Elections

A Marine who stormed the US Capitol and apparently flashed a Nazi salute in front of the building was sentenced on Friday to nearly five years in prison.Tyler Bradley Dykes, of South Carolina, was an active-duty US marine when he grabbed a police riot shield from the hands of two police officers and used it to push his way through police lines during the attack by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021.Dykes, who pleaded guilty in April to assault charges, was previously convicted of a crime stemming from the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Dykes was transferred to federal custody in 2023 after he served a six-month sentence in a state prison.US district judge Beryl Howell sentenced Dykes, 26, to four years and nine months of imprisonment, the justice department said.Federal prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of five years and three months for Dykes.“He directly contributed to some of the most extreme violence on the Capitol’s east front,” prosecutors wrote.Dykes’ attorneys requested a two-year prison sentence. They said Dykes knows his actions on January 6 were “illegal, indefensible and intolerable”.During the sentencing hearing, Dykes said that he still stood with Trump and that he supports him “to be the next president of our country”.“Tyler hates his involvement in the Capitol riot,” his lawyers wrote. “He takes complete responsibility for his actions. Tyler apologizes for those actions.”Dykes, then 22, traveled to Washington to attend the Republican Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally with two friends from his hometown of Bluffton, South Carolina. After parting ways with his friends, Dykes ripped snow fencing out of the ground and pulled aside bicycle rack barricades as he approached the Capitol.Later, Dykes joined other rioters in breaking through a line of police officers who were defending the stairs leading to the Capitol’s East Rotunda doors.“After reaching the top of the stairs, Dykes celebrated his accomplishment, performing what appears to be the ‘Sieg Heil’ salute,” prosecutors wrote.After stealing the riot shield from the two officers, Dykes entered the Capitol and held it in one hand while he raised his other hand in celebration. He also used the shield to assault police officers inside the building, forcing them to retreat down a hallway, prosecutors said.Dykes gave the shield to an officer after he left the Capitol.Dykes denied that he performed a Nazi salute on 6 January, but prosecutors say his open-handed gesture was captured on video.In August 2017, photos captured Dykes joining tiki torch-toting white supremacists on a march through the University of Virginia’s campus on the eve of the Unite the Right rally. A photo shows him extending his right arm in a Nazi salute and carrying a lit torch in his left hand.In March 2023, Dykes was arrested on charges related to the march. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of burning an object with intent to intimidate.Dykes briefly attended Cornell University in the fall of 2017 before he joined the US Marine Corps. In May 2023, he was discharged from the military under “other than honorable” conditions.“Rather than honor his oath to protect and defend the constitution, Dykes’s criminal activity on January 6 shows he was instead choosing to violate it,” prosecutors wrote.More than 1,400 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol riot.More than 900 of them have been sentenced, with roughly two-thirds receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from a few days to 22 years. More

Tyler Bradley Dykes was charged with assaulting law enforcement after prosecutors said he stole a police officer’s riot shield to help break into the Capitol.A South Carolina man who was serving in the United States Marine Corps when he stormed the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and stole a police officer’s riot shield to help break into the building was sentenced on Friday to nearly five years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.The man, Tyler Bradley Dykes, 26, who was previously convicted of a felony for his actions while marching in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., was sentenced by Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to four years and nine months in prison for assaulting law enforcement during the 2021 riot, the U.S. Department of Justice said.“His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the 2020 presidential election,” the department said.Prosecutors said that Mr. Dykes moved fences to help other members of the crowd get to the Capitol doors, helped push officers back from their posts, gave a Nazi salute, stole a police riot shield and used it to help break into the Capitol.They recommended that Mr. Dykes, who is from Bluffton, S.C., receive a sentence of five years and three months.Lawyers for Mr. Dykes asked for a sentence of two years, arguing that he had acknowledged his wrongdoing when he pleaded guilty in April to the assault charges, that he was only 22 years old at the time of the riot, and that he had enlisted in the Marine Corps to serve his country.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 R.N.C. ended with uncertainty about whether Trump can capitalize on the opportunity ahead.The latestPresident Biden is maintaining his public defiance as more Democratic lawmakers call for him to exit the presidential race.A call with Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to reassure major donors that there was little to worry about.More than 25 million people watched former President Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention.It was all going so well.The delegates in front of former President Trump were euphoric. The fake White House gleamed behind him. Everyone there, from the show runners to Hulk Hogan to Melania Trump, had nailed their role in a glitzy production aimed at returning Trump to the real Oval Office.Well, almost everyone.“I’d better finish strong,” Trump said, nearly 45 minutes into his acceptance speech. “Otherwise, we’ll blow it, and we can’t let that happen.”More than forty-six minutes later, when he finally finished a winding speech that grew heavy with grievance, it was clear that the person most likely to stop him from becoming the 47th president, the person most likely to blow it, was Trump himself. He couldn’t help it.Until then, the four-day spectacle that unfolded in Milwaukee had been a smooth celebration of the rise and astonishingly good luck of a former president who has consolidated the support of his party. But now, with the balloons popped and the T-R-U-M-P lights turned off, Trump has shown Republicans that he might be unable to seize fully the opportunity that has been laid out in front of him.An earthly celebrationAs Trump took the stage in Milwaukee, Democrats were having a full-on meltdown over President Biden and were trading polling showing that he could not win. They will spend much of the weekend with their eyes trained on Rehoboth Beach, Del., looking for white smoke as a president isolated by Covid-19 and the screaming doubts of his party drags out a Shakespearean drama over the future of his ambition.In Milwaukee, by contrast, it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. The week was an ode to a former president that a bullet had missed, and a sacrament for a man who many at the convention believed was protected by God. Earthly factors were working in his favor, too: Television screens had showed battleground polls leaning Trump’s way. And the convention itself was going off without a hitch.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 only surprise in the guilty verdict against Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent who was arrested in Russia last year on phony charges of espionage, was that it came so quickly. The charge itself was a farce. No evidence was ever made public, the hearings were held in secret, and Mr. Gershkovich’s lawyers were barred from saying anything in public about the case.Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest, trial and conviction all serve President Vladimir Putin’s goal of silencing any honest reporting from inside Russia about the invasion of Ukraine and of making Russians even warier of speaking with any foreigner about the war.Independent Russian news outlets have been almost entirely shut down and their journalists imprisoned or forced to leave the country, so foreign correspondents are among the few remaining sources of independent reporting from inside Russia. Mr. Gershkovich’s last published article before his arrest, on March 29, 2023, was headlined “Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone” — just the sort of vital independent journalism that challenges Mr. Putin’s claims of a strong and vibrant Russia fighting a just war.Russian prosecutors claimed that Mr. Gershkovich, acting on instructions from Washington, used “painstaking conspiratorial methods” to obtain “secret information” about Uralvagonzavod, a Russian weapons factory near Yekaterinburg, where he was arrested and tried.The existence of this massive industrial complex is well known, but the charge of espionage allowed Russian prosecutors to keep the entire proceeding secret while fueling Mr. Putin’s propaganda about efforts by the United States and Europe to destabilize Russia.Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free expression, especially about the war in Ukraine, is unrelenting. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 22 in detention, including Mr. Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, a U.S.-Russian dual citizen and an editor with the U.S.-government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.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 move is in line with what other Republican-led states have done, but it is the first such ban in the Northeast.The NewsNew Hampshire will ban gender-transition surgeries for minors after Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill on Friday that bars health professionals from performing the procedures. The new law also threatens disciplinary action for doctors who refer minors to other providers for such services.The governor, a Republican, also signed a bill that bars transgender athletes from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identities, and another that lets parents choose to have their children opt out of any public school instruction in “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or gender expression.”Mr. Sununu vetoed a fourth bill that would have allowed businesses and public entities to separate bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic teams based on biological sex.BackgroundThe moves are in line with what other leaders in the Republican Party have done. About two dozen other states have passed laws that bar transgender minors from receiving gender-transition care.“This bill focuses on protecting the health and safety of New Hampshire’s children and has earned bipartisan support,” Mr. Sununu said in a statement about the measure banning gender-transition surgeries.Before Friday, Mr. Sununu had taken a relatively mixed stance on gender-identity issues and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.In 2018, he signed bills that banned discrimination based on gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations and prohibited therapies that sought to change the sexual orientation of minors.“We must ensure that New Hampshire is a place where every person, regardless of their background, has an equal and full opportunity to pursue their dreams and to make a better life for themselves and their families,” Mr. Sununu said at the time.At a State House hearing last year, Courtney Tanner, senior director of government relations for Dartmouth Health, testified against the measure banning surgeries, saying: “We don’t like to legislate medicine. These are complex subject matters that are really between a patient and a provider.”The measure signed into law was significantly pared down from its initial version, which included prohibitions on a wider range of medical treatments for transgender minors, such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and top surgeries.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

A singer, composer, curator and founder of the vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, she provided a gospel soundtrack for the civil rights movement.Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose stirring gospel voice helped provide the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, then went on to become a cultural historian, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and the founder of the women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 81.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Toshi Reagon, who did not give a cause.Bernice Reagon, the daughter of a Baptist preacher in Albany, Ga., grew up in a church without a piano, and the first music she absorbed, rooted in spirituals and hymns, was performed by human voices to the accompaniment of clapping and foot stomping.She was an original member in 1962 of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that provided anthems of defiance for civil rights protesters preparing to confront the police or as they were hauled away to jail. The Freedom Singers were associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sent them across the South as well as to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963.Ms. Reagon once wrote, “I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective.”She went on to earn a doctorate in American history from Howard University in 1975 and to direct the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian. There, she amassed a collection of blues, gospel and spiritual music and presented that heritage to the public.During one gospel music presentation, in the 1980s, Ms. Reagon encouraged the audience to hum and sing along with the performers. “And if you can’t do that, grunt or sigh a little,” she instructed.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

While service is slowly recovering, flights have been delayed and canceled worldwide. Here’s information on the most affected airlines and airports, passengers’ rights and how to reach airline customer service.Travel plans across the world were thrown into disarray on Friday, as a global technology outage disrupted businesses and services — including air travel — leaving thousands of flights canceled or delayed across the United States and beyond.While service was slowly recovering by midmorning Eastern time, the ripple effect was still snarling travel plans as delayed and canceled flights created a buildup of passengers waiting at airports, and some planes and crews out of position.“The anxiety is getting up a little,” said Adonis Ajayi, 35, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Friday morning. Mr. Ajayi was on his way to Key West, Fla., for a long weekend and said he had been checking social media constantly for flight updates — his flight had been delayed for nearly three hours. “I’ve never seen anything of this scale.”The outage was caused by a flawed update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, whose software is used globally by scores of industries to protect Microsoft systems. Messages posted on social media by travelers worldwide showed flights grounded, some terminal monitors down and crowds of stranded passengers waiting at airport gates and customer service desks. Some passengers at one airport in India had to stand in long lines to obtain handwritten boarding passes.Which airports have been hit the worst?In the United States, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the world’s busiest airport, appeared to have the most flights affected by the outage on Friday morning, with more than 230 incoming and outgoing flights canceled and more than 370 flights delayed, according to FlightAware, a real-time flight tracker.Many other airports, including hubs in New York, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., also appeared to experience significant disruption.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

President Biden has repeatedly tried to erase the concerns over his age and mental acuity. But nothing has changed the narrative.Nothing President Biden did seemed to work.He delivered an angry, defensive rant on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He showed foreign policy chops at a news conference. He wrote a long letter to “fellow Democrats” demanding an end to the calls for him to step aside. He confronted lawmakers on a Zoom call that devolved into a tense, heated exchange about his age and mental competency.Eleven days ago, the president and his closest family members and advisers went on the offensive, determined to end what already had been nearly two weeks of hand-wringing over his listless performance at a debate on June 27. The result was a flurry of interviews, rallies, defiant meetings with his closest allies and impromptu campaign stops — all intended to rebut the premise that he was too old and frail to win a second term.But almost every step was undercut by his own fumbles and the steady drumbeat of calls from his friends and allies for him to step aside, even from loyalists like the actor George Clooney. Together, it was evidence that nothing he was doing was having much impact. Mr. Biden was racing from place to place, but nothing was changing.This story of the 11 days that Mr. Biden has spent trying to rescue his hopes for a second four years in the Oval Office is based on interviews with people close to him, including lawmakers, current and former aides, friends and others. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss one of the most difficult periods in Mr. Biden’s political life.At the end of two hectic days in the 110-degree heat of Las Vegas this week, it all seemed to catch up with him. Mr. Biden was coughing during interviews and seemed almost as tired and scattered as he did during the debate on June 27. At a campaign stop at a restaurant, he looked pale. He tested positive for Covid, canceled his final speech and flew back to his beach house in Delaware.By Thursday, Mr. Biden’s flashes of anger had given way to what allies perceived as the beginnings of acceptance that he might lose. People close to him began privately predicting that the end of the campaign was near, and that he might even drop out of the race within days.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