Elections

Recent changes in college sports have made March Madness even more unpredictable.Happy Selection Sunday!Green beer and lucky leprechauns aside, today is one of America’s great (unofficial) holidays. It’s the day the 68-team brackets for the N.C.A.A. men’s and women’s basketball tournaments are revealed.Tonight’s unveiling of the matchups may bring back a feeling you haven’t had since digesting the prompt for that 10th grade U.S. history essay: What in the world do I make of all this?Did Duke get a favorable draw? What’s the path for my school? Which No. 12 seed looks like a Cinderella? Where the heck is McNeese State? Is Cream Abdul-Jabbar in the field? And how come the Fairfield women’s team is called the Stags?No matter how much basketball you’ve studied since November — poring over KenPom ratings, streaming games from obscure conferences, reciting the eight-player rotations of the Purdue men and the South Carolina women before you go to bed — there is so much uncertainty when it comes to filling out your bracket.Picking winners has never been simple — remember, over all these years, there has never been a perfect bracket — but recent changes to the sport have made it more unpredictable than ever. I’ll explain them in today’s newsletter.New rulesThree years ago, under mounting legislative and judicial pressure, the N.C.A.A. changed two major rules. It allowed athletes to make money from so-called name, image and likeness payments, and it eased restrictions on players transferring from one school to another. Those changes — prompted in part by a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the N.C.A.A.’s authority — have upended the top levels of college sports.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

Aaron Esposito and Daniel Farrell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyIn October 2022, amid a flurry of media appearances promoting their film “Tàr,” the director Todd Field and the star Cate Blanchett made time to visit a cramped closet in Manhattan. This closet, which has become a sacred space for movie buffs, was once a disused bathroom at the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, a 40-year-old company dedicated to “gathering the greatest films from around the world” and making high-quality editions available to the public on DVD and Blu-ray and, more recently, through its streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Today Criterion uses the closet as its stockroom, housing films by some 600 directors from more than 50 countries — a catalog so synonymous with cinematic achievement that it has come to function as a kind of film Hall of Fame. Through a combination of luck, obsession and good taste, this 55-person company has become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hollywood studio or awards ceremony.There are a lot of ways to listen to “The Daily.” Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at [email protected]. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at [email protected] production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More

Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, bejeweled elephants and 5,500 drones. Those were some of the highlights of what is likely the most ostentatious “pre-wedding” ceremony the modern world has ever seen.On a long weekend in early March, members of the global elite gathered to celebrate the impending nuptials of the billionaire business titan Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant, and Radhika Merchant. Monarchs, politicians and the ultrawealthy, including Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump, descended on an oil refinery city in the western Indian state of Gujarat for an event so extravagant you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, well, a wedding. But that will take place in July. For the long windup to the big day, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, though invited as guests, took to the stage to sing and dance in what amounted to a bending of the knee to India’s most powerful family.Watching the event, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1911 durbar, or royal reception, when King George V was proclaimed emperor of India. Once India won its independence from Britain in 1947, it committed itself to becoming a democratic welfare state — an audacious experiment that resulted in what is now the world’s largest democracy. But in advance of this year’s general election, expected to begin in April, the Ambani-Merchant matrimonial extravaganza shows us where true power in India now lies: with a handful of people whose untrammeled wealth and influence has elevated them to the position of India’s shadow leaders.It’s difficult to imagine the Ambani-Merchant wedding event in an India that isn’t ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It’s true that the Ambanis have been wealthy for years now and that accusations of favorable treatment from government authorities are not unique to this family or the Modi government. But no other prime minister in India’s history has been so openly aligned with big business, and never before has the concentration of wealth been more apparent. India’s richest 1 percent now own more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam. The country has the world’s largest number of poor, at 228.9 million. And according to a newly published study looking at 92 low- and middle-income countries, India had the third-highest percentage of “zero food” children — babies between 6 months and 23 months old who had gone a day or more without food other than breast milk at the time they were surveyed. Oxfam has described this new India as the “survival of the richest.”For the uberwealthy, this presents a no-holds-barred opportunity to exert their power and influence. In 2017, Mr. Modi introduced a fund-raising mechanism called “electoral bonds” to allow unlimited anonymous donations to political parties. In the five years that followed, the prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party received $635 million in contributions through such bonds, 5.5 times as much as its closest rival, the Congress Party. The 2019 Indian general elections cost $8.6 billion, surpassing the estimated $6.5 billion spent on the 2016 U.S. presidential and congressional elections.Analysis by three independent media organizations in India published on March 14 revealed that a company called Qwik Supply Chains purchased bonds in the scheme worth $50 million. One of the company’s three directors, reporters later uncovered, is also a director at several subsidiaries of Reliance, Mukesh Ambani’s mega-firm. A spokesperson for Reliance said that Qwik is not a Reliance subsidiary and did not respond to further questioning from Reuters. The Indian Supreme Court has since struck down the electoral bond mechanism, calling it unconstitutional, but the delay in addressing the matter has most likely come too late to change the outcome of the forthcoming election, which is widely considered all but certain to go in Mr. Modi’s favor.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

The authorities said the eruption on Saturday night was the most powerful of a series that started in December.A volcano erupted with little notice in southern Iceland on Saturday night, the latest in a string of eruptions in the area, threatening local infrastructure and leading the authorities to declare a state of emergency.Lava fountains burst out of the ground, and a nearly two-mile-long fissure opened up on the Reykjanes Peninsula around 8:30 p.m., the Icelandic Meteorological Office said. The eruption occurred near the town of Grindavik, the Svartsengi Power Plant and the Blue Lagoon, one of Iceland’s most famous tourist attractions.The meteorological office said that it had received indications of a possible eruption only about 40 minutes before it happened. The office sent out its first warning moments before the eruption began.The Blue Lagoon and Grindavik were evacuated shortly after the eruption, according to RUV, the national broadcaster. Grindavik has a population of about 4,000, but few residents were in the town at the time. About 700 visitors were staying at the Blue Lagoon.Local news media reported that lava flowed over the main road leading to Grindavik around 1 a.m. and was heading toward the town and the power plant. Both have defensive barriers built around them to protect them from lava.On Sunday morning, Hjordis Gudmundsdottir, a spokeswoman for the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management, told reporters that the biggest risk was to two pipes that carried hot water from the geothermal Svartsengi Power Plant to homes on the peninsula.The eruption was most likely the biggest of the seven that have occurred across the Reykjanes Peninsula since 2021, including four since December, the civil protection agency said in a statement. Before that, the peninsula had laid dormant for 800 years.Meteorologists have expressed concerns that if the lava continues at the same rate, it could flow into the North Atlantic. Contact between lava and water can create small explosions and dangerous gases. More

President Biden’s re-election campaign said on Sunday that it had raised more than $53 million in February together with the Democratic Party, an influx of cash that is expected to widen the Democrats’ cash advantage in a general-election contest against former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party and their shared accounts now have $155 million cash on hand — up from $130 million at the end of January, his campaign said. The campaign credited strong support from small-dollar donors for its February fund-raising.So far in the race, Mr. Biden and the Democrats have built a substantial fund-raising advantage over Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee, which reported around $40 million in cash on hand between them at the end of January. The Trump campaign has not released its February fund-raising figures but has said it also had its strongest month among small donors — topping the $22.3 million raised last August. Mr. Trump and the R.N.C. formed a formal joint fund-raising account only last week.“The fact that we have $155 million in cash on hand — which is 100 percent going to building out the campaign and focused on the six or seven states that are going to determine the outcome of this election — is just a huge competitive advantage,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chair of the Biden campaign, said in an interview.Mr. Trump has been schmoozing with donors at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., trying to lessen the financial disparity he faces against Mr. Biden. The former president is also confronting the financial pressure of his legal bills, which are being paid by one of his political action committees.Both campaigns must disclose details of their finances on March 20, with a more complete picture due on April 15.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

Anna Shechtman’s new memoir-history hybrid, “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” explores the gender politics behind one of the world’s most popular word games.Anna Shechtman was 15 when she started building crossword puzzles, and 19 when her first puzzle was published in The New York Times. She later helped to found The New Yorker’s crossword section where, as one of very few female puzzle creators, she has been part of an ongoing effort to diversify the field.Now 33 and a resident scholar at Cornell, Shechtman has spun her experience and her deep knowledge of puzzles into a book, “The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle,” published earlier this month. Part history, part memoir, part feminist reconsideration, it offers a sweeping overview of the American crossword puzzle over the last century, told primarily through the stories of four pioneering women who were integral to its evolution.A significant portion of the book is also an intimate chronicle of Shechtman’s struggle with anorexia, which began around the same time her interest in puzzles emerged. She sees the two as tightly linked — attempts to “retreat from the hard fact of [my] embodiment into a world of words, into its order and disorder.”“The Riddles of the Sphinx” poses questions — What kinds of intellectual work is considered worthy of our attention? What boxes have women historically been permitted to fill? — only to consistently invert and twist them. What emerges is a surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and off the page.In an interview that has been edited and condensed for clarity, Shechtman discussed her investigation of this legacy and the revelations, both personal and political, that came from finding her place within 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

The suspect and the 15-year-old were both living in a hotel that currently serves as a migrants shelter. The charge comes amid heightened scrutiny over America’s immigration policy. A Haitian migrant has been charged with raping a 15-year-old girl at a hotel serving as a migrant shelter in Massachusetts, authorities said Thursday.Cory B. Alvarez, 26, was arrested on Thursday and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment that day in Hingham District Court on one count of aggravated rape of a child. He entered the United States lawfully in June 2023 through New York, according to James Covington, a spokesman for the Enforcement and Removal Operations unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston. But it was unclear through which specific immigration program Mr. Alvarez entered the country. The charge comes as Boston and other cities grapple with questions over migrant housing and amid intense debate across the country over America’s immigration policy. The killing of a 22-year-old woman at the University of Georgia campus in February became a political flashpoint when a Venezuelan migrant was charged with the crime, with Republicans including former President Donald J. Trump blaming the death on President Biden’s policies. Such statements have struck many liberals as inflammatory rhetoric.National data has suggested that there is not a causal connection between immigration and crime in the country, and that growth in illegal immigration does not lead to higher local crime rates. Many studies have found that immigrants are less likely than people born in the United States to commit crimes.In the Massachusetts case, both Mr. Alvarez and the teenager, who is disabled, were living at the Comfort Inn in Rockland, a Boston suburb, according to the Rockland Police. It was not clear whether the girl was also a migrant.The Comfort Inn is part of a state and federal program to house migrant families, the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. There are about 7,500 families enrolled in the emergency shelter system across Massachusetts, with just under 3,900 of them in hotels or motels, according to government figures from Friday. In December, the state reported that just over 3,500 families receiving emergency assistance housing were migrants, refugees or asylum seekers. 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

Former President Donald J. Trump, at an event on Saturday ostensibly meant to boost his preferred candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary race, gave a freewheeling speech in which he used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, maintained a steady stream of insults and vulgarities and predicted that the United States would never have another election if he did not win in November.With his general-election matchup against President Biden in clear view, Mr. Trump once more doubled down on the doomsday vision of the country that has animated his third presidential campaign and energized his base during the Republican primary.The dark view resurfaced throughout his speech. While discussing the U.S. economy and its auto industry, Mr. Trump promised to place tariffs on cars manufactured abroad if he won in November. He added: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”For nearly 90 minutes outside the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, Mr. Trump delivered a discursive speech, replete with attacks and caustic rhetoric. He noted several times that he was having difficulty reading the teleprompter.The former president opened his speech by praising the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump, who faces criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commended their spirit and vowed to help them if elected in November. He also repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been discredited by a mountain of evidence.If he did not win this year’s presidential election, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”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