Elections

The move to raze the church in Sutherland Springs, which had served as a memorial to the victims of the 2017 massacre, came over objections from some in the community.Over the past seven years, Terrie Smith had often stopped to mourn at the small church in the town of Sutherland Springs, Texas, where a U.S. Air Force veteran gunned down 26 people, including her close friend and two of her friend’s children.On Monday, when she saw an excavator at the site, her heart sank and her stomach tightened, she said. “They are going to demolish it,” she said.Despite opposition from many in town, crews began tearing down First Baptist Church, a small sanctuary in the tiny hamlet 45 miles east of San Antonio that became the scene of one of the deadliest mass shootings in the nation’s history.The fate of the building had remained uncertain as a battle over its future played out in the courts. Though a majority of church members had voted in 2021 to raze it, with church officials expressing concern for the 100-year-old building’s structure, others filed a lawsuit claiming that not all members had been allowed to cast votes and should be given the opportunity to have their say.Early last month, a judge in Wilson County, which includes Sutherland Springs, granted a temporary restraining order halting the demolition. Only two weeks later, a different judge denied a request to extend that order, clearing the way to raze the church.Lawyers representing the families who opposed the demolition did not respond to a request for comment.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

Arizona state troopers rescued Stitch, the giant sulcata tortoise, from an interstate highway after it escaped from its enclosure at a ranch.On an interstate highway between Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., drivers on their morning commute called 911 to report a runaway. A very … very … slow one.He was miles from home and ambling across the four-lane highway when he was finally caught by police.State troopers, with the help of a few good Samaritans, stopped traffic and picked up the escapee: Stitch, a giant sulcata tortoise with a sand-colored shell.The 14-year-old tortoise had broken out of his enclosure and a few layers of fences at the nearby Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch, a roadside animal park open to the public, before making a run for it. Danna Cogburn, an owner of the ranch, said he had been missing for two to three hours before officers told the owners they had found him on the road.“How in the world or where he got out?” Ms. Cogburn said. “I’m not really sure.” She said Stitch was one of only two tortoises on the ranch who were small enough to have made it through the fence. “He had to work at it and be very determined.”The night before his July 30 escape, Ms. Cogburn said, storms had damaged some of the ranch’s gates and enclosures, including the area where the tortoises are kept.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 hit Encores! production has transferred to Broadway, with a cast fiercely dedicated to entertaining its audience.Princess Winnifred and Prince Dauntless are goofy and playful characters. In most musicals, they would provide comic relief from the main story line. But in “Once Upon a Mattress,” it’s the funny people who rule, both literally and figuratively.All the more so since Winnifred and Dauntless are played by Sutton Foster and Michael Urie in symbiotic performances that are highly controlled and precise while maintaining the appearance of off-the-cuff abandon.And with the rest of the cast mostly following suit, it is refreshing to see actors so actively dedicating themselves to entertaining their audience. This kind of unabashed reveling in the joys of strutting your stuff appears to be in demand, too, judging by the recent success of “Oh, Mary!” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”The family-friendly “Once Upon a Mattress,” which premiered in 1959, is a good fit for the Encores! series — which stages shows that are rarely revived and presented this one in January. Now the production has transferred, with some changes in the supporting cast, to the Hudson Theater on Broadway.Like many Encores! entries, Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer’s variation on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Princess and the Pea” would probably struggle to crack anybody but a tween’s Top 10 list of the best musicals ever.Also like many of those entries, “Once Upon a Mattress” turns out to be surprisingly sturdy in the right hands. Rodgers’s music is zingy and Barer’s lyrics often deploy sneakily enjoyable wordplay (“I lack a lass; alas! Alack!”). Just as important, the book by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller is engineered to let gifted comic actors run loose — it is no coincidence that Carol Burnett originated the role of Winnifred.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

Elon Musk’s live conversation with former president Donald J. Trump on X got off to a glitchy start on Monday, a setback for the social media service as Mr. Musk pushes the company to regain its dominance as an online epicenter of political discourse.Some users who tried to listen to the conversation, which was hosted on the company’s audio livestreaming feature called Spaces, were greeted by silence and an error message that read: “Details not available.” Users said they had trouble accessing the livestream on desktop computers and mobile phones. Those who were able to get the livestream to work were met with hold music. The Spaces event was originally scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Eastern. The number of attendees fluctuated wildly as users struggled to gain access, drifting between 100,000 and more than 700,000 listeners. Mr. Musk blamed a cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, for the glitches. DDoS attacks work by flooding servers with malicious traffic and knocking them offline. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he wrote. The attack could not immediately be verified.Mr. Musk claimed the system had been tested “with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier that day.He had spent Sunday evening testing the service to make sure it could stay up and running by streaming himself playing a video 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

La candidata demócrata ha sido vapuleada por Trump y otros por su historial en materia migratoria. Ahora está probando un enfoque que, según los demócratas, ya ha funcionado antes.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Durante semanas, los republicanos se han dedicado a atacar a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris por el tema migratorio, culpándola de las políticas del presidente Joe Biden en la frontera.Ahora, Harris, la candidata presidencial demócrata, está tratando de neutralizar esa línea de ataque, una de sus mayores debilidades ante los votantes, con una serie de estrategias que los demócratas aseguran que les han funcionado en las últimas elecciones y con la postura más contundente que ha mostrado hasta ahora como una fiscala estricta con la delincuencia y dedicada a proteger la frontera.Esta semana, contraatacó con la promesa de aumentar la seguridad fronteriza de resultar elegida y criticó a su oponente republicano, el expresidente Donald Trump, por ayudar a acabar con un acuerdo fronterizo bipartidista en el Congreso. Además, su campaña ha dado marcha atrás en algunas de las posturas más progresistas que adoptó durante su candidatura a la nominación demócrata en 2019, entre ellas su postura de que los migrantes que cruzan la frontera de Estados Unidos sin autorización no deberían enfrentar sanciones penales.“Fui fiscala general de un estado fronterizo”, dijo el viernes Harris, quien fue fiscala superior de California, en un mitin en Arizona, un estado pendular donde la inmigración es una de las principales preocupaciones de los votantes.“Perseguí a las bandas transnacionales, a los cárteles de la droga y a los traficantes de personas. Los procesé, caso por caso, y gané”, dijo.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’s presidential campaign said on Monday that it was unaware that a private plane used by Mr. Trump for campaign travel on Saturday was once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender.Mr. Trump flew from Bozeman, Mont., to Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo., on the jet, made by Gulfstream, to attend campaign fund-raisers after Mr. Trump’s signature Boeing 757, often referred to as Trump Force One, experienced a mechanical issue en route to a campaign rally in Bozeman on Friday.A Trump campaign official said that the campaign had called its charter jet vendor, Private Jet Services Group, after the mechanical failure to get a plane that could ferry the former president, and that the charter service had provided the Gulfstream jet. The official added that the campaign had used that private jet service as a vendor for years, and that it would take efforts to avoid using that plane in the future.A representative for Elevate Aviation Group, which owns Private Jet Services Group, hung up on a phone call requesting a comment about the aircraft. Other phone calls and text messages were not answered.Over the weekend, viral social media posts highlighted the apparent connection to Mr. Epstein. A report by The Miami Herald on Monday matched the charter plane’s tail number to a Gulfstream jet once owned by Mr. Epstein.Mr. Epstein’s planes have long been a source of public interest; he was known to travel with high-profile passengers, including Bill Clinton, Mr. Trump, Prince Andrew and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now running for president as an independent candidate. Mr. Epstein also brought young women — and girls, according to some who accused Mr. Epstein of sex trafficking — to entertain guests on board.Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein had routinely crossed paths over the decades, attending many of the same social events and being photographed together in the 1990s and early 2000s. Mr. Trump spoke enthusiastically about their relationship in the years before Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to charges of unlawful sex with minors. In 2002, Mr. Trump told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.”Speaking in the Oval Office in 2019, Mr. Trump distanced himself from Mr. Epstein, saying that he’d “had a falling out with him.”“I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years,” he added. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” More

A new study shows that behavioral and social changes can reduce heat mortality. But challenges remain as temperatures continue to rise.More than 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes during 2023, the world’s hottest year on record, a new report in Nature Medicine has found.But the number could have been much higher.Without adaptations to rising temperatures over the past two decades — including advances in health care, more widespread air-conditioning and improved public information that kept people indoors and hydrated during extreme temperatures — the death toll for Europeans experiencing the same temperatures at the start of the 21st century could have been 80 percent higher, according to the new study. For people over 80 years old, the death toll could have doubled.“We need to consider climate change as a health issue,” said Elisa Gallo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a nonprofit research center, and the lead author of the study. “We still have thousands of deaths caused by heat every year, so we still have to work a lot and we have to work faster.”Counting deaths from extreme heat is difficult, in part because death certificates don’t always reflect the role heat played in a person’s death. The study used publicly available death records in 35 countries, representing about 543 million Europeans and provided by Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union.The researchers used an epidemiological model to analyze the deaths alongside 2023 weekly temperature records to estimate what fraction of deaths could be attributable to heat.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 packages were sent to a woman whose work had led to the heralded recovery of the Kyrenia, and to new insights into classical Greek seafaring. But their ancient contents were a problem.In the 1960s, Susan Womer Katzev, a marine illustrator, and her husband, the archaeologist Michael L. Katzev, spent two summers diving with a team beneath the lapping waves of the Mediterranean off Cyprus.Their quarry was an ancient shipwreck on the sandy ocean floor discovered just years earlier by a man foraging for sponge. It would become a startling find.Before it sank in the third century B.C., the Kyrenia had traded food, iron and millstones out of its home port, thought to be the island of Rhodes. After more than 2,000 years underwater, much of its hull and cargo — old plates, coins, amphoras that once held wine and others that still held almonds — were remarkably intact.Mrs. Katzev’s drawings and photographs helped document a discovery that revealed not only ancient trading behaviors but also a wealth of information about how the Greeks built ships. For decades, her and her husband’s efforts have been heralded for their central role in establishing nautical archaeology as a field.This year, some two decades after Mr. Katzev’s death, Mrs. Katzev and a co-editor won plaudits for a definitive account of the ship’s excavation, a 421-page first volume that won a major award in January from the Archaeological Institute of America.The shipwreck became known as Kyrenia because it was found in a part of the Mediterranean that is not far from that town on the coast of Cyprus. Paul Popper/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWe 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