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      Top Democrat Warns Hegseth He Could Face Fines for Accepting Qatari Plane

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      Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland urged the defense secretary to come to Congress for approval of the jet President Trump wants to use as Air Force One.Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, informed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday that he could face steep fines for having accepted a luxury jet from the Qatari government, arguing the gift violated the Constitution and a federal gifts law, and required congressional approval.Mr. Hegseth was the official who formally accepted a Boeing 747 jetliner from Qatar last month, according to a Defense Department spokesman. The Pentagon has directed the Air Force to upgrade its security measures so that President Trump can use the plane as a new Air Force One.The gift has raised a host of concerns among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Some have focused on national security risks, saying they worry the plane might have listening devices, or that Mr. Trump’s desire for a new plane before he leaves office might rush any security upgrade and lead corners to be cut on critical protection systems.But many lawmakers, especially Democrats such as Mr. Raskin, have focused on the ethical issues raised by a lavish gift to an American president from a foreign government. They have accused Mr. Trump of corruption and expressed fears that Qatar may be trying to improperly influence the Trump administration.In a letter on Wednesday, Mr. Raskin, a former professor of constitutional law, warned Mr. Hegseth that his acceptance of the plane violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from accepting financial benefits from foreign governments without Congress’s approval.Congress has not yet taken any formal vote to accept the plane as a gift from Qatar. Officials in the Trump administration have said that the gift is to the U.S. government, not to him as president, and therefore that it does not violate the Constitution or ethics laws.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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      Ispace of Japan’s Resilience Lander Heads to the Moon: How and When to Watch

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      Ispace crashed on the moon in 2023. Its second spacecraft, Resilience, aims in the hours ahead to succeed where its predecessor failed.Video posted by iSpace showed the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander circling the moon on Wednesday.iSpaceA Japanese company is hoping that the second time’s the charm for putting a robotic lander on the moon.Ispace of Tokyo is among the private companies that have emerged in recent years aiming to establish a profitable business by sending experiments and other payloads to the surface of the moon.Its first spacecraft made it to lunar orbit in 2023, but crashed as it attempted to land. Its second spacecraft, named Resilience, launched in January and has been taking a roundabout path to the moon, entering orbit last month.Resilience is now ready to descend to the lunar surface, and Ispace hopes that it will arrive there intact.When is the moon landing, and how can I watch it?Resilience, also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, is scheduled to land at 3:17 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. (It will be Friday at the company’s mission control in Tokyo.)Ispace will provide live coverage of the landing beginning at 2:10 p.m. Eastern time.What is Ispace, and what happened during its last moon mission?Ispace emerged from a Japanese team that had aimed to win the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered $20 million for the first privately financed venture to land on the moon. None of the X Prize teams got off the ground before the competition expired in 2018. Takeshi Hakamada, the leader of the Japanese X Prize team, raised private financing to push forward and is the chief executive of Ispace.Do You See Craters or Bumps on the Moon’s Surface?A picture taken recently by a Japanese company’s spacecraft shows how your interpretation of objective reality can be tested by the power of illusion.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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      Supreme Court Unanimously Rules for Straight Woman in Workplace Discrimination Suit

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      The justices rejected an appeals court’s requirement that members of majority groups meet a heightened standard to win employment discrimination cases.The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled in favor of a straight woman who twice lost positions to gay workers, saying an appeals court had been wrong to require her to meet a heightened burden in seeking to prove workplace discrimination because she was a member of a majority group.The decision came two years after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs in higher education and amid the Trump administration’s fierce efforts to root out programs that promote diversity and could make it easier for white people, men and other members of majority groups to pursue claims of employment discrimination.The standards for proving workplace discrimination under a federal civil rights law, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court, “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”The case was brought by Marlean A. Ames, who had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which oversees parts of the state’s juvenile corrections system. After a decade there, in 2014 she became the administrator of a program addressing prison rape. Five years later, she applied for a promotion.Her supervisors turned her down, saying she lacked vision and leadership skills. They eventually gave the position to a gay woman who had been at the department for a shorter time and, unlike Ms. Ames, lacked a college degree.Not long after denying her the new position, her supervisors removed her from her existing job, telling her that they had concerns about her leadership and offering her a demotion that came with a substantial pay cut. She was replaced by a gay man with less seniority.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 Orders Investigation of Biden and His Aides

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      The executive order is the latest effort by President Trump to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor and question the legality of his actions in office.President Trump ordered his White House counsel and the attorney general on Wednesday to investigate former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his staff in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor.In an executive order, Mr. Trump put the power and resources of the federal government to work examining whether some of Mr. Biden’s presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge.The executive order came after Mr. Trump shared a social media post over the weekend that claimed Mr. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, following a pattern of suggestions by the president and his allies that Mr. Biden was a mentally incapacitated puppet of his aides.The former president called such claims “ridiculous and false” in a statement on Wednesday after the order’s release.“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” he said. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations.”The order comes after disclosure in recent weeks that Mr. Biden, 82, had received a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer and in the wake of renewed scrutiny of his health during his presidency.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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      Harvey Milk’s Name Is Not Going Anywhere in San Francisco

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      Mr. Milk’s name adorns numerous sites in the city, where he became a trailblazer for gay rights before he was killed in 1978. The Pentagon is considering stripping his name from a Navy vessel.In San Francisco, children attend elementary school at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy. Travelers pass through the Harvey Milk Terminal at the airport. At Harvey Milk Plaza at Castro and Market streets, a giant rainbow flag dedicated to him can be seen for miles.Mr. Milk is the gay rights figure who won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, becoming California’s first openly gay elected official. Just 11 months after taking office, he was assassinated in his City Hall office. Sean Penn played him in the 2008 movie “Milk,” and California celebrates Harvey Milk Day every year on May 22, his birthday.Thousands of miles from San Francisco, in the body of water President Trump calls the Gulf of America, sits another tribute to Mr. Milk.For now, anyway.The United States Naval Ship Harvey Milk, a tanker currently moored in Mobile, Ala., may soon lose its name to, as the Pentagon put it, better reflect the country’s “warrior ethos.”One of the lesser-known chapters in Mr. Milk’s biography was his four-year stint in the U.S. Navy. He served during the Korean War on a submarine rescue ship and later as a diving instructor. He was issued an “other than honorable discharge” in 1955 after his superiors learned he was gay.In 2021, the Navy christened a tanker in the name of Mr. Milk, the first Navy ship to be named for an openly gay man. At the ceremony, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said he felt compelled to be there to make amends for the wrongful treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people in the military “and to tell them that we’re committed to them in the future.”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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      ‘Carol,’ Whose Detention Rattled Her Small Missouri Town, Is Released

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      Ming Li Hui’s detention by the immigration authorities brought the reality of President Trump’s immigration crackdown to rural Missouri, where supporters rallied for her freedom.An immigrant waitress from Hong Kong whose looming deportation brought home the reality of President Trump’s immigration crackdown to her conservative Missouri hometown was freed on Wednesday after more than a month in jail.“They released me,” the waitress, Ming Li Hui, better known as Carol to everyone in Kennett, Mo., said in a voice mail message left for her lawyer and relayed to The New York Times.Her lawyer, Raymond Bolourtchi, said Ms. Hui, 45, had been released under a federal immigration program that offers a “temporary safe haven” to immigrants from Hong Kong and a handful of other countries who are concerned about returning there. The so-called deferred enforced departure gives Ms. Hui a reprieve but does not guarantee her future in the United States.“By no means are we in the clear,” Mr. Bolourtchi said. “But at this point I’m optimistic. It’s an immediate sigh of relief.”Ms. Hui, who was born in Hong Kong, entered the United States 20 years ago on a short-term tourist visa and stayed long past its expiration, in the process building a life, having three children and becoming a beloved waitress serving waffles and hugs to the breakfast crowd at a diner in Kennett, a rural farming town in the Bootheel of Missouri.She was ordered deported more than a decade ago but had been able to stay in the country through a series of temporary permissions from the immigration authorities that ended abruptly with her arrest in late April.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 June 5, 2025

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      Timothy Gaetz makes his New York Times Crossword debut.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — There’s something deeply satisfying about figuring out a crossword theme, especially on a Thursday, when almost anything can happen inside — and sometimes outside — the grid. Filling in entries on a Thursday can sometimes generate more questions than answers, and things can get chaotic as the solver tries to make sense of what’s going on.But oh, when a sense of order is restored upon completion — that’s a great feeling. And that is why we solve puzzles, isn’t it? They are one way to feel mastery over chaos, even when other areas of our lives seem out of control.You may have had that sense of satisfaction while solving Timothy Gaetz’s debut crossword. I wasn’t sure what was going on until I figured out the revealer at 63A, and even then I had to use my patented “stare at the grid until the penny drops” method of solving. When the penny finally did drop — like an anvil on my head — that feeling of satisfaction warmed me.Speaking of chaos, the New York Times Games team posted an interesting “character alignment” chart on Instagram a couple of months ago. (That’s not the chaotic part.) These charts will be familiar to anyone who plays Dungeons & Dragons or has seen them turned into memes on social media. In D&D, the characters are assigned squares that supposedly describe ethical and moral perspectives: lawful versus chaotic, and good versus evil.The Games version of this chart was developed among members of the team and vetted by the puzzle editors so they wouldn’t cry when their game was assigned to, say, chaotic evil. To her credit, Wyna Liu, the editor of Connections — who also happens to be one of the nicest people on the planet — thought that her game totally deserved it.Even if these charts are new to you, where would you place each New York Times game?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 Travel Order Bans People From 12 Countries From Entering U.S.

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      The president’s proclamation barred travel from countries including Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.President Trump on Wednesday signed a travel ban on 12 countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East, resurrecting an effort from his first term to prevent large numbers of immigrants and visitors from entering the United States.The ban, which goes into effect on Monday, bars travel to the United States by citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.Mr. Trump also imposed restrictions — but stopped short of a full ban — on travel from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. People from those countries cannot come to the United States permanently or get tourist or student visas.The travel ban is the latest move in Mr. Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, including blocking asylum at the southern border and barring international students from Harvard University. His administration has also conducted immigration raids across the country.The decision came just days after an Egyptian man in Colorado was arrested and charged with carrying out an attack on a group honoring hostages being held in Gaza. Trump administration officials had warned that there would be a crackdown after that attack.“The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colo., has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” Mr. Trump said in a video message announcing the travel ban. “We don’t want 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