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    Who Took the ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo?

    Questions about the credit for a famous photograph from the Vietnam War have divided the photojournalism community for months.The photo is indelible, and its importance unmistakable: a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, naked and screaming, her arms outstretched in despair. It drove home the consequences of the Vietnam War to readers in the United States, where it won a Pulitzer Prize.But who took the photo, widely known as Napalm Girl? That is the question dividing the photojournalism community 53 years after it was taken.The image, from a road in the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam, has been credited to Nick Ut, a photographer who worked for The Associated Press. In the decades since, Mr. Ut has repeatedly talked publicly, in interviews and elsewhere, about his role in capturing the photo and his later friendship with its subject, Kim Phuc Phan Thi.Yet a documentary that premiered early this year, “The Stringer,” set off investigations into the creator of the image. The film argues that a freelance photographer took the image, and that an Associated Press photo editor misattributed it to Mr. Ut.On Friday, the World Press Photo Foundation, a prominent international nonprofit, weighed in. It said a monthslong investigation had found that two other photojournalists “may have been better positioned to take the photograph than Nick Ut.”Mr. Ut’s lawyer, James Hornstein, has repeatedly disputed the film’s claims and called them “defamatory.” He said in a statement that the World Press Photo decision was “deplorable and unprofessional” and “reveals how low the organization has fallen.” Mr. Hornstein declined to make Mr. Ut available for an interview.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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    L.A. Fire Victims Move Away From Altadena and Pacific Palisades to Start Over

    In the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires that destroyed thousands of homes and properties, many fire victims moved far away from Altadena and Pacific Palisades in a sudden diaspora that upended the two tight-knit communities in ways beyond the initial loss of property.Residents now living in rentals, with expenses that have ballooned, expressed frustration with school transfers, longer commutes to work and the overnight disappearance of yearslong relationships with their neighbors.Of those who had to move, more than half ended up in neighborhoods at least a half-hour’s drive away, according to more than 3,500 change of address records analyzed by The New York Times. A quarter left the Los Angeles metro area entirely, and most ended up living somewhere with higher population density than their original neighborhood. While the data doesn’t include every displaced person, the results provide a clearer picture of where the victims settled after several fires erupted amid high Santa Ana winds across Los Angeles in early January. More

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    Novo Nordisk to Replace C.E.O. After Losing Edge in Weight-Loss Drugs

    The Danish drugmaker, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, has seen its stock tumble as competition in the weight-loss drug market has grown fiercer.Novo Nordisk will replace its chief executive, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the company announced Friday, citing a sharp decline in its stock price that stemmed from increased competition for its popular weight-loss drug.The Danish drugmaker said it was searching for a new chief executive to soon replace Mr. Jorgensen, who has led Novo Nordisk for eight years.The move reflects a remarkable fall in fortune for the maker of one of the most well-known drugs in the world, which is sold as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for obesity. The company’s stock has fallen by 50 percent in the past year.

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    Novo Nordisk’s share price
    Source: FactSetBy The New York TimesSales of that drug created boom times for Novo Nordisk. In 2023, the company’s extraordinary success prompted the Danish central bank to keep interest rates lower than it otherwise would. For more than a year, Novo Nordisk’s market value surpassed Denmark’s entire gross domestic product.But investors have soured on the company as it has faced increasingly fierce competition. Lower-cost copycat versions of the weight-loss drugs made through a process known as compounding have cut into Novo Nordisk’s sales. Even more damaging has been competition from Eli Lilly, the maker of the drug sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound.Novo Nordisk had a head start, winning approval to market its drug for obesity more than two years before Eli Lilly. But Novo Nordisk has been rapidly losing market share to its competitor: American patients have filled more prescriptions this year for Zepbound than for Wegovy, and the gap has been widening, according to the industry data provider IQVIA.Eli Lilly is also developing new weight-loss drugs, including a daily pill, that are expected to set up years of blockbuster sales for the company. Novo Nordisk has a hazier path forward. More

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    Trump Administration Fires Hundreds of Voice of America Employees

    The layoffs amounted to over a third of the media organization’s staff, and came as the Trump administration put up for sale the federal building in Washington that houses the network.The Trump administration on Thursday fired nearly 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news network that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedoms.The layoffs targeted contractors, most of them journalists but also some administrative employees, and amounted to over a third of Voice of America’s staff. They signaled that the Trump administration planned to continue its efforts to dismantle the broadcaster despite a court ruling last month that ordered the federal government to maintain robust news programming at the network, which President Trump has called “the voice of radical America.”In another sign of the Trump administration’s hostility toward the broadcaster, the federal building in Washington that houses the media organization was put up for sale on Thursday.Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, said in an email to his staff on Thursday that the firings were “inexplicable.”“I am heartbroken,” he said. Mr. Abramowitz has sued to stop the Trump administration from closing the news organization.Kari Lake, a senior adviser at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, said that the Trump administration had acted within its legal authority.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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    NYT Crossword Answers for May 16, 2025

    August Lee-Kovach opens our solving weekend.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — August Lee-Kovach is building a good name for himself as a constructor of late-week puzzles.This is his fifth grid in The New York Times, and his first Friday puzzle. Mr. Lee-Kovach has had a Saturday crossword published already, which means that he has some experience with themeless grids. It shows: He packs his puzzle with some lively nine-letter stacks, and while there are a couple of speed bumps, I found it to be a fun tug of war between me as solver and Mr. Lee-Kovach as puzzle maker.Tricky Clues1A. [One shooting for the stars?] sounds as if we are supposed to be thinking of a person, but the “one” in the clue is a SPACESHIP.19A. I needed help for this one, but I’m proud to say that I still have enough brain cells left to recognize that [The “1” in 3-1-4, say] is a sports clue. The answer is LOSS, as in wins, losses and ties.48A./45D. These near-twin clues — ([It/They might grab a bite to eat]) — are somewhat grizzly. The “it” at 48A is TALON, as in the claws of a bird grabbing its prey, and the “they” at 45D are MOLARS, as in one’s back teeth. And now for a question from the Department of Pedantic Arguments: Don’t we bite food with our front teeth, and then transfer the food to the MOLARS to be chewed? No judgment if you do it the other way, of course. The department was just wondering.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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    Jewish Student Who Held Out in Lawsuit Against Harvard Agrees to Settle

    Shabbos Kestenbaum sued Harvard University over allegations it did not do enough to curb antisemitism. He had continued his lawsuit even after other students settled.Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity School graduate who became a public figure as a fiery speaker at the Republican National Convention, on Thursday settled his lawsuit accusing Harvard of allowing antisemitism to fester on its campus.The terms of the settlement are confidential, but in a lengthy statement, Mr. Kestenbaum said he was “so proud to help lead the student efforts combating antisemitism within institutions of higher learning across the country, including by suing my alma mater.”He said that his lawsuit “drew the nation’s attention to the scourge of antisemitism at Harvard and other campuses, and it also caught the attention of President Trump and his Department of Education.”Harvard released a statement saying that the university “and Mr. Kestenbaum acknowledge each other’s steadfast and important efforts to combat antisemitism at Harvard and elsewhere.” It said that both sides were “pleased to have resolved the litigation.”In recent weeks, Harvard has gone to court to fight a Trump administration freeze on billions of dollars in federal research funding to the university. The freeze came after Harvard refused to comply with demands from the administration that Harvard do more to combat antisemitism — including by allowing the government to be involved in admissions, hiring and instructional decisions, among other things.The litigation and his outspokenness made Mr. Kestenbaum the face of the Republican-led campaign against antisemitism in universities, and something of a polarizing figure on Harvard’s campus.He graduated from the divinity school in May 2024, and in July he spoke at the Republican National Convention.“My problem with Harvard is not its liberalism but its illiberalism,” Mr. Kestenbaum said in his convention speech. “Too often students at Harvard are taught not how to think but what to think. I found myself immersed in a culture that is anti-Western, that is anti-American and that is antisemitic.”He has been in demand since then as a speaker for Jewish groups across the country.In his statement following the settlement, Mr. Kestenbaum said he had campaigned with Mr. Trump because the president planned to hold universities accountable.Mr. Kestenbaum, an Orthodox Jew, was a second-year divinity school student when the campus became the site of protests over the war in Gaza. Some Jewish students accused protests of veering into antisemitism, a charge that protesters, some of them Jewish themselves, have strongly denied.In January 2024, Mr. Kestenbaum and five other Jewish students sued the university, accusing it of becoming “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” That case was settled the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.Harvard agreed to take a number of steps, including adopting a strict definition of antisemitism.But Mr. Kestenbaum refused to go along with the settlement and continued to litigate on his own, culminating in Thursday’s agreement. More

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    36 Deaths in Police Custody Should Have Been Called Homicides, Report Finds

    An audit of deaths in Maryland found that in cases of people who died after being restrained by the police, medical examiners often classified the deaths as natural or accidental.Medical examiners in Maryland miscategorized dozens of deaths that happened in police custody over the past two decades, according to a report released by state officials on Thursday.At least 36 of those deaths should have been called homicides, the report said. Instead, medical examiners had classified them as accidental, or as a result of natural or undetermined causes.The report, 70 pages long, capped a yearslong audit that revisited medical examiners’ reports over 17 years ending in 2019 — a time period matching Dr. David R. Fowler’s tenure as Maryland’s chief medical examiner — and found evidence of racism and pro-police bias.Anthony Brown, Maryland’s attorney general, said at a news conference on Thursday that medical examiners had been less likely to call a death a homicide if the person who died was Black, or if he or she had died after being restrained by police officers.“These findings have profound implications across our justice system,” Mr. Brown said. “They speak to systemic issues rather than individual conduct.”Dr. Fowler did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. He was not solely responsible for the decisions made by medical examiners during his tenure, and in the past he has defended the work of the pathologists in his office.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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    Cassie Confronted by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Lawyer Over ‘Freak-Offs’ During Trial

    During cross-examination, the defense team depicted Casandra Ventura as fully engaged in staging and participating in the marathon sex sessions she says were abusive.Lawyers for Sean Combs worked on Thursday in court to portray his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, as a willing and full participant in sex marathons with prostitutes, as they sought to undermine her harrowing account of an abusive, coercive relationship riddled with violence.Ms. Ventura’s credibility is central to the government’s case, in which they have charged Mr. Combs, the music mogul, with sex trafficking and racketeering. Earlier this week she told the jury of eight men and four women of how she had suffered through hundreds of degrading sexual encounters and many injuries out of a misguided attempt to please a man she loved.But on the fourth day of Mr. Combs’s trial, the defense tried to recast Ms. Ventura, a singer known professionally as Cassie, as not nearly the victim she had portrayed herself to be. During cross-examination, Anna Estevao, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers on a team led by Marc Agnifilo, repeatedly had her read text messages in which she expressed graphic enthusiasm for their sexual encounters, including the now famed “freak-offs” involving paid escorts.“I’m always ready to freak off lolol,” Ms. Ventura said in a message from 2009.In another exchange from around the same time, Ms. Ventura expressed her excitement in graphically sexual terms, and he told her: “I can’t wait to watch you. I want you to get real hott.”She answered: “Me too. I just want it to be uncontrollable.”Jurors gazed at the barrage of text messages, which were displayed on screens in front of them, sometimes leaning forward to get a closer look.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his defense has argued that the government is trying to criminalize unconventional, but lawful, sexual relations between consenting adults. In her first two days on the stand, Ms. Ventura said that she might have feigned interest at times to avoid Mr. Combs’s anger, and she recited a litany of incidents in which she was beaten when she failed.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