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      Marjorie Taylor Greene to Lead ‘DOGE’ Panel and Work With Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

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      When she arrived in Congress in 2021, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, was quickly stripped of her two committee assignments by Democrats and shunned by her colleagues on Capitol Hill.Almost three years later, Ms. Greene is poised to hold a gavel for the first time, a sign of the ascendancy of the MAGA wing of the G.O.P. in Congress, where President-elect Donald J. Trump’s most loyal allies will occupy prominent posts next year.Representative James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is planning to create a new subcommittee to partner with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to “eliminate government waste.” The committee, which has yet to be created, will work with the new Department of Government Efficiency, known as “DOGE,” and leading Republicans have agreed to allow Ms. Greene to serve as its chairwoman.Republicans said the committee would be charged with investigating waste and corruption within the federal government.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene during a House Homeland Security Committee meeting on Capitol Hill, in Washington, in January.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesEven though she is not yet the chairwoman of a committee that does not yet exist, Ms. Greene’s new position appeared to be a done deal, with top Republicans confirming it would be hers to lead when the new Congress convenes in January.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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      Review: In ‘Death Becomes Her,’ Spiking the Fountain of Youth

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      Hilarious star turns from Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard make the mostly unfunny 1992 film into an intermittently memorable Broadway musical.Not since Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne themselves performed there in 1958, leaving a trail of scrapes and bite marks in their wake, has Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater housed such equal-billing dragons as the ones Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard play in “Death Becomes Her.” The musical, which opened on Thursday, stars the two comic treasures as lifelong frenemies for whom the “lifelong” part is an understatement. Their animosity is eternal.That Hilty and Simard make it so jolly is a big relief and a big surprise. The 1992 Robert Zemeckis movie on which the show is based may be a queer camp classic, but its misogynistic ick factor is high. The leads — Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn — are shot leeringly yet unflatteringly, a queasy combo. The violence they do to each other is more vivid than the vanity at its root. What binds them, even in acrimony, goes largely unexplored. And, fatally, the film is not very funny.For its first 30 minutes, the musical is nothing but. When introduced, Hilty’s Madeline Ashford is a star of a certain age being hoisted by chorus boys in a creaky vehicle called “Me! Me! Me!” Its opening number, “For the Gaze,” establishes her epochal narcissism while also winking, in its title pun, to the material’s cult audience. The staging, by Christopher Gattelli, goes so breathtakingly over the top — costume changes, key changes, cameos by both Liza and Judy — that half the lyrics get lost in the laughs.Though best known for her vocal chops — fully exploited here in glossy songs by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey — Hilty is an inventive and beguiling comedian, putting a warm spin on even the meanest zingers. Indeed, one of the improvements in Marco Pennette’s book for the musical is that those zingers seem like love pinches, painful but titillating. They are often self-directed, too, and thus a kind of self-pleasure. When Simard’s Helen Sharp tells Madeline she’s stunning, the diva responds, with evident delight, “Well, thanks to my hair, makeup and neck team.” She also credits “that tapeworm diet.”Simard is simply brilliant. I say “simply” advisedly; it takes a lot of craft and homework to stand next to Hilty and not be outdone. Happily, her Helen is an astonishing creation of disappointment and disparagement: Dorothy Parker boiled down to a syrup, spitting takedowns like sour candies. “Love her like a twin,” she says of Madeline, in a voice of squeaky chalk. “Who stole my nutrients in the womb.”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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      China’s Hacking Reached Deep Into U.S. Telecoms

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      The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said hackers listened to phone calls and read texts by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks that connect systems.China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.At first, the F.B.I. and other investigators believed that China’s hackers used stolen passwords to focus mostly on the system that taps telephone conversations and texts under court orders. It is administered by a number of the nation’s telecommunications firms, including the three largest — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. But in recent days, investigators have discovered how deeply China’s hackers had moved throughout the country by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks connecting disparate systems.U.S. officials said that since the hack was exposed, the Chinese intruders had seemingly disappeared, suspending their intrusion so their full activity could not be discovered. But Mr. Warner said it would be wrong to conclude that the Chinese had been ousted from the nation’s telecommunications system, or that investigators even understood how deeply they were embedded.“We’ve not found everywhere they are,” Mr. Warner said.The committee has received briefings from the government on the hack, and Mr. Warner has had conversations with telecommunications executives.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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      West Bank Settlement Supporters Have Big Hopes for Trump’s Presidency

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      As Donald J. Trump nominates staunch supporters of Israel to key positions, advocacy groups are taking aim at the departing administration’s policies.The Biden administration this week imposed sanctions on more groups and individuals it accuses of having ties to Israeli settlers inciting violence in the occupied West Bank, a last-ditch show of disapproval of Israelis’ annexation of land there before U.S. policy on the issue most likely swings the other way under the next administration.When President-elect Donald J. Trump returns to the White House next year, he could easily revoke the February executive order authorizing the sanctions or, even, some pro-settlement activists hope, use the order to go after Palestinian organizations instead.Texans for Israel, a Christian Zionist group, and several other settler supporters and organizations this month renewed a challenge to President Biden’s order in federal court, arguing that it was being applied unconstitutionally, targeting Jewish settlers and violating the rights of Americans exercising freedom of religion and speech in support of them.The case highlights the growing international controversy over West Bank settlement amid the war in the Gaza Strip and the great expectations of the settler movement and its supporters of another Trump presidency.Israel seized control of the West Bank from Jordan in a war in 1967, and Israeli civilians have since settled there with both the tacit and the explicit approval of the Israeli government, living under Israeli civil law while their Palestinian neighbors are subject to Israeli military law. Expanding Israel’s hold over the West Bank is a stated goal of many ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government.The international community largely views the Israeli settlements as illegal, and Palestinians have long argued that they are a creeping annexation that turns land needed for any independent Palestinian state into an unmanageable patchwork.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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      Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Exchange Posts About Trump on X

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      The world’s two richest men are longtime business rivals, but now one of them has the ear of the next president of the United States.A few months ago, a three-post exchange between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mr. Musk’s X would have passed for petty sniping between billionaire rivals.But times have changed.“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Mr. Musk wrote Wednesday night, referring to two of his companies. He added an emoji for a snickering face, with a hand covering the mouth.“Nope. 100% not true,” Mr. Bezos responded on Thursday morning.“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Mr. Musk wrote back, with a laughing-crying emoji.With President-elect Donald J. Trump’s history of animosity toward Mr. Bezos, the posts carried an unspoken message about Mr. Musk’s growing power within the incoming administration.The exchange — brief, brassy and fairly typical of Mr. Musk’s overwhelming presence on X — could foreshadow a bumpy next few years for Mr. Bezos and the companies he started, Amazon and the rocket maker Blue Origin. It was also a reminder that the power dynamics in the longtime rivalry between the world’s two richest men changed on Nov. 5.Plenty of tech executives have drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over the last few years. Perhaps none more than Mr. Bezos, largely because he owns The Washington Post, which has frequently written critically about Mr. Trump. (The Post did not endorse a presidential candidate this year, a decision that angered many of its readers and that Mr. Bezos publicly defended.)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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      Why Botham Jean’s Family Won’t Get $100 Million Awarded by Jury

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      Cities have paid out billions of dollars in police misconduct cases, but depending on the case, families may not receive any money at all. A recent $100 million penalty for a police shooting case in Dallas may never lead to a payout.The family of George Floyd received $27 million after he was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. The family of Breonna Taylor got $12 million. Richard Cox, who was paralyzed after a ride in a police van in New Haven, Conn., got $46 million.But the family of Botham Shem Jean, who was killed by an off-duty officer, Amber R. Guyger, as he watched television in his apartment in Dallas in 2018, may never see a penny.That is not because the courts did not value his life. On Tuesday, a jury awarded his family almost $100 million. The difference lies, rather, in who was held responsible for his death.How do police violence cases usually work?In many high-profile cases of police violence, the city or county where the misconduct occurred is responsible for any payout connected to wrongful death or injury. Those taxpayer-funded payouts have amounted to billions of dollars: In 2023, New York City paid nearly $115 million in police misconduct settlements, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society.Awards to victims or their families can vary greatly, depending on factors such as the projected earnings over a victim’s lifetime, the sympathies of juries in a given jurisdiction and the amount of publicity generated by the case. Some families win money in civil rights claims even when the officers involved are not criminally charged or disciplined.But in order to have a successful case, plaintiffs must surmount at least two significant legal obstacles. First, officers are granted qualified immunity from lawsuits if victims cannot show that the officers have violated their “clearly established” rights. Second, municipalities can be held responsible only if the plaintiff’s rights were violated because of a negligent policy or practice — for example, if the police department had ignored previous bad behavior on the part of an officer or had failed to properly train its officers.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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      Rare ‘Doomsday Fish’ Found on California Beach by Woman Going for a Walk

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      In Japanese mythology, the deep-sea-dwelling oarfish is a harbinger of impending disaster. For scientists in California, where three oarfish have washed up in recent months, it’s an exciting find.Everything seemed picture-perfect on a recent day at Grandview Beach in Encinitas, Calif. — the waves shimmered under the California sun, and locals sunbathed and swam.Everything, except for one thing: the mysterious deep-sea creature that had washed up on the shore.“What is that?” Alison Laferriere recalled thinking. She saw something long and skinny on the beach while walking her dog: “It looked like it could be some garbage or something.”But when she got closer, Ms. Laferriere, a doctorate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, recognized the find immediately. She had a rare close-up view of the oarfish, a striking creature from the depths of the ocean that has eluded researchers over the decades.With its long eel-like body, gaping mouth and bright red dorsal fins, it’s no surprise that the oarfish calls to mind a sea monster. Japanese mythology suggests that the appearance of the fish can signify impending earthquakes: Many have even wondered if reports of a dozen oarfish washing up on various parts of Japan’s coast were perhaps a harbinger of the catastrophic 2011 earthquake that devastated northern Japan. The superstition was so popular that researchers in Japan addressed it, publishing a paper in 2019 that debunked any significant link.Still, the eerie mythology returns with every sighting of the oarfish — hence its nickname as the “doomsday fish.”More superstitious Californians might be spooked, but researchers are thrilled at the rare opportunity. At least three have washed up on Californian shores in recent months, including a 12-foot-long specimen in August, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In all, only 22 have been documented by scientists since the 20th century.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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      Candidatos anteriores se vieron perjudicados por menos de lo que rodea a los elegidos de Donald Trump

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      Impuestos atrasados, consumo de marihuana y niñeras indocumentadas descalificaron a anteriores elecciones presidenciales para altos cargos. Algunos de los candidatos del presidente electo enfrentan mayores cuestionamientos.Un aspirante a la Corte Suprema se retiró tras revelarse que había fumado marihuana en su juventud. Dos candidatos a fiscal general fueron eliminados cuando salió a la luz que habían empleado a inmigrantes indocumentadas como niñeras. Un tercer candidato al gabinete —nada menos que un exlíder del Senado— fue rechazado por no pagar impuestos sobre un automóvil y un chofer que le había prestado un socio. Incluso unos tuits malintencionados bastaron para hundir a un candidato.Los problemas legales y éticos que rodean a algunas de las personas seleccionadas por el presidente electo Donald Trump para ocupar altos cargos en el gobierno, por no hablar de su historial de declaraciones públicas que levantan cejas, son mucho más profundos que el tipo de revelaciones que han acabado con candidaturas en el Senado en el pasado.Lo que antes se consideraba descalificante para un candidato presidencial parece francamente benigno en comparación con las acusaciones de conducta sexual inapropiada y consumo de drogas ilícitas por parte de su candidato a fiscal general, detalladas en un informe secreto del Congreso, una acusación de agresión sexual seguida de un acuerdo pagado por su elección para dirigir el Pentágono y una antigua adicción a la heroína reconocida por el futuro secretario de salud.No hace tanto tiempo que los candidatos a puestos de alto nivel, e incluso algunos de los menos conocidos, tenían que ser irreprochables, hasta el punto de que una cuestión fiscal relativamente menor podía hacerlos fracasar. Pero es evidente que los tiempos están cambiando en lo que respecta a los nombramientos en los albores del segundo gobierno de Trump.“Los estándares aparentemente están evolucionando”, dijo el senador John Cornyn, republicano por Texas y miembro principal del Comité Judicial. El panel consideraría la nominación del exrepresentante Matt Gaetz, republicano de Florida, para fiscal general si se presenta formalmente.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