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    Haitian Migrant in Massachusetts Is Charged With Raping a Teenager

    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

    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

    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’

    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

    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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    Book Review: ‘Romney,’ by McKay Coppins

    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

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    Oppenheimer biographer supports US bill to bar use of AI in nuclear launches

    A biographer whose Pulitzer prize-winning book inspired the new movie Oppenheimer has expressed support for a US senator’s attempt to bar the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons launches.“Humans must always maintain sole control over nuclear weapons,” Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus, said in a statement reported by Politico.“This technology is too dangerous to gamble with. This bill will send a powerful signal to the world that the United States will never take the reckless step of automating our nuclear command and control.”In Washington on Thursday, Bird met Ed Markey, the Democratic Massachusetts senator who is attempting to add the AI-nuclear provision to a major defense spending bill.Markey, Politico said, was a friend of Bird’s co-author, the late Tufts University professor Martin J Sherwin.A spokesperson for the senator told Politico Markey and Bird “shared their mutual concerns over the proliferation of artificial intelligence in national security and defense without guardrails, and the risks of using nuclear weapons in south Asia and elsewhere.“They also discussed ways to increase awareness of nuclear issues among the younger set.”J Robert Oppenheimer was the driving force behind US development of the atomic bomb, at the end of the second world war.Bird and Sherwin’s book is now the inspiration for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster starring Cillian Murphy in the title role.The movie opens in the US on Friday – in competition with Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film about the popular children’s doll.On Friday, Nolan told the Guardian: “International surveillance of nuclear weapons is possible because nuclear weapons are very difficult to build. Oppenheimer spent $2bn and used thousands of people across America to build those first bombs.“It’s reassuringly difficult to make nuclear weapons and so it’s relatively easy to spot when a country is doing that. I don’t believe any of that applies to AI.”Nolan also noted “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and AI experts now calling for such technology to be controlled.Nolan said he had “been interested to talk to some of the leading researchers in the AI field, and hear from them that they view this as their ‘Oppenheimer moment’. And they’re clearly looking to his story for some kind of guidance … as a cautionary tale in terms of what it says about the responsibility of somebody who’s putting this technology to the world, and what their responsibilities would be in terms of unintended consequences.”Bird and Sherwin’s biography, subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, was published in 2008.Reviewing for the Guardian, James Buchan saluted the authors’ presentation of “the cocktails and wire-taps and love affairs of Oppenheimer’s existence, his looks and conversation, the way he smoked the cigarettes and pipe that killed him, his famous pork-pie hat and splayed walk, and all the tics and affectations that his students imitated and the patriots and military men despised.“It is as if these authors had gone back to James Boswell, who said of Dr Johnson: ‘Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.’” More

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    Cheryl Hines Didn’t Expect to Be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Running Mate

    The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress is beloved in Hollywood. In supporting her husband’s campaign, is she normalizing his often dangerous ideas?On a quiet Thursday in May, there was almost no indication that anyone in Cheryl Hines’s house was running for president. A hockey stick poked out from a bush in front of the Spanish colonial home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Leaning up against a wall outside were several surfboards, caked with wax, at least one of which belonged to her husband, the 69-year-old environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had announced his candidacy for the 2024 Democratic nomination only four weeks earlier. In the foyer, the family’s three dogs wagged their tails near a portrait of Mr. Kennedy’s famous uncle and aunt, John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by the artist Romero Britto. Over the door hung an even larger portrait, of Ms. Hines and Mr. Kennedy, also by Mr. Britto, a friend of the couple.Ms. Hines, 57, has been in many spotlights during her three decades as a professional actress, most famously for her role as Larry David’s wife on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but this new one is different. After a lifetime of not being particularly political, she finds herself not only married to a man from a storied American political family, but also attached to his long-shot campaign for the highest office in the country. (Mr. Kennedy is the son of former United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.) And it seems clear he will need Ms. Hines, who is in the unique position of being more recognizable to some voters than her candidate husband, to help soften his image for those put off by his crusade against vaccines and history of promoting conspiracy theories, such as the false narrative that Bill Gates champions vaccines for financial gain. “I support Bobby and I want to be there for him, and I want him to feel loved and supported by me,” said Ms. Hines, who is a registered Democrat. “And at the same time, I don’t feel the need to go to every political event, because I do have my own career.”Mr. Kennedy, in an interview with The New York Times a few weeks later, said that he sees his wife as crucial to his success. “I think ultimately if I get elected, Cheryl will have played a huge role in that,” he said. “She’s an enormous asset to me, and I don’t think we’ve really unveiled her in her true power yet.” He added: “She has a gift that she’s kind of mesmerizing when she’s on TV and she’s talking, because she’s so spontaneous and she has this what I would call a quick, a fast-twitch reflex when it comes to conversation.”Friends keep checking in on her. Elections can get ugly, and Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, seemingly by design, will put him in contact with many of this country’s more unconventional voters.After a lifetime of not being particularly political, Ms. Hines finds herself not only married to a man from a storied American political family, but also attached to his long-shot campaign for the highest office in the country.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I’m bracing myself for it,” said Ms. Hines of the public scrutiny that comes with campaigning, while sitting in her home office. On the bookshelf, there’s a plaque of her Hollywood Walk of Fame star and a humorous framed photo of Mr. David in a turtleneck and fake mustache, holding a pipe with a note congratulating her. “It is hard not to live in that space of, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen? And is it going to be as terrible as I think?’”In her first interview since her husband announced his candidacy, Ms. Hines initially appeared at ease. She has done hundreds of interviews throughout her career, and as a seasoned improv actress, is known to be quick on her feet and sharply funny. She cut her teeth in the Groundlings, a Los Angeles-based improv troupe; “Curb” is outlined but unscripted. In some ways, answering questions from a stranger is just another form of: “Yes, and.” With improv, “it’s challenging because you don’t know what’s coming next. You don’t know what the audience is going to shout out,” she said. “‘Where are these two people?’ ‘They’re scooping poop in the lion’s den at the zoo!’ Lights go down. Lights go up.”“You have to commit 100 percent,” she continued, “or it’s not funny or interesting.”But here’s a scenario that would challenge even an improv master: You are beloved by fans and peers, and have managed to steer clear of controversy your entire career, but fall in love with a man who touches it off regularly with his often outlandish claims — a man who was kicked off Instagram along with his anti-vaccine nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, for spreading misinformation during the pandemic. (Instagram reinstated Mr. Kennedy’s personal account earlier this month, because of his candidacy.) Who last year drew criticism and later apologized when, at a rally against vaccine mandates in Washington, he spoke against 5G technology, surveillance and what he called “technological mechanisms for control” and said, “even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” Who just this week suggested “S.S.R.I.s and benzos and other drugs” might be responsible for America’s school-shooting problem. (Mr. Kennedy told The Times that assault rifles “clearly make the world more dangerous and we should figure out a way to limit that impact,” but added, “there’s something else happening.”)Now, he is running for president, and you — “a genuine ray of light,” says the producer Suzanne Todd, and whom actor Alec Baldwin has said “everybody loves” — are along for the ride. After years of being able to distance yourself from your husband’s most problematic views, you now risk being seen as at least tacitly embracing them by standing by and smiling if he says things on the campaign trail that are demonstrably untrue.A note of congratulations from Larry David for Ms. Hines’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesA plaque for Ms. Hines’s star.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIntroduced by Larry DavidMs. Hines was raised in Tallahassee, Fla., a thousand miles away— geographically and culturally — from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, Mass., where she and Mr. Kennedy wed in 2014. Her father, who worked in construction, and her mother, an assistant at the Department of Revenue, were private about their politics, if they even had any. “If I ever asked my mom who she voted for, she would tell me it’s nobody’s business and it was her own secret,” Ms. Hines said. “I don’t recall my dad ever once talking about politics or current events, so it was not part of my life. Really, the only thing I knew about the Kennedys was what I learned in public school, in history.”After cosmetology school and the University of Central Florida, her first acting job was at Universal Studios, where she performed the shower scene from “Psycho” up to 15 times a day for a live audience. It was a gig that involved standing in a flesh-colored body suit while an audience member stabbed her with a rubber knife. In her 30s — practically of a certain age in Hollywood years — Ms. Hines was still paying her dues: bartending, working as the personal assistant to the filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and going to improv classes. Her break came in 1999, when she was cast in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” In 2002, the show won the first of its many Emmys and Golden Globes. Ms. Hines recalled being backstage at the Golden Globe Awards and running into Harrison Ford. When he stopped to congratulate her, she extended her hand and said, “I’m Cheryl Hines. Harrison Ford said, ‘I know who you are,’ and I thought, Oh my God, what?”She and Mr. Kennedy met in 2006 when Mr. David, a longtime friend of Mr. Kennedy’s, introduced them at a ski-weekend fund-raiser in Banff, Canada, for Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental nonprofit co-founded by Mr. Kennedy. Ms. Hines had no plans to ski, “but the next thing you know, we’re in skis and we’re on a ski lift,” she said. “I was looking at Larry like, ‘What is happening?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah,’ giving an indication like, ‘That’s Bobby.’” Ms. Hines said she was aware of Mr. Kennedy’s work as an environmental lawyer, but “I still didn’t know too much about the politics of it all.”By then, Ms. Hines was well entrenched in her own philanthropic work: for the nonprofit United Cerebral Palsy, after her nephew was diagnosed, and for under-resourced schools. “Cheryl was always reachable and accessible to me,” said Jacqueline Sanderlin, a former principal and district administrator of the Compton Unified School District. “She wasn’t a mercenary person. She wasn’t doing this for herself.”Ms. Hines’s break came in 1999, when she was cast in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the HBO show created by Mr. David.Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesMs. Hines and Mr. Kennedy spent time together at another ski event in 2011, when they each were going through a divorce, and eventually began dating long distance. Mr. David never intended for them to connect romantically, Ms. Hines noted. (“Poor Larry,” she said, looking up at the ceiling.) Mr. David told her the relationship was a bad idea, which she said was in jest. “It’s part of the fun of Larry. You just know no matter what you say to him, he’s going to say, ‘Why would you do that? Are you crazy?’”She was attracted to Mr. Kennedy’s wit. “Bobby is very smart and funny, although a lot of people don’t see the funny side,” she said. “He also has this sense of adventure that will catapult me outside of my comfort zone, which I find exciting most of the time.” (How about now, with him running for office? “It seems like, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ Yeah, but, scuba diving.”)Their relationship made headlines when tragedy struck: In May of 2012, Mr. Kennedy’s second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, died by suicide at her home in Bedford, N.Y. Ms. Hines stayed on the West Coast while Mr. Kennedy focused on his children. “I gave him the space and time to heal,” she said. “I think grief is very personal.”When Ms. Hines and Mr. Kennedy got married two years later, Mr. Kennedy gave a speech in which he repeatedly called Ms. Hines “unflappable.” “It was to the level where we joked about it afterward,” said Ms. Todd, a close friend of Ms. Hines. “But he’s actually right, because Cheryl is unflappable.”Her career had continued at a clip: “Curb” returned in 2017 after a six-year hiatus. She joined the cast of the film “A Bad Moms Christmas” along with Susan Sarandon and Christine Baranski, guest-starred in a slew of sitcoms and started a podcast about documentaries with the comedian Tig Notaro.Mr. Kennedy had also been busy. In 2016, he founded the World Mercury Project, which became the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that advocates against vaccines for children. He co-wrote a book on vaccines and began posting anti-vaccine propaganda on social media.During the pandemic, Mr. Kennedy became an even louder voice in the anti-vaccine movement, encouraging people to “do your own research,” even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization deemed the Covid vaccines safe and effective.Mr. Kennedy has long expressed skepticism about vaccines, but his intensity grew with his platform and audience. He published another book, “Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which has blurbs from the former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, the director Oliver Stone and the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, among others. Ms. Hines stayed out of the fray for most of the pandemic. On her Instagram, she shared images of herself wearing a mask, as well as posts about her involvement with Waterkeeper Alliance — notably never mentioning Children’s Health Defense — and didn’t comment on her husband’s vaccine rhetoric. But then Mr. Kennedy made his Holocaust remark, and claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible public health leader fighting Covid, was orchestrating “fascism.”“My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own. While we love each other, we differ on many current issues,” Ms. Hines wrote on Twitter. The next day, she tweeted again, calling the Holocaust reference “reprehensible.” “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything,” she wrote.Ms. Hines’s first acting job was at Universal Studios, where she performed the shower scene from “Psycho” up to 15 times a day.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy said it was a difficult time for them. “I saw how it was affecting her life and I said to her, ‘We should just announce that we are separated,’ so that you can have some distance from me,” he said. “We wouldn’t really be doing anything, we would just — I felt so desperate about protecting her at a time where my statements and my decisions were impacting her.” He said he even wrote up a news release, though it never went out. Ms. Hines said that was never an option, although she was upset with Mr. Kennedy for his choice of words. “It was also frustrating to hear Bobby say things that could so easily be twisted into snippets that misrepresented his meaning and didn’t represent who he is,” she said.Several months later, Mr. Kennedy approached her to say he was considering running for office. “It was definitely a discussion,” Ms. Hines said, “because he said, ‘If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t.’” She ultimately agreed. On June 5, Ms. Hines was pulled into a Twitter Spaces conversation with Mr. Kennedy and Elon Musk, even though she hadn’t intended to participate. After she gave a measured comment about how she feels about her husband running for office — “It’s been really interesting,” she said, slowly, “and at times exciting” — Mr. Kennedy said that, to cope with the campaign, Ms. Hines had joked she was going to “invent a new kind of margarita that had Xanax in it.”Seeing ‘Both Sides’ on VaccinesMr. Kennedy’s traction has been surprising. A recent CNN poll found that Mr. Kennedy had support from 20 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters (though not the multiple members of his own family who have publicly said they will support President Biden.) Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive of Twitter, has endorsed him. Steve Bannon has been supportive of Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, floating the idea of a Trump-Kennedy ticket; Alex Jones and other right-wing conspiracy theorists have also expressed enthusiasm. Mr. Kennedy said he has never met Mr. Jones and has “never spoken to Mr. Bannon or Mr. Jones about my presidential campaign.” When asked twice if he would reject an endorsement from Mr. Jones, who lost a $1 billion lawsuit for repeatedly saying the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn., was a government hoax, Mr. Kennedy did not respond. Mr. Kennedy said that he would “love to go on Steve Bannon’s show, but Cheryl just can’t bear that,” so he has not. Back at her home in Los Angeles, what Ms. Hines seemed most excited to talk about was Hines+Young, the eco-friendly company she recently started with her 19-year-old daughter, Catherine Young. It is mostly skin care and candles, and one scent is called Hyannis Seagrass. This — the skin care, the podcast, the film and TV projects — was her world, not whatever was happening on the campaign trail.Ms. Hines does have issues she cares about, including school safety, and “bodily autonomy,” which she said includes abortion but more broadly is the ability to “make decisions about our body with a doctor, not with a politician.” (She declined to comment on whether that includes vaccines.) She had no canned answers prepared about her husband’s political career, but unlike in her improv, seemed unsure what to say. “Bobby is very smart and funny, although a lot of people don’t see the funny side,” Ms. Hines said about her husband. “He also has this sense of adventure that will catapult me outside of my comfort zone, which I find exciting most of the time.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesOn potentially being first lady: “I haven’t really spent time in that space, because we’re not there yet.” On how much she has prepped for the trail: “Every day I learn a lot.” On which current issues, specifically, she was referring to when she tweeted that she and her husband “differ”: “OK. Let me think here.” There was a 49-second pause then, which didn’t resolve in a clear answer. Ms. Hines, who appeared in a 2006 public service announcement encouraging people to get a whooping cough booster vaccine — and who had her own daughter vaccinated when she was young — had not previously commented on Mr. Kennedy’s views. “I see both sides of the vaccine situation,” she said. “There’s one side that feels scared if they don’t get the vaccine, and there’s the side that feels scared if they do get the vaccine, because they’re not sure if the vaccine is safe. And I understand that.”“So if Bobby is standing up and saying, ‘Well, are we sure that they’re safe and every vaccine has been tested properly? That doesn’t seem too much to ask,” she continued. “That seems like the right question to be asking.” Ms. Hines tried to dodge several questions about her views on vaccines, including “Do you think vaccines are dangerous for children?,” eventually answering in a manner that didn’t criticize her husband or reveal much about her own opinion.And Mr. Kennedy has been asking questions about the safety of vaccines for years, his family name and work as an environmental lawyer giving credibility to his skepticism, which he spreads through Children’s Health Defense. In 2019, family members wrote an open letter in which they said, in part, that although they love Mr. Kennedy, “on vaccines he is wrong” and called him “complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate asserted that Mr. Kennedy was one of 12 people responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content on Facebook. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign website makes no mention of vaccines. Instead, he has positioned himself as a fighter for the middle class and a crusader against corruption, in an effort to appeal to what he has called “all the homeless Republicans and Democrats and Independents who are Americans first.” He wrote in an email to The Times that “the principal villain in the war in Ukraine is Vladimir Putin” but also blamed the war on “State Department and White House Neocons.” In May, he said on Russell Brand’s “Stay Free” podcast that Ukraine is “a victim of U.S. aggression” by way of a “proxy war.” Language included on his campaign website states his intention is to “make America strong again.”Upon learning that an opinion piece in The Washington Post had recently compared her husband to former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Hines’s eyes widened. She tried to make sense of the observation.“His skin is much thicker than mine, let’s just say that,” she said. Mr. Kennedy’s father was killed while campaigning; his uncle was assassinated in office — a horrific loss for the country, but also for a family. “He doesn’t talk about that,” Ms. Hines said. “He’s not afraid of much. I can’t think of even one thing he’s afraid of.”In an interview with Breitbart News Daily — Mr. Kennedy has appeared frequently on right-wing cable shows and podcasts — he said, in response to a question that involved the phrase “cancel culture,” that Ms. Hines’s career had already suffered because of her support for his candidacy. Ms. Hines clarified: “I haven’t lost any jobs because of my support for his candidacy, but there was a project I’m involved in where there was a pause for discussion about how his candidacy might affect what we are doing but it has been resolved.” Mr. Kennedy added that so far, “I feel a lot of support and love from most of her friends, including Larry.” (In a text, Mr. David clarified: “Yes love and support, but I’m not ‘supporting’ him.”)“It was definitely a discussion,” Ms. Hines said about Mr. Kennedy’s decision to run for president, “because he said, ‘If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t.’”Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“But I’m sure there’s people who just don’t talk to me about it, who feel uncomfortable or, you know, whatever,” Mr. Kennedy continued. Ms. Hines said she was getting used to people wanting to talk to her about “their political feelings and thoughts.” Her strategy is to deflect. She said that she responds with a version of, “This is probably something you should talk about with Bobby, although I’m happy to hear your thoughts.” (The day after Mr. Kennedy announced his candidacy, Mr. Reiner, Ms. Hines’s friend and former boss, tweeted his support for President Biden.) Her industry friends, to her relief, are also consumed with their own affairs. “I went to this poker charity tournament the other night, and I thought everybody was going to be really talking to me about politics,” she said. But instead, “everybody was talking about the writers’ strike.”Ms. Hines isn’t a stiff person. Her personality comes out most in the lighter moments: While talking about a scene she recalled from her time with the Groundlings, Ms. Hines broke out into an impersonation of Cher singing “The Hills Are Alive.” She gushed as she talked about her love for her daughter, and how (not completely unlike her character in “A Bad Moms Christmas,” who sniffs her adult daughter’s hair) one of the reasons she wanted to work with her is to keep her close. Ms. Hines is used to talking about her work, too; her upcoming projects include the 12th season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” a new season of the music game show “I Can See Your Voice,” on which she is a judge and the comedic film “Popular Theory.”But when it comes to the campaign, Ms. Hines is more guarded. “This feels different, because it feels like every word is important,” she said. “Before this, really, my world was just about comedy, so I could make light of things. But now I understand people are listening in a different way, and I know that it’s really important to them. ”As the interview wound down, she laid out several Hines+Young body creams on the coffee table to smell. “It’s all about taking care of yourself and relaxing,” she said. “So it’s hilarious that it’s launching right now.”She then walked over to a bookshelf behind the sofa, where white T-shirts with “Kennedy24” printed across the front were rolled up and stacked, like towels at a gym. “I’m going to give you a T-shirt,” she said. “I don’t know who you’re voting for, and you can do whatever you want with it.”She looked around the room again, and then toward the door. “I have all these Kennedy T-shirts.” More