Elections

A visually-impaired runner briefly let go of the tether to her guide after he cramped near the finish line, costing her a bronze medal.A visually impaired runner was disqualified from receiving a medal at the Paralympics after helping her guide who had stumbled just yards from the marathon’s finish line.The runner, Elena Congost of Spain, was denied a bronze medal in the race in Paris on Sunday, the final day of the Paralympics, because she briefly let go of the tether that connected her with her guide, a violation of the rules, as he lost his footing while cramping.Blind and visually impaired athletes run with a guide, a sighted person who keeps them on the right path. Both guide and runner must at all times hold a tether, a short rope with a loop on each end that keeps them connected.About 10 yards before the finish line, after three hours of running, Congost was on her way to third place when her guide, Mia Carol Bruguera, who was suffering from cramps, stumbled. Congost went to help steady him, briefly letting go of the tether in the process.They quickly steadied themselves and crossed the line, more than three minutes ahead of the fourth place finisher, but the release of the tether led to the disqualification.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

La decisión del candidato opositor de solicitar asilo en España y el antagonismo del líder autocrático, Nicolás Maduro, hacia las potencias regionales reducen las posibilidades de una transición política.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La noticia de que Edmundo González, candidato de la oposición venezolana, había huido del país en un avión de la Fuerza Aérea Española este fin de semana tomó al país, y al mundo, por sorpresa.El año pasado estuvo marcado por meses de represión que desembocaron en unas disputadas elecciones presidenciales. A la votación siguió una brutal represión por parte del gobierno autoritario de Nicolás Maduro.Aun así, muchos venezolanos mantenían la esperanza de que, mediante una salida negociada, el gobierno de inspiración socialista pudiera hacerse a un lado y dejar que González, un exdiplomático de voz suave, asumiera el poder.Su partida el sábado redujo aun más esa remota posibilidad. Y se produjo mientras las fuerzas de seguridad venezolanas rodeaban la residencia diplomática argentina en Caracas, donde seis altos dirigentes de la oposición se han refugiado desde marzo.Según algunos analistas, Maduro se ha afianzado en el poder, aunque muchos venezolanos y gobiernos de todo el mundo no han reconocido su afirmación de que fue reelegido para la presidencia en los comicios del 28 de julio.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

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on sports books that have been adapted into films within the past 25 years.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie adaptations. More

A jury trial opening in Austin, Texas, on Monday will seek to hold Trump supporters accountable for allegedly ambushing a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign bus on the state’s main highway in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege they were terrorised and intimidated for more than 90 minutes as they took a bus tour canvassing for the Democratic ticket in the final days of the election.At least 40 vehicles flying Make America great again flags formed themselves into a so-called “Trump Train” and encircled the bus, trying to run it off the road and playing what the suit claims was a “madcap game of highway ‘chicken’”.The plaintiffs, who include the bus driver, a Biden campaign staffer and Wendy Davis, the former Texas senator and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, say they were forced to cancel campaign events for fear that the intimidation would be repeated. They are pursuing punitive damages under both Texas law and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a federal statute from the Reconstruction period designed to end political violence and voter intimidation.Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the trial is a test of modern democratic safeguards.“The violence and intimidation that our plaintiffs endured on the highway for simply supporting the candidate of their choice is an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans,” said co-counsel John Paredes, a litigator for Protect Democracy, one of the groups bringing the case.Monday’s case, Cervini v Cisneros, is one of the most substantial legal battles arising from acts of alleged political intimidation by Trump supporters in the 2020 election besides the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Hundreds of criminal prosecutions have been brought around the events of January 6; by contrast, the Texas trial is a civil lawsuit brought in pursuit of damages by the plaintiffs.But it is extensive in scale, with five named defendants and an unknown number of additional unidentified John and Jane Does alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to terrorise the Biden-Harris campaigners.The suit accuses the defendants of using force to intimidate a political opponent, claims they engaged in civil assault as well as civil conspiracy designed to stifle the political voice of the Biden-Harris campaign, and calls for punitive damages and compensation.Trouble began almost immediately after the Biden-Harris campaign announced it was staging a three-day “soul of the nation” bus tour through Texas on 27 October 2020. The tour was to take Biden surrogates to a number of featured rallies and gatherings.By 28 October, chatter had begun on social media platforms among Trump supporters calling for the formation of “Trump trains” – gatherings of trucks and other vehicles to demonstrate support for the re-election of the then Republican president. One Trump train member in Alamo posted that day that they should “flood the hell out of them”, in a reference to the Biden-Harris bus.That afternoon the then president’s son, Don Trump Jr, posted on Twitter (now X) an invitation to Trump supporters to assemble. He wrote: “It would be great if you guys would all get together and head down to McAllen and give Kamala Harris a nice Trump Train welcome. Get out there. Have some fun. Enjoy it.”Flag-waving trucks driven by Trump supporters began to follow the Biden-Harris bus on 28 and 29 October. One of the vehicles was decked out as a “Trump hearse”, and said on its bodywork that it was “collecting Democratic votes one dead stiff at a time”.Larger numbers of cars convened on Friday 30 October, with some Trump supporters attracted to the melee because they thought, wrongly, that Kamala Harris would be onboard the Democratic bus that day (she was in fact campaigning in McAllen and Fort Worth). The suit claims a group of Trump supporters conspired to ambush the bus on a stretch of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe vehicles in the Trump train swarmed around the tour bus, coming within inches of it and forcing the driver to slow to a crawl. Several of the participants livestreamed their actions on social media, bragging about their aggressive driving, the plaintiffs allege.One of the defendants, Eliazar Cisneros, is accused of side-swiping an SUV being driven by a Biden-Harris campaign staffer behind the bus. The complaint says that Cisneros later boasted about “slamming that fucker”.The occupants of the bus pleaded with police to provide an escort but none appeared. A separate case, Cervini v Stapp, was settled in October with local law enforcement admitting that they had fallen short of their standards and agreeing to pay compensation to those whose safety they failed to protect.The suit claims that the plaintiffs have suffered “ongoing psychological and emotional injury”. The bus driver, Timothy Holloway, was so traumatised that he gave up his tour bus business and has stopped driving buses.Wendy Davis, who is best known for the 11-hour speech she made in the Texas senate in 2013 to filibuster an anti-abortion bill, said she suffered “substantial emotional distress”. She feared speaking publicly about her experiences in the bus as it might put her at risk of physical harm from Trump supporters.At the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs will make the case that while free speech is protected under the first amendment of the US constitution, intimidation and threats against people with different political beliefs is not. “Where groups are permitted to terrorize those with whom they disagree into forgoing their constitutional rights, the functioning of our democracy demands accountability,” the lawsuit says. More

The opposition candidate’s decision to seek asylum in Spain and the autocratic leader’s antagonism toward regional powers lessen the chances of a political transition.The news that Edmundo González, Venezuela’s opposition candidate, had fled the country on a Spanish Air Force plane this weekend took the country, and the world, by surprise.The past year has been marked by months of repression leading up to a disputed presidential election. The vote was followed by a brutal crackdown by the authoritarian government of President Nicolás Maduro.Still, many Venezuelans held out hope that through a negotiated exit the socialist-inspired administration might step aside and let Mr. González, a soft-spoken former diplomat, assume power.His departure on Saturday narrowed that slim possibility even further. And it came as Venezuelan security forces surrounded the Argentine diplomatic residence in Caracas where six top opposition leaders have been taking shelter since March.Mr. Maduro has solidified his hold on power, some analysts say, even if many Venezuelans and governments around the world have not recognized his claim that he was re-elected to the presidency in the July 28 election.Efforts by countries in the region, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, to broker a resolution to the conflict have gone nowhere, and the opposition, which has called on the global community to rally behind it, has seemingly few options.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

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a former 1980s party girl and art collector who is now known for her connections to far-right conservatives, told a German news organization the Alitos were “private friends.”On his most recent financial disclosure form, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. reported a single gift: $900 concert tickets from a German princess known for her links to conservative activists.The disclosure does not list the event’s details, including the concert’s name, location or how many tickets the princess provided. But in an interview with a German news organization, the gift provider, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, described Justice Alito and his wife as “private friends” and said the tickets were for the Regensburg Castle Festival, an annual summer celebration she hosts at her 500-room Bavarian castle.The princess, known in earlier decades as a party-loving, art-collecting aristocrat and who was once christened Princess TNT for her explosive personality, has become known in recent years for her close relationships with several high-profile people who oppose the current pope, as well as with Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime ally of former President Donald J. Trump.The disclosure only heightened the scrutiny around ethics at the Supreme Court, which has been in the spotlight after revelations that some of its members, most notably Justice Clarence Thomas, accepted luxury gifts and travel from wealthy benefactors without disclosing the largess on their mandatory annual financial forms.“No matter the identity of the patron — whether it be a German princess, Queen Bey or the king of Dallas real estate — the justices should not be accepting expensive gifts,” Gabe Roth, who leads Fix the Court, an organization that has been critical of transparency on the court, said in response to Justice Alito’s disclosure. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2023.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesWe 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

Every presidential election brings with it a technological innovation or two: the Bill Clinton and Bob Dole campaigns’ first-ever campaign websites, Barack Obama’s email list, Donald Trump’s candidacy-by-tweet.For the weeks-old Kamala Harris campaign, it has been a Zoom window.On Sunday night, former Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York was holding forth from one such window, swirling a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in a restaurant in Baltimore’s Little Italy, trying to draw an Italian family dinner memory out of Robert De Niro at “Paisans for Kamala,” a livestreamed online fund-raiser billed as an Italian Sunday Dinner that was hosted by the Italian American Democrats.“Tell us a story!” Mr. de Blasio implored. “Tell us a memory! Tell us a dish!”“I guess the closest thing I have is Marty Scorsese’s mother,” Mr. De Niro replied from a neighboring Zoom box. “She makes great pizza. She did. She passed away years ago.” He warned Democrats against complacency — “We know what’s coming, we see it coming”— and then excused himself to attend a Harris fund-raiser with Nancy Pelosi, who popped up in her own Zoom window later in the evening.The streamed fund-raiser was the latest of several dozen similar efforts that have raised millions of dollars on behalf of Ms. Harris since the group Win With Black Women hosted the first on July 21. Subsequent events have included “White Dudes for Harris” (featuring the actor Jeff Bridges, in character as the Dude from “The Big Lebowski”), “Cooking for Kamala” (hosted by Padma Lakshmi and featuring celebrity chefs like José Andrés and Giada de Laurentiis), “Deadheads for Kamala” (Ben and Jerry, inevitably), and many more.The events are a very post-pandemic spin on the small-donor fund-raising that powered the campaigns of Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders in recent cycles, a sort of telethon adapted to the technologies Americans learned to know and tolerate during years of remote work and school. (On Sunday night’s stream, both Leon Panetta, the former secretary of defense and director of the C.I.A., and Steve Buscemi, the actor, struggled briefly with the mute button.)The relative ease of participating, as well as Democrats’ sense of urgency around the election, have meant that even small groups have assembled significant wattage for their calls. Besides Mr. De Niro and Mr. Buscemi, Sunday night’s stream featured Marisa Tomei, John Turturro, Mark Ruffalo and Lorraine Bracco.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

At candlelight vigils and in Sunday church services, at fund-raisers for funerals and in quiet moments at home, another city began wrestling with a grief that has been inflicted on numerous American communities before it, a profound sorrow swirled with anger and confusion caused by a deadly mass shooting.And now, those emotions in Winder, Ga., were streaked with budding doubts there had been missed opportunities to intervene before a gunman killed two students and two teachers last week at Apalachee High School.Some in the community — including family members of victims, and students and parents at the school — expressed increased skepticism on Sunday about whether indications that the 14-year-old suspect was a threat had been adequately heeded by the teenager’s family, school officials and law enforcement officials.The concern grew after reports emerged of the suspect’s mother calling the school roughly a half-hour before the authorities responded to the shooting, apparently to warn them.“We believe it was preventable — 100 percent,” Lisette Angulo, the older sister of Christian Angulo, a 14-year-old boy who was killed, said of her and her family’s perspective in a message sent to The New York Times. “They knew of the situation beforehand,” she said, “and didn’t take proper action to prevent this tragedy from happening.”Ms. Angulo praised the officers and emergency workers who responded to the shooting on Wednesday morning, namely the school resource officers to whom the suspect surrendered. They had acted “efficiently and appropriately,” she 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