Pittsburgh (Pa)

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    O’Connor Wins Democratic Primary for Pittsburgh Mayor, Defeating Incumbent

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    The outcome is the latest in a string of losses in deep-blue cities that has raised questions about the power of progressive officeholders.Corey O’Connor, the son of a popular former mayor, won the Democratic primary for Pittsburgh mayor on Tuesday night, according to The Associated Press, signaling voters’ dissatisfaction with the city under its current progressive leader, Ed Gainey.Mr. Gainey’s defeat is the latest in a string of losses in deep-blue cities, most notably in San Francisco and Oakland, that have raised the volume on questions about progressive officeholders, as their wing of Democratic Party seeks to wrest control from centrist leaders who have struggled to counter President Trump.Mr. O’Connor, the Allegheny County controller, will face Tony Moreno, the winner of the Republican primary, in the general election in November. But Pittsburgh has not had a Republican mayor since one was appointed in 1932, so winning the Democratic primary has become tantamount to winning the mayoral election.“Your voices and your call for accountable leadership have been heard in this Democratic primary,” Mr. O’Connor said as he greeted a jubilant group of supporters at a victory party on Tuesday night. He added that he was humbled by the opportunity and would work to deliver on what he called a promise of progress.Mr. Gainey’s loss halted the momentum that progressives had enjoyed in this Democratic stronghold of a perpetual swing state.In recent years, Representative Summer Lee, a progressive who represents much of Pittsburgh in Congress, and Sara Innamorato, the Allegheny County executive who started her political career as a socialist candidate, vaulted into elected office. Riding the progressive wave with them was Mr. Gainey, a former state legislator who was elected mayor in 2021 with the backing of the powerful Service Employees International Union.Mr. Gainey, the city’s first Black mayor, made affordable housing — and affordable living — the primary plank of his platform. But his gains in lifting the working class and poor were incremental, and his administration was plagued by persistent missteps.Questions about the constant turnover in police leadership, accusations of fudged budget numbers and complaints about basic services like filling the city’s ubiquitous potholes overshadowed promising economic data and a decrease in crime.Mr. O’Connor — whose father Bob was elected mayor in 2006 and died later that year from cancer — had positioned himself as a pragmatic candidate who would get the city working again while it tried to rebuild a tax base devastated by the pandemic downturn in commercial real estate.In his campaign, Mr. O’Connor, 40, pledged a more conciliatory approach toward powerful institutions like universities and health care companies and real estate developers. He had enjoyed a 3-to-1 fund-raising advantage over Mr. Gainey in recent months. Mr. Gainey, by contrast, regularly chastised leaders of some of those organizations for not contributing more to address the city’s inequalities.A peacemaking approach might well be required now, after a sharp-elbowed campaign between two candidates with few policy differences that split allegiances among city and county political leaders. More

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      In Pittsburgh, Many Sentiments About Pope’s Health Reflect Concern, Not Closeness

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      On a recent weekend in this once deeply Catholic city, many expressed worry about Pope Francis, but there was also an air of ambivalence.Congregants escaping the winter morning’s chill trickled into Immaculate Heart of Mary Church for Sunday Mass last weekend. There was a time when the massive brick church, which stands like a beacon atop Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood, would have been packed with parishioners who lived in the surrounding blocks.Mark Dobies and his wife, Kim, remember those days. Their grandfathers were among the Polish immigrants who built the church, whose interior is bathed in an ethereal light by the stained-glass windows. The couple, who live two blocks away, were married under the church’s dome, as were their parents.“I’ve watched it evolve,” Mr. Dobies said after Sunday’s service, which resembled a pandemic Mass with far more pews empty than occupied. “People migrated out of the city.”This arc of a storied church in what was once a deeply Catholic city has in many ways mirrored what has taken place around the country, as ethnic congregations in working-class neighborhoods shriveled when manufacturing jobs disappeared. The church’s long-running sexual abuse scandal only exacerbated the decline.Now, that distancing from the church might be seen here in another way: the relative ambivalence toward Pope Francis, whose health is increasingly frail. There might be an occasional candle lit in Pittsburgh for Francis, the 88-year-old pontiff, but there are no massive public vigils or signs of a community on edge.“I’m praying, but I don’t know a lot about him,” Carol Novak said after a Monday morning Mass at St. Anthony Chapel, a quaint church in the Troy Hill neighborhood that boasts of housing more relics than anywhere outside of Rome.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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      Museum With Renowned Dinosaur Fossils Gets a $25 Million Gift

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      The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, home to the Tyrannosaurus rex holotype and a famous Diplodocus, will benefit from Carole and Daniel Kamin’s donation.Carole Kamin first walked through the doors of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1975 after taking a job as a buyer for the Pittsburgh museum’s gift shop. Awe-struck by the fossils on display, she would style herself as a “dinosaur queen” for the next 20 years.She sourced dino-patterned fabric from India for barbecue aprons. She worked with a toy manufacturer to produce models of the museum’s ancient creatures. She persuaded a candy supplier to make caramel-filled “Sweet Beasts.”Now Kamin and her husband, Daniel, are donating $25 million toward renovating the museum, which was founded in 1895 and has one of North America’s largest museum collections of fossils. The gift comes at a time when dinosaurs are as firmly entrenched in the zeitgeist as ever, thanks in part to record-setting fossil auctions and blockbuster films.The Carnegie museum’s holdings include the species-defining fossils — known as holotypes — of the terrifying predator Tyrannosaurus rex and the giant herbivore Apatosaurus louisae.It also displays arguably the most famous dinosaur skeleton on Earth: the remains of Diplodocus carnegii, a long-necked dinosaur found in 1899 during an expedition funded by the steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Replica casts of the dinosaur, known as “Dippy,” reside in museums around the world.The Diplodocus carnegii skeleton at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is known as “Dippy.” Replica casts of the dinosaur reside in museums around the world.via Carnegie Museum of Natural History; Photo by Joshua Franzos, Treehouse MediaWe 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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      Trump Twists Harris’s Position on Fentanyl After She Called for a Border Crackdown

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      When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border on Friday, she called fentanyl a “scourge on our country” and said that as president she would “make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”Ms. Harris pledged to give more resources to law enforcement officials on the front lines, including additional personnel and machines that can detect fentanyl in vehicles. And she said she would take aim at the “global fentanyl supply chain,” vowing to “double the resources for the Department of Justice to extradite and prosecute transnational criminal organizations and the cartels.”But that was not how her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, characterized her position on Sunday at a rally in Erie, Pa., where he made a false accusation against Ms. Harris that seemed intended to play on the fears and traumas of voters in communities that have been ravaged by fentanyl.“She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” Mr. Trump said during a speech that stretched for 109 minutes. It was the second straight day that Mr. Trump had amplified the same false claim about Ms. Harris; he did so on Saturday in Wisconsin.The former president did not offer context for his remarks, but his campaign pointed to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that Ms. Harris had filled out in 2019 during her unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.A question asking if Ms. Harris supported the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use appeared to be checked “yes.” Ms. Harris wrote that it was “long past time that we changed our outdated and discriminatory criminalization of marijuana” and said that she favored treating drug addiction as a public health issue, focusing on rehabilitation instead of incarceration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In His Last Months as President, Biden Is Both Liberated and Resigned

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      President Biden spent decades seeking the highest office, only to drop his bid for re-election under pressure. These final months before the November election are bittersweet, his allies say.President Biden began the final stretch of his political career this week freed from the rigors of running for re-election, appearing by turns nostalgic, liberated and — in some cases — resigned to finding himself once again in a supporting role.After a two-week summer vacation, Mr. Biden has been campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris, now at the top of the Democratic ticket, and traveling the country to promote his administration’s accomplishments.But for a man who has spent decades seeking the highest office, only to drop his bid for re-election under pressure from his own party, these final months before the November election are bittersweet, his allies say.“For my whole career I’ve either been too young or too old, never in between,” Mr. Biden told a crowd of union workers on Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. The president, who was not yet 30 when he first won a Senate seat in 1972, cracked that he went on to serve for “374 years.”Earlier in the week, Mr. Biden appeared unbothered about alienating conservatives when he attacked Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — in the Republican’s home state — for not voting for the Inflation Reduction Act, the president’s signature legislation.And on Monday in Pittsburgh, during an event with Ms. Harris, Mr. Biden did not seem particularly keen to cede the spotlight. He spoke eight minutes longer than the vice president, even as he said he would be “on the sidelines” going forward.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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      Harris and Walz Venture Into Less-Friendly Terrain to Court Pennsylvania Voters

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      Before their convention that this week will signal the final sprint to November, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, headed out on a brief bus tour on Sunday to fire up voters in perhaps the most crucial battleground state in the 2024 election.As they toured western Pennsylvania, their play for support beyond the state’s more liberal cities was apparent at the team’s first stop, a field office in Rochester, Pa., in the largely conservative Beaver County: Ms. Harris picked up a volunteer’s cellphone to speak with a resident from Erie, a northwestern city in one of the state’s swingiest counties, which Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 but Joseph R. Biden Jr. won four years later.“I love Erie,” Ms. Harris said. “At some point we’ll get to Erie.”Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz were joined on the outing by their spouses, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, traveling in two new campaign buses from the Pittsburgh airport, where they arrived on Air Force Two to greet a small group of supporters.Recent polling of Pennsylvania shows a close race between the Harris-Walz ticket and the Trump-Vance ticket.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas are the two main drivers of Democratic support in Pennsylvania, a state whose 19 electoral votes could decide the presidency. Recent polling shows a neck-and-neck race there between Ms. Harris and former President Donald J. Trump, with some surveys showing Ms. Harris gaining a narrow edge recently.Mr. Trump is also increasing his presence in Pennsylvania — on Saturday he held a rally in Wilkes-Barre and another is set in York on Monday, while Senator JD Vance of Ohio, his running mate, campaigns in Philadelphia.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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      Unrelenting Heat Stifles Millions of Americans for 3rd Consecutive Day

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      As the heat wave moved east, the Northeast felt the brunt of the conditions. But forecasters provided a glimmer of relief, saying “conditions should improve over New England” this weekend.From the Midwest to the northern tip of Maine, millions of Americans sweltered under a springtime heat wave on Wednesday that stifled the Eastern portion of the United States for a third consecutive day.As the heat wave moved east, the Northeast felt the brunt of the conditions, stemming from a high-pressure system called a heat dome that scorched the Great Lakes region earlier this week.Conditions in a swath of central Maine were particularly brutal, largely because the area was farther from ocean winds, according to Jay Engle, a forecaster at the National Weather Service. The heat index — a measure that includes temperature and humidity to showcase how hot it actually feels — topped 100 degrees in some areas, and temperatures reached as high as 95 degrees in cities like Bangor, Houlton and Millinocket, according to the National Weather Service. In Caribou, in the northeastern tip of the state, it was 96 degrees, tying the highest temperature ever recorded there.More than 78 million people were under heat warnings, watches and advisories on Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service. Heat waves are not uncommon in mid-June, but the Weather Service warned that this one could last longer than some places have experienced in decades. Heat waves are also hotter, more frequent and longer lasting now because of global warming.But forecasters provided a glimmer of relief: Meteorologists at the Weather Prediction Center said in a post on its website that “conditions should improve over New England” this weekend.Still, in many areas, Wednesday felt more like the height of summer than the last full day of spring. Cities and states helped residents deal with the stifling temperatures by opening more cooling centers, moving some Juneteenth celebrations indoors and pushing up opening hours of pools and beaches.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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      Summer Lee, ‘Squad’ Member, Wins Democratic House Primary in Pennsylvania

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      Representative Summer Lee, a first-term progressive Democrat, won her primary contest in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, fending off a moderate challenger in a race that centered on her stance on the war in Gaza.The primary, in Pennsylvania’s 12th District, presented one of this year’s first down-ballot tests of whether left-wing incumbents would be hurt by their opposition to Israel’s military campaign. After Ms. Lee for months faced scrutiny for voting against support for Israel, her victory was partly seen as a reflection of how public, and party, sentiment on the issue has appeared to shift in her favor.The congresswoman was winning by an overwhelming margin with counting nearly complete late Tuesday, underlining the strength of her position as an incumbent this year after she out-raised her opponent with widespread backing from Democratic officials.Ms. Lee, who in 2022 was elected the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress and later joined the group of left-leaning lawmakers known as the Squad, defeated Bhavini Patel, a city councilwoman in Edgewood, Pa. Ms. Patel ran as a more moderate Democrat and tried to paint Ms. Lee as dismissive of voters who oppose her approach to the conflict in Gaza. The seat is considered safely Democratic in the general election.A former state representative, Ms. Lee, 36, narrowly won a primary fight in the district two years ago against a centrist opponent favored by the party’s establishment. Her victory was heralded by left-leaning organizations and leaders as a win for the progressive movement.This year, Ms. Lee, now the incumbent, garnered support across the Democratic spectrum. Her endorsers included Pennsylvania’s senators, House Democratic leaders, labor unions and the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, which opposed her candidacy in 2022. Progressive groups spent large sums on her behalf, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, stumped for her in Pittsburgh on Sunday.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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      Honor Roberto Clemente With a Coin, Congressman Says

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      The right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates deserves to be commemorated with a coin, Representative Adriano Espaillat says.Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out why a congressman from the Bronx is pressing for a coin to commemorate a baseball player from the Pittsburgh Pirates. We’ll also see what to expect as Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial moves into its final phase.Preston Stroup/Associated PressRepresentative Adriano Espaillat has introduced 49 bills in this session of Congress. One would direct colleges to send information about hate crimes to the federal Department of Education. Another would simplify the requirements for federal assistance after disasters like Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.Yet another bill would authorize a coin commemorating Roberto Clemente, the superlative right fielder who played for only one team in 18 years in the major leagues, the Pittsburgh Pirates.Why is a congressman from the Bronx cheering on a star of a team that beat the Yankees in the World Series?“I watched him play,” Espaillat said, before talking about how deep the Pirates’ stadium was when Clemente played there — 457 feet to the center-field wall.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?  More