Elections

Ms. Murphy, the first lady of New Jersey, had racked up early endorsements from Democratic Party leaders in the state, but she struggled to gain support among rank-and-file voters.Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady, has ended her run for a U.S. Senate seat now held by the state’s embattled senior senator, Robert Menendez, she announced on Sunday in a video posted to social media.Ms. Murphy said that she had concluded that continuing to compete in the Democratic primary against Representative Andy Kim, a third-term congressman from South Jersey, would mean waging a “very divisive and negative campaign.”She was unwilling to do that, she said, and instead decided to suspend her campaign and to “focus entirely on re-electing President Biden” and other Democrats.“With Donald Trump on the ballot and so much at stake for our nation, I will not in good conscience waste resources tearing down a fellow Democrat,” she said.An aide said that Ms. Murphy, the wife of Gov. Philip D. Murphy, held a meeting with county Democratic Party leaders at 2 p.m. on Sunday before making a final decision and notifying her campaign staff members.Candidates who plan to run in June’s primary are required to file petitions with at least 1,000 signatures by the end of the day on Monday. Ms. Murphy’s decision on the eve of that deadline means that her name will not appear on the primary ballot.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

Russian state media pushed the idea that Ukraine was the obvious culprit, but at least three of the four suspects charged on Sunday are from the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan.Bodies were recovered, flowers were laid and fingers were pointed on Sunday as competing narratives took shape over who was behind the terrorist attack on a Russian concert hall where at least 137 people out to enjoy an evening of music were killed.President Vladimir V. Putin has hinted that Ukraine was behind the Friday night attack. He stopped short of accusing Kyiv directly, but on Sunday, some of his allies showed no such compunction.American officials have said that the attack appeared to be the work of an offshoot of the Islamic State, and that there is no evidence connecting Kyiv to it. But many Russian nationalist commentators and ultraconservative hawks are pushing the idea that Ukraine is the obvious culprit.A pro-Kremlin analyst who is a regular on Russian state television, Sergei A. Markov, wrote in a post on Telegram that the Kremlin must work at isolating the Ukrainian leadership by “connecting the terrorist act not with ISIS but with the Ukrainian government as much as possible.”Russian state news outlets barely mentioned that ISIS itself claimed that it was responsible for the attack at Crocus City Hall, a concert venue in the outskirts of Moscow. The ISIS offshoot U.S. officials believe was tied to the attack, the Islamic State Khorasan, which is known as ISIS-K, has been active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.Russian were stunned by the attack. People lined up to leave flowers at Crocus City Hall, in the Moscow suburbs, on Sunday.Nanna Heitmann 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 billionaire Wall Street financier is also a major investor in ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, which faces a possible ban in the United States.Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor who is a major investor in the parent company of TikTok, was also the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that recently merged with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company.A December regulatory filing showed that Mr. Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owned about 2 percent of Digital World Acquisition Corp., which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group on Friday. That stake, of about 605,000 shares, was worth about $22 million based on Digital World’s last closing share price.It’s unclear if Susquehanna still owns those shares, because big investors disclose their holdings to regulators only periodically. But if it did retain its stake, Mr. Yass’s firm would become one of Trump Media’s larger institutional shareholders when it begins trading this week following the merger. Shares of Digital World have surged about 140 percent this year as the merger with the parent company of Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform, drew closer and Mr. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president.“Susquehanna is a market maker and has zero economic interest in Trump Media,” said the company in a statement. “The firm’s long position is offset by short positions of the same size.”Regulatory filings show the firm used offsetting securities to try to minimize its gains or losses in the stock.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

Contestants rushed through the streets with croissant-laden trays in a moment for the French capital to showcase its cafe culture ahead of the Summer Olympics.The contestants warmed up with stretches and squats in front of City Hall, carefully repositioned croissants and glasses on their trays and tightened their aprons as pop music blared from loudspeakers.Then, they were off.On Sunday, for the first time in over a decade, Paris revived a tradition: an annual race of cafe and restaurant waiters. About 200 men and women swerved, jostled and jogged 1.2 miles through the city streets, which were lined with cheering crowds. The rules were simple: No running, and reach the finish line with laden trays intact with a croissant, a glass of tap water and a small coffee cup.The race, which was first held in the early 20th century, had been on hiatus since 2012 because of a lack of funding. But Paris officials saw an opportunity for the city to shine before hosting the Summer Olympics, which kick off in July. It was also a moment to illustrate that sipping coffee at a cafe or wine in a bistro was as integral to the capital’s cultural heritage as its most famous landmarks.“When foreigners come to Paris, they don’t just come for the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower,” said Nicolas Bonnet-Oulaldj, the deputy mayor in charge of commerce. “They also come to eat in our cafes, at the Bouillon Chartier, the Brasserie Lipp or the Procope.”André Duval, center, said he remembered the days when waiters ferried wine — not water — across the finish line. Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesParis was home to more than 15,000 bars, cafes and restaurants last year, according to city statistics.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe 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

Her work looked at how race and power are experienced in America. In 2022, she filed a lawsuit saying that the appraisal of her home was undervalued because of bias.Shani Mott, a scholar of Black studies at Johns Hopkins University whose examinations of race and power in America extended beyond the classroom to her employer, her city and even her own home, has died in Baltimore. She was 47.She died of adrenal cancer on March 12, said her husband, Nathan Connolly, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins.Though Dr. Mott spent her career in some of academia’s elite spaces, she was firmly committed to the idea that scholarship should be grounded and tangible, not succumbing to ivory tower abstraction. She encouraged students to turn a critical eye to their own backgrounds and to the realities of the world around them. In a city like Baltimore, with its complicated and often cruel racial history, there was plenty to scrutinize.“How do we think about what we’re doing and how it relates to a city like Baltimore?” is how Minkah Makalani, the director of the university’s Center for Africana Studies, described some of the questions that drove Dr. Mott’s work. “There was this kind of demanding intellectual curiosity that she had that she brought to everything that really pushed the conversation and required that people think about what we’re doing in more tangible ways.”Her research focused on American books both popular and literary, and how they revealed the kind of conversation about race that was allowed by the publishing industry and other cultural gatekeepers. This work connected to a larger theme of her scholarship: how big institutions determine how race is discussed and experienced in America.As an active member of the Johns Hopkins faculty, she pointedly explored the ways the university engaged, or did not engage, with its own workers and the majority Black city in which it sits. In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Mott was a principal investigator for the Housing Our Story project, which interviewed Black staff workers at Johns Hopkins whose voices had not been included in the campus archives. 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

Shannon Rapp and Will Eisenberg make their New York Times collaboration debut.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesMONDAY PUZZLE — Spring has finally sprung in New York. Its gentle thaw may be restorative enough for some, but I tend to treat it as a mere preamble to the season that follows. The sight of blossoms budding on park trees drives me into a frenzy of excitement for summer’s arrival. Those are the true dog days of bicycle rides, beach trips and group outings to games of a certain spectator sport — represented in today’s crossword — whose season begins this week.This puzzle is the first collaboration between Shannon Rapp and Will Eisenberg in The New York Times, and it is also Mr. Eisenberg’s Times debut. It has plenty of shorter fill to ease beginner solvers into the week, along with a few longer zingers to whet the appetites of experts — and a seasonally appropriate theme, to boot. I don’t want to spoil anything by using a figure of speech, but what the heck: They knocked it out of the park.Today’s ThemeAbsent a helpful revealer, or visibly themed clues — denoted, say, by special formatting or symbols — you can usually spot the theme set of an early-week puzzle by the longest Across entries. In today’s puzzle, those are 20-, 29-, 47- and 56-Across.The “Woven creation of the Ojibwe people” (20A) is a DREAM CATCHER, and “Thick liquid poured on a hot griddle” (29A) is PANCAKE BATTER. Any patterns come to mind yet? How about if we toss in “Emma Stone’s co-star on Showtime’s ‘The Curse’” (47A), NATHAN FIELDER? Here’s a hint: Take a look at the second words of each entry.The CATCHER, BATTER and FIELDER are all players in a baseball game. Now see if you can score the last entry on your own; otherwise, click to reveal it below.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

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said in an interview released on Sunday that she would not vote for former President Donald J. Trump. She also did not rule out the possibility of leaving the Republican Party.In the interview, which Ms. Murkowski gave to CNN, she said that she would “absolutely” not support Mr. Trump in the general election in November. She said that she wished Republicans had nominated someone whom she could vote for, but that she “certainly can’t get behind Donald Trump.”Asked whether she might leave the party and become an independent, she said that she considered herself “very independent-minded” and added, “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” But she did not give a yes-or-no answer, saying: “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times. Let’s just leave it at that.”If Ms. Murkowski left the Republican Party, it would be welcome news for Democrats facing a brutally difficult map in the Senate elections in November. Three of their current seats are up for election in red states, and several more are up for election in swing states. There are almost no opportunities to pick up seats currently held by Republicans, and there’s no room for error, given their very narrow majority.Ms. Murkowski, who has served in the Senate for more than 20 years, has long been more moderate than many Republicans. Among other positions that are rare in her party, she supports abortion rights, and she has long been critical of Mr. Trump, including in voting to convict him in his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.But most elected Republicans, even those who denounced Mr. Trump after Jan. 6, have fallen back in line behind him as it has become clear that he will be the party’s nominee for president.Ms. Murkowski’s declaration that she will not vote for Mr. Trump puts her in the company of a small number of prominent anti-Trump Republicans, among them Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.“No, no, no, absolutely not,” Mr. Romney said last month when asked by CNN whether he would vote for Mr. Trump. More

Once they heard the shots ring out on Friday night at Crocus City Hall, Efim Fidrya and his wife ran down to the building’s basement and hid with three others in a bathroom.They listened as the gunfire began and thousands of people who had come to a sold-out rock concert on Moscow’s outskirts began screaming and trying to flee.Horrified and scared, Mr. Fidrya did the only thing he could think to do: He held on tight to the bathroom door, which didn’t lock, trying to protect the group in case the assailants came to find them.“While we could hear shooting and screaming, I stood the whole time holding the bathroom door shut,” Mr. Fidrya, an academic, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “The others were standing in the corner so that if someone started shooting through the door, they wouldn’t be in the line of fire.”They didn’t know it then, but they were sheltering from what became Russia’s deadliest terror attack in two decades, after four gunmen had entered the popular concert venue and began shooting rapid-fire weapons.Their story is one of many harrowing accounts that have emerged in the days since the attack, which killed at least 137 people. More than 100 injured people are hospitalized, some in critical condition, health officials 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