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      F.D.A. Approves Novavax Covid Vaccine With Stricter New Conditions

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      The agency narrowed who can get the shot and added new study requirements that could cost the company tens of millions.The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine, but only for older adults and for others over age 12 who have at least one medical condition that puts them at high risk from Covid.Scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who typically make decisions on who should get approved shots and when, have been debating whether to recommend Covid shots only to the most vulnerable Americans. The F.D.A.’s decision appeared to render at least part of their discussion moot.The new restriction will sharply limit access to the Novavax vaccine for people under 65 who are in good health. It may leave Americans who do not have underlying conditions at risk if a more virulent version of the coronavirus were to emerge. It could also limit options for people who want the vaccine for a wide array of reasons, including to protect a vulnerable loved one.The vaccine had previously been authorized under emergency use. Covid vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which are more widely used by Americans, were granted full approval in 2022. However, the companies are working on updated shots for the fall, and the new restrictions on the Novavax shot portend a more restrictive approach from the F.D.A.The F.D.A.’s new restrictions also appeared to reflect the high degree of skepticism about vaccines from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the other leaders he has appointed at health agencies.“This is incredibly disappointing,” said Dr. Camille Kotton, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who cares for immunocompromised patients, and a former adviser to the C.D.C.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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      Austria Wins Eurovision 2025 Song Contest With JJ’s ‘Wasted Love’

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      Austria’s entrant, JJ, took the prize after a tense count that was neck-and-neck until the last votes were revealed.Austria narrowly edged out Israel to win the Eurovision Song Contest after a tense vote count on Saturday night in which the lead switched repeatedly and the victor became clear only at the last moment.Israel received the most points in the public vote, which accounts for half of the overall tally. Last year, the competition was overshadowed by protests over Israel’s involvement because of the country’s military campaign in Gaza.Austria was represented this year by JJ, a classically trained singer, who performed “Wasted Love,” a dramatic song about heartbreak. He received 436 points to Israel’s 357.Sweden, the pre-event favorite, came fourth.Austria last won the competition in 2014, when Conchita Wurst, a bearded drag queen, triumphed with “Rise Like a Phoenix.”JJ, a 24-year-old whose real name is Johannes Pietsch, is a countertenor, meaning that his vocal range most closely matches that of a female mezzo-soprano. He sings in the choir at the Opera School of the Vienna State Opera, and in recent months has appeared onstage in the company’s productions of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd.”Accepting the Eurovision winner’s trophy, a tearful JJ thanked the voters and called on them to “spread more love” in the world.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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      Federal Courts Buck Trump Deportation Schemes, Focusing on Due Process Rights

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      The Trump administration’s aggressive push to deport migrants has run up against resistance from the judiciary.If there has been a common theme in the federal courts’ response to the fallout from President Trump’s aggressive deportation policies, it is that the White House cannot rush headlong into expelling people by sidestepping the fundamental principle of due process.In case after case, a legal bottom line is emerging: Immigrants should at least be given the opportunity to challenge their deportations, especially as Trump officials have claimed novel and extraordinary powers to remove them.The latest and clearest expression of that view came on Friday evening, when the Supreme Court chided the Trump administration for seeking to provide only a day’s warning to a group of Venezuelan immigrants in Texas it had been trying to deport under the expansive powers of an 18th-century wartime law.“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal,” the justices wrote, “surely does not pass muster.”While many questions remain to be answered about Mr. Trump’s deportation plans, many legal scholars have hailed courts’ support of due process. At the same time, they have also expressed concern that such support was needed in the first place.“It’s great that courts are standing up for one of the most basic principles that underlie our constitutional order — that ‘persons’ (not ‘citizens’) are entitled to due process before being deprived of life, liberty, or property,” Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an email. “It would be even better if the administration would simply cease violating such principles.”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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      Trump Administration Abandons Fight to Ban Powerful Gun Accessory

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      The device, called a forced-reset trigger, allows semiautomatic weapons to fire hundreds of rounds. The Biden administration had sought to block them from being sold.The Trump administration has given up a legal fight to ban a device that makes semiautomatic weapons more powerful.The Justice Department said Friday that it had reached a settlement ending litigation filed by the Biden administration to block the sale of the device, called a forced-reset trigger.“This Department of Justice believes that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.”Forced-reset triggers allow gun owners to fire their semiautomatic weapons at great speed. Aided by the device, a shooter can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute with an extended squeeze, Biden administration officials had said.The accessory is similar to a bump stock, which President Trump banned during his first term after a gunman used one to massacre dozens of concertgoers in Las Vegas. Bump stocks, like forced-reset triggers, allow semiautomatic rifles to fire at speeds approaching those of machine guns.Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the bump stock ban. But the Biden administration had sought to maintain a ban on forced-reset triggers.A federal judge in Texas struck down the forced-reset trigger ban, but the Biden administration appealed the case.The Justice Department said the new settlement included gun-safety provisions and would prevent the sale of forced-reset triggers in pistols.Still, gun safety advocates decried the settlement, saying that it would allow gun owners to transform their firearms into virtual machine guns, making life in America more dangerous.“Machine guns have no place on our streets, and this move from the Trump administration will only lead to tragedy,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. More

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      Biden’s Interview With Hur Confirms What Many Suspected

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      The former president’s halting responses to questions by a special counsel show him exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.For much of his time in the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered a quick rebuttal to those raising concerns about his age: “Watch me,” he said.Yet, in the end, it may be the sound of Mr. Biden’s own voice that proves what his aides worked furiously, and spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars, to try to keep the public from seeing with its own eyes.The five-hour-and-10-minute audio recording of a special counsel’s interview with Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023, shows a president struggling to recall dates and details, whose thoughts seem jumbled as he tries to recreate events that had occurred just a few years earlier.The information in the audio recording, which Axios published on Saturday, is not new. The 258-page transcript of the interview of Mr. Biden by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents, was released in March 2024. His report set off a political firestorm in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign.But the sound of Mr. Biden’s fragile voice and unsteady responses offers a revelation of its own. The Hur tapes reveal the president exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.In the days after Mr. Hur released his report, Democrats fanned out across the news media to vouch for the president, assuring the public of their eyewitness vantage point on his deep knowledge and sure-handed command of the nation and the world. He was “sharp” and at the “top of his game,” they said almost in unison. He was “focused, impressive, formidable and effective,” as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the youngest leading Democrats, put it memorably. Biden administration officials declined to release the audio recording of his interview, asserting executive privilege.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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      Yuval Raphael, Israel’s Eurovision Entrant, Survived the Hamas Attacks of Oct. 7

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      Not long after the attacks, Yuval Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.When Hamas attacked the Nova music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Yuval Raphael went from dancing with friends to hiding in a bomb shelter.After attackers broke into the shelter and started shooting partygoers, Raphael played dead, then lay beneath bodies for eight hours until she was rescued.That experience, Raphael told the Israel Hayom newspaper earlier this year, changed her outlook on life. “When I was there, I realized that everything could be over in a moment, and you don’t want your life to end without experiencing it,” she said. Not long after the attacks, Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.Now, Raphael, 24, is representing Israel at Eurovision with “New Day Will Rise,” a ballad in which she sings, over twinkling piano, “New day will rise / Life will go on / Everyone cries / Don’t cry alone.”As Israel’s retaliation to the Oct. 7 attacks grinds on, some Eurovision fans have called on the competition organizers to expel Israel from the contest over the country’s conduct in the war.At last year’s final, some audience members booed Israel’s singer as she performed, though others cheered her. Raphael told the BBC this week that she was expecting a hostile reception during her performance and that she had been rehearsing with distracting sounds playing in the background. Indeed, on Thursday in Basel, a small group of protesters blew whistles and waved flags to disrupt one of Raphael’s public rehearsals.But, she told the broadcaster, she was trying to avoid the furor and stay focused on winning. Eurovision’s slogan is “United by music,” she said, adding, “That’s what we are here for.” More

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      Estonia’s entry, ‘Espresso Macchiato,’ brewed trouble in Italy.

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      When Tommy Cash, a rapper and singer from Estonia, won his country’s Eurovision selection with “Espresso Macchiato,” he barely had time to celebrate before a backlash began.In the song, Cash sings in a cheesy Italian accent that he is “sweating like a Mafioso” from working so hard, and just wants a coffee. “Me like mi coffee,” he says: “Very importante.”Cash’s riff on Italian clichés did not go down well in some parts of Italy. Gian Marco Centinaio, a lawmaker with Italy’s far-right League Party, posted on Instagram that Eurovision should ban the song. “Is this the idea of ​​European brotherhood that the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest have in mind?” he wrote.The flap also made headlines because Codacons, an Italian consumer rights organization, complained that the song “conveys a message of a population tied to organized crime.”In a recent interview, Cash said that he found the reaction over the top. He hadn’t meant to insult Italians, he said: “I love Italy. I love the people. I’m drawn to them because they’re so passionate.”In earlier songs, he rapped in English with his own heavy Eastern European accent, he said, and he also made a track with a German-accented chorus. His comedic Italian voice in “Espresso Macchiato” was no different than those, he said.Cash — who has made several tracks with Charli XCX — has many fans in Europe who love his left-field vibe and provocative videos, but he’s never been close to a household name. But in Italy, at least, he is now a star. Cash said that he had performed on Italian TV many times since “Espresso Macchiato” blew up. On a recent trip to Milan, he added, fans chased him down the street.He had a simple message for anyone who still felt insulted. “Drink a coffee,” he said: “Chill!” More

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      Three Iranians Accused of Targeting People in Britain

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      The charges against the men come as concerns have grown about Iranian operatives carrying out operations against British residents and citizens.Three Iranian men appeared in court on Saturday in London, accused of helping Iran’s intelligence service by targeting individuals in Britain.Mostafa Sepahvand, 39; Farhad Javadi Manesh, 44; and Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 55, have been charged under Britain’s National Security Act with engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service between Aug. 14 last year and Feb. 16.They are also accused of carrying out surveillance and reconnaissance as part of a plan to commit serious violence against an individual, who was not identified.The arrests come amid growing concern about efforts by Iranian operatives to target British citizens and residents.The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the men had been arrested and detained on May 3. “The foreign state to which the charges relate is Iran,” the statement added.The BBC reported that the three had been accused of targeting journalists working for Iran International, an independent, Persian-language broadcaster based in London that has been critical of the Iranian government.All three defendants, who live in London, had illegally entered Britain between 2016 and 2022, and two were among the thousands who have traveled to the country on small boats from France.“The charges that have been laid against these three individuals must now take their course through the criminal justice system, and nothing must be done to prejudice the outcome of those proceedings,” Yvette Cooper, Britain’s home secretary, said in a statement.“But we will also take separate action to address the very serious wider issues raised by this case,” Ms. Cooper added. “The police have confirmed that the foreign state to which these charges relate is Iran, and Iran must be held to account for its actions.”Thanking the police, Ms. Cooper said, “We will not tolerate growing state threats on our soil.”In a speech last year, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, identified Iran as a country of growing concern to the counterterrorism police. He said that since January 2022, the security services had been investigating 20 Iranian-backed plots that posed potentially lethal threats to British citizens and residents. More