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      Johnson’s Spending Plan Falters, Facing Resistance From Both Parties

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      The speaker’s first effort to avert a government shutdown ran into a buzz saw of opposition from both far-right and mainstream Republicans.Speaker Mike Johnson’s initial plan to avert a government shutdown has run into a wall of Republican opposition, as lawmakers from an array of factions in his party balk at a six-month stopgap funding measure that Democrats have already rejected.Mr. Johnson has said he plans to bring up a spending bill this week that would extend federal funding through March 28, which includes a measure that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. The addition of the voting restriction bill was a nod to the right flank of his conference and an effort to force politically vulnerable Democrats to take a fraught vote.But his $1.6 trillion proposal was almost immediately met with an outpouring of skepticism by House Republicans on Monday evening as they returned to Washington after a lengthy summer recess. Hard-line conservatives, including Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, said they would oppose the legislation because it would extend current spending levels they believe are too high.The legislation “doesn’t cut spending, and the shiny object attached to it will be dropped like a hot potato before passage,” Mr. Massie said, referring to the voting restriction. He added: “I refuse to be a thespian in this failure theater.”On the other hand, Republican defense hawks, including Representative Mike D. Rogers of Alabama, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said they opposed the plan because extending current spending levels for such a lengthy period would amount to a cut to military spending, which would otherwise be slated to increase in the coming months.The internal divisions were the latest headache for Mr. Johnson in a seemingly interminable series of skirmishes over government funding that have dogged him since Republicans took control of the House. Every episode has ended with the same result: passage of a bipartisan spending bill that has angered the right flank of the House Republican conference.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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      Netanyahu Stands Firm on Cease-Fire Terms Amid Growing Outrage in Israel

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      In his first news conference since the bodies of six killed hostages were recovered, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to budge on his conditions for any truce in Gaza.Brushing aside pleas from allies and the demands of Israeli protesters for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza in exchange for the release of hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday vowed to maintain Israeli control along the border between Egypt and Gaza, a contentious plan that appeared to dim, if not dash, prospects for a truce.In his first news conference since the bodies of six slain hostages were recovered over the weekend, Mr. Netanyahu told reporters on Monday night that, to ensure its security, Israel needed to assert control over the Gazan side of the border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, calling it the lifeline of Hamas.Hamas has said Israeli control of the corridor is a nonstarter in negotiations for a truce, demanding instead a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.“If we leave, there will be enormous diplomatic pressure upon us from the whole world not to return,” Mr. Netanyahu said of the corridor, as a large crowd protested near his private residence in Jerusalem on Monday night.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters on Monday that to ensure its security, Israel needed to assert control over the Philadelphi Corridor, calling it the lifeline of Hamas. Ohad Zwigenberg/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Netanyahu made the comments a day after the Israeli military announced that the six hostages had been found dead in a tunnel underneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The discovery devastated Israelis and spurred both the mass protests on Sunday and a widespread work stoppage by the country’s largest labor union.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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      Backpage Founder Gets Five Years in Case That Shut Down Website

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      Michael Lacey, 76, co-founded the website that became known for its ads for prostitution. He was convicted on a money laundering charge in a case that included accusations of sex trafficking.A founder of the shuttered classified advertising website Backpage was sentenced on Wednesday to five years in federal prison in connection with a sweeping case that led to the closing of the website and accusations against its executives that they promoted sex trafficking, prosecutors said.Michael Lacey, 76, of Arizona, was convicted on a single count of international concealment money laundering in November after being charged in a 100-count indictment in 2018 with several other defendants who, prosecutors said, conspired to promote prostitution ads and launder earnings of more than $500 million made from the scheme between 2010 and 2018. The case was tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.In addition to the five-year prison sentence, Mr. Lacey was ordered Wednesday to pay a $3 million fine, prosecutors said.The jury that convicted Mr. Lacey last year was deadlocked on 84 other charges against him, including several charges that he helped advertise prostitution on Backpage. The deadlock led U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa to declare a mistrial on those counts. It was the second mistrial in the case. Mr. Lacey would later be acquitted of several of the counts, but could still face 30 of them, according to The Associated Press.Two other executives, Scott Spear and John “Jed” Brunst, were convicted alongside Mr. Lacey on both money laundering and prostitution facilitation counts.They were acquitted on some of those charges in April, but each received 10-year sentences Wednesday, according to a spokesman for the Justice Department, Joshua Stueve.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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      Bennington to Revive Dance Program of Philadelphia Arts School

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      Bennington College raised nearly $1.3 million to absorb the dance program of the University of the Arts, which shuttered suddenly in June.Two months after the University of the Arts in Philadelphia closed, the school’s dance program will be revived at Bennington College in Vermont, which will absorb the dance school, three staff members and nearly 50 students, the college announced on Thursday.“What they are doing is the future of dance,” said Laura Walker, the president of Bennington College, who helped raise nearly $1.3 million from philanthropists to make it happen. The money included a donation of $1 million from Barbara and Sebastian Scripps, who run a nonprofit focused on arts education.“It’s a tough time, and we hope this will be a model for others,” Walker said.Nearly 1,150 students and 700 employees were left adrift after the University of the Arts president, Kerry Walk, abruptly closed the school in June, citing financial woes, and then resigned. Soon after, Pennsylvania officials opened an inquiry into the unexpected collapse. Some faculty and students have joined class-action lawsuits accusing the school of fraud and breach of contract; a union representing workers also filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the university in July.Several universities have offered spots to incoming freshmen who had committed to the University of the Arts. Temple University in Philadelphia has also welcomed returning fine arts and drama students, some of whom were near graduation.But the agreement with Bennington College goes further: All incoming and returning students were invited to attend. Donna Faye Burchfield, the former dean of the University of the Arts School of Dance, will oversee the bachelor and masters of fine arts programs, with about 50 students. The program will also include a number of visiting dance artists who previously taught in Philadelphia.“On a Friday evening, we learned about the school closing,” Burchfield said. “On Saturday morning, I started making calls.”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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      New York Will Allow Mount Sinai to Close Beth Israel Hospital

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      The health facility’s potential closure had been contentious following the shuttering of other hospitals serving Lower Manhattan.The New York State Department of Health has agreed to allow a major hospital in Manhattan to close, which would leave many downtown residents farther away from emergency medical care.The fate of the hospital, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, has been up in the air since 2016, when its parent hospital system first announced a closure plan. The hospital survived for years, kept alive by community activists who filed lawsuits to keep it open, as well as by the coronavirus pandemic, which filled its beds with critically ill patients.Over the past year, however, the parent hospital system, Mount Sinai, renewed its push to close Beth Israel, claiming the facility was losing so much money that the losses threatened the entire hospital system, one of the city’s largest.On Thursday the State Health Department, which evaluates hospital closure proposals, said that it had approved Mount Sinai’s plan to close Beth Israel, with several conditions.The conditions are aimed at ensuring that nearby hospitals aren’t overwhelmed by the increase of patients expected after Beth Israel closes. The hospital, at 16th Street and First Avenue, treated just under 50,000 patients last year, and handles about 6 percent of all emergency room visits in Manhattan. Once it closes, many of those patients will most likely land at Bellevue or NYU Langone Health, two hospitals both several blocks up First Avenue from Beth Israel.The Health Department said Beth Israel must fund an expansion of the emergency room at Bellevue, the flagship of the city’s public hospital system. Another condition is that Beth Israel must run an urgent care center, open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for three months.The state’s decision removes a major hurdle standing in the way of Mount Sinai’s closure, but for the moment, the hospital must stay open: It still faces a lawsuit challenging the closing, and a judge has ordered the facility not to reduce its medical services in the meantime. But many doctors and nurses have left over the past year to find more secure jobs elsewhere. At times, care has suffered and patients have been rerouted to other hospitals because Beth Israel is no longer able to respond to strokes and some other medical emergencies.A spokesman for the Mount Sinai hospital system, Loren Riegelhaupt, said in a statement that Beth Israel would remain open and accept patients, for now.Beth Israel was founded in 1889, initially as a dispensary serving mainly Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. It grew into a major Manhattan hospital, but has struggled in recent years.The past 20 years have seen the closure of two large nearby hospitals: Cabrini in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village.In a letter to the state health commissioner on Thursday, a longtime health activist, Mark Hannay, wrote that allowing the closure to go forward risked leaving “a dangerous gap in availability of emergency care in Lower Manhattan.” More

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      Philadelphia’s University of the Arts Announces Sudden Closing

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      The institution’s financial woes were widely known, but the announcement surprised students and faculty members.The nearly 150-year-old University of the Arts in Philadelphia will close its doors June 7. Many of its 1,149 students and about 700 faculty and staff members got the news from an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday or on social media, only later getting official word from the school.“The situation came to light very suddenly,” an announcement on its website said. It noted that “UArts has been in a fragile financial state, with many years of declining enrollments, declining revenues and increasing expenses.”Enrollment is down from 2,038 in 2013. In an interview with the Inquirer, the institution’s president, Kerry Walk, said that revenue, including grants and gifts, failed to arrive in time to bolster the school’s finances. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredited the institution, indicated on Friday that it had revoked the University’s accreditation immediately, leaving no option for the school but to close. Town halls are planned on Monday.“At 2:47 p.m. on Friday I got an email asking me to apply for graduation, and at 6:03 the Inquirer posted the story that my school was closing,” Natalie DeFruscio, an illustration major who first took classes there in the sixth grade and would have started her senior year in the fall, told The New York Times. “If you spent five minutes there, you could tell it was oozing with talented students. And there were amazing professors I adore who were also blindsided by this,” she said.The closing was the result of a mix of cash flow constraints that are typical of schools like UArts, which depend on tuition dollars. In addition, UArts faced significant unanticipated costs, including major infrastructure repairs. The escalation of the costs significantly increased and could not be covered by revenue, according to a statement from the board of trustees on Sunday. “Despite our best efforts, we could not ultimately identify a viable path for the institution to remain open and in the service of its mission,” the statement said.The email on Friday, from Walk, who had been in the position less than a year, and Judson Aaron, chair of the board of trustees, pledged to assist students in transferring to area institutions. The school did not make its leadership available for interviews.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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      Walmart Is Shutting Health Centers After Plan to Expand

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      The 51 locations, next to Supercenters, proved too costly to be profitable, the retailer said.Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, said Tuesday that it was shutting down its health care centers, a network that only last year it said it planned to expand.The retailer said in a blog post that its 51 health centers across five states would close. The centers were next to Supercenter locations. The plans won’t affect the more than 4,600 pharmacies and more than 3,000 vision centers within Walmart stores.Walmart started the health-care clinic initiative in 2019 in Dallas, Ga., with centers providing primary care, labs, X-rays and electrocardiograms, counseling, and dental, optical and hearing services. Many were in smaller towns where customers might lack access to quality care, and the company had said it was focused on affordability. In 2021, Walmart started offering a virtual option when it acquired MeMD, a telehealth provider.“This is a difficult decision, and like others, the challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs create a lack of profitability that make the care business unsustainable for us at this time,” the company said Tuesday.Walmart said it was still deciding when it would close each center. In addition to Georgia, centers are in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Workers within the centers will be paid for 90 days and will be eligible to transfer to other Walmart or Sam’s Club locations, the company said.Offering health care is more difficult than selling consumer goods like laundry detergent and car parts, said David Silverman, a retail analyst at Fitch Ratings, noting the layers of government and insurance providers involved.“The attempts to enter these spaces and some of the failures of doing so really underscore the challenges and complexities of operating in the U.S. health care space,” Mr. Silverman said.In March 2023, Walmart said it planned to double its health center locations. It said that by the end of 2024, it expected to have more than 75 Walmart Health Centers and expand to states like Missouri and Arizona.In 2021, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase ended their high-profile joint health care venture, which sought to explore new ways to deliver health care to their employees. In March, Walgreens said it had closed 140 of its VillageMD clinics and planned to close 20 more. More

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      Key Solar Panel Ingredient Is Made in the U.S.A. Again

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      REC Silicon says it will soon start shipping polysilicon, which has come mostly from China, reviving a Washington State factory that shut down in 2019.A factory in Moses Lake, Wash., that shut down in 2019 will soon resume shipping a critical ingredient used in most solar panels that for years has been made almost exclusively in China.The revival of the factory, which is owned by REC Silicon, could help achieve a longstanding goal of many American lawmakers and energy executives to re-establish a complete domestic supply chain for solar panels and reduce the world’s reliance on plants in China and Southeast Asia.REC Silicon reopened the factory, which makes polysilicon, the building block for the large majority of solar panels, in November in partnership with Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean company that is investing billions of dollars in U.S. solar panel production. As part of the deal, Hanwha this month said it has become the largest shareholder in REC Silicon, which is based in Norway.Executives at the companies say they reopened the factory in part because of incentives for domestic manufacturing in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate law. They expressed hope that their decision would also encourage other companies to revive production of a technology that was created in the United States about 70 years ago.“As a whole, the United States was No. 1,” said Kurt Levens, chief executive of REC Silicon. “People forget that. You need more cell manufacturing that is outside China.”Factories in China and Southeast Asia produce more than 95 percent of the solar panels that use polysilicon and most of the components that go into those devices. Chinese manufacturers are so dominant that most manufacturers in the United States had stopped producing polysilicon, including REC Silicon.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