Elections

“Hell’s Kitchen,” “Stereophonic” and others are up for top prizes at Sunday’s ceremony. Our critic takes stock of their cast albums, all available now.Cast albums are both keepsakes and fantasies, preserving a show for those who have seen it and implying it for those who have not. At their best, they are also stand-alone works of musical-theater art. Listening to the recordings of the eight shows nominated for Tony Awards in the best musical and best score categories — all of which are now available — I was impressed by how often and how variously they reached that standard. Below, in chronological order by opening date on Broadway, a guide to the latest batch of future treasures.‘Here Lies Love’The first of the season’s best score nominees, this sung-through biography of Imelda Marcos was the only one not to release a cast recording. That’s a shame, but die-hards can seek out the 2014 Off Broadway version or the 2010 concept album, with its whacka-whacka disco-beat ditties by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Remastered in 2023, and with a very different collection of songs from the Broadway show, the concept album is naturally less theatrical; with each track featuring a different singer in a totally distinctive style — Tori Amos, Florence Welch, Natalie Merchant, Sia — character development is impossible. Instead, it offers hypnotic dance-floor euphoria, as in Cyndi Lauper’s take on Imelda’s “Eleven Days” of courtship.“Eleven Days”“Here Lies Love,” featuring Cyndi Lauper, from the 2010 concept album (Nonesuch)‘Days of Wine and Roses’A story of husband-and-wife alcoholics on diverging paths toward recovery and disaster is bound to be harrowing, but Adam Guettel’s score carefully balances the inevitable lows with the sometimes wild highs. The cast album brilliantly captures that full-spectrum range, especially in the edge-of-danger singing by Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James at their finest. Their quasi-operatic cries for relief and forgiveness effectively contrast (but do not contradict) the jazzy mania of songs like “Evanesce,” in which the snockered characters sound like xylophones and leap like dolphins, making you ache if not for drink then for these desperate drinkers.“Evanesce”“Days of Wine and Roses” (Nonesuch)‘Water for Elephants’Jessica Stone’s thrilling staging is a real eye-catcher in this circus-based musical at the Imperial Theater. But the cast album demonstrates how the songs, by PigPen Theater Co., a seven-man indie folk collective, can grab you by the ears. Avoiding the rut of some Americana scores, PigPen, along with its arrangers and orchestrators, offers a wide variety of sounds and formats that suit the milieu and the action: bravura showstoppers for the ringmaster, soaring anthems for the hero, haunting ballads for the woman caught between them. One of those ballads is “Easy,” a heartbreaker even if you have no idea that it’s sung to a dying horse.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 writer reflects on the moment she understood the roots of her workaholism.“COME SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU’RE IN,” concludes the flurry of Slack messages from my manager, an all-caps tirade that began at 4:56 a.m.It’s a Monday morning in 2017. I’m sitting in my car in the parking lot of my newish job, my body frozen, my eyes glued to my phone screen.I’m 45, and after decades relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, I’d landed a high-profile, C-suite “dream” job and published my first book, a career guide for misfits. I’d become an in-demand speaker, traveling the country to deliver talks on “making it,” my platitudes-with-a-twist quoted in business magazines, written up in women’s lifestyle blogs.To the outside world, my success was unimpeachable. Inside I am a mess.I’d worked through the weekend and, because I worked most weekends, the days and demands had all started to blur. My husband and I had moved to Los Angeles five years earlier, but I still hadn’t made any friends.I’d skipped the parent social at our kid’s new preschool because of a work trip. I’d turned down an invitation to a neighbor’s potluck because I knew I’d be at the office late, and had said “no” to enough coffee requests from the few people I knew in the city that eventually they stopped asking. Instead of putting in the effort required to build a community, I spent nearly all of my energy in service of my career.The Slack messages are followed in short order by three calls from my boss’s assistant. When I don’t pick up, the accompanying voice messages, each more frantic than the last, remind me that our boss wishes to see me, post haste. The crisis, like most work crises, does not warrant this level of urgency. But it feels like a five-alarm fire to me.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

Several London hospitals, still reeling from a cyberattack last week, have made an urgent plea to medical students to help stem the disruption.Several London hospitals, still under significant strain more than a week after a cyberattack crippled services, have asked medical students to volunteer to help minimize disruption, as thousands of blood samples have had to be discarded and operations postponed.The ransomware attack on Synnovis, a private firm that analyzes blood tests, has crippled services at two major National Health Service hospital trusts, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ and King’s College, which described the situation as “critical.”According to a memo leaked in recent days, several London hospitals asked medical students to volunteer for 10- to 12-hour shifts. “We urgently need volunteers to step forward and support our pathology services,” said the message, which was reported earlier by the BBC. “The ripple effect of this extremely serious incident is felt across various hospital, community and mental health services in our region.”The attack also disrupted blood transfusions, and the N.H.S. appealed to the public this week for blood donors with O-negative blood types, which can be used in transfusions for any blood type, and O-positive blood types, which is the most frequently occurring blood type, saying it could not match patients’ blood at the same frequency as usual.While the N.H.S. has declined to comment on which group was suspected of carrying out the attack, Ciaran Martin, a former head of British cybersecurity, told the BBC last week that a Russian cybercriminal group known as Qilin was most likely the perpetrator. Synnovis said last week in a statement that it was working with the British government’s National Cyber Security Center to understand what had happened.Synnovis, in an email sent Monday to primary health providers, said that thousands of blood test samples would probably have to be destroyed because of the lack of connectivity to electronic health records. In a statement on Wednesday, Synnovis said that the I.T. system had been down for too long for samples taken last week to be processed.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

In a blow to the National Labor Relations Board, the justices cited inconsistent standards for courts to order employers to reinstate fired workers.The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Starbucks on Thursday in a challenge against a labor ruling by a federal judge, making it more difficult for a key federal agency to intervene when a company is accused of illegally suppressing labor organizing.Eight justices backed the majority opinion, which was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion concurring with parts of the majority opinion, dissenting from other portions and agreeing with the overall judgment.The ruling came in a case brought by Starbucks over the firing of seven workers in Memphis who were trying to unionize a store in 2022. The company said it had fired them for allowing a television crew into a closed store, while the workers said that they were fired for their unionization efforts and that the company didn’t typically enforce the rules they were accused of violating.After the firings, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint saying that Starbucks had acted because the workers had “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” Separately, lawyers for the board asked a federal judge in Tennessee for an injunction reinstating the workers, and the judge issued the order in August 2022.The agency asks judges to reinstate workers in such cases because resolving the underlying legal issues can take years, during which time other workers may become discouraged from organizing even if the fired workers ultimately prevail.In its petition to the Supreme Court, the company argued that federal courts had differing standards when deciding whether to grant injunctions that reinstate workers, which the N.L.R.B. has the authority to seek under the National Labor Relations Act.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

10
FDA v. ALLIANCE FOR HIPPOCRATIC MEDICINE
Opinion of the Court
Driehaus, 573 U. S. 149, 162–163 (2014).
By contrast, when (as here) a plaintiff challenges the
government’s “unlawful regulation (or lack of regulation) of
someone else,” “standing is not precluded, but it is ordinarily
substantially more difficult to establish.” Lujan, 504 U. S.,
at 562 (quotation marks omitted); see Summers, 555 U. S.,
at 493. That is often because unregulated parties may have
more difficulty establishing causation—that is, linking
their asserted injuries to the government’s regulation (or
lack of regulation) of someone else. See Clapper, 568 U. S.,
at 413-414; Lujan, 504 U. S., at 562; Duke Power Co. v.
Carolina Environmental Study Group, Inc., 438 U. S. 59, 74
(1978); Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization,
426 U. S. 26, 41-46 (1976); Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490,
504-508 (1975).
When the plaintiff is an unregulated party, causation
“ordinarily hinge[s] on the response of the regulated (or
regulable) third party to the government action or
inaction—and perhaps on the response of others as well.”
Lujan, 504 U. S., at 562. Yet the Court has said that
plaintiffs attempting to show causation generally cannot
“rely on speculation about the unfettered choices made by
independent actors not before the courts.” Clapper, 568
U. S., at 415, n. 5 (quotation marks omitted); see also
Bennett v. Spear, 520 U. S. 154, 168–169 (1997). Therefore,
to thread the causation needle in those circumstances, the
plaintiff must show that the “third parties will likely react
in predictable ways”” that in turn will likely injure the
plaintiffs. California, 593 U.S., at 675 (quoting
Department of Commerce v. New York, 588 U. S. 752, 768
(2019)).
As this Court has explained, the “line of causation
between the illegal conduct and injury”—the “links in the
chain of causation,” Allen, 468 U. S., at 752, 759-must not
be too speculative or too attenuated, Clapper, 568 U. S., at
410-411. The causation requirement precludes speculative More

Inflation is one of President Biden’s biggest weaknesses with voters heading into November, and former President Donald J. Trump has hammered him on the issue relentlessly.But Mr. Biden is trying to fight back: His campaign released a new advertisement on Thursday featuring him talking about his working-class roots and expressing sympathy for Americans struggling with high prices.The ad, produced in English and Spanish, is part of a seven-figure June media purchase targeted to Hispanic voters. It will run on television, radio and digital platforms across the battleground states, according to the Biden campaign, and is debuting on a day when Mr. Trump is set to speak in Washington to the Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying group.Mr. Biden has built a sizable fund-raising advantage over Mr. Trump and has used his campaign war chest to dominate the airwaves. But the former president still leads in many polls, and he has made significant progress with Hispanic voters since his defeat in 2020. He is also making up ground in fund-raising.What the ad saysThe 30-second ad begins with a voice-over from Mr. Biden recounting his family leaving their hometown so his father could find work, paired with a black-and-white image of people carrying suitcases.“I know what it’s like to struggle,” the president says. “I know many American families are fighting every day to get by.”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

Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in a medication abortion. It is combined with a second drug, misoprostol, to end a pregnancy.Mifepristone blocks a hormone called progesterone that is necessary for a pregnancy to continue. Misoprostol brings on uterine contractions, causing the body to expel the pregnancy as in a miscarriage.In U.S. studies, the combination of these pills causes a complete abortion in more than 99 percent of patients, and is as safe as an abortion procedure administered by a doctor in a clinic. A variety of research has found that medication abortion has low rates of adverse events, and a study published in The Lancet in 2022 found that patients are generally satisfied with it.Growing evidence from outside the United States suggests that abortion pills are safe even among women who do not have a doctor to advise them.While the only F.D.A.-approved method in the United States is to use both pills, misoprostol can also end a pregnancy when used alone, and its availability was not affected by the ruling on mifepristone. Misoprostol — which is around 80 percent effective on its own, although it sometimes has to be taken more than once — is also prescribed to treat ulcers, and is available over the counter in many countries, including Mexico.The Food and Drug Administration has approved medication abortion for up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, while World Health Organization guidelines say it can be used up to 12 weeks at home and after 12 weeks in a medical office. The vast majority of abortions occur before 12 weeks.More than half of people who get legal abortions in the United States — and three-quarters in Europe — use medication abortion. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it became more common because patients wanted to avoid going to clinics in person, and a change in federal regulation made it easier for them to get prescriptions via telemedicine and to fill them in a pharmacy.Since nearly two dozen states banned or restricted abortion following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, some women in those states have turned to mail-order abortion pills instead. Clinicians in several states have mailed pills into states with bans, protected by so-called shield laws. And foreign nonprofit groups and entrepreneurs have shipped some women pills from overseas.The court’s decision does not influence the availability of the overseas pills, which operate outside the bounds of the legal U.S. health care system. More

Donald Trump will go to the US Capitol to rally congressional Republicans today in his first visit since January 6, 2021, when his supporters descended on the building in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Trump’s favour.The high-profile meeting will set out Trump’s priorities for a second presidency, but is also expected to see him demand that the GOP further intensify efforts to overturn a recent conviction by a New York court on felony charges.Ahead of the meeting, anti-Trump and pro-Palestinian protesters were seen gathering outside the Capitol Hill Club. One sign visible from one protester read: “No one is above the law.” Some protesters implored Republicans entering the meeting to not “drink the Kool-Aid”.Trump, the presumptive GOP 2024 presidential nominee, was found guilty last month of 34 counts of document falsification relating to hush money paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, shortly before his 2016 election victory.He has since corralled the Republicans into pushing a narrative line that the conviction is a result of the Department of Justice (DoJ) being weaponised against him by Joe Biden – even though the DoJ has no jurisdiction over the New York state court in which he was tried.Thursday’s visit comes a day after his Republican allies secured a significant victory in a House of Representatives vote to hold the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt of Congress. Garland is being held in contempt for refusing to turn over recordings of an interview Biden gave to a special prosecutor, Robert Hur, appointed to investigate the president’s illegal retention of classified documents.The meeting was billed in advance as forward looking, with Trump supposedly focused on his agenda for a future presidency.This was expected to feature pledges against cuts to social security and Medicare in what is seen as a boon to older voters, as well as a promise to make permanent his multitrillion-dollar tax cuts of 2017, which are due to expire next year.He is also expected to amplify his plans for a crackdown on migrants trying to cross the US southern border and flag up plans for a U-turn away from the Biden administration’s foreign policy priorities, which have included aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, per Politico.But a focus on the legal cases against him is likely to be given equal – or perhaps greater – priority.This could, according to Politico, include urging greater efforts to defund the office of special prosecutor Jack Smith. Smith was notably appointed by the DoJ to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection and the removal of classified documents from his presidency to his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.Congressional Republicans are also preparing, at Trump’s urging, legislation that would move state state cases against him, including the New York conviction, and a separate charge of attempted election interference in Georgia to federal courts.Trump apparently signified his desire for congressional support in an expletive-laden phone call with Mike Johnson, the House speaker, after his 31 May conviction.Johnson, who initially opposed an attempt by the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to defund Smith’s office, has now backtracked and held talks with the House judiciary chairman, Jim Jordan, about how to target it through the congressional appropriations system.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That country certainly sees what’s going on, and they don’t want Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg [the district attorneys in the Georgia and New York cases respectively] and these kinds of folks to be able to continue to use grant dollars for targeting people in a political lawfare type of way,” Jordan, a vocal Trump backer, told Politico.Some GOP members have expressed scepticism about the efforts on behalf of Trump.“We accuse Democrats of weaponising the Justice system. That’s exactly what we’d be doing,” one unnamed congressman, apparently granted anonymity for fear of reprisals from the former president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) allies, told the outlet.In another development underscoring Trump’s vicelike grip on the congressional party, five GOP senators, led by JD Vance of Ohio, reportedly in the running to be the ex-president’s running mate, will announce a plan to subject lower level Biden administration nominees to confirmation votes – a move designed to use up senate floor-time – in protest against the hush money conviction.Such appointments, including federal judges, US attorney and sub-cabinet level appointments, are normally approved without a vote.Thursday’s meeting was to be attended by senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who has not met Trump since December 2020 after criticising him over the January 6 attack but who has endorsed his 2024 candidacy.Three prominent Republican senators known for their hostility to Trump will be absent; Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. 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