Elections

Local law enforcement officials, present in abundance, said they were not assigned security duties around a warehouse used by a man who tried to kill former President Donald Trump.A key question after an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump a week ago is why the Secret Service excluded from its secured zone a nearby warehouse the gunman used for his assault.But another possible flaw in the Secret Service’s plans for the campaign rally at the farm show grounds in Butler, Pa., is emerging. The protection agency expected the sizable contingent of officers from local law enforcement agencies to contain any threats outside of the secured zone but assigned almost all those officers to work inside it, according to numerous interviews with local law enforcement and municipal officials.None of the law enforcement agencies that assisted the Secret Service that day — the Pennsylvania State Police, the Butler Township Police Department, the Butler County Sheriff, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police or the multicounty tactical teams — say they were given responsibility for watching the zone outside the Secret Service’s security perimeter.More specifically, the local law enforcement officials say that none of them were assigned to safeguard the complex of warehouses just north of the farm show grounds. The gunman was able to use the roof of the warehouse closest to the stage — about 450 feet from the podium — from which to shoot.“I am going to defend those guys, because it wasn’t their job to secure the building,” said Richard Goldinger, the district attorney in Butler County, who oversees the multicounty tactical teams that were used at the rally, on July 13.Rather, an overwhelming majority of the dozens of local and state officers called upon to aid the Secret Service were given other duties at or inside the secured perimeter — an area that was protected by a fence, metal detectors and the Secret Service itself.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

Our attention spans may be fried, but they don’t have to stay that way. In a modest attempt to sharpen your focus, we’d like you to consider looking at a single painting for 10 minutes, uninterrupted. Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her […] More

An execution, scheduled for next month, would have used an experimental three-drug combination that critics said could inflict serious pain.Plans to use an experimental three-drug combination in an upcoming execution in Utah — a cocktail that critics said could inflict serious pain — have been scrapped after state officials said in court documents released Saturday that they would be able to seek an alternative.Taberon D. Honie, who was convicted of aggravated murder in 1999, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Aug. 8. It would be the first execution conducted by that method in the state in nearly 25 years. The Utah Department of Corrections recommended using an untested three-drug cocktail of ketamine, fentanyl and potassium chloride when it could not find sodium thiopental, the drug required by Utah law, or other alternatives.That drug has been challenging to obtain for more than a decade, after Hospira, the only American producer of sodium thiopental, announced it would stop selling it, citing concerns about producing the drug in Italy. But many states across the country where the death penalty is legal have struggled for years to obtain and properly use suitable drugs for lethal injections.A lawsuit filed last week by Mr. Honie’s lawyer against several Utah prison officials expressed many concerns about the proposed drug cocktail, including that it would not create the anesthesia Mr. Honie needed to be “unconscious, unaware and insensate to pain,” when the potassium chloride, which stops the heart, is administered. The drugs carried the risk “of serious pain and unnecessary suffering,” the lawyer, Eric Zuckerman, wrote in the complaint.On Friday, Brian Redd, the executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections, agreed instead to obtain the sedative pentobarbital for Mr. Honie’s execution, a drug that is now used by other death penalty states. Mr. Redd also vowed to abandon the idea of using the three-drug combination in any execution if pentobarbital could be supplied.“We still believe that the three-drug combination would have been effective, but we also recognize we could’ve been caught in a lengthy court battle,” said Glen Mills, a spokesman for the department.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

When the judge threw out the case, the jurors said, they had doubts that Mr. Baldwin was guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of the cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust.”When the judge threw out the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin earlier this month after finding that the prosecution had withheld evidence that could have helped his defense, it left key questions that have hung over the case for more than two years unresolved.But two members of the jury who spoke about the case publicly for the first time on Saturday said in interviews that they had been far from convinced — given the evidence they had heard before the trial was brought to its abrupt end — that Mr. Baldwin was guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on a film set.“As the week went by, it just didn’t, it didn’t seem like a very strong case,” Johanna Haag, known to the court as juror No. 7, said in a phone interview on Saturday.Gabriela Picayo, who was identified in court documents as juror No. 9, said that she too had been having serious doubts about the case against Mr. Baldwin before it was dismissed.A critical moment for her during the trial, she said, was when she learned that the armorer who had loaded a live round into the gun that day, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had already been convicted of involuntary manslaughter. “I’m still here, I’m still open to hearing and obviously trying to stay unbiased,” Ms. Picayo said of her thinking at the time, “but I was starting to move towards the direction of thinking that this was very silly and he should not be on trial.”The trial centered on what happened on Oct. 21, 2021, when Mr. Baldwin was rehearsing on the set of the film “Rust” in New Mexico with a gun that he had been told was “cold” — meaning that it should have contained no live ammunition — when it suddenly fired a bullet that killed Halyna Hutchins, the movie’s cinematographer.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

As officials work to determine the cause, many lament the damage at First Baptist Dallas, a church that grew along with the downtown around it.The red brick outer walls of First Baptist Dallas Church were singed black on Saturday morning, and though they were still intact, along with the steeple at the front of the historic building, there was no sanctuary within. The roof, windows and interior were gone. And the smell of smoke lingered.Larry Smith and his wife, Rita, two members of the church, drove 20 miles from Arlington, Texas, to see firsthand the destruction of the fire from the previous night. Other members also gathered outside.Ms. Smith wiped tears from her eyes with a tissue as she talked about the sanctuary, with its dark wood pews and ornate carvings. There was a library in the church, she said, along with a printing shop and the offices of former pastors. “A lot of history in that building,” she said. Mr. Smith began to talk about what was lost when he trailed off, looking at the smoldering remains.Church members and other residents of the Dallas area mourned on Saturday the severe damage to the sanctuary, a landmark in the heart of Dallas where many of the megachurch’s members have been baptized, married and memorialized.On Friday night, the blaze, which caused the church’s roof to collapse, grew to a four-alarm fire that sent smoke billowing over the city. More than 60 firefighting units responded to the scene.No injuries or fatalities have been reported, according to Dallas Fire-Rescue. The fire occurred in the old part of the church’s sprawling complex, where the main Sunday services are no longer held, but which has been in use since its construction in 1890.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

People posing as airline customer service representatives may be making fraudulent attempts to access your money or private data, experts warn.In the hours after the American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike deployed a flawed software update that crippled critical businesses and services around the world, scammers pounced.Government agencies and businesses have warned that the panic caused by the CrowdStrike crash on Friday has given criminals an opening to take advantage of customers who are looking to reschedule flights, access banking information or fix their technology.Here are some ways to guard against the fraudulent schemes.Scammers see an opportunity.CrowdStrike provides cybersecurity for some 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies, so the crash led to widespread failures that grounded planes, crippled businesses, disrupted 911 emergency systems and delayed banking transactions.Thieves online are using the confusion to carry out a variety of scams, including phishing attempts, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said. The National Cyber Security Center in the United Kingdom issued a similar statement noting that an “increase in phishing referencing this outage has already been observed.”Scammers may look to get your money immediately by offering a product like a bogus plane ticket. But they could also be after personal identifying data that would allow them to access your finances in the future.What industries are being targeted?Because grounded planes caused frustrated customers to look to reschedule their flights, travel has been particularly subject to schemers, said Anton Dahbura, the executive director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.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

As the vice president’s name is floated as a potential presidential candidate, the internet took a goofy Kamala Harris meme and made it a drink.When things go kerflooey in American political life, the time is always right to reach for a dumb internet trope. Mostly harmless, these are needful distractions from difficult truths. So while the annals will remember this as a summer of reckonings with the nature of democracy, history’s footnotes may also record the Kamala Harris coconut tree meme.Some background: Since early July, the internet (well, X; Instagram has given it a pass) has been abuzz with stories examining and professing to explain a meme involving the vice president and remarks she made a year ago quoting a comment her mother often made during her childhood.“She would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree,’” Ms. Harris said during a 2023 speech at a White House initiative on advancing educational equity for Hispanic people. Dated without a doubt, the expression was not as incomprehensible as Gen Z commentators had it, its language vaguely Depression-era, when the generationally clueless were often said to have been found “under a cabbage leaf.”When the online chattering classes from the opposition got hold of the clip, it quickly became part of an archive of mostly derogatory Harris kooky-isms — her uproarious and sometimes situationally inappropriate laugh, her dance moves and anecdotes that can seem inapt. Detractors pilloried her. Stans of the KHive hearted her for an individuality seldom on public display in public life.A Kamala Harris coconut piña colada may be fun to consider, but it may not be her drink of choice.David Walter Banks 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

Less than two years after her release from a Russian penal colony, the W.N.B.A. center and two-time Olympic gold medal winner said that her son was born on July 8.Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. center and two-time Olympic gold medal winner, announced on Friday that she and her wife, Cherelle Griner, have welcomed their first child, less than two years after the basketball star was released from a penal colony in Russia and made her return to the sport for the Phoenix Mercury.Griner, 33, discussed the birth of her son during an interview on “We Need To Talk,” a CBS Sports show, saying that he was born on July 8, weighing 7 pounds, 8 ounces. Earlier this year, the couple said that they planned to name their son Bash.On social media, Griner and her wife had posted about their excitement about the pregnancy. After the “We Need To Talk” host asked what Griner was looking forward to about parenting, she revealed that her son had already arrived.“They say as soon as you see him, everything that you thought mattered just goes out the window,” Griner said. “And that’s literally what happens.”Griner will head to Paris for the 2024 Olympics to play for the U.S. women’s basketball team, with the first game scheduled for July 29 against Japan. She said that she was disappointed that she had to leave her newborn but that “he’ll understand.”Last month, Griner wrote on social media that she and Cherelle were celebrating their sixth anniversary.The birth announcement comes two months after the release of Griner’s memoir, “Coming Home,” which details the 10 months she spent in a Russian penal colony after being detained in an airport for possession of 0.7 grams of medicinal marijuana oil she had forgotten to take out of her luggage.At the prison, she sewed uniforms for the Russian military and survived on spoiled food.Griner was released in a December 2022 prisoner swap negotiated by the Biden administration. She had been sentenced to nine years in the penal colony.“My life became a blur of sweeping and dusting, cleaning and praying, hoping I could somehow get home,” Griner wrote in her memoir.In her first game back in the W.N.B.A. in 2023, Griner scored a team high of 18 points. This year, she returns to the United States women’s national roster. Griner won Olympic gold medals with the team in 2016 and 2021. More