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      U.K. Labour Lawmaker Suspended From Party After Arrest

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      Dan Norris, a lawmaker who won a seat in Parliament last year, was swiftly suspended from Britain’s governing party.Britain’s governing Labour Party on Saturday said it had suspended Dan Norris, one of its lawmakers in Parliament, after he was arrested by the police.Mr. Morris “was immediately suspended by the Labour Party upon being informed of his arrest,” the party said in a statement, adding that it “cannot comment further while the police investigation is ongoing.”The party did not specify why Mr. Norris, 65, had been arrested, and he did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. In Britain, the police typically do not disclose the name of suspects unless they are charged. The BBC said that Mr. Norris was arrested on suspicion of rape, child sex offenses, child abduction and misconduct in a public office.In a statement that did not give any names, the Avon and Somerset Police said that a man in his 60s was arrested on Friday on suspicion of sexual offenses against a girl, rape, child abduction and misconduct in a public office. The police said he had been released on conditional bail.“In December 2024, we received a referral from another police force relating to alleged non-recent child sex offenses having been committed against a girl,” the police statement said.“Most of the offenses are alleged to have occurred in the 2000s, but we’re also investigating an alleged offense of rape from the 2020s,” it added. The police said that the investigation was “ongoing and at an early stage.”The Labour Party’s move is expected to mean that Mr. Norris will, pending the investigation, be effectively suspended from representing the party in the House of Commons.Last year Mr. Norris won a seat in Parliament representing North East Somerset and Hanham, near the city of Bristol, defeating a former Conservative cabinet minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg.Mr. Norris is also the mayor of the West of England, responsible for the administration of several cities in a western region, a position he has held since 2021, though he is not running for re-election when that post is contested on May 1.His political career goes back more than two decades. Mr. Norris was a lawmaker from 1997 to 2010, representing the seat of Wansdyke, in the west of England. He was an assistant whip in the government of Tony Blair from 2001 to 2003, and a junior minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2009 to 2010, under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. More

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      Trump Weighs In on Marine Le Pen Conviction

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      “FREE MARINE LE PEN!”With this blunt call, a strange one in that the French far-right leader is walking the streets of Paris, President Trump has waded into the politics of an ally, condemning her conviction this week on embezzlement charges and her disqualification from running for public office.The conviction was “another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. Elon Musk, his billionaire aide, drove home the point: “Free Le Pen!” Mr. Musk echoed on his social media platform X.More than an extraordinary American intervention in French politics, the statements ignored the overwhelming evidence arrayed against Ms. Le Pen, who was convicted of helping orchestrate over many years a system to divert European taxpayers’ money illicitly to offset the acute financial difficulties of her National Rally party in France.Instead, for the American president and his team, as well as an angry chorus of Le Pen supporters at home, her case has become part of a vigorous campaign to undermine the separation of powers and the rule of law, which have been portrayed by Vice President JD Vance as no more than a means to stifle the far right and to quash democracy in the name of saving it.Ms. Le Pen last year. She became the face of France’s far right after taking over the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen will speak at a big National Rally demonstration Sunday in Paris under the banner “Let’s Save Democracy!” The National Rally was founded in 1972 as the National Front, an antisemitic party of fascist roots, by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. It was long seen as a direct threat to the democratic rule of the Fifth Republic, before Ms. Le Pen embarked on a makeover.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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      Javier Milei, Trump’s ‘Favorite President,’ Has Few Deals to Offer — but Lots of Adoration

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      Javier Milei of Argentina might not be that useful for the United States on economics or geopolitics — but he can help to fight the culture wars.The day after President Trump antagonized world leaders across the globe with his most sweeping set of tariffs yet, he was scheduled to fly to Florida and potentially see the one leader he has called his “favorite president.”That leader, President Javier Milei of Argentina, had flown overnight to receive an award on Thursday at a right-wing gala at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump was scheduled to also be there late Thursday — Mr. Milei said Mr. Trump would receive an award, too — and Mr. Milei said he hoped the two would meet.It was Mr. Milei’s 10th trip to the United States in 15 months as president, and nearly every time, he has met Mr. Trump or Elon Musk.Mr. Trump has posited that he is reshuffling U.S. foreign policy strictly around what is good for the United States.So what can be puzzling about his elevation of Argentina to the front row of America’s allies — Mr. Milei and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy were the only world leaders onstage at Mr. Trump’s inauguration — is that the chronically distressed South American nation is not particularly important as an economic or geopolitical partner.Instead, through Mr. Milei, Argentina has offered Mr. Trump something else he appears to crave: adoration.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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      Mallory McMorrow Enters Michigan Senate Race

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      The 38-year-old Democratic state lawmaker says that her party needs a generational shift.State Senator Mallory McMorrow of Michigan, a Democrat from the Detroit suburbs, jumped into her state’s U.S. Senate race on Wednesday, becoming the first prominent candidate to enter the contest, which will help decide control of the chamber next fall.The seat opened after Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, announced his retirement, and the race — in a state that has often favored Democratic senators but twice voted for President Trump — will be among the most closely watched in the country next year.“We need new leaders,” Ms. McMorrow, 38, said in her announcement video. “The same people in D.C. who got us into this mess are not going to be the ones to get us out of it.”Ms. McMorrow won Democrats’ acclaim several years ago for defending liberal values while identifying herself as a “straight, white, Christian, married suburban mom,” and her announcement video featured national pundits remarking on the speech. She flipped a Republican-held district in 2018 and is the first woman to become State Senate majority whip, her campaign has noted, in Michigan’s history.She is unlikely to have the Democratic lane to herself for long.Democrats who have signaled that they are eyeing the Senate race include Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate from suburban Detroit; Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat who won a challenging House district in Michigan last year; and Abdul El-Sayed, an outgoing health director in Wayne County and a progressive who ran unsuccessfully against now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, in the 2018 primary.Ms. Whitmer, who is term-limited, has said she is uninterested in running for Senate. Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has also taken himself out of contention.Whoever emerges from the Democratic primary, the race is expected to be competitive in the general election.Republicans who could or are expected to run include former Representative Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost to Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, in November, and Representative Bill Huizenga. Tudor Dixon, who lost the governor’s race to Ms. Whitmer in 2022, and Kevin Rinke, who lost that Republican primary, could look at runs for Senate or governor. More

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      How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul

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      For decades, Larry Ellison reveled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.Few paid much attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the America’s Cup, which he did. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.”Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of U.S. users on its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5 percent of a new company, TikTok Global. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.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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      South Korea’s President Will Learn His Fate on Friday

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      The Constitutional Court will announce on Friday whether Yoon Suk Yeol, who was impeached in December for declaring martial law, will be permanently removed from office or restored to power.Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, who was impeached in December over his failed attempt to impose martial law, will learn on Friday whether he will be formally removed from office or returned to power, the nation’s top court said on Tuesday.Suspense was building in South Korea as the country waited for the Constitutional Court to rule on Mr. Yoon’s fate. Mr. Yoon has been suspended from office since the National Assembly impeached him on Dec. 14. In South Korea, the Constitutional Court decides whether an impeached official is removed permanently from office or reinstated.Removing Mr. Yoon would require the votes of six or more of the court’s eight justices; otherwise, he will return to office.​ The court’s decision, which cannot be appealed, is a critical moment in the political upheaval​ that Mr. Yoon unleashed when he declared martial law on Dec. 3.If ​the court removes him, Mr. Yoon will become the second president in South Korean history to leave office through impeachment. (President Park Geun-hye was the first, in 2017.) The country will quickly shift gears toward a new election; a successor must be chosen within 60 days.If he is reinstated, South Korea’s political crisis is likely to deepen. Mr. Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law angered millions of South Koreans. Even if reinstated, he will resume his presidential duties with his ability to govern considerably weakened.Mr. Yoon was detained on Jan. 15 on insurrection charges, also connected to his ill-fated imposition of martial law. The suspense surrounding his future intensified after a Seoul court unexpectedly released him from jail on March 8, saying that his detention was procedurally flawed.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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      What’s at Stake in Wisconsin

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      Elon Musk sees the state’s Supreme Court race as a way of preserving Republicans’ power in Washington.About nine minutes into his time onstage in Green Bay last night, Elon Musk neatly explained why he — a billionaire technologist who is already distracted by a little project in Washington — had poured $20 million and hours of his time into a Wisconsin Supreme Court election.“What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives,” he said.The party that controls the chamber, he added, “controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization.”Anybody not currently serving in the House might consider that last part to be hyperbole. But Musk’s words revealed his stated motivation behind his involvement on behalf of the conservative candidate, Judge Brad Schimel: He sees it as a way of preserving Republicans’ power well beyond Wisconsin.He has a point. Democrats don’t talk about it in quite such existential terms, but they are widely expected to challenge the narrowly divided state’s congressional maps, which currently favor Republicans, if voters maintain a liberal majority on the Supreme Court.With Republicans holding a thin majority in the House now, any changes that make it easier for Democrats to win seats could have major consequences in midterm elections next year.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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      Fire at New Mexico Republican Party Headquarters Being Investigated as Arson

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      The headquarters of the Republican Party of New Mexico in Albuquerque was damaged early Sunday morning in what the party described as a “deliberate act of arson.”Albuquerque Fire Rescue confirmed that it had been dispatched to the party’s headquarters just before 6 a.m. for a report of a structure fire, which was brought under control within five minutes. No injuries to civilians or firefighters were reported.The fire burned the entryway of the headquarters and left smoke damage throughout the building, Lt. Jason Fejer, a spokesman for the fire department, said on Sunday.He confirmed that the department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives were investigating the fire as an act of arson.A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. confirmed that it was investigating but said she could not provide further details because the investigation was ongoing. The A.T.F. did not immediately respond to requests for information on Sunday.The Albuquerque Police Department confirmed that the federal authorities were investigating but did not provide any further information, including whether arrests had been made.In a statement, the Republican Party of New Mexico said the fire was “not an isolated incident” and was accompanied by the spray-painted letters “ICE=KKK.”In recent months, ICE, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has deployed agents across the country to carry out what the Trump administration has characterized as a new and more aggressive effort to target illegal immigration and deliver on a key campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations.The Democratic Party of New Mexico said on Sunday that it condemned “any vandalism at the Republican Party of New Mexico headquarters as strongly as possible.”The Republican Party of New Mexico said the fire was accompanied by the spray-painted letters “ICE=KKK.”Republican Party of New Mexico“We firmly maintain that this sort of act has absolutely no place in our democracy, and that peaceful discourse and organization are the only ways to approach political differences in our country,” the state Democratic Party added. “We hope whoever is responsible is found and held accountable.”Amy Barela, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of New Mexico, said on Sunday that the alarm system at the party’s headquarters had gone off around 1 a.m., about four hours before the fire started.There had been a separate bomb threat and other acts of vandalism at the headquarters in recent years, she said.A former Republican candidate for the New Mexico House of Representatives this month was found guilty of hiring people to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials in Albuquerque in 2022 and 2023.“We completely condemn violence,” Ms. Barela said. “It doesn’t matter where it’s coming from.”The party was “deeply relieved that no one was harmed in what could have been a tragic and deadly attack,” she said. More