Elections

As the 12 jurors entered into the courtroom to deliver the verdict against Donald J. Trump, 11 of them looked ahead. But one looked in the direction of the defendant.At that moment, the juror knew what was about to happen. Mr. Trump did not.Moments later, the foreman would read the verdict convicting Mr. Trump of all 34 counts of falsifying business records with which he had been charged, making him the first American president to become a felon.The jurors — seven men and five women — remained expressionless as they were individually polled to confirm the verdict, even as Mr. Trump looked at them.Justice Juan M. Merchan then thanked them for their service, and then they filed out, going directly past Mr. Trump, who kept his eyes downcast as they walked by.Before they left, Justice Merchan told them they were free to discuss the case if they so pleased, but no juror has yet spoken to the news media. Because of the sensitivity of the case, their identities were kept secret to all, except the lawyers in the case, and the defendant. As news that the jury had reached a verdict spread beyond the courthouse, uniformed officers and sergeants standing outside could be seen speaking furtively to one another, as the whirring of helicopter blades droned on overhead.Parts of Columbus Park behind the courthouse were blocked off to reporters, with court officers scolding some that they risked tampering with the jury by being so close.The jurors piled into black vans with tinted windows that zipped north along Baxter Street, cutting against traffic as they zoomed away from the courthouse, and the first conviction of an American president.Molly Cook EscobarMolly Cook EscobarMolly Cook EscobarMolly Cook EscobarMolly Cook Escobar More

The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump shortly after it ended in a conviction on Thursday, describing it as a politically motivated and “profoundly undemocratic” case that would only strengthen Mr. Trump’s support.“The Democratic Party’s strategy is to beat President Trump in the courtroom rather than the ballot box,” Mr. Kennedy said in a statement on X. “This will backfire in November.”His response echoed many of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies, who have for months described the charges against him as a partisan “witch hunt.”In recent weeks, Mr. Kennedy has amplified his criticism of Mr. Trump, focusing particularly on his Covid-19 policies and his “coziness” with corporate America. Mr. Trump, in turn, has attacked him, with recent polling indicating that Mr. Kennedy could draw voters equally from Mr. Trump and President Biden in swing states.But Mr. Kennedy has stayed largely silent on Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, occasionally appearing to suggest that the Justice Department under Mr. Biden has been used to political ends. In April, Mr. Kennedy questioned the motivations of the federal prosecutors who had brought charges against Trump supporters who participated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Trump has been charged in a federal case related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a case entirely separate from the one brought in Manhattan.In his statement on X on Thursday evening, Mr. Kennedy said that he was also “running against President Trump in this election,” adding, “The difference is I’m challenging him on his record.”Earlier, shortly after the verdict came down, Mr. Kennedy was speaking at a cryptocurrency conference in Austin, Texas, where he was asked about the conviction.“I think this is probably the weakest case that people brought against him,” Mr. Kennedy told the audience. “My belief is that it will end up helping President Trump among a large part of the American public, who believes that the judicial system and the enforcement system have been weaponized politically.” More

More than a year after the death of P-22, the beloved mountain lion who made Griffith Park his home, another has been spotted nearby.Vladimir Polumiskov witnessed a wild mountain lion near his home in Los Angeles.Vladimir PolumiskovFor months, Los Angeles residents believed the park had been vacated. Only the memory of P-22, the beloved celebrity mountain lion who had once made it his home, lingered as the city mourned his death. That was until this month, when an apparent successor — another mountain lion, seemingly bigger, younger and stronger — emerged late one night.“It’s very mystical,” said Vladimir Polumiskov, who captured footage of the big cat near his apartment complex, which borders Griffith Park, a sprawling urban reserve north of downtown Los Angeles. “They called P-22 the Brad Pitt of the Hollywood Hills,” he said. “This is going to be the puma DiCaprio.”Mr. Polumiskov, 30, saw the “huge cat” around 9 p.m. on May 14, he said, just as he was returning home from dinner with his wife and their 2-year-old son.He said he had just parked and was unbuckling his son from his seat when he noticed the creature standing just feet away from his car. He gingerly placed his son back into his seat, got back in the car, and closed all the doors — all while the animal stared at him. “I was shocked at how big he was,” he said. “This guy is just beautiful.”After the mountain lion known as P-22 was euthanized in December 2022, a new mountain lion, P-122, has emerged in the same area of the Hollywood Hills. Vladimir PolumiskovWe 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 prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among college students rose to 7.5 percent in 2022, more than double the rate five years earlier, researchers found.Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday.The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey.“The magnitude of this rise is indeed shocking,” said Yusen Zhai, the paper’s lead author, who heads the community counseling clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His clinic had seen more young people struggling in the aftermath of traumatic events. So he expected an increase, but not such a large one.Dr. Zhai, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Studies, attributed the rise to “broader societal stressors” on college students, such as campus shootings, social unrest and the sudden loss of loved ones from the coronavirus.PTSD is a mental health disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and heightened sensitivity to reminders of an event, continuing more than a month after it occurs.It is a relatively common disorder, with an estimated 5 percent of adults in the United States experiencing it in any given year, according to the most recent epidemiological survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Lifetime prevalence is 8 percent in women and 4 percent in men, the survey found.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 opinion, by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, found that the gun rights group had plausibly claimed a First Amendment violation.The Supreme Court sided with the National Rifle Association on Thursday, saying it could pursue a First Amendment claim against a New York state official who had encouraged companies to stop doing business with it after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla.Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for a unanimous court, found that the N.R.A. had plausibly claimed a violation of the First Amendment, sending the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, for further proceedings.The N.R.A., in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, cited what it described as the enormous regulatory power of the state official, Maria T. Vullo, a former superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services. The N.R.A. accused Ms. Vullo of applying “pressure tactics — including back-channel threats, ominous guidance letters and selective enforcement of regulatory infractions” and warned of wide-ranging consequences of a ruling against it. A court decision siding with Ms. Vullo, the group warned, would open the door to government officials making similar pleas about hot-button issues like abortion and the environment.Ms. Vullo, in court filings, has pushed back again the N.R.A.’s allegations that she undermined the First Amendment.The case began in 2017, when the New York Department of Financial Services started investigating an insurance product known as Carry Guard, which provided coverage for various issues arising from the use of a firearm, such as personal injury and criminal defense.The program was brokered, serviced and underwritten by insurance companies and included the N.R.A.’s name, logo and endorsement.The department regulates more than 1,400 companies and more than 1,900 financial institutions. It concluded that Carry Guard violated state insurance law, in part by providing liability coverage for injury from the wrongful use of a firearm. The department entered into consent decrees with the insurance groups and imposed civil penalties.After a mass shooting in 2018, when a former student opened fire at a high school in Parkland, Fla., the department began to re-evaluate “the implications of regulated entities’ relationships with gun-promotion organizations,” according to legal filings for Ms. Vullo.The department issued two memos, one to insurance companies and another to financial institutions, titled “Guidance on Risk Management Relating to the N.R.A. and Similar Gun Promotion Organizations.”These documents encouraged regulated institutions “to review any relationships they have with the N.R.A. or similar gun promotion organizations.”The Vullo case is one of two concerning when government advocacy crosses a constitutional line into coercion.The other, Murthy v. Missouri, involves a push by Republican-led states to curb the Biden administration’s efforts to crack down on what it viewed as misinformation on social media. More

A study found that hundreds of sites, many without obvious Kremlin links, copied Russian propaganda and spread it to unsuspecting audiences ahead of the E.U. election.The website calling itself Man Stuff News caters to a certain sensibility, with categories like “Backyard Grilling,” “TV Shows for Guys” and “Beard Grooming.” A recent article headlined “Tips for Dads During Labor” offered this nugget of advice: “Just remember to spend some time together before deciding whether or not to give birth.”Get to its section devoted to world news, however, and the nature of the coverage changes drastically. There, a recent article belittled an international warrant to arrest Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, for war crimes. It repeated, word for word, an article that had appeared a day before under a different byline on the website for RT, Russia’s global television network.RT, which the U.S. State Department describes as a key player in the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Sites like Man Stuff News, however, have helped RT sidestep the restrictions and continue reaching European and American audiences, according to a new report.Replicas of RT articles have been laundered thousands of times through hundreds of sites, according to the report, written by researchers from the German Marshall Fund, the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research nonprofit. The sites include content aggregators like Infowars, run by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; mirrors of RT repurposed from abandoned “zombie” sites; faux local news outlets with names like San Francisco Telegraph; and domains focusing on spirituality, yoga, extraterrestrials and the apocalypse. Many of the articles were then further disseminated through social media.The rationale for reposting RT content most likely varies from site to site, but the surreptitious republishing represents a particular danger in the European Union, where concerns about Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns are intensifying, especially as Russia tries to weaken European support for Ukraine ahead of parliamentary elections next week.“This is really the tip of the Russian propaganda iceberg,” said Bret Schafer, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at German Marshall. “It was quite evident when we were running the search results in the E.U. that if Russian propaganda is not showing up on Russian domains, it’s getting through, which is sort of a double whammy because it’s not just evading restrictions and bans, it’s doing so on sites that are less transparent than RT 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

A 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, unearthed in the 1930s, is believed to have been stolen in the early 1940s.While excavating an ancient Greek palace in eastern Libya in the 1930s, an archaeologist dug up a large earthen storage jar, looked inside and spotted something unexpected — a 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, a dark volcanic stone.The two-foot-tall antiquity, most likely chiseled during ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty, was a rare find. Known as a striding male figure, it is one of only 33 statues like it known to exist, Egyptologists say.But it wasn’t long before thieves got ahold of the bearded figure and took it on an illicit odyssey that brought it, in 1991, to the Cleveland Museum of Art.On Wednesday, after curators had reviewed abundant proof that the item was stolen from Libya, including photos of it on display in the 1940s at a small museum near its discovery site, the museum agreed to transfer ownership to Libyan officials.“When confronting a situation like this we look at all the material and try to come to an agreement that is beneficial to all parties,” said Seth Pevnick, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Cleveland museum.“It’s less about ownership and more about access” to the object, he said, adding that the museum is hoping to display it on loan for five more years.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