Elections

MaryEllen Uthlaut’s crossword is worth celebrating.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — Discovering the theme of a crossword puzzle can occasionally engender a sense of private embarrassment. We ask ourselves how we could have missed the pattern, given how obvious it seems in hindsight. I hope that you’ll give yourself some grace as you solve MaryEllen Uthlaut’s crossword puzzle, though, because its theme isn’t obvious. In fact, I needed a colleague to point out that I was only halfway appreciating its brilliance (another reason to try solving puzzles with a friend, a recommendation I have made in this column before).This is Ms. Uthlaut’s fourth crossword for The New York Times, and she seems to be developing a real knack for subtle theme sets: She can add and subtract letters from common phrases to change their meaning, and she can hide U.F.O.s in plain sight. As for today’s theme, she truly — ahem — rises to the occasion.Today’s ThemeThe occasion alluded to above appears at 57A: “‘Best wishes for your once-a-year celebration!’ (and a wish for solvers of this puzzle).” A couple of annual occasions may fit the bill, so we’ll deduce this one using our other theme entries.A certain “Buzzer you wouldn’t want to hit?” (17A) is a BUMBLEBEE, and a “Breast milk container” (25A) is a BABY BOTTLE. One particularly bold consonant stands out in these entries. It serves as our hint to Ms. Uthlaut’s revealer — HAPPY B-DAY.But wait, there’s more: Solvers of this puzzle are showered with B’s not only in the entries of this puzzle but in their clues: Every clue starts with the letter B. Beautiful, isn’t it?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

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a mainstream Republican, on Tuesday easily fended off a primary challenge from a right-wing businessman, advancing to what is expected to be a tight re-election contest in a competitive district won by President Biden in 2020.Mr. Bacon, a fourth-term congressman who has maintained a reputation as an independent voice in a party increasingly dominated by the hard right, won with an overwhelming share of the vote, according to The Associated Press.In recent years, a number of mainstream Republicans in politically competitive districts have been felled in primaries by ultraconservative candidates who went on to drag the party down in the general election.But since he was elected in 2016, Mr. Bacon, a former brigadier general in the Air Force, carved out a niche for himself as one of the only Republicans who could hold the Omaha-based swing seat. Since 2000, voters in the district have backed the winner of the presidential election, except in 2012.That brand came through for him on Tuesday night.His opponent, Dan Frei, a hard-line Republican who secured the endorsement of the state’s Republican Party, had painted Mr. Bacon as a fixture of the Washington establishment and ran on cutting federal spending and an “America First agenda.” Mr. Frei described himself as “a Trumper” but did not ultimately secure an endorsement from the former president.He also lagged far behind Mr. Bacon in fund-raising.Mr. Bacon, 60, has broken repeatedly with his party to support several bipartisan pieces of legislation, including Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill, a bill to establish an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and a measure calling for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.He was one of several Republicans in purple districts who pressed Speaker Mike Johnson to allow a foreign aid package including funding for Ukraine to come to a vote on the House floor. “We need to have a Churchill, not a Chamberlain,” Mr. Bacon said at the time.Mr. Frei sought to weaponize Mr. Bacon’s support for aid to Ukraine against him; Mr. Bacon, in turn, received backing from Mark Levin, a prominent right-wing radio host.“I am not into these radical isolationists,” Mr. Levin said. “I don’t side with terrorists against Israel. I don’t side with Russia against Ukraine.”Mr. Bacon also received some backup from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leaders, which ran advertisements supporting the congressman on the southern border, an issue his opponent had sought to leverage against him.Mr. Bacon won re-election last year by 3 points against Tony Vargas, a state senator, even though Mr. Biden won the district in 2020 by 6 points.He will have a rematch against Mr. Vargas in November. More

As former US president Donald Trump’s hush-money trial plays out in New York, Matilda Boseley breaks down the details on her whiteboard. Here’s how former adult film star Stormy Daniels, disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen and tabloid boss David Pecker fit into a sprawling legal story that could have implications for the 2024 US election. More

Newly restored, Horace Ové’s film about a Trinidadian family in London makes a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The title “Pressure” suggests the force with which this first feature by the Trinidadian British director Horace Ové struck the conscience of a country. The movie, which premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival, was praised by critics and then shelved for three years. Apparently, its producer, the British Film Institute, deemed the public unready for Ové’s blunt depiction of the police violence and racial animus directed at London’s West Indian residents in Brixton.The film’s landmark status has since been recognized by the institute and its maker knighted. Newly restored, the movie is making a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where a 16-millimeter version was previously shown in 2016.With consummate irony, “Pressure” was originally titled “The Immigrant.” Anxiously watched by his Trinidadian family, Tony (Herbert Norville), born and educated in London, attempts to join, and is repeatedly rejected by, the white British world. His mother (Lucita Lijertwood), an overworked house cleaner, is perpetually, vociferously anxious. His father (Frank Singuineau), an accountant turned grocer, is resigned. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), a Black Power militant who is unemployed, is contemptuous. (The casting mirrors the situation: All but Norville were born in Trinidad.)Written with the Trinidadian novelist Samuel Selvon, “Pressure” is a didactic film, opening with Tony’s mother frying up a traditional English breakfast, with greasy bacon shown in unappetizing close-up, triggering Colin’s disdain for the local cuisine. (He peels and devours an avocado swiped from his father’s store.)Venturing out, Tony, the first-generation Briton, is exposed to Brixton life — suffering a painful job interview, a landlady’s racist diatribe and a Black preacher who urges his congregation to “drive all black thoughts from your hearts.” Alongside these set pieces, neorealist footage captures white reactions to the Black people they pass on the street. Indeed, the streets provide Tony’s education in double consciousness. “Learn how to thieve constructively — for the struggle,” Colin scolds him when Tony is naïvely caught up in a bungled shoplifting caper.Colin likes to posture. His associate Sister Louise (the American actor Sheila Scott-Wilkinson) provides the speechifying. Her political line, racially aware and class-conscious — synthesizing the thinking of two Trinidadian activists Ové admired, the Black Power firebrand Stokely Carmichael and the internationalist historian C.L.R. James — brings down the power of the state in the form of riot police.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

Another 40 passengers who had been on the bus were taken to nearby hospitals to be treated for injuries, the local authorities said.At least eight people were killed and dozens of others were injured on Tuesday after a bus carrying farm workers collided with a pickup truck in Central Florida, the local authorities said. The bus was carrying 53 farm workers when it sideswiped a pickup truck, drove through a fence and overturned in Ocala, Fla., according to a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol, which is investigating the incident.About 40 passengers were taken to nearby hospitals to be treated for injuries, the spokeswoman said. She did not say the extent of their injuries.The authorities did not confirm where the bus was traveling, but the local station WCJB reported the bus was carrying migrant workers employed at a watermelon farm in the area.The Marion County Sheriff’s Office said a stretch of State Road 40, where the incident occurred, would be closed for most of the day.This is a developing story. More

In the first few weeks of the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, witnesses have cast Michael D. Cohen as a bully, a nervous wreck and, as one witness put it, a “jerk.”That may not make Mr. Cohen, the one-time lawyer and fixer for Mr. Trump, seem like the ideal witness in the first criminal trial of an American president. But prosecutors — anticipating the attacks Mr. Trump’s lawyers will mount against the man who once called himself the former president’s “designated thug” — have introduced those unflattering characterizations as a way to desensitize the jury to Mr. Cohen’s bracing presence.On Tuesday, one of the prosecutors, Susan Hoffinger, walked Mr. Cohen again through previous testimony about “monetizing” his role as Trump’s personal lawyer by using it to attract other clients — another attempt to present and defang Mr. Cohen’s behavior themselves, before what is expected to be a cross-examination bent on undermining his credibility.Mr. Trump’s legal team, which has taken aim at Mr. Cohen before, is expected to paint him as a rogue actor who caused more problems than he fixed. They have promised to seize on Mr. Cohen’s credibility and criminal record — Mr. Trump is fond of noting that he is a “convicted liar” — and portray him as a scorned underling seeking revenge against the former president.Mr. Cohen does have baggage: In August 2018, he has pleaded guilty to a number of crimes, including breaking campaign finance laws with a pair of hush-money payments to women who had said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump.One of those payments, to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, is at the heart of the case. Mr. Cohen is expected to offer his firsthand account of how the new president subsequently reimbursed him but falsified records to disguise the reimbursement as legal expenses.While the prosecutors introduced witnesses to corroborate much of Mr. Cohen’s account, they have invited those same witnesses to offer their unflattering views of him.Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump’s former spokeswoman, scoffed at the notion that Mr. Cohen would have made the $130,000 hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels out of the kindness of his heart because doing so “would be out of character for Michael,” an insulting comment that nonetheless supported Mr. Cohen’s story.The intent, it appears, is to suck the air out of the defense’s attacks and turn Mr. Cohen into an object of amusement for the jury. Already, his name has drawn smiles from some of the jurors, who will now evaluate his credibility for themselves.Prosecutors also made sure to enter into evidence the voice of a man who had once found Mr. Cohen essential.“Michael Cohen is a very talented lawyer,” Mr. Trump said, in a recording from a news conference in 2017 that was played in the courtroom. “He’s a good lawyer at my firm.” More

Scientists used tree rings to compare last year’s extreme heat with temperatures over the past two millenniums.The summer of 2023 was exceptionally hot. Scientists have already established that it was the warmest Northern Hemisphere summer since around 1850, when people started systematically measuring and recording temperatures.Now, researchers say it was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature that compares 2023 with a longer temperature record across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The study goes back before the advent of thermometers and weather stations, to the year A.D. 1, using evidence from tree rings.“That gives us the full picture of natural climate variability,” said Jan Esper, a climatologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and lead author of the paper.Extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for most of the recent increases in Earth’s temperature, but other factors — including El Niño, an undersea volcanic eruption and a reduction in sulfur dioxide aerosol pollution from container ships — may have contributed to the extremity of the heat last year.The average temperature from June through August 2023 was 2.20 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between the years 1 and 1890, according to the researchers’ tree ring data.And last summer was 2.07 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between 1850 and 1900, the years typically considered the base line for the period before human-caused climate change.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

Why have podcasters emerged as the rumpled protagonists of numerous television shows? We’ll discuss after the break.Gilbert Power, a public radio veteran and the host of the podcast “On Record,” went to a small town in Ireland to make a show about a 20-year-old missing-persons case. The podcast, he explained, was meant to be “a bit of fun, something to listen to on your drive home. I didn’t understand then how much power a story actually has. But stories can change us.”Gilbert, played by a grinning Will Forte, is the lightly inane hero of “Bodkin,” a seven-episode series that premiered last week on Netflix. And as the fictional host of a fictional podcast, he has plenty of onscreen competition.In the past five years, podcasters have emerged as the rumpled protagonists of numerous television shows (“Based on a True Story,” “Truth Be Told,” “Only Murders in the Building,” “Alex Inc.”) and films (“C’mon C’mon,” “Vengeance,” “Monolith,” “Bros”). Even the trendsetting Carrie Bradshaw was onboard; in “And Just Like That…,” she moved from print journalism to the advice podcast “X, Y and Me,” before going solo.Some of these works are comedies, some dramas. Many of them involve one or more mysteries in homage to or parody of true-crime podcasting. In these shows and movies, podcasters fill the roles once occupied by journalists or amateur sleuths, as tyros desperate for answers. These protagonists are often bumbling, and their relationship to ethics is distinctly off-and-on. But characters like these help fulfill a very particular fantasy: that we can tell the truth while also telling a good, possibly even powerful, story. And maybe land a mattress sponsorship while we’re at it.From left, Selena Gomez, Martin Short and Steve Martin in “Only Murders in the Building,” which revolves around a true-crime podcast.Patrick Harbron/HuluWe 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