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    We must defend elective abortions, not just the most politically palatable cases | Moira Donegan

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    A Kentucky woman known by the pseudonym Mary Poe recently filed a lawsuit against her state, seeking an abortion for what was once a banal reason: because she wanted one.Poe, who was about seven weeks pregnant at the time of the lawsuit’s filing, has since had an abortion out of state. But her attorneys argue that she still has standing to sue to overturn Kentucky’s two abortion bans – a six-week ban and a separate total ban – arguing that the laws violate the state constitution. This much, at least, is typical: lawsuits challenging abortion bans have sprung up across the country since Dobbs, with women and their families seeking to overturn bans, expand exceptions, or get some compensation from the state for the graphic, distressing, disabling or deadly outcomes that the bans have made them suffer.The US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe in Dobbs cited the surge in activist litigation around abortion – a product of conservative investment in anti-choice legal shops – as part of their reason for doing so. Surely this must be a contentious, controversial issue that the federal bench is ill equipped to resolve, the judges from the conservative legal movement reasoned – because look how many complaints the conservative legal movement has filed against it!This rationale was always disingenuous, but it has also been proved flatly wrong: Dobbs has not got the courts out of the abortion business. Instead, lawsuits over abortion have exploded. The anti-choice camp has pounced, seeking to further restrict abortion by banning pills; targeting reproductive rights advocates, abortion funds and sexual health educators; claiming rights for fetuses or embryos; or by asserting that men who father pregnancies have a right to keep women from terminating them.But the pro-abortion rights side has been busy with litigation, too. Women who have been put at great health risk or made to suffer terrible, painful complications as a result of bans brought a class-action lawsuit in Texas. Bans have been challenged over and over again – on religious liberty grounds, on the grounds of state constitutional provisions securing the right to make individual healthcare decisions, under a federal law that guarantees emergency room treatment for patients needing stabilizing care, and under state constitutional clauses guaranteeing liberty, due process and privacy.The Kentucky lawsuit is part of this latter camp. Mary Poe has cited Kentucky’s constitutional guarantees of individual rights to both privacy and self-determination, which she says have been violated by the bans. “I feel overwhelmed and frustrated that I cannot access abortion care here in my own state,” she said in a statement delivered via her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I am bringing this case to ensure that other Kentuckians will not have to go through what I am going through, and instead will be able to get the healthcare they need in our community.”This kind of desire for an abortion – the dignified simplicity of it – has been missing from much of the post-Dobbs abortion rights discourse. After the ruling, as trigger bans shot into effect across the country, clinics shuttered their doors, and scared women tried to discern their options, there was no shortage of tragic stories highlighting the brutality, indignity and gendered bigotry of the laws. But as the dust settled and members of the Democratic party, the major reproductive rights advocacy groups and the liberal legal movement surveyed the national scene, a consensus emerged that the face of the mainstream pro-choice movement would be the patient who experienced a medical emergency.Women who had suffered horrific medical complications became lucid, moving and highly sought after tellers of their own stories, explaining how abortion bans has risked their health: Amanda Zurawski, for example, was denied an emergency abortion at 18 weeks, subsequently went into septic shock twice, and one of her fallopian tubes was so scarred that it is now permanently closed, inhibiting her future fertility. Kate Cox was denied an abortion after discovering that her fetus has trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition which is incompatible with life, and which, because of Cox’s own medical history, also endangered her fertility and life.During her presidential run, Kamala Harris ran an ad featuring a woman identified only as Ondrea, who suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks and was denied the standard care due to her state’s abortion ban. She developed sepsis and almost died. The ad features a shot of Ondrea in a bathroom, staring at her body in a mirror wearing only a sports bra. Her belly bears the scars of the emergency surgery that eventually saved her life – the surgery that she never would have had to have if it weren’t for the ban.It does not diminish these women’s bravery, their suffering, or the wrongness of what was done to them to say that they are only one small fraction of those who need abortions in America. These are married, middle-class women with wanted pregnancies; Zurawski and Cox are both white. Cox has spoken movingly about her hopes to meet her future child, a girl; in the ad that features Ondrea, she and her husband hold a baby blanket. These are women whose suffering at the hands of abortion bans has nothing to do with a refusal or distaste for heterosexual, married, middle-class life. Their suffering can be made visible precisely because they are so acceptable.Not so with Mary Poe. Poe may well be married, middle-class and white; from her statement, in which she talks about the difficulty of finding childcare, we can infer that she, like most abortion patients, is already a mother. But Poe is not suffering a physical emergency; she is not enduring any pain or medical misfortune that she can use to purchase social license. She is not, in other words, a woman whose claim to an abortion is based on a plea for mercy. She is merely a woman who seeks to be in control of her own life, one who believes that things like privacy and self-determination apply to her, too.“I have decided that ending my pregnancy is the best decision for me and my family,” Poe writes in her public statement. “This is a personal decision, a decision I believe should be mine alone, not made by anyone else.”This was not always a radical proposition. But in the post-Dobbs world, it has sadly become one.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Democratic leaders across US work to lead resistance against Trump’s agenda

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      After the November elections ushered in a new era of unified Republican governance in Washington, Democratic leaders across the country are once again preparing to lead the resistance to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said he would convene a special legislative session next month to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights”.Washington state’s governor-elect, Bob Ferguson, who is currently the state’s attorney general, said his legal team has been preparing for months for the possibility of a second Trump term – an endeavor that included a “line-by-line” review of Project 2025, the 900+ page policy blueprint drafted by the president-elect’s conservative allies.And the governors of Illinois and Colorado this week unveiled a new coalition designed to protect state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism, as the nation prepares for a president who has vowed to seek retribution against his political enemies and to only govern as a dictator on “day one”.“We know that simple hope alone won’t save our democracy,” the Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said on a conference call announcing the group, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy. “We need to work together, especially at the state level, to protect and strengthen it.”With Democrats locked out of control in Washington, many in the party will turn to blue state leaders – governors, attorneys general and mayors – as a bulwark against a second Trump administration. For these ambitious Democrats, it is also an opportunity to step into the leadership void left by Kamala Harris’s defeat.Progressives such as Newsom and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, are viewed as potential presidential contenders in 2028, while Democratic governors in states that voted for Trump such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are seen as models for how the party can begin to rebuild their coalition. And Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, returned home to Minnesota with a national profile and two years left of his gubernatorial term.Leaders of the nascent blue state resistance are pre-emptively “Trump-proofing” against a conservative governing agenda, which they have cast as a threat to the values and safety of their constituents. As a candidate, Trump promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In statements and public remarks, several Democrats say they fear the Trump administration will seek to limit access to medication abortion or seek to undermine efforts to provide reproductive care to women from states with abortion bans. They also anticipate actions by the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations and expand gun rights.“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people – you come through me,” Pritzker said last week.Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory shocked the nation, blue state leaders say they have a tested – and updated – playbook to draw upon. But they also acknowledge that Trump 2.0 may present new and more difficult challenges.Ferguson said Trump’s first-term executive actions were “often sloppy”, which created an opening for states to successfully challenge them in court. Eight years later, and after studying Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47, he anticipates the next Trump White House will be “better prepared” this time around.Pritzker said Trump was surrounding himself with “absolute loyalists to his cult of personality and not necessarily to the law”. “Last time, he didn’t really know where the levers of government were,” the governor said on a call with reporters this week. “I think he probably does now.”The courts have also become more conservative than they were when Trump took office eight years ago, a direct result of his first-term appointments to the federal bench, which included many powerful federal appeals court judges and three supreme court justices.The political landscape has also changed. In 2016, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Despite Republican control of Congress, there were a number of Trump skeptics willing – at least initially – to buck the president during his first two years in office.This time around, Trump is all but certain to win the popular vote, and he made surprising gains in some of the bluest corners of the country.Though the former president came nowhere close to winning his home state of New York, he made significant inroads, especially on Long Island. At a post-election conference last week, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, struck a more neutral tone. Hochul, who faces a potentially tough re-election in 2026, vowed to protect constituents against federal overreach, while declaring that she was prepared to work with “him or anybody regardless of party”.In New Jersey, where Trump narrowed his loss from 16 percentage points in 2020 to five percentage points in 2024, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, acknowledged the result was a “sobering moment” for the party and country. Outlining his approach to the incoming administration, Murphy said: “If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death. If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”Progressives and activists say they are looking to Democratic leaders to lead the charge against Trump’s most extreme proposals, particularly on immigration.“Trump may be re-elected but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for young people brought to the US as children, known as Dreamers.She called on state and local officials, as well as university heads and business leaders, to “use every tool at their disposal” to resist Trump’s mass deportation campaign, stressing: “There is a lot we can do to ensure Trump and his cabinet are not successful in their plans.”State attorneys general are again poised to play a pivotal role in curbing the next administration’s policy ambitions.“The quantity of litigation since the first Trump administration has been really off the charts – it’s at a new level,” said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin. “I fully expect that to continue in Trump 2.0.”There were 160 multi-state filings against the Trump administration during his four years in office, twice as many as were filed against Barack Obama during his entire eight-year presidency, according to a database maintained by Nolette.Many of the Democratic lawsuits succeeded – at least initially – in delaying or striking down Trump administration policies or regulations, Nolette said. Attorneys general can also leverage their state’s influence and economic power by entering legal settlements with companies. States have used this approach in the past to “advance their own regulatory goals”, Nolette said, for example, forcing the auto industry to adopt stricter environmental regulations.In a proclamation calling for a special session next month, Newsom asked the legislature to bolster the state’s legal funding to challenge – and defend California against – the Trump administration. Among his concerns, the California Democrat identified civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, as well as Trump’s threats to withhold disaster funding from the state and the potential for his administration to repeal protections shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.Trump responded on Truth Social, using a derisive nickname for the Democratic governor: “Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election.”Democratic leaders in battleground states that Trump won are also calibrating their responses – and not all are eager to join the resistance.“I don’t think that’s the most productive way to govern Arizona,” the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, told reporters this week, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Hobbs, who faces a potentially difficult re-election fight in 2026, said she would “stand up against actions that hurt our communities” but declined to say how she would respond if Trump sought to deport Dreamers or to nationalize the Arizona national guard as part of his mass deportation campaign.The state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, who also faces re-election in two years, drew a harder line against Trump, vowing to fight “unconstitutional behavior” and protect abortion access, according to Axios. In an interview on MSNBC, Mayes said she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against allies of the former president who attempted to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory in the state.Yet she insisted there would be areas of common ground. She urged Trump to revive a bipartisan border deal that he had previously tanked and called on the next administration to send more federal resources and agents to help combat the flow of fentanyl into the US.With Democrats locked out of power in Washington, the new Indivisible Guide, a manual developed by former Democratic congressional staffers after Trump’s election in 2016 and recently updated to confront a new era of Maga politics, envisions a major role for blue states.“Over the next two years, your Democratic elected officials will make choices every single day about whether to stand up to Maga or whether to go along with it,” the Indivisible guide states. “Your spirited, determined advocacy will ensure that the good ones know they’ve got a movement behind them as they fight back – and the bad ones know they’re on notice.”Among the examples of actions blue state activists can demand their leaders consider, it suggests establishing protections for out-of-state residents seeking abortion access or gender-affirming care; refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and forging regional compacts to safeguard environmental initiatives, data privacy and healthcare.Democratic leaders at every level and across the country – even those in purple or red states – can serve as “backstops for protecting the democratic space”, said Mary Small, chief strategy officer at Indivisible.“The important things are to be proactive and bold, to be innovative and to work with each other,” she said. “I don’t think everybody has to have all of the answers right now, but to have that intention and that commitment and to not shrink down in anticipation of a more oppressive federal government.” More

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      Rare Northern Lights Entrance Viewers in New York and Beyond

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      The aurora borealis, which transformed the sky with startling streaks of pink and purple, arose from a magnetic storm.As a girl in Michigan, Gabriela Aguilar sometimes went looking for the northern lights in the state’s Upper Peninsula. But it wasn’t until Thursday night, when she climbed to the roof of her apartment building in Harlem, that she finally saw them.“I’m just shocked that it took my entire life to be able to see it,” said Dr. Aguilar, 37, who stood with her dog, Gomez, and watched the sky turn pink, purple and green until the autumn chill drove her back inside. “And — of all places — seeing it in New York City!”New Yorkers were treated to a rare light show Thursday night as the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, spread an ethereal smear across the sky. On social media, people as far south as Washington, D.C., and Kentucky reported seeing the lights, which in pictures seemed to vary in color and intensity from neon pink to a subtle hazy purple.Udi Ofer, a professor of public affairs at Princeton University, was at home shortly after dusk when a neighbor texted to alert him to the sky. He rushed to his backyard in Princeton, N.J., with his 9-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son.For about 20 minutes, they watched stripes of pink and purple as the stars began to come out.“I think the thing that’s most remarkable about it are the streaks of light, which I just didn’t expect,” Mr. Ofer, 49, said. He called them “pretty magical.”The northern lights were also seen from behind Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, on the Upper East Side.City of New YorkWe 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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      Tiny Love Stories: ‘Filled With Warm, Sugary Feelings’

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      Modern Love in miniature, featuring reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.Brian ReaTaking the Bitter With the SweetOn a recent night after I moved out of our home in Moab, my ex and I went to a diner and ordered a mysterious item called the Cinnamon Roll Rage. As we dismantled layers of pastry, caramel and pecans, I thought it was a fitting end. Like the dessert, I was angry but also filled with warm, sugary feelings for this man who was doing everything he could to blunt the pain of his decision to end our four-year relationship. Alas, life is not always sweet, but when we treat each other well, it can taste far less bitter. — Amanda HeidtThe Moab Diner’s Cinnamon Roll Rage in all its glory. His Main SqueezeWeeks after her second marriage, I asked my mother how things were going. She replied, “It’s great; we’re still in the honeymoon phase.” How would she know when the honeymoon phase was over? When the toothpaste tube she had brought with her to their new shared home was empty, she joked. Six months later, she expressed surprise at how long a tube of toothpaste lasts: “I never really paid attention before.” My stepfather, an engineer, had overheard our conversation and had been secretly refilling the toothpaste tube every few days for months! — Ann Baker PepeMy mother, Lois, and my stepfather, Al, on their wedding day.Proust Was RightOdds of winning this footrace were not favorable. Flights, freeways and I.C.U. visitation rules. I hurtled through flashbacks of our visits, calls, letters, emails and texts since Donna and I met at college and then never lived in the same city. When I arrived at Donna’s bedside, the universe slowed. “I made it,” I whispered. A long look. A wan but beautiful smile. Everyone who had to be gathered had gathered, and everything to be said was said. Within hours, my friend of 56 years was gone. So yes, Monsieur Proust, space and time are indeed measured by the heart. — Gwendolyn W. WilliamsOutside my mother’s house when Donna, on the right, was visiting me in Los Angeles. Worth the SneezeJordan and I matched on Hinge — she in Ohio; I in Kentucky. An attorney with two dogs plastered on nearly every one of her profile pictures, Jordan was a woman wildly out of my league, or so I thought. Blown away by us “matching,” I was afraid to tell her about my moderate allergies to dogs. Once our Hinge messaging escalated to text, I determined it time to spill the beans. A year later, I’m a proud dog owner of two rescues for whom I take daily allergy medication. Sometimes, you get three loves for the price of one. — Kale VogtThe best photo you’re going to get of our little family. Jordan is on the right.See more Tiny Love Stories at nytimes.com/modernlove. Submit yours at nytimes.com/tinylovestories.Want more from Modern Love? Watch the TV series; sign up for the newsletter; or listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Coal jobs were out, opiates were in’: how shame and pride explain Trump’s rural popularity

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      Arlie Russell Hochschild has spent decades studying the relationships between work, identity and emotion. The sociologist has a knack for coining terms that gain social currency – including “emotional labor”, in 1983, to describe the need for certain professionals, like flight attendants and bill collectors, to manage their emotions, and “the second shift”, in 1989, to describe women’s household labor.Her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, explores what Hochschild calls the “pride paradox”: because conservative Americans value personal responsibility, they feel proud when they do well, and blame themselves when they don’t. Yet, her thinking continues, conservative regions often have worse economies and fewer opportunities than so-called blue states, so people feel ashamed of circumstances that aren’t really their fault.Stolen Pride hits shelves just weeks before a monumental presidential election that will hinge in part on competing visions of identity. The book is an attempt to understand how that pride paradox finds political expression, drawing on several years of field research in mountainous eastern Kentucky, a Donald Trump stronghold.Hochschild believes progressives need to learn to better hear “the powerful messages that are being communicated from a charismatic leader to a followership, and potentially intercept and understand them and speak to an alienated sector of the population”, she tells me on a recent evening, speaking by Zoom from a book-filled office in Berkeley, and peering at the screen through thin, red-framed eyeglasses.View image in fullscreenIn recent years, Hochschild’s work has investigated how cultural identity influences politics. Her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right studied conservative Tea Party supporters in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a region where the petrochemical industry is linked to serious environmental and health problems. Hochschild was interested in why the people she met were hostile to government regulation even when they might personally benefit from state intervention. The book, embraced by progressives anxious to understand Donald Trump’s appeal, became a bestseller.Hochschild began researching Stolen Pride in 2017. The book applies a similar ethnographic method to an equally conservative, but in other ways very different, region: Appalachia. It focuses on Kentucky’s fifth congressional district, which is the United States’ whitest and second poorest voting district, with high unemployment, poor health metrics and many people, especially men, who are subject to the so-called diseases of despair – drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide. While Hochschild’s interest in the American white working class is hardly new, her book offers some interesting new theories and angles of understanding.One of the book’s central events is a march that white supremacists held in Pikeville, Kentucky, in April 2017 – a test run for their more famous and deadly march in Charlottesville, Virginia, a few months later. These neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other extremists saw Pikeville as an ideal place to preach; in addition to being overwhelmingly white, eastern Kentucky had suffered a “perfect storm”, Hochschild says: “Coal jobs were out, opiates were in. It was a distressed area, and the white supremacists were coming to speak to that distress, to say, Hey, we’ve got answers for you,” in the form of violent fascism and white separatism.Hochschild discovered that Pikeville rejected the white supremacists’ pitch. “And I compared it to another kind of appeal, which was that of Donald Trump. One appeal didn’t work, and one did.” Her book, based on interviews with a number of local residents as well as white supremacists, wrestles with the complicated question of why.Hochschild argues that a “pride economy” coexists with the material economy and is almost as important. It also helps to explain Trump’s popularity in many rural and blue-collar areas.For more than a century, eastern Kentucky was one of the centers of the American coal industry. Though back-breaking and sometimes deadly for its workers, the sector employed thousands of people, lifted many out of poverty, and brought railways and other infrastructure into the region. Men took pride in their work, which required courage and knowhow, and the people of the region were proud that their coal fueled America.“[People could] proudly say, ‘We kept the lights on in this country; we won world war one, world war two by digging coal,’ and the coalminer was kind of like a decorated soldier – he faced danger. Many died young, of black lung. But it was like a trade passed down from generation to generation for men, and then suddenly it was cut off.”Many Appalachians blame Barack Obama’s environmental regulations for the loss of coal jobs, though that decline was decades in the making and had more to do with the rise of natural gas and automation that made the coal industry less reliant on human labor. The job losses contributed to people leaving, exacerbating a depopulation already endemic in rural America. Men who remained were humiliated, Hochschild notes, and forced to accept “‘girly jobs’ – waiting tables or scooping ice-cream, jobs that young teenagers took that couldn’t support a family”.Add to this OxyContin, which Purdue falsely marketed as a non-addictive painkiller for people recovering from work injuries. Some liberal states required three copies of every prescription, with one going to a government-controlled substances monitor; in conservative, regulation-averse states such as Kentucky, which required only two, OxyContin distribution was 50% higher.“So many people succumbed to drug addiction,” Hochschild says, “and that became [another] kind of shame, because once you did that, you lost your family, custody of your kids, you might be stealing from Grandma’s purse, or you’re on the dole, and great shame in this area was attached to accepting government services, although many people did.”Like many blue-collar, formerly Democratic areas of the US, eastern Kentucky has a history of leftwing populism. Pikeville is only 35 miles from Matewan, West Virginia, where striking miners memorably battled union-busting private detectives in 1920. The phrase “redneck” – today a term of derision, including in Kentucky, where some of Hochschild’s subjects stressed that they were “hillbillies” but not rednecks – was once a badge of honor that distinguished union miners, who wore red scarves, from scabs.The white supremacists’ belief that Pikeville would be sympathetic ground turned out to be wrong. “I spotted only three locals who marched with the white nationalists,” someone tells Hochschild in her book, “and one of them is mentally challenged.” Residents, conscious of stereotypes about Appalachia, resented the marchers’ assumption that just because their area was rural and economically deprived it would also be bigoted. The local government went to lengths to prevent violence and protect a local mosque, and residents treated the march with indifference or hostility.In contrast, Trump is more popular than ever in eastern Kentucky, which Hochschild thinks is because voters regard him as a “good bully” willing to be obnoxious on behalf of white working-class people, even if that means flouting norms of political correctness and civility.Trump shrewdly understands the power of shame and pride, Hochschild argues, and his antagonism of the liberal establishment follows a predictable pattern: Trump makes a provocative public pronouncement; the media shames Trump for what he said; Trump frames himself as a victim of censorious bullies; then he “roars back”, shifting blame back on to his persecutors and away from himself and, by extension, his supporters. Struggling Appalachians, who feel that big-city Americans look down on them, identify with Trump’s pugnacity.Shame is “almost like coal”, Hochschild says – “a resource to exploit by a charismatic leader”.Places like eastern Kentucky used to have strong labor unions that protected workers and connected blue-collar Americans to the Democratic party. The decline of unions, which now represent fewer than 7% of American private-sector workers, has been accompanied by the kind of alienation to which a strongman figure like Trump is adept at speaking.“If we look at whites without [bachelor’s degrees] who fit this pattern of loss and decline, they’re all turning Republican,” Hochschild says. “And we’re not speaking to them.” (By “we”, she seems to be referring to progressives, coastal elites, the establishment.) Despite what she calls a mutual loss of political empathy, Hochschild still believes there is “an opportunity for us to become bicultural” – and that, with an acrimonious and consequential election looming, doing so is more important than ever. More

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      Video Footage Shows Fatal Shooting of Kentucky Judge

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      A preliminary hearing in the case against a former sheriff yielded details about his interactions with the slain judge before he was killed.Video of the fatal shooting of a judge in Kentucky was played in court on Tuesday, as prosecutors presented evidence of their case against the ex-sheriff charged with carrying out the killing on Sept. 19.In the footage, a man is seen opening fire on the judge, Kevin Mullins, who is pictured in his robes, sitting in his chambers in the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg. When the judge tumbles out of his chair, the gunman walks around the desk and fires additional shots.“Multiple gunshot wounds,” Detective Clayton Stamper of the Kentucky State Police said in court on Tuesday afternoon.Prosecutors say that Shawn Stines, who had been the Letcher County sheriff for several years, was the shooter. The hearing on Tuesday was to determine whether there was probable cause for the murder charges filed against Mr. Stines after he was arrested. He pleaded not guilty last week during a virtual arraignment.As Jackie Steele, the prosecutor handling the case, played the soundless, minute-long clip of footage from a security camera, the judge’s relatives and friends seated in the courtroom sobbed.After his arrest, Mr. Stines, who is known as Mickey, announced through his lawyers that he was retiring, at age 43, “to allow for a successor to continue to protect his beloved constituents while he addresses the legal process ahead of him.”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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      ‘He Saved Many Lives’: Small Kentucky Community Mourns Slain Judge

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      The fatal shooting of the judge has rocked the town of Whitesburg. On Sunday, friends, family and community members gathered to remember the victim.As a rural Kentucky town reeled from the fatal shooting of a judge, residents over the weekend mourned the victim whom many saw as a kind man who loved his community.The judge, Kevin Mullins, 54, was remembered by many for providing second chances to people struggling with drug addiction in Letcher County, Ky., a tight-knit Appalachian community located about 150 miles southeast of Lexington. Tributes to Judge Mullins poured in on social media over the weekend, from friends, relatives and others who simply knew him as a judge. Some posted memories of him chatting with colleagues outside the courthouse on smoke breaks and talking about his love for his wife and two daughters. “Kevin was a lot of things to a lot of people,” his wife, Kimberly Mullins, wrote on Facebook. “But he was Everything to me and my girls.” Ms. Mullins said on Sunday that she could not comment further.But the mystery around what transpired between Judge Mullins and Shawn Stines, the sheriff who is accused of shooting him, was still top of mind for many in the community.On Thursday afternoon, Judge Mullins and Sheriff Stines, also known as Mickey, ate lunch together before meeting in the judge’s chambers in the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg. According to investigators, the two men got into an argument and, around 3 p.m., Sheriff Stines shot Judge Mullins multiple times in the chest before surrendering to the police. Sheriff Stines is facing a charge of first-degree murder and being held in the nearby Leslie County Detention Center.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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      Officials Confirm Body Found Near Site of Kentucky Highway Shooting Was Suspect’s

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      The identification, made through DNA testing, affirmed the belief of officials. The body was discovered Wednesday after a 12-day manhunt.DNA testing of a body found this week near the site of a Kentucky highway shooting that led to an extensive manhunt confirmed the identity as the suspect, officials said on Friday.Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said in a release that the body belonged to Joseph A. Couch, 32, who authorities said shot at passing vehicles on Interstate 75 near London, a city about an hour south of Lexington. The attack on Sept. 7 seriously injured five people and hit a dozen vehicles with bullets.Authorities had expressed confidence on Wednesday, when the body was discovered, that it had belonged to the suspect, but Friday’s confirmation officially brought closure to the case. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, the authorities said.The state’s chief medical examiner, William Ralston, said in the release that the commonwealth could now “move forward from this tragic situation.”The attack led to an intense manhunt of nearly two weeks across tens of thousands of acres of densely forested land near where the shooting occurred, leaving the local community in fear. Several schools canceled classes, and the police stepped up their presence at sporting events, bus routes and other places where people gathered.On the 12th day of the pursuit, the authorities announced that they, along with a married couple who had been searching for the suspect on their own, had found a body in a dense brush behind the highway exit where the shooting took place. Items were found with the body, including a weapon, that the authorities believed belonged to Mr. Couch.According to the release, officials were initially unable to identify the body through a soft tissue DNA test because of the “extreme decomposition” of the body. (It is unclear how long the body had been there before it was discovered.) Instead, they used DNA extracted from a bone to confirm the identity, the release said.The motive for the attack remains unclear. According to court records, Mr. Couch, who served in the Army Reserve, had several charges on his criminal record, including an arrest where he was charged with terroristic threatening in February. More

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      Five People Shot on I-75 in Kentucky, Officials Say

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      The victims were in stable condition, the authorities said. What led up to the shooting on I-75 near London, Ky., was not immediately clear.A section of a Kentucky highway was closed for several hours on Saturday night after five people were shot, the authorities said.What led up to the shooting was not immediately clear. All five shooting victims were in stable condition, said a spokesman for the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office, Deputy Gilbert Acciardo.The Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that the shooting happened on I-75, which was closed at Exit 49, nine miles north of London, Ky. It said just after 6:30 p.m. that the highway was closed “due to an active shooter situation,” but did not elaborate.Randall Weddle, the mayor of London, said in a Facebook video said the authorities were searching for a “suspect or suspects” in “rugged terrain” in the northern part of Laurel County.Deputy Acciardo said helicopters and infrared scanners were being used to search for the gunman in the woods.The London Police Department said on Saturday night that a person of interest had been identified and asked the public for any information about his whereabouts. The city of London is about 90 miles south of Lexington.Just after 9:20 p.m., the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that while I-75 had reopened, the search for the suspect would continue. Angel Jarrett was working at the 49er Truck Stop when someone told her that shots had been fired nearby.Eventually, multiple police cars surrounded the truck stop near the exit where the shooting took place and placed the facility on lockdown.“We’re not allowed to go in or out,” Ms. Jarrett said. “It’s a little panicky but we’re OK. They’re surrounding us, the cops are.”Saint Joseph London, a hospital in London that is a part of CHI Saint Joseph Health, said that it had “received multiple patients and is treating them for minor injuries.”Two patients were being treated at the University of Kentucky’s Albert B. Chandler Hospital, a spokeswoman said. Their conditions were unknown.The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said on social media that it was sending agents from its Louisville office to help the State Police and local authorities “with a critical incident” near Interstate 75 in Laurel County.Yan Zhuang More