Elections

The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office said that the use of deadly force during the May 3 encounter at the airman’s apartment was unreasonable.The Florida sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a U.S. Air Force senior airman in the airman’s home this month has been fired, the sheriff’s office said on Friday, describing the deputy’s use of deadly force, which was captured on body camera, as “not objectively reasonable.”The deputy, Eddie Duran, was responding to a physical disturbance call in Fort Walton Beach in the Florida Panhandle on May 3 when he killed Senior Airman Roger Fortson in his apartment. Sheriff Eric Aden of Okaloosa County said in a statement on Friday that his decision to fire Mr. Duran had come after an internal affairs investigation and a review of the body camera footage.“This tragic incident should have never occurred,” Sheriff Aden said, adding: “Mr. Fortson did not commit any crime. By all accounts, he was an exceptional airman and individual.”The sheriff’s comments were a stark departure from the language that his office used in the initial aftermath of the shooting. At that time, the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office said Mr. Duran had “reacted in self-defense.”The footage, released a week after the shooting, showed that Mr. Duran was told by a worker at the apartment complex to go to Apartment 1401 because of an apparent domestic dispute there.When the deputy arrives at that apartment, the footage shows, he first knocks without identifying himself. Mr. Duran then knocks again, announces himself and steps away from the door. Seconds later, the deputy shifts to the other side of the door, knocks and announces himself again.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 bill, which Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, is expected to sign this weekend, appeared to end the possibility that President Biden would not be on the state’s ballot in November.The Ohio General Assembly has passed a legislative fix that ensures President Biden will be on the state’s ballot in November, averting a crisis that had been brewing for weeks over what is typically a minor procedural issue.The secretary of state in Ohio, a Republican, had said that he planned to exclude Mr. Biden from the ballot because the president would not be officially nominated by his party until after a state deadline for certifying presidential nominees. That had threatened the possibility that the president would not be on the ballot in all 50 states.The General Assembly resolved the issue by passing a bill that pushes back the deadline to accommodate the date of the Democratic nominating convention. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, is expected to sign the bill over the weekend, pending a legal review, according to a spokesman.The solution has been used before. Ohio passed temporary extensions to its certification deadline for President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012 and for President Donald J. Trump in 2020. Other states that had similar deadline issues, including Alabama, have also passed legislative fixes with overwhelming bipartisan support, in 2024 and in other election cycles.But the solution proposed in the Ohio Legislature was entangled in a separate partisan clash over foreign donations. The General Assembly adjourned last week without a fix in place, after the Ohio Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, advanced a bill that would have resolved the issue but included a partisan measure banning foreign money in state ballot initiatives. Democrats opposed that measure, and the speaker of the Ohio House did not take it up before the chamber adjourned.Mr. DeWine then called a special legislative session to fix the problem, saying that legislators had failed “to take action on this urgent matter.” The General Assembly ultimately adopted two bills, one that fixed the ballot issue and another that banned donations in support of state ballot initiatives from foreign nationals, including immigrants with green cards.With the legislative solution appearing dead in the water last week, the Biden campaign considered suing the state to ensure that the president was on the ballot. Instead, the Democratic National Committee scheduled a virtual roll-call vote to officially nominate Mr. Biden ahead of the party’s convention in August. That vote is still set to go forward, even as the issue appears to be resolved.Hannah Muldavin, a spokeswoman for the committee, denounced what she called “partisan games” by Republican lawmakers that had delayed a solution.“Since the beginning of this process, Ohio Republicans have been playing partisan games and trying to chip away at our democracy, while Democrats have been defending Ohioans’ right to vote,” Ms. Muldavin said in a statement.Matt Huffman, the leader of the Ohio Senate, praised the foreign-influence ban, adding in a statement that Ohio “needed to ensure that President Biden is on the ballot in November, and it needed to be done legislatively.” More

The hacking group ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for stealing the user information of more than 500 million Ticketmaster customers.Ticketmaster confirmed in a federal filing on Friday that it was investigating a data breach after a hacking group known as ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for stealing the information of more than 500 million Ticketmaster customers.In the filing, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, said it had “identified unauthorized activity within a third-party cloud database environment.”Who is behind the breach?ShinyHunters, a hacker group believed to have been formed around 2020, is believed to have been behind the breach.Brett Callow, a threat analyst with the cybersecurity company Emsisoft, said it was a “credible threat actor,” though not much more was known about the group.Its chief aim appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them.Its past victims have included Microsoft and AT&T, among dozens of other companies in the United States and elsewhere, according to federal prosecutors.In March, AT&T confirmed a breach in a news release and said it had affected roughly 70 million past or present customers.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 Doctor saves a rich wannabe vlogger from being eaten by a giant slug, but a final twist leaves him reeling.Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Dot and Bubble’We’ve passed the midway point in this season of “Doctor Who,” and the show’s ambition shows no sign of subsiding. After playing with themes of religion and politics, it’s artificial intelligence, already touched on in the earlier episode “Boom,” that’s the topic du jour in “Dot and Bubble.”With its slick visuals and clear anti-technology viewpoint, Episode 5 has echoes of “Black Mirror,” Charlie Brooker’s dystopian TV anthology — as this season’s showrunner, Russell T Davies, who also wrote the episode, noted in a recent interview.But whereas Brooker can use each episode of “Black Mirror” to focus on a different aspect of contemporary technology, Davies has just 43 minutes to explore its overarching morality in “Dot and Bubble.”It makes for a slightly overstuffed episode — critiquing and parodying capitalism, YouTube and celebrity worship — that is saved, in part, by a genuinely unexpected twist in the final act.As with the previous episode, “73 Yards,” the Doctor doesn’t feature all that heavily in “Dot and Bubble” and the action feels less consequential to the season’s overall arc. Instead, the focus is on Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), a blonde-haired, blue-eyed wannabe vlogger with a penchant for pastels.Lindy’s life revolves around a two-part technology: Dot, a tiny robotic pearl that hovers in front of her, and Bubble, a virtual sphere of colorful screens beamed around her head. Within the Bubble, the perpetually peppy Lindy is in constant conversation with her friends; she chats away with the cadence — and vocal fry — of a family-friendly YouTuber, and they coo back.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 day after Donald J. Trump left the courthouse shellshocked, he emerged on his home turf revitalized and railing against his rivals.The Donald J. Trump who emerged from a drab courtroom in Lower Manhattan yesterday afternoon did so glumly, shuffling into the hallway to speak for less than two minutes. He seemed, like much of the nation, to be still absorbing the gut punch of his conviction on 34 felony charges.That was Desultory Donald.Nineteen hours later, it was a different Donald J. Trump who held forth for 33 minutes from a lectern in the lobby of the tower that bears his name. He’d slept on it, and things turned out not to be all bad, he seemed to suggest. “Let me give you the good news,” he said, picking up a piece of paper to read out the campaign’s boffo fund-raising numbers since the verdict came down ($39 million in 10 hours, he said).“Does anybody read The Daily Mail?” he asked at one point. It had apparently published a new poll that “has Trump up six points in the last 12 hours,” he chirped. “Who thought this could happen?”Americans were still processing the jolting news of Mr. Trump’s conviction on Friday. But Mr. Trump himself, a candidate of unusual personality and sometimes impenetrable psyche, seemed to be willing himself forward, moving from downcast to defiant within a day.It helped that he was back in his marble bunker, surrounded by creature comforts. Eric and Lara Trump, his son and daughter-in-law, stood behind a red velvet rope with dozens of supporters (many of whom work in the building). Employees at the Gucci store in the building’s lobby pressed their faces against the glass pane, agog at the spectacle. Secret Service agents pushed their fingers into their earpieces. New York City police officers milled around in their caps and starched white shirts. A doorman in a three-piece suit and a bow tie watched with interest. A forest of cameras and lighting rigs pointed toward Mr. Trump.Outside, a “Trump or Death 2024” flag, roughly the size of a Honda Civic, billowed in front of the Prada store across the avenue.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 manufactured video fabricated comments by the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller.A day after U.S. officials said Ukraine could use American weapons in limited strikes inside Russia, a deepfake video of a U.S. spokesman discussing the policy appeared online.The fabricated video, which is drawn from actual footage, shows the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, seeming to suggest that the Russian city of Belgorod, just 25 miles north of Ukraine’s border with Russia, was a legitimate target for such strikes.The 49-second video clip, which has an authentic feel despite telltale clues of manipulation, illustrates the growing threat of disinformation and especially so-called deepfake videos powered by artificial intelligence.U.S. officials said they had no information about the origins of the video. But they are particularly concerned about how Russia might employ such techniques to manipulate opinion around the war in Ukraine or even American political discourse.Belgorod “has essentially no civilians remaining,” the video purports to show Mr. Miller saying at the State Department in response to a reporter’s question, which was also manufactured. “It’s practically full of military targets at this point, and we are seeing the same thing starting in the regions around there.”“Russia needs to get the message that this is unacceptable,” Mr. Miller adds in the video, which has been circulating on Telegram channels followed by residents of Belgorod widely enough to draw responses from Russian government officials.The claim in the video about Belgorod is completely false. While it has been the target of some Ukrainian attacks, and its schools operate online, its 340,000 residents have not been evacuated.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

New research shows that people who develop dementia often begin falling behind on bills years earlier.Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.“The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency,” said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study’s authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, “consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we’re observing.”The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer’s patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.“There’s not just getting forgetful, but our risk tolerance changes,” said Lauren Hersch Nicholas, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has studied dementia’s impact on people’s finances. “It might seem suddenly like a good move to move a diversified financial portfolio into some stock that someone recommended.”Tell us about your family’s challenges with money management and Alzheimer’s. More

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Human rights has long been considered a Western concept, but recent scholarship has been uncovering the influence of women from the global south. Women like Hansa Mehta.Mehta stood up against the British government during India’s struggle for independence. She campaigned for women’s social and political equality and their right to an education. And she fought for her ideals during the framing of the constitution for a newly independent India.Mehta with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1949, when they were the only two women named as delegate to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.Marvin Bolotsky/United NationsFor Mehta, women’s rights were human rights. This conviction was best exemplified at a 1947 meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, to which she had been appointed as one of just two women delegates, alongside Eleanor Roosevelt. Mehta boldly objected to the wording of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the commission was tasked with framing.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