Elections

The former congresswoman and co-chair of the House January 6 committee Liz Cheney is urging the US supreme court to rule quickly on Donald Trump’s claim that he has immunity from prosecution for acts he committed while president – so that his 2020 election interference trial can begin before the 2024 election this November.“If delay prevents this Trump case from being tried this year, the public may never hear critical and historic evidence developed before the grand jury, and our system may never hold the man most responsible for January 6 to account,” Cheney wrote in an opinion article for the New York Times, published on Monday.Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress by extremist supporters, urged on by the then president, on 6 January 2021.Cheney warned: “I know how Mr Trump’s delay tactics work,” adding: “Mr Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether.”The special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuting the case against Trump, has urged the court to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Cheney, a Republican and the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, was ousted from her congressional seat, representing Wyoming, after she became one of the strongest voices from the GOP demanding Trump be held accountable for inciting and failing to stop the January 6 insurrection.She has since said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party as it has become more extreme, because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship” and that another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.Cheney said in her New York Times article: “The special counsel’s indictment lays out Mr Trump’s detailed plan to overturn the 2020 election … [and that] senior advisers in the White House, Justice Department and elsewhere repeatedly warned that Mr Trump’s claims of election fraud were false and that his plans for January 6 were illegal.”She added: “If Mr Trump’s tactics prevent his January 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people – evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on January 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.”The court’s nine-member bench leans very conservative, especially after Trump nominated three rightwing justices while he was president. The court hears oral arguments in the immunity case on Thursday.Trump and his team urged the court to find that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts they take in office and therefore dismiss the federal criminal case. More

The Beirut bureau chief for The Associated Press, he was kidnapped in 1985 by Islamic militants.Terry Anderson, the American journalist who had been the longest-held Western hostage in Lebanon when he was finally released in 1991 by Islamic militants after more than six years in captivity, died on Saturday at his home in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 76.The cause was apparently complications of recent heart surgery, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.Mr. Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief for The Associated Press, had just dropped his tennis partner, an A.P. photographer, at his home after an early morning tennis match on March 16, 1985, when men armed with pistols yanked open his car door and shoved him into a Mercedes-Benz. The same car had tried to cut him off the day before as he returned to work from lunch at his seaside apartment.The kidnappers, identified as Shia Hezbollah militants of the Islamic Jihad Organization in Lebanon, beat him, blindfolded him and kept him chained in some 20 hideaways for 2,454 days in Beirut, South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.The militants, supported by Iran, indicated that they were retaliating against Israel’s use of American weapons in earlier strikes against Muslim and Druze targets in Lebanon. They also had been seeking to pressure the Reagan administration to secretly facilitate the illegal sales of weapons to Iran — an embarrassing scheme that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair because the administration had planned to use proceeds from the arms sales to secretly subsidize the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua.Mr. Anderson was the last of 18 Western hostages released by the kidnappers. After his release, he married his fiancé, who had been pregnant when he was kidnapped, and, for the first time, met his 6-year-old daughter.While he had not been tortured during his captivity, he said, he was beaten and chained. He spent a year or so, on and off, in solitary confinement, he said.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

After reports of harassment by demonstrators, some Jewish students said they felt unsafe. Others rejected that view, while condemning antisemitism.Days after Columbia University’s president testified before Congress, the atmosphere on campus remained fraught on Sunday, shaken by pro-Palestinian protests that have drawn the attention of the police and the concern of some Jewish students.Over the weekend, the student-led demonstrations on campus also attracted separate, more agitated protests by demonstrators who seemed to be unaffiliated with the university just outside Columbia’s gated campus in Upper Manhattan, which was closed to the public because of the protests.Some of those protests took a dark turn on Saturday evening, leading to the harassment of some Jewish students who were targeted with antisemitic vitriol. The verbal attacks left some of the 5,000 Jewish students at Columbia fearful for their safety on the campus and its vicinity, and even drew condemnation from the White House and Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable and dangerous,” Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, said in a statement.But Jewish students who are supporting the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus said they felt solidarity, not a sense of danger, even as they denounced the acts of antisemitism.Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student at Columbia University, says he doesn’t feel unsafe on campus.Bing Guan for The New York TimesWe 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 Getty House was broken into early Sunday through a smashed window, the police said. Mayor Karen Bass said she and her family were safe. The Getty House in Los Angeles, the official residence of Mayor Karen Bass, was broken into early Sunday, the Los Angeles Police Department said. The police took the intruder into custody, officials said. Details on the break-in were scant, but the police said on social media that the intruder had entered the Getty House after smashing a window around 6:40 a.m., while Ms. Bass and her family were inside. Ms. Bass’s office said in a statement that she and her family were safe and had not sustained any injuries.“The mayor is grateful to L.A.P.D. for responding and arresting the suspect,” Ms. Bass’s office said in a statement.The police did not identify the suspect and said that the investigation was ongoing. The suspect is currently being processed, and officials will then release more details, Tony Im, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, said.The Getty House is in Windsor Square, a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles. The city, with a population of about four million, was struggling with a surge in homelessness and violent crime when Ms. Bass took office in December 2022, two years into the pandemic. But data show that rates of violent crime have gone down in the city more recently. According to the Los Angeles Police’s report on crime in 2023, homicides went down that year by 17 percent from the year before. There were slight upticks in some nonviolent crimes, however. Property crimes increased by about 3.5 percent, and motor vehicle thefts went up by 2 percent, compared with the previous year, the report said. The Los Angeles Police said they would not categorize the Getty House break-in until booking is completed. In her State of the City Address this month, Ms. Bass hailed the city’s progress in lowering crime rates and homelessness. “Over the last year, we have done big things together,“ Ms. Bass said. “Thousands more unhoused Angelenos came inside, and homicide and violent crime came down last year.” In September 2022, before she took office as mayor, Ms. Bass’s personal home in the city’s Baldwin Vista neighborhood was burglarized. Two thieves stole two handguns at the time. In recent years, several politicians have been targeted in break-ins and swatting attempts.One high-profile case involved Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco in October 2022, when she was speaker of the House. Ms. Pelosi was not there at the time, but her husband, Paul Pelosi, was assaulted by an intruder with a hammer. Mr. Pelosi sustained severe injuries, including a skull fracture. And last December, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she was swatted, or subjected to a hoax call, on Christmas Day. It was not the first time she had been targeted of swatting, she said. “This is like the 8th time,” she wrote on social media after the incident. More

Her films centered on Latin American experiences and received wide acclaim.Lourdes Portillo, the Oscar-nominated Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues through spellbinding narratives, has died. She was 80.Ms. Portillo died Saturday at her home in San Francisco. Her death was confirmed by her friend Soco Aguilar. No cause was given.One of Ms. Portillo’s best-known works is her 1994 documentary “The Devil Never Sleeps,” a murder-mystery in which Ms. Portillo investigates the strange death of her multimillionaire uncle, whose widow claimed he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In 2020, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation at the National Film Registry.“Using vintage snapshots, old home movies and interviews, the film builds a biographical portrait of Oscar Ruiz Almeida, a Mexican rancher who amassed a fortune exporting vegetables to the United States and went on to become a powerful politician and businessman,” Stephen Holden, a Times movie critic, wrote in a 1995 review of the film.The documentary had the tenor of a telenovela and presented open questions about Mr. Ruiz Almeida’s mysterious life and death and the people who could have had a motive for the murder.“The more Oscar is discussed, the more enigmatic he seems,” Mr. Holden wrote.Ms. Portillo crafted the film’s story line from the information her mother relayed over the phone while Ms. Portillo was living in New York, she said in a talk at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last year.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 high-energy crowd rallied on Sunday in Pittsburgh to support Representative Summer Lee, a left-leaning congresswoman whose primary on Tuesday is a high-profile test whether she can stave off a challenge aimed in part at her stance over the war in Gaza.Headlining the event were Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the progressive lawmaker, and Justin Jones, the Tennessee state representative who rose to stardom when he was briefly ousted for protesting inaction on state gun legislation.Speakers framed Ms. Lee’s race, in Pennsylvania’s 12th District, as crucial to building a movement for working people and to fighting what they cast as billionaire influence in the race.The rally with several hundred supporters drew a small group of protesters who held signs outside the headquarters of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers to criticize Ms. Lee and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s stances on the war in Israel and Gaza. Ms. Lee’s primary is one of the first down-ballot electoral tests of the Israel-Gaza conflict this year.“To fight for common sense in the House is to often be alone. I have seen Summer walk alone,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “On Tuesday, what we must do is show her and show the world and show the people in that big white house that she is not alone.”“It’s not about winning — it’s about winning big,” she added.Ms. Lee won a close primary in 2022 against a moderate challenger on her way to become the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress. She has garnered broad support from Democrats this year. Even so, she has also faced pressure within her district after becoming one of the first members of Congress to call for an immediate cease-fire, just over a week after Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel responded with a military assault on Gaza.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

Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin star in a buzzy Broadway revival that rips the skin off the 1966 musical.Just east of its marquee, the August Wilson Theater abuts an alley you probably didn’t notice when last you were there, perhaps to see “Funny Girl,” its previous tenant. Why would you? Where the trash goes is not usually part of the Broadway experience.But it is for the latest revival of “Cabaret,” which opened at the Wilson on Sunday. Audience members are herded into that alley, past the garbage, down some halls, up some stairs and through a fringed curtain to a dimly lit lounge. (There’s a separate entrance for those with mobility issues.) Along the way, greeters offer free shots of cherry schnapps that taste, I’m reliably told, like cough syrup cut with paint thinner.Too often I thought the same of the show itself.But the show comes later. First, starting 75 minutes beforehand, you can experience the ambience of the various bars that constitute the so-called Kit Kat Club, branded in honor of the fictional Berlin cabaret where much of the musical takes place. Also meant to get you in the mood for a story set mostly in 1930, on the edge of economic and spiritual disaster, are some moody George Grosz-like paintings commissioned from Jonathan Lyndon Chase. (One is called “Dancing, Holiday Before Doom.”) The $9 thimbleful of potato chips is presumably a nod to the period’s hyperinflation.This all seemed like throat clearing to me, as did the complete reconfiguration of the auditorium itself, which is now arranged like a large supper club or a small stadium. (The scenic, costume and theater design are the jaw-dropping work of Tom Scutt.) The only relevant purpose I can see for this conceptual doodling, however well carried out, is to give the fifth Broadway incarnation of the 1966 show a distinctive profile. It certainly does that.The problem for me is that “Cabaret” has a distinctive profile already. The extreme one offered here frequently defaces it.Let me quickly add that Rebecca Frecknall’s production, first seen in London, has many fine and entertaining moments. Some feature its West End star Eddie Redmayne, as the macabre emcee of the Kit Kat Club (and quite likely your nightmares). Some come from its new New York cast, including Gayle Rankin (as the decadent would-be chanteuse Sally Bowles) and Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell (dignified and wrenching as an older couple). Others arise from Frecknall’s staging itself, which is spectacular when in additive mode, illuminating the classic score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the amazingly sturdy book by Joe Masteroff.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

Mary J. Blige and Ozzy Osbourne were also voted in, but Sinead O’Connor, who died last year at 56, did not make the cut.Cher, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Frampton and Mary J. Blige are part of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2024, along with Dave Matthews Band, Kool & the Gang, Foreigner and A Tribe Called Quest, the hall announced on Sunday.The latest crop of stars will officially join the pantheon in a ceremony on Oct. 19 at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, where the hall’s affiliated museum is also located.The 39th annual group of inductees matches the hall’s genre and demographic spread of recent years, with a pop diva (Cher), a metal idol (Osbourne), a top funk band of 1970s and ’80s vintage (Kool & the Gang), a couple of ’90s hip-hop and R&B heroes (Blige, Tribe) and rock mainstays from the boomer (Frampton, Foreigner) and Gen X (Matthews) eras.Of those artists, four were elevated to the hall on their first nomination: Cher, Foreigner, Frampton and Kool & the Gang. Osbourne was nominated for the first time as a solo act, though he had joined the hall as part of Black Sabbath in 2006. The Rock Hall has come under increasing pressure in recent years to diversify its ranks with more women and artists of color, and has made progress in that regard, though some critics say it is not enough.“Rock ’n’ roll is an ever-evolving amalgam of sounds that impacts culture and moves generations,” John Sykes, chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, said in a statement. “This diverse group of inductees each broke down musical barriers and influenced countless artists that followed in their footsteps.”Seven acts that were nominated in February did not make the cut: Mariah Carey, Jane’s Addiction, Oasis, Sade, Eric B. & Rakim, Lenny Kravitz and, perhaps most surprisingly, Sinead O’Connor, whose death last year, at age 56, elicited a global outpouring of grief and a reconsideration of her place in rock history.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