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      Robert Menendez Trial Jurors See Gold Bars at Heart of Bribery Case

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      An F.B.I. agent, testifying for the government, described his search of Senator Robert Menendez’s house in New Jersey.With the corruption trial of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey underway on Thursday, a prosecutor handed a juror in the first row of the jury box a plastic bag containing an object at the heart of the government’s case: a gold bar that glinted under the courtroom lights.One by one, jurors held the bag, turning it over in their hands and feeling its weight before passing it to their neighbor — the jury’s first tangible exposure to evidence prosecutors say was a bribe paid to Mr. Menendez, 70, and his wife.The prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, soon handed jurors another bag containing several gold bars. But before she could hand over a third, the judge, Sidney H. Stein, said the jury “has gotten a feel for the weight of gold.”Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, have been charged with accepting gifts collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including gold, cash and a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible, in exchange for the senator’s dispensing of political favors to the governments of Egypt and Qatar and to three New Jersey businessmen.The senator and two of the businessmen — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — are being tried together in Manhattan federal court. Ms. Menendez, 57, was to be tried with them, but her trial was postponed after her lawyers said she had a “serious medical condition.”On Thursday, the senator revealed that Ms. Menendez was being treated for breast cancer and was preparing to undergo a mastectomy and possible radiation treatment.Who Are Key Players in the Menendez Case?Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, are accused of taking part in a wide-ranging, international bribery scheme that lasted five years. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.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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      Columbia Professors Host Alternative Graduation for NYC Students

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      Approximately 550 students, professors and religious leaders gathered near the Columbia University campus in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon for what organizers called an alternative graduation ceremony, featuring speeches by pro-Palestinian activists and writers, and clergy from various faiths.The two-hour event, called “The People’s Graduation” and organized by Columbia faculty and staff, was held toward the end of a week of official graduation ceremonies, many of which the university moved to its athletic complex some 100 blocks north to avoid disruptions by protesters.“People are feeling very alienated from the college and the university and they wanted a space where they could celebrate their accomplishments and express themselves politically,” said Nara Milanich, a professor of history at Barnard College, who attended the event.Many students had expressed dismay when Columbia’s leadership canceled the university’s main commencement ceremony, and moved most events off campus. In the weeks leading up to graduation, the school’s administration had called the police twice to remove protesters from its Morningside Heights campus, where students established a pro-Palestinian encampment and occupied a building.In a letter to the New York Police Department in April, Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, requested that the police remain on campus until at least May 17 “to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished.”Administrators said they were “deeply disappointed” at having to change plans for graduation, but said the security issues were “insurmountable.”During the alternative event on Thursday, held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, college students from across New York City attended, and many wore the powder blue caps and gowns of Columbia. Some speakers grew emotional as the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah read his poem “Dedication,” which he wrote during the first three months of the war in Gaza.Toward the end of the ceremony, organizers played a video message from Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, who thanked the protesters for their actions.“We never imagined that anyone is gonna ever give us hope the way you guys did,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll see you one day soon when all of this ends.” More

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      Line Outside Court in Trump Trial Is Packed, With Seats a Hot Commodity

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      The hottest ticket in New York City is not for a Broadway show, or even to see basketball star Caitlin Clark play against the New York Liberty. Rather it is to get a seat inside Courtroom 1530 to see the criminal trial of former president Donald J. Trump.Increasing numbers of people have traveled to downtown Manhattan in recent weeks to queue for one of roughly half a dozen seats on a wooden bench inside the courtroom. There are another two dozen reserved for the public in an overflow room otherwise packed with reporters.Admittance is free, but securing a good spot in line often comes with a hefty price tag.It did not start this way. Weeks ago, during jury selection, only a handful of people turned up and everyone got a seat. But with each consecutive day the lines have gotten increasingly longer. And people, it seems, are willing to brave any sort of weather. Thursday featured spitting rain.Michael D. Cohen, the central witness in this first criminal trial against an American president, has drawn the longest lines, even though showing up in hopes of seeing a certain witness is a bit of a crapshoot because prosecutors are not giving much notice of who their witnesses might be.People at the front of line say to ensure a seat in the courtroom they have to start lining up the day before.On Thursday morning, a woman who was 12th in line was asking $450 for her spot. Behind her was a lawyer who had paid for hundreds of dollars for line sitters so she and her friend could get into the overflow room. She ultimately paid another $500 for someone else’s spot and got a seat in the overflow room.(Yes, professional line sitters are a thing, and The New York Times has availed itself of their services in the lines reserved for reporters. There are companies that line sit for people. More often it is for concert tickets, not a spot in line at a criminal trial.)Things can get heated. People are, not surprisingly, territorial about their spots and do not take kindly to line jumpers. There have been a few. The crowd typically shames them but police have been hesitant to step in, so a few line jumpers have gotten into the overflow room.For those who do not make it there is a silver lining. There are seats for the public available at the nearby trial of Sen. Robert Menendez, who is charged in a vast international web of corruption. Opening arguments in that trial were on Wednesday. More

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      Civilian Prosecutors Rejected Evidence in 9/11 Case That Military Calls Crucial

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      The revelation sets in stark relief the decision by military prosecutors to seek to include the evidence, which has opened the door to years of litigation over confessions by the men accused of plotting the attacks.For years, a thorny question has dominated pretrial hearings in the military commissions case over the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Did the men accused of plotting them voluntarily confess in 2007 after the C.I.A. had stopped torturing them, and could those statements be used as evidence at their eventual death-penalty trial?So it came as a surprise when a veteran F.B.I. analyst revealed that in 2009, when the Obama administration was planning to instead try the men in civilian court, federal prosecutors had decided against trying to offer the statements as evidence.The revelation sets in stark relief the contrary decision by military prosecutors to build their case around summoning the F.B.I. interrogators as witnesses, calling such potential testimony their “most critical” evidence. It also underlines how that decision has opened the door to years of litigation and contributed to a lengthy delay in getting the case to trial.Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo from 2011 until his retirement in 2021, did not respond to a request for comment.During a closed hearing on March 6, Kimberly Waltz, a supervisory intelligence analyst at the F.B.I. who works on the Guantánamo prosecution team, disclosed that civilian prosecutors had decided the statements were unnecessary. In 2009, when she helped the civilian prosecution team evaluate the evidence, federal prosecutors rejected using the confessions at trial, according to a transcript of the hearing recently released by the government.“At that time it was my understanding,” she said, that “we were not going to be able to use them; they weren’t admissible.”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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      Kansas City’s Harrison Butker Draws Intense Criticism for Graduation Speech

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      Kansas City’s Harrison Butker quoted Taylor Swift lyrics while telling men to be “unapologetic in your masculinity” and women to focus on being homemakers.Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs is one of the best place-kickers in the N.F.L. That is enough to make him somewhat famous in the football world, but players of his position aren’t typically known by more casual observers — unless they do something especially great or terrible on the field.Last weekend, with the N.F.L. solidly in its off-season, Mr. Butker found himself at the center of a great deal of vitriol on social media, and it had nothing to do with his job.On Saturday, Mr. Butker delivered a 20-minute commencement address to the graduates of Benedictine College, a conservative Catholic school in Atchison, Kan., about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City. He packed his speech full of conservative political discourse, railing against “degenerative cultural values and media.” He rebuked President Joe Biden for his stance as a Catholic who supports abortion rights, and urged women to forgo careers so that they could support their husbands.“I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” Mr. Butker said. “I’m on this stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.”He added: “It cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.”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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      Senator Menendez’s Wife Is Being Treated for Breast Cancer

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      Nadine Menendez is charged along with her husband, Senator Robert Menendez, in a complex bribery scheme. She will undergo a mastectomy.Nadine Menendez, the wife of Senator Robert Menendez, is being treated for breast cancer and will undergo a mastectomy, her husband revealed on Thursday.Mr. Menendez announced his wife’s cancer diagnosis in a statement released while he was in Federal District Court in Manhattan, where he is on trial on charges that he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for political favors.“We are of course concerned about the seriousness and advanced stage of the disease,” Mr. Menendez, 70, said in the statement. “We hope and pray for the best results.”The timing of the announcement, issued by his Senate office, was conspicuous and punctuated a remarkable first week on trial. It came less than a day after the senator’s lawyers told jurors in an opening statement that Ms. Menendez, 57, was largely to blame for the gold bars and other lucrative bribes prosecutors say he took in exchange for helping Egypt and New Jersey businessmen.Mr. Menendez said he was releasing the information now because of “constant press inquiries and reporters following my wife.” He asked that she be given privacy as she battles cancer, which he described as “grade 3.”A lawyer for Ms. Menendez could not immediately be reached for comment. Ms. Menendez has not appeared in court.Ms. Menendez was originally scheduled to stand trial with him and two other defendants beginning this week. But last month, the judge presiding over the case, Sidney H. Stein, agree to grant her a delay and separate trial in July after her lawyers informed the court that she was dealing with a “serious medical condition” that would require surgery.The disclosure prompted widespread speculation in New Jersey political circles. But at the time, the lawyers only shared details of her diagnosis in a sealed submission to Judge Stein, withholding it from the public.The couple have both been accused of conspiring to trade Mr. Menendez’s clout as a senator and leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for lucrative bribes, including the gold bars, cash and a $60,000 convertible for Ms. Menendez. In opening statements on Wednesday, prosecutors described Ms. Menendez as a crucial “go-between” for the senator and New Jersey businessmen accused of providing the payoffs.The senator and his wife have both pleaded not guilty. More

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      How to Care for Yourself as a Caregiver

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      Forget yoga or weekend escapes. There are more realistic tools to put in place, experts say.Once a quarter, Bich Le, 52, travels from her home outside of Minneapolis to St. Augustine, Fla., where she moves into her father’s guest room for three weeks.The health care executive is one of five siblings who take turns caring for their widowed 90-year-old father, who has lung cancer and requires constant assistance. While she’s in Florida this month, she will miss her daughter’s final high school prom; she missed it last year, too, due to her caregiving duties.The drugs Ms. Le’s father takes to manage pain can “negatively impact how he treats people,” she said. When he becomes volatile, Ms. Le said, she mostly tries to ignore it and “not add to the stress of the situation.” She tells herself to “just care for him and just let it go.” But sometimes, when she’s exhausted, his temper grates.“What runs through my brain is: ‘A simple thank you would really go a long way,’” she said. “‘You have me, or you have a nursing home.’”Caregiving can be fraught for the estimated 53 million Americans who assist family members and friends. And factors like financial strain and isolation can add to psychological distress. In a 2017 survey of 1,081 caregivers conducted by AARP, 51 percent of respondents reported feeling worried or stressed. But there was a surprising upside: The majority — 91 percent — also reported feeling pleased that they were able to help.How can caregivers hold on to that feeling amid the stress, fatigue and resentment that also come with the role? There are strategies for feeling “less burdened or stressed by the daily problems” they encounter, said William Haley, a professor of aging studies at the University of South Florida.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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      Portishead’s Beth Gibbons Returns Solo, Doleful Yet Determined

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      With “Lives Outgrown,” her first album of her own songs in 22 years, the pensive voice of the trip-hop group confronts maturity and mortality.“All trying but can’t escape/All going to nowhere,” Beth Gibbons sings in “Floating on a Moment” from her new album, “Lives Outgrown.” It’s an acknowledgment of mortality, of limitations, of inevitable endings. It’s also an insight that can be grim or oddly comforting. Gibbons leans tentatively toward comfort; as the song ends, children sing, “All going to nowhere” while minor chords give way to major ones and Gibbons concludes, “All we have is here and now.”For three decades, Gibbons, 59, has made herself a voice of melancholy yearning and shattered hopes. With Portishead in the 1990s and 2000s, and on her own very occasional solo projects, she has sung about alienation, grief, doubt, loneliness, fear, betrayal and tormented love. Now, on “Lives Outgrown,” Gibbons has matured without becoming complacent. “The burden of life just won’t leave us alone,” she sings in “Burden of Life.”Portishead’s two 1990s studio albums, “Dummy” (1994) and “Portishead” (1997), were foundations of trip-hop. They deployed atmospheric samples to conjure a foreboding netherworld, where Gibbons’s vocals could sound anxious, jazzy, witchy or utterly bereft. Portishead’s return in 2008, “Third,” was uncompromising, dissonant and volatile, bristling against the ways trip-hop had been smoothed into background music during the group’s hiatus.In between, Gibbons collaborated on an album with Paul Webb, a.k.a Rustin Man, the bassist of Talk Talk. “Out of Season,” released in 2002, placed her voice in more naturalistic settings, with studio bands and orchestral arrangements. “Lives Outgrown,” 22 years later, is its latter-day sequel.The album was assembled gradually over the last 10 years, while Gibbons occasionally resurfaced with other projects: composing film scores, performing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on “Mother I Sober.”Produced by Gibbons and James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), “Lives Outgrown” relies on hand-played instruments, but it often juxtaposes them in surreal ways. Ford alone plays a huge assortment — guitars, dulcimer, keyboards, woodwinds, brasses, even musical saw — while the drummer Lee Harris (from Talk Talk), who shares some songwriting credits, uses all sorts of found percussion, including boxes and kitchenware. For the first time in her catalog, Gibbons allowed herself to layer on backup vocals, which materialize like a ghostly sisterhood.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