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      Opening Statements in Senator Menendez’s Corruption Trial: 5 Takeaways

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      The corruption trial of Senator Robert Menendez, a powerful New Jersey Democrat, spun into motion in Manhattan on Wednesday, with combative opening statements and an extraordinary claim by the defense.Speaking directly to the jury, a U.S. prosecutor asserted that Mr. Menendez “put his power up for sale,” trading favors involving Egypt and New Jersey businessmen for gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz convertible. But it was a lawyer for Mr. Menendez who shook the courtroom awake, piling blame on the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez.Mr. Menendez, 70, betrayed little emotion as he watched the opening statements from the courtroom, where he is facing some of the gravest charges ever leveled against a sitting U.S. senator. He has pleaded not guilty.He is being tried alongside two of the businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. Prosecutors have also charged Ms. Menendez, but her trial was delayed until July for health reasons.Here are five takeaways from the senator’s third day on trial:The prosecution tried to keep it simple.Prosecutors have spun a dizzying set of accusations against Mr. Menendez, filing four rounds of charges that involve a halal meat monopoly, a Qatari sheikh and the inner workings of the U.S. government. All of it could easily confuse jurors.So laying out a road map for their case, they offered the panel a far simpler view: “This case is about a public official who put greed first,” said Lara Pomerantz, an assistant U.S. attorney. “A public official who put his own interests above the duty of the people, who put his power up for sale.”Who Are Key Players in the Menendez Case?Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, are accused of taking part in a wide-ranging, international bribery scheme that lasted five years. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.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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      No Bias Found in F.B.I. Report on Catholic Extremists

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      Republicans claimed the bureau’s memo was evidence of an anti-conservative strain among F.B.I. ranks, but an internal investigation failed to uncover any “malicious intent.”A memo by the F.B.I. warning of possible threats posed by “radical-traditionalist” Catholics violated professional standards but showed “no evidence of malicious intent,” according to an internal Justice Department inquiry made public on Thursday.Republicans have seized on the 11-page memo, which was leaked early last year, as a talking point. They have pointed to the document to sharply criticize the bureau and suggested, without evidence, that it was part of a broader campaign by the Biden administration to persecute Catholics and conservatives over their beliefs.The memo was quickly withdrawn after being leaked, and top law enforcement officials have repeatedly distanced themselves from it.The assessment by the Justice Department’s watchdog found that agents in the F.B.I.’s office in Richmond, Va., improperly conflated the religious beliefs of activists with the likelihood they would engage in domestic terrorism, making it appear as if they were being targeted for the faith.But after a 120-day review of the incident ordered by Congress, Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general — drawing from the F.B.I. report and interviews conducted by his own investigators — found no evidence that “anyone ordered or directed” anyone to investigate Catholics because of their religion.A statement from the F.B.I. on Thursday said the inspector general’s review aligned with the bureau’s own accounting.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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      Justice Dept. Nears $100 Million Settlement to Larry Nassar Victims Over FBI Failures

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      The deal, which could be announced in coming weeks, would bring an end to one of the last major cases stemming from a horrific sports scandal.The Justice Department is nearing a $100 million settlement over its initial failure to investigate Lawrence G. Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing girls under his care, according to people familiar with the situation.The deal, which could be announced in coming weeks, would bring an end to one of the last major cases stemming from a horrific sports scandal, with around 100 victims in line to receive compensation.The approach of a settlement comes two and a half years after senior F.B.I. officials publicly admitted that agents had failed to take quick action when U.S. national team athletes complained about Mr. Nassar to the bureau’s Indianapolis field office in 2015, when Mr. Nassar was a respected physician known for working with Olympians and college athletes. He has been accused of abusing more than 150 women and girls over the years.The broad outline of the deal is in place, but it has not yet been completed, according to several people with knowledge of the talks, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss continuing negotiations.The details of the settlement deal were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.It would be the latest in a series of big payouts that reflect the inability of institutions to protect hundreds of athletes — including the Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney and Aly Raisman — from a doctor who justified his serial sexual abuse by claiming he was using unconventional treatments.In 2018, Michigan State University, which employed Mr. Nassar, paid more than $500 million into a victim compensation fund, believed to be the largest settlement by a university in a sexual abuse case. Three years later, U.S.A. Gymnastics and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee reached a $380 million settlement.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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      Biotech Exec Gets 7 Years in Prison for False Claims About Rapid Covid-19 Test

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      Prosecutors said Keith Berman falsely claimed he had invented a blood test that could detect Covid-19 in 15 seconds. His lawyer said he had put “genuine effort” into developing such a test.The former chief executive of a biotechnology company who, during the early days of the pandemic, falsely claimed that he had invented a blood test that could detect Covid-19 in 15 seconds was sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for securities fraud, federal prosecutors said.From February 2020 to December 2020, the former executive, Keith Berman, 70, of Westlake Village, Calif., engaged in a scheme to defraud people into investing in his company, Decision Diagnostics Corporation, by claiming the test could detect Covid using a finger prick sample of blood, prosecutors said.In March and April 2020, Mr. Berman issued 12 “false and misleading” news releases describing the rapid Covid test, which his company called GenViro, prosecutors wrote. Decision Diagnostics’ stock price jumped by more than 1,500 percent during the period, prosecutors said.In reality, prosecutors said, Mr. Berman had “privately confided in a friend the test could not actually detect Covid-19.”Prosecutors accused Mr. Berman, the sole director of the publicly traded medical device company, of capitalizing on people’s fears about the pandemic in an effort to resuscitate the company’s fortunes.Mr. Berman’s scheme resulted in about $28 million in investor losses, prosecutors said. Mr. Berman was indicted in December 2020, and he pleaded guilty in December 2023 to securities fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of an official proceeding.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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      What is FISA, and What Does It Mean for U.S. Surveillance and Spying?

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      Under Section 702, the government is empowered to collect, without a warrant, the messages of Americans communicating with targeted foreigners abroad.The House on Friday passed a two-year reauthorization of an expiring warrantless surveillance law known as Section 702, reversing course after the bill collapsed days earlier when former President Donald J. Trump urged his allies to “kill” it.But disappointing privacy advocates, the House narrowly rejected a longstanding proposal to require warrants to search for Americans’ messages swept up by the program.Here is a closer look.What is Section 702?It is a law that allows the government to collect — on domestic soil and without a warrant — the communications of targeted foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans.Under that law, the National Security Agency can order email services like Google to turn over copies of all messages in the accounts of any foreign user and network operators like AT&T to intercept and furnish copies of any phone calls, texts and internet communications to or from a foreign target.Section 702 collection plays a major role in the gathering of foreign intelligence and counterterrorism information, according to national security officials.Why was Section 702 established?After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush secretly ordered a warrantless wiretapping program code-named Stellarwind. It violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, which generally required a judge’s permission for national security surveillance activities on domestic soil.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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      Ex-Cornell Student Admits Targeting Jewish Students With Online Threats

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      Patrick Dai pleaded guilty to posting a series of messages in which he threatened to stab, rape and behead Jewish people.A former Cornell University student pleaded guilty on Wednesday to posting a series of online messages shortly after the war in Gaza began last fall in which he threatened to stab, rape and behead Jewish people, federal prosecutors said.The former student, Patrick Dai, pleaded guilty to posting threats to kill or injure another person using interstate communications, according to federal prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for New York’s Northern District.Mr. Dai, 21, who is originally from Pittsford, N.Y., is scheduled to be sentenced in August and faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, prosecutors said.“This defendant is being held accountable for vile, abhorrent, antisemitic threats of violence levied against members of the Cornell University Jewish community,” Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.Lisa Peebles, a federal public defender representing Mr. Dai, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview with WHEC, a local television station, outside the federal courthouse in Syracuse, N.Y., on Wednesday, she said the threats were a product of a “bad decision” over “a bad couple of days.”“He’s very remorseful,” she said. “He accepts responsibility.”A university spokesman declined to comment on the plea.Mr. Dai was a junior majoring in computer science when he made the threats. In pleading guilty, he admitted to posting them anonymously on Oct. 28 and Oct. 29 in the Cornell section of an online discussion forum about fraternity and sorority life, prosecutors said.The threats included saying he was “gonna shoot up” a kosher dining hall on the Cornell campus and was “gonna bomb” a Jewish residence there, prosecutors said.In one post, prosecutors said, he threatened to “stab” and “slit the throat” of any Jewish man he saw on campus; to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish women; to behead Jewish babies; and to “bring an assault rifle to campus” and shoot Jews.The F.B.I. traced the threats to Mr. Dai through an IP address, and he admitted they were his in an interview with federal agents, according to a criminal complaint.The threats came amid a surge in antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric across the United States, including at colleges and universities, after the war in Gaza began in October. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Doug Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, traveled to Cornell’s Ithaca campus to show support for rattled students. Cornell canceled classes for a day.Mr. Dai’s mother, Bing Liu, told The Associated Press in November that she believed the threats were partly the fault of medication her son had been taking for depression and anxiety.She told The A.P. that her son’s depression had prompted her to bring him home on weekends, that he was home the weekend the threats were made and that he had previously taken three semesters off. More

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      What the ‘Rust’ Trial Says About the Case Against Alec Baldwin

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      The trial of the “Rust” armorer offered a preview of the case against Mr. Baldwin, who is set to stand trial on an involuntary manslaughter charge in July.The trial of the armorer on the film “Rust,” who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter this week for putting live ammunition into a gun that went off on the set and killed the cinematographer, offered a preview of the criminal case prosecutors are building against Alec Baldwin, who was handling the gun when it fired.A grand jury indicted Mr. Baldwin in January on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, which carries up to 18 months in prison. He pleaded not guilty; his trial is set for July.Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver when the gun fired on Oct. 21, 2021, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director. He has denied responsibility from the beginning, telling investigators that he had been told the gun did not contain live ammunition, and noting that live ammunition was supposed to be banned on the set. He also denied pulling the trigger, saying that the gun went off after he pulled its hammer back and released it; a forensic analysis commissioned by prosecutors found that he must have pulled the trigger for it to go off.Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Baldwin failed to observe firearms safety measures.“Alec Baldwin’s conduct and his lack of gun safety inside that church on that day is something that he’s going to have to answer for,” Kari T. Morrissey, the lead prosecutor in the case, said during the closing arguments in the trial of the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. “That’ll be with another jury on another day.”Some of the evidence and testimony presented at the trial of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed could help Mr. Baldwin’s case; other things that emerged in court could undermine it. Here’s a look at evidence that could play a role at his trial.Jurors at Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s trial watched video of Mr. Baldwin shooting blanks from a revolver on the set of “Rust.”Gabriela Campos/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Chinese National Accused of Stealing AI Secrets From Google

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      Linwei Ding, a Chinese national, was arrested in California and accused of uploading hundreds of files to the cloud.A Chinese citizen who recently quit his job as a software engineer for Google in California has been charged with trying to transfer artificial intelligence technology to a Beijing-based company that paid him secretly, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday.Prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, who was part of the team that designs and maintains Google’s vast A.I. supercomputer data system, of stealing information about the “architecture and functionality” of the system, and of pilfering software used to “orchestrate” supercomputers “at the cutting edge of machine learning and A.I. technology.”From May 2022 to May 2023, Mr. Ding, also known as Leon, uploaded 500 files, many containing trade secrets, from his Google-issued laptop to the cloud by using a multistep scheme that allowed him to “evade immediate detection,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.Mr. Ding was arrested on Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, Calif., not far from Google’s sprawling main campus in Mountain View, officials said.Starting in June 2022, Mr. Ding was paid $14,800 per month — plus a bonus and company stock — by a China-based technology company, without telling his supervisors at Google, according to the indictment. He is also accused of working with another company in China.Mr. Ding openly sought funding for a new A.I. start-up company he had incorporated at an investor conference in Beijing in November, boasting that “we have experience with Google’s 10,000-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it,” prosecutors said in the indictment, which was unsealed in San Francisco federal court.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