Elections

Donald J. Trump claims the order has unfairly restricted his free speech rights ahead of his sentencing on 34 felony counts. He has nonetheless attacked the judge, prosecutor and justice system.Prosecutors in Manhattan said on Friday that a judge should keep in place major elements of a gag order that was imposed on Donald J. Trump, citing dozens of threats that have been made against officials connected to the case.The order, issued before Mr. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial began in mid-April, bars him from attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff and relatives of the judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to have the order lifted since Mr. Trump’s conviction in late May. But in a 19-page filing on Friday, prosecutors argued that while Justice Merchan no longer needed to enforce the portion of the gag order relating to trial witnesses, he should keep in place the provisions protecting jurors, prosecutors, court staff and their families.The New York Police Department has logged 56 “actionable threats” since the beginning of April directed against Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case, and against his family and employees, according to an affidavit provided with the filing.Such threats, evidently made by supporters of Mr. Trump, included a post disclosing the home address of an employee at the district attorney’s office, and bomb threats made on the first day of the trial directed at two people involved in the case.The 56 threats that were logged, prosecutors said, did not include the hundreds of “threatening emails and phone calls” that were received by Mr. Bragg’s office in recent months, which the police are “not tracking as threat cases.”Mr. Trump was convicted on May 30 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payoff made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. The money was meant to cover up a sexual tryst she says she had with Mr. Trump in 2006, a decade before he was elected president. (Mr. Trump, 78, has continued to deny ever having had sex with Ms. Daniels.)Mr. Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He faces up to four years in prison, or lesser punishments like probation or home confinement.The first American president to face — and be convicted of — criminal charges, Mr. Trump has worn the guilty verdict as a badge of honor, using it to raise money and presenting himself as a “political prisoner.”He has also continued to voice the false theory that his prosecution was the work of a nefarious conspiracy among Democrats, including President Biden and Mr. Bragg.This is a developing story and will be updated. More

A replica of the Athena Giustiniani that greeted students at Wells College for more than 150 years was accidentally decapitated in the scramble to close the institution forever.A marble statue of the Roman goddess of wisdom that presided over Wells College for 156 years, surviving both a devastating fire in 1888 and an attempted kidnapping in 1975, was embraced by students as a symbol of resilience for generations.Until Minerva was decapitated by a backhoe.The statue was accidentally damaged during a hasty move this month after the college, nestled against one of the Finger Lakes in central New York, said financial challenges would make the spring semester its last.At a college where students have long kissed Minerva’s feet for good luck and referred to “her” as a fellow student, the beheading is an unavoidable metaphor for the angst surrounding the institution’s sudden closure.Wells was a women’s college for the bulk of its history, and many alumni cherish how the godly representative of wisdom and war, embodied in a woman, looked over the campus on Cayuga Lake for generations.“I lost my mother a couple years ago,” said Caolan MacMahon, who graduated from Wells in 1985. “This is almost harder.”Workers moving the statue on June 12 strapped Minerva to a furniture dolly before hanging the statue horizontally from a backhoe’s bucket with moving straps. Too heavy for the supports, her head snapped off.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

After hosting talk shows for nearly three decades, Conan O’Brien has come to believe that longevity is overrated. The first time he made this point to me was in April at a restaurant in New York, when he proposed that all statues and monuments should be made with durable soap that dissolves in seven years. One month later, in his office in Los Angeles, down the hall from his podcast studio, he went further, declaring himself anti-graveyard.Asked if this means he wants to be cremated, O’Brien responded: “I want to be left in a ditch and found by a jogger.” Taking up space in a cemetery seems selfish to him. “I say this in a positive way,” he added, leaning forward and shifting to a less jokey tone. “We don’t matter.”Since leaving late-night television in 2021, Conan O’Brien, 61, has become more reflective about life (and death), given to philosophical flights of fancy that he compulsively alternates with comic tangents. O’Brien famously champions the intersection between smart and stupid, but in conversation, what stands out is how quickly he moves between light and heavy. In one of several interviews, I asked him if he was happier now than when he was on television and his response was to question happiness itself. “At best it’s a fleeting moment after a rainstorm when the sun’s coming out,” he said. “Being contented comes in little moments, here and there.”The only thing trickier than being a late-night talk show host is being a former one. Some relapse (Jon Stewart). A few vanish (Johnny Carson, Craig Kilborn). Most enter a more modest era (David Letterman, Jay Leno). Since he started writing for “Saturday Night Live” in the 1980s, Conan O’Brien has built one of the most consequential careers in comedy. And while his late-night tenure is beloved by comedy nerds, helping define a sensibility for a generation of comedians like Bill Hader, Eric André and Nikki Glaser, his postshow work may turn out to be more impressive.It helps that his brand of joyfully goofy absurdity ages well. Stewart may have repeatedly beaten him out for Emmys during the George W. Bush years, but jokes about the Iraq War have a shorter shelf life than the masturbating bear, a recurring character on O’Brien’s late-night show that is exactly what it sounds like. His reputation has grown as new generations have discovered his work online.The other reason O’Brien has done well since leaving “Conan,” his final late-night show (after “Late Night” and “The Tonight Show”), is that he’s always been excited by and open to experimentation. “I enjoyed playing with that form,” he said of the talk show. “The stuff I’m really interested in, there’s so many opportunities to do it now. ‘Hot Ones’ is proof.”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

Many remarkable performances fueled the Royal’s mini-festival of ballets by Frederick Ashton, the company’s founding choreographer.Dance, people like to say, is a universal language. But ballet isn’t. Rather, it’s a language with many sharply contrasting dialects. Tradition, training and temperament all shape distinctive styles, and the English style of classical dance, embodied by the Royal Ballet, was largely shaped by Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), the company’s founding choreographer.Ashton’s work is still regularly performed at the Royal Ballet and vital to its identity. British critics may grumble both about which ballets are performed and about a loss of nuance in their execution. But it would be hard to grouse much during the past two weeks of Ashton Celebrated, a mini-festival of work, running through Saturday at the Royal Opera House, which put the choreographer’s genius — and the English classical dance style — on abundant display in often remarkable performances. (Ashton Celebrated also included performances by the Sarasota Ballet of small-scale Ashton rarities at the smaller Linbury Theater.)Like his contemporary George Balanchine, who shaped a very different aesthetic at New York City Ballet, Ashton developed his Neo-Classicism from the 19th-century heritage of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, the choreographers of “Swan Lake,” among other things. But unlike Balanchine’s pared-back, direct physicality, Ashton cultivated a pliant lyricism paired with intricate footwork and a complex use of épaulement — the contrasting angles of the head, shoulders and hips. Well-mannered and witty, the best of his ballets are also full of emotional subtlety and vitality.Monica Mason, a former director of the Royal Ballet, said one of the principal challenges of performing Ashton now is capturing the flavor of the work. “Fred wanted expression through your whole movement, how you offer your hand, how he puts his arm around your waist,” she said. “The tiny, subtle things are the challenge.”Those nuances were wonderfully evident in “Les Rendezvous,” Ashton’s first substantial classical piece, created in 1933 and back after a 19-year absence from the Royal’s repertory.Set to irresistibly melodic music from Auber’s opera “L’Enfant Prodigue,” the ballet, which opened the first program, evokes a bygone world of long-elbowed gloves, cream teas and chivalrous escorts. It’s a rush of heady delight, full of unobtrusive virtuosity and filigree nuance.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

Typically, Maine is a summer destination for people who want to cool off.The state usually boasts average summer temperatures in the upper 70s and low 80s. So why was Maine, along with New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and other parts of New England, in the heat danger zone this week, with skyrocketing temperatures well into the 90s?Andrew Orrison, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the cause was a kind of weather system that usually forms farther over the Atlantic Ocean and farther south.The shift of this expansive band of heat toward the coast and farther north helped send temperatures soaring in New England, he said. It was part of a larger “high-pressure aloft” system, a type of phenomena that can produce heat domes.Additionally, descending westerly winds off the mountain ranges in New England helped to further compress the heat into the lower elevations, which meant higher temperatures in many cities, Mr. Orrison added.Now that same band of heat has moved further south and is sitting over New York City.Although high-pressure systems closer to the surface mean fair weather, ones in the atmosphere (the so-called “aloft” systems) can mean days of sustained heat, with little cloud cover to disrupt the power of the sun.As these high-pressure systems weaken, they can create space for low-pressure events to develop, which is why thunderstorms threatened the area yesterday.And then there is climate change. The continued burning of greenhouse gases means that the temperature of the atmosphere is increasing almost everywhere, said Jason Smerdon, a professor at the Columbia Climate School.Though the underlying causes of the most recent heat wave in the Northeast are yet to be determined, he said, the combination of high temperatures and humid conditions created a “double whammy” effect, since a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture.“So the ‘feels-like’ temperature from combined heat and humidity made the event particularly severe,” he said. More

The justices rejected a Second Amendment challenge to a federal law that makes it a crime for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders to possess a gun.The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the government may disarm a Texas man subject to a domestic violence order, limiting the sweep of its earlier blockbuster decision that vastly expanded gun rights.That decision, issued in 2022, struck down a New York law that put strict limits on carrying guns outside the home. It also established a new legal standard for assessing laws limiting the possession of firearms, one whose reliance on historical practices has sown confusion as courts have struggled to apply it, with some judges sweeping aside gun control laws that have been on the books for decades.The new case, United States v. Rahimi, explored the scope of that new test. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, the author of the majority opinion in the 2022 decision, dissented.Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that Second Amendment rights had limits.“When a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may — consistent with the Second Amendment — be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect,” he wrote. “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms.”The case started in 2019 when Zackey Rahimi, a drug dealer in Texas, assaulted his girlfriend and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone, leading her to obtain a restraining order. The order suspended Mr. Rahimi’s handgun license and prohibited him from possessing firearms.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

Eastern European countries who have in recent years lagged behind their continent’s bigger names are having their day in the sun in Germany.Edi Rama’s best friend during the World Cup summer of 1982 just so happened to be the one person he knew who owned a color television. So every evening, Rama would find himself crammed into his kitchen with countless others, desperately hoping that the fuzzy, flickering signal would hold.Albania was an island back then, under the repressive, conspiracist rule of Enver Hoxha. Foreign travel was banned for all but a select few insiders. Even communication with the outside world, particularly the West, was limited. Rama and his friends could only follow that World Cup through what he has subsequently called a “dark network” operated by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster.In a recent interview with Italy’s Tuttosport, he said that he still remembers that month warmly. Italy served as Albania’s avatar for the tournament; the two countries, in Rama’s estimation, are “a people divided by the sea, but united in everything else, similar as two drops of water.” When Dino Zoff, the Italian captain, eventually lifted the trophy in Madrid, it felt like victory in Tirana, too. “We saw it in his hands, as if it were also in ours,” Rama said.Triumph, though, was really something of a bonus. More than anything, what stayed with Rama from that summer, decades before he would become prime minister of Albania, was the sensation that there was life outside of his country. The commentators’ words, he said, “had the indescribable effect on us of not feeling alone in that black hole.”At the opening of an exhibition earlier this year about the life of Paolo Rossi, one of the great Italian heroes of that tournament, Rama put it even more eloquently. “Soccer was not only the ball and the game for us, it was the image of another world,” he said. “It was the chance to see a moving mirror, a forbidden dream.”Nedim Bajrami gave Albania the lead after only 23 seconds against Italy, the fastest goal in the history of the Euros.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated PressWe 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 giant airship was scheduled to fly across Germany to Denmark, Sweden and back. A flight across the Atlantic to the United States was tentatively planned to follow.BERLIN — The giant Zeppelin ZR-3 probably will make its first big trial trip about July 5, it was announced at Friedrichshafen today. The ship will carry several American naval officers and will fly across Germany to Copenhagen and Stockholm, returning to Friedrichshafen by way of Berlin, but without landing here.This trip will be followed by several others over Germany which, if satisfactory, will make possible the flight to the United States late in July or early in August, weather permitting. The route to America will be across Germany via Hamburg to Scotland and thence across the Atlantic to Lakehurst. The voyage is expected to require eighty hours.— The New York Herald, European Edition, June 21, 1924 More