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      Where Does Biden’s Student Loan Debt Plan Stand? Here’s What to Know.

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      The Supreme Court refused to allow a key part of President Biden’s student debt plan to move forward. Here’s what’s left of it, and who could still benefit.President Biden’s latest effort to wipe out student loan debt for millions of Americans is in jeopardy.The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to allow a key component of the policy, known as the SAVE plan, to move forward after an emergency application by the Biden administration.Until Republican-led states sued to block the plan over the summer, SAVE had been the main way for borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness. The program allowed people to make payments based on income and family size; some borrowers ended up having their remaining debt canceled altogether.Other elements of Mr. Biden’s loan forgiveness plan remain in effect for now. And over the course of Mr. Biden’s presidency, his administration has canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million people, or roughly one in 10 federal loan holders.But Wednesday’s decision leaves millions of Americans in limbo.Here is a look at what the ruling means for borrowers and what happens next:Who was eligible for SAVE?Most people with federal undergraduate or graduate loans could apply for forgiveness under SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.But the amount of relief it provided varied depending on factors such as income and family size. More than eight million people enrolled in the program during the roughly 10 months that it was available, and about 400,000 of them got some amount of debt canceled.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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      Supreme Court, for Now, Blocks Protections for Transgender Students in Some States

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      The order maintained halts by lower courts on federal rules prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in schools.The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily continued to block Education Department rules intended to protect transgender students from discrimination based on their gender identity in several Republican states that had mounted challenges.The emergency order allowed rulings by lower courts in Louisiana and Kentucky to remain in effect in about 10 states as litigation moves forward, maintaining a pause on new federal guidelines expanding protections for transgender students that had been enacted in nearly half the country on Aug. 1.The order came in response to a challenge by the Biden administration, which asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a number of Republican-led states sought to overturn the new rules.The decision was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency petitions. But all nine members of the court said that parts of the new rules — including the protections for transgender students — should not go into effect until the legal challenges are resolved.“Importantly,” the unsigned order said, “all members of the court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”The decision handed a victory to the Republican-led states that had challenged the rules. A patchwork of lower court decisions means that the rules are temporarily paused in about 26 states.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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      Tom Korologos, Sherpa of Republican Nominees, Dies at 91

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      As a White House official and later as a lobbyist, he guided about 300 nominees through their confirmation hearings, including Supreme Court justices.Tom Korologos, an influential Republican lobbyist and adviser whose specialty was shepherding presidential nominees through their Senate confirmation hearings, died on July 26 at his home in Washington. He was 91.His son, Philip, confirmed the death.Mr. Korologos (pronounced core-a-LOW-gus) was a strategist, hand-holder and stage manager for about 300 nominees to the United States Supreme Court, the cabinet and other positions in the federal government. He coached them in the politics of the confirmation process, which grew more contentious over the course of his lifetime; squired them to meetings with senators; counseled them to speak with caution; and conducted tough mock hearings that he called “murder boards.”“I fire the rottenest, most insulting questions in the world at them,” he told The New York Times in 1986.He was the successful sherpa for major figures like William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia when they were nominated to the Supreme Court, and once again for Judge Rehnquist when he was named chief justice; Nelson A. Rockefeller as vice president; Edwin Meese III as attorney general; Alexander M. Haig Jr. as secretary of state; and Donald H. Rumsfeld both times he was nominated for secretary of defense.Mr. Korologos developed his expertise in Senate confirmations while working from 1971 to 1975 as special assistant to President Richard M. Nixon, and later as deputy assistant for legislative affairs under both Mr. Nixon and President Gerald R. Ford. He continued that work, without pay, as the president of Timmons & Company, a lobbying firm he helped start, whose clients included Eastern Airlines, Major League Baseball and Anheuser-Busch.Mr. Korologos, right, conferred with Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, President Gerald R. Ford’s running mate, at a platform committee meeting in advance of the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Mo.George Tames/The New York TimesWe 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 Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      Sean Patrick Cirillo called Ms. Greene’s office and told staff members about his plans to kill the politician, the F.B.I. said. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.An Atlanta man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to making death threats against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.The man, Sean Patrick Cirillo, 34, made two threatening phone calls on Nov. 8, 2023, to Ms. Greene’s Washington, D.C., office, spoke to staff members and said that he planned to shoot the politician in the head, an F.B.I. agent said in court documents.“I’m gonna kill her next week,” Mr. Cirillo said, according to recordings of the phone call that were reviewed by the F.B.I. “I’m gonna murder her.”Mr. Cirillo pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to one count of transmitting interstate threats. He will face a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison when he is sentenced on Nov. 7.“Threatening to kill a public official is reprehensible,” Ryan K. Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. “Our office will not tolerate any form of violence, threats or intimidation against public officials.”In a statement, Mr. Cirillo’s lawyer, Allison Dawson, said that Mr. Cirillo had struggled with mental health issues and was not on his prescribed medication at the time of the incident.Ms. Greene’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.After Mr. Cirillo was arrested, Ms. Greene said in a statement to Atlanta News First: “Threats to murder elected officials should never be tolerated.”During his phone calls to Ms. Greene’s office, the F.B.I. said, Mr. Cirillo said that he was focusing on Ms. Greene through the sight of a sniper rifle. He also threatened to kill her staff members who picked up the two calls, which he made on Nov. 8 at 1:33 p.m. and 5:36 p.m., the F.B.I. said.The next day, when the F.B.I. showed up at Mr. Cirillo’s home by tracking his phone number, Mr. Cirillo admitted to making the calls, said he had made them to “get attention” and added that he had called “multiple other people as well including other members of Congress,” court records state. It is not clear who else received Mr. Cirillo’s calls.Mr. Cirillo’s guilty plea is the latest event in a recent pattern of threats toward political figures. Last week, a man was charged with threatening to assault and kill federal officials, judges and state employees across several states, including people involved in the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump.In California, some elected officials said they were rethinking public office in light of increasing harassment.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Antisemitism on Campuses, Ivy and Beyond

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      More from our inbox:A Middleman’s Role in Drug PrescriptionsObjection, Your HonorTrump vs. the Environment Alex Welsh for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?,” by Bret Stephens (column, June 26):Mr. Stephens has issued a sobering and well-documented indictment of antisemitism on elite campuses. The question asked by the headline is timely and troubling for many Jewish high school students and their families.As noted by Mr. Stephens, confused administrators and revisionist curriculums contributed to this crisis. But the insensitivity and hypocrisy of supposedly idealistic and enlightened college students may be the most striking and unkind cut of all.“Safe spaces” and rules against “microaggressions” have become commonplace on campuses. Yet when Jewish students made it known that calling for deadly attacks on Jews (“Globalize the intifada!”) is offensive and intimidating, they were ignored.Chants in favor of colonization or racism would never — and should never — be met with such indifference. It hurts.Perhaps the headline of Mr. Stephens’s column should be rephrased: “Have Elite Universities Abandoned American Jews?”Alan M. SchwartzTeaneck, N.J.To the Editor:While the Ivies have claimed the antisemitism spotlight this year, Jew-hatred is flourishing on many other campuses, including mine, the University of California, Davis.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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      America’s Gerontocracy Problem Goes Beyond the President

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      Whether or not Joe Biden persists in his run for president, America’s gerontocratic crisis will keep on worsening. But high-profile symptoms like Mr. Biden’s difficulties provide an opportunity to confront the issue — a social form of sclerosis that will persist unless and until more power is transferred from the wrinkled to the rest.Gerontocracy transcends government as a full-scale social phenomenon, in which older people accumulate power of different kinds, and then retain it.This form of power is both old and new. The term “gerontocracy” was popularized a century ago by the Scottish anthropologist J.G. Frazer to refer to a very early form of government, in which power reposed in councils of elders. Since premodern societies valued the past over the future, and the ancestral over the innovative, it was only natural to allocate authority to those with cumulative experience and nearer the realm of the honored dead.When the Constitution imposed an age minimum of 30 (and no maximum) on the Senate, that restriction alone excluded roughly three-quarters of the white population from serving. This set up the distant possibility of our present, in which Mr. Biden could become one of the youngest senators ever when he took his seat at age 30, while Dianne Feinstein (age 90), Robert Byrd (92) and Strom Thurmond (100) all either died in office or just months after retirement.The Supreme Court is also an outpost of elder rule. The Constitution gives federal judges life tenure, so it is entirely up to them when they finally depart, alive or dead. And it is not surprising when they die in the midst of opining on the law: Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 87, William Rehnquist at 80 and Antonin Scalia at 79. At least five federal judges have passed 100 years of age while on the bench.The Supreme Court was quasi-gerontocratic from the start, like the Senate, only more so. The popular and professional ideology of the judicial role emphasizes even more the association of age with wisdom. And the Supreme Court’s oracular purposes, priestly trappings and mystical rituals make it resemble, more than any other American political institution, gerontocratic clubs like the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals.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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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.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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      U.S. Marshal Shoots Man in Attempted Carjacking Near Sotomayor’s Home

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      The marshal was sitting in an unmarked federal vehicle near the Supreme Court justice’s home when a man approached the vehicle and pointed a handgun at him through the driver’s side window.A U.S. marshal on a Supreme Court security detail shot and wounded an armed man who tried to carjack him early Friday near Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home in northwest Washington, according to court documents.The marshal was sitting in an unmarked federal vehicle when a silver Toyota minivan pulled over next to him, according to court documents. A man, identified in the documents as Kentrell Flowers, 18, exited the van, approached the marshal and pointed a handgun at him through the driver’s side window.The marshal drew his gun and fired at Mr. Flowers through the window four times, hitting him in the mouth, according to the court documents. A second U.S. marshal from another vehicle also responded and fired his weapon, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.The first marshal provided first aid to Mr. Flowers, who was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Mr. Flowers was charged with armed carjacking, carrying a pistol without a license, and possession of a large-capacity ammunition-feeding device.The driver of the minivan, which had been carjacked, fled the scene. The Metropolitan Police Department opened an investigation into the episode, which occurred in the Shaw neighborhood.The marshals “involved in the shooting incident were part of the unit protecting the residences of U.S. Supreme Court justices,” a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement. “As a general practice, the U.S. Marshals don’t discuss specifics of protective details.”Carjackings are down nearly 50 percent this year compared with the same period last year, according to the crime data from the Metropolitan Police Department. Following a national trend, the overall crime rate in the District of Columbia is down 17 percent compared with last year. More