid problems, loss of bone density and sarcopenia, a weakness disorder associated with aging. There are potentially other serious long-term side effects, though millions of Americans have been taking Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes for years without serious issues. (Some of them do report more familiar side effects, like nausea.) The GLP-1 drugs aren’t a permanent fix in a single shot — whether the thing being addressed is body mass index or cardiac risk or the progression of Alzheimer’s — but a permanent disease-management program. They also haven’t exactly cured cancer, although more than a dozen cancers are linked to obesity, and in at least one case, colorectal cancer, there is reason to believe GLP-1 drugs may directly cut the chances of developing the disease.All that means that semaglutide isn’t exactly a cure-all, in the vernacular sense. But it seems to be about as close as we’ve gotten, even in a time of racing biomedical progress, to that old science-fiction proposition — one pill for almost everything and almost everyone forever.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