Elections

The consumer review site temporarily disabled comments on the franchise’s page after the former president’s appearance prompted a flurry of reviews.Yelp has temporarily disabled reviews for the McDonald’s in Pennsylvania where former President Donald J. Trump held a campaign photo op because of a flood of phony write-ups and ratings.On Sunday, Mr. Trump donned an apron and briefly worked the fryer at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pa., where he distributed orders to preselected customers in the drive-through and spoke with reporters.But his customer service led to a flurry of mocking reviews that were not based on customers’ firsthand experiences, as required. Instead, the reviews on the restaurant’s Yelp page criticized Mr. Trump and also took aim at the franchise, while some celebrated the former president.“Don’t let convicted felons who tried to overturn an election stage campaign stunts,” one reviewer wrote.“This was an awful thing that was done and McDonald’s is now the new chick filet , and will get ZERO of my money and my business , hope it was worth alienating EVERY Woman in the USA,” another reviewer wrote.“There was a giant orange rat in the kitchen. The operator let it in to roam around and even posted pictures of it. Pretty weird,” another wrote.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

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota raced across battleground Wisconsin on Tuesday, exhorting voters to get to the polls on the state’s first day of early voting and just two weeks before Election Day.At a rally in Madison, Mr. Walz appeared alongside former President Barack Obama for the first time on the campaign trail, giving Mr. Obama a bro hug onstage. The two took turns, in successive speeches, laying into former President Donald J. Trump and stressing the urgency of the moment to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, who leads the Democratic presidential ticket with Mr. Walz.“Our team is running like everything is on the line, because everything’s on the line,” Mr. Walz told the crowd of thousands at an event center. He urged voters to avoid complacency, suggesting that a second term for Mr. Trump would be even more chaotic than the first and that he was “far more dangerous” now.“He is not the 2016 Donald Trump — this is a brand-new version,” Mr. Walz said. “The consequences of putting him back into office are deadly serious.”In Racine on Tuesday night, he addressed comments from John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff, who said recently that Mr. Trump had told him during his presidency that he wished he had generals like Adolf Hitler’s. “As a 24-year veteran of our military, that makes me sick as hell,” Mr. Walz said. “The guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness.”In Madison, Mr. Obama was lighthearted as he began, making jokes and telling the audience that Mr. Walz was “the kind of person who should be in politics.”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

Federal prosecutors said that Andrew Do, an Orange County supervisor, enriched himself and his family with federal pandemic aid meant for seniors.The federal money was supposed to feed seniors and people with disabilities in Southern California who were stuck at home and especially vulnerable to Covid-19.Instead, Supervisor Andrew Do figured out how to funnel more than $550,000 to himself and his family through a charity in Orange County, Calif., federal prosecutors said on Tuesday. Rather than pay for meals, some of the funds helped to finance a million-dollar home for his daughter and retire $15,000 of his own credit card debt.Mr. Do, 62, resigned on Tuesday from the Orange County Board of Supervisors and agreed to plead guilty to taking bribes in exchange for directing more than $10 million in pandemic relief funds to a charity that had no track record of serving the community.Mr. Do now faces up to five years in prison under a plea agreement that he struck with federal prosecutors. He had sat on the elected board since 2015.“By putting his own interests over those of his constituents, the defendant sold his high office and betrayed the public’s trust,” Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. “Even worse, the money he misappropriated and accepted as bribe payments was taken from those most in need — older adults and disabled residents.”The case, the latest in a string of criminal corruption investigations in California, ended the tenure of one of the most influential Vietnamese American politicians in the country. Mr. Do, a Republican, represented more than 600,000 people, including a large constituency of older Vietnamese Americans who fled communism as refugees and live on a fixed income.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 American Civil Liberties Union has sued Vail, Colo., on behalf of a Native American artist who painted a work entitled “G is for Genocide.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the town of Vail on behalf of a Native American artist, claiming it violated her First Amendment rights when it abruptly canceled an artist residency she had been offered after she posted to social media a painting about her views on the war in Gaza.The painting depicted a woman wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh and a feather, and it was entitled “G is for Genocide.” In March, the artist, Danielle SeeWalker, shared a photo of it on Instagram with the caption, “Some days, I have overwhelming grief + guilt for walking around privileged while people in Gaza are suffering for no reason.”Two month later, town officials told SeeWalker, 41, that her residency through Vail’s Art in Public Places program, which was scheduled to last 10 days in June while she completed a mural in the town, had been terminated because the painting had angered some in the local Jewish community, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court last week.The fallout from SeeWalker’s painting is the latest in a string of incidents involving criticism of Israel that have roiled the art world, raising questions over freedom of speech among artists, writers, museum employees, actors and others who oppose Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.The war started with Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people. Since then, Israeli military operations have killed more than 42,000 people in Gaza, many of them women and children, local health authorities say. Israel vehemently denies that its military has targeted civilians and claims Hamas fighters purposely hide among noncombatants.A spokeswoman for Vail, a town more than 90 miles west of Denver best known for its ski resorts, declined to comment about the lawsuit on Tuesday.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

Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than presidential contenders’ gender.The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.“The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us and what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans,” she said.Harris was asked why she hasn’t leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy – that she is a woman of color running for the presidency.“I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”“That is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions and the aspirations of the American people,” Harris continued, saying that Americans deserve a president focused on them, “as opposed to a Donald Trump, who is constantly focused on himself”.Harris also said she was aware that Trump might potentially try thwarting the presidential election results, noting that her team “will deal with election night and the days after as they come”.Harris said that she is focused on campaigning over the next two weeks while noting “we have the resources and the expertise and the focus” on any potential threats to election results. Jackson noted that Trump declared victory before all the votes were tallied in 2020.Trump, who has refused to accept the 2020 election results and claimed the race was stolen, has been stoking fears with unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2024 cycle. “This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris told Jackson.Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 stormed the US Capitol in an effort to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That day, four people died at the Capitol and a police officer working during the insurrection died several days later; four other police officers posted at the building on 6 January 2021 committed suicide, according to CBS News.“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris also said.Jackson also asked about voters’ concerns about the economy, noting that many blame the US president for rising prices.Harris said her policies “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and with inflation, “I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson noted that if Harris won, her victory might coincide with Republican control of Congress, which would thwart protecting abortion at the national level.“What concessions would be on the table?” Jackson asked.“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said.Harris said she would not “get into those hypotheticals” when asked if a pardon might be on the table for Trump.“I’m focused on the next 14 days.”Harris was pressed on the pardon topic, asked if she thought it could help the country move forward together and be less divisive.“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on: I get elected to president of the United States.” More

Voters with Eastern European backgrounds could be crucial in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.Christine Baranski, star of stage and screen, was watching the presidential debate in September when a lightbulb went off.Vice President Kamala Harris made a pointed reference to “the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania” as she castigated former President Donald Trump for his warm relationship with Vladimir Putin. Baranski, an actress who is among the country’s more famous Polish Americans, wondered if she could help sway any of them to Harris.This is how Baranski, a Buffalo native who plays a socialite in “The Gilded Age,” found herself on a modest street corner in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., last week, knocking on doors and talking to me.“I just thought, ‘Well, if there’s a way of making Polish Americans feel that heroic thing that they have,’” Baranski said, after stepping off a doorstep decorated for Halloween. “This election is so important that actually they could make a difference.”As Election Day nears, Polish American voters — as well as other Eastern European ethnic groups — have become as hot a commodity, electorally speaking, as kielbasa at Christmastime.In a dead-heat race, both Trump and Harris have made direct appeals to the group, which happens to be well-represented in the so-called Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. While Polish Americans are often seen as fairly conservative because of their Catholic roots, Democrats are hoping to gain the support of those who are concerned about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and apprehensive about Trump’s ties to the Russian president. Harris’s campaign is working to reach to those voters on the ground, while her allies say they have spent more than $1 million on digital advertisements micro-targeted at Polish and Ukrainian Americans in Pennsylvania.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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Employees have complained to the board about hiring and management practices at the parent company of Truth Social, which serves as the main online megaphone for former President Donald Trump.The parent company of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media platform has soared on the stock market over the past month, despite growing turmoil behind the scenes.In recent weeks, Trump Media & Technology Group has dismissed or pushed out at least three senior managers amid employee complaints about the leadership of Devin Nunes, the former Republican congressman who is chief executive, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.The departures came after several employees anonymously sent a letter, which they described as a whistle-blower complaint, to Trump Media’s board a few weeks ago. The letter accused Mr. Nunes of being over-reliant on foreign contract workers and mismanagement. A copy of the letter was reviewed by The New York Times.It was not clear whether the employees who were pushed out of Trump Media were involved in drafting the letter.In the letter, the employees said that Mr. Nunes’s “directive” to hire foreign contractors was inconsistent with “the ‘America First’ principles we stand for.” Trump Media has looked to outsource some work to Cosmic Development, a technology company based in Canada that has operations in Macedonia and Serbia, said the two people.Mr. Trump, who is the largest shareholder of Trump Media and the main draw for users on Truth Social, has talked on the campaign trail about imposing stiff tariffs on foreign goods and U.S. companies that outsource abroad.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