Elections

Last year, the band’s frontman, Steven Tyler, suffered a vocal injury during a show, and the farewell tour was postponed. The band announced its retirement on Friday, saying a full recovery was not possible.Aerosmith, the venerated American hard rock band whose hit records like “Dream On” have reverberated across the airwaves and in sweaty sold-out venues around the world for more than half a century, announced Friday that it was retiring from the tour stage, citing a permanent vocal injury to its star frontman, Steven Tyler.“He has spent months tirelessly working on getting his voice to where it was before his injury,” the band said in a statement on its website. “We’ve seen him struggling despite having the best medical team by his side. Sadly, it is clear, that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible. We have made a heartbreaking and difficult, but necessary, decision — as a band of brothers — to retire from the touring stage.”The band is only retiring from going on tour, Katie Altman, a representative, said. It is not breaking up. The announcement came ahead of the band’s “Peace Out” farewell tour, which had been set to begin in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20 and run through February at stops in the United States and in Canada, including a performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Feb. 23, 2025. The band’s final tour stop was scheduled for Buffalo on Feb 26.The tour had been postponed to later this year after Tyler, 76, hurt his vocal cords during the band’s Sept. 9, 2023, show at UBS Arena on Long Island. The band said that it had decided to postpone the tour until this year because the injury turned out to be more serious than initially thought and involved a fractured larynx in addition to the vocal cord damage.Fans who purchased tickets through Ticketmaster will receive automatic refunds, the band said. People who bought tickets via third-party sites were asked to contact those vendors. More

Hawaiian Electric is expected to pay the largest share — nearly $2 billion — but avoided a heftier price tag that could have forced the utility into bankruptcy.Nearly a year after a ferocious wildfire on Maui killed 102 people and leveled the historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii’s largest utility has agreed to pay the largest share of a legal settlement totaling just over $4 billion and compensating more than 10,000 homeowners, businesses and other plaintiffs.The proposed agreement was filed late Friday in a Maui-based state court, six days before the anniversary of the disaster. Fire victims and insurers have spent months in court-ordered mediation with the state, Maui County, large private landowners and utilities within the fire zone to resolve more than 600 lawsuits brought in state and federal courts by survivors of the catastrophe.The settlement, which remains subject to court approval, will cover less than half of the overall cost of the disaster — estimated at nearly $12 billion — which cut a path of destruction through one of the world’s most spectacularly beautiful destinations. More than 3,000 homes and other structures were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of residents were killed, injured or displaced.Gov. Josh Green had pushed for a single global agreement among all the parties to litigation to swiftly compensate fire victims, rather than extending negotiations for years without payment. State officials had also hoped to ward off a potentially devastating financial hit to Maui County and the bankruptcy of Hawaiian Electric, which provides electricity for more than nine in 10 of the state’s residents on Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Lanai and Hawaii Island.“Settling a matter like this within a year is unprecedented,” Mr. Green said on Friday. “And it will be good that our people don’t have to wait to rebuild their lives as long as others have in many places that have suffered similar tragedies.”Under the proposed terms, which do not include any admission of liability, the utility is expected to pay a little less than half of the $4.037 billion settlement, $1.99 billion, a considerable amount but less than the potential $4.9 billion liability that the investment research firm Capstone estimated last year would most likely bankrupt the company.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. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania, wrote in his college newspaper three decades ago that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to achieve a two-state solution in the Middle East, prompting criticism as Vice President Kamala Harris considers him to be her running mate.Mr. Shapiro, 51, has embraced his Jewish identity and been one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders of Israel at a moment when the party is splintered over the war in Gaza.But he says his views have evolved since publishing an opinion essay as a college student at the University of Rochester in New York, when he wrote that Palestinians were incapable of establishing their own homeland and making it successful, even with help from Israel and the United States.“They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own,” he wrote in the essay, published in the Sept. 23, 1993, edition of The Campus Times, the student newspaper. “They will grow tired of fighting amongst themselves and will turn outside against Israel.”Mr. Shapiro, who was 20 at the time, noted in his essay that he had spent five months studying in Israel and had volunteered in the Israeli Army.“The only way the ‘peace plan’ will be successful is if the Palestinians do not ruin it,” Mr. Shapiro wrote, adding, “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully.”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

If deals are struck, Meta may incorporate the actors’ voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, people with knowledge of the effort said.Meta is in discussions with Awkwafina, Judi Dench and other actors and influencers for the right to incorporate their voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, according to three people with knowledge of the talks, as the company pushes to build more products that feature artificial intelligence.Apart from Ms. Dench and Awkwafina, Meta is in talks with the comedian Keegan-Michael Key and other celebrities, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. They added that all of Hollywood’s top talent agencies were involved in negotiations with the tech giant.The talks remain fluid, and it is unclear which actors and influencers, if any, may sign on to the project, the people said. If the parties come to an agreement, Meta could pay millions of dollars in fees to the actors.A Meta spokesman declined to comment. The discussions were reported earlier by Bloomberg.Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, which the biggest tech companies are racing to develop and lead. Meta has plowed billions into weaving the technology into its social networking apps and advertising business, including by creating artificially intelligent characters that could chat through text across its messaging apps.On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, increased how much his company would spend on A.I. and other expenses this year to at least $37 billion, up from $30 billion at the beginning of 2024. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would rather build too fast “rather than too late” to prevent his competitors from gaining an edge in the A.I. race.One area of A.I. that is rapidly emerging are chatbots with voice abilities, which act as virtual assistants. In May, OpenAI, a leading A.I. company, unveiled a version of its ChatGPT chatbot that could receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos. It was part of a wider effort to combine conversational chatbots with voice assistants like the Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.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

Mientras muchos aplaudían a la campeona olímpica por haber priorizado su salud mental en 2021, el hoy candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia dijo en ese momento que los medios celebraban la debilidad.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El senador JD Vance, de Ohio, candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia, está siendo objeto de un nuevo escrutinio debido a declaraciones que hizo en el pasado, afirmando que la gimnasta estadounidense Simone Biles, quien el jueves ganó otra medalla de oro en los Juegos Olímpicos, había mostrado debilidad al retirarse de la edición anterior del evento por un problema de salud mental.Durante una aparición en Fox News en 2021, Vance cuestionó que Biles estuviera recibiendo elogios por haber salido de la competición en los Juegos de Tokio.“Creo que el hecho de que intentemos alabar a las personas, no por sus momentos de fortaleza, no por sus momentos de heroísmo, sino por sus momentos más débiles, hace que nuestra sociedad, digamos, terapéutica, se vea muy mal”, dijo Vance, quien en ese momento se postulaba para el Senado.Ahora que tanto Vance como Biles se encuentran de nuevo bajo los reflectores, los demócratas estaban ansiosos por destacar estos comentarios. Aida Ross, vocera del Comité Nacional Demócrata, afirmó el jueves que Vance no estaba “en posición de hablar de los ‘momentos más débiles’ de nadie”.“Mientras el resto del país celebra la actuación del equipo femenino de gimnasia de EE. UU. en los Juegos Olímpicos, JD Vance se enfrenta a su momento más débil en medio de un lanzamiento lleno de tropiezos que lo ha hecho el candidato a vicepresidente más impopular en décadas”, 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

The drawing of Schiele’s wife was the focus of a trial at which three parties, all with Jewish roots, argued whether it had been looted by the Nazis and from whom.For three weeks in May a judge in Rochester, N.Y., heard evidence meant to solve the mystery of who really owns a drawing of a smiling woman by the Austrian artist Egon Schiele.For years, the drawing has been in the possession of a foundation named after Robert Owen Lehman Jr., who said he had received the work, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” in the 1960s from his father, a financier who steered the Lehman Brothers investment firm through the Great Depression.But the heirs of two men, Heinrich Rieger and Karl Mayländer, both art collectors who knew Schiele and were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, had pursued competing claims to the work as well.During a bench trial at State Supreme Court, the heirs of Rieger, who had been Schiele’s dentist, and the heirs of Mayländer, a textile merchant who is the subject of two Schiele portraits, presented evidence to suggest their relatives had owned the work before chaos and Nazi looting caused countless gaps in the ownership histories of important art.On Thursday, Justice Daniel J. Doyle ruled in favor of the organization founded by the Mayländer heirs, who are now represented by a foundation that pursues the family’s interests. “The evidence presented at trial establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that the Mayländer Heirs have superior title to the drawing,” Justice Doyle wrote in an 86-page decision.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

Juan Rivas, who threatened flight attendants with a champagne bottle and a plastic knife, tried to open an exit door of an American Airlines plane, prosecutors said.A California man who tried to intimidate flight attendants on an American Airlines flight using plastic silverware from a service cart and a glass champagne bottle, and then tried unsuccessfully to open an exit door and the cockpit, was sentenced on Wednesday to 19 months in prison.The man, Juan Remberto Rivas, 52, was arrested and charged with interfering with flight crew members on Feb. 13, 2022, after a flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri.During the flight, Mr. Rivas, who, according to court records, admitted to using methamphetamines before the flight, began to panic and told flight attendants that the plane was not moving and that his family was in danger, court records said.His behavior led to a physical struggle that forced the plane to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Mo.Mr. Rivas, who pleaded guilty in January, had faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison but prosecutors sought a sentence of 41 to 51 months despite him threatening to “bring down the plane,” court records and the attorney’s office said.“The government believes that the defendant’s actions were reckless because of his use of methamphetamine, rather than an intentional effort to bring down the aircraft,” the prosecution, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul S. Becker, argued in a sentencing memorandum.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 Justice Department and special counsel Robert Mueller investigated whether a Trump adviser was part of an Egyptian plan, never proven, to funnel $10 million to the 2016 Trump campaign.In the summer of 2017, as the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was starting his investigation, his agents and prosecutors were chasing potentially explosive allegations about foreign influence over Donald J. Trump and his campaign.C.I.A. intelligence relayed to the special counsel’s office suggested that senior leaders of a foreign adversary had signed off on secretly funneling millions of dollars — with the help of a Trump campaign adviser acting as “a bag man” — to Mr. Trump in the final days of the 2016 election.Interviews and other evidence obtained by the special counsel’s office showed that indeed Mr. Trump had lent his campaign a similar amount of money in the final days of the race — and, after beating Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump immediately struck a far more favorable tone toward the country than his predecessors.The country in question, however, was not Russia. It was Egypt.Seven years after Mr. Mueller’s team dug in on those allegations, people familiar with the investigation acknowledged that while much of the country’s attention was focused on ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, the most concrete lead Mr. Mueller’s team initially had about potential foreign influence over Mr. Trump involved Egypt. The people familiar with the inquiry discussed details of it on the condition of anonymity.While Mr. Mueller has often been criticized for not moving aggressively enough to investigate Mr. Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia, his team took invasive steps to try to understand whether Mr. Trump or his campaign had received financial backing from Cairo.Mr. Trump’s foreign business ties and efforts by foreign interests and government to influence him have come under scrutiny again as he seeks to return to the White House. The little-known investigation into possible Egyptian influence shows both the intensity of past efforts to explore the issue and how they have fueled Mr. Trump’s long-running assertions that he has been subject to a “witch hunt.”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