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    More Than 170 Protesters Arrested at Northeastern and Arizona State University

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    The police made arrests at Northeastern University, Arizona State and Indiana University on Saturday, as more schools move in on encampments protesting the war in Gaza.Nearly 200 protesters were arrested on Saturday at Northeastern University, Arizona State University and Indiana University, according to officials, as colleges across the country struggle to quell growing pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments on campus.More than 700 protesters have been arrested on U.S. campuses since April 18, when Columbia University had the New York Police Department clear a protest encampment there. In several cases, most of those who were arrested have been released. More

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      William Delahunt, former congressman of Massachusetts, dies aged 82

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      Longtime Democratic congressman William D Delahunt, who postponed his own retirement from Washington to help pass the Barack Obama presidency’s legislative agenda, has died after a long-term illness, his family announced.Delahunt died Saturday at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the age of 82, news reports said.Delahunt served 14 years in the US House, from 1997 to 2011, representing Massachusetts’s 10th congressional district. He also was the Norfolk county district attorney from 1975 to 1996 after serving in the Massachusetts state House from 1973 to 1975.The Delahunt family issued a statement Saturday saying he passed away “peacefully” but did not disclose his specific cause of death, news reports said.“While we mourn the loss of such a tremendous person, we also celebrate his remarkable life and his legacy of dedication, service, and inspiration,” the statement said. “We could always turn to him for wisdom, solace and a laugh, and his absence leaves a gaping hole in our family and our hearts.”Democratic US senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts lauded Delahunt’s long public service as a legislator in the nation’s capital and a prosecutor in a county south of Boston.“I met with Bill in Quincy in February, and he was clear and as committed as ever to working on behalf of the … people of Massachusetts,” Markey said in a statement. “It is a fitting honor that the door of the William D Delahunt Norfolk county courthouse opens every day so that the people inside can do the hard work of making lives better, as Bill Delahunt did.”President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela posted a statement on Twitter/X mourning Delahunt’s passing. As a member of Congress, Delahunt brokered a 2005 deal with then Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to obtain heating oil for low-income Massachusetts residents, according to news reports. Delahunt also attended Chavez’s state funeral in Caracas in March 2013.Delahunt stepped down from the US House in January 2011. He told the Boston Globe he had previously considered retirement, but the late Massachusetts US senator Ted Kennedy convinced him he was needed to help pass Obama’s legislative initiatives at the time.Delahunt was an early Obama backer. He became the first member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation to endorse the Illinois senator’s presidential bid, according to reporting by the Patriot Ledger, the newspaper in Delahunt’s home town, Quincy.Announcing his retirement in March 2010, Delahunt said Kennedy’s death the previous year turned his thoughts to finding time for priorities beyond Washington.“It became clear that I wanted to spend my time, the time that I have left, with my family, with my friends and with my loved ones,” Delahunt said. More

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      2 Ex-Officials at Veterans Home Where 76 Died in Covid Outbreak Avoid Jail Time

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      The former superintendent and medical director of the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Massachusetts were indicted in 2020 on charges of neglect after many residents became sick and died.Two former officials at a Massachusetts veterans’ home where at least 76 people died during a coronavirus outbreak in 2020 won’t have to serve any jail time under a court order imposed by a state judge on Tuesday, according to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.The two — Bennett Walsh, the former superintendent at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, Mass., and Dr. David Clinton, the former medical director there — were each indicted in September 2020 on five criminal counts of neglect, the attorney general’s office said.The charges were centered on a decision by the facility in March 2020 to consolidate two dementia units into one, which led to the “mingling” of residents who had contracted the coronavirus with others, the attorney general’s office said when the indictment was announced.The move to consolidate the units happened in the early days of the pandemic as many were just beginning to learn how the coronavirus spread. What followed was an outbreak that led to the deaths of at least 76 people at the facility.At a hearing on Tuesday afternoon at the Hampshire County Superior Court in Northampton, Mass., the attorney general’s office asked that Mr. Walsh and Dr. Clinton be sentenced to one year of home confinement, with three years of probation.Mr. Walsh and Dr. Clinton asked the court for a continuance without a finding, meaning that they would admit that there was enough evidence to find them guilty, according to the attorney general’s 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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      Haitian Migrant in Massachusetts Is Charged With Raping a Teenager

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      The suspect and the 15-year-old were both living in a hotel that currently serves as a migrants shelter. The charge comes amid heightened scrutiny over America’s immigration policy. A Haitian migrant has been charged with raping a 15-year-old girl at a hotel serving as a migrant shelter in Massachusetts, authorities said Thursday.Cory B. Alvarez, 26, was arrested on Thursday and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment that day in Hingham District Court on one count of aggravated rape of a child. He entered the United States lawfully in June 2023 through New York, according to James Covington, a spokesman for the Enforcement and Removal Operations unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston. But it was unclear through which specific immigration program Mr. Alvarez entered the country. The charge comes as Boston and other cities grapple with questions over migrant housing and amid intense debate across the country over America’s immigration policy. The killing of a 22-year-old woman at the University of Georgia campus in February became a political flashpoint when a Venezuelan migrant was charged with the crime, with Republicans including former President Donald J. Trump blaming the death on President Biden’s policies. Such statements have struck many liberals as inflammatory rhetoric.National data has suggested that there is not a causal connection between immigration and crime in the country, and that growth in illegal immigration does not lead to higher local crime rates. Many studies have found that immigrants are less likely than people born in the United States to commit crimes.In the Massachusetts case, both Mr. Alvarez and the teenager, who is disabled, were living at the Comfort Inn in Rockland, a Boston suburb, according to the Rockland Police. It was not clear whether the girl was also a migrant.The Comfort Inn is part of a state and federal program to house migrant families, the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. There are about 7,500 families enrolled in the emergency shelter system across Massachusetts, with just under 3,900 of them in hotels or motels, according to government figures from Friday. In December, the state reported that just over 3,500 families receiving emergency assistance housing were migrants, refugees or asylum seekers. 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 who sent bomb threat to Arizona election officials jailed for 42 months

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      A Massachusetts man who threatened to blow up the secretary of state of Arizona in 2021 has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison, one of the most severe federal punishments yet handed down for the wave of violent threats against election officials unleashed by Donald Trump’s stolen election lie.James Clark, 38, was sentenced in federal district court in Phoenix on Tuesday to 42 months of imprisonment, to be followed by three years on probation. Judge Michael Liburdi said that his online bomb threat had inflicted “emotional and psychological trauma” on government employees and required a deterrent sentence to protect democracy.Liburdi remarked that there had been so many recent threats in Arizona against election officials that people were quitting their jobs. “If we do not have good people to fill these positions who are committed to the delivery of fair elections, we lose our ability to govern ourselves,” the judge said.The prosecution was handled under the auspices of the election threats task force, a specialist unit within the justice department. The task force was set up in 2021 in response to the plague of intimidation of election officials that has erupted since the former president made his baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.Tuesday’s sentence of three and a half years in prison is on a par with the previous harshest sentence secured by the task force. In August, Francis Goetz from Texas was given a similar punishment for posting several threats against Arizona election officials on far-right social media platforms.Clark made his bomb threat a week after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. In his plea agreement he admitted to logging into the website of the then secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, who is now Arizona’s governor.He demanded that she resign within two days or an “explosive device impacted in her personal space will be detonated”. Within minutes of sending the threat, Clark searched online for Hobbs’s home address and put her name against the search term “how to kill”.Four days after the bomb threat, he searched for details of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing.After Clark’s bomb threat was discovered, two floors of the Arizona government building were evacuated and the then Republican governor Doug Ducey was forced to shelter in place. Security sweeps were conducted of Hobbs’s home and car.Before the sentence was handed down, a statement from the current Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, was read out to court. He said that the bomb threat had made employees in his office suffer fear and anxiety.“It makes each of us feel vulnerable, and that trauma does not abate over time. This type of threat is anti-American and a threat to democracy,” Fontes said.Tanya Senanayake, a trial attorney with the public integrity section of the justice department who prosecuted the case, had pressed for an even longer prison sentence of almost five years. She said that a deterrent punishment was needed to protect public officials from “a growing trend of threats to their lives and to the safety of their families”.Defense attorney Jeanette Alvarado emphasized that Clark was in the throes of alcohol and drug abuse at the time he committed the offense. He was now in recovery and has been clean and sober for three years, she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClark himself addressed the judge and said that when he made the bomb threat “I was not the person I wanted to be … I am deeply, deeply ashamed.”Since Trump became the first president in US history to refuse to cede power, election administrators and their families have come under a barrage of verbal and online attacks. A study by the Brennan Center last year found that almost one in three election officials had been threatened or abused, and almost half were concerned about the safety of their colleagues and staff.Arizona has borne the brunt of much of the wave of harassment. In two separate incidents last month, the FBI arrested individuals in Alabama and California alleged to have made violent threats against election officials in Maricopa county, the largest constituency in Arizona that covers Phoenix.On 25 March, a further federal sentencing hearing will be held in Phoenix in the case of Joshua Russell, 44, of Bucyrus, Ohio. Russell pled guilty to having left three threatening voicemails in August 2022 targeting an unnamed election official in the Arizona secretary of state’s office.The messages accused the victim of perpetrating election fraud and said: “America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life, you communist fucking traitor bitch.”The US attorney general Merrick Garland has made combating threats against election officials a priority for the justice department. In a speech in January he said: “These threats of violence are unacceptable. They threaten the fabric of our democracy.” More

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      Super Tuesday 2024 live: millions of voters head to polls in the US as Haley suggests she could stay in the race

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      Voters in more than a dozen states head to the polls on Tuesday for what is the biggest day of the presidential primaries of the 2024 election cycle.Polls are now open in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia for voters to cast their ballots in the Republican presidential primary on Tuesday. All those states except Alaska are also holding their Democratic primary contests as well. In Iowa, where Democratic caucuses were held by mail since January, the results are expected this evening. (Republicans held their Iowa caucuses in January, when Trump easily won the first voting state.)First polls will close at 7pm Eastern time. Here’s what to expect tonight, so you can plan your evening. Meanwhile, here’s a recap of the latest developments:
      Nikki Haley once again rejected a third-party presidential bid, as she insisted she would stay in the race “as long as we’re competitive”.
      “I don’t know why everybody is so adamant that they have to follow Trump’s lead to get me out of this race. You know, all of these people deserve to vote. Sixteen states want to have their voices heard,” she told Fox News.
      Joe Biden aimed to shore up his standing among Black voters as he warned what would happen if Democrats lose the White House.
      Biden is reportedly eager for a “much more aggressive approach” to the 2024 contest for the White House that would revolve going for Donald Trump’s jugular.”
      Donald Trumphas predicted he will sweep “every state” on Super Tuesday and said he is fully focused on the November election against his presumed opponent, Joe Biden.
      Trump voiced support for the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza, and claimed the Hamas attacks of 7 October on Israel would have never happened if he had been president at the time.
      Taylor Swift has urged her fans to vote on Super Tuesday in a post on her Instagram Story.
      Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming has decided not to run for Senate Republican leader to succeed Mitch McConnell, and instead will run for the No. 2 position of whip.
      Only in the past few years have Democrats known success in Arizona’s Senate races, and Republicans are hoping to undo that in November.In a statement, Montana senator and head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee Steve Daines said Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to bow out will boost the prospects of Kari Lake, who the party is backing for the seat.“An open seat in Arizona creates a unique opportunity for Republicans to build a lasting Senate majority this November. With recent polling showing Kyrsten Sinema pulling far more Republican voters than Democrat voters, her decision to retire improves Kari Lake’s opportunity to flip this seat,” Daines said.Turnout has lagged in Minnesota’s primary compared to previous years, at least so far. About 88,000 people had returned early ballots as of Tuesday morning, out of 200,000 who had received them, the state’s secretary of state, Steve Simon, told reporters.Nationally, many states have seen lower turnout this presidential primary season as Trump and Biden have dominated the nominating contests, leaving voters feeling like their vote won’t play much of a role at this point.“There are at least a couple of factors that explain turnout,” Simon said. “One is candidates that inspire strong feelings, and the other is perceptions of competitiveness. I think it’s safe to say, I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here, that we have a lot of number one, and not so much of number two.”But the lower turnout in the presidential primaries doesn’t tell us anything about what could happen in November’s general election. Presidential general elections bring the highest turnout of any US elections.“Over the last many years, there has been virtually no connection, virtually none, between early in the year primary turnout and general election turnout,” Simon said.Nationally, many states have seen lower turnout this presidential primary season as Trump and Biden have dominated the nominating contests, leaving voters feeling like their vote won’t play much of a role at this point.“There are at least a couple of factors that explain turnout,” Simon said. “One is candidates that inspire strong feelings, and the other is perceptions of competitiveness. I think it’s safe to say, I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here, that we have a lot of number one, and not so much of number two.”But the lower turnout in the presidential primaries doesn’t tell us anything about what could happen in November’s general election. Presidential general elections bring the highest turnout of any US elections.“Over the last many years, there has been virtually no connection, virtually none, between early in the year primary turnout and general election turnout,” Simon said.Hello US politics live blog readers, Super Tuesday is all go at the voting booths and the results will start coming in this evening. We’ll be here to bring you all the news and the context, as it happens.Here’s where things stand:
      Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, have been charged with obstruction of justice in a new, 18-count indictment unsealed on Tuesday related to a years-long bribery scheme linked to Egypt and Qatar.
      Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, ex-Democratic Party and now independent US Senator, has announced she will retire at the end of her term this year. Her exit clears the way for a likely matchup between Republican Kari Lake and Democratic Ruben Gallego in one of the most closely watched 2024 Senate races.
      Nikki Haley, the last rival to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, once again rejected a third-party presidential bid, as she insisted she would stay in the Republican race “as long as we’re competitive.” She told Fox News on Super Tuesday: “All of these people deserve to vote. Sixteen states want to have their voices heard.”
      Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming has decided not to run for Senate Republican leader to succeed Mitch McConnell, and instead will run for the No. 2 position of whip, according to multiple reports. Barrasso, 71, is relatively popular with the Republican right. He endorsed Donald Trump in January and has the closes relationship with the former president of the “three Johns”.
      Barasso’s decision not to run means the race is now effectively between senators John Thune of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas, although Barrasso’s departure could pave the way for another Trump ally to throw their hat in the ring, such as Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who met with Trump on Monday night amid speculation that he could launch a bid for Senate leader.
      Polls are open and voting is under way in some states as millions head to the ballot box on this Super Tuesday, the largest day for voting for both Democrats and Republicans before the November presidential election. Voters involved today are in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. The territory of American Samoa will be caucusing.
      The Guardian US Super Tuesday live blogging team’s Léonie Chao-Fong is now handing over for the rest of the day and evening to Chris Stein and Maanvi Singh.Senator Bob Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, have been charged with obstruction of justice in a new, 18-count indictment unsealed on Tuesday related to a years-long bribery scheme linked to Egypt and Qatar.Menendez has pleaded not guilty to earlier charges of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from businessmen to impede law enforcement probes they faced, and illegally acting as an agent of the Egyptian government.In the new indictment, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said Menendez’s former lawyers had told them in meetings last year that Menendez had not been aware of mortgage or car payments that two businessmen had made for his wife, and that he thought the payments were loans, Reuters reported.In countless campaign appearances during his futile pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, celebrated his state as “the place woke goes to die”.Now, by virtue of a federal appeals court ruling that skewers a centerpiece of his anti-diversity and inclusion agenda, Florida resembles a place where anti-woke legislation goes to die.In a scathing ruling released late on Monday, a three-judge panel of the 11th circuit appeals court in Atlanta blasted DeSantis’s 2022 Stop Woke Act – which banned employers from providing mandatory workplace diversity training, or from teaching that any person is inherently racist or sexist – as “the greatest first amendment sin”.The judges upheld a lower court’s ruling that the law violated employers’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They were also critical of DeSantis for “exceeding the bounds” of the US constitution by imposing political ideology through legislation.The panel said the state could not be selective by only banning discussion of particular concepts it found “offensive” while allowing others.Donald Trump is seeking a new trial in the defamation case brought by E Jean Carroll, claiming that the judge in the case improperly restricted his testimony.In January, Trump was ordered to pay $83.3m in damages to Carroll for defaming her in 2019 when he denied her allegation that he raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.Trump’s testimony lasted less than five minutes as the judge in this case, Lewis Kaplan, significantly limited what the ex-president could say in court.In a court filing on Tuesday, Trump’s defense attorneys Alina Habba and John Sauer argued “the Court’s restrictions on President Trump’s testimony were erroneous and prejudicial” because Trump was not allowed to explain “his own mental state” when he made the defamatory statements about Carroll. They continued:
      This Court’s erroneous decision to dramatically limit the scope of President Trump’s testimony almost certainly influenced the jury’s verdict, and thus a new trial is warranted.
      Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, has announced she will retire at the end of her term this year.“I love Arizona and I am so proud of what we’ve delivered,” she said in a video posted to social media.
      Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year.
      The now independent senator won her seat in 2018 as a Democrat. She was the first non-Republican to win a Senate seat for Arizona since 1994. She’d go on in December 2022 to announce her leave from the Democratic party to become an independent.Her exit clears the way for a likely matchup between Republican Kari Lake and Democratic Ruben Gallego in one of the most closely watched 2024 Senate races.Joe Biden claimed he has been leading in recent public opinion polls not noticed by the media.The president was asked about his message for Democrats who are concerned about his poll numbers as he boarded Air Force One in Hagerstown, Maryland. Biden replied:
      The last five polls I’m winning. Five in a row, five. You guys only look at the New York Times.
      A spokesperson for the Biden campaign did not immediately provide a full list of polls referenced by Biden, the Washington Post reported.Biden was also asked about the chances of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, to which he said:
      It’s in the hands of Hamas right now. Israelis have been cooperating. There’s been a rational offer. We will know in a couple of days what’s gonna happen. We need a ceasefire.
      Although many Democrats have sharply criticized Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, several primary voters who cast ballots in Arlington, Virginia, said they felt the president has done as much as he can to bring about a ceasefire.“I think he’s been between a rock and hard place,” said John Schuster, 66. “I’m a supporter of the state of Israel, but not of the way Israel has prosecuted the war.”Looking ahead to the general election against Donald Trump, Schuster said:
      I see no reason whatsoever to vote against Biden on that issue [of the war in Gaza] because the alternatives will all be worse.
      Russell Krueger, 77, condemned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the situation in Gaza, where more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes.On the question how Biden has navigated the war, Krueger said”:
      I would have liked a little bit more verbal outreach, but I suspect he’s done most of what he can do … I would have given up on Netanyahu a little before this.
      Asked about Kamala Harris’ recent call for an immediate temporary ceasefire in Gaza, Krueger took her comments as a sign that the administration is “definitely moving in the right direction”. He added:
      I think that they will probably come out much more forcefully at the State of the Union address this Thursday.
      One Virginia Democrat said he had planned to cast a primary ballot for “uncommitted” on Tuesday, but he ended up voting for Marianne Williamson because “uncommitted” did not appear on Virginia’s primary ballot.David Bacheler, 67, criticized Joe Biden as a “horrible” president, arguing that the nation’s welfare had been materially damaged since he took office.“This country needs to change. It’s going in a very bad direction,” Bacheler said after voting at Clarendon United Methodist Church in Arlington.
      Everything’s blown up. Look at all the mess we’ve got in the Middle East now. It wasn’t like that a few years ago.
      Bacheler said he believes the country was better off when Donald Trump was president, and he is currently leaning toward supporting him over Biden in the general election.“He knows how to handle the economy better,” Bacheler said.
      I’m still undecided, but I’m leaning toward Trump.
      Two self-identified Democrats said they cast primary ballots for Nikki Haley this afternoon at Clarendon United Methodist Church in Arlington, Virginia.Virginia holds open primaries, so voters do not necessarily have to participate in the primary of the party with which they are registered.Although both said they planned to vote for Joe Biden in the general election, they chose to participate in the Republican primary as a means of protesting Donald Trump‘s candidacy.“There’s no greater imperative in the world than stopping Donald Trump,” said John Schuster, 66.
      It’ll be the end of democracy and the world order if he becomes president.
      Schuster acknowledged he did not align with Haley on most policy matters, but he appreciates how her enduring presence in the Republican primary appears to have gotten under Trump’s skin.“It’s a vote against Trump. Nikki Haley is very conservative. I disagree with her on everything, except for on the issue of democracy and Russia,” Schuster said.
      Anything to irritate [Trump] and slow him down is what I’m doing.
      Voters in more than a dozen states head to the polls on Tuesday for what is the biggest day of the presidential primaries of the 2024 election cycle.Polls are now open in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia for voters to cast their ballots in the Republican presidential primary on Tuesday. All those states except Alaska are also holding their Democratic primary contests as well. In Iowa, where Democratic caucuses were held by mail since January, the results are expected this evening. (Republicans held their Iowa caucuses in January, when Trump easily won the first voting state.)First polls will close at 7pm Eastern time. Here’s what to expect tonight, so you can plan your evening. Meanwhile, here’s a recap of the latest developments:
      Nikki Haley once again rejected a third-party presidential bid, as she insisted she would stay in the race “as long as we’re competitive”.
      “I don’t know why everybody is so adamant that they have to follow Trump’s lead to get me out of this race. You know, all of these people deserve to vote. Sixteen states want to have their voices heard,” she told Fox News.
      Joe Biden aimed to shore up his standing among Black voters as he warned what would happen if Democrats lose the White House.
      Biden is reportedly eager for a “much more aggressive approach” to the 2024 contest for the White House that would revolve going for Donald Trump’s jugular.”
      Donald Trumphas predicted he will sweep “every state” on Super Tuesday and said he is fully focused on the November election against his presumed opponent, Joe Biden.
      Trump voiced support for the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza, and claimed the Hamas attacks of 7 October on Israel would have never happened if he had been president at the time.
      Taylor Swift has urged her fans to vote on Super Tuesday in a post on her Instagram Story.
      Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming has decided not to run for Senate Republican leader to succeed Mitch McConnell, and instead will run for the No. 2 position of whip.
      Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary turned Arkansas governor, has said she is confident that her former boss will win the GOP nomination and take back the White House in the November general election.Sanders, speaking to reporters as she cast her ballot at a Little Rock community center with her husband, Bryan Sanders, said:
      This is a head to head matchup at this point between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and he’s the clear favorite, has all the momentum, and I feel really good about him winning again in November.
      She went on to say that she was not surprised by the US supreme court’s ruling restoring Trump to primary ballots, adding that the 9-0 decision was “very telling” and “should be a signal to stop trying to use our courts for political purposes.”Reaching for racist rhetoric bizarre even for him, Donald Trump compared undocumented migrants to the US to Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer and cannibal famously played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Oscar-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs.“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums,” the former president and probable Republican presidential nominee claimed in an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network on Monday.
      You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff. Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?
      To laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump added:
      We don’t want ’em in this country.
      Trump has made such statements before, including in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland last month. As framed to Right Side, they were the latest piece of extremist and dehumanizing invective from a candidate seeking to make immigration a core issue of the 2024 presidential campaign.Trump has a long history of such racist statements, having launched his successful 2016 presidential campaign by describing Mexicans crossing the southern border as rapists and drug dealers.Joe Biden took to the radio airwaves on Super Tuesday as he aims to shore up his standing among Black voters, a critical constituency for Democrats in the November general election.In an interview aired this morning, Biden promoted his achievements for Black voters, such as increased funding for historically Black colleges and universities and key investments in infrastructure to benefit Black communities, AP reported.The president also criticized Donald Trump and warned what would happen if the Democrats lose the White House in another interview.“Think of the alternative, folks. If we lose this election, you’re going to be back with Donald Trump,” said Biden.
      The way he talks about, the way he acted, the way he has dealt with the African-American community, I think, has been shameful.
      Donald Trump has claimed that the Hamas attacks of 7 October on Israel would have never happened if he had been president at the time.Trump, in an interview with Fox, was asked whether he supported the way the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is fighting in Gaza. Trump said:
      You’ve gotta finish the problem. You had a horrible invasion [that] took place. It would have never happened if I was president.
      Texas’s plans to arrest people who enter the US illegally and order them to leave the country is headed to the supreme court in a legal showdown over the federal government’s authority over immigration.An order issued on Monday by Justice Samuel Alito puts the new Texas law on hold for at least next week while the high court considers what opponents have called the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since an Arizona law more than a decade ago.The law, known as Senate Bill 4, had been set to take effect on Saturday under a decision by the conservative-leaning fifth US circuit court of appeals. Alito’s order pushed that date back until 13 March and came just hours after the justice department asked the supreme court to intervene.The Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed the law in December as part of a series of escalating measures on the border that have tested the boundaries of how far a state can go to keep people from entering the country.The law would allow state officers to arrest people suspected of entering the country illegally. People who are arrested could then agree to a Texas judge’s order to leave the country or face a misdemeanor charge for entering the US illegally. Those who do not leave after being ordered to do so could be arrested again and charged with a more serious felony.Donald Trump has predicted he will sweep “every state” on Super Tuesday and said he is fully focused on the November election against his presumed opponent, Joe Biden.“My focus is really at this point, it’s on Biden,” Trump said on Fox News.
      We should win almost every state today, I think every state. … But we [should’] really look at Biden. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘The Unthinkable Mental Health Crisis That Shook a New England College’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Rowan Niemisto and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyThe first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. Katherine Foo, an assistant professor in the department of integrative and global studies, felt especially crushed by the news. She taught this student. He was Chinese, and she felt connected to the particular set of pressures he faced. She read through old, anonymous course evaluations, looking for any sign she might have missed. But she was unsure where to put her personal feelings about a loss suffered in this professional context.The week before the academic year began, a second student died. A rising senior in the computer-science department who loved horticulture took his own life. This brought an intimation of disaster. One student suicide is a tragedy; two might be the beginning of a cluster. Some faculty members began to feel a tinge of dread when they stepped onto campus.Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is a tidy New England college campus with the high-saturation landscaping typical of well-funded institutions. The hedges are beautifully trimmed, the pathways are swept clean. Red-brick buildings from the 19th century fraternize with high glass facades and renovated interiors. But over a six-month period, the school was turned upside down by a spate of suicides.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      Providence Officials Approve Overdose Prevention Center

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      The facility, also known as a safe injection center, will be the first in Rhode Island and the only one in the U.S. outside New York City to operate openly.More than two years ago, Rhode Island became the first state in the nation to authorize overdose prevention centers, facilities where people would be allowed to use illicit drugs under professional supervision. On Thursday, the Providence City Council approved the establishment of what will be the state’s first so-called safe injection site.Minnesota is the only other state to approve these sites, also known as supervised injection centers and harm reduction centers, but no facility has yet opened there. While several states and cities across the country have taken steps toward approving these centers, the concept has faced resistance even in more liberal-leaning states, where officials have wrestled with the legal and moral implications. The only two sites operating openly in the country are in New York City, where Bill de Blasio, who was then mayor, announced the opening of the first center in 2021.The centers employ medical and social workers who guard against overdoses by supplying oxygen and naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug, as well as by distributing clean needles, hygiene products and tests for viruses.Supporters say these centers prevent deaths and connect people with resources. Brandon Marshall, a professor and the chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health, said studies from other countries “show that overdose prevention centers save lives, increase access to treatment, and reduce public drug use and crime in the communities in which they’re located.”Opponents of the centers, including law enforcement groups, say that the sites encourage a culture of permissiveness around illegal drugs, fail to require users to seek treatment and bring drug use into neighborhoods that are already struggling with high overdose rates.Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, said that while supervised drug consumption sites “reduce risks while people use drugs inside them,” they reach only a few people and “don’t alter the severity or character of a neighborhood’s drug problem.”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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      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Romney,’ by McKay Coppins

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      ROMNEY: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins“For most of his life, he has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.” One doesn’t expect these opening words from an authorized biography of a handsome, wealthy, happily married and instinctively moderate man, but this is how McKay Coppins’s “Romney” begins. Perhaps Mitt Romney fears his severance from so many blessings, but as Coppins’s revealing new book demonstrates, this businessman-politician has often wondered if he deserved such an abundance of good fortune at all.Coppins conducted 45 interviews with Romney over two years and had access to hundreds of pages in private journals that the now 76-year-old senator has kept since 2011. “Romney” presents a man given to cycles of rationalization and guilt, to sometimes near-O.C.D. levels of repetitive thinking and self-recrimination. The biographer pronounces his “defining trait” to be a “meld of moral obligation and personal hubris.”Romney has, in fact, had two brushes with sudden death, the first in a terrible automobile accident in 1968 when he was a 21-year-old Mormon missionary in France. The second came a half-century later on a January afternoon in the besieged Senate chamber of the U.S. Capitol, to which the better angels of Romney’s conscience had led him after a long up-and-down political life.His father, George, was a progressive Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s, marching with civil rights activists even as his own church banned Black members from the priesthood. His 1968 run for the presidency collapsed after he referred to the military cheerleading for the Vietnam War as “brainwashing.”Mitt grew up with predictable comforts but nothing like a sense of direction until, during his Mormon mission, sick with diarrhea, he knocked on doors in the French port city of Le Havre that might as well have been brick walls. It eventually “struck him with the force of something divine” that, however futile they seemed, his sacrifices were accepted by God.Once back home he was on his way, along a path both faithful and lucrative, into the expanding worlds of business consulting and private equity in the 1970s and ’80s. Straining to make time for both his church and the five sons he and his wife were raising in suburban Boston, Romney achieved big success at Bain Capital, the investment firm he helped found that guided the office-supply chain Staples toward explosive growth and cut jobs at Ampad, one of the stationery manufacturers that stocked Staples’ shelves.Romney was moving fast, and Coppins himself is a bit headlong in the book’s early going, which includes Romney’s ill-fated 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. Romney’s later repair of Utah’s shambolic preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics propelled him to a single term as governor of Massachusetts, during which he enacted the health-insurance plan that came to be seen as a state-level precursor of Obamacare. The governor was logical and naïve enough to believe that the program’s success might get him the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But after running into Iowans’ suspicions of Mormonism, he limped toward an early withdrawal from the race.Four years later, he somehow succeeded with Republican primary voters newly jazzed by tea-partying and birtherism and not particularly craving a candidate who had to spend time convincing them that Romneycare was actually quite different from Obamacare. To overcome Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and the two Ricks (Perry and Santorum), Romney needed to dial his rationalization settings high enough to endure mad conversation with the conservative provocateur Glenn Beck.Securing the nomination proved only a prelude to what Coppins, with some justice, calls “one of the pettiest, most forgettable presidential elections in modern history” — no matter that it’s been all downhill since then. Romney was demagogued by Vice President Joe Biden, who told Black voters in one audience that the Republican candidate hoped to “put y’all back in chains,” and mocked by Obama for having observed that Russia would be our most dangerous long-term adversary. But he lost the election mostly on his own, with a gaffe worse than his father’s old brainwashing one: Romney was caught on tape dissing the “47 percent” of voters “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.”Few moments of that year’s campaign will be more cringe-inducing to a reader than Romney’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s endorsement, in Las Vegas, for the Republican nomination. Throughout Coppins’s narrative Trump, the supposed billionaire, morphs from comic relief into devouring nemesis. As late as May 2012, Romney was confiding this description of Trump to his journal: “No veneer, the real deal. Got to love him. Makes me laugh and makes me feel good, both.” Four years later, having come to his senses, Romney refused Trump his own endorsement, earning the candidate’s fury.Romney also sent a blistering email to Chris Christie after the New Jersey governor came out for Trump: “He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic.” Even so, after Trump’s victory, thinking he could perhaps be a force for restraint, Romney allowed himself to be humiliated by Trump’s prolonged public dangling of the secretary of state job.It took two more years for him to arrive at his finest — and final — hours in politics. In 2018, as a handful of anti-Trump Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake left Congress, Romney jumped in. His becoming a freshman senator from Utah was made possible by his own humility and the Mormon state’s temperamental aversion to the president’s personality, which had helped depress Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state.Setting up shop in a lousy basement office, Romney abandoned his plan “to fight Trumpism while ignoring Trump,” at last realizing he had to face the man head-on. While should-have-known-better Republican colleagues waffled (Ben Sasse) or submissively swooned (Lindsey Graham), Romney kept his head above the fetid waters, eventually developing a particular contempt for J.D. Vance, the once anti-Trump hillbilly elegist who reached the Senate via what Romney’s father might have called self-brainwashing. Resistance to Trump’s election-fraud claims left Romney to be jeered by fellow passengers on a flight from Salt Lake City to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021. Even before his vote to convict Trump in a second impeachment, private security for his large family was costing him $5,000 a day.“Romney: A Reckoning” is in many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions: One remembers Monica Crowley’s “Nixon Off the Record” (1996) and Thomas M. DeFrank’s “Write It When I’m Gone” (2007), a collection of opinions that Gerald Ford wanted to make public, though not too soon.Romney has not waited until he’s dead to unleash his candor and surrender his journals, but he has announced his retirement from electoral politics, on the sensible grounds that it is already too geriatric an arena. Even so, a second Senate term was hardly guaranteed to him. Whatever remains of Mormon distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and meanness, 2024 will be a meaner year than 2018; in a poll taken in the spring, more than half of Utah’s Republicans did not want Romney to run again.Coppins, a fellow Mormon, is generally as polite as his subject, though the characterization of Romney’s “late-in-life attempt at political repentance” seems a bit stark. As this able book shows, Romney almost certainly has less to repent of than the average politician. Indeed, one believes Coppins when he says that “watching Trump complete his conquest of the G.O.P. was even more devastating to Romney than losing his own election in 2012.”The depicted “reckoning” is actually lifelong and, more important, something that has always been made from within. Romney’s moral vitality, for all its fitfulness and ambivalence, has kept him a free man. Only a morally dead one, whose self-worth comes entirely from without, will find that stone walls do indeed a prison make.ROMNEY: A Reckoning | By McKay Coppins | 403 pp. | Scribner | $32.50 More