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    Georgia Voters Feel Re-energized, Even as 2020 Looms Large

    A perpetually expanding sprawl encircles Atlanta, the capital of Georgia and arguably all of the South. Newcomers from all over have powered its rapid growth, lured by a sense of promise and possibility. Because of the demographic shifts in these rapidly diversifying suburbs, Georgia recently emerged as a battleground state, after years of Republican dominance. […] More

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    Rallying in Two Key States, Harris Presses Her Case on Abortion Rights

    Rallying supporters in two battleground states, Vice President Kamala Harris signaled on Friday that her closing campaign message would focus on the life-or-death risks that abortion bans pose to American women — and on the argument that former President Donald J. Trump is to blame.In Madison, Wis., a crowd that had been ebullient suddenly grew hushed as Ms. Harris spoke about her visit with the family of a Georgia woman who died of sepsis after waiting for more than 20 hours for medical care to treat an incomplete medication abortion.“She was a vibrant 28-year-old,” Ms. Harris said. “Her name, Amber Nicole Thurman, and I promised her mother I would say her name every time.”Earlier in the day, Ms. Harris traveled to Georgia, where Ms. Thurman and another woman, Candi Miller, died after delays in medical care tied to state abortion restrictions, according to reporting by ProPublica. Their deaths occurred in the months after Georgia passed a six-week ban made possible by the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.In Atlanta, Ms. Harris condemned the deaths of the two women in an impassioned speech, saying that Mr. Trump had caused a “health care crisis” and that women were being made to feel as “though they are criminals.”Ms. Harris’s stops in the two battleground states capped a relatively smooth week for her campaign as Mr. Trump again caused or confronted several politically unhelpful headlines and controversies. Most strikingly, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, whom Mr. Trump has praised as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” was found to have called himself a “Black Nazi” and praised slavery in a pornographic chat room.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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    Trump Says Georgia’s Governor Is Hampering His Efforts to Win There

    Former President Donald J. Trump suggested without evidence on Saturday that Georgia’s Republican governor was hampering his efforts to win the battleground state in November, a claim that carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat to President Biden there in 2020.“In my opinion, they want us to lose,” Mr. Trump said, accusing the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, of being disloyal and trying to make life difficult for him.At a rally at the Georgia State University Convocation Center in Atlanta, in a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes and that was peppered with grievances about his loss four years ago, Mr. Trump falsely claimed, “I won this state twice,” referring to the 2016 and 2020 elections.Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden by roughly 12,000 votes in Georgia in 2020. Last year, the former president was indicted by an Atlanta grand jury on charges related to his efforts to subvert the results of that election in that state. On Saturday, he complained that he might not have ended up in legal jeopardy if Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger had cooperated with his attempts to reverse the 2020 results.Mr. Trump added that he thought Georgia had slipped under Mr. Kemp’s leadership. “The state has gone to hell,” he said.Representatives for Mr. Kemp, who indicated in June that he had not voted for Mr. Trump in the Republican primary this year, and Mr. Raffensperger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.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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    Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Marjorie Taylor Greene

    Sean Patrick Cirillo called Ms. Greene’s office and told staff members about his plans to kill the politician, the F.B.I. said. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.An Atlanta man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to making death threats against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.The man, Sean Patrick Cirillo, 34, made two threatening phone calls on Nov. 8, 2023, to Ms. Greene’s Washington, D.C., office, spoke to staff members and said that he planned to shoot the politician in the head, an F.B.I. agent said in court documents.“I’m gonna kill her next week,” Mr. Cirillo said, according to recordings of the phone call that were reviewed by the F.B.I. “I’m gonna murder her.”Mr. Cirillo pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to one count of transmitting interstate threats. He will face a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison when he is sentenced on Nov. 7.“Threatening to kill a public official is reprehensible,” Ryan K. Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. “Our office will not tolerate any form of violence, threats or intimidation against public officials.”In a statement, Mr. Cirillo’s lawyer, Allison Dawson, said that Mr. Cirillo had struggled with mental health issues and was not on his prescribed medication at the time of the incident.Ms. Greene’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.After Mr. Cirillo was arrested, Ms. Greene said in a statement to Atlanta News First: “Threats to murder elected officials should never be tolerated.”During his phone calls to Ms. Greene’s office, the F.B.I. said, Mr. Cirillo said that he was focusing on Ms. Greene through the sight of a sniper rifle. He also threatened to kill her staff members who picked up the two calls, which he made on Nov. 8 at 1:33 p.m. and 5:36 p.m., the F.B.I. said.The next day, when the F.B.I. showed up at Mr. Cirillo’s home by tracking his phone number, Mr. Cirillo admitted to making the calls, said he had made them to “get attention” and added that he had called “multiple other people as well including other members of Congress,” court records state. It is not clear who else received Mr. Cirillo’s calls.Mr. Cirillo’s guilty plea is the latest event in a recent pattern of threats toward political figures. Last week, a man was charged with threatening to assault and kill federal officials, judges and state employees across several states, including people involved in the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump.In California, some elected officials said they were rethinking public office in light of increasing harassment.Kirsten Noyes More

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    Is Your Flight Delayed by the Tech Outage? Here’s What You Need to Know.

    While service is slowly recovering, flights have been delayed and canceled worldwide. Here’s information on the most affected airlines and airports, passengers’ rights and how to reach airline customer service.Travel plans across the world were thrown into disarray on Friday, as a global technology outage disrupted businesses and services — including air travel — leaving thousands of flights canceled or delayed across the United States and beyond.While service was slowly recovering by midmorning Eastern time, the ripple effect was still snarling travel plans as delayed and canceled flights created a buildup of passengers waiting at airports, and some planes and crews out of position.“The anxiety is getting up a little,” said Adonis Ajayi, 35, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Friday morning. Mr. Ajayi was on his way to Key West, Fla., for a long weekend and said he had been checking social media constantly for flight updates — his flight had been delayed for nearly three hours. “I’ve never seen anything of this scale.”The outage was caused by a flawed update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, whose software is used globally by scores of industries to protect Microsoft systems. Messages posted on social media by travelers worldwide showed flights grounded, some terminal monitors down and crowds of stranded passengers waiting at airport gates and customer service desks. Some passengers at one airport in India had to stand in long lines to obtain handwritten boarding passes.Which airports have been hit the worst?In the United States, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the world’s busiest airport, appeared to have the most flights affected by the outage on Friday morning, with more than 230 incoming and outgoing flights canceled and more than 370 flights delayed, according to FlightAware, a real-time flight tracker.Many other airports, including hubs in New York, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., also appeared to experience significant disruption.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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    Arizona Man Plotted Mass Shooting to Trigger ‘Race War,’ Officials Say

    Prosecutors said Mark Adams Prieto of Arizona planned to target Black concertgoers at an Atlanta venue. He was indicted on hate crime and firearm charges.An Arizona man who planned to commit a mass shooting at an Atlanta rap concert as a way of inciting a “race war” has been indicted by a federal grand jury on hate crime and firearm charges.The man, Mark Adams Prieto, hatched a plan in several discussions with two people working with the F.B.I. who posed as racist extremists to carry out a mass shooting targeting Black people and other people of color at a concert in Atlanta on May 14 and May 15, the Justice Department said on Tuesday.Mr. Prieto intended for the shooting to incite a “race war” before the presidential election, prosecutors said in a news release.Mr. Prieto, 58, was reported to the authorities last year by an acquaintance who said he had made concerning comments calling for mass shootings targeting Black people and others, according to officials.Mr. Prieto faces two counts of trafficking in firearms, one count of transfer of a firearm for use in a hate crime and one count of possessing an unregistered firearm.He faces a maximum 15-year prison sentence for each firearm trafficking and transfer charge and a maximum 10-year sentence for the unregistered firearm charge, prosecutors said. Mr. Prieto also could be fined $250,000 for each count.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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    The Museum Revolution Gains Momentum

    Faced with dwindling attendance and changing demographics, museum directors are shifting their approach, with an eye toward “radical hospitality.”When Melissa Chiu began her tenure as the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 10 years ago, she had a stray thought about the institution’s location, on the National Mall, and its appearance, a doughnut-shaped concrete structure by the architect Gordon Bunshaft with a certain resemblance to a spaceship.“Maybe some of our visitors thought it was the Air and Space Museum,” she said of the popular institution next door, which, like the Hirshhorn, is part of the Smithsonian and which was getting more than six million visitors a year at the time. “So, OK,” she said, “that’s not a bad thing.”Chiu — who is appearing this week at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Venice with the artist and writer John Akomfrah to discuss how artists and museums can work together to address social, political and ecological issues — did not wait around for confusion to boost attendance at her museum. (The annual conference was founded by The New York Times, and is convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation, with panels moderated by Times journalists.)Melissa Chiu, the director of the Hirshhorn, in front of Torkwase Dyson’s “Bird and Lava #04” at the museum. Her mantra for the museum? “Radical accessibility.”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesThe number of people visiting the Hirshhorn has increased dramatically since she started in 2014, when the museum received 552,000 visitors. In 2018 and 2019 that figure was up more than 50 percent, and even in the post-lockdown phase of the pandemic, a time when many museums have faced a slump in visitors, the numbers are still well above that decade-old baseline.The issue of attendance has been a focus of museums large and small across the country lately, as tourism has shifted, interest on the part of younger people has waned in some places and regional demographics have changed. Museums have taken various steps to manage the challenge: featuring newer and sometimes lesser-known artists, catering more to local audiences, and adding technological enhancements to attract nontraditional visitors.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