Elections

BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and State Street are quitting or scaling back their ties to an influential global investment coalition.BlackRock, which has been criticized for its embrace of environmental considerations in investing, was among the firms that scaled back or withdrew from a climate coalition.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesA $14 trillion exit Climate hawks have long questioned the financial industry’s commitment to sustainable investing. But few foresaw JPMorgan Chase and State Street quitting Climate Action 100+, a global investment coalition that has been pushing companies to decarbonize. Meanwhile, BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, scaled back its ties to the group.All told, the moves amount to a nearly $14 trillion exit from an organization meant to marshal Wall Street’s clout to expand the climate agenda.The retreat jolted the political landscape. Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who compared the coalition to a “cartel” forcing businesses to cut emissions, called for more financial companies to follow suit. And Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, accused the firms of “caving into the demands of right-wing politicians funded by the fossil-fuel industry.”The companies say they’re committed to the climate cause. JPMorgan said it had built an in-house sustainable investment team to focus on green issues. And BlackRock will maintain some ties to the coalition: It has transferred its membership to an international entity.A recent shift by Climate Action raised red flags. Last summer, the group shifted its focus from pressuring companies to disclose their net-zero progress to getting them to reduce emissions.State Street said the new priorities compromised its “independent approach to proxy voting and portfolio company management.” And BlackRock, which has become a political lightning rod over its embrace of climate considerations in investing, said those tactics “would raise legal considerations, particularly in the U.S.” (Hence the transfer to an overseas division.)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

Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, vehemently denied wrongdoing while testifying at a court hearing on Thursday as she rebutted accusations that her romantic relationship with a deputy prosecutor on the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump meant she should be disqualified from the case. The district attorney testified that her relationship with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade started months after he was retained to work on the case, charging Trump over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state, and ended in summer 2023 More

Colin Adams is a very busy person these days.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — As the great sage Ferris Bueller once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

via GIPHYGiphy.comI hope Colin Adams is looking around and feeling proud of his accomplishments today. As he says in his constructor notes, 2024 has turned out to be a big year for him. If that weren’t enough, this puzzle is his New York Times Crossword debut.It’s a good one. Mr. Adams made some lively stacks in the northeast and southwest, and the long Across and Down entries were fun to write into the grid.More on this below. There will be a few spoilers, so if you don’t want to see them, scroll up to the “Tricky Clues” jump link above the Games newsletter sign-up box. Clicking the link will take you directly to the section where I discuss the clues.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

Robert DuBoise, 59, was sentenced to death after being wrongfully convicted in a 1983 murder and rape. He sued after his conviction was overturned and reached a settlement with the city on Thursday.A man who spent 37 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted in the 1983 rape and murder of a woman in Tampa, Fla., will receive $14 million in a settlement with the City of Tampa, it said Thursday.The man, Robert DuBoise, 59, was just 18 when he was arrested in connection with the killing of Barbara Grams, 19, who was beaten to death and whose body was discovered behind a dental office on the north side of the city on Aug. 19, 1983.Mr. DuBoise was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted sexual battery in 1985 following a one-week trial in which a jailhouse informant claimed he was guilty, and prosecutors argued that Mr. DuBoise’s teeth matched what they described as a bite mark on the victim’s cheek. He was initially sentenced to death, but three years later, the Florida Supreme Court changed that sentence to life in prison.In August 2020, Mr. DuBoise was freed after new DNA evidence came to light that exonerated him and implicated two other men who were later charged in the killing. The next year, Mr. DuBoise filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Tampa, four former police officers and the forensic odontologist who had testified against him.On Thursday, the Tampa City Council unanimously approved the settlement, which is to be paid in three installments over three years.“I’m just grateful,” Mr. DuBoise said in an interview Thursday, adding that he hoped his case could serve as an example for others who had been wrongfully convicted. He said he hoped that “they get justice and can move on without having to spend the rest of their life fighting the system that has already wronged them.”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

Defense lawyers argue a romance between the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, and the special prosecutor she hired to handle the election interference case in Georgia should disqualify them. A case charging former President Donald J. Trump and his allies with trying to subvert the 2020 election results in Georgia took a detour on Thursday into the details of the prosecutors’ romantic and financial lives — their sleeping arrangements, vacations and private bank accounts — in an unusual and highly contentious hearing.Lawyers for Mr. Trump and his co-defendants have argued that the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, and the special prosecutor she hired to manage the case, Nathan J. Wade, should be disqualified from the case because their romantic and financial entanglements had created a conflict of interest. Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade forcefully rejected those accusations in testimony on Thursday, with Ms. Willis accusing the defense lawyers of spreading “lies.”“You think I’m on trial,” Ms. Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is a co-defendant in the case. “These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”The hearing, in Fulton County Superior Court, was a remarkable turn of events, as the prosecutors who have accused Mr. Trump of trying to invalidate election results were grilled by the defense lawyers about the trips they took together, their breakup and who paid for their meals and hotels. Ms. Willis took the stand after her former friend, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, testified that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade began a romantic relationship in 2019, before Ms. Willis hired him in November 2021. Ms. Bryant-Yeartie said that it was still going on when she and Ms. Willis last spoke in 2022, just before they had a falling out.Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade forcefully rejected accusations in testimony on Thursday.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerWe 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 Paris End seeks to celebrate a recovering Australian city.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter based in Melbourne.In August 1972, a collective of writers, mostly in Melbourne, released the first issue of a biweekly broadsheet that would chronicle a certain corner of Australian countercultural life — starting with a scathing piece on the “young press baron” Rupert Murdoch.Over a run of about 40 months, The Digger newspaper featured fervent opinion columns, extended reviews and cultural listings, as well as what it described as “gonzo accounts” of Australian life. It touched on topics including sex education, Aboriginal rights, republicanism (“It’s time we chucked the Queen of Oz and her GG,” an abbreviation for governor general, “into the sea”) and the joys of riding a bike.The paper was connected with some of the most important names in Australian literature of the time, and it played a significant role in starting the Australian novelist Helen Garner’s career as a writer. (The Digger folded in 1975 when, as the founder Phillip Frazer wrote in 2018, it “ran out of money and lawyers.”)Five decades later, another Australian publication is channeling some of that same irreverent spirit and commitment to, as its editors put it, “reportage.”The Paris End is a longform Substack newsletter started around a year ago by the writers Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz, whose ages run from about 25 to about 35. (Mr. Schwartz has previously contributed to The New York Times.)The newsletter is named for the local nickname for the eastern end of Collins Street in downtown Melbourne — once home to the city’s artistic community, and today the site of luxury hotels and glitzy international fashion boutiques. (The newsletter does not exclusively, or even primarily, trade in stories from that part of town.)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

St. Patrick’s Cathedral was the site of protests over the church’s position on homosexuality and AIDS. On Thursday, it hosted a jubilant funeral for Cecilia Gentili, a former sex worker and actress.The pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral were packed on Thursday for an event with no likely precedent in Catholic history: the funeral of Cecilia Gentili, a transgender activist and actress, former sex worker and self-professed atheist whose memorial functioned as both a celebration of her life and an exuberant piece of political theater.Over 1,000 mourners, several hundred of whom were transgender, arrived in daring outfits — glittery miniskirts and halter tops, fishnet stockings, sumptuous fur stoles and at least one boa sewed from $100 bills. Mass cards and a picture near the altar showed a haloed Ms. Gentili surrounded by the Spanish words for “transvestite,” “whore,” “blessed” and “mother” above the text of Psalm 25.That St. Patrick’s Cathedral would host the funeral for a high-profile transgender activist, who was well known for her advocacy on behalf of sex workers, transgender people and people living with H.I.V., might come as a surprise to some.Not much more than a generation ago, at the heights of the AIDS crisis, the cathedral was a flashpoint in conflicts between gay activists and the Catholic Church, whose opposition to homosexuality and condom use enraged the community. The towering neo-Gothic building became the site of headline-grabbing protests in which activists chained themselves to the pews and lay down in the aisles.On Thursday, St. Patrick’s Cathedral was filled those mourning Ms. Gentili. Decades ago, L.G.B.T.Q. activists chained themselves to the pews to protest the church.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesThe church has softened its tone on those issues in recent years, and New York’s current cardinal, Timothy Dolan, has said the church should be more welcoming of gay people. Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, did not respond to questions about whether the church had been aware of Ms. Gentili’s background when it agreed to host her funeral.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 results came as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak deals with a shrinking economy and discontent over a crisis gripping the country’s health system.Britain’s governing Conservative Party has lost the first of two parliamentary elections in a new blow to its embattled leader, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose future has been questioned by critics within his fractious political party.The Conservatives were defeated in Kingswood, near Bristol, by 8,675 to 11,176 votes, losing a seat that the party had previously held. Votes were cast Thursday to replace two Conservative lawmakers who had quit Parliament, with the first set of results announced early Friday morning.With a general election expected later this year, the result is likely to compound Mr. Sunak’s difficulties at a time when the British economy is shrinking, interest rates are high, and Britain’s health service seems to be in a state of almost permanent crisis. Opinion polls show his party trailing the opposition Labour Party by double-digit margins.The results from the second parliamentary election, in Wellingborough, are expected later on Friday morning. Turnout in both contests was low at less than 40 percent, with many people staying home rather than casting a ballot.A woman leaving a polling station after casting her vote in the Kingswood by-election near Bristol, Britain, on Thursday.Phil Noble/ReutersThe gloomy mood within the Conservative Party had already deepened on Thursday, after the release of economic data showing that in the last months of 2023, Britain had officially entered a recession.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