Elections

Manhattan’s federal prosecutor said the number of bribery charges, more than 60 in all, amounted to a single-day record for the Justice Department.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged more than 60 current and former employees of the New York City Housing Authority with bribery and extortion, a sweeping indictment of a troubled organization.The unsealing of the complaints was announced early Tuesday, with additional details on the scope of the investigation to be unveiled by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a late morning news conference.The defendants were charged with “accepting cash payments from contractors in exchange for awarding NYCHA contracts,” a news release said. It added that the more than 60 federal bribery charges amounted to a single-day record for the Department of Justice.Last year, officials at the housing agency estimated that it would need some $78 billion over the next two decades to renovate the aging system, which is home to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in an expensive city starved for affordable apartments. Complaints about aging buildings, rodents, leaky pipes and broken elevators have dogged the agency, which operates more than 270 developments.In 2022, NYCHA collected just 65 percent of the rent it charged, the lowest percentage in its nearly 100-year history.This is a developing story and will be updated. More

The ruling answered a question that an appeals court had never addressed: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune to charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden.The 3-0 ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed Mr. Trump a significant defeat, but was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Mr. Trump is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court — possibly with an intermediate request to the full appeals court.Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in American jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?The question is novel because no former president until Mr. Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he has put forward.The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that, despite the privileges of the office he once held, Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”The panel’s ruling came nearly a month after it heard arguments on the immunity issue from Mr. Trump’s legal team and from prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith. While the decision was quick by the standards of a normal appeal, what happens next will be arguably more important in determining when or whether a trial on the election subversion charges — now set to start in early March — will take place.. More

Britain’s king has been a highly visible royal, making hundreds of public appearances. As he steps back from view, who will fill the gap?Queen Elizabeth II liked to say that she needed to be seen to be believed. Now it falls to her son King Charles III to test that principle, after a cancer diagnosis that will force him out of the public eye for the foreseeable future.For a family that has cultivated its public image through thousands of appearances a year — ribbon-cuttings, ship launchings, gala benefits, investiture ceremonies, and so on — the sidelining of Charles may finally force the royals to rethink how they project themselves in a social-media age.The king’s illness is the latest blow to the British royal family, which has seen its ranks depleted by death (Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip), scandal (Prince Andrew), self-exile (Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan), and other health woes (Catherine, the wife of Prince William).Charles, who is 75, took part in 425 royal engagements in 2023, his first full year on the throne, according to a count by The Daily Telegraph. That made him the second hardest-working royal after his younger sister, Princess Anne, who did 457. Both were busier than in the previous year, when Elizabeth, though in the twilight of her life, still appeared in public sporadically.While Anne, 73, shows little sign of slowing down and William plans to return to public duties while his wife convalesces at home from abdominal surgery, even a temporary absence of the king from the public stage would put heavy pressure on the family’s skeleton crew of working royals.Princess Anne, left, during royal duties on Tuesday, giving an honor to Nicholas Spence, an operatic tenor.Yui Mok/Press Association, via Associated PressWe 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 far-right political agitator James O’Keefe and the Project Veritas organization he once led have admitted that they had “no evidence” backing up widely spread claims of voter fraud at a Pennsylvania post office during the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.O’Keefe and Project Veritas made that admission Monday after settling a lawsuit filed against them by Robert Weisenbach, the postmaster of Erie, Pennsylvania, in state court, concluding one of the more prominent legal battles spurred by Republican lies that Donald Trump was defrauded out of another term in the White House.“Neither Mr Weisenbach nor any other [postal] employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots,” O’Keefe said in a statement published Monday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie post office during the 2020 presidential election.”Claims by an Erie mail carrier and Trump supporter named Richard Hopkins thrust his local post office into the center of rightwing conspiracy theories seeking to delegitimize Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Hopkins maintained in a signed affidavit that he had overheard Weisenbach discuss illicitly backdating mail-in ballots, which overwhelmingly favored Biden after Trump urged his supporters to vote in person instead despite vaccines meant to limit the spread of Covid-19 still not being widely available at the time.But Hopkins recanted his sworn allegations after Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who was then leader of the chamber’s judiciary committee, cited them to support his calls for a federal investigation into ballot tampering.Hopkins sought to cast doubt on his retraction soon after, saying in a YouTube video: “I did not recant my statements.” But Monday, Hopkins confirmed he was wrong to have besmirched Weisenbach.“I only heard a fragment of the conversation [involving] Weisenbach and reached the conclusion that the conversation was related to nefarious behavior,” Hopkins said in a statement released along with O’Keefe’s. “As I have now learned, I was wrong. Mr Weisenbach was not involved in any inappropriate behavior concerning the 2020 presidential election.”Hopkins’s statement alluded to the results of a US post office inspector general’s investigation which cleared Weisenbach and his colleagues of wrongdoing. The statement also apologized to Weisenbach, his family and his post office employees, along with anyone who was “negatively” affected by Hopkins’s falsehoods. “I implore everyone … to leave the Weisenbach family alone and allow them to return to their normal, peaceful lives,” Hopkins’s statement added.Neither Project Veritas nor Weisenbach’s attorney, David Houck, could immediately be reached for comment. But Houck confirmed to NBC News that Monday’s statements from O’Keefe and Hopkins came after they had agreed to settle Weisenbach’s lawsuit.Houck did not elaborate on any other terms of the settlement.“The only comment I’m allowed to make about it is that the case was filed, litigated, and settled to the satisfaction of the parties,” Houck said to NBC.O’Keefe’s and Hopkins’s statements Monday inspired heaps of schadenfreude in some quarters. A comment on X from Bill Grueskin, who spent six years as academic dean of the prestigious Columbia Journalism school, summarized the general reaction.“Sorry to take down a couple of your heroes, but it appears that James O’Keefe and Project Veritas got something wrong,” Grueskin wrote while sharing screencaptures of Monday’s mea culpas.Despite Trump supporters’ claims to the contrary, election integrity experts consider the 2020 race to be the most secure ever. In a rare instance of an improperly reported voting result from the 2020 election, a Virginia county confirmed in January that Trump had been awarded 2,237 ballots more than he should have, and Biden was short changed nearly 1,650.O’Keefe and Project Veritas earned notoriety for video stings – often involving hidden cameras – which targeted progressives. One of his more prominent stings took down the community activism group Acorn, whom O’Keefe duped by posing as a pimp aspiring to establish a brothel.Another aimed at US senator Mary Landrieu during her final term in office saw O’Keefe and three associates plead guilty in 2010 to entering federal property under false pretenses. O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a fine of $1,500.O’Keefe resigned from Project Veritas in February 2023 after the group’s governing board found that he had “spent an excessive amount of donor funds in the [previous] three years on personal luxuries” and filed a civil complaint against him.In September, Project Veritas suspended its operations and laid off most of its employees. Then, Hannah Giles resigned as chief executive of Project Veritas in December, alleging that “illegality” and “financial improprieties” in the past had left the nonprofit “an unsalvageable mess”. More

Murray Auchincloss signaled that he would take a more profit-oriented approach than his predecessor, who started a big push into renewables.BP’s new chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, promised a flexible approach to the shift away from fossil fuels as the oil giant reported a $3 billion profit in its latest quarter on Tuesday.Mr. Auchincloss said in an interview after BP reported earnings that the company was pursuing what he called a “demand strategy.” BP’s shares rose more than 5 percent in trading in London, where the company is based.BP has a plan to become what Mr. Auchincloss called an integrated energy company. But in the meantime, “we see growing demand for energy right now across the globe,” he said. “It is not slowing down.”BP is “going to invest in today’s energy system, to help make sure that prices don’t get out of control,” Mr. Auchincloss said. “So that’s investing into oil and gas,” he added, while also putting money into alternative energy sources like biofuels and hydrogen.Mr. Auchincloss was confirmed as chief executive of BP in January. The former chief financial officer had been serving in an interim capacity after the departure of his predecessor, Bernard Looney, over his failure to fully disclose personal relationships at the company.In a presentation to financial analysts on Tuesday, Mr. Auchincloss seemed to suggest a more profit-oriented approach than the one pursued by Mr. Looney, who after becoming chief executive in 2020 began perhaps the most ambitious shift into renewable technologies among the major oil companies.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 state has agreed to use at least $2 billion meant for pandemic recovery to help students hurt most by remote learning.A Los Angeles Unified School District student attended an online class in 2020.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressThe State of California settled a lawsuit last week that had been going on for more than three years, since the height of the debate around pandemic school closures. The case was notable nationally; there have been few others like it. And the settlement included an eye-popping number: $2 billion.Several families in Oakland and Los Angeles had sued the state, accusing it of failing in its constitutional obligation to provide an equal education to all children in the state, because lower-income, Black and Hispanic students tended to have less access to remote learning in the spring and fall of 2020 than other students did.It’s important to note that the state — meaning taxpayers — will not pay out any new money under the settlement. Instead, it will take money that was already set aside for pandemic recovery — no less than $2 billion of it — and will direct schools to use it to help students who need it most to catch up. There will be requirements to spend the money on interventions that have a proven track record. You can read more about the settlement here.Why does this matter?Because new national data released last week, in a study led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard, made it clear that students across the country are nowhere close to catching up on learning lost during the pandemic.That is true for students of all backgrounds, but especially for poor students. Schools in poor communities tended to stay closed longer than those in more affluent areas, and when they did, students lost more ground. Once schools reopened, students from richer families have tended to catch up more quickly than students from poorer families in the same districts, according to the new data.Yet there have been some surprising variations.In California, Compton Unified, near Los Angeles, and Delano Unified, north of Bakersfield, are examples of lower-income school districts that have recovered remarkably well, at least judging by standardized-test scores. You can read more about bright-spot districts, including Delano Unified, in an article I wrote with my colleagues Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris.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

A series of events in preparation for the Paris Olympics explores a paradox, since arts and sports rarely mix in France.When it comes to the biggest sports show on earth, many Parisians have reached the stage of begrudging acceptance. The level of disruption — and metro price hikes — to get the city ready for this summer’s Olympic Games hasn’t exactly endeared the event to locals, especially those who favor culture over sports.“The Olympics are coming — whether we like it or not,” a curator from the Pompidou Center, Linus Gratte, said as he introduced a performance there this past weekend as part of the “Hors Pistes” festival. The audience chuckled.“Hors Pistes” (meaning “Off-Piste”), a festival the Pompidou Center says is devoted to “moving images,” came with an Olympic-ready theme this year: “The Rules of Sport.” It is part of the Cultural Olympiad, the program of arts events that is now a part of the Olympic experience in every host city.For the Paris Cultural Olympiad — spearheaded by Dominique Hervieu, an experienced performing arts curator — the city has opted to go big. Any cultural institution could apply for the “Olympiad” label, leading to a sprawling lineup of sports-related exhibitions and performances, which started back in 2022. This has led to a degree of confusion over what, exactly, the Olympiad stands for: Its official website currently lists no fewer than 984 upcoming events.And quite a few of them end up exploring a paradox, because art and sports rarely mix in France. As a rule, the country’s artistic output leans toward intellectualism rather than the virtuosity embodied by high-level athletes. The Pompidou Center, a flagship venue for contemporary art, telegraphs as much in its “Hors Pistes” publicity material, which says the festival’s goal is “to question and subvert the rules of sport, and to imagine new interpretations of them.”While the Pompidou is primarily an art museum, and “Hors Pistes” comes with a small exhibition, the festival features a significant number of performances, onstage in the center’s theater, or in its galleries. Some of these struggled to find coherent common ground with sports, however, like Anna Chirescu and Grégoire Schaller’s “Dirty Dancers,” an hourlong dance performance staged in the exhibition space, with sports-style bleachers for the audience.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 social network wants to promote standardized labels to help detect artificially created photo, video and audio material across its platforms.Last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, called a nascent effort to detect artificially generated content “the most urgent task” facing the tech industry today.On Tuesday, Mr. Clegg proposed a solution. Meta said it would promote technological standards that companies across the industry could use to recognize markers in photo, video and audio material that would signal that the content was generated using artificial intelligence.The standards could allow social media companies to quickly identify content generated with A.I. that has been posted to their platforms and allow them to add a label to that material. If adopted widely, the standards could help identify A.I.-generated content from companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and others that offer tools that allow people to quickly and easily create artificial posts.“While this is not a perfect answer, we did not want to let perfect be the enemy of the good,” Mr. Clegg said in an interview.He added that he hoped this effort would be a rallying cry for companies across the industry to adopt standards for detecting and signaling that content was artificial so that it would be simpler for all of them to recognize it.As the United States enters a presidential election year, industry watchers believe that A.I. tools will be widely used to post fake content to misinform voters. Over the past year, people have used A.I to create and spread fake videos of President Biden making false or inflammatory statements. The attorney general’s office in New Hampshire is also investigating a series of robocalls that appeared to employ an A.I.-generated voice of Mr. Biden that urged people not to vote in a recent primary.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