Elections

His financial misdeeds may have led to conviction, but his extravagant sartorial tastes proved little help to the former N.R.A. chief’s case. You’d think Wayne LaPierre would have read the playbook. After decades in the spotlight, the former chief executive of the National Rifle Association could have been expected to know that, for public figures, conspicuous consumption is always a bad look.This is seldom truer than when sartorial choices come into play. And among the dominant motifs in the reporting and online chatter about Mr. LaPierre’s civil corruption trial were his fashion habits and the unpardonable fact that the face of an organization purporting to speak for the country’s heartland had billed it hundreds of thousands of dollars for suits, many from a luxury boutique in Beverly Hills.Haven’t we been here before? Wasn’t Sarah Palin rudely schooled on the matter back in 2008, when, even as she campaigned alongside Senator John McCain as a champion of blue-collar workers, it was revealed by Politico that staffers shopping for Ms. Palin spent more than $150,000 on clothes and accessories from high-end retailers like Neiman Marcus — in a single month.Long after details evaporated as to why exactly Paul Manafort, who served as chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, had been sentenced to jail for seven years (tax fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy, to remind), plenty of folks can recall in vivid detail how eagerly the press publicly depantsed the former lobbyist for his unseemly taste in finery.“The poor slob should have known that flagging a taste for expensive clothes always gets you in trouble,” said Amy Fine Collins, a fashion expert as keeper of the International Best Dressed List and an editor at large at Airmail.“Superiority in dress is inherently seen as elitist,’’ Ms. Collins said. “And we know how American feels about elites.”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

In a letter, Joseph Ladapo said parents at an elementary school with confirmed measles cases can decide whether their children should attend school.As a cluster of measles cases grew in an elementary school in southern Florida, the state’s surgeon general sent a letter to parents that contradicted widespread medical guidance about how to keep the disease from spreading.Doctors and health officials typically recommend that children who are not vaccinated for measles isolate for 21 days after they have been exposed at school. In the letter, the state surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, said it was up to parents and guardians to determine when their children can attend school, even if those children have not been vaccinated against the disease.“Because of the high likelihood of infection, it is normally recommended that children stay home until the end of the infectious period,” the letter read. However, the state Department of Health “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance,” the letter, sent to parents at Manatee Bay Elementary School in Weston, Fla., continued.Dr. Ladapo added that these recommendations might change in the future and stressed that children with measles symptoms should not go to school. As of Friday, there were six confirmed cases at the school, according to Broward County Public Schools.Measles is one of the world’s most infectious diseases. Cases and deaths have been rising across the globe, in part because health officials have struggled to vaccinate people in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and growing vaccine hesitancy. In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned physicians to “stay alert for measles” as more cases emerged in the United States, largely among unvaccinated children and adolescents.Dr. Ladapo, a former clinical researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has played a prominent role in the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, appearing with the governor at events that mainstream public health experts have repeatedly criticized as spreading dangerous falsehoods.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 fire, in the Hamilton Heights section, spread quickly from the third floor, trapped people above and led at least one person to jump for safety.One person died and at least 17 people were injured in a two-alarm fire that tore through an apartment building in the Hamilton Heights area of Harlem on Friday, the authorities said.The Fire Department responded to a call at 2:14 p.m. at 2 St. Nicholas Place, a six-story apartment building with 25 units, officials said. The fire started on the third floor and spread quickly through the floors above, according to the Fire Department.Twelve people were taken to New York Health and Hospitals Harlem, the police said; five were in critical condition. One person died at the hospital, according to Joseph Pfeifer, the Fire Department’s first deputy commissioner.When firefighters arrived, several residents were on the building’s fire escapes and three people were trapped, hanging out of fifth-floor windows. Three firefighters were lowered on ropes from the roof to help them.“I told them not to jump, that we’re coming down to rescue them,” Firefighter Chris Lopez, who was involved in the rescue effort, said at a news conference Friday evening.John Hodgens, the Fire Department’s chief of department, said at the news conference that the firefighters usually conduct one or two rope rescues a year. One person jumped out of a window just before firefighters arrived, Chief Hodgens said. Separately, three people were found unconscious on the sixth floor, he 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

The museum asserts it is the rightful owner of an Egon Schiele drawing that New York investigators say in a new court filing was stolen by the Nazis.New York investigators trying to seize a drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago filed an exacting 160-page motion on Friday accusing the museum of blatantly ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been looted by the Nazis on the eve of World War II.While the court papers, filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, did not accuse the museum of being party to the fraud, they said it had applied “willful blindness” to what the investigators said were clear indications that it was acquiring stolen property.The drawing, “Russian War Prisoner,” by Egon Schiele was purchased by the Art Institute in 1966. It is one of a number of works by Schiele that ended up in the hands of museums and collectors and have been sought by the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret entertainer from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. The institute paid about $5,500 for the drawing, which has been valued by investigators today at $1.25 million.In a statement, the Art Institute said it had good title to the work by Schiele, an Austrian Expressionist, and would fight the district attorney’s attempt to seize it.“We have done extensive research on the provenance history of this work and are confident in our lawful ownership of the piece,” the museum said, adding: “If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”But the investigators said in their court filing that the institute’s “failure” to vet the work properly “undercuts any arguments that AIC were truly good-faith purchasers.”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

Donald Trump is creating hurdles his allies wish he would avoid. For much of 2023, Donald Trump’s political campaign was defined by the criminal charges he faces in four jurisdictions. Republicans reacted, the former president went to arraignments and the coverage on television was often wall to wall.The cycle of events created a sense of motion for a front-running Republican candidate seeking another term in office who was, in fact, speaking fairly infrequently in public compared with his previous campaigns. That impression cushioned him from, bluntly, himself — limiting the self-inflicted wounds he made by giving relatively few interviews and holding relatively few rallies.But as Trump has moved closer to becoming the Republican nominee, such a cushion has become harder to maintain. There is barely a primary race for him to disappear behind. And as the race shifts to a new phase, he is creating hurdles his allies wish he would avoid.Take his recent comments about mail-in voting and early voting.“If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” Trump said to the Fox News host Laura Ingraham this week. When Ingraham pointed out that mail-in voting exists in Florida, a state where Trump lives and which he won, he pressed again. “That’s right, that’s right. If you have it, you’re going to have fraud,” he said.It’s a message he delivered again in Nashville before an audience of Christian broadcasters on Thursday night. Mail-in voting is rife with fraud, he insisted.“We no longer have Election Day, we have election periods, some of them last for 45 days,” Trump said ominously. “And what they do during those 45 days is very bad. A lot of bad things happen.”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

He put the experience behind him after he returned from the Vietnam War. But fame finally caught up to him in the 1990s.Chuck Mawhinney, whose ability to creep through the dense jungle and looming elephant grass of South Vietnam and then wait for hours with his scoped rifle to pick off an enemy soldier made him the deadliest sniper in the history of the Marine Corps, died on Feb. 12 in Baker City, a town in the northeastern corner of Oregon. He was 74.His death was announced by Coles Funeral Home in Baker City. No further details were available.Mr. Mawhinney, who served in Vietnam from May 1968 to March 1970, had 106 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills, averaging about four a week — more than the average company, which comprised about 150 soldiers.Among American military snipers, only Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and had 160 confirmed kills, and Adelbert Waldron, an Army sniper during the Vietnam War with 109 kills, had higher numbers than Mr. Mawhinney.As a sniper, Mr. Mawhinney filled a number of roles. He would stay up all night with his rifle and night scope, watching the perimeter of an encampment for incursions. He would go out on patrol with other Marines, ready to support them if a firefight broke out. But mostly he and his spotter, a novice sniper who helped him identify targets, went out alone, looking for individual targets to kill as a way of sapping enemy morale.Most of his kills came slowly, a single shot from his bolt-action M40 after hours of waiting. But some came in bursts: On the night of Feb. 14, 1969, Mr. Mawhinney watched as a column of North Vietnamese soldiers crossed a shallow river near Da Nang, making their way toward a Marine encampment. He started firing, quickly but methodically, and in 30 seconds he had killed 16. The rest retreated.He claimed no special talent as a sniper, just the willingness to put in endless hours of practice. But he also demonstrated an unusual ability to tolerate grueling hours of stillness hiding in the jungle, alert for targets while bugs and snakes crawled over him.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 measure still requires approval from the Council of States, but the vote brings the country closer to becoming the largest nation in Europe to legalize the drug for recreational use.Lawmakers in Germany approved legalization of cannabis on Friday, bringing the country a step closer to becoming one of the few European nations — and by far the largest — to fully legalize limited amounts of the drug for recreational use.“By legalizing it, we are taking cannabis out of the taboo zone,” said Karl Lauterbach, who as health minister is largely responsible for the law, on public television before the vote, which ended up being 407 votes for and 226 against.The proposal must be approved by the Federal Council next month.Several other European countries, perhaps most notably the Netherlands, tolerate the use of cannabis, but legalization is rare: With in the European Union, Only Malta and Luxembourg have gone that far.If the law passes the Federal Council and is signed by the president, it will be rolled out in two steps. Starting in April, all adults will be allowed to carry up to 25 grams, own up to 50 grams, and grow up to three adult plants for private consumption. Then, in July, adults in Germany will be permitted to form social clubs that can produce cannabis plants for their members.Critics have objected to the new law on the grounds that it could normalize the drug and make it easier for minors to obtain it. To try to prevent this, the measure limits carrying and use of the drug to people over 18 years old and bans consumption of the drug close to schools or other places where young people gather.States have warned that the legalization would cause an extra burden for the traffic police, who expect to see an increase in the number of people driving under the influence of the drug on German roads. More

The company said that it was leaving its space in a former bank in Times Square after 25 years because the rent was too high and the lease had unfavorable terms.Second Stage Theater, a leading nonprofit that presents work by living American writers both on and off Broadway, is giving up its Rem Koolhaas-designed Off Broadway home in a former bank near Times Square, saying its rent was too high and its lease had unfavorable terms.The theater company, which has nurtured multiple Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning shows over the years, until recently operated three theaters: the Hayes Theater on Broadway, an Off Off Broadway space on the Upper West Side and an Off Broadway theater, the Tony Kiser Theater, in a former bank building at the corner of West 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue.Last year, Second Stage gave up the lease on its Off Off Broadway space. Now it is also relinquishing the Kiser Theater, a 296-seat theater space where it has been presenting plays and musicals since 1999. The Broadway house has been unaffected by the changes. The company said it was committed to continuing to produce work Off Broadway, and was searching for a new place in which to do so.Second Stage is letting go of the Kiser at a time of significant strain on nonprofit theaters everywhere, and at a time of transition for the organization. Carole Rothman, one of the company’s founders and now its president and artistic director, is leaving the organization this summer after a 45-year tenure; the board is conducting a search for her successor.The Second Stage board had agreed to an 8-year lease renewal for the West 43rd Street building in 2021, but decided late last year to exercise a one-time option that allowed it out of the lease at the end of this year.Lisa Lawer Post, the company’s executive director, cited financial concerns in explaining the decision by the organization’s board to terminate the lease for the West 43rd Street building, which is where the company presented early productions of shows including “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Next to Normal” and “Between Riverside and Crazy.”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