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    Von der Leyen Faces No-Confidence Vote in Far-Right Challenge

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    Ahead of the vote on Thursday, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the commission, appeared before the European Parliament to defend herself against complaints about transparency.Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is expected to face a no-confidence vote in the European Parliament this week. While the measure is likely to fail, it will be a symbolic challenge to the European Union’s top official at a time of high tension.Ms. von der Leyen appeared before Parliament on Monday for a debate to address the complaints against her ahead of the vote, which is scheduled for Thursday.The challenge originated from Europe’s far right: Gheorghe Piperea, a parliamentary newcomer from Romania who belongs to a political group that is often critical of the European Union, accused Ms. von der Leyen’s commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, of “failures to ensure transparency.”The complaint referred to a lawsuit filed by The New York Times over the commission’s denial of a request for records of text messages between Ms. von der Leyen and Dr. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, when she was trying to procure coronavirus vaccines.The General Court in Luxembourg sided with The Times, ruling in May that Ms. von der Leyen’s commission did not provide enough of an explanation in refusing the request for her text messages with the Pfizer executive.Mr. Piperea’s complaint also referred to the commission’s push to ramp up joint defense procurement and to carry out digital laws. He asserted in a filing that the commission’s behavior had been repeatedly opaque and “undermines trust.”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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      Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid? | Margaret Sullivan

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      A recent New York Times news story immediately drew fire from readers – and for very good reason.Headlined “Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application,” the article centered on Zohran Mamdani, the candidate for New York City mayor who drew national attention recently with his stunning win in the Democratic primary election.Its gist was that as a high school senior in New York City, Mamdani – who was born in Uganda and is of Indian descent – checked a couple of different boxes about race when applying for admission to Columbia University.So what, you might ask. Why is this even a story, you might also ask.Excellent questions.Whatever its news value, or lack thereof, the story certainly got the attention of one of Mamdani’s rivals – current New York City mayor Eric Adams, who will run in the general election as an independent candidate.Adams, who is Black, called it “deeply offensive” that Mamdani would try to “exploit” an African American identity even though he is not Black.And on Fox News, talkshow hosts used the Times story to trash Mamdani. Charlie Hurt, for one, called the mayoral candidate a racist on Fox & Friends and claimed that Mamdani despises America “and everything that we stand for”.The rightwing cable network was having a field day with Mamdani, a Muslim and social democrat, even before the Times story. President Trump has called him a communist and suggested he should be deported. Other rightwing outlets picked up the story, too, presenting it as a DEI scandal – that Mamdani lied about his race in order to take advantage of the affirmative action admission policy at Columbia. (Making the story even more absurd is the fact that Mamdani didn’t get in.)In print, the would-be scandal got some help from headline writers: “Mamdani Faces Scrutiny Over College Application.”Mamdani has explained that he was trying to communicate his complicated background. His father is Indian Ugandan and his mother is Indian American; Mamdani himself was born in Uganda and lived briefly in South Africa before moving to New York City as a child.“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” he told the Times.The Times’s decision to pursue and publish the story was, at the very least, unwise.For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication. Much of Big Journalism, for example, turned their noses up at insider documents offered to them about JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign, in part because the source was Iranian hackers; in some cases, they wrote about the hack but not the documents.The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.A ranking Times editor, Patrick Healy, responded to criticism of the story in a thread on X, justifying it as part of the paper’s mission “to help readers better know and understand top candidates for major offices”.Soledad O’Brien, the prominent media entrepreneur and journalist, called that explanation “a joke”. The publication of the Mamdani story is “an absolute embarrassment” for the Times, charged O’Brien, who herself is of mixed-race ancestry and identifies as Black.Plenty of others agreed, seeing Healy’s explanation not as admirable transparency but as damage control.The incident raises a larger issue: the Times’s apparent opposition to Mamdani’s candidacy.On the opinion side of the paper, there’s little question about that. Even though the Times no longer makes endorsements for mayor, they published an editorial urging voters to avoid ranking Mamdani at all on their ballots because he was so unqualified. (New York City uses ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to list several candidates in order of preference.)Remarkably, the Times stopped short of giving the same “don’t rank him” advice about disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his office in 2021 and then ran for mayor against Mamdani in the primary.The opinion side of the Times is entitled to its opinion, however misguided. But straight news articles, by contrast, aren’t supposed to go to bat for or against candidates. They’re supposed to be neutral and non-partisan, not cheering on one candidate or kneecapping another.In practice, of course, that’s often not the case.With this made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani.And no lofty explanation about the mission can disguise it.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Ask The Times About New York City’s Mayoral Race

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      Have questions about New York City’s mayoral race or politics in the city? We want to hear them.This year’s mayoral race in New York City is already historic in many ways. What questions do you have about the candidates, the electoral process, City Hall or our coverage of local politics? We’ll get them answered by our beat reporters and share the results in future editions of New York Today or our flagship newsletter, The Morning. (Sign up for The Morning newsletter here.)Ask The Times More

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      What to Know About the Effects of Ketamine

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      Elon Musk has said that he used ketamine as a treatment in the past, but he denied reports that he was taking it frequently and recreationally.News reports detailing Elon Musk’s drug use have prompted renewed attention to ketamine, a powerful anesthetic that has become increasingly popular as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression and other mental health issues.Although Mr. Musk has acknowledged using ketamine in the past to treat depression, he has denied suggestions that he is currently using ketamine — or any other drug.“I am NOT taking drugs!” he wrote last week in a social media post following the publication of an article in The New York Times that described reports of his use of drugs on the campaign trail last year. Those drugs included ketamine and other psychedelic compounds, among them MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms.Mr. Musk left the White House last week. Since then, he and President Trump have traded barbs on social media over the president’s domestic policy bill and have mentioned government contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies and Mr. Musk’s relationship to the White House.Mr. Trump, who was briefed on the article in The Times, has been telling associates in the last day or so that Musk’s “crazy” behavior is linked to his drug use, according to a Times report citing two people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s private conversations. But later on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not want to comment on Mr. Musk’s drug use.The very public feud between the two men has once again drawn unflattering attention to ketamine, a drug that has become increasingly available at legal clinics across the country. It is also used recreationally and can be dangerous when misused.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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      Former Harvard president urges people to ‘speak out’ against threats to US democracy

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      A recent former president of Harvard University urged people to “speak out” in defense of “foundational threats” to values such as freedom, autonomy and democracy in the US, as those whose deaths for such causes in war were being honored on Memorial Day.Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, also warned on Monday of US constitutional checks and the rule of law being “at risk” under the current administration, even as Donald Trump issued a fresh threat against the elite university as it seeks to repel his assaults on its independence and funding.“We are being asked not to charge into … artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which [the US civil war dead] gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?” Faust wrote in a guest opinion essay for the New York Times.She highlighted, in particular, the principles fought and died for by Union soldiers in the US civil war and the roles played by assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and leading Black civil rights leader of the 19th century.“We must honor these men,” she wrote.Faust, who led Harvard between 2007 and 2018 and still teaches there, did not mention the US president by name but she referred to his position and made a direct link between the civil war and now.Noting that about 2.7 million men, mostly volunteers, in 1861-1865 “took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth”, she went on to warn: “Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires.”View image in fullscreenFaust said that Lincoln regarded the Confederacy’s split from the Union, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery and evade federal government intervention, as a “direct assault” on government by the majority “held in restraint” by constitutional checks.“Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders,” she wrote in her essay.Critics of Trump lament congressional Republicans’ acquiescence to the president’s expansions of his authority and challenges to constitutional constraints, Democrats’ lackluster resistance, and the administration’s defiance of court orders over various anti-immigration extremes and partisan firings of federal officials and watchdogs without cause.Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly accused Harvard of antisemitism and bias against Jewish students and attacked its efforts towards greater diversity on campus, and the administration has further demanded cooperation with federal immigration authorities, while harnessing federal powers to try to punish the university.Last Friday, Harvard sued prominent government departments and cabinet secretaries for what it said was a “blatant violation” of the US constitution when the Trump administration announced it would revoke federal permission for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution to enroll international students. A federal judge issued an injunction within hours, temporarily blocking such a ban.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard had previously sued in April over what it said was Trump’s attempt to “gain control of academic decision-making” at the university and the administration’s threat to review about $9bn in federal funding.On Monday, Trump posted on his social media platform: “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” adding: “What a great investment that would be for the USA.”By Monday afternoon the president had not followed up with action or further explanation or statements.Harvard’s current president, Alan Garber, who is Jewish, has called the Trump demands “illegal” and said the administration was trying “to control whom we hire and what we teach”.Faust, a historian and research professor at Harvard, who was also its first president to have been raised in the US south, concluded her essay by acknowledging that those who fought in the US civil war did, in fact, save the nation and subsequently gave opportunities to the generations that followed.“They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future,” she wrote, adding that “we possess a reciprocal obligation to the past” and that “we must not squander what they bequeathed to us”. More

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      Brad Holland, Subversive Artist Who Reinvented American Illustration, Dies at 81

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      Brad Holland, an idiosyncratic artist who upended American illustration in the 1970s with his startling imagery for Playboy magazine and The New York Times’s opinion page, spawning a generation of imitators, died on March 27 in Manhattan. He was 81.His brother, Thomas Holland, said he died in a hospital from complications of heart surgery.Mr. Holland was in his late 20s and contributing to Playboy and a few of New York City’s underground papers, including The New York Review of Sex and Politics and The East Village Other, when he was invited to be part of an experiment at The New York Times.In 1970, the paper had introduced what it called an Op-Ed page — the name referred to its placement opposite the editorial page — as a forum for essays and ideas. The art director of this new page, Jean-Claude Suares, was another veteran of the underground presses; while working at The Times, he was also designing Screw magazine.For The Times, Mr. Suares wanted to commission standout art to accompany the writing, but he didn’t want to illustrate the themes of the articles literally. He was an admirer of Mr. Holland’s work and recruited him, along with other notable insurgents, including Ralph Steadman, the British caricaturist who had been illustrating Hunter Thompson’s gonzo adventures, and a coterie of European political cartoonists.One of three illustrations for a 1968 essay by P.G. Wodehouse, “The Lost Art of Domestic Service,” that were Mr. Holland’s first assignment for Playboy magazine. He would work for the magazine for a quarter-century.Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkMr. Holland had already attracted attention with the gorgeous rococo images he made to illustrate Playboy’s “Ribald Classics,” a series that reprinted erotic stories by the likes of Ovid, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. His work could be surreal, grotesque and beautiful, and it was often inscrutable. It recalled the satirical engravings of the 19th-century caricaturist Thomas Nast and the more terrifying paintings of Francisco Goya.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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      Anne Kaufman Schneider, 99, Ardent Keeper of Her Father’s Plays, Dies

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      She shepherded the works of George S. Kaufman from the 20th century into the next, encouraging regional theater productions and helping to steer two of them to Broadway.Anne Kaufman Schneider, who shepherded the plays of her father, George S. Kaufman, a titan of 20th-century American theatrical wit, into the 21st century with an acerbic sagacity all her own, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.Her executor, Laurence Maslon, confirmed her death.“Headstrong girls are difficult,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider once told The New York Times, “but that was the source of my good relationship with my father. And it started early. Because there wasn’t any baby talk. We went to the theater together starting when I was 4. Now I have made his work my agenda in life.”George Kaufman’s stellar career as a hit-making playwright and stage director included winning two Pulitzer Prizes — one, in 1937, for “You Can’t Take It With You,” a comedy he created with his most constant collaborator, Moss Hart; the other, in 1932, for “Of Thee I Sing,” a satirical political musical co-written with Morrie Ryskind to a score by George and Ira Gershwin.George S. Kaufman, left, with Moss Hart, his most constant collaborator, in 1937, the year their play “You Can’t Take It With You” won the Pulitzer Prize.Underwood Archives/Getty ImagesEven so, after his death in 1961 at the age of 71, Kaufman was a hard sell for theatrical revivals.“Very little happened at all,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider once recalled, “until Ellis Rabb revived ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ for the A.P.A./Phoenix Theater in 1965. Ellis proved that these are classic American plays.” (Founded by Mr. Rabb, an actor and director, the A.P.A., formally the Association of Producing Artists, was a Broadway entity notable for mounting revivals after it merged with the Phoenix Theater, another Broadway house.)Ms. Kaufman Schneider proceeded to oversee her father’s renaissance over the next 50-plus years — a term of service that outdistanced his own living stewardship of his career.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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      Matea Gold Named Washington Editor of The New York Times

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      Ms. Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post, is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the paper.Matea Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post who until recently was a contender for the newspaper’s top editing role, is joining The New York Times as a senior editor in its Washington bureau.Ms. Gold will be Washington editor for The Times, reporting to its newly appointed Washington bureau chief, Dick Stevenson, the company said on Monday. She starts in January.Since May 2023, Ms. Gold, 50, has been a managing editor overseeing The Post’s political, local and investigative coverage. She was previously the newspaper’s national editor, leading a staff of 150 journalists. Ms. Gold joined The Post more than a decade ago from The Los Angeles Times and has served in a variety of roles, covering politics as a reporter and shepherding ambitious political investigations.Under Ms. Gold’s supervision, The Post’s national staff contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Post’s national staff also won a Pulitzer for a feature article on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutionally protected right to abortion.Her departure is the latest in a series of high-profile exits from The Post news and opinion departments in recent months.The newsroom has been in turmoil since Will Lewis, the company’s chief executive, abruptly forced out the paper’s top editor, Sally Buzbee, in June. Matt Murray, the former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, has led the newsroom on an interim basis since then. Several journalists from the opinion section stepped down from their positions after Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, decided shortly before the U.S. presidential election that the paper would not endorse a candidate for president.The Post is searching for a permanent top editor for its news department. Ms. Gold had been considered a candidate for executive editor of The Post, according to two people familiar with the search process. Other candidates include Clifford Levy, a former deputy managing editor of The Times and now the deputy publisher of Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation site, and The Athletic, its sports site, the people said. Mr. Murray is also a candidate, the people said.One of the final hurdles is an interview with Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, who weighs in on hiring decisions for top positions.Ms. Gold joins The Times amid changes in the top ranks of its Washington bureau. The Times announced in November that Elisabeth Bumiller, who had led the bureau since 2015, would be stepping down from that role and returning to reporting. Mr. Stevenson, who has worked at The Times in various reporting and editing jobs for nearly 40 years, will be taking over for her in January. More

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      How the NYT Super Mega Crossword in Puzzle Mania Is Made

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      The centerpiece of the annual Puzzle Mania print section requires a big helping of teamwork, with a side order of patience.Any puzzle maker will tell you that building a crossword is no easy task. (If you need proof, we’ve previously followed a group of New York Times crossword constructors as they make one.)Crossword construction requires, among other skills, an eye for wordplay, a keen sense for what makes an answer entertaining and, above all, patience. That last trait enables a constructor to hang in there when trying to fill in the blank grid of a stubborn daily (typically 15×15 squares) or Sunday crossword (usually 21×21). The answers don’t just cross themselves, and puzzle makers often run into sections of their grids that they can’t fill unless they make substantial changes.Now imagine that you are a constructor and the blank puzzle grid in front of you is 50×50 squares, far larger than any puzzle The New York Times offers. Your job is to make an entertaining crossword that stands on its own but also contains clues and entries that connect to a contest. The finished grid is larger than most crossword software can handle on one screen, so you have to make the puzzle in sections and find a way to put it together. Oh, and you are not allowed to have duplicate entries, a rule that can be dicey when you’re trying to fill a big space one section at a time.No pressure, right? It’s only the centerpiece of Puzzle Mania, the 12-page print section that The New York Times Magazine has published annually since 2016. The section was the creation of Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine; Caitlin Roper, then the special sections editor; and Will Shortz, the lead puzzle editor.Ms. Roper had been brought on to create the look and feel of this new project, and she was intrigued: The Times offered a variety of special digital features, she said recently, so why not do something equally delightful in print?The Super Mega would be the centerfold, enabling the constructor and puzzle editors to build the largest crossword that could fit across the giant sheet of paper. The approximately 700 clues would be packed onto a separate page in the Puzzle Mania section.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