Elections

The director Michael Gracey hopes Americans will finally get the British hitmaker, who’s depicted warts, fur and all in “Better Man,” debuting at the Telluride Film Festival.Dance, monkey, dance. Sing, monkey, sing. The British pop star Robbie Williams has always felt like a performing monkey. He has described himself that way when remembering eras of his life: his days as a young boy, trying to prove to his father that he had the “It factor” required to become a star; when he was a teenager and landed his dream job as the fifth member of the boy band Take That; and finally as an adult trying to start a solo career.Recent biopics of the band Queen and Elton John have proved that audiences are willing to taking a fantastical ride through pop-stars’ common trajectories of rise and fall and rise again. But will they be so amenable when the protagonist is played by a computer-generated monkey?Yes, you read that correctly. In the coming musical biopic “Better Man,” the character of Robbie Williams is a chimp, though everyone else around him is human. It’s a leap that the director Michael Gracey, best known for the smash “The Greatest Showman,” is betting moviegoers will take, even those in the United States where Williams is hardly a name despite his international stardom.The monkey, said Gracey, “was the thing for me that clicked, and it was also the thing that made the film near impossible to finance.”His plan was to rely on the magicians at Weta FX (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) in New Zealand to design a computer-generated monkey, something similar to the process that turned Andy Serkis into Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. For “Better Man,” the stage actor Jonno Davies wore the gray motion-capture suit for the entire production and was then rendered into simian form. For the chimp’s face, the eyes of the actual pop star were used.This approach not only doubled the budget of the movie, but also seemed just too far afield for most backers. Multiple times, Gracey said, “I would sit down with financiers. They would say, ‘Director of “The Greatest Showman,” Robbie Williams. I couldn’t be more excited about this. How much do you think?’ And I would say, ‘Well, there’s just one thing: Robbie in the film is being portrayed by a monkey.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, yes, in some dream sequence, or he looks at his reflection and he sees himself as a monkey.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, the entire film.’ Their faces would just drop and they would say, ‘OK, well, this is the end of the meeting.’”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

Former President Donald J. Trump grappled on Friday with the lingering fallout from his visit to Arlington National Cemetery this week, offering an extended defense of his campaign’s actions leading up to an altercation between a Trump 2024 staff member and a cemetery official.Over a digressive 13 minutes, Mr. Trump insisted that he had not been seeking publicity on Monday when he posed for photographs in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. He accused the news media of stoking the controversy and said baselessly that his political opponents had manufactured it.Accusing President Biden of being responsible for the deaths of the service members whose graves Mr. Trump was visiting, the former president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., “They tell me that I used their graves for public relations services, and I didn’t.”He said conspiratorially at one point, “That was all put out by the White House.” He repeated the accusation at an event in Washington on Friday night hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group focused on education.The controversy over the cemetery photographs has overshadowed the political intent of Mr. Trump’s visit: He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.Instead, Mr. Trump has found himself struggling this week to fend off new criticisms of his long-scrutinized treatment of America’s veterans and fallen service members. At the same time, he has been twisting himself in knots to navigate the politics of in vitro fertilization and abortion rights and has confronted negative headlines for making obscene attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.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

Es fácil encontrar ejemplos de respuestas vacuas y engañosamente reflexivas que rozan lo caricaturesco de la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, y es sencillo concluir que esa mezcolanza retórica es lo que ha postergado encuentros con periodistas serios, porque no es ágil en situaciones sin un guion o desenvuelta con los datos necesarios. En todo caso, esos son los argumentos de los republicanos.Pero esa valoración ignora su actuación en un debate en 2020 con el vicepresidente de entonces, Mike Pence. ¿Lo recuerdan? Fue un encuentro con mucho en juego y tan arriesgado como cualquier entrevista con cualquier peso pesado de los medios, y ella lo hizo bien. Mejor que bien, de hecho. Varias encuestas posteriores al debate, entre ellas una publicada por 538 y otra por CNN, concluyeron que Harris había ganado. Es cierto que Pence se enfrentaba a la decisión de una mosca de posarse sobre su cabeza, pero aun así. Él llevaba más tiempo en la escena política nacional que ella, y ella no vaciló.Por eso, las recientes quejas y amenazas de Donald Trump de retirarse del debate previsto en ABC News el 10 de septiembre tienen todo el sentido. Debería tener dudas. De hecho, debería tener miedo.A pesar de todas sus fanfarronadas absurdas sobre sus anteriores actuaciones en debates, muchas de ellas han sido risibles: una combinación de burlas pueriles, mentiras sin paralelo, quejas, explosiones, desprecio y regodeo. ¿Se acuerdan de esos bailes caricaturescos que hacen los jugadores de fútbol cuando han llegado a la zona de anotación en el último cuarto de un partido reñido? Ese es Trump en el atril del debate, solo que no ha marcado ni un touchdown. Ni siquiera ha movido el balón ni un milímetro.Me refiero a sus trucos con sus rivales por la nominación presidencial republicana en 2016, en tres encuentros con Hillary Clinton en las elecciones generales de ese año y en dos con Joe Biden en las elecciones generales de 2020. (Se saltó los debates de las primarias republicanas de 2024, sabiamente, dada su ventaja sobre los demás aspirantes).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 court found that throwing out otherwise eligible ballots because they were undated or had the wrong date on the outer envelope would violate the State Constitution.Pennsylvania’s two most populous counties cannot throw out otherwise timely and eligible mail-in ballots because they are undated or do not have the correct date on the outer envelope, a state court ruled on Friday.The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, siding with voter advocacy groups, found that tossing ballots because they did not comport with a 2019 law requiring voters to date and sign the outer envelope would violate a State Constitution clause guaranteeing “free and equal elections” and pose a “substantial threat of disenfranchisement.” The ruling could play a critical role in November in the battleground state, which polls now show to be a tossup between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump. Election officials disqualified nearly 16,000 mail-in ballots for irregularities during April’s primary election. Almost half were disqualified because of issues like missing signatures and wrong dates on outer envelopes.The ruling applies only to Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties. Whether it will extend across the state will most likely depend on county officials and guidance from the office of the secretary of the commonwealth, who leads Pennsylvania’s Department of State.“This ruling makes clear a voter’s minor error of forgetting to date or misdating a ballot envelope cannot be a cause for disenfranchisement,” the department said in a statement. Gov. Josh Shapiro hailed the court’s decision in a statement posted on social media, calling it “a victory for Pennsylvanians’ fundamental right to vote.”The state Republican Party, which had intervened in the suit in support of the state law, known as Act 77, is likely to appeal the ruling to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The party’s state chairman referred a request for comment to its office in Harrisburg, which did not immediately respond.In 2022, the same Commonwealth Court ordered the counting of undated mail-in ballots after David McCormick, a Republican primary candidate for the U.S. Senate, filed a lawsuit during his close race against Mehmet Oz, the TV personality also known as Dr. Oz.Voting by mail in Pennsylvania rose roughly tenfold between the 2016 and 2020 presidential election cycles to 2.7 million ballots, which amounted to about 39 percent of all ballots cast across the state. The rise followed the passage of Act 77 in 2019, which allowed all Pennsylvanians to cast their votes by mail.The law also prohibited county officials from processing or counting mail-in ballots until the morning of Election Day. That slowed vote counting and results, which contributed to some protests in downtown Philadelphia in 2020.Officials across the country have been scrambling to figure out how to count ballots with only months before the election. In Georgia, local officials are trying to make sense of new rules about certification from the state election board.Nebraska is in the middle of a court battle over whether the votes of people convicted of felonies should be counted. Like in Pennsylvania, the Nebraska dispute hinges on whether a new state law comports with the State Constitution. More

The prominent A.I. start-up is also considering a change to its corporate structure to make it more appealing to outside investors.Amid a flurry of news around its funding plans, OpenAI has tapped the political veteran Chris Lehane as its vice president of global policy.Mr. Lehane held a similar role at Airbnb and served in the Clinton White House as a lawyer and spokesman who specialized in opposition research. He earned a reputation as “the master of disaster” during his time working for President Bill Clinton.As OpenAI has built increasingly powerful artificial intelligence technologies, it has warned of their potential danger, and it is under pressure from lawmakers, regulators and others across the globe to ensure that these technologies do not cause serious harm. Some researchers worry that the A.I. systems could be used to spread disinformation, fuel cyberattacks or even destroy humanity.Mr. Lehane could help navigate an increasingly complex social and political landscape. Through a spokeswoman, he declined to comment.A spokeswoman for OpenAI, Liz Bourgeois, said, “Just as the company is making changes in other areas of the business to scale the impact of various teams as we enter this next chapter, we recently made changes to our global affairs organization.”OpenAI is negotiating a new funding deal that would value the company at more than $100 billion, three people familiar with discussions have said. The deal would be led by the investment firm Thrive Capital, which would invest more than $1 billion.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

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Friday that he would vote against a ballot measure in Florida that would expand abortion access in the state, clarifying his stance after having suggested a day earlier that he might support the measure.“I’ll be voting no,” Mr. Trump told Fox News, even as he said he disagreed with his home state’s current ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.Passage of the ballot measure, called Amendment 4, would allow patients to seek an abortion up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy.In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Mr. Trump, who had long avoided taking a firm position on the measure, said he was “going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” His campaign promptly sought to clean up those remarks, saying in a statement that they were not indicative of how he would vote in November.His comments were also met with backlash from social conservatives and abortion opponents. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group, said Mr. Trump would be undermining a long-held opposition to abortions after five months of pregnancy if he voted for the measure.“We strongly support Florida’s current heartbeat law,” Ms. Dannenfelser said in a statement, adding that she had also spoken privately with the former president. “For anyone who believes in drawing a different line, they still must vote against Amendment 4, unless they don’t want a line at all.”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

Nine days after former President Donald J. Trump falsely claimed to accept an endorsement from the pop superstar Taylor Swift, thousands of Swift fans, including some high-profile cultural and political figures, gathered on a video call with the goal of ensuring his defeat.They shared their favorite Swift songs. They quoted their favorite Swift lines. And then they assailed Mr. Trump’s political agenda as a threat to women.One fan, the singer Carole King, sang Ms. Swift’s song “Shake It Off.” Another, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, described Mr. Trump as a bully who was “trying to claw us back into the dark days.”Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who attended two concerts on Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour, made a series of jokes at Mr. Trump’s expense that played on the singer’s lyrics.They all were gathered on Tuesday under the banner of Swifties for Kamala, a group that is not officially affiliated with Vice President Kamala Harris or Ms. Swift — who has not publicly endorsed a candidate in the election — but that is seeking to deploy the intensity of Ms. Swift’s vast fan base in support of Ms. Harris’s bid for the White House.“For me, Kamala is really a relaxing thought,” Emerald Medrano, 22, a founder of the group, said on the call, alluding to the singer’s lyrics in the song “Karma.”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

Conseguir que se cubran los costosos tratamientos de fertilidad sería algo que no puede hacer un presidente solo, dijeron los expertos en políticas de salud.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El expresidente Donald Trump dijo el jueves en campaña que quiere que el tratamiento de fertilización in vitro (FIV) sea gratuito para todos los estadounidenses.“Bajo un gobierno de Trump, tu gobierno pagará o tu compañía de seguros estará obligada a pagar todos los costos asociados con el tratamiento de fertilización in vitro”, dijo Trump el jueves en un mitin en Potterville, Míchigan.La fecundación in vitro suele costar decenas de miles de dólares. Las políticas para cubrir esos costos serían difíciles de implementar, dijeron los expertos.Exigir a las aseguradoras que paguen estos procedimientos probablemente significaría aprobar leyes en el Congreso o persuadir a un panel de expertos para que añadan la FIV a una lista de servicios preventivos gratuitos de salud femenina establecidos por la Ley de Asistencia Asequible, la ley de cobertura de salud que Trump trató de derogar.Si el gobierno pagara directamente la FIV, se crearía un sistema de pagador único para una sola condición. El enfoque requeriría que el Congreso financie una nueva división del gobierno federal para supervisar el programa.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