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      Trump to Withdraw Musk’s Ally as Nominee for Top NASA Job

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      Jared Isaacman was a close associate of Elon Musk, whose SpaceX company has multiple contracts with NASA.President Trump on Saturday said that he planned to withdraw his nomination of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and close associate of Elon Musk’s, to be the next NASA administrator, days before Mr. Isaacman’s expected confirmation to the role by the Senate.Mr. Trump in recent days told associates he intended to yank Mr. Isaacman’s nomination after being told that he had donated to prominent Democrats, according to three people with knowledge of the deliberations who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. Mr. Trump said on social media on Saturday that he had conducted a “thorough review of prior associations” before deciding to withdraw the nomination.Mr. Trump added that he would “soon announce a new Nominee who will be Mission aligned, and put America First in Space.”The U-turn was the latest example of how Mr. Trump uses loyalty as a key criterion for top administration roles, and came at a fraught moment for the space agency. NASA has so far been spared the deep cuts that have hit the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies. But the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026 seeks to slice the space agency’s budget by one-quarter, lay off thousands of employees and end financing for a slew of current and future missions.The Trump administration also wants to overhaul NASA’s human spaceflight program, ending the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule initiatives after the Artemis III mission that is to land astronauts on the moon in 2027 and adding money to send astronauts to Mars in the coming years, something that had been a priority for Mr. Musk.People inside and outside NASA had hoped that Mr. Isaacman’s arrival as administrator would help provide stability and a clearer direction for the agency, which has been operating under an acting administrator since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s term.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

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      Why Is This Supreme Court Handing Trump More and More Power?

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      Since taking his second oath of office, President Trump has been on a firing spree. In violation of numerous laws or longstanding presidential practice (or both), he has ordered the removal of many high-level officials who normally retain their positions regardless of who is in the Oval Office.Some of these high-level officials have successfully challenged their removal in the lower courts. But on Thursday, in a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority inside the executive branch.The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the unsigned order noting concerns about the “disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.”In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority.Over the last four months, the legal world — and the country — has been plunged into chaos, and the Supreme Court bears a heavy dose of responsibility. Many of it decisions involving the presidency — including last year’s on presidential immunity — have enabled the president to declare himself above the law. The court’s latest order both enables the consolidation of additional power in the presidency and risks assimilating a “move fast and break things” ethos into constitutional law.No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president’s ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.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

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      Emil Bove, Top Justice Dept. Official, Is Considered for Circuit Court Nomination

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      Emil Bove III has emerged as a top contender to fill a vacancy on the appeals court covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, people familiar with the matter said.President Trump is considering nominating Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official responsible for enacting his immigration agenda and ordering the purge of career prosecutors, to be a federal appeals judge, according to people familiar with the matter.Mr. Bove, 44, is a former criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump and a longtime federal prosecutor in New York. He was the Justice Department official at the center of the Trump administration’s request earlier this year to dismiss a corruption case against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams.One of the department’s most formidable and feared political appointees in the second Trump administration, he has emerged as a top contender to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, those people said.There are two vacancies on the court — one based in New Jersey and one in Delaware. It is not clear which seat Mr. Bove is under consideration for. He has a property in Pennsylvania, and some conservatives have called for moving the Delaware-based seat to Pennsylvania.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter that has not yet been publicly announced. They cautioned that the timing remains unclear, and the intentions could still shift.If Mr. Bove is nominated for the post, Democrats are all but certain to use his Senate confirmation process to scrutinize his role in some of the Justice Department’s most contentious actions since Mr. Trump took office.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

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      CBS News President to Depart Amid Network’s Tensions With Trump

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      Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News and Stations, had allied herself with Bill Owens, the “60 Minutes” executive producer who recently resigned.CBS News faced another shock wave on Monday after its president, Wendy McMahon, abruptly said that she would exit her post, the latest development in an ongoing showdown between the news division and President Trump.Ms. McMahon, whose full title was president of CBS News and Stations, said in a memo that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”Tensions between Ms. McMahon and CBS’s parent company, Paramount, have simmered for months, a period that Ms. McMahon described in her memo as “challenging.”Paramount is in talks to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accused “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview last year with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Many legal experts have called the suit baseless, but Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has said she favors settling the case. She is seeking the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to a Hollywood studio, Skydance.The situation prompted the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, to resign last month, saying he no longer enjoyed his usual journalistic independence. At the time, Ms. McMahon took pains to signal her support for Mr. Owens, saying that “standing behind” the producer “was an easy decision for me.”Her embrace of Mr. Owens and “60 Minutes” put Ms. McMahon at odds with Paramount executives who were anxious about the show’s reporting about the Trump administration. Within CBS News, some journalists expected Ms. McMahon to be gone within months. But the timing of her announcement, less than 24 hours after Sunday’s season finale of “60 Minutes,” still raised eyebrows.Ms. McMahon’s tenure atop CBS News, which she took over in August 2023, has been rocky at times.An overhaul of “CBS Evening News,” introduced earlier this year, has failed to connect with viewers, and ratings for the flagship newscast have fallen sharply. Besides the tussle with Mr. Trump, the news division also faced internal criticism from Ms. Redstone over a “60 Minutes” segment in January about the war between Israel and Hamas.And Ms. Redstone openly criticized Ms. McMahon’s handling of an October incident involving the “CBS Mornings” anchor Tony Dokoupil, who in an interview had challenged the author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.CBS News executives rebuked Mr. Dokoupil on a newsroom-wide call, saying his interview fell short of editorial standards. Ms. Redstone said that move was “a mistake” and that Mr. Dokoupil “did a great job with that interview.” More

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      Novo Nordisk to Replace C.E.O. After Losing Edge in Weight-Loss Drugs

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      The Danish drugmaker, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, has seen its stock tumble as competition in the weight-loss drug market has grown fiercer.Novo Nordisk will replace its chief executive, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the company announced Friday, citing a sharp decline in its stock price that stemmed from increased competition for its popular weight-loss drug.The Danish drugmaker said it was searching for a new chief executive to soon replace Mr. Jorgensen, who has led Novo Nordisk for eight years.The move reflects a remarkable fall in fortune for the maker of one of the most well-known drugs in the world, which is sold as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for obesity. The company’s stock has fallen by 50 percent in the past year.

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      Novo Nordisk’s share price
      Source: FactSetBy The New York TimesSales of that drug created boom times for Novo Nordisk. In 2023, the company’s extraordinary success prompted the Danish central bank to keep interest rates lower than it otherwise would. For more than a year, Novo Nordisk’s market value surpassed Denmark’s entire gross domestic product.But investors have soured on the company as it has faced increasingly fierce competition. Lower-cost copycat versions of the weight-loss drugs made through a process known as compounding have cut into Novo Nordisk’s sales. Even more damaging has been competition from Eli Lilly, the maker of the drug sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound.Novo Nordisk had a head start, winning approval to market its drug for obesity more than two years before Eli Lilly. But Novo Nordisk has been rapidly losing market share to its competitor: American patients have filled more prescriptions this year for Zepbound than for Wegovy, and the gap has been widening, according to the industry data provider IQVIA.Eli Lilly is also developing new weight-loss drugs, including a daily pill, that are expected to set up years of blockbuster sales for the company. Novo Nordisk has a hazier path forward. More

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      La Scala Taps South Korean Maestro Myung-whun Chung as Music Director

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      Myung-whun Chung will be the first Asian, and one of the first conductors born outside Italy, to serve as music director in the opera house’s 247-year history.The Teatro alla Scala in Milan, one of the world’s most revered opera houses, announced on Monday that its next music director would be the South Korean conductor Myung-whun Chung.Chung, 72, a veteran who has led renowned ensembles in Europe and Asia, will succeed the Italian maestro Riccardo Chailly, who started in 2015. Chung will be the first Asian — and one of the first conductors born outside Italy — to serve as music director in La Scala’s 247-year history. He will take the podium in late 2026 for an initial term of about three years.The selection of Chung is one of the most important decisions so far under Fortunato Ortombina, the Italian impresario who took over as superintendent and artistic director of La Scala in February. Ortombina nominated Chung for music director, and La Scala’s board unanimously approved the choice on Monday, the opera house said in a statement.The statement called Chung, who has been a regular at La Scala since 1989, “one of the most beloved artists among the Milanese public.” Chung has conducted 84 performances of nine operas at La Scala, in addition to 141 concerts. Chung holds the record for the most appearances at the opera house, aside from music directors, according to La Scala. In 2023, he was named honorary conductor of the Filarmonica della Scala in Milano, an ensemble of La Scala musicians, the first maestro to receive that designation.The statement called Chung, who has appeared with La Scala singers and musicians on global tours, “the conductor who has most contributed to the international prestige of the Teatro alla Scala, excluding its music directors.”Representatives for La Scala and Chung did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Chung, who lives in France and South Korea, was born in Seoul and moved at age 8 to the United States, where he studied music. He has led many prestigious ensembles, including the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. He has visited North Korea to push for closer cultural ties between the North and South.At La Scala, Chung will serve under Ortombina, whose tenure is still taking shape. Ortombina was chosen to lead La Scala during a nationalistic time for the arts in Italy, with government leaders making clear they favor homegrown talent over foreigners for major cultural posts.But the cultural and political establishment did not stand in the way of La Scala’s selection of Chung.“La Scala has the total right and autonomy of choice; I do not intervene on this,” Alessandro Giuli, the Italian minister of culture, told reporters, according to a report in La Repubblica, one of the country’s major newspapers. More

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      Does Trump Have the Power to Install Jeanine Pirro as Interim U.S. Attorney?

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      By using another interim appointment to fill a vacancy for the top prosecutor in Washington, the White House is bypassing Senate confirmation and potentially claiming expansive authority.President Trump’s announcement that he was making the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro the interim U.S. attorney in Washington has raised questions about whether he had legitimate legal authority to do so.Under a federal law, the attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for up to 120 days. But soon after taking office in January, the Trump administration installed a Republican lawyer and political activist, Ed Martin, in that role.The question is whether presidents are limited to one 120-day window for interim U.S. attorneys, or whether they can continue unilaterally installing such appointees in succession — indefinitely bypassing Senate confirmation as a check on their appointment power. Here is a closer look.What is a U.S. attorney?A U.S. attorney, the chief law enforcement officer in each of the 94 federal judicial districts, wields significant power. That includes the ability to start a criminal prosecution by filing a complaint or by requesting a grand jury indictment. Presidents typically nominate someone to the role who must secure Senate confirmation before taking office.What is an interim U.S. attorney?When the position needs a temporary occupant, a federal statute says the attorney general may appoint an interim U.S. attorney who does not need to undergo Senate confirmation. The statute limits terms to a maximum of 120 days — or fewer, if the Senate confirms a regular U.S. attorney to fill the opening.Is the president limited to one 120-day window?This is unclear. The ambiguity underscores the aggressiveness of Mr. Trump’s move in selecting Ms. Pirro. Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Democrats on the panel “will be looking into this.”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

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      Holocaust Museum Board Member Condemns Silence on Trump Firings

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      Board members clashed over email after a Biden appointee sent a scathing letter invoking the Holocaust as he denounced the museum’s silence on President Trump’s firings of board members.A member of the board that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum wrote a blistering letter to the other board members on Friday condemning the institution’s silence after President Trump’s recent firings and invoking the Holocaust as he warned about the dangers of not speaking out.In late April, Mr. Trump fired a number of board members appointed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., including Doug Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as other former senior administration officials.The firings were widely criticized as an effort to politicize an organization dedicated to educating the world about one of the worst atrocities in history. But the museum’s statement at the time made no mention of the terminations and instead emphasized an eagerness to work with the Trump administration.Kevin Abel, who was appointed to the museum’s board by Mr. Biden in 2023, wrote in his letter on Friday that Mr. Trump’s “campaign of retribution” had been met with troubling “public silence” by the museum.Mr. Abel wrote that while it was “understandable” that museum leaders might fear speaking out at the risk of losing funding, it was vital to do so.“At this juncture of rising threats and a swirling atmosphere of hatred, it is ever more imperative that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the one institution that can most credibly call out the administration’s attack of its Council for what it is, not choose to remain silent,” Mr. Abel wrote, invoking Martin Niemöller’s words “about the danger of not speaking out,” which he noted were “inscribed on the wall of the Museum’s permanent exhibition.”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