The New York Times - 11.10.2026 — 2026-10-11

The New York Times

"All the News That's Fit to Print"

VOL.CLXXVI ... No. 61,034

© 2026 The New York Times Company

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2026

Today, heavy rain, street flooding, high 64. Tonight, a bit of rain, flooding will linger, low 58. Tomorrow, a shower early, afternoon sunshine, high 71. Weather map, Page 32.

THE WEATHER

Prices in Canada may be higher

\$6.00

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAIYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

'It makes you put your head on a swivel. I didn't go to leave the house at the same time of day and didn't take the same route to work frequently.'

RODRIC BRAY, Republican leader of the Indiana Senate, whose office received bomb threats.

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'My dad, in his final month of life, is having to answer the door to police who are told that he was killing his wife inside the residence.'

ELISSA SLOTKIN, Democratic U.S. senator from Michigan, whose parents' home was "swatted," or targeted with false police reports.

A U.S. Diplomat Altered and Quashed Reports Critical of Israel

By NATAN ODENHEIMER and ADAM RASGON

JERUSALEM — In late March, at the height of the Iran war, Israel quietly approved more settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank than it ever had at one time.

Staff members at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem saw the move as potentially flouting one of President Trump's explicit red lines for Israel — no annexation of the West Bank — and drafted an urgent report intended for policymakers in Washington.

That memo never reached Washington. It was quashed by David Milstein, a top aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee, according to three U.S. officials briefed on the process.

This was no isolated incident.

Since taking up his post in April 2025, Mr. Milstein, 36, has repeatedly suppressed or significantly revised embassy reporting on Israeli activities to present the Netanyahu government in a favorable light, according to a dozen people who work with or interact with Mr. Milstein in both Jerusalem and Washington.

As settler violence in the West Bank surged in the spring, for instance, he stymied embassy reporting suggesting that the Israeli government was failing to take action, according to the three officials. Instead the embassy sent a cable to Washington, viewed by The New York Times, praising Israel for "cracking down" on the attacks.

When members of Congress pushed for accountability over the killings of Palestinian Americans by Israeli settlers and security forces, he suppressed a detailed report that the embassy staff had

Continued on Page 6

Trump Attacks Ukraine Leader Over Oil Strikes

By MARC SANTORA and ANDREW E. KRAMER

President Trump on Saturday accused Ukraine of causing a "world problem" with attacks on Russian refineries and said it should "get a new president," further undermining Kyiv a day after saying the U.S. would open its markets to Russian diesel.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Saturday, he said the United States had told Ukraine: "You can do whatever you want to Russia. Don't hit the refineries because that's a world problem that's caused."

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, he said, "wants to make problems for the world." He added, "I think it's time for Ukraine to get a new president."

More than four years since Russia began its full-scale invasion, Ukraine has pursued a strategy of mid- and long-range strikes that have battered Russian supply lines and oil infrastructure. The attacks have helped Ukraine to stall Russian advances and even claw back some territory, but Mr. Trump on Saturday linked them to high fuel prices, which spiked this year after the United States and Israel attacked Iran.

"He wants to make problems for the world," Mr. Trump said of Mr. Zelensky. "He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers with diesel fuel because Russia supplies a large portion of

Continued on Page 11

Indian Security Forces Quell Demonstration

SAUMYA KHANDELWAL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In an extraordinary move, throngs of people were detained for opposing a voting revision. Page 4.

Thousands of Violent Messages Targeting U.S. Politicians Across Party Lines

Public Officials Are Living In Fear as Threats Mount

In January, a caller began leaving threats in the voice mail in-boxes of members of Congress: "I want to see their throat cut from ear to ear."

By NICK CORASANITI

Another caller left a blunt threat for a U.S. senator: "I'm going to murder you, and I'm going to start with your children."

A state attorney general received this three-word missive: "Bang, bang, bang."

Serving in public office in the United States is dangerous. From state and local government to Congress, an unending river of violent threats is washing through the mailboxes, offices, voice mail and texts of those who govern the nation. Thousands of public servants are living, working and, in the final weeks of election season, campaigning in a state of fear.

And it's getting worse, office-holders said in dozens of interviews.

An investigation by The New York Times examining hundreds of records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, court documents and law enforcement logs has found that, over a two-year period from 2024 to August of this year, thousands of violent threats inundated the lives of elected officials in unprecedented ways.

Some threats were vague; some were frighteningly specific. They promised torture, stabbing, rape and murder. They aimed at Republicans and Democrats alike, and at a range of officeholders from county clerks to United States senators. They targeted spouses, parents, siblings and children.

At least 44 governors, as well as their staffs and families, have been subjected to violent threats over the past two years. The Times's investigation found. That's also true of at least 70 of the nation's 100 senators, and at least 185 members of the House of Representatives — nearly half the body. More than half of the country's secretaries of state, most of whom serve as their states' chief election officers, have received threats of violence.

Actual violence also spiked during that period: assassination attempts against Donald Trump, the killing of Charlie Kirk, the assassination of a legislative leader and her husband in Minnesota, the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro's home in Pennsylvania. For many elected officials, the escalation is a grim testament to the toxicity of violent rhetoric and how it can shake the country's democratic institutions.

The threats have also reshaped private lives. Dozens of officials have fortified their homes, installed cameras and hired private security guards, often at their own

Continued on Page 18

HOPE FOR G.O.P. In Oregon, the Republican candidate for governor is gaining traction against the unpopular Democratic incumbent. PAGE 20

HISTORY LESSON The last two midterms where Democrats surged against a Republican president had quite different outcomes. PAGE 20

Would Fortune Quietly Grown Go to Relatives, or the D.S.A.?

By BENJAMIN WEISER

David F. Greenberg was an academic who lived modestly in a small, rent-controlled apartment in the West Village that was, by one account, piled high with papers — the sort of man who leaves a legacy of ideas, not money.

He earned a Ph.D. in physics before joining New York University, which hired him to its sociology department in 1973 even though he did not hold a degree in that field. He worked there for half a century, building an expansive body of scholarship and a reputation as a caring teacher and mentor.

He was also building something else: a retirement fund. By the time Mr. Greenberg died two years ago, at the age of 82, its balance had grown enormously. Today, the fund is worth more than \$6.6 million.

But there was a problem. It wasn't clear who should get it.

The professor, who was not married, had no children and left no will, had listed his parents as his beneficiaries, but they were already dead. He also had selected a backup beneficiary, an obscure 1970s socialist group called the

David F. Greenberg, a professor, left millions to a socialist group that no longer exists.

N.A.M. had disappeared. But it didn't take long for the fund's managers to figure out what had happened to it. In 1982, N.A.M. merged with another group to form an organization that does exist: the Democratic Socialists of America.

The issue has started to move to the center of the race between Senator Susan Collins, a vulnerable fifth-term Republican, and her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, who has blamed Ms. Collins for the rising fuel oil costs. Their

New American Movement, or N.A.M. — “or any successor thereof.”

The professor's unexpected be-Continued on Page 23

"It's a huge issue up here,"

Senate Control May Rest in Shivering Hands of Mainers Mad Over Heating Costs

By TIM BALK

BATH, Maine — As the Senate race in Maine heats up, the state is getting cold.

And for many Maine voters, chilly weather could present a particular challenge this year: New England's northernmost state is singularly reliant on heating oil, and the price of the product is surging because of President Trump's war with Iran, which has clogged a vital oil shipping corridor.

contest could be critical to determining which party controls the Senate.

For Ms. Collins, who initially supported the war but has opposed it for months, the rising fuel costs pose a significant headwind as she works to fend off Mr. Jackson, voters and strategists in both parties say.

Lance Dutson, a Republican strategist in Maine, said Tuesday night as temperatures in parts of the state dipped into the 40s. Ms. Collins can point to her work to bring federal heating assistance funds to the state, he added, but that might go only so far in assuaging an “emotional electorate” facing deep financial strain because of the price increases.

In Maine, the cost to fill a standard heating-oil tank as of Wednesday was \$1,650, up roughly 80 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state governments in securing federal money for heating bills.

Although sticker-shocked con-

Continued on Page 20

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INTERNATIONAL 4-13

Death in Russia Still a Mystery

More than a week after a young plague researcher died from pneumonia, officials have not publicly identified the pathogen that killed her. PAGE 9

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A Shadow War in Congo

A U.S. military contractor is playing a central role in one of Africa's most intractable conflicts. PAGE 8

175 | THE NEW YORK TIMES AT 175

It took a risky trek through a blizzard in the Alps to put a photo of Mussolini's corpse on the front page. PAGE 21

SPECIAL SECTION

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The Restaurant List 2026

In this year's group of our 50 favorite places to eat in the United States, some are decades old, others just weeks old.

METROPOLITAN

The delivery machines have conquered Jersey City's sidewalks, and Hoboken is their next target. PAGE 8

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A Call for Public Restrooms

Community leaders ask city officials to require bathroom access in privately owned public spaces. PAGE 1

REAL ESTATE

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Where the Rooster Crows

In Vermont, a bird set off a feud over what constitutes farm country, mirroring a battle dividing communities nationwide. PAGE 9

ARTS & LEISURE

Overjoyed at the Attention

The singer Tinashe often flew under the radar. That seems to be changing with her new album, "Popstar." PAGE 7

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'Hamilton' Star, Back Onstage

Christopher Jackson is reprising his Tony-nominated role on Broadway as a wiser George Washington. PAGE 5

SUNDAY BUSINESS

The Impact of Free Money

What happened when three people in California received a year of benefits from an experimental program. PAGE 6

Taxing the Quietly Wealthy

A new book makes the case for Washington to tap the wealth of "Main Street Millionaires." PAGE 1

SUNDAY OPINION

Michelle Goldberg

PAGE 8

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The New York Times

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Quote of the Day

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"This is going to take a long time for the math community to digest."

BRYNA KRA, a mathematician at Northwestern University, on OpenAI's release of findings on hundreds of higher math problems. Page 15.

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A Notable Number

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1,064

The number of public bathrooms in New York City, mainly in parks and libraries. Only 973 of them are operational — or roughly one for every 9,035 New Yorkers, according to a City Council analysis. Page A29.

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Corrections

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MAGAZINE

An article on Page 32 this weekend about a group of Texas activists misstates the charges filed against members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club in 2023. Two were charged with assault on a peace officer, and one with resisting arrest and interfering with public duties. They were not all charged with aggravated assault.

An article on Page 4 this weekend about the Supreme Court misstates when the court struck down President Trump's tariffs. It was this year, not last year. And

the article transcribes incorrectly a line from a 2022 court opinion. The correct line is "A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself."

An article on Sept. 27 about Congress misstated House Speaker Mike Johnson's position in the presidential order of succession. He is second in line, not third.

Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions. For recently published corrections, visit nytimes.com/corrections.

Inside The Times

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The Story Behind the Story

A New Space Editor Has Her Eye on the Cosmos

Victoria Jaggard spends her days pondering some of the universe's most pressing mysteries.

SUNHYE CHO

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By SARAH BAHR

Victoria Jaggard remembers the moment she knew she wanted to spend her life writing about space: It was in May 2008, and she was at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., covering the Phoenix lander's arrival on Mars.

"Just the electricity in the room and the energy of everybody as they're holding their breath, crossing their fingers, really, really hoping that this multimillion-dollar thing that they built lands safely on another planet," said Ms. Jaggard, who was then National Geographic's senior space editor. "From that point, there was no going back."

Ms. Jaggard has since covered the last space shuttle launch, in 2011; the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing; and the 2024 total solar eclipse. And last month, she secured her status as the cool relative at Thanksgiving, with a new job as The New York Times's space editor.

"After the Artemis II mission captivated our readers — and after SpaceX's huge L.P.O. underscored just how much the ambitions of the private space industry are going to drive America's future exploration — it seemed clear to me that the Science desk needed one editor to coordinate and elevate all our coverage," said Bill Wasik, The Times's Science editor. Michael Roston, who is now a deputy breaking news editor, previously handled all things space.

In an interview, Ms. Jaggard shared how strong visuals can strengthen science stories, how artificial intelligence is changing space travel and whether she'd ever want to go to space. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

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How did you first get interested in space?

I've always been interested in science fiction and fantasy. I had dreams of being just like Kathryn Janeway from "Star Trek: Voyager." I actually started out studying drama and musical theater, but my mother, being a very reasonable person, was like, "You need a job that makes money."

I studied science writing in college, graduated with the idea of being an environmental science reporter and then ended up kind of tripping and falling into space and physics in my career. It's so full of awe and wonder and joy.

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What fascinates you about the cosmos?

The No. 1 attribute for most journalists is an inherent sense of curiosity. All of us just want to understand how the world works. And some of the most interesting questions in science — to me, at least — are about space and the cosmos. Could we ever live in space? What would the lack of gravity do? Are there any other planets that could potentially host life? What is the universe even made of? That's still an open question, which absolutely boggles my mind.

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How is A.I. changing space travel?

We're talking a lot these days about satellite constellations that will provide internet access to more remote areas of the world. But there's also a lot of discussion about what that means for the crowding of the orbital bands around Earth.

Various tech companies have also been talking about putting data centers in space, and have even started to get the permissions to be able to launch prototype versions. On one hand, the argument goes, they'll have continuous access to solar power, and they'll have different ways of cooling. But it comes back to issues of potential overcrowding, and even how feasible the technology is.

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What other space stories are you watching?

NASA just launched the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which is going to provide some exciting opportunities for a better understanding of galactic structure and exoplanets. I'm also excited by the various planetary missions. Japan has one launching at the end of October to try to touch one of Mars's moons and potentially bring back a sample, so we can get a better sense of how Mars got its moons in the first place.

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What are your goals for the future of our coverage?

One of the things I've learned as a space journalist is the importance of visuals in connecting people with topics that can sometimes be a little hard to wrap your head around. I could try to explain to you the orbital dynamics of solar eclipses until the cows come home, but the instant I show you a little animation of how all the systems are moving, the lightbulb clicks on.

One of my biggest goals is to embrace the power of multimedia, to really bring home for readers the joy, wonder and profound nature of everything we're discovering out there. I'm hopeful that we can engage with readers who wouldn't necessarily think of themselves as space nerds, but who will find these kinds of stories interesting because we're all human and we're interested in our place in the universe.

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Would you go to space?

Oh, no. If there's one thing I've learned from covering spaceflight, it's that it's a grueling experience on the human body. We are designed to live quite comfortably on the surface of Earth. And I'm quite comfortable sitting here and letting robots do the hard part.

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Do aliens exist?

Statistically speaking, I'd like to think there's got to be something else out there. We've seen all kinds of evidence that even worlds within our own solar system have the necessary ingredients for more complex life to not only spring up but thrive. For all we know, there could be something swimming under the ice crust on Jupiter's moon Europa. I want to believe.

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The Newspaper and Beyond

TODAY'S PAPER

Crossword THE MAGAZINE, PAGE 54

Obituaries PAGES 29-31

Weather PAGE 32

VIDEO

AUDIO

INTERACTIVE

As the Iran war continues, it is being felt in a wider region. Eric Schmitt, a national security correspondent, explained how the conflict is reaching U.S. military bases and why American forces are pulling back. nytimes.com/video

Freddie Jackson, the singer who topped the R&B charts in the 1980s with hits like "You Are My Lady," died last week at 69. Listen to five of his essential songs at nytimes.com/music.

For its latest focus challenge, The Upshot invites you to spend uninterrupted time looking at Willem van Haecht's 1628 painting, "The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest." What will you notice in the piece? nytimes.com/upshot

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A Headline From History

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KAISER'S SISTER TO WED MERE YOUTH.

October 11, 1927. Princess Victoria of Prussia, 61, a sister of the former German emperor Wilhelm II, was to marry Alexander Zubkov, a Russian man "nearly forty years her junior," The Times reported. The relationship was viewed as scandalous, and neither Germany's Evangelical Presbyterian Church nor Wilhelm consented to the union. But the eccentric princess would not be dissuaded. The wedding took place that November in Bonn, and it "was barely over when storm clouds began gathering." The Times later said. Within months, Zubkov had made headlines for his debauchery, squandered his new bride's fortune and been expelled from the country. In 1929, Victoria sought an annulment of the marriage, "which had overwhelmed her in a deluge of social ostracism," The Times reported. She died from pneumonia before it was granted.

10/11/2026

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Facts of Interest

Spy magazine, the defunct satirical monthly, sent checks for tiny amounts to wealthy people as part of its search to find "America's cheapest zillionaire." Donald Trump was named winner in 1990 after he redeemed a check for 13 cents.

Vulgarians, Beware: Spy Magazine Is Back (for a Month)

SUNDAY STYLES, PAGE 5

"Berl," a Slavic word for "swamp," is the source of the name Berlin. The German capital was built on swamps, which still survive in the Spreewald, an inland delta some 60 miles away. Lover of Swamps Brings One to MoMA ARTS & LEISURE, PAGE 12

Microdramas are vertical soap operas for your phone, with episodes rarely exceeding two minutes in length. The format was born around 2018 in China, where its revenue now exceeds that of the conventional film industry.

Long Story Short

THE MAGAZINE, PAGE 24

This year, domestic airfares for Thanksgiving flights are up 31 percent compared with last year, according to the booking app Hopper. 31% SUNDAY BUSINESS, PAGE 2

After the death of the hermitic author Cormac McCarthy in 2023, archivists cataloged the books at his home in New Mexico. The final tally was 20,000, on subjects like whale biology, violins and quantum physics.

All the Pretty Novels

THE MAGAZINE, PAGE 20

The Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard's discovery of chain reactions led to the development of nuclear weapons. Machine Dreams BOOK REVIEW, PAGE 9

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The Mini Crossword

BY JOEL FAGLIANO

1 Towel (off)

ACROSS

5 Result of brainstorming

6 What jellyfish and bees do

7 Glowed bright

8 Surface over which to skip a stone ... as illustrated in the circled letters

DOWN

1 The Beatles' " \_ Little Help From My Friends"

3 Pasta that can be made "alla vodka"

2 Dummy

4 Like a beaver, in a saying

6 Direction from N.Y.C. to Miami: Abbr.

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE

Where Times Journalists Are Reporting Around the World

THE NEW YORK TIMES

ROMAN MURADOV

3. MANGOCHI, MALAWI — Tens of thousands of Malawians who left the country for steady jobs in South Africa are now b driven back by anti-immigrant violen The population surge and the decreas remittances have upended local econ John Eligon and Golden Matonga rep

1. KODIAK ISLAND, ALASKA — Anger over a billion-dollar fishing industry is shaping Alaska's key Senate race, and could affect which party takes control of the chamber in the midterms. Anna Griffin visited the seafood-dependent community of Kodiak.

2. COL DE BARBERINE, SWITZERLAND — Raymond Zhong hiked with archaeologists in the Alps, which are losing ice faster than almost anywhere on the planet. Melting glaciers are releasing relics, including tools, garments and human remains.

4. SEOUL — Yan Zhuang toured Galax Robot Park in Seoul, where a host of I manoid robots entertain and interact people. At the park, she found that "t most useful machines are the least lif

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Wordplay

Tips for Today's Crossword

In Wordplay, a Times Games columnist helps readers solve the day's crossword. Warning: There are spoilers ahead.

The eight entries in this theme set all contain a pair of gray squares, and each has a clue that poses as a question. I had a good chunk of grid solved before figuring out the two top examples.

First was 34-Across, [Secrets known only to E.N.T.s?]. For infernal reasons, I read "E.N.T." as a personality type; the crossing entries reminded me that those letters stand for Ear, Nose and Throat. The entry solves to EAR CANAL ARCANA, knowledge held by specialized doctors. I found this entry intriguing, but not apparently funny or idiomatic. I mentally pronounced the phrase a few times, and then took a moment to think about the letters in the shaded boxes: "E" and "L" in EAR CANAL.

[Some "Star Trek" slang?], at 23-Across, solves to KLINGON LINGO, which you probably agree is a bit catchier than EAR CANAL ARCANA. I think it's also a much more obvious example of the trick in this theme, because of the way that it rolls off the tongue. This is a really clever variation on reduplication: Each of these entries

takes a term and removes its first and letter for the last word in the answer.

In the case of both EAR CANAL AR NA and KLINGON LINGO, the final p the phrase is where the first and last l are missing. The theme entries in the tom half of the puzzle are opposite, a f detail that must have taken some care pull off. [Spark joy?], at 75-Across, wa hardest one in the set for me to answer solves to ELICIT FELICITY, which is dearingly silly and poetic.

Now, what about this title and those squares? To perform the "Heart Transplant" surgery in this puzzle, you need letters they frame, the "heart," not the letters in the shaded squares. This was real red herring for me. I'm used to think highlighted letters' being important, spent time trying to figure out if they transplants themselves and even two letters down to see whether they spell phrase or had something in common. This case, less presumptive solvers mi have had an easier time than I did.

CAITLIN LOVINGER

Play the crossword on Page 54 in the maga.

A Better Way to End Relationships

My sister Dinah recently moved from the house where she had spent 28 years. She and her husband had divorced, her two daughters were grown and she was downsizing into an apartment.

Before the rush of packing and moving, she and my nieces shared their memories of the house and talked about what it meant to them. They were doing what Priya Parker, a conflict resolution facilitator, calls "the connected goodbye."

That's "the refusal to allow the slow fade or the quiet exit" when a group breaks up or people leave, Ms. Parker wrote in her new book, "The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict." I asked her to walk me through the steps of making a connected goodbye. JANCEE DUNN

Acknowledge the ending. First, recognize the end of the relationship openly and truthfully, Ms. Parker said. "Ambivalence saps everyone's energy," she wrote. "Drawing a finish line, counterintuitively, pulls people forward."

In order to have a true connected goodbye, calling it quits needs to be a mutual act, she said. "Certain endings are too painful or raw, or one person's not up for it, or there's a power imbalance," she added. But if all members are aligned, then "draw a boundary" around the ending and mark it, she said, and be clear but respectful.

Take stock. Recognize the loss or change and what it means to you. You can talk about the importance of the group or the relationship, reminisce about your history together and, it if applies, thank the others for your time together, Ms. Parker said.

MATT CHASE

Taking that moment to reflect and recognize the relationship's significance is a crucial step that "allows you to move forward and clear space for the next thing," she said.

Say goodbye. Consider conducting some sort of ritual to mark the exit. "It doesn't have to be super dramatic," Ms. Parker said. "You can use humor. It can be playful."

As she took me through the steps, I realized that I once practiced a connected goodbye with a group of parents I knew. Our kids were all leaving the elementary school they had attended together and were scattering to different middle schools.

I saw those parents five days a week for years; we had a goodbye dinner to reminisce and regretfully confirm that things were going to be different, but that our time together meant something to all of us.

For more relationship advice, visit nytimes.com/well.

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International

The New York Times

Protest Leaders Are Rounded Up as New Delhi Is Locked Down

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Revisions to voter rolls spurred thousands of mostly younger Indians to take to the streets, where they were met with force. Over 2,000 were detained.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAUMYA KHANDILWAL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEW DELHI — The capital of the world's largest democracy turned into a fortress Saturday, as an extraordinary show of force by Indian authorities met an equally extraordinary display of defiance by the country's young.

Throughout the day, thousands of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, tried to gather in Delhi to protest a sweeping revision of their country's voter roll. Security forces hauled them away, sometimes grabbing them by their arms and legs, and stuffed them, often forcefully, into buses and vans.

Those detained banged on the doors of police vans. They shouted from the windows of buses. One police officer was seen grabbing a protester by the throat. By early evening, more than 2,000 people had been detained, according to a lawyers' group providing legal aid to the detainees, though an exact number was impossible to ascertain.

The leaders of the Gen Z movement that called for the protest, the Cockroach Janta Party, said they, too, had been detained, including Abhijeet Dipke, one of the movement's founders.

He shared a video of their encounter with police officers on Instagram. They were landing in Delhi on a flight from Mumbai after attending rallies in other cities earlier in the week, when police officers boarded the plane.

"You can see where the nation is heading. This is dictatorship," he said. By Saturday evening, it was not known where they were being detained.

The Delhi police appeared to confirm that Mr. Dipke was in their custody. In a post on social media, they said they had offered “assistance” to help him travel home “on humanitarian grounds” after his grandmother’s death on Saturday.

The protest on Saturday followed a week of nationwide demonstrations demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the head of India's election commission, a body that was long held in high regard but has come under public criticism because of the revision of the national voter roll. That eliminated 130 million names, and critics say it is an effort directed by the government to entrench Prime Minister Narendra Modi's power.

The protests, while focused on the voter roll issue, signal growing frustration with the government of Mr. Modi, who has been in power for 12 years. Mr. Modi has not commented on the protests.

A member of Parliament from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, Ravi Shankar Prasad, on Saturday evening issued a scathing attack on the protests. "Indian democracy has destroyed the quest for anarchy," he said. "The country will be run from the Parliament and not from the streets."

The security measures to prevent protesters from gathering were unusual in a country that has long prided itself as a vibrant democracy. The heavy-handedness drew comparisons to the 1970s, when the prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, suspended the Constitution and jailed opposition leaders.

By Friday, the police had ordered the cancellation of trains bound for the capi-

Pragati K.B., Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.

tal and closed 45 metro stations in the city. Videos circulated online of would-be protesters being pulled from trains bound for Delhi in various parts of the country. Some youth activists were placed under effective house arrest days ahead of the protest. Mobile internet was shut in the center of the city, where the protest was to be held.

By early morning, hours before the protest was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m., security officials were out in full force, brandishing batons and shooing away small clusters of protesters.

"Aren't we children of this nation?" asked Nada Haseen, 22, who had come with several fellow university students to protest, only to be met by a blockade of yellow police barriers. "We are asking for our basic right, to vote."

They were undeterred. Tanmay Koli, 20, rode a train for two days by himself to come to his nation's capital. He found his way to a Sikh temple to sit for a while and eat. Then he headed out into the streets of New Delhi with two other young men, who, like him, had come by train from their own hometowns far away.

On Saturday, the three of them, strangers until just a few hours ago, sat together on a curb staring at barricades and security forces. They were nervous, they said, but they wanted to be here.

"They're stealing votes," Mr. Koli, said. He had come from Pune, a city to the south.

"Democracy is not safe," said his new friend, a 28-year-old man who, fearing reprisal, gave only his first name, Om. He had traveled from Chandigarh, a city to the north.

Delhi police said Friday they had denied permission for the Cockroach Janta Party-led protest at Jantar Mantar, the 18th-century monument that is a designated protest site. Police said they had not asked for permission in time.

In Connaught Place, a shopping and restaurant hub, protesters in police vans rolled past a tricolor Indian flag, flying behind them, and a statue of Gandhi's spinning wheel, a symbol of India's nonviolent independence movement.

A group of lawyers, dressed in their signature black and white garb, marched from the Supreme Court and a nearby district court, holding copies of the Indian Constitution; 400 of them were soon detained, according to Utkarsh Sinha, a lawyer who attended the demonstrations. From a Sikh house of worship near Jantar Mantar, a small group of protesters set off; several were grabbed by police, and others sprinted away.

By midday, when it became clear there would be no gathering at Jantar Mantar, another group, including by a prominent student activist named Neha Bora, began marching from a market nearly six miles away. She too was detained.

Throughout the afternoon, spontaneous protests erupted, some with a handful of people, others with hundreds.

All the detainees were taken away from the city center and held in various places, including a meeting hall and a stadium, before being taken to several police stations around the city, according to several of the detainees.

Lawyers groups fanned out across the city to help the detained at police stations. Others organized caravans of cars to retrieve detainees and bring them home. Some of them were also detained.

Ajinkya Shinde, a Cockroach Janta Party leader, issued a video message on behalf of the other leaders who had been detained. He urged people to continue protesting even if they were prevented from reaching the designated site, Jantar Mantar, "Wherever you are stopped, turn that place into Jantar Mantar."

Exasperation in Greece Over U.S. Ambassador

This article is by Niki Kitsantonis, Lara Jakes and Lynsey Chutel.

POOL PHOTO BY MARK SCHIEFELBEIN

Kimberly Guilfoyle is facing allegations that she asked a donor to pay off her credit card bill.

ATHENS — As the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle has cultivated a highly visible profile, attending late-night parties and appearing on the cover of Vogue Greece. Lately, however, she has drawn a different kind of attention from Greeks.

Revelations last week that a Republican donor said Ms. Guilfoyle asked him to pay her American Express bill in exchange for access to senior Trump administration officials were the latest allegations of hardball tactics or outright misconduct to emerge against her.

Greeks interviewed in Athens in recent days expressed exasperation and cynicism about the steady drip of reports about Ms. Guilfoyle's dealings, and some said they saw them as signs of what smaller countries are forced to endure from larger, wealthier nations.

“Greece is not a major power,” Petros Malliaros, 35, a freelance lighting technician, said. “We have to get along with the U.S. and whatever representatives it chooses to send us.”

The accusations against Ms. Guilfoyle are "hardly a shock," said Anna Markaki, a 38-year-old school teacher. Of President Trump, she added, "He probably thinks she's done a good job."

Pavlos Iliopoulos, a 47-year-old pizza store owner, shrugged it off. "Greece is a small country and

Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.

pretty much has to play along with the U.S.," he said. "One corrupt diplomat staying or going isn't going to make much of a difference."

Anta Rapaki, 52, a former health care worker, criticized the administration's decision to send Ms. Guilfoyle to Greece in the first place. "They're underestimating my country as a faithful ally — instead of honoring that friendship, they sent her here as a favor," she said.

She added, "Because we're a small country, we have to have friends, and we need the U.S. But we'll dance the dance up to the point that serves us; we won't knuckle under."

Ms. Guilfoyle, who was once engaged to Mr. Trump's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was one of the first ambassadors to be nominated in the president's second term. She has said that her experience with Greece before being nominated as Mr. Trump's envoy last November came from college history classes and a honeymoon trip. She has served in Athens with a mixture of MAGA glitz and what her supporters have described as relentlessness in securing business deals involving American interests.

She has come under fire in recent weeks in reports in The Wall Street Journal, which reported last month on potential conflicts of interest in Ms. Guilfoyle's involvement in energy deals in Greece.

Last week, the Journal revealed her communications with a Republican donor, Eric Deters, who said that Ms. Guilfoyle had asked him to wire \$100,000 to pay off her credit card just before her confirmation hearing, which he did not pay. The New York Times confirmed their discussions.

A lawyer for Ms. Guilfoyle declined to comment. The U.S. Embassy in Athens directed requests for comment to the State Department in Washington, which did not respond.

In a visit to Athens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to answer questions on Thursday about the ambassador's conduct. Ahead of his trip, he had described her as "an incredibly effective advocate for the President's agenda in Greece," adding that she had "successfully advanced U.S. energy interests in Greece and across southeastern Europe."

Mr. Trump said he knew little about the allegations against Ms. Guilfoyle. "I don't know too much," he told journalists on Friday. "But she was always very nice."

For some Greeks, more troubling was a comment she was reported to have made at a dinner in Athens in March insinuating that the United States could replace the Greek government. "The fact that they would send someone like that here, with no tact or diplomacy skills, shows how low we rank in Trump's priorities, how insignificant Greece is for them," Maria Stefanou, a 68-year-old retiree, said.

Ms. Guilfoyle's lawyer has disputed the characterization of the dinner, and the foreign minister, George Gerapetritis, said on Friday that the Greek energy minister who was there denied it as well.

Asked about Ms. Guilfoyle's purported comment, Pavlos Marinakis, a government spokesman, said, "There was never any question of the Greek government being threatened, nor would anything of the sort ever be tolerated." He added that the Greece-U.S. partnership was founded on "mutual respect."

In Parliament on Friday, Mr. Gerapetritis said it was not necessary to summon Ms. Guilfoyle to explain herself. "Summoning an ambassador and potentially creating a diplomatic incident would serve no purpose," he said.

Their responses were part of a Greek government effort seeking to tamp down a national debate over Ms. Guilfoyle. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has aligned himself with the Trump administration, seeking cooperation on security and other issues.

"As long as Ms. Guilfoyle enjoys the support of the U.S. president and secretary of state, the Greek government has to respect the position of the U.S. government," said Constantinos Filis, a prominent analyst and director of the Institute of Global Affairs at the American College of Greece, said. "It's as simple as that."

Leftist parties have called on the government to demand clarifications from Ms. Guilfoyle.

"Favors from Trump's America come with a price tag," Rena Dourou, a prominent lawmaker of the leftist Syriza party, said Friday. "The question is: How much will the Greek people ultimately have to pay?"

Ms. Guilfoyle is the latest of Trump administration ambassadors accused of engaging in decidedly undiplomatic behavior. Many serve in Europe, which long has been a destination for American political appointees of both parties who have little to no experience in official diplomacy.

Bill White, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, was asked by that country's foreign minister to stop making derogatory statements about government officials. Charles Kushner, the chief envoy to France (and father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump's son-in-law), ignored summonses by the French Foreign Ministry after criticizing Paris for doing too little to combat antisemitism.

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DANIEL BEREHULAK/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Masked settlers hurled stones at Palestinians in the occupied West Bank last year. Expansion of settlements is an inflammatory subject that has soured Israel's relationship with some of its allies.

How a U.S. Diplomat Altered and Quashed Reports Critical of Israel

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From Page 1

written, effectively stonewalling lawmakers' efforts to gain information, according to multiple officials briefed on the matter.

Soon after arriving in Jerusalem, Mr. Milstein began insisting on approving communications from the embassy section that handles Palestinian affairs, multiple officials with direct knowledge of the process said. The flow of cables plummeted from several a week to a few a month, as some staffers refrained from writing reports for fear that Mr. Milstein would block or rewrite them, these officials said.

Mr. Milstein's interventions go far beyond those of any recent predecessor, several officials said. They and others said they were speaking out of concern that officials in Washington were getting a distorted view of Israeli actions through core diplomatic channels.

Mr. Milstein's efforts have helped insulate Israel's right-wing government against potential blowback from a Trump administration that has been its closest ally.

Among the most contentious issues on which Mr. Milstein has intervened is the accelerating expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

It's an inflammatory subject that has soured Israel's relationship with some of its longtime allies. Last month, Britain, Canada and France announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank in response to the Israeli policy on settlement expansion. Britain accused some settlers of "ethnic cleansing."

It is unclear to what extent Mr. Huckabee is aware of his adviser's actions. Both he and Mr. Milstein declined requests for an interview.

The ambassador, a longtime advocate for the Israeli settlement movement, has denounced specific attacks by settlers, calling them "Israeli terrorists," but he has played down settler violence more broadly, saying it is being carried out by a small group.

Mr. Huckabee is required to sign off on most cables and significant decisions, but officials said Mr. Milstein sometimes acts on his own. The ambassador has also sometimes worked in concert with Mr. Milstein to suppress or recast information, these officials said. But in several cases when he believed Mr. Milstein had gone too far, they said, Mr. Huckabee has reined him in.

either country, and his role as a gatekeeper of information sent to Washington has drawn little attention.

His effort to shape embassy reporting was first reported a year ago by the online magazine of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that advocates de-escalation and U.S. military restraint.

But fresh reporting by The Times unearthed documentary evidence and previously unreported instances of Mr. Milstein's effort to skew information to the benefit of the Netanyahu government, which has continued throughout this year.

Earlier this month, after an article critical of Mr. Milstein for inviting wedding guests to give him money appeared in Politico, Mr. Huckabee posted on social media that he had "absolute confidence" in his aide, who he said possesses "impeccable integrity."

Mr. Milstein is a familiar figure in right-wing circles in the United States and Israel, and has organized meetings between Mr. Huckabee and some top Israeli officials. But he is not well known in

The Times interviewed 15 U.S. officials for this article, including many in Washington, all of whom worked with Mr. Milstein in some manner. The Times also talked to nine former diplomats who provided context on the role and responsibilities of senior embassy officials. All spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. The Times also obtained or reviewed dozens of documents, cables, memos and other internal communications.

David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

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Expressing Concern

The people who spoke to The Times were career government officials and political appointees, including strong supporters of the United States-Israel relationship. Most said they were speaking out of concern that Mr. Milstein's actions are undermining standard diplomatic work, expressing worry that, in some cases, they contradict the president's stated policies.

It is not clear whether Mr. Milstein's interventions have affected White House policy. But since Mr. Trump declared a year ago that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, he has said little about the issue beyond briefly reaffirming in February that he opposed annexation, even as Israel was extending more control over the territory.

In response to questions sent to the embassy about Mr. Milstein's actions, Mr. Huckabee did not address specific instances cited by The Times. He wrote in a statement: "The elements of the story The New York Times is trying to assemble are so lacking in fact that it ranks up with other Times farcical endeavors." He added: "I personally and categorically refute the elements of your proposed 'story.'"

The concern extended to senior administration officials in Washington, including in the White House, who have expressed frustration to colleagues over some of Mr. Milstein's actions, according to four officials, who have either witnessed or been briefed on the dissatisfaction.

Asked about The Times's reporting on Mr. Milstein, the State Department provided the following statement: "The entire team at State remains focused on advancing President Trump's America First agenda."

The White House referred The Times to the State Department.

Mr. Milstein is the stepson of the right-wing radio host Mark Levin — a close ally of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu. That relationship is well known in Washington and the embassy, and has been a factor in how he is treated, officials in both Jerusalem and Washington said.

As an adviser to Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Milstein is one of the most senior officials in the embassy, acting as a chief of staff of sorts to Mr. Huckabee. The ambassador has empowered him to oversee much of the mission's portfolio, particularly the West Bank and Gaza.

Previous ambassadors to Israel have had political appointees as senior advisers who, like Mr. Milstein, tried to influence the reporting back to Washington. And Mr. Milstein's responsibilities include reviewing and amending information sent to Washington.

In response, officers in the embassy compiled a report that was completed in March detailing the status of each investigation, according to multiple officials briefed on the process.

Its central findings suggested that, in most cases, investigations had made little progress, that some cases had been closed and that no one had been charged in any of the killings, these officials said. Instead of forwarding the report, Mr. Milstein argued that the embassy should send a letter saying that Israel was properly handling the investigations, two officials briefed on the discussions said.

People who interact with Mr. Milstein professionally, however, say he goes to unusual lengths to frame Israel in a positive light. He has blocked reporting from being sent, rewritten cables to deliver a different — sometimes opposite — message from the original, and delayed approving drafts until the topic was no longer relevant, these officials said.

In the summer of 2025, for instance, dozens of Palestinians seeking food were killed near the distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by Israel and the United States. American diplomats in Israel drafted a cable, viewed by The Times, warning that the foundation's distribution process was chaotic and deadly and risked more "mass casualty events."

Veteran American diplomats said that withholding or twisting the information sent to Washington should raise serious concerns.

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Glaring Discrepancies

Mr. Milstein rewrote the cable to declare the foundation's operation a success while overlooking the mass casualties, according to people who saw the cable and were briefed on the editing process.

"The embassy ought to tell Washington everything — the good, the bad and the ugly," said Dan Kurtzer, who was a U.S. ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush. "If they're not doing so, they are damaging the policymaking process and possibly undermining the president's policies."

briefed on the outreach and an internal communication from late this summer seen by The Times.

Troubled by glaring discrepancies between news coverage and the embassy's official reports, White House and State Department officials seeking a clearer picture of events bypassed standard channels at least twice to communicate directly with embassy staff, according to two officials

Mr. Milstein also questioned several colleagues on whether they were "pro-Israel" or "pro-Hamas," according to four officials, who found the question inappropriate and said it made some people fearful of speaking freely.

ter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding answers from Israel.

GO NAKAMURA/REUTERS AVISHAG SHAAR YASHUV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A conservative and longtime Republican, Mr. Milstein served as an aide to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas from 2013 to 2018 before relocating to Israel to study at a Jerusalem yeshiva, a school for Jewish religious studies. In 2020, he landed a job as an assistant to David M. Friedman, Mr. Trump's ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021.

During the Biden administration, Mr. Milstein worked for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, handling outreach to pro-Israel voters.

In April 2025, Mr. Milstein was back at the embassy in Jerusalem after Mr. Trump was elected to a second term.

In February, Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 19, was trying to stop settlers from stealing livestock when one of them shot him dead in his West Bank village.

He was the ninth American citizen of Palestinian or Turkish heritage killed in the West Bank by Israeli settlers or soldiers in four years. Weeks later, seeking an update on the investigations into the killings, 30 members of Congress led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, sent a let-

David Milstein, left, a top official in the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, has been entrusted with much of the mission's portfolio by Ambassador Mike Huckabee, right. Mr. Milstein altered reports.

On May 4, Paul D. Guaglianone, a State Department official, sent a letter responding to Mr. Van Hollen, saying that the embassy, which had reduced staff because of the Iran war, was focused on security cooperation with Israel and protecting Americans against Iranian attacks. (The intense fighting had wound down nearly a month earlier, after a cease-fire was struck on April 8.)

The letter, provided to The Times by Mr. Van Hollen's office, said the embassy was working with Israel to "ensure accountability for these deaths."

The response did not reassure Mr. Van Hollen.

"If you don't get accountability, you endanger more American citizens," he said in a phone interview.

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West Bank Expansion

In February, the Netanyahu government passed a measure that made it easier for Israelis to buy land in the West Bank, a move widely condemned internationally as speeding the way to annexation.

Any formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, would carry immense consequences. But in embassy discussions, Mr. Milstein portrayed the government's announcement on land purchases as a domestic matter with little significance to the outside world, according to two officials.

An embassy report sent to Washington, reviewed by The Times, said the Israeli policy was meant "to address humanitarian needs" of Israeli settlers, without detailing those needs.

A similar intervention occurred in April, when top Israeli military commanders publicly warned that West Bank settler violence could set off a new Palestinian uprising. Embassy staff members tried to alert Washington to those warnings, but Mr. Milstein prevented the reports from being sent as drafted, according to three officials.

In a cable viewed by The Times on which he is listed as the first author, Mr. Milstein praised Mr. Netanyahu's "unprecedented new initiatives to combat" rising violence in the West Bank. The report's title read, "Government Cracks Down on Escalating West Bank Violence."

Kin carrying the body of Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 19, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in February.

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Deadly Clash Exposes Shadow War in Congo

Spotlight on U.S. Contractor's Role

By DECLAN WALSH

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The hasty evacuation of a former Green Beret who was badly wounded during a firefight in the Democratic Republic of Congo last month has opened a window into the latest mercenary deployment by Erik Prince, the high-profile American military contractor.

The former Green Beret, Tim Kennedy, who is also known for his career in mixed martial arts and appearances on Fox News, was shot several times during intense fighting in Congo's eastern highlands, where government forces have been battling a powerful, Rwanda-backed rebel group.

An elite ex-soldier from New Zealand who previously served with his country's Special Air Service unit was killed. Six people briefed on different aspects of the ambush and subsequent evacuation spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation.

What brought both men to Congo was their employment by Mr. Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, a company notorious for a civilian massacre in Iraq in 2007. For years, Mr. Prince has sought opportunities in resource-rich countries plagued by conflict, mostly in Africa. Now his interests are expanding in Congo, where the government has hired foreign help to fend off the rebel advance in the east, while also trying to curry favor with the Trump administration.

To advance its goals, Kinshasa has turned to Mr. Prince, a prominent supporter of President Trump, giving him a central role in one of Africa's most intractable conflicts.

Details of Mr. Prince's operations in Congo were provided to The Times by a dozen current and former officials from the United States, Congo, Europe and other African countries, as well as U.N.

Declan Walsh reported from Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nairobi, Kenya. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt in Washington, Emanuel Stoakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, and John Eligon in Johannesburg.

officials, military contractors and some of Mr. Prince's own employees. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military casualties or confidential business arrangements.

Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, as did a spokesman for Vectus Global, the company that leads his operations in Congo.

Mr. Prince's growing influence in Congo comes as the Trump administration seeks a new toehold for American companies in the country's lucrative mining industry, where China's dominance over critical minerals like cobalt is a source of growing concern in Washington. Last December the United States and Congo signed an agreement granting preferential access to American mining interests in Congo, which many Congolese officials privately called a "peace for minerals" deal.

In late 2024, Mr. Prince signed a wide-ranging contract to provide security and mining services to President Félix Tshisekedi's government. The contract was worth hundreds of millions of dollars over five years, although it is unclear how much has been paid out, said a former U.S. official who worked on regional diplomacy.

Since then, Mr. Prince has supplied drones and mercenaries to help Congo fight the M23, the rebel group backed by Rwanda, and has even moved into taxation. His company in Congo employs about 100 people in a drive to recoup some of the estimated \$3 billion in taxes that Congo loses every year from fraud in the mining sector.

The tax effort is led by a former French Foreign Legion soldier who works from a gleaming new financial center in the capital, Kinshasa. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an employee of Mr. Prince described plans to digitize mining records, tackle widespread fraud and curb what he called the "blatant looting" of Congolese resources by criminal syndicates that include Chinese mining companies.

Mr. Prince's employee likened the anticorruption drive to that of Eliot Ness, the Prohibition-era law enforcement officer who aggressively went after the crime boss Al Capone's bootlegging empire.

The U.S. military contractor Erik Prince, top, in Ecuador last year. He has helped Congo fight rebels backed by Rwanda, bottom, and his company has also moved into taxation in the country.

JOSPIN MWISHA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

SANTIAGO ARCOS/REUTERS

The employee said the tax effort is going well. But in the rugged highlands 1,000 miles to the east, where Congo's war is being fought, Mr. Prince's other mission has been stymied by setbacks and casualties — not for the first time, say his critics.

"Among mercenaries, especially in Africa, Prince is derided because he has zero successful missions," said Sean McFate, a former private military contractor who is currently a fellow at The Atlantic Council.

For the past year, mercenaries employed by Mr. Prince have been based at an airfield in Kalemie, a town on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in eastern Congo, several of the current and former officials said. Drone pilots from Colombia and Ukraine, contracted by Mr. Prince, carried out strikes against the M23, the most powerful of more than 100 armed groups operating in Congo. Last January, Mr. Prince's forces helped the Congolese recapture the key city of Uvira.

But as fighting intensified recently in the nearby Minembwe

Highlands, where remote villages nestle amid steep slopes, Mr. Prince's employees were drawn into a vicious fight. One battle early last month led to the deaths of several Colombian contractors, according to a person briefed on the incident and a report seen by The Times.

Then on Sept. 17, a second group of mercenaries accompanying Congolese soldiers, this time including Mr. Kennedy, was caught in the deadly ambush.

What exactly happened is unclear. One person close to Mr. Prince, briefed on the incident, would only say that it was a "long ordeal," which was exacerbated by a lack of support from Congolese forces.

When it was over, Mr. Kennedy had been shot multiple times and several others were dead, including Justin Conaglen, a former special operations soldier from New Zealand. Asked about Mr. Conaglen's death, a spokesman for New Zealand's foreign ministry said it was "providing support in this case" but declined to provide further information.

After the ambush, Mr. Prince's officials began to search for air transport options to evacuate the dead and wounded, the people briefed on the incident said. Mr. Kennedy was rushed to Burundi and then South Africa for treatment at the private Milpark hospital in Johannesburg.

Mr. Kennedy has since been flown back to the United States, where he is recovering at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a flagship facility that primarily treats active-duty troops, friends and officials said.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Romanian soldiers defending Goma were routed last year.

The Pentagon declined to comment, and Mr. Kennedy did not respond to questions.

Known for his dual career in the military and professional sports, Mr. Kennedy served as a Green Beret and competed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship until he retired from professional fighting in 2017. He has hosted shows for the History and Discovery channels, published an autobiography, "Scars and Stripes," and has drawn criticism for making provocative statements about the nature of war on podcasts and TV.

Accusations last year that Mr. Kennedy had exaggerated his military awards prompted the Maryland National Guard to investigate. He publicly apologized for having “unintentionally misstated aspects of my military service.”

Mr. Conaglen took unpaid leave from the New Zealand military in March, before formally leaving the service in August, a spokesman for his country's military said in an email.

Originally from New Zealand's North Island, he competed in endurance sports and high-altitude mountaineering, and was part-owner of a holiday rental business in Raglan, a surfing town known for its black-sand beaches.

His remains were returned to New Zealand, where they were cremated on Oct. 1 after a memorial at a rugby club in the small town of Taipa.

Western mercenaries have long been a sensitive subject in Congo, where hundreds of European fighters joined an effort by the Katanga region to secede in the 1960s. Many Congolese also remember the C.I.A.'s role in the overthrow of their country's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who was later executed by a firing squad led by Belgian contract officers.

But Mr. Tshisekedi put aside those misgivings as the M23 began to resurge across eastern Congo in 2023. As Congo's notoriously weak national army struggled to respond, he outsourced crucial parts of the fight to foreigners.

Romanians were tasked with defending Goma, the region's biggest city, until they were routed in January 2025. Algerian drone pilots flew Chinese drones from Kisangani until their base was hit by a suspected Rwandan drone strike in May, current and former officials in the region said.

Those losses have left Mr. Prince as the pre-eminent military contractor in Congo — one who has embraced the language of colonialism.

In a podcast interview in 2024, he called on the United States to "put the imperial hat back on" in African countries that he said were "incapable of governing themselves."

Asked if he was promoting a new form of colonialism, Mr. Prince replied, "Absolutely, yes."

In interviews, Mr. Prince often plays up his tough-guy image, presenting himself as a hard-nosed pragmatist who is willing to harness the power of private military action. But in Africa, his ventures have often gone wrong.

In Libya, his mercenaries had to flee on a speedboat in 2019 after a dispute with the warlord who hired them. In Somalia, U.N. investigators accused his forces of violating an international arms embargo on Somalia in 2012.

In Congo, some fear more of the same chaos. Hiring Mr. Prince is a sign of the government's desperation against the M23, but "it's creating more problems than solutions," said Zobel Behalal, author of a recent report on mercenaries in Congo. "It's a sign that the army is very weak. And while others are making money, in the end it's the population that suffers."

Last month, Mr. Prince spent time promoting his new company, Vectus Air Defense Systems, which sells an anti-drone system that he says can protect oil fields, data centers and other sensitive sites. He also began negotiating with Congolese officials over a possible \$200 million contract to protect the country's air force assets, an adviser to the Congolese president said.

American officials say that Mr. Prince's ventures in countries like Congo are entirely private and that he enjoys no U.S. government support. Still, Mr. Prince, who once donated \$250,000 to a Trump campaign, uses his political connections to support his military operations. Mr. Prince's sister, Betsy DeVos, also served as secretary of education during Mr. Trump's first term.

Last January Mr. Prince traveled to Belgium for a meeting at the residence of the U.S. ambassador Bill White. In the meeting, Mr. Prince outlined his views on Congo to Belgium's top Africa diplomat, Marc Pecsteen de Buytswerve, according to two European officials.

Then Mr. Prince asked for help.

His drones had been impounded at customs in the Netherlands and he needed to get them out. He also asked if Belgium would authorize the export of guns and ammunition from a Belgian manufacturer to Congo.

The State Department and Belgian foreign ministry declined to comment on the meeting, which State described as a "private diplomatic engagement." But the answer to both of Mr. Prince's requests, the officials said, was "No."

12 Killed in Houthi Attack on Saudi Airport

By VIVIAN NEREIM and EUAN WARD

The Iran-backed Houthi militia launched a deadly attack on an international airport in Saudi Arabia's capital on Saturday that Saudi officials said killed at least 12 people and injured over 300 more, in a dramatic escalation of the war between the kingdom and the Houthis.

The strike, which a senior Houthi official said the militia was responsible for, was the deadliest attack in a Gulf Arab country since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began in February.

The latest toll was announced early Sunday morning by the Saudi civil aviation authority, which said four Saudi nationals and one U.S. citizen were among the 12 dead. It added that of the 309 people injured.

Earlier, the Saudi aviation agency announced the temporary suspension of operations at King Khalid International Airport in the capital, Riyadh. Repeated, deadly Houthi attacks on the airport last week have struck at the heart of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's ambitions to turn the city into a global travel and business hub, threatening to disrupt major international events planned for the coming weeks.

Across the border in Yemen, Saudi warplanes have been waging a deadly bombing campaign against the Houthis, who say that the country has been subjected to hundreds of airstrikes in recent weeks. Since Sept. 3, airstrikes have killed 91 people in Yemen, mostly women and children, according to Anees al-Asbahi, a spokesman for the Houthi government-affiliated health ministry.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi official, said the militia was responsible for the attack in Riyadh on Saturday, which he said

Vivian Nereim reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon. Shuaib Almosawa contributed reporting from Sanaa, Yemen.

was in retaliation for Saudi strikes, including on civilian infrastructure in Yemen.

The Houthis carried out the attack "so that the world understands that airports, seaports, wedding and mourning halls, hospitals, and markets in Yemen are civilian facilities that must not be targeted or harmed—and that the same rules that apply to these facilities in Yemen must also apply to their counterparts everywhere else," he said.

Saudi officials did not immediately respond to questions about details of the attack. A reporter for The New York Times, however, saw at least six ambulances heading toward the airport, where the police had blocked entry.

The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and other Western embassies urged its citizens to avoid the area and warned of travel disruptions.

Speaking at the White House, President Trump told reporters, "we just found out about the recent attack." He said the United States would "make a decision" about possibly intervening in the conflict, without offering further detail. Mr. Trump carried out a bombing campaign against the Houthis last year, declaring a swift victory after the United States burned through weapons and munitions at a rate of about \$1 billion in the first month alone.

The Houthis also carried out attacks earlier last week on airports in Riyadh and Abha, in the south of the kingdom, killing and injuring several people, according to the Saudi authorities.

Maj. Gen. Turki al-Maliki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen, said early Sunday that "a projectile fell" in the area of King Fahd International Airport, in eastern Saudi Arabia, without elaborating.

Saudi Arabia previously led a disastrous bombing campaign against the Houthis in 2015, after the militia took over Yemen's capital of Sanaa, routing the Yemeni government. During the brutal war that ensued, hundreds of thousands of people died from violence, hunger and disease, but the Houthis survived, cementing their rule over northern Yemen.

A truce in 2022 brought a fragile peace to the country, until the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, igniting a regional war.

Tensions between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis re-emerged in July, after the Houthis accused the kingdom of bombing the airport in Sanaa. The Saudi-backed Yemeni government claimed responsibility for that bombing, saying it was acting to prevent an unauthorized Iranian plane from landing.

The Houthis have long bristled at restrictions on their airspace that are enforced by Saudi Arabia, calling them a blockade. They soon announced that they intended to enforce a "blockade for blockade" policy and declared an embargo on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea — which has become an important alternative route for Saudi oil exports after the Iran war disrupted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.

Yemen's internal war soon reignited, with fierce clashes between the Houthis and Saudi-backed forced allied with the Yemeni government.

The Houthis seized Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline last month in a lightning offensive that gave the group greater control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait, an important choke point for global trade.

Finally, a full-blown war broke out earlier this month. The Saudi-backed Yemeni government announced a new military campaign against the Houthis, pledging to oust them from all of the territory they had seized over the past 12 years, and Saudi Arabia began a new bombing campaign against the militia.

That decision has plunged the kingdom deeper into the regional fallout of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the Houthis' main backer. Prince Mohammed now faces the difficult task of stopping the Houthi attacks while avoiding another prolonged war that could derail his economic plans.

Russia Providing Few Details About What Killed Plague Researcher

The Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East in Irkutsk, Russia, where a researcher working on pathogens died on Oct. 2.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Fears of Outbreak In Region Subside

By PAUL SONNE and JULIAN E. BARNES

BERLIN — More than a week after a young plague researcher's mysterious death from pneumonia, Russia has still not publicly identified the pathogen that killed her.

The possibility that the researcher contracted pneumonic plague in her lab led to global fears of an outbreak. Those worries have begun to recede as no other known cases have surfaced in the Irkutsk region, where Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old researcher at the Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died on Oct. 2.

But the absence of an official explanation for Ms. Shipilova's death, despite thousands of tests conducted on others in the community and on her own remains, has stoked concerns about what, if anything, Russia's authoritarian government might be hiding.

According to Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian public health regulator, Ms. Shipilova's remains did not test positive for any of the dangerous pathogens she was working on at the institute, which included the bacterium that causes the plague. The regulator has said she died of pneumonia of an unknown origin. Pneumonia can be caused by numerous viruses, bacteria and fungi.

The World Health Organization is still seeking to understand the "causative agent" of the fatal pneumonia, whether or not it was the plague, Maria Van Kerkhove, the W.H.O.'s director of epidemic and pandemic management, said at a news conference on Wednesday.

"If that is ruled out — they say that is ruled out — what did she actually die from?" Ms. Kherkhove asked.

Experts said they believed that with modern testing technology, the Russian authorities should know the answer by now.

"Presumably, they have the capability within days to do a simple genome sequence," said Raj Panjabi, who served as a White House public health official during the

Paul Sonne reported from Berlin, and Julian E. Barnes from Washington. K.R. Callaway contributed to this report.

Biden administration. "Presumably, they've done that, but they've not shared the results, and that's concerning."

The lingering questions reflect a broader lack of global public trust that stems in part from unanswered questions about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than six years after Covid upended the world, questions remain about whether the lab that was studying bat coronaviruses in the Chinese city where the pandemic started played a role in the outbreak. China swiftly rejected the possibility and impeded a global investigation into the matter.

In Russia, any possible case of a pathogen escaping a lab attracts outsize attention globally, in part because the country is one of the few that continues to work on biological weapons, according to the U.S. intelligence community's annual threat assessment.

That has led to greater concern among officials and experts in the United States, who point to the nation's vulnerabilities.

"The United States does not have a licensed plague vaccine," said Andrew Weber, a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks and a former Pentagon official in charge of biodefense. "Given that Russia has an illegal bioweapons program, it is very concerning."

There is no indication that the Irkutsk institute was doing bioweapons research, people briefed on U.S. intelligence said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment.

Ms. Shipilova was involved in testing which antibiotics and doses worked against Y. pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, according to the summary of a study presented this year at a Moscow infectious disease conference.

The plague, which is endemic to Siberia and some other regions of the world, caused the "Black Death" that ravaged Eurasia in the 14th century, but it is treatable with antibiotics if caught quickly. Pneumonic plague is considered the most dangerous of the three main forms of infection, because it spreads from person to person

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Lingering questions reflect a broader lack of global public trust.

and causes deadly, rapid-onset pneumonia.

Referring to Ms. Shipilova as "the patient," the Russian authorities have said that she was vaccinated against the dangerous microorganisms she was working with, and that two reviews of the institute ruled out any "emergency situations" at the lab. The quarantine measures that the Russian authorities took in the Ir-kutsk region were put in place out of caution, owing to the nature of the patient's work, they said.

Plague vaccines have long existed, but experts have raised serious doubts about their effectiveness and safety.

Beyond what pathogen led to Ms. Shipilova's pneumonia, many other questions remain, including where she was in the days leading up to her death, what she was working on at the institute at the time, and how and when her illness first showed itself and then progressed.

Labs around the world working with deadly germs take extensive precautions to keep workers from being infected, but accidents have occurred.

Though Russia took swift action to quarantine and test individuals who had come into contact with the researcher, Rospotrebnadzor has not held any news briefings and has provided information only in periodic public statements. The Kremlin has declined to field specific questions, urging the public to listen only to public health officials.

Russia has been slow to reveal the details of other incidents with possible public health implications.

In 2019, Moscow concealed critical information about the failed underwater recovery of a nuclear-powered missile in the White Sea, which caused an explosion and left seven people dead. The authorities did not initially say that a nuclear device was involved, acknowledge a spike in radiation or warn doctors that they were treating irradiated patients.

Nondisclosure has long been the modus operandi of the Soviet and now Russian bureaucracy, said Alexander Kelle, a senior researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg in Germany. He cautioned against reading too much into the paucity of details.

"Just because there is a lack of information, we have to be careful not to equate that with something nefarious," Mr. Kelle said, noting that there were many legitimate public health reasons for researchers to work on dangerous pathogens.

To posit any link to Russian biowarfare, he said, would "be stretching the very limited evidence that has been presented too far."

In a video message on Thursday, the governor of the Irkutsk region, Igor Kobzev, sought to close the book on the episode. He said that the medical monitoring of people in the region had concluded and thanked his fellow Russian officials for taking swift action under intense scrutiny.

Mr. Kobzev said the W.H.O. had publicly confirmed that there were no risks to public health, though the organization has said it has not received enough information from Russia to make a risk assessment.

Some people commenting on Mr. Kobzev's video in his Telegram channel weren't having it.

"What caused the pneumonia that killed the healthy young woman?" one asked.

"Are there really still naïve, gullible people in our city who would believe this?" another commenter said.

A third wrote: "X-Files, nothing to see here."

THE EXCEPTIONAL DAYS OCTOBER 9 - 25

Script. Modular sofa, designed by Sacha Lakic.

rochebobois PARIS

From left: Weaving mats in Mangochi, a district in eastern Malawi; the Hello Paisa transfer service is a way to get money from South Africa; Yusufu Mustafa, who returned in May.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOAO SILVA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Buying fish on the banks of Lake Malawi last month. Malawians had long been a major source of migrant labor in South Africa, but tens of thousands have come back home this year.

Driven to Leave by Desperation, Driven Back by Hate

Anti-Immigrant Violence in South Africa Forces a Return to Malawi, and Its Poverty

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By JOHN ELIGON and GOLDEN MATONGA

MANGOCHI, Malawi — On a dirt road in a rural village in eastern Malawi, business was slow at a convenience store operating from the front of a family home.

A few miles up the road, two women sat beneath a thatched roof weaving palm leaves into mats for sale, but there were no buyers.

Farther away in the bustling commercial hub of this district, Mangochi, a wire transfer business had done only one transaction by lunchtime. Hundreds of boats on Lake Malawi were packed with fishermen desperate to make a buck.

Just a few months ago, life wasn't like this, residents said. This is the fallout of the anti-immigrant violence that has consumed the nearby nation of South Africa in recent months, they say.

Tens of thousands of Malawians have fled back home from South Africa, leaving behind jobs and steady incomes that had paid for school fees, food and housing.

Around 90,000 immigrants have been deported from or fled South Africa since June, as anti-immigrant violence has swept the country. Most of the immigrants who have left have been Malawian, according to the South African government.

Perhaps nowhere has the burden of this mass uprooting been clearer than in Mangochi, a sprawling, largely rural district that long has been a major source of migrant labor in South Africa.

To escape violent anti-immigrant protesters who were ransacking homes and businesses, many Malawians left all their belongings behind — furniture, clothes, appliances — and returned to communities where finding formal work is nearly impossible.

Local economies have been upended by the population increase and the decrease in remittances in a nation where roughly seven in 10 people live on less than \$2.15 a day.

"Everything's very hard," said Imraan Cassim, a mechanic who had worked in South Africa for 15 years before returning to Mangochi in May.

Drivers in Mangochi don't have money for repairs, said Mr. Cassim, 31. He has not earned any income since returning, he said, and is relying mostly on savings, which he expects to run out this month.

"I don't know what will happen next," he said.

In South Africa, where he had a valid work permit, he said, he earned around \$1,500 a month and sent much of it back home to Malawi to support his wife, three children, mother and sister.

Now his sister, Eliza Osman, 21, has been reduced to surviving on the meager income from the convenience store she started out of the family home last year. She has fewer customers, she said, and is not earning enough to replenish her merchandise.

Many families are struggling to eat.

Returnees in Mangochi said their families were lucky if they could afford more than one meal a day. Almost every meal consists of a sticky corn porridge, known as nsima, and boiled vegetables.

Meat is a luxury, though some said they occasionally buy fish from Lake Malawi. Purchasing everyday staples like soap and cooking oil has also become a challenge.

Still, many say they want to make things work in Malawi rather than return to South Africa, where the protesters and some government officials say that foreigners are stealing jobs and using precious public resources.

Mangochi's central hub is crowded with roadside markets. From brick-and-mortar stalls and shacks built from tree branches, traders hawk gasoline, clothes, dried fish and goat tripe. The streets are busy with bicycle taxis. Pickup trucks overloaded with passengers, snacks and furniture shuttle essentials to outlying villages.

But the hustle and bustle belies harsh economic realities.

Malawi has very little industrial production and is heavily reliant on imports. Most families use small-scale farming to feed themselves. The country is vulnerable to external shocks, such as drought, war and fluctuating oil prices.

The government has been criticized for its lack of investment beyond agriculture, and for poor fiscal management. Some say government officials have not done enough to help those who returned

from South Africa.

Yusuf Hafana, 24, had a full stock of bicycles to sell at his roadside stand in Mangochi, but that was because no one was buying, he said.

His stock mostly comes from Malawians who bring bikes back from South Africa. They are now charging him more for the bikes, he said, while his buyers are paying less. He has to borrow money from friends and relatives to pay for his children's school.

Mangochi developed a migration culture and passion for trading that dates back to when Arab merchants first came to the region. Residents have long traveled to do business and sell goods in other parts of Africa and the world, said Gasiano Nicholas, who works in social development for the Catholic diocese in Mangochi.

People from the area are mostly from the Yao ethnic group, and are known as risk takers willing to venture to new places, said the Rev. Simon Mundisiye, the social services director for the diocese. Many men from Mangochi went to South Africa to work in the mines during apartheid, and subsequent generations followed in those footsteps.

Cattle in Mangochi. Meat is a luxury most cannot afford without the money sent home by workers abroad.

Father Mundisiye now worries about the mental anguish of the workers chased from South Africa. Working there had put many of the men at the top of the socioeconomic ladder in Mangochi. Some men even looked down on those who remained home, Father Mundisiye said.

The tables have turned. Now returnees need support from the people they left behind, he said. "They have become a laughingstock," Father Mundisiye said. "They're anxious. They are depressed."

In this heavily Muslim area, Mr. Nicholas, of the Catholic diocese, said he was concerned that the lack of opportunity could lead some young men to neighboring Mozambique, where militants affiliated with the Islamic State are staging an insurgency. They have lured new recruits with anti-government rhetoric and the promise of resources, he said.

Life in Mangochi has become so dire for Jeffrey Malemia that he said he is doing whatever he can to get back to South Africa. He used to earn roughly \$200 a month working at a textile factory in the coastal South African city of Durban. Now he works odd jobs, but doesn't make enough to feed his 9-year-old daughter.

Two brick columns are all there is of the home he had started to build in Mangochi with money he had sent from South Africa. He can no longer afford construction, he said. The main thing hindering his return is the money he needs to pay for a passport. (He had previously been in South Africa illegally.)

"I'm not scared because that's where I need to go and make money," said Mr. Malemia, 28, referring to the anti-immigrant violence. "I don't mind the dangers that are there."

Even as they struggle to survive, some Malawians are trying to find joy back home.

On a recent afternoon, hundreds of revelers crowded a dirt soccer field in a village on the outskirts of Mangochi, dancing to a fusion of Afrobeats and traditional Yao ballads. It was an annual festival that celebrates the initiation of young children into Yao culture.

This one was more packed than usual, said Yusufu Mustafa, 40, who returned from South Africa in May.

"We celebrate together now," he said. "Of course it's painful because we don't have money. But we celebrate together."

HILARY SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

KATERYNA KLOCHKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Trump Attacks Zelensky Over Kyiv's Strikes Against Russian Refineries

Above, a Russian blast on Saturday that killed at least 20 in Zaporizhzhia. President Trump linked Kyiv's attacks on refineries to high diesel prices, which he said caused a "world problem."

From Page 1

the diesel fuel throughout the world."

The Ukrainian government did not immediately respond to Mr. Trump's remarks.

Mr. Trump's announcement on Friday came despite a Russian ban on exporting fuel and was followed by the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel exports until April. The Kremlin apparently offered no concessions.

Hours later, Russian officials said there would be no immediate resumption of peace talks.

"We will think about when these negotiations might be resumed," Yuri Ushakov, President Vladimir V. Putin's foreign policy adviser, said in a statement on Friday night.

The diplomatic efforts fizzled shortly after Ukrainian negotiators arrived in Miami to meet with Mr. Trump's top envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. As those talks were about to begin, Mr. Trump spoke over the phone at length with Mr. Putin.

While Mr. Trump's announcement of the diesel deal made no mention of Ukraine, it was poised to hurt Ukrainian efforts to defend itself, as any major purchase of Russian fuel would help fund Moscow's war machine.

Ukrainian officials said on Saturday that the talks in Miami had ended without a breakthrough.

In an online chat with reporters on Friday night, Mr. Zelensky did not hide his sense of betrayal.

"I believe our team is simply being used as a smoke screen, and that is certainly not fair," Mr. Zelensky said. He has worked hard to maintain a stable relationship with the White House as Mr. Trump has steered America closer to Russia and away from traditional democratic allies.

"It is certainly not how partners should treat each other," Mr. Zelensky added, calling Mr. Trump's announcement on diesel a "weak decision."

For Kyiv and its European allies, the short-lived talks in Miami laid bare how U.S. diplomacy has drifted from the pursuit of a durable peace settlement to a hunt for business deals with Russia. The Trump administration has placed the burden of compromise almost entirely on Ukraine and put little pressure on Moscow.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump similarly did not suggest that Mr.

Valerie Hopkins and Ivan Neche-purenko contributed reporting.

Putin should make compromises to end the war. The U.S. president said that Mr. Zelensky, though, "could have settled this war many times, many many times, and he chooses not to."

On Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said Russia had directed five guided bombs at a residential area of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, killing at least 20 people, including three children. "In Russia, they take any easing of pressure to mean they can keep fighting, to mean they can keep dropping bombs on cities," he said.

Daniel Fried, a longtime senior U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Poland, said it was “very clear that the Russians are completely uninterested in any diplomatic approach and are simply standing back waiting for the West, the U.S., the Ukrainians to come to them with some bigger and better offer.”

"When you start chasing after them, they simply smirk and wait for you to purchase bigger and better bouquets to throw at their feet," Mr. Fried said.

Mr. Fried argued that decades of relations with Moscow showed that appeals would fail unless backed by the threat of acute consequences.

"If you have sticks, wield the sticks," he said.

He said Mr. Trump was undermining not only Ukraine's security but also Europe's.

"All of this is taking place at a time when Russia is escalating its shadow warfare against Europe, and we are acting as if that is not occurring," he said.

It is not clear if Mr. Trump's move to import Russian diesel will have much of an immediate effect on prices before the U.S. midterm elections.

In a statement on Friday night, Mr. Putin said after his phone call with Mr. Trump that Russia had "confirmed its willingness to supply oil and petroleum products to the U.S. market and global markets at large," but he did not specify any amounts.

Ukraine has also made clear that it will continue a campaign against Russian refineries.

Mr. Trump's end run around Ukraine continued a pattern that had been playing out since he started his second term claiming he could end the war in 24 hours.

Last year, Kyiv agreed to a call by Mr. Trump for an immediate, unconditional cease-fire, but Moscow flatly rejected it. That first round of diplomacy established a dynamic that still defines negotiations: Ukraine received no reward for saying yes, and the Kremlin paid no price for saying no.

Since then, ambitions of forging a lasting peace have largely evaporated. Instead, there have been a handful of hastily announced tactical pauses and holiday truces.

Still, when the Trump administration opened the latest diplomatic track on the sideline of the U.N. General Assembly in late September, Ukrainian officials were startled by how far Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff went in their offerings to Russia.

According to officials familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential diplomatic talks, the Americans placed three lucrative economic incentives on the table to coax Moscow into a limited cease-fire on energy infrastructure or at sea.

Washington floated releasing billions of Russian sovereign assets immobilized in the West. The money, the officials said, was viewed as an upfront incentive for partial truces, not a reward for their enactment. This revived a proposal from last year to release funds to Russia. Then, the suggestion was to release up to \$100 billion.

The Americans also revisited a plan to sell off parts of the Russian oil giant Lukoil in a multibillion-dollar deal that would go to a group of Middle Eastern investors, including some with business ties to U.S. negotiators.

And Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner revived a U.S. proposal that would allow Belarus, the Kremlin's ally and neighbor, to export potash, according to officials familiar with the talks.

Kyiv has been careful not to reject any proposal outright but has demanded guardrails. For instance, it has suggested dollar-for-dollar mirror payments of frozen assets to Ukraine or guarantees of additional military aid upon any truce breach.

But Mr. Zelensky's frustration with Washington was clear earlier last week when he visited the site of a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in northern Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the front lines. The strike killed 22 people, including five children — among more than 100 civilians killed in Russian strikes in the past week.

Asked about Secretary of State Marco Rubio's comments that talks to end the fighting were "proving elusive" because the war had reached a "strategic stalemate," Mr. Zelensky bristled.

"We are not at a diplomatic dead end," he said. The problem, he added, was that there was not enough pressure on Moscow.

"Shut down their entire economy," he said. "Sew Russia's mouth shut. Don't feed them with your own sales."

New Italian Law Gives Bonus Seats In Parliament to Election Winners

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

MATTED MINNELLA/REUTERS

Members of Italy's lower house of Parliament protested Thursday after the secret ballot vote on a contested electoral reform.

ROME — Italian lawmakers on Thursday approved a controversial law that awards bonus seats in Parliament to election winners, a move supporters say will help prevent governments from collapsing and that detractors denounce as unconstitutional and antidemocratic.

Championed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had threatened to resign should the legislation not pass, the law gives a bonus to the winning party or coalition of an election: 70 seats in the lower house of Parliament and 35 in the Senate, provided the party or coalition reaches 42 percent in both houses. Italy has a 600-seat Parliament, with 400 seats in the lower house and 200 seats in the Senate.

Proponents of the law have nicknamed it "Stabilicum," saying it will ensure a coalition's ability to govern in a country notorious for short-lived governments. Critics call it "Melonellum," saying the law was made by the current government to bolster its chances at re-election next year. After the vote, opposition lawmakers raised signs with the slogans: "Fraudulent Law" and "No to the Deception." Critics have vowed to petition the Constitutional Court of Italy for a review.

Italian governments have a history of instability; there have been 68 of them since Italy became a republic in 1946, with the shortest lasting a 22 days in 1954. Last month, Ms. Meloni, who was elected in September 2022, set a record for leading Italy's longest-serving government. She is in the last year of a five-year mandate.

"This electoral law provides very strong stability," which "builds credibility, allowing our businesses to operate with much greater peace of mind, and giving our foreign partners reassurances," said Andrea Di Giuseppe, a member of Ms. Meloni's Brothers of Italy party. He called the law "very important" in an interview.

The measure has been the topic of heated debate for months, prompting protests and petitions from civil rights groups and constitutional experts as well as intense discussion in Parliament, even within Ms. Meloni's center-right coalition.

"It doesn't deliver what it promises," said Gianluca Passarelli, a professor of political science at Sapienza University. He described it as a "Frankenstein law" with no comparable counterparts in any democracy.

Critics say that the bonus will allow the winning coalition to have outsize power to make decisions without negotiating with lawmakers, including appointing judges or the president, thus undermining the democratic process.

"The bonus modifies the balance of actual electoral votes," said Professor Passarelli, warning that the law also introduced "institutional tension" among the country's governing forces by shifting power to the executive and weakening Parliament.

Massimo Giannini, a left-leaning journalist and pundit, compared the law to one passed in 1923 that enabled Mussolini's National Fascist party to take control of Parliament.

"One hundred and three years later, this pattern repeats itself. An electoral law with a massive majority bonus that shifts the balance of democracy," Mr. Giannini said on his podcast.

Previous electoral laws — Italy has passed six since 1993 in attempts to achieve political stability — have sought to introduce a majority bonus. A 2005 electoral law that awarded extra seats was declared unconstitutional in 2013.

Critics have raised other concerns as well, including a provision that coalitions name their candidate for prime minister before elections.

Mr. Di Giuseppe, the lawmaker, said such a measure "ensures clarity and transparency for our citizens." But opponents of the law say that the choice of the prime minister is a prerogative of Italy's president, who is elected by Parliament and has specific legislative and judicial powers.

They have also argued over a provision about voter preferences. Supporters of the law say it will reinstate voters' ability to express preferences in each district for three candidates from a party list of six names; critics say that the lists have party-selected lead candidates, limiting voters' ability to choose.

And as most of the lead candidates are expected to be men, there are concerns that a gender imbalance in Parliament will grow.

"The vast majority of the Parliament is made up of men, and we know they will keep their power," said Professor Passarelli.

Thursday's vote was held in secret ballot.

Salvatore Vassallo, the director of the Bologna-based Istituto Carlo Cattaneo, a research foundation, said it was not a given that the center-right coalition had the votes to reach the 42 percent threshold. He noted that Ms. Meloni faced a challenge on her right from Roberto Vannacci, a retired general whose new party, National Future, has found growing appeal among hard-right voters.

“Both sides have a chance at winning,” Mr. Vassallo said, and the majority bonus was “in the interest” of any coalition that sought to govern without having to compromise when cobbling together a ruling majority.

The Fight for Britain's Right: Are Conservatives Ready to Reset?

By STEPHEN CASTLE

BIRMINGHAM, England — Plain-speaking, confident and buoyed by rising personal ratings, Kemi Badenoch has gained a tight grip on Britain's main opposition Conservative Party since she became its leader in 2024, following its disastrous general election defeat.

But as she delivered a keynote speech on Wednesday at her party's annual conference in Birmingham, England, Ms. Badenoch, who is the first Black leader of a major British political party, faces battles on two fronts.

Despite her own improved ratings, the Conservatives are less popular with voters, surveys suggest, than when they suffered their catastrophic election loss in 2024. According to opinion polls they trail not just the governing Labour Party — rejuvenated under its recently installed leader, Prime Minister Andy Burnham — but also the right-wing populist Reform U.K. party, led by Nigel Farage.

Mr. Farage has had a rocky few months, with questions swirling about his finances and those of his party, but Reform's support in the polls still hovers at around 22 percent, about five percentage points above the Tories.

The fractures on Britain's political right could help the Labour Party in the next general election, analysts say, which must be called by 2029 but could come sooner.

"Farage has not yet conceded that he can't kill the Conservatives and perhaps still hopes that he can," said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. "And Badenoch shows no signs of wanting to do a deal with Reform, at least before the election."

In her speech, Ms. Badenoch rejected explicitly the idea of a pact with Reform, pointing to continuing police investigations into that party's finances. "To those who say 'unite the right,' we are not uniting with that," she said.

Ms. Badenoch also criticized people who "debate whether my mixed-race children are English," saying she should not have to explain to her son, while watching England's soccer team, "that some people don't think our Black players are English."

Suella Braverman, a Reform lawmaker and former Conservative who was born in England to parents who emigrated from Mauritius and Kenya, recently said she did not count herself as English, claiming it was an "ethnicity," rather than a nationality. Her comments provoked a fierce debate.

While Ms. Badenoch drew some dividing lines with Reform, she also announced several policies apparently designed to tempt Reform voters, talking tough on migration and promising welfare cuts and looser climate change targets. In her speech, she contrasted the Tories with Labour by pledging lower taxes and less government intervention. Promising

PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLI SCARFF/A.E.P.

VIA CETTY IMAGES

The Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, top, and Nigel Farage, bottom, the leader of the Reform U.K. party.

a “battle for the soul of this nation,” she argued that “spending money we don’t have on things we cannot afford is not kind, it is reckless.”

She also outlined plans to reduce inheritance tax, which is deeply unpopular even though it is paid by less than five percent of the population.

In Birmingham the mood was upbeat among many Conservatives despite the party's failure to improve its ratings since the election that ejected them from power after 14 years.

The party displayed a mock-up of the famous Bayeux Tapestry, the original of which is on display in London. Its "Birmingham Tapentry" features satirical images of opponents, including Mr. Farage who is portrayed at one point as a wailing infant throwing his toys out of a stroller, a reference to his anger at a parliamentary investigation into an undisclosed 5 million pound gift.

Ms. Badenoch, who is depicted in the mock tapestry as a triumphal leader, has produced a 30,000-word document on her political principles, telling The Times of London, "I call it Kemistry."

Many supporters hope that Mr. Farage's troubles will continue and that Mr. Burnham's popularity subsides amid economic challenges, leaving the Conservatives as the obvious alternative.

But some activists believe that the party should pay close attention to the online debate among supporters of Reform U.K. and Restore Britain — a far-right party led by a Reform defector.

"The Conservative Party needs to explore the conversation online and direct it into a positive direction for itself," said Lucy Harris, a Conservative Party member who once represented Mr. Farage's Brexit Party, the forerunner of Reform, in the European Parliament.

By trying to capture some voters back from Reform, Ms. Badenoch has shifted her party rightward. That will likely make it less attractive to more centrist Conservative voters, some of whom have switched to the Liberal Democrats.

Reform has helped Ms. Badenoch in one respect, by providing a home for her former leadership rival, Robert Jenrick, who defected from the Conservatives to Mr. Farage's party earlier this year.

Critics once predicted that Ms. Badenoch would be a short-lived leader, but for now she appears to have no credible challenger.

Relations between leading Conservative Party and Reform U.K. figures are icy. For now, a deal to unite the right looks unlikely even if, on some issues, the Conservatives and Reform are not so far apart.

Things could change, however.

"Before elections it's always difficult," Professor Bale said. "If the next election were to deliver the two parties, put together, a possible majority, then they maybe would be able to come to some agreement."

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China Broadens Its Military Reach With an Air Force Installation in Laos

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

China has begun operating a new air force base in Laos, marking another step in Beijing's efforts to establish military footholds abroad and project power into Southeast Asia.

Satellite images released this week revealed that eight small military aircraft had arrived at the China-Laos Joint Logistics and Training Center, which officially opened late last month at Ban Keun, about 30 miles north of the Laotian capital, Vientiane.

The satellite images, first reported by Reuters, showed a 1.2-mile runway at Ban Keun that could be extended, opening the possibility that the facility could host bigger aircraft that need longer takeoffs and landings.

The base in Laos, a landlocked country between Vietnam and Thailand, could help the Chinese air force reach across the region, including countries with which Beijing has long-running territorial tensions over the South China Sea, some experts said.

China has the world's second biggest military after the United States. The People's Liberation Army has been expanding rapidly but has taken only limited steps to open bases in other countries: a naval facility in Cambodia and another naval support center in Djibouti, in East Africa.

“Ban Keun is significant because it appears to be China's first openly acknowledged overseas military facility for air power,” said Ying Yu Lin, an associate professor at Tamkang University in Taipei who studies China's military. The new facility “sits in the center of the Indochinese peninsula, and could enable the Chinese Communist Party to easily project air power across surrounding areas.”

But for now at least, the Chinese air force presence at Ban Keun is too small and isolated to have tangible military consequences, said Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official.

"Laos is landlocked, so a base there doesn't give the Lao or Chinese air force unfettered access to the Indian Ocean or Gulf of Thailand," said Mr. Thompson, who is

Hannah Beech in Bangkok and Amy Chang Chien in Taipei contributed reporting.

now a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. "The threat of a joint Lao-China air force base is primarily political rather than military because it was established without consultation" with Laos' neighbors.

The eight aircraft at Ban Keun were possibly K-8 jets, also called Hongdu JL-8, a light two-seater built by China and Pakistan that is mostly used for training, said Professor Lin. Laos' air force has only a few dozen aircraft, including about four of the K-8 jets, according to an annual global military

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The base appears to be China's first openly acknowledged facility for air power abroad.

---

One expert called the threat of a joint base 'primarily political.'

survey from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Nearby countries such as Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore will likely watch to see if Ban Keun's runway is lengthened to host bombers or surveillance aircraft. Many Chinese fighter jets and other aircraft can take off from runways shorter than the one at Ban Keun, but standard Chinese air force runways are often notably longer.

Countries in Southeast Asia generally try to stay friendly with Beijing, while many also look to the United States to counterbalance Chinese power. Singapore and Thailand, in particular, provide logistic support for U.S.

forces in the region, said Professor Lin. Vietnam, which has had acrimonious boundary disputes with China, has also turned to the United States.

Rear Admiral Surasant Kongsiri, a spokesman for Thailand's Ministry of Defense, said Laos had the right to decide whether to allow China to operate a base there, Reuters reported. "Nevertheless, Thailand will continue to closely monitor developments," he said.

Ban Keun has been used by a foreign military before. During the Vietnam War, an airfield there served as a forward base for covert American support operations that were carried out under the name Air America.

Construction on the new base began around October 2025 and proceeded swiftly, satellite images show. By May, much of the runway was visible.

In late September, Laotian and Chinese military officers assembled for the formal opening of the support and training center, a Chinese television report showed. China's Ministry of National Defense said that Ban Keun was "not aimed at any third party."

The center will be "jointly maintained by both sides" and "its construction and operation are the fruit of mutual respect and consultation on an equal basis between China and Laos," the ministry said.

In recent decades, Laos has increasingly depended on China for investment, political support and tourism.

In January, the International Monetary Fund warned that Laos, one of Asia's poorest and least developed nations, has a debt burden that is "unsustainable." About half of Laos' public debt is owed to China, which has financed a high-speed railway that largely bypasses the local population. Laos has also poured money into hydropower, and a Chinese joint venture now runs its power grid.

China's first major military foothold in Southeast Asia was at a naval base in Ream, Cambodia, which it helped expand into a deepwater base. Cambodia has lately tried to reduce its reliance on China by courting Washington, both by lauding President Donald Trump and welcoming a visit in January by an American warship.

In Race With U.S., China Struggles To Recruit Foreign A.I. Researchers

By ZEYI YANG

JADE GAO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

The ascendancy of companies like DeepSeek might explain why most Chinese A.I. researchers choose to remain in the country.

As the United States and China vie for A.I. dominance, the Trump administration has made it more difficult for companies to hire foreign researchers, while China has made recruiting the world's best scientists a national priority.

Over the past two years, China has flung open its doors to international researchers, introducing a visa for scientists and offering lucrative research grants.

Despite those efforts, foreigners are not coming.

Worse still for China's ambitions, the number of Chinese scientists working in the United States has risen rather than declined, according to a study about global A.I. research.

For every 30 Chinese researchers in the United States working on artificial intelligence in 2025, only one in China made the opposite journey, according to the study, conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank.

"Despite U.S.-China tensions, the number of Chinese-origin researchers working in the U.S. actually rose by four percentage points rather than declined" compared with three years ago, said Damien Ma, who led the study.

The study determined the flow of scientists around the world by examining research papers accepted by last year's NeurIPS, an academic conference focused on machine learning and computational neuroscience. The team analyzed where the papers' authors went to college, received graduate degrees and ended up working.

The results affirm the popular understanding that the United States and China are the leaders in A.I. research. While China is failing to recruit foreign researchers, the study found, it is seeing a boon in retaining local talent, people who have risen though the domestic education system and are increasingly choosing not to seek work overseas. The U.S., on the other hand, maintains its lead by employing foreign researchers, many of whom emigrated from China and elsewhere.

The Carnegie study counts those researchers who migrated from one country to another, but it does not indicate when a researcher moved. One explanation for the high number of Chinese scientists working in America is that they arrived before the Trump administration imposed restrictions on obtaining visas and cut research funding last year.

"There is a delay effect — the researchers in this study mostly made their decisions years ago to study or work here," said Yingyi Ma, a sociology professor at Syracuse University who studies Asian students in the United States. "The danger for the U.S. is a slow erosion of its appeal to attract talent that compounds over decades. By the time the effect shows up in the data, it is hard to reverse."

For years, Chinese scientists and their peers from around the world were drawn to America, which offered opportunities at start-ups and ample academic funding. But China has gained ground as an alternative for A.I. researchers.

In 2022, only six of the top 30 institutions publishing papers at NeurIPS were based in China; in 2025, that number rose to 12. Peking University and Tsinghua University, two of China's top academic institutions, sat at the top of the chart, eclipsing U.S. heavyweights like M.I.T., Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. Chinese researchers also made up 41 percent of the published authors at NeurIPS last year; U.S. researchers stood at 34 percent.

Today, China has an abundance of workplaces for A.I. researchers, including well-funded universities, big tech companies and start-ups, said Kevin Xu, the founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in A.I. technologies. As Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot repeatedly make names for themselves on the global stage, they also become more attractive to top talent.

The ascendancy of Chinese companies might explain why a vast majority of Chinese A.I. researchers choose to remain in the country. But, Mr. Xu added, there's another reason some researchers remain in China: The government is unwilling to let them go.

This year, the Chinese government restricted the two founders of Manus, an A.I. start-up that was set to be acquired by Meta for \$2 billion, from leaving the country. Since then, travel by Chinese A.I. entrepreneurs and researchers — as well as by their spouses and children — has been further curtailed, according to a recent Bloomberg report.

While China is struggling to recruit foreign talent, it has made some gains in its effort to encourage Chinese researchers and executives abroad to return.

The Chinese tech giant Tencent last year appointed Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher, as its chief A.I. scientist. The move was seen as one of the most notable examples of an A.I. researcher returning to China after having studied and worked in the West.

Despite China's new offers of visas and grant money, Silicon Valley still provides more attractive offers and investment opportunities than China for American researchers. Also, moving to a country with few immigrants and a different language is always going to be a challenge.

"For everybody else who's outside the walled garden, culturally or digitally, it's still very hard to break into," Mr. Xu said.

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'We're in really new territory with consumer protection regulations.' PAUL HUDSON, the president of FlyersRights.org, an advocacy group for air travelers, on the Trump administration's policies.

Transportation Department Is Rolling Back Protections For U.S. Airline Passengers

By CHRISTINE CHUNG

For years, U.S. airline passengers have been gaining ground against annoyances like misleading prices, hidden fees and flight disruptions. But now the tide appears to be turning.

The Department of Transportation is aiming to water down longstanding passenger protections, pushing, for example, to change how prominently airlines display prices in advertising and to clamp down on compensation for disrupted flights.

These recent steps have alarmed consumer groups and elected officials, with some saying that the proposals tilt the scales in favor of the airline industry. In addition, they say, the department is steadily taking a more hands-off approach to policing airlines, and that could end up hurting passengers.

"We're in really new territory with consumer protection regulations," said Paul Hudson, the president of FlyersRights.org, one of the largest U.S. advocacy groups for air travelers. "It's shaping up to be a wholesale reversal of consumer protection for airline passengers."

When Sean Duffy was sworn in as transportation secretary in January 2025, he pledged to help usher in a “golden age” of transportation by taking action to remove what he called government overreach.

Since then, advocates say, the department has consistently worked to roll back passenger rights in areas like cash compensation, wheelchair handling and hidden, or "junk," fees. It has also adopted a markedly gentler approach for addressing bad behavior by airlines compared with previous administrations: Under Mr. Duffy, the department has not yet issued a single fine to an airline.

In a statement, the Transportation Department rebutted the claims. "No passenger rights have been diminished," a spokesperson wrote.

---

Font Sizes and Hidden Fees

Two of the biggest changes have taken place in how the Transportation Department aims to regulate junk fees and pricing information.

In June, the department abandoned a Biden-era rule on hidden fees that would have forced airlines to show charges for extras like checked bags and ticket changes alongside the full fare during the booking process. Airlines sued in 2024 to block the rule, which a federal court vacated on procedural grounds.

A month later, the department moved to undo a 15-year-old requirement that airlines display a ticket's final price more prominently and in a larger font size than other components of the price, such as taxes and fees.

"The department proposed a common-sense adjustment to protect passengers from misleading pricing information by allowing parts of airfare, such as government taxes, to be displayed just as prominently as the total price, but not more so," the department spokesperson said, adding that public comments are being reviewed.

In September, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, sent a letter of opposition to Mr. Duffy, stating that the new rule would allow airlines to advertise "false or misleading ticket prices."

"If the rule is implemented, it is inevitable that more consumers will need to invest additional time searching for the full fare or government charges, and will be surprised by unexpected, mandatory fees," he wrote.

The department has taken steps to undo other rules drafted under Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. It has dropped early-stage efforts to let families sit together at no extra charge and to make airlines pay passengers cash for significant flight disruptions.

And it has carved out more exceptions for flight disruptions in which airlines would not need to compensate travelers.

It has also repeatedly delayed enforcement of a rule that expands the rights of disabled travelers, including making airlines liable for mishandled wheelchairs. Airlines sued over that rule, and the department has pushed back the enforcement of key sections of it to next year.

---

Backing Away From Fines

Past administrations have made headlines for penalizing airlines with hefty fines for failures like delays on the tarmac, false advertising of fares and mistreatment of passengers who use wheelchairs.

Each year from 2002 to 2025, the Transportation Department assessed at least half a million dollars in fines against airlines. But in the two years since Mr. Duffy took over, the department has not issued any against them.

Three previous transportation secretaries — Ray LaHood, Anthony Foxx and Mr. Buttigieg — said in interviews that they used fines as a way to keep airlines accountable.

"We leveled tough, stiff penalties," said Mr. LaHood, a Republican who served as secretary during President Barack Obama's first term. "It sends a loud message that the D.O.T. is serious about the No. 1 priority, which is safety."

Under Mr. Duffy, the department has walked away from its own investigations into airlines for operational and customer service failures. Last May, it dropped a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines, in which it accused the carrier of illegally operating chronically delayed flights in 2022. A month later, it ended an inquiry into Delta Air Lines stemming from the 2024 CrowdStrike software meltdown.

The department also waived at least \$25 million in fines owed by airlines, softening the impact of penalties like a \$50 million fine against American Airlines for its "undignified" treatment of passengers with disabilities and a record \$140 million fine against Southwest for an operational debacle in 2022.

Asked about its view on enforcement, a department spokesperson said in a statement that "fines are only one tool" and that the department "focuses on airlines fixing the root causes of travel disruptions."

Others have a different view.

"Simply not enforcing anything is like a backdoor way of repealing regulations," said Mr. Hudson, of Flyers-Rights.org.

---

'Dark Period' for Passengers

At the same time that the Transportation Department is loosening up on airlines, its relationship with the industry appears to be growing more harmonious.

"The airlines never really loved the rules we were putting forth and in some cases litigated against some of the rules," Mr. Foxx said.

Several of the department's recently proposed rules and actions appeared on a list of recommendations from Airlines for America, the industry trade association. These include undoing the junk-fee rule, changing the font size and prominence of fees, and contesting liability for mishandled wheelchairs.

Several Democratic lawmakers have questioned Mr. Duffy's relationship with the airlines, noting his time as an airline lobbyist for BGR Group in 2020. Last December, a group including Representative Jerrold Nadler, of New York; Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts; and Mr. Blumenthal wrote a letter to the department's Office of Inspector General to request an investigation into whether Mr. Duffy had violated federal ethics law by "improperly assisting" an industry he had previously lobbied for.

"We are very concerned that Secre-

MEGAN VARNER/GETTY IMAGES

The Department of Transportation dropped a plan to make airlines pay customers cash for some disruptions. Taking on what Secretary Sean Duffy, above, called government overreach, the department said, "No passenger rights have been diminished."

tary Duffy may have eliminated protections for American travelers not based on impartial policy assessments and the good of the flying public, but, at least in part, as a result of conflicts of interest and potential bias related to his former client's airline members," the lawmakers wrote.

ANDREW HARNIK/GETTY IMAGES

A spokesperson for the office declined to comment.

Mr. Buttigieg, whose department levied the most fines against airlines by a significant amount, said consumer protections are either being "quietly picked apart or just not enforced."

A Transportation Department spokesperson said that Mr. Duffy had briefly represented the Partnership for Open Skies, a coalition of domestic carriers funded by United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines. He worked to encourage “access for U.S. carriers into foreign markets,” not on domestic aviation policy, the spokesperson added.

The secretary has taken "clear, decisive regulatory actions" to hold airlines accountable, the spokesperson said.

Consumer rights advocates say the department's stance is costing passengers money, even as some aspects of flying have significantly deteriorated. Last year, a combination of cancellations and delays led to the industry's worst on-time performance since 2014, according to a report by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. There were more tarmac delays last year than in any year since 2010.

The department is tracking 90 tarmac delay incidents for potential violations, a spokesperson said.

"It's a really dark period for airline passengers right now as far as consumer rights," said William McGee, a senior fellow for aviation at the American Economic Liberties Project, a progressive-leaning nonprofit research and advocacy group.

"Clearly, the big airlines have access," he added. "They have the ear of the department, and the interests of consumers are not being heard."

KIE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

OLGA PANKOVA/GETTY IMAGES

The department has delayed enforcement of a rule expanding the rights of disabled travelers. Consumer advocates say the Trump administration has taken a hands-off approach to passenger rights.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Mathematics Is Reeling After OpenAI's New Release

OpenAI released about 350 A.I.-generated findings on Tuesday on problems covering nearly every subfield in mathematics.

IAN C. BATES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By SIOBHAN ROBERTS

"If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked."

That's how Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers, responded to an A.I.-generated proof that OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant, released on Tuesday.

And that single proof — worthy, in Dr. Kontorovich's assessment on social media, of arguably the highest honor in the field of mathematics — was just one among more than 350 findings that the firm released that day, all at once.

Not all of them were quite so remarkable. But Martin Bridson, a mathematician at Oxford and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which established the coveted Millennium Prize Problems, called OpenAI's release "breathtaking."

“Until very recently, it would have been impossible to imagine that the frontiers of mathematics could move so far in one day,” Dr. Bridson said.

If there had been any doubt that the leaps achieved by A.I. this year would transform mathematics, the tens of thousands of pages let loose on Tuesday have put that doubt to rest. The puzzles apparently conquered by OpenAI include crucial open questions in nearly every subfield of math, including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science, mathematical logic and topology.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

None of the proofs fully resolve any of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, which were designated at the turn of the century as a way of celebrating mathematics. But the findings seemed to include results that make tangential or related progress on all of them. Perhaps the most significant result — the one Dr. Kontorovich was responding to — was a proof of the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis,” a conjecture related to the best known of the Millennium problems, the Riemann hypothesis, and a possible steppingstone of sorts to its resolution.

Ken Ono, a professor at the University of Virginia and the founding mathematician at Axiom Math, an A.I. firm, was not sure whether the quasi-Riemann solution would be a springboard for solving the original hypothesis. But he said that, as is expected with the original Riemann hypothesis, an encyclopedia of consequences would flow from this result, providing rich fodder for future breakthroughs.

"I imagine many mathematicians, like me, felt like they got punched in the stomach yesterday," Dr. Ono said of Tuesday's turmoil. "But that feeling is quickly giving way to excitement and determination. For those working to push mathematics forward, this is a challenge and an invitation to aim higher."

(As of Thursday, OpenAI had made a number of updates to the public online repository; withdrawing three papers and making fixes to several others. A spokeswoman said: "Where errors are identified, we will work to correct them promptly and withdraw papers if no fixes can be found. As with other research manuscripts, this is an iterative process.")

---

Spectrum of Emotions

Talking to mathematicians after the release, it is clear that it is a highly conflicting environment, motivating a range of reactions.

"The list of problems includes several that were guiding challenges in my own research," Dr. Bridson said in an email, citing specific results in group theory, topology and algebra. "I have thought hard about all of these problems."

The solutions announcement, he added, "will be exciting for many, frightening for others, and devastating for some."

For Bryna Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern, problem No. 145 on the list was of great interest — “the Rokhlin problem on mixing implying higher order mixing," which answers a question from the 1940s.

"The writing, however, makes it impossible to understand," said Dr. Kra, former president of the American Mathematical Society, who is among a group of mathematicians who are proactively working to chart a course for the field through this period of "uncertainty and seismic change," as she described it.

Overall, the results are “amazing,” Dr. Kra said, but now tens of thousands of pages of results need to be carefully checked. Typically checking and verification are done by peer review. “Peer review is gone in this process,” she said. “So, the question is, what kind of impact will these A.I.-generated results have? This is going to take a long time for the math community to digest.”

The French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre, an emeritus professor at the Collège de France in Paris — who has won two of math's top prizes, the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, and celebrated his 100th birthday last month — was naturally attracted to finding No. 46 in OpenAI's list, which solves positively a conjecture he made almost 70 years ago.

But Dr. Serre is conflicted about doing math with A.I. He uses the technology for things like references, and, with the help of friends, for chasing down hunches about errors.

"Mathematicians take pleasure in doing maths in two different ways: learning and finding new things," Dr. Serre said. "Hence a conflict: A.I. increases the first pleasure and lowers the second one. The problem is it may lower the pleasure too much; that is especially serious for young mathematicians."

---

'A Kind of Vertigo'

Indeed, the cataclysmic upheaval will affect students the most, especially graduate students, those on the cusp of becoming a part of this intellectual community.

Thomas Carlson, a Ph.D. student at Montana State University, currently attending a semester-long program at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath) in Berkeley, worried about some practical implications of such powerful A.I. systems doing math.

"I think we have reached a point where we need to carefully consider the structure, requirements and value of a graduate degree in math," he said. "What can be done to ensure that a 2028 graduate has a degree with the same value of that of a 2023 graduate?"

Kai Shaikh, a Ph.D. student in mathematics at the University of Toronto, also currently at SLMath, observed that theorems are easy to use as benchmarks, but that they capture little of the wonderment at the heart of math.

"Just like a photograph of a mile marker can't provide much of the value of actually going on a hike," he said, "it would seem to me that proofs without stories, or even stories without struggle or mystery, and first glimpses of strange beasts, are not very meaningful or valuable to us humans."

Yuanning Zhang, a Ph.D. student in mathematics at Northwestern, visiting at SLMath, said: "What I'm feeling is less a judgment than a kind of vertigo."

If these reported resolutions are verified, this would suggest that A.I.-assisted mathematical research is beginning to operate on an industrial scale."

Initially, the rumors about the OpenAI results had it that there were solutions to 400 problems, and now the rumors are that more dumps are arriving soon. The number 400 had made Mr. Zhang think of the film "The 400 Blows."

"The film is about a boy who is evaluated, judged and shut away from society, and no one really takes the time to understand him," Mr. Zhang said. "Towards the end, he runs to the sea, and the film ends on a freeze frame that passes no judgment on whether this is an escape or a dead end. I don't think that's a bad picture of where mathematics stands with these results."

A.I. Agents Went Rogue, Anthropic Details in Blog

This article is by Kate Conger, Mike Isaac, Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger.

SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence agents created by Anthropic, acting on their own, tried to gain access to a range of government websites, filled out visa applications on the State Department's website and sent a fake homicide tip to Philadelphia's Police Department.

Anthropic detailed the activity of its A.I. agents in a blog post on Friday, without naming the targeted websites. But two sources with knowledge of the incidents said Anthropic's A.I. agents had submitted 20 visa applications through a form available on the State Department's website. All the applications were incomplete and were not processed, they said.

White House officials said they were briefed on the agents' actions on Friday, and demanded that A.I. companies immediately report rogue A.I. activity. It was the most aggressive statement so far on A.I. regulation by the Trump administration, which has refused calls for tighter controls.

A new White House A.I. task force, created last week, said Anthropic told it about the agents' activities earlier on Friday. Called the Super Intelligence Force, the group includes Jay Clayton, the White House A.I. czar; Andrew Ferguson, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission; Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management; and Emil Michael, the chief technology officer of the Defense Department.

"We informed the company that we expect immediate and full transparency to the entities involved and the public," they said in a statement. "We also expect that the company will immediately provide remediation services to the affected entities and any harmed Americans."

They added that they expected Anthropic and other companies to "immediately report incidents," cooperate with federal and state law enforcement and ensure that the incidents were not repeated.

Anthropic said in its blog post that it discovered what its A.I. agents had done after it started a review of its A.I. activity in July. At

Kate Conger and Mike Isaac reported from San Francisco, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Alan Feuer contributed reporting from Washington.

the time, OpenAI had disclosed that its technology attacked another A.I. start-up, Hugging Face. Anthropic and other labs also discovered that their technology had escaped from testing environments and conducted hacks.

Anthropic said an A.I. model it had been testing had taken unauthorized actions, including using a flaw in a university website to download data and sending a government agency a form that it had been told not to submit.

A spokesman for Anthropic declined to comment beyond the company's blog post.

The Philadelphia Police Department said earlier on Friday that Anthropic had notified it that the company's technology submitted a false homicide tip to the agency's website. The tip was dated July 18 and claimed that the submitter had information about an unsolved case, the department said.

The tip was flagged as spam and never investigated, the department said, but Anthropic notified the police last week about the incident and said the company would publicly disclose it on Friday.

"An unreleased, non-frontier research model was meant to fill out a practice copy of a government form," Anthropic said in its blog post. "When the copy failed to load or the model closed it by mistake, the model instead navigated to the website where the real form is normally hosted and submitted the form there."

Concerns about rogue A.I. have risen as more artificial intelligence labs have reported losing control of agents. Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic have been under scrutiny for the dangers that cutting-edge A.I. models might pose. They also face questions about whether to slow down development of their systems.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

Safety experts have warned that rogue A.I. could take down critical infrastructure like electric grids or banking systems. After A.I. models from several leading labs broke out of testing environments this summer, the companies said they planned to introduced enhanced safety measures to control them.

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The Cornell Rape Investigation

He Was Named a Fraternity Event Monitor. She Accused Him of Assault.

A former Cornell student accused seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity of sexual assault at a party in 2024. The accusations have set off a debate about sexual assault and consent on campuses.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAUREN PETRACCA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article is by Nicole Hong, Emma Goldberg and Sharon Otterman.

The fraternity party at Cornell University where a woman alleges she was sexually assaulted in 2024 was officially registered under university rules that were supposed to promote safer partying.

The rules required fraternities to designate "trained event monitors" who would stay sober and wear distinctive clothing so that police officers, paramedics or other partygoers could quickly identify them in an emergency.

One of the monitors listed by the Chi Phi fraternity in paperwork to register the 2024 party was Jonathan Newell, a man who would later be accused of sexually assaulting the woman known as Jane Doe — and the one who sent a Snapchat message inviting others into the room with her.

That information was included among more than 1,000 pages of confidential university records obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Newell, a sophomore at the time who was expelled for his actions that night, has told investigators that his sexual encounter with Jane Doe was consensual and that he did not remember sending the Snapchat message, the records show.

He was one of seven men accused of assaulting Jane Doe, who has since dropped out of Cornell, in a lawsuit she filed last month. All have denied any wrongdoing. None have been charged with a crime.

A university spokeswoman declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Mr. Newell's designation as a safety monitor in the paperwork underscores the limitations of Cornell's efforts to rein in its party culture in response to a drumbeat of troubling incidents.

One of the first recorded deaths from a fraternity hazing in the United States took place at Cornell, when a student fell into a gorge during initiation in 1873.

More recently, Greek life at Cornell has faced scrutiny after two high-profile deaths — one in 2011 when a student died of alcohol poisoning after a fraternity party and another in 2019 when a student was found dead in a gorge after a recruitment event.

Reporting was contributed by Maia Coleman, Henry Fernandez, Amy Julia Harris, Duy Nguyen, Zach Seward and Steve Eder. Georgia Gee contributed research.

Every school year, the university investigates new allegations of hazing. In 2022, Cornell made headlines again after reports were published in a single weekend that one student had recently been sexually assaulted and at least four others drugged at off-campus fraternity parties.

In response, Cornell has layered rules atop sorority and fraternity events.

It banned all hard liquor from Greek houses. It mandated that parties where alcohol is served must end by 1 a.m. It required a roving security team to conduct random spot checks at Greek houses.

And it bolstered the rules around event monitors.

The monitors, who must regularly complete a training program, are supposed to remain sober and have a range of responsibilities at parties.

As of earlier this year, according to an archived version of Cornell's event rules, the monitors were required to take reasonable steps to prevent overcrowding and underage drinking; prohibit public urination; and stop people from leaving with open containers of alcohol.

Sororities and fraternities were required to identify one such monitor for every 25 attendees and to submit the names in an online application before the party.

On the paperwork filed ahead of the Chi Phi party on Oct. 19, 2024, the night of the alleged assault, Mr. Newell was listed among the fraternity's seven designated monitors, according to the records obtained by The Times.

It was not clear whether Mr. Newell knew he was listed on the paperwork, and campus investigators did not ask him about it when they interviewed him in December 2024, about two months after the party.

In the interview, Mr. Newell said that by the time he showed up to Chi Phi that night at about midnight, he had already been drinking at earlier parties — where he estimated he had two to three beers, several shots, two mixed drinks and a half bottle of a strawberry tequila drink. He was drunk to the point of stumbling down the stairs, he told the investigators.

After he walked into the party, he said, another fraternity member asked if he wanted to participate in a threesome with Jane Doe — a statement consistent with what the woman told investigators in November 2024, the university records show.

But afterward, Jane Doe said in her lawsuit, Mr. Newell and other fraternity members pressured her into snorting ketamine with them and then began engaging in sex acts without her consent. She said she pushed Mr. Newell's hands away as he repeatedly reached for her vagina through-

out the night.

Mr. Newell told investigators that Jane Doe gave verbal consent for the sexual encounters. He denied giving her ketamine, but acknowledged that he had gaps in his memory later in the night when he was vomiting from the drugs and alcohol he took.

Mr. Newell did not respond to a request for comment. It was not

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Underscoring the limitations of efforts to rein in parties.

clear whether he had hired a lawyer.

Shortly after the Chi Phi party in 2024, the campus police interviewed the fraternity member who served as its risk manager in charge of assigning the sober monitors, according to the files obtained by The Times.

He said he did not remember who the monitors were that night because he sometimes wrote the names in one document and then deleted them to write the names for the next party in the same document.

"I'm a pretty lazy person," he told the investigators.

He said that as he was controlling the crowd at the front door, the party "got very hectic at points." He was the one who let Jane Doe come in, he said, because she seemed "completely sober" when she arrived. (Jane Doe has told investigators that she had drunk heavily before showing up that night.)

The risk manager said he had heard at the party about "rumors of a threesome going on, and then another threesome going on," but brushed it off as gossip.

Cornell's guidelines state that event monitors are supposed to be "substance free for the duration of the event." But, according to Chi Phi's party registration and witness interviews, the party was scheduled to begin at 10:30 p.m. and had an official end time of midnight.

Winston Lee, another Chi Phi member accused of sexual assault by Jane Doe, was not listed as an event monitor in the paperwork filed by the fraternity ahead of the party. But he told investigators that he was assigned to be a sober bartender and performed that duty until the party ended. He said he helped get water and an Uber for a female attendee who was throwing up in the balcony.

After the party ended, he said, he entered an upstairs room to find Mr. Newell, Jane Doe and another fraternity member under the sheets.

He later told investigators that he took ketamine off Jane Doe's body and received oral sex from her but only after she gave verbal permission.

A lawyer for Mr. Lee did not respond to a request for comment.

Soon after the party, Chi Phi was suspended from campus and has been closed ever since.

In interviews with more than a dozen current and recently graduated Cornell students, many emphasized that the role of an event monitor was not always taken seriously, especially in fraternities, where the policies were often seen as boxes to check, not as rules the university strictly enforced.

Some understood the role primarily to involve making sure nobody was vomiting in the house, stumbling or passed out. Others said the responsibility of the risk manager was to turn off the music by 1 a.m. so the police weren't summoned.

One senior who has attended fraternity parties said she had never heard of event monitors.

A former fraternity president who graduated this year and spoke on the condition of anonymity said fraternity leaders regularly shared ideas for how to circumvent the rules and throw unregistered parties, including by pouring all alcohol out of labeled bottles into cups so that the bottles could not be spotted in social media posts.

Students also emphasized that even an effective sober monitoring system would not resolve underlying cultural problems that encourage sexual misconduct.

"The sober monitors at parties I've been to don't seem to be by any stretch of the imagination monitoring what could become a threat or risk," said Julian Weinberg, a 21-year-old junior. "It helps shift the blame from the frat as a whole to a few individuals."

The event monitoring at the Chi Phi fraternity was not the only breakdown in protocols on the night Jane Doe said she was sexually assaulted.

In fact, she was herself supposed to be a sober monitor for her sorority's date party earlier in the night but began drinking in her sorority house after learning that another person was assigned that duty, she told investigators. When it was time to leave, she discovered her sorority sisters had forgotten to account for her in ordering Ubers to the bar and began to cry, she said.

Her house mother, a sorority employee who is supposed to report misconduct, took her to the bar in Ithaca instead, Jane Doe said. In her lawsuit, she said the house mother should have observed that she was drunk.

At her sorority's date party, the bar marked an X on her hand to indicate she was under the legal drinking age, she said. But she was able to buy a cocktail anyway, she said, simply by keeping her hand down as she was ordering.

In the lawsuit, Jane Doe sued her sorority, Delta Delta Delta, for not preventing underage binge drinking at the sorority house and at social events, accusing the organization of failing to adequately train its sober monitors.

It remains to be seen whether Jane Doe's lawsuit will have an effect on the party culture on campus.

Earlier this year, Cornell suspended a fraternity after finding that it had forced new members to drink to the point of blacking out and encouraged them to consume "unspecified drugs to the point of being too high."

This year alone, the Cornell University Police has responded to at least 100 incidents involving alcohol or drug offenses, the agency's crime logs show.

At Cornell, Mixed Views Over Sorority's Inclusion In Suit by One of Its Own

By JULIE BOSMAN and ANDREA BARNES

The searing lawsuit brought by a former college student known as Jane Doe lays blame at the feet of her school, Cornell University. The seven men she accused of sexual assault, the fraternity Chi Phi and an off-campus bar where she drank at a private party have also faced public backlash.

Less scrutinized is the role of another defendant: Delta Delta Delta, Jane Doe's sorority.

It was the 113-year-old Cornell chapter of Tri Delta, Jane Doe claimed in the lawsuit, that also bears responsibility for what she described as a violent, traumatic assault. The sorority had put on a public face promising safety for the women who joined, the lawsuit said, vowing to monitor and protect the sisters of Tri Delta who lived in the stately brick sorority house on Triphammer Road.

Yet on that night in October 2024, an underage Jane Doe drank alcohol with her sorority sisters at their house, downing what she later estimated to be about six shots of vodka. The “house mom,” an employee of the sorority who supervised the women living in the house, escorted an intoxicated Jane Doe in an Uber from the sorority house to a bar in downtown Ithaca, N.Y., the lawsuit said. At that bar, where Tri Delta hosted a “date party” for women and their guests, Jane Doe was able to drink even more alcohol, ordering a cocktail from a bartender without interference, the lawsuit said.

These events, the lawsuit said, led directly to the sexual assault of Jane Doe later that night at the Chi Phi house.

Tri Delta said in a statement that it "supports women and will continue to stand beside those who have experienced sexual violence."

But the naming of Tri Delta as a defendant has roiled the sorority's members in Ithaca and beyond, prompting many to ask whether

Davaughnia Wilson and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.

an organization founded on principles of sisterhood and personal character could have been culpable in the rape of one of its own.

Others have questioned whether the lawsuit has made Tri Delta a convenient scapegoat, another instance of women shouldering blame for men's actions.

"It makes me angry that it's even a conversation of, 'What didn't we do to protect our sister?'" Lucia Montes, a Tri Delta member who graduated from Cornell in 2017, said in an interview. "But that's the reality."

By Jane Doe's account, the night of Oct. 19, 2024, began with a scene of sisterly camaraderie at the Tri Delta sorority house.

In hundreds of pages of confidential investigative files obtained by The New York Times, Jane Doe said that she and her fellow Tri Deltas had gathered at their house, preparing for a party at Moonies, a bar off campus. Jane Doe, who was relieved of her "sober monitor" duties after her wallet was stolen earlier that day, took swigs of Tito's vodka from a bottle while the young women chatted and got ready to leave, drinking quickly enough that at least one friend gently told her to slow down.

But when the group eventually loaded into a pair of Ubers for the party, Jane Doe was mistakenly left behind.

Alone and struggling to hold back tears of disappointment, she sought out the "house mom."

"I didn't want to tell her I was drunk because she's a mandated reporter," Jane Doe said, according to a transcript of her conversation with investigators.

Sororities nationwide have strict rules banning alcohol in their houses. The lawsuit claimed that Tri Delta, whose Cornell chapter counts more than 160 members, failed to "exercise reasonable care to prevent plaintiff from binge drinking at its sorority house on Cornell's campus, when plaintiff was in its care, custody and control."

The house mother offered to drop off Jane Doe at the party in an Uber, since she was also heading in that direction. At the door at Moonies, Jane Doe, who was then 20, was given a mark on her hand to indicate to the bar staff that she was not allowed to drink.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAUREN PETRACCA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

But, according to documents obtained by The Times, she was able to order a cocktail from the bartender anyway, socializing with friends and vaping tobacco in a back room at the bar.

"Everyone kind of knows that if you want alcohol, you will find a way to get alcohol," Jane Doe told investigators, according to the transcript obtained by The Times.

Around 10 p.m., Jane Doe walked over to another bar, Lot 10, and bumped into more friends. Most of the women, she recalled in the transcript, were accompanied by their boyfriends or friends.

"It was a pretty solid group of people there," she told investigators at Lot 10. "They all had somebody watching out for them."

Around 11 p.m., Jane Doe set out to meet a friend at the Chi Phi house, walking alone.

On Oct. 1, Tri Delta members across the country received an unexpected email. The subject line read: "A message from Tri Delta."

In the email, Stacey Dickenson Cox, the president of the sorority, said she was "saddened, outraged and deeply concerned" by the news reports about the "incident" at Cornell in 2024.

Because the sorority was named in the lawsuit, she added, there are details that she could not share publicly.

"There will undoubtedly be difficult conversations and strong reactions as the lawsuit moves forward," she wrote. "Some of what is said publicly may be painful for our sisters to hear."

To some devoted Tri Delta women, the email did not go far enough.

"Sickeningly thin," said Haisley Smith, a dues-paying Tri Delta alumna from Mountain Brook, Ala. "It was just completely inadequate to make any current members, alumni or prospective members feel like the national organization is feeling the gravity of this in any substantial way."

Brittany Robb, a spokeswoman for Tri Delta, said in an email that the organization does not comment on pending litigation. "As an organization, we are committed to supporting women and victims of sexual violence," she said.

The Cornell chapter of Tri Delta said in a statement that it was "inspired by women like Jane Doe."

"We stand in solidarity with Jane Doe and every other survivor," the statement said.

Lenore Schiller, a Tri Delta member who graduated from Cornell in 2019, saw Jane Doe's lawsuit as something unique to the sorority: an embodiment of the Tri Delta values of strength and solidarity, the kind of philosophy reflected in its members' standard

Cornell's chapter of the Tri Delta sorority, left, and Moonies Bar & Nightclub in Ithaca, N.Y., below, also bear responsibility for an assault, Jane Doe's lawsuit claims.

email sign-off, "Loyally."

"Our values were always like women's rights, standing up for each other, not taking B.S.," Ms. Schiller said. "She was brave enough to come out to say something because that's what Tri Delt stood for."

Some members questioned whether the sorority had enough safety measures in place to protect its young women from fraternity men, in a Greek system where alcohol and drug use is commonplace.

"What do we expect to happen?" said JoDee Neil, a Tri Delta alumna of Texas A&M University. "We're not giving them any tools. And we're sending them off, basically, into a lion's den."

Legal experts said that the inclusion of Tri Delta as a defendant in the lawsuit reflected a common strategy in civil legal actions like this one. Including every party who could be held liable for a plaintiff's suffering helps make a case to a jury. And the more defendants found liable, the more financial damages a plaintiff could presumably recover, the experts added.

"You want to be able to tell a full story to the jury," said Heidi Li Feldman, a professor emerita of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

She cautioned that simply being named as a defendant in the lawsuit does not suggest that Tri Delta would bear an equal burden of responsibility to other defendants.

Thomas Giuffra, a lawyer for Jane Doe, said in an interview that she never should have been allowed to leave the sorority house.

"That's the first failed guardrail," he said. "Somebody should have said: 'Hey, no, you're intoxicated. You're not, you shouldn't be going outside. It's not safe.' And that failed."

But holding Tri Delta liable could be an uphill battle.

"I can't see a world in which the sorority would be held responsible for this conduct," said Rebecca Zipkin, a lawyer who has represented victims of sexual assault on college campuses.

PHOTOGRAPHS VIA MONRIDE COUNTY SHERRIFF'S OFFICE

Day's Catch Near Keys: Cocaine Bricks

A package believed to be a cocaine brick, top, was found off the Florida Keys in August. Bradford Picariello, facing charges of selling cocaine he found, directed agents to 20 kilos in storage.

By DAVID OVALLE

MIAMI — Plastic-wrapped bricks of drugs floating in the waters of the Florida Keys are common enough that they have a locally flavored nickname: square grouper.

This summer, lobster divers plucked a brick of cocaine from the waters off Big Pine Key, about 30 miles northeast of Key West. The boat captain, unable to find any sheriff's deputies once she anchored, left the brick — printed with a fiery sun, praying hands and the words "With God" in Spanish — on the hood of a fire-rescue ambulance.

Eager to score an easy payday — the bricks can fetch tens of thousands of dollars — others are not so honest.

Consider John Strama, a long-time boat builder and mechanic in the Keys who led a ring of people recently sentenced to prison for distributing cocaine found at sea. Mr. Strama, 44, used his knowledge of local waterways, tides and currents to home in on cocaine bricks that either fell off boats or were dumped by spooked traffickers, federal prosecutors said.

"Fishing for 'square groupers' in the waters off the Florida Keys is not a harmless pastime. It is drug trafficking," Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in August.

The drug trade in the Keys has ebbed and flowed over decades, but there is a resurgence in cocaine globally. Rick Ramsay, the sheriff of Monroe County, said packages of cocaine surfaced nearly every week, a consistent pattern, though a string of recent cases have drawn more attention than usual.

Though the Trump administration has ordered strikes on what it says are boats suspected of running drugs in the Caribbean, those operations are far from the Keys, making it unlikely that they are causing more cocaine to end up adrift. Neither the Coast Guard nor the Drug Enforcement Administration responded to requests for information.

The Keys remain an ideal place to offload drugs: The island chain offers hundreds of miles of coastline dense with mangroves and tiny spoil islands that make good spots to hide from the law.

During the heyday of the marijuana trade in the 1970s, traffickers enlisted commercial fishing boat captains and crews in the region. For some local teens, racing to catch bales of pot ditched at sea became something of a sport.

Mr. Strama, a father of four, knew the trade as a child, said one of his lawyers, Sam Rabin. "His father sent him to sea alone to search for floating bales of marijuana," Mr. Rabin wrote in a sentencing memo before a judge gave Mr. Strama 10 years in prison.

More than a few Keys residents made fortunes off their hauls as square grouper became local lore. Restaurants, T-shirts and bumper stickers bear the sobriquet. Residents have ridden square grouper floats at parades in Key West.

Over time, drug traffickers off the Florida coast have changed their tactics. In the 1980s, cocaine smugglers knifed through the ocean on "Miami Vice"-style speedboats that could easily outrun police boats. Today, they are more likely to use inconspicuous sailboats or freighters to transport cocaine to the Keys, Sheriff Ramsay said.

The packages are typically marked with numbers or symbols identifying their intended buyers, he said. Bricks stamped "333" have repeatedly popped up recently. This month, someone cleaning a popular state park found a package featuring the cat from "Tom and Jerry."

"Drug smuggling in the Keys is alive and well," Sheriff Ramsay said.

Square grouper has occasionally proved deadly.

In 2011, a Keys man died of a cocaine overdose after ingesting drugs from a brick he found while on a fishing boat with his brother. Four years later, sheriff's deputies discovered a young couple shot to death inside their Keys home, victims of a dispute that stemmed from the sale of cocaine that had been found at sea by a charter boat crew. A boat mate is serving life in prison for the murders.

Last month, Bradford Picariello, who owns Outlaw Fishing Charters in Marathon, Fla., pleaded not guilty after a federal indictment charged that he sold a brick of cocaine found at sea to an undercover investigator. Mr. Picariello, 66, faces 10 years to life in prison if convicted.

A confidential source tipped off the authorities that Mr. Picariello was selling more than 20 kilograms of cocaine that he had found, according to a police report. The source brokered a deal to buy some, and Mr. Picariello told the source to "bring a cooler to make it look as though he was getting fish," according to the police report.

Then, in January, Mr. Picariello sold a kilo to an undercover agent posing as a buyer at a marina for \$100,000, the police said. He was immediately arrested. Mr. Picariello directed agents to nearly 20 more kilos in a storage container.

His defense lawyer, Joseph Rosenbaum, said his client would fight the charges. "Every old fisherman that I talk to tells me he's got a sterling reputation," Mr. Rosenbaum said. "They're all in shock."

Mr. Picariello remains in federal custody in Miami.

Discovering cocaine at sea played out differently for Danielle Nutten, the boat captain who left a brick on an ambulance in August. She and her friends used to joke about what they would do if they found square grouper. After catching 48 lobsters that day, they found a brick floating among garbage.

They were incredulous — and briefly panicked. "One girl was terrified drug dealers were going to kill her," Ms. Nutten said.

Ms. Nutten tossed the brick in the center console of her truck and drove around Big Pine Key looking for the authorities, a decision she now says might have gone wrong had she been pulled over. Later that night, she and her friends celebrated their unusual experience with a dinner a few islands away.

The restaurant was the Square Grouper Bar and Grill.

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Four Die and Multitudes Lose Power As Isaias Weakens and Moves Inland

HILARY SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By DAVID OVALLE

A demolished trailer in Gulf Breeze, Fla., top, and Wynnehaven Beach, above, after Hurricane Isaias struck the Panhandle.

ZACK WITTMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

DESTIN, Fla. — At least four people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of others lost power after Hurricane Isaias struck the Florida Panhandle late Friday night and raced into Alabama.

Two people died when trees fell onto homes in Escambia County, Fla., which includes Pensacola, and Birmingham, Ala., according to local officials. A man in Florida was found dead in his garage with a generator running, according to Gov. Ron DeSantis, indicating he might have died from carbon monoxide poisoning. A person in southeast Alabama died after a motor vehicle crash involving fallen trees in Barbour County, said Josh Johnson, a spokesman with the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

Towns across the region suffered damage, and downed trees and power lines made some roads impassable.

But many residents of the Panhandle, which was hit with winds surpassing 100 miles per hour, were relieved Saturday morning.

Trees and fences had been toppled. Signs for restaurants and mini-golf courses had been knocked over, as had some R.V.s. Winds had crumpled garage doors and peeled away the siding and roofs on some homes.

The damage was bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as many people had feared. Coastal flooding was less intense than had been predicted. "We got away with murder," said David Gates, 60, who was out walking in Fort Walton Beach.

The hurricane made landfall in Destin, Fla., as a Category 2 storm, and was the first to hit the mainland United States in two years. It was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone soon after midnight, but it was still bringing heavy rain to much of the Southeast on Saturday as it moved inland, churning along an expected track north through Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. Officials in the Carolinas warned residents there to prepare for possible flash flooding. The remnants of the storm will bring rain to the Northeast on Sunday and Monday.

Nearly 900,000 customers lost

Reporting was contributed by Amy Graff, Isabella Kwai, Judson Jones, Maia Spoto and Eduardo Medina.

power in Florida, Alabama and Georgia, though about 200,000 had it restored by later Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us.

Florida officials said Saturday that they had not received reports of missing people. "We have not yet received any requests for search and rescue deployment, and I think that is an optimistic sign," Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference.

The Atlantic hurricane season has been quiet this year; the last time that the first hurricane formed this late in the season was 1905. A major reason for the lull is the El Niño weather system, which typically suppresses hurricanes in the Atlantic, while feeding them in the Eastern Pacific.

On Saturday, two storms, Hurricane Simon and Tropical Storm Rachel, were headed toward Mexico and the American Southwest, bringing risks of flooding but also potential relief from a brutal Southern California heat wave.

Before Isaias, the last hurricane to hit the mainland United States was Milton, which made landfall in Florida in 2024.

In the Panhandle town of Mary Esther, Maria Hernandez, 75, and her son, Louis Hernandez, 59, said they had ridden out the hurricane in their weather-beaten house, which was built in 1968. A transformer exploded across the street during the storm and a tree had blown down but missed the house.

"It's gone through a lot of hurricanes," Ms. Hernandez said of the house. "Thank God it's still standing."

Her son added that he intended to celebrate by collecting sea-shells at a beach. "The best time to find them is after a hurricane," he said.

A Constant Stream of Menace ... not see the inaugural, you'll be dead. Your family will be dead. Your staff will be dead. On the 20th, you'll all be dead. This will be the beginning of a revolt against you, you racist c\*\*\*." "You deserve to \*\*\*\* die a horrible, horrible painful death just like Lisa Murkowski from Alaska." "I hope someone goes hunting for Derek Van Orden like they did in Minnesota." "second amendment right to form a militia and shoot Congresswoman Dingell dead." "FUCK YOU DEBBIE. This is why Allyssa Slotkin is here. Slotkin is New York City shit. Corrupt New York City shit got her elected here so the DEMOCRAT SHIT CAN take our money. The New York City shit have done the same thing many places to control the U.S. and take money from those who work in the U.S." "Message for Ken Paxton - Bang, Bang, Bang." "Prepare to die, you, Tulsi and everyone you hold dear." "I'm gonna kill Marsha Blackburn. I'm gonna shoot her with a gun. I'm gonna blow her head up on national TV. She will literally have brains splattered behind her because she will not be a person. She will be a dead f\*\*\*ing body." "I promise to kill all the tyrants." "Do I have to fuckin kill someone to get attention?" "So If say someone should kill...@realDonaldTrump for betraying Americans & enforcing tyranny I'm the bad guy?." "I man fighting tyrants by himself will, be labeled a domestic terrorist. That's why I encourage people to join me, we have strength in numbers." "@real Donald Trump Shut up before you end up like Kennedy you fuckin Jews worshipping tyrant." "your going to get assassinated if you

'I had to move my house physically due to death threats — credible — that were investigated by the F.B.I. to my family. That's where we're at.'

Representative

Derrick Van Orden

Wisconsin, Republican

'It's really important to have conversations with your family . . . before entering into an elected position and have them understand, you know, like you're probably going to see my blood in the water a little bit.'

Carly Koppes

Weld County clerk and recorder

Colorado, Republican

U.S. Public Officials Are Living in Fear As Violent Threats Against Them Rise

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAIYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

'I didn't want to do this job anymore after that. Not just out of fear or anything, but the joy of public service, the joy of being with Melissa Hortman, and just how that was taken.'

Gov. Tim Walz

Minnesota, Democrat

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From Page 1

expense. They've changed their daily routines, moved their children to new schools, grocery-shopped only at certain times and places. They've scrubbed the internet to remove personal information about themselves and their loved ones.

Some of them have altered what they say in public and, in rare cases, how they govern. Some, including members of Congress, have quit. Both parties have struggled to recruit candidates, especially women.

And policing violent threats against officials is a difficult task. The Times's review of federal court data from the past two years found only 53 cases in which individuals were charged with threatening public officials, excluding the president.

Vague state and federal laws and free speech protections can make prosecution challenging. Anonymous letters and screen names can be hard to track. The sheer volume of threats can make hunting down those responsible virtually impossible.

This new normal can also be measured in dollars spent. In the 2017-18 election cycle, candidates for federal office spent roughly \$6 million on security-related items, according to campaign finance records. In the current midterm cycle, candidates had already spent at least \$25 million by Aug. 1, with the final general election sprint still to come. That excludes what many officials are spending from their own pockets.

Overall, the threats tallied by The Times are likely undercounts; state laws and communication policies bar many offices from disclosing security issues.

Many members of Congress said privately that it was hard to imagine any remaining offices on Capitol Hill that have not experienced a violent threat this decade.

The rhetoric is abetted by the anonymity of the internet, a polarized political landscape and the entrenched public opinion that politicians are not improving American lives. Those receiving threats include divisive figures who have juiced the increasingly belligerent tone of political rhetoric, as well as others who avoid inflammatory talk but are targeted for their policies, ideology or party affiliation.

Representative Derrick Van Orden, a Republican from Wisconsin seeking re-election next month, attended the "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in support of President Trump's false claim that he had won the 2020 election. Mr. Van Orden was outside the U.S. Capitol that day when a mob attacked it, though he has denied entering the building. He was elected to Congress in 2022.

That's when the threats began.

"I was a Navy SEAL for over 22 years," Mr. Van Orden said in an interview with The Times. "I hunted terrorists around the world a lot and was very successful at that. Never had a single threat to my family. Ever."

Now, Mr. Van Orden travels with armed security personnel. His family, he said, is "protected 24 hours a day."

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'This Is Just Not Worth It'

For much of her political career, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Republican House member from Georgia, injected herself into the most pitched political battles. Her liberal foes said she courted controversy to raise her profile. But her rapid rise also came at a cost.

What started out as a flood of threats primarily from the left evolved into menace from the right, too, after Ms. Greene's break with President Trump last fall.

Ms. Greene's dispute with the president centered largely on Jeffrey Epstein, the sexual predator who eventually killed himself in jail. Like many on the far right, Ms. Greene had agitated for the release of government files pertaining to Mr. Epstein. Then she began agitating directly against the president she had once fawned over, when his government refused to do so.

Her disillusionment expanded after Mr. Trump took the country to war against Iran. She believed his tariff policies and curtailment of health subsidies were hurting her constituents in rural northwest Georgia, she said, and flouting his promise to put "America First."

Her breaking point came after the president called her a "traitor." Of the torrent of threats that followed, one stood out. It was aimed at her son.

"That's the one that bothers me on a visceral level," she said.

Ms. Greene reached out to Mr. Trump, hoping for compassion from a president she had stood by for years. She forwarded copies of the threats to him, hoping that seeing the threats against her family would be enough to tone down the attacks.

She got a five-word reply from the president: "Your fault, you deserve it."

Weeks later, Ms. Greene announced her retirement from Congress.

"I looked at what are the risks and what is the reward," she said. "And for me, it was, I'm not going to be treated that way, and I'm not going to have my children's lives threatened."

A White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, did not deny the contents of Mr. Trump's text, but he said Mr. Trump condemned political violence.

"Having survived multiple assassination attempts — and having seen his dear friend Charlie be assassinated last year — no one understands the dangers of political violence more than President Trump," he said, referring to Mr. Kirk.

Women are often more aggressively targeted than men, and harder to recruit, said Greta Neubauer, the Democratic minority leader in the Wisconsin State Assembly. Mothers are more apt to avoid the risk to themselves and their families, she said.

If potential recruits don't bring up fears of violence on their own, Ms. Neubauer does. "There is an amount of risk that you and your family are going to need to accept if you choose to do this," she regularly says to potential candidates. "And we want to make sure that you are fully aware of that in advance."

Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat from Minnesota, nearly walked away, too.

He was inundated with violent threats after Kamala Harris, then the vice president, selected him as her running mate in 2024. But it was the assassination of two close friends, the former Minnesota House speaker, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark, in June 2025 that led Mr. Walz to question his resolve to keep going.

The tragedy also altered Mr. Walz's daily life. His security team was on increased alert. He felt helpless to protect state lawmakers who felt exposed and unsafe after losing one of their own.

"We're a part-time legislature," Mr. Walz said. "These folks go back home and teach school, run their business, they're dentists, they're nurses, they do all those things. How do you follow them in the nine months they're not here?"

---

When Families Are Targets

A former C.I.A. analyst and Defense Department official, Senator Elissa Slotkin had been trained to deal with a variety of "threat environments."

Her family had not. So when political foes started targeting her parents, including an ailing father, Ms. Slotkin couldn't shield them from a toll they had not invited.

Last November, Ms. Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, joined five others in a video telling U.S. soldiers that they did not have to follow unlawful orders.

The message infuriated Mr. Trump, who described it as “seditious behavior from traitors” and “punishable by death.” Conservatives labeled the lawmakers the “seditious six.” The threats poured in — especially to Ms. Slotkin, the one who had posted the video on the social-media platform X.

The Capitol Police assigned round-the-clock shifts to protect her. What they couldn't prevent: her parents' home being swatted in the middle of the night. Her father, 81 at the time, was dying of cancer when someone called the local police with a false report that a man was killing his wife at the couple's address.

The senator's brothers put security details in front of their homes. Staff members temporarily moved out of theirs. Her father died just a few weeks after the police came to his door.

"I signed up for this, but my family and my staff did not," Ms. Slotkin said.

Threats to family and staff feel more chilling, several officials said, and the impacts are often more disruptive.

"My daughter just sent me one yesterday," Mr. Walz told The Times, "where somebody said, 'Wait what I've got in store for you — and then a picture in front of the house."

Mr. Van Orden moved his family because of violent threats. "I know exactly what these people are trying to do," he said. "To make me leave the public

targeted and killed for your actions against me LGBTQ will fall." .Rubio, Noem...You have been found guilty of 18 USC Section 2384: Seditious Conspiracy. Both of you will be executed at 16:30. Best wishes to your future endeavors." "@SecRubio I guess the only way that you are going to shut your mouth is through DEATH." "To whom it may concern, I am going to have the Illinois attorney general killed." "HANG Jena Griswold NOW!!!!!" "Hang Griswold from a tree at \*\*\* \* \* \* \* \* St." "Jena, Guilty of Treason....Hangman Measure The Distance Of Drop And Watch The Vertebrae Pop." "I will murder Gregg Amore." "Marylin, you are a fucking piece of shit. Okay, you voted yes to send 3.3 billion dollars of taxpaying money to Israel. Literally genocide. You fucking, I'm gonna kill you. Okay, watch your fucking back." "The Government has until Wednesday before I exercise my second Amendment on the Governor of Wyoming. I'M VERY SERIOUS." "Hey Jocelyn you better get ready to experience the nasty side effects of hemp rope for treason." "You should all be lined up and fucking shot in the fucking faces." "I have your locations doxxed I can get around your security guards I have the best access to your window... I'm gonna murder you and I'm gonna start with your children." "I want to see them dead. I want to see them hanged. I want to see their throat cut from ear to ear. I want to see them gunned down in the streets." "You better think about reversing that decision pretty soon, you have a bunch of black op boys coming down there and it won't be pretty." "She belongs back in balls and chains with

She belongs, hanging by a fucking hunting for fucking n\*\*\*\*\* like

'When you had 2,000 threats a year, you could get it done with, you know, a handful of detectives or investigators. But when it doubled and tripled . . . you had to add dozens of folks.'

J. Thomas Manger

Former chief, Capitol Police

Shenna Bellows

Maine secretary of state,

Democrat

'It was a bit surreal . . . calling my husband and saying, honey, law enforcement's recommending that we find a safe house.'

'I was just at a rally last night in Tarrant County in Fort Worth and a woman prayed over me. The public is afraid, right? The public senses that this space is dangerous.'

Gina Hinojosa

Texas state representative and candidate for governor, Democrat

'Voices that sounded like demons, saying they wanted to dig my brains out of my head with a screwdriver, or other calls where they said they wanted to smash my head open on a curb.'

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Former U.S. representative

Georgia, Republican

square through threatening my family, because they know threatening me has no effect at all because of my background."

Many officials cite a desire to improve their country for their children and grandchildren as motivation for seeking office. The deluge of threats has done the reverse, pushing the civic-minded out of the public square to shield their loved ones from an increasingly toxic world.

Carly Koppes, a Republican county election official in Colorado, saw a new kind of violent threat after her pregnancy became public: messages targeting both her and her unborn child.

---

The Challenge of Staying Safe

Rodric Bray, the Republican leader of the Indiana Senate, drew critics, but rarely threats, after he became a well-known power broker in Indianapolis — until his chamber bucked Mr. Trump's push to eliminate the state's two remaining Democratic congressional districts.

Amid headline after headline about the intraparty disagreement, threats of violence overwhelmed the staid political atmosphere of the Indiana Statehouse. Mr. Bray became the main target.

Bomb threats were called into his office. Death threats, too. "They were very short," he said. "Just saying, I'm going to come down there and kill you." Same with messages about his house. "Just, 'There's going to be a bomb mailed to your house,' or, 'There's been a bomb placed at your house.'"

Mr. Bray said he forced himself into a stressful state of high alert. He changed his daily routine. He talked with his family about staying "extra vigilant" around the house and away from home. Friends kept watch. Once, law enforcement noticed something suspicious on his patio, alarming neighbors and keeping family away until it was cleared.

Ms. Koppes said she, too, changed her hours and took different routes to work after learning that some threats against her had come from a man living directly across from her office. "Good day War Criminal," one of them read. "You traitor guilty of treason and sedition; oath breaking piece of trash loser, you should get gang raped."

Shenna Bellows, the Democratic secretary of state in Maine, and her husband moved out of their home after law enforcement told her it wasn't safe to stay. Ms. Bellows, Maine's chief election officer, had been receiving threats at least since 2020, when Mr. Trump and his allies persuaded thousands of his supporters, without evidence, that the election that year had been rigged.

Ms. Bellows was swatted in 2023, a day after she removed Mr. Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot under the Constitution's insurrection clause. She later reversed herself after a court ruled against a similar measure in Colorado, but the threats kept coming.

In January, someone posted her cellphone number and other personal information online. Menacing voice mail and text messages poured in. Her social media was inundated. "Shenna bellows I'm coming for you," one person wrote, adding profanity. "Beheaded soon."

Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, was out of state when an activist posted a picture of her home online. She urged her family to move in with relatives.

"It was a feeling of being hunted," she said.

Now the Democratic candidate for governor in Texas, Ms. Hinojosa has installed new fencing and other barriers at home "so that we're just not as easily accessible, we're not as easily seen."

Officials are also buying guns. Jennifer Johnson, a county judge in rural Florida, recently purchased one and enrolled in a firearms course after an animated video of her being murdered circulated online.

Security equipment has become a huge expenditure for officeholders. Much of it has come on Capitol Hill, where, in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, threats of violence spiked dramatically.

J. Thomas Manger took over as chief of the Capitol Police in 2021. He more than doubled his roster of investigators. Offices were fortified and modernized. Furniture was scrutinized and rearranged. District offices across the country got security assessments.

The House's sergeant-at-arms, who oversees security in that chamber and helps govern the Capitol Police, spent more than \$28 million in 2025, the second most in recent history, according to congressional records.

Among the expenditures: \$1.8 million on an alert system, and more than \$200,000 on a gunshot detection system.

By the time Mr. Manger retired in May 2025, the volume of threats had gotten worse, he said.

One reason is the difficulty of mounting prosecutions, which reduces the deterrent effect, he said. Fewer than 10 percent of the cases Mr. Manger's team investigated in 2021 led to criminal charges, he said.

Some of that is due to mitigating circumstances such as a lack of a criminal record or mental health struggles. Some of it results from the use of diversion programs such as counseling.

Making a threat is also a tricky crime to prosecute. Explicit death threats against members of Congress are illegal, but some stop short of that line and are ruled menacing, not explicit.

"One member got a photograph, an actual physical photograph, mailed to them, and it was a photograph of their, I think it was an 8-year-old child walking a dog in their neighborhood," Mr. Manger said. "All it said on it was 'cute dog.'"

Some officeholders don't control government purse strings. State lawmakers, election officials, council members and school board officials are often left to fend for themselves.

Ms. Hinojosa said that almost every fortification she had undertaken had come at personal expense.

Threats have remade how candidates run for office. Outdoor events are increasingly rare. Sweeping event spaces is a regular part of campaign advance work. Metal detectors and frisks are common. Many candidates have a security official in their inner circle.

Such measures have made candidates feel isolated, yet the public has taken notice.

For some, at a certain point, it all becomes too much.

Ms. Greene recalled that her feud with the president came shortly after the assassination of Mr. Kirk. That made the subsequent deluge of threats more personal and more frightening.

"I said, you know what? This is just not worth it for me personally," she said. "I'm a very happy person without being in Congress. Much happier actually. And probably a lot safer."

Methodology

Above are real threats made to public officials. The Times filed hundreds of open records requests for this project, reviewing thousands of violent threats made in emails, handwritten notes, social media postings, voice mail messages and police reports. The Times conducted more than 30 interviews with current and former elected officials, law enforcement officials, election officials, security experts and political operatives, while reaching out individually to every member of Congress. The Times also used artificial intelligence to compile and filter thousands of pages of court documents. Each case was manually reviewed and confirmed by Times journalists.

2026 Election

Local Concerns Propel G.O.P. Hopefuls

By ANNA GRIFFIN and BETSY HAMMOND

Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon, a Democrat, has presided over slow progress on housing and education.

CLARE RUSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The polls show that Christine Drazan, the Republican nominee, is in a close race with Ms. Kotek.

JORDAN GALE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

PORTLAND, Ore. — National Republicans, facing stiff headwinds in some of the most conservative parts of the country, see a ray of hope in an unlikely state: Oregon.

With Oregon's ballots set to hit the mail this week, Gov. Tina Kotek's quest for re-election in one of the country's most consistently liberal states is at risk of being derailed by a conservative, anti-abortion Republican, State Senator Christine Drazan.

Conservatives are not exactly surging statewide in the land of protest frogs and craft beer. But Ms. Kotek, a first-term Democratic governor, has become almost as unpopular among her constituents as President Trump, whom they denounce routinely.

"If this were just a straight-up question, 'Do you want Tina Kotek to have another four years or not?' she would get destroyed," said John Horvick, senior vice president at DHM Research, a polling firm in Portland, Ore.

Oregonians haven't elected a Republican governor since 1982, and Ms. Kotek would seem well positioned to continue that streak. She went toe-to-toe with Mr. Trump last fall over his efforts to deploy National Guard troops to Portland amid immigration demonstrations and she has already defeated Ms. Drazan once.

Yet polls show this race between Ms. Kotek and Ms. Drazan essentially tied. A recent statewide poll conducted by Mr. Horvick's firm for Oregon Public Broadcasting found that 60 percent of potential voters viewed Ms. Kotek unfavorably, versus 63 percent for the president.

The situation in Oregon has echoes in another blue state: Minnesota. There, the Democratic lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is struggling for a clear lead in her Senate race against a Republican newcomer, Michele Tafoya, and the progressive attorney general, Keith Ellison, is in danger of losing his re-election.

In both states, the issues are local, not national — a social welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota and a sense in Oregon that the state's post-pandemic malaise is not lifting, as the cost of living goes up.

There's also a political truth that Democrats risk forgetting even in a potential blue-wave year: Performance matters.

Ms. Kotek ran four years ago pledging to reduce homelessness, supercharge housing production and improve public schools, but the progress has been slow.

Ms. Kotek pushed through changes to ease construction of affordable homes, and housing starts have begun rising after falling early in her term. Still, they are short of her goal of 36,000 houses a year, and the homeless population is substantially higher than when she took office.

In 2024, the most recent data available, Oregon's fourth graders posted the fourth worst performance in reading in the country. This year, just 42 percent of third graders scored as proficient at reading and writing.

"Tina Kotek told Oregonians that she would solve the problems and challenges facing our state," Ms. Drazan said at their first debate on Oct. 1. "She hasn't."

Priscilla Southwell, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, said she thinks Ms. Kotek "has actually done a good job with what she's been handed." But, she added, Oregon "is more purple than people may realize, and these are hard economic times."

Some progressives have joined the criticism chorus, frustrated by the business-friendly recommendations from a bipartisan “prosperity council” she convened to tackle economic issues and her 2025 calls to reduce a tax on high earners that funds one county’s universal preschool program.

---

In Minnesota and Oregon, Democrats are in tight races.

In a second term, Ms. Kotek has promised to bring Oregon schools up to the national average for instructional time, expand child care and affordable housing, create a new state commerce department to spur economic growth, and halt new data centers until the state passes its own standards. Her campaign pitch echoes Vice President JD Vance's: Just give her "more time."

"I'm not satisfied, either," Ms. Kotek said at the recent debate.

When it comes to Ms. Drazan, Ms. Kotek has been mostly focused on the president. One ad deemed the Republican his "right hand." At the debate, the governor mentioned him so many times Ms. Drazan accused her of helping viewers play a drinking game.

In the State Legislature, Ms. Drazan sponsored bills to bar transgender girls from playing on girls' sports teams and to end Oregon's universal vote-by-mail system. She opposes abortion, but has said she would not challenge Oregon's statutory abortion protections, which are among the strongest in the country.

Last fall, as Mr. Trump's attempt to deploy federalized National Guard troops to Portland prompted demonstrations and a court challenge, Ms. Drazan accused state and local leaders of allowing "violent mobs and domestic terrorists" threaten federal agents. She's banking on Oregonians, particularly suburban and rural voters, being tired of the homeless camps and empty storefronts in Portland lingering six years after the pandemic.

The candidates agree that Oregonians are hurting financially. Ms. Kotek has emphasized decisions made in Washington. Ms. Drazan points to the State Capitol.

The two candidates have a rivalry that goes back before the 2022 campaign, when Ms. Kotek won 47 percent to 44 percent of votes. That lent a personal edge to the frowns, head shakes and mutual accusations of dishonesty that peppered their first debate.

As the State House Republican leader, Ms. Drazan used walkouts and other procedural tactics to block or slow Ms. Kotek's legislative agenda. In 2021, Ms. Drazan accused Ms. Kotek of reneging on a deal to give Republicans equal representation on a redistricting committee in exchange for ending their delaying tactics.

History suggests Democrats and independents will "come home" to Ms. Kotek. Polls around this time four years ago also suggested a closer race than the final result., and a new poll from The Oregonian shows movement toward the governor and a slight Kotek lead. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report still says the race leans Democratic in a state where Republicans make up just 24 percent of the electorate.

Ms. Kotek also has a substantial financial advantage — her campaign has \$3.4 million to spend, compared with nearly \$2 million for Ms. Drazan's. And Ms. Drazan has yet to receive any contributions from the one person in Oregon who could close that gap: Phil Knight, the Nike co-founder and frequent Republican donor.

RYAN DAVID BROWN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Windham is the type of politically divided town in Maine that could be critical to determining who wins the Senate race.

From Page 1

Senate Control May Rest In Cold Hands of Mainers

sumers across the country are feeling the economic impact of the Iran war — when they fill up their cars' gas tank, grab a six-pack of beer at a liquor store or buy some tomatoes at the supermarket — the spiking costs of heating oil are felt uniquely in the frosty North-east.

Just 3 percent of U.S. households use heating oil to warm their homes. But 50 percent of homes do in Maine, according to the state. (The price of natural gas, used to warm most American homes, has remained relatively flat.)

Speaking in the lodge-like hall of the Maine Maritime Museum in coastal Bath one night last week, Mr. Jackson told voters gathered for a town-hall-style event that he did "not know how people are going to heat their homes" this winter.

He scoffed at the efforts of Ms. Collins to lobby the Trump administration for the emergency release of oil from strategic reserves, arguing that she was too close to Mr. Trump and had "turned her back" on working-class Mainers.

and freeze to death — they'll do things to try and heat their home," Mr. Jackson said. Referring to the pride Ms. Collins has expressed in her efforts to secure federal funds for fire stations, Mr. Jackson added, "It's a good thing that Susan Collins got all those fire stations, because we're going to have a lot of fires."

"No one's going to just sit there

Some in the crowd laughed. One woman in the back muttered that the line was not funny.

Ms. Collins has tried to get ahead of the issue.

Last month, she joined Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, in writing a letter to Mr. Trump urging the administration to secure the emergency release of heating oil. And she has pushed the federal government to increase its funding for heating assistance, joining a bipartisan letter from senators and backing a call by Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat, for more federal support. "I have repeatedly urged the Administration to use every tool available to increase supply and bring down energy costs," Ms. Collins said in a statement on Oct. 2.

But in recent years, federal heating assistance programs have not kept up with rising prices. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump tried to eliminate a federal program to help poor Americans cover their heating and cooling bills, arguing that the United States needed to prioritize military needs.

Debbe Kelley, 70, an engineer in Windham, Maine, said she thought fuel oil costs, layered on top of broader inflation, had become the most pressing issue in the Senate race.

"The issue that's going to affect most Mainers is how they're going to afford to get by this winter," Ms. Kelley, wearing a long coat, a woven teal alpaca scarf and a dark hat, said as she braced herself against the fall wind outside the town hall in Windham, the sort of politically divided town that could be critical to determining the Senate race.

Ms. Kelley, a Democrat, said that she planned to vote for Mr. Jackson, and that she knew political independents who had voted Republican in the past but were being drawn toward Democrats by the economic conditions. She said it had cost her \$1,982 to fill the tank of her house with fuel oil.

"A lot of people are struggling," Ms. Kelley said. "It's going to be a very tough year for Maine."

Democrats Look to History To Forecast This Midterm

By REID J. EPSTEIN

WASHINGTON — The party out of power typically makes gains in midterm elections. With President Trump unpopular and gas prices stubbornly high, both parties expect Democrats to win seats.

Will it be a blue wave, though? And if so, will it be strong enough to flip both chambers of Congress? Not all waves have the same gravitational force.

In 2006, when President George W. Bush and Republicans faced a backlash over the Iraq War, Democrats flipped 31 seats in the House and five in the Senate, winning both chambers. Mr. Bush called it a "thumpin."

In 2018, in Mr. Trump's first term, the wave was even larger in House races, with Democrats flipping 41 seats. They failed to win control of the Senate, however, and actually lost two seats to Republicans.

Signs are now piling up that another Democratic wave may be coming. Many officials in both parties privately say that they expect Democrats to win back the House, and that the main question is how many seats will change hands.

The Senate, long seen as easier for Republicans to hold, now appears to be a tossup. Polls suggest that the party is playing defense even in states Mr. Trump won by double digits two years ago.

Election forecasting is a dangerous business — Republican fortunes could still turn around — but history is often a useful guide. That is why officials in both parties wonder if these midterms will look like 2006, when Democrats flipped both chambers, or 2018, when Republicans were wiped out in House races but picked up two seats in the Senate.

Democrats face challenges that did not exist in those earlier midterms. Republican redistricting gains have narrowed the House battleground. The party also has a significant cash advantage. Most of this year's battleground Senate races are in states Mr. Trump won easily in 2024. The country has only grown more polarized. And the Democratic Party's brand remains diminished, with liberal voters mistrustful of its leaders.

"All these races that are showing we've got a two- or three-point lead or it's a tossup, we could end up losing all of them by two points," former President Barack Obama said on Wednesday at a fund-raiser for Senate Democrats. "It's within the margin of error."

This time, the economy is worse.

"The fact that Democrats allowed Donald Trump to get elected twice is nuts," said Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat who was first elected in 2018. "We have more on our plate and more to do and more to prove now than we had in 2018."

Some Republicans, for their part, worry that their messaging this year may not be as effective as it was in 2018.

"Trump is the larger-than-life character in this election," said former Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, who led House Republicans' campaign committee in 2018.

"There's no Nancy Pelosi on the Democratic side. There are folks trying to use A.O.C. and the D.S.A., but I'm not sure it has the same knowledge with voters," he said.

The disparity between the parties is perhaps most acute in Texas.

"In 2018, people weren't that sour on the economy," said former Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, a Democrat who lost her re-election bid that year as rural states turned hard toward Republicans. "They were shocked by the craziness, but they felt pretty good about the economy before the pandemic."

party's House and Senate committees and their allied super PACs trail far behind Republicans in fund-raising. And Mr. Trump's enormously powerful super PAC, funded in part by business executives and corporations looking to curry favor with his administration, has given his party an extra advantage.

Mr. Trump, she added, "still had much more good will than he has right now."

The University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment is down 33 percent since Mr. Trump returned to office in early 2025. In May, the index reached its lowest point since it began tracking monthly data in 1952.

Republican super PACs have directed more than \$150 million to help their Senate nominee, Ken Paxton. Democratic super PACs have invested just \$4 million so far for their party's nominee, James Talarico, who has spent more than \$60 million of his campaign's money.

A tough map for Democrats.

Only one of the Senate seats Democrats are trying to flip is in a state, Maine, that former Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024. The rest — in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are in states Mr. Trump carried all three times he has run for president.

The G.O.P. has a money advantage. Eight years ago, furious online donors powered a Democratic fund-raising surge that Republicans could not match.

Former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a Democrat who lost in 2018, said her state had shifted toward Mr. Trump in 2016 in ways she could not arrest two years later.

With gas prices and interest rates up, inflation refusing to yield and Mr. Trump's tariffs causing a surge in prices in rural America, the country appears to be seriously angry about the cost of living.

"I'll never forget — in 2016, I was seeing flags and bumper stickers and handmade signs saying, 'I'm a deplorable,'" Ms. McCaskill said. "I remember just thinking, 'This is different, I haven't seen this.' People were anxious to claim him as their guy, and that was still there in 2018."

Trump is a central campaign issue. In 2018, most Democrats did not make Mr. Trump the centerpiece of their campaigns. They ran instead on health care, attacking Republicans for a failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and for cutting taxes for the wealthy.

Mr. Trump has sought to rekindle that connection with Republican voters by telling them to pretend he is on the ballot this year.

This time, the president has far less good will with voters and has done little to convey that he is concerned about their day-to-day economic concerns.

The Democratic National Committee is effectively broke. The

The Iraq War dragged down Mr. Bush in 2006, and Mr. Trump faced a mass defection of educated suburbanites from his party in 2018. But both years, Americans felt fairly confident about the economy.

Now Republicans have built a huge financial edge that has left Democrats begging for help.

That is not the case now.

"Trump was the background music last time, and now he's much more in the foreground," said Howard Wolfson, a political aide to Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who directed \$112 million to back Democrats in 2018. "You're seeing more Democratic candidates attempting to tie their opponents to Trump because his numbers are much worse."

One such Democrat is Roy Cooper, who is leading polls of the Senate race in North Carolina. He recently released a video criticizing his Republican rival, Michael Whatley, for being a Trump acolyte.

Mr. Cooper said that his opponent was "pretty much going to do and say whatever this president tells him to do and say, regardless of whether it's good for the people of North Carolina."

The president is visiting red states. Twenty years ago, Mr. Bush was forced to campaign in deeply Republican districts because he would not be helpful to his party's candidates in political battlegrounds.

Two days before the 2006 elections, Mr. Bush traveled to Grand Island, Neb., where he sought to motivate rural Republicans to vote in a suddenly competitive House district by celebrating Saddam Hussein's conviction and death sentence by an Iraqi tribunal.

Mr. Trump went to Grand Island on Monday for a rally for Senator Pete Ricketts, a Republican whose seat had been considered safe. Mr. Trump won Nebraska by 20 percentage points two years ago.

This month the president held a rally in Oklahoma, where he won by 34 points in 2024.

The president's visits, combined with Republican advertising spending meant to shore up incumbent senators in Kansas and South Carolina, suggest that the political battleground has shifted from traditionally purple states to red ones.

For Republicans like Mr. Ricketts and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, who had expected to cruise to re-election but were now in competitive races, the political whiplash can be severe and put their campaigning skills to the test.

"In 2018, you had people whose districts that were not competitive suddenly becoming competitive," said Matt Gorman, who was a senior aide on House Republicans' campaign committee that year. "In a span of a year, they had to go from sitting in a ruby-red district to sitting in a purple district, and that is hard for some people to do."

TO SHOW DEATH OF MUSSOLINI, THE PICTURE WAS THE STORY

A Bloody Milan Square, a Blizzard in the Alps And a Risky Trek to Transmit Proof to the World

By SARAH LYALL

It was an incredible thing to see firsthand: the battered bodies of the deposed Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and his lover, Clara Petacci, dumped like so much rubbish in a public square in Milan in the waning days of World War II. The New York Times correspondent Milton Bracker was there on that day, April 29, 1945 — nine days before V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe — to take the measure of the moment.

"Benito Mussolini came back last night to the city where his fascism was born," Bracker wrote in a front-page article in the next day's paper. "He came back on the floor of a closed moving van, his dead body flung on the bodies of his mistress and 12 men shot with him."

Bracker's account, written in the first person with an unusual undercurrent of moral indignation, reflected the gravity of the event, the sense that history had swerved suddenly in a new direction. It told how, his support crumbling away, Mussolini had driven north in an attempt to escape to Switzerland. Before he got there, Bracker wrote, he was caught, "like the fleeing Marie Antoinette."

The story was packed with details. Mussolini's speedy trial and summary execution by a firing squad along with a group of his followers in Giulino di Mezzegra, in northern Italy. How their bodies were heaped in a van and deposited in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, of symbolic importance "because recently 15 patriots were executed there."

they were transformed back into photographic images for publication.

175

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THE NEW YORK TIMES AT 175 This story is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times. Read more at nytimes.com/175.

The bodies were then savagely attacked by angry partisans. Bracker said he and other American reporters had been "thrust into the circle of death" by onlookers eager to show them what had happened.

An unknown photographer shows the reporter at the scene in his military uniform, notebook in hand, interviewing a soldier while the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress lay sprawled at their feet. Bracker saw two young men viciously kicking the slain dictator's head, causing a "hideous crunch that wholly disfigured the once-proud face," he wrote.

"It was naturally one of the grimmest moments of our lives, but it will at least serve to give absolutely authentic eyewitness accounts," he added.

It is one thing to read about such an event in a newspaper; it's another thing to see a picture of it. Bracker's story was accompanied by a four-column, front-page photograph depicting the chaotic scene: the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci atop the pile of corpses — Mussolini is easily identifiable by his bald head — as a crowd of armed onlookers pushes and jostles alongside them.

The following day, May 1, the paper printed two additional photographs. One showed the corpses of Mussolini, Petacci and others dangling by their ankles from a pole at an abandoned service station, where they had been strung up by the mob; another showed Lt. Gen. Achille Starace, an ally of Mussolini, in the final moments before his own execution by a firing squad.

The publication of these photographs was a coup for The Times. Transmitting photos around the world in the age of the internet is such a smooth undertaking that it's easy to forget how difficult it once was. In the early days of news photography, the only method to get a photo from one place to another was to physically transport the film — an exercise in delayed gratification if, say, it involved a journey by boat across the Atlantic.

A breakthrough came in the 1920s with the development of practical radiophoto technology, a technique by which photographs were scanned and their tones converted into electrical pulses. The pulses were then sent wirelessly to New York, in the case of The Times, where

Along with several other major news organizations, including The Chicago Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor, The Times in 1929 set up a company called Press Wireless that bypassed commercial telegraph monopolies. The company built its own shortwave radio transmission and receiving stations, allowing its members to transmit articles and images far more efficiently.

But transmission was still subject to logistical challenges, particularly during war. At the time of Mussolini's death, the Press Wireless transmitting office nearest to Milan was in Geneva, some 155 miles away as the crow flies. So in order to get the photographs — which were taken by an Italian photographer whose name remains stubbornly lost to time — to New York, someone first had to get them to Geneva.

Bracker was busy writing his article, the first draft of history. But the mysterious photographer knew Daniel T. Brigham, a Times correspondent based in Bern, Switzerland, and offered to personally transport the photos to Ponte Chiasso, on the Italian-Swiss border, and put them on a train bound for Bern.

Even that was no easy task in a country ravaged by war. The photographer had to hitchhike to the border, navigating "highways blocked with bewildered countrymen and kept in ferment by roving partisan bands," Meyer Berger, a former Times correspondent, wrote in his book about The Times's first century, "The Story of The New York Times 1851-1951." But the photographer got there and put the package on the train.

"Oh, boy, have I got something special!" Brigham exclaimed when he called The Times late that night to say that he had collected the package in Bern. He asked the Press Wireless office, normally closed on Sunday, to prepare to receive his transmission. Meanwhile, he got ready to go to Geneva.

After scrounging up gas for the trip, and obtaining permission from a military censor to use the photos, Brigham set off alone on a dangerous Alpine drive in the middle of the night.

"He headed into a mountain blizzard, careening and skidding over black precipices on the dark and narrow alpine roads," Berger wrote. At one point, one of his tires blew out, and Brigham had to change it in the storm.

At 11:30 p.m. New York time — 5:30 a.m. in Geneva — the images began to emerge from the Press Wireless's receiver at The Times. They arrived too late for the first edition. But after some changes to the paper's layout by the night managing editor, Raymond H. McCaw, the first photo, of Mussolini lying in the pile of corpses, was placed on the front page for the second edition.

It was rare to print such a graphic image in the paper, especially on the front page. But the photographs were irrefutable proof that Mussolini was dead. And they were a crucial visual complement to the story of what happened, told in Bracker's accompanying article and analyzed in a Times editorial that same day.

"The wretched end of Benito Mussolini marks a fitting end to a wretched life," the editorial said. "The man who once boasted that he was going to restore the glories of ancient Rome is now a corpse in a public square in Milan, with a howling mob cursing and kicking and spitting on his remains."

After putting the paper to bed, McCaw typed a memo to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, with the time at the top, 1:15 a.m.

"Mr. Sulzberger: I think you will agree that the Mussolini picture was well worth page one," he wrote. "Personally, I think that next to the Iwo Jima flag-raising this is the second-best picture of the year," he added, referring to the famous photo, by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press, of six Marines raising the American flag on the Pacific island two months earlier.

Sulzberger's Western Union message to Brigham in Bern later that day was presumably no less heartfelt, despite being written in the weird unpunctuated syntax peculiar to telegrams. "Congratulations securing Mussolini picture which unique," he wrote.

"All the News That's Fit to Print"

The New York Times.

U.S. 7TH IN MUNICH, BRITISH PUSH ON BALTIC; RUSSIANS TIGHTEN RING ON BERLIN'S HEART; MILAN AND VENICE WON; MUSSOLINI KILLED

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The newspaper's night managing editor, Raymond H. McCaw, explained his decision to place the photograph of Mussolini's corpse on the front page in an overnight memo to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

April 30, 1945.

1.15 A.M.

Mr. Salzberger:

The image accompanying Milton Bracker's account of the display of Benito Mussolini's corpse in Milan after his execution in 1945 was taken by an Italian photographer whose name remains lost to time. The print in The Times's photo library.

I think you will agree that the Mussolini picture was well worth page one, and that it was not gruesome, either. Personally, I think that next to the two Jimi flag-reising this is the second-best picture of the year. Incidentally, Brigham did a hell of a job getting it. I am told that he drove 200 miles from Berne to Milan and back to Berne again with the negative, all in less than twelve hours. The transmission was as near perfect as anything I have seen in the way of overseas radio photos. It was done by Press Wireless.

At one o'clock the AP had nothing at all in sight in the way of radio photos.

McCav

da

THE NEW YORK TIMES

C. 1987. 2004. 2005. 2006. 2007. 2008. 2009. 2010. 2011. 2012. 2013. 2014. 2015. 2016. 2017. 2018. 2019. 2020.

UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD

Bracker, left with arrow above his head, reporting near Mussolini's body in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. Above, radiophoto technology allowed the wireless transmission of photographic images for publication.

The 47th President

OZIER MUHAMMAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A memorial for soldiers killed in 2009 at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. A livestream is planned for the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan.

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WHITE HOUSE MEMO

Macabre Twist on Trump's Latest Spectacle

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By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Trump loves a public spectacle. After 14 years on reality television, he has brought one show after another to his presidency — a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the biggest fireworks display ever, even a cage match on the White House's South Lawn.

Now his administration is planning another unprecedented public exhibition, but one with a macabre twist: livestreaming a firing-squad execution.

For the first time, Americans would be invited to watch on their cellphones, laptops and other screens as a convicted murderer is put to death. Never before has an official execution been broadcast live in the United States, turning what in theory is supposed to be the solemn application of justice into an event for an audience of potentially millions.

Under the plan announced last week, those who click online on Dec. 3 would see Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 fellow Army soldiers and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, shot by rifle-bearing soldiers at the same base on the same day of the week at the same time of day that he opened fire. No limits on who would be allowed to watch were described, even though an Army manual restricts witnesses to an execution.

"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public, because people need to understand there's serious consequences for these types of things," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with a conservative news outlet.

The idea seemed to shock even some of his colleagues in the administration. Vice President JD Vance cast doubt that it would be livestreamed, telling reporters, "I don't know that that's going to happen" and adding that he would not watch if it does. But Mr. Trump said he signed off on it. "Did I approve?" he said. "Absolutely I did."

The idea of public executions hearkens back to the days when criminals were put to death in front of large crowds in person. And it fits into a broader sense advanced by Mr. Hegseth that the military was better in the days before politically correct "wokeness," back when women were not allowed in combat, diversity was not a priority, soldiers were not accused of war crimes for aggressive action and

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

his agency was called the Department of War.

No public execution has been conducted in the United States in 90 years, and the decision to conduct this one in front of an audience would put the country in the company of Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Somalia. Just 17 executions around the world were confirmed to have been conducted publicly last year, according to Amnesty International: six in Afghanistan and 11 in Iran. Even Saudi Arabia, once known for hanging prisoners in public, has not conducted a public execution since 2022.

Even some supporters of capital punishment finched at the idea of livestreaming Mr. Hasan's execution, calling it medieval and barbaric. "Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting," said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. "Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America."

At least a half-dozen other Republican members of Congress made similar statements.

The plan horrified many senior military officers as well. Adm. James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy officer and former NATO supreme commander, agreed that Mr. Hasan deserved the death penalty, but said doing so in public was the kind of thing that “terrible regimes” did, not the United States. “It is not who we are as a military or a nation,” he said.

The Hasan execution order comes at a complicated time for the death penalty in the United States. Tennessee has paused executions after a botched effort to kill Christa Pike, a convicted murderer who survived two doses of a lethal drug. And Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, has indicated that he is seriously considering sparing the lives of all 563 prisoners on death row in California before leaving office in the coming months.

President Joseph R. Biden Jr. similarly reprieved nearly every prisoner on federal death row weeks before stepping down, commuting the sentences of 37 convicted murderers to life in prison. He left just three men convicted of particularly notorious crimes on death row. Mr. Trump, when he took over, ordered the 37 men to be housed in the toughest federal prison conditions, prompting a legal fight.

No one was expressing sympathy last week for Mr. Hasan, 56, an Army psychiatrist who had been assigned to deploy to Afghanistan but decided he was on the wrong side of a war on Islam. On Nov. 5, 2009, he opened fire with a personal handgun at a processing center for deploying troops, shouting "Allahu akbar," Arabic for "God is great."

The victims included 10 men and three women ranging in age from 19 to 62. It was the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. military base in history, and caused a searing debate about the presence of Muslim troops in the armed forces at a time when the United States was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Hasan, who was shot during the attack and paralyzed from the waist down, was convicted in 2013 of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder. His would be the first military execution since 1961 and its first by firing squad since 1945.

But counterterrorism special-

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An unprecedented public firing-squad execution is sought.

(No text)

ists called it self-defeating to show Mr. Hasan's execution live, arguing that it could play into the hands of jihadist groups that celebrate the martyrdom of those who kill infidels.

Colin P. Clarke, a terrorism expert who is the executive director of the Soufan Center, an intelligence and consulting firm in New York, said that the administration's plan was "incredibly myopic."

"The video of a wheelchair-bound Hasan executed by firing squad will serve as ready-made propaganda for jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic State," he said. "I don't understand how this benefits the United States."

The SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda and messaging, found posts indicating that extremists were already using the pending execution to encourage other radicals. "The crusaders wish to execute the brother publicly," one message read. "Have they not learned anything from the pages of history?"

The Pentagon has not offered many details about how the execution would be carried out or how it would square with Army rules. The Army manual for military executions says who can witness an execution, including the base commander, a chaplain, two members of the news media, the condemned prisoner's family and one victim or representative of a victim's family.

"No person under the age of 18 shall witness the execution," the manual says.

Public executions were somewhat common in the early days of the United States. George Washington had soldiers he deemed traitors hanged in front of other troops, and revolutionaries hanged two accused loyalists in the Philadelphia Commons in November 1778. Northern states mostly abolished public hanging in the mid-1800s "out of a sense that it was an undignified spectacle," said Stuart Banner, a historian of the death penalty.

Hangings were moved into prison yards and accessible mainly to public officials, journalists and the well-connected. As the electric chair and gas chamber replaced the gallows in the late 19th and early 20th century, executions were moved indoors, and were therefore witnessed by fewer people.

"This would be the first public execution in the U.S. in nearly a century, and it would probably be seen by more people than any execution in American history," said Mr. Banner, the author of "The Death Penalty: An American History" and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "There are photographs of public hangings from the old days, but no one filmed them."

The last legally sanctioned public execution in the United States was conducted in Owensboro, Ky., in 1936, when Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, was convicted of raping a 70-year-old white woman and hanged in front of a crowd of as many as 20,000 spectators. Another hanging a year later in Missouri was moved into a specially built stockade with only a few hundred select witnesses, though many others climbed trees to watch.

Sonya Lea, the author of "American Bloodlines," a book about the Bethea case that was published last year, said that it was widely denounced as "a brutal carnival of sadism" and led states to stop allowing large crowds to witness executions.

"There's a kind of parallel in what we're looking at now," she said, "in terms of America's barbarism and depravity that's happening — not just a killing by firing squad but cultivating that kind of cruelty as a modern entertainment."

Conservative Commentator Picked as Press Secretary

This article is by Hamed Aleaziz, Tyler Pager and Karoun Demirjian.

Katie Zacharia, a conservative commentator who briefly worked at the Department of Homeland Security, has been chosen as the next White House press secretary, President Trump announced on Friday.

Ms. Zacharia, 41, will succeed Karoline Leavitt, who left the position in August. She is currently a communications adviser to Trump Media and Technology Group, which runs the president's social media site, Truth Social. She previously had a stint working as a spokeswoman for then-Secretary Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security and has been a frequent guest on conservative media, including Fox

News and Newsmax.

Katie Zacharia

In his announcement, Mr. Trump said Ms. Zacharia had worked for his campaigns, assisting in his efforts to win swing states.

"She has an unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning," Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, where Ms. Zacharia has been employed since June, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Ms. Zacharia is stepping into the role of press secretary at a politically sensitive time for the

White House, as the Trump administration faces a midterm election in which increasing numbers of Republican candidates are distancing themselves from the president. She is also inheriting the White House briefing room podium during a period of particularly tense relations with the press, as the president's efforts to ban three news organizations from White House grounds are challenged in court.

Ms. Leavitt, who left the administration before that ban was imposed, frequently voiced disdain for mainstream media, but had a penchant for delivering quick and sharp-tongued answers to reporters' questions.

In a social media post on Friday, Ms. Zacharia said Ms. Leavitt had set a "high standard," and that she wanted "to continue delivering strong results for our Country and communicating to the American people the major wins that this Administration is making every single day."

Ms. Zacharia, an attorney who earned her undergraduate and law degrees at Pepperdine University, lives in California and, according to her social media posts, has four children.

Before her stint in the Trump administration, she served as general counsel for Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Ric Grenell, a Trump ally, to advance a conservative agenda in the state, and White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion advocacy group, according to her online résumé.

Mamdani Link to Trump Fails After ICE Shooting

This article is by Dana Rubinstein, Jeffery C. Mays and Sally Goldenberg.

In several phone calls over the course of two hours on Thursday evening, Mayor Zohran Mamdani pleaded with President Trump and his homeland security secretary to release a New Yorker whom federal immigration agents had shot and then detained.

The mayor's effort failed.

Then, as he stood next to his police commissioner, Jessica S. Tisch, at a news conference Thursday night, calling for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, his words were nearly drowned out by protesters chanting, "Mamdani is complicit." Blocks away, his Police Department was clashing with another set of protesters at the hospital where the shooting victim was being treated.

Mr. Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, has until now managed to maintain the steadfast support of his left-wing base while moderating some of his positions as he adjusts to a job often described as the country's second hardest. He has kept as police commissioner Ms. Tisch, a technocratic billionaire who has criticized liberal policies on criminal justice. He has also developed a surprisingly warm relationship with Mr. Trump.

In a brief interview on Friday, the mayor insisted that the purpose of his friendly meetings with the president was “to ensure that we’re using every opportunity we have to deliver for this city.”

But after the shooting, that relationship failed him, raising immediate questions about its value in New York, a city of immigrants where Mr. Trump is broadly unpopular and where Mr. Mamdani's left flank is increasingly restive both about Washington's deportation campaign and about policing

DAKOTA SANTIAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York on Thursday. His efforts to get President Trump to release a New Yorker failed.

at the local level.

"What have we seen from the Trump administration for New York?" asked Alyssa Aguilera, the co-executive director of VOCALNY, an advocacy group for low-income New Yorkers. "Not much."

The heckling on Thursday came a day after pro-Palestinian demonstrators jeered Mr. Mamdani and called him a "traitor" during a peace vigil he was attending to mourn those killed in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and in the war in Gaza. Among their grievances was Mr. Mamdani's decision to meet with Mr. Trump despite having called him a fascist.

The president's continuing crackdown on immigrants in New York burst into public view around 4 p.m. on Thursday when a plainclothes immigration agent shot and wounded Oscar Belgal while trying to arrest him in his car, in front of his 5-year-old son. Federal officials later said Mr. Belgal, a Dominican immigrant, had a grand larceny conviction, had refused orders to exit his car and had "weaponized his vehicle." Police officers arrived shortly after the shooting and took Mr. Belgal to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital.

Protesters soon gathered at the scene of the shooting in the Marble Hill neighborhood and at the hospital. And as Mr. Mamdani tried to negotiate with the president, police officers established a perimeter around the hospital, where ICE agents ultimately took Mr. Belgal into custody.

As the night wore on, the protests devolved into clashes with officers. At one point amid the chaos, officers pushing back the crowd shoved Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democratic nominee for Congress, to the ground.

Ms. Avila Chevalier said on Friday that the Strategic Response Group, a controversial police unit that the mayor has vowed to disband, was also on the scene.

The Police Department said the unit did not respond to the protests, and was merely on standby. But questions about its presence further fueled calls from Mr. Mam-

Oishika Neogi contributed reporting.

dani's ideological allies for him to honor his promise to dismantle it. In the interview, Mr. Mamdani said he was still committed to doing so, and that he would have an update on that "soon."

In an interview, Ms. Avila Chevalier took particular issue with what she cast as the Police Departments's failure to de-escalate the situation, and with Ms. Tisch's decision during the Thursday news conference to mention Mr. Belgal's criminal record.

In response to that criticism, the Police Department said on Friday that it is standard practice to release factual updates about police incidents.

Ms. Avila Chevalier said the Police Department and Ms. Tisch had "violated the spirit, if not the letter, of our sanctuary city policies," referring to laws that limit cooperation between local law enforcement officials and immigration authorities.

A fellow democratic socialist, Ms. Avila Chevalier has close ties to the mayor. Nevertheless, on Friday, she called for his police commissioner to step down.

Mr. Mamdani responded that Ms. Tisch was going nowhere.

"Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner and there are no plans to change that," Mr. Mamdani said in an interview, adding that he and the commissioner would conduct a review of "all of the events of the last 24 hours."

But he also condemned the Police Department's treatment of Ms. Avila Chevalier.

"I do not think it is acceptable to throw anyone to the ground in our city," the mayor said. "I believe that to be true when it applies to the congresswoman-elect and, frankly, any New Yorker."

It was a challenging week for Mr. Mamdani, with “a few events coming together at the same time creating a perfect storm for him,” said Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mr. Mamdani’s political home. Mr. Gordillo acknowledged frustration with Mr. Mamdani among members of his base.

"I think people don't just want symbolic gestures in response to things like the genocide and an ICE shooting," Mr. Gordillo said. "And we're going to partner with the mayor, I'm sure, to develop concrete policies. But I think it's an area where we need more development."

On immigration enforcement, Mr. Gordillo said: "We think the police commissioner needs to call off the police from aiding ICE in these situations. And if she cannot fulfill that, then she needs to resign or be fired."

The Police Department said on Friday that officers had done nothing to assist ICE's operations, and that they had only transported Mr. Belgal to the hospital and responded to the protests.

On Friday, Mr. Mamdani suggested that he empathized with his detractors.

"I think that people are restive and so am I," he said. "I am, frankly, furious. I'm in pain hearing from families whose loved ones were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7. I'm angry that the genocide in Gaza continues and has killed 74,000 Palestinians. I'm outraged that ICE agents dressed up in construction vests carrying long guns shot at a man and his 5-year-old child in our city streets, and I understand people feeling the same."

During Mr. Mamdani's Thursday evening talks with Mr. Trump and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, the mayor offered to take over the investigation into the shooting but said the city would not detain Mr. Belgal because it had no legal basis to do so, according to a person briefed on the call.

"I made clear we would not take him into custody and that we would not do their job for them," Mr. Mamdani said.

The White House and Department of Homeland Security referred reporters to the department's prior statements on the matter.

That Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Trump's relationship should fail to yield results in this situation is not particularly surprising, said Stu Loeser, who served as press secretary for former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

"Zohran Mamdani is the most telegenic political communicator in America, and President Trump loves to associate himself with that," Mr. Loeser said. "The president of the United States still has the biggest bully pulpit in America and the mayor of our biggest city is smart to try and appear behind it sometimes."

But, he continued, Mr. Trump's "aggressive anti-immigration strategy" is one of his "central campaign promises."

"This is a deliberate policy and political strategy by the president, and he's not likely to back off it for any reason," Mr. Loeser said.

Would a Fortune of Millions He Quietly Grew Go To Relatives, or to the D.S.A.?

David F. Greenberg, a longtime sociology professor at New York University, died in 2024. He left behind a legacy of writing and teaching — and a fund that grew to be worth more than \$6 million.

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quest could be an enormous financial boon to D.S.A., whose membership has more than doubled to about 126,000 in the past two years. Large donations are uncommon for the group, which brings in most of its money from dues. Its last publicly filed tax return, in 2024, showed net assets of \$4.7 million.

Ashik Siddique, a D.S.A. national co-chair, said last month that the group would have no qualms with accepting the professor's funds.

"We don't see any contradiction between being socialists and organizing to have money in a capitalist society," Mr. Siddique said. "The more the better," he added, "as long as it is meaningfully supporting the decisions that our members make together."

But before any money was transferred to the organization, one of the professor's nephews, Martin Hecht, as the administrator of his estate, filed suit, arguing that his uncle had not left his money to the D.S.A. but rather to N.A.M., which was "now defunct." The lawsuit argued that Mr. Greenberg's family, not the modern socialist group, would be the rightful recipient of his millions.

"Our Uncle David never missed an important family occasion, especially a birthday, because family meant more to him than anything," Mr. Hecht said Wednesday in a statement. "Even in the months before he passed, he was working on our family lineage, reflecting the deep importance he placed on where we came from and the people we loved."

The dispute over Mr. Greenberg's wishes played out in Manhattan federal court over nearly a year and a half, pitting ideological bonds against familial ones, and seemed to near a conclusion on Friday.

The court filings illuminated the origins of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has become a force in Democratic politics in recent years. They also shed light on an unassuming but prolific man — a radical thinker, in his time — who stood to become, according to the group's records, the D.S.A.'s largest donor ever. Whether he meant to or not.

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'Never a Question'

In his 49 years with the sociology department, Mr. Greenberg was its institutional memory — “and he was also often its conscience,” according to David Garland, a fellow N.Y.U. professor.

"He spoke up clearly and forcefully, popular or not, whenever he felt we were going in the wrong direction, whenever he felt that there was departing from some past practice or some injustice was being perpetrated," Mr. Garland said at a September 2024 memorial service for his colleague, before Mr. Greenberg's sizable bequest became known. "He cared deeply about the department, about teaching, about students."

He also cared about his family. Dayna Bender, a cousin of Mr. Greenberg's from Chicago who spoke over Zoom at the service, said he was always the uncle who was free with his time and his smile. She related a story from one nephew who remembered being stumped on a physics problem. "He called Uncle David, who explained it in a way that made the problem simple," Ms. Bender said. The nephew was working in renewable energy, she added.

Born in Evanston, Ill., in 1942, Mr. Greenberg became involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He took part in voter registration drives in rural South Carolina, where he was shot at — and, on one occasion, ar-

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

rested, according to an obituary prepared by N.Y.U.'s sociology department and other records. He also joined in anti-Vietnam War protests and in organized draft resistance. He argued for the abolition of prisons — a position he later dropped after an inmate wrote to him urging that he focus on more attainable goals. (He continued to believe that prisons required radical reform.)

Mr. Greenberg's early writings on radical criminology caught the attention of the N.Y.U. sociology department, according to the obituary, and his body of work continued to expand. A 1981 collection of essays on Marxist criminology that he edited was widely used in the United States and elsewhere, the obituary says. His 1988 book, "The Construction of Homosexuality," traced the history of same-sex relationships from ancient civilizations to modern times. The historian Nicholas B. Dirks, in a review for The New York Times, called the 635-page volume "careful, encyclopedic and important."

"He was intensely curious about so many things," said Mariana Veras, an N.Y.U. doctoral student with a math background. When they first met, she said, they talked about number theory.

Several of Mr. Greenberg's former colleagues and students recall him as a shy and, at times, eccentric man whose office at the university was cluttered with papers he was unwilling to throw away. It was the same story at his Village apartment, on Bank Street, where he lived by himself.

At his 2024 memorial service, Mr. Greenberg's cousin, Ms. Bender, read a message from an out-of-town relative who recalled staying with the professor once. "Every room was filled with corridors of paper stacked up to the ceiling," the relative wrote. "We had to clear off a space to eat our Chinese food. And then I had to clear off space on the couch to sleep. I felt like I had walked right into a Charles Dickens novel."

Former students said that, even years after they left school, Mr. Greenberg would send them carefully cut-out newspaper clippings on what their areas of study had been.

And he kept an open door for pupils who had questions or wanted feedback on their work, Valerie West, a former doctoral student and research assistant who counted Mr. Greenberg as a friend, said at the memorial service. Although the professor "did not give compliments lightly," she said, he was "generous and kind in spirit."

In a recent interview, Ms. West said she had two conversations with Mr. Greenberg, years ago, in which he made it clear he wanted to leave his estate to his family.

"It was to his sisters, and then later on he specifically said his nephews broadly," Ms. West recalled.

She did not know how much money they were talking about, she said.

They spoke again after his sisters died. She said he reiterated his position.

"There was never a question in my mind that his relatives were going to get it," she said.

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'Any Successor Thereof'

Mr. Greenberg, who once described himself as living an "abstemious, spartan lifestyle," also left behind stocks, bonds and cash worth a total of at least \$1 million, New York probate court records show. Those assets were not involved in the dispute with the D.S.A.

In 1996, he enrolled in a second N.Y.U. plan, designating his two sisters as primary beneficiaries. He listed no backup recipients for that account. By the time he died in July 2024, his sisters were already dead, and the \$1.3 million in the second plan went to his nephews. There was no disagreement over that money, either.

When he enrolled in the second N.Y.U. plan, Mr. Greenberg was in his 50s and “a loving uncle to four nephews,” who themselves were starting to have children, the lawsuit said. Motivated by his growing family responsibilities, the suit argued, the professor would have assumed his choice of his sisters as beneficiaries for the smaller fund would also apply to his earlier, more valuable account.

But Mr. Greenberg only ever made one change to that first account. In 1975, a year after enrolling, Mr. Greenberg changed the form to say that if his parents were no longer alive, the fund should go to N.A.M. "or any successor thereof."

On the question of succession, the D.S.A.'s lawyers argued that the line was clear — that the merger of N.A.M. and the other leftist group, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, had been seamless, intentional and immediate.

To bolster its case, the D.S.A. submitted to the judge, among other evidence, news coverage of the vote at the March 1982 convention in Detroit that drew hundreds of members from the two organizations.

N.A.M. and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee each met in separate rooms to consider the resolution, according to the socialist newspaper "In These Times," which also described an emotional scene: "N.A.M.'s finale resembled the last moments of a '60s commune, with tributes, tears and raised fists."

Mr. Greenberg was not only aware of the new organization, he actively supported it, according to the D.S.A.'s records. Those records show he was a member of the organization since at least 1993, when the group began keeping electronic records, and that he paid dues to the group 29 times, totaling \$1,815, over the next three decades until his death.

Tiffany Gong, the organization's development director, said it was "incredibly meaningful" for Mr. Greenberg to have designated N.A.M. or its successor as a beneficiary — at such a young age, without seeking credit.

"You're not getting a building named after you," Ms. Gong said.

Jeff Manza, the former chairman of N.Y.U.'s sociology department, said he wasn't certain how Mr. Greenberg would feel about his retirement fund ending up with the D.S.A. But the nature of his politics, at least, was clear.

"He was a principled radical throughout his life," Mr. Manza said, adding, "I think he never deviated from a belief in the possibility of a just and socialist world."

In July, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer ruled in the D.S.A.'s favor, saying it was "emphatically" clear that the organization was N.A.M.'s legal successor — and thereby entitled to the funds. The judge based the ruling not just on old newspaper clips but also on declarations from former N.A.M. leaders and other records. The professor's estate appealed.

The judge ordered Mr. Greenberg's retirement funds — which stood at \$6,609,236.13 last month — to be deposited in a court account until the appeal was resolved. A recent legal filing suggested that a settlement was in the works, and on Friday afternoon, the parties indicated they had reached an agreement.

The Democratic Socialists of America would receive the full balance being held in the court's account, a legal filing shows. As part of the agreement, the D.S.A. has dropped a request that Mr. Greenberg's estate pay its legal fees. As of late Friday afternoon, the transfer of the roughly \$6.6 million to D.S.A. still needed to be approved by the judge.

Hospital Returns Execution Survivor

By EMILY COCHRANE

NASHVILLE — Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.

She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but was still struggling with concentration and memory.

“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”

Ms. Pike has spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.

Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.

Her survival has gripped the nation and become a flashpoint in the debate over the death penalty at a moment when support for capital punishment is at its lowest in decades, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Conservative leaders, however, have continued to champion the practice, including in Tennessee. The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison but declined to offer additional details about her condition or

Christa Pike survived a lethal injection and is back in prison.

treatment.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican in the final months of his term-limited tenure, had put a moratorium on executions for the remainder of the year while an independent investigation into Ms. Pike's botched execution continues. Frank Strada, the head of the state's prison system, said he would step down this month.

The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.

Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.

May Martinez, the mother of her victim, had traveled from her Florida home to Nashville to witness the execution and has expressed frustration that the promised capital punishment was not carried out. Before the execution, Ms. Martinez told The Times she remained angry not only over the gruesome torture of her daughter — carried out by Ms. Pike and two others — but also the toll of lengthy litigation over Ms. Pike's

execution.

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the front-runner to be elected governor in November, has said she believes Ms. Pike should face execution again. The office of the attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, has not said whether lawyers will ask the Tennessee Supreme Court to set another date.

Ms. Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

A teenager when she was sentenced to death, Ms. Pike had spent decades largely isolated in the Nashville prison as the only woman on death row. During those years, only one other woman, Gaile Owens, was ever held on death row at the same time, and the two did not have physical contact.

At the prison, Ms. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, which her lawyers have since said contributed to the violence of her 1995 crime. In response to questions from The Times before her execution, Ms. Pike said, "The biggest punishment was taking me away from people and human contact."

A 2024 settlement allowed her to physically interact with other women in the prison. But in the days before her Sept. 30 execution, Ms. Pike was returned to isolation under Tennessee's new execution protocol.

Her lawyers have fought to shield Ms. Pike's privacy in the aftermath of the bungled execution. But one, Randy Spivey, has described her expressing overwhelming confusion over what happened, as well as worry about her loved ones and Ms. Slemmer's family.

8 Killed in Shooting, Erie Officials Say

JEFF SWENSEN/GETTY IMAGES

Police officers on Saturday outside the house in Erie, Pa., where eight people were killed on Friday. The shooter was also dead.

By EMMETT LINDNER and TIM ARANGO

A neighbor's Ring doorbell camera showed two women arriving at the home in a residential neighborhood on the east side of Erie, Pa., on Friday night, screaming and pounding on the door. The sounds of muffled gunshots were heard from inside.

Moments later, the two women were shot dead in the street. Inside, the gunman then shot himself with a .40-caliber handgun.

When the police arrived, just before 5 p.m., there was just silence.

"Those officers were met with eerie silence when they arrived there," Chief Rick Lorah of the City of Erie Police Department said at a Saturday afternoon news conference.

After deploying a drone and a robot, the officers finally entered the home, and found the bodies of seven people, including a 5-year-old boy; a girl who was 1 year 10 months old; and a woman who was 8 months pregnant. All of the victims inside the home were family members of the suspected shooter, who was identified as a 45-year-old man, city officials said at the news conference.

In total, nine people were dead, including the shooter. Of the eight people he killed, seven were family members. The other, a family friend, was one of the women found dead on the street.

"It was horrific," Chief Lorah said. "It was the worst scene I have ever experienced."

Officers responded to the home within minutes of receiving an alert, city officials said. Emergency responders could not immediately determine if there was a continuing threat at the scene, but no gunshots were fired after their arrival, officials said.

There was no standoff, and all of the deaths occurred before offi-

Eduardo Medina and Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.

cers arrived at the scene, the officials said.

Neighbors were rattled and sought answers.

Jennifer Lott, who lives on the block where the shooting took place, said she was at home on Friday night when she heard gunshots. She ran to the street and when she did not see anything, she went inside to grab her phone. Racing back outside, she saw a woman lying in the street.

"I got closer and I noticed she had a gunshot wound to her head and she wasn't moving and everybody kept telling me to back up, the police were coming," she recalled in an interview on Saturday.

The identities of the shooter and the victims were not immediately released.

Chief Lorah said it was too early to determine an exact motive, but he said that "mental health is at play." He said that there was a history of the police being called to the residence, but not recently. He said the department's last interaction with the shooter was in 2022.

Ms. Lott, 52, said she hadn't slept all night, and that her neighborhood on Saturday was strewed with crime scene tape, and the road remained blocked to traffic.

She said she knew the identities of two women whom she saw were dead in the street, but was uncertain who else had died. "They wouldn't give any names," she said of the police. "They just said nobody made it out of the house."

On the same day, five people were fatally shot in a murder-suicide involving family members who lived together at a house in Douglas, Ga.

The shooting was related to domestic violence, officials said at a news conference on Saturday. The identities of the victims were not released.

Chief Brannen Pruette of the Douglas Police Department said that a few hours before the shooting, a woman called to complain about her husband, who had been smoking in the house.

She said "he was killing her with the smoke," Chief Pruette said.

When officers responded to reports of shots fired at the house, they found four adults dead inside, and a fifth adult wounded who later died at a hospital. The police said that the shooter was among the dead.

Philadelphia Officer Shot Dead in Ambush

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

One police officer was killed and another was badly wounded early Saturday when a man ambushed them on the porch of a house in West Philadelphia, police officials said.

The gunman, who continued to fire at the police as more officers responded to the scene, was eventually captured and taken into custody.

The officer who was killed, Shane Seiber, 40, leaves a 7-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, Kevin J. Bethel, the Philadelphia police commissioner, told reporters in a briefing. He was on the force for 10 years.

"He fought valiantly, but he lost his life today," Mr. Bethel said. "His wife was able to be at his side before he passed, as well as his family."

The other officer, who has not been named, was shot 12 times. He is in stable condition at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Mr. Bethel said.

Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney, identified the suspect as Eric Lewis, 35.

Mr. Lewis is being charged with murder and homicide of a law enforcement officer, along with attempted murder for wounding the other officer, as well as a litany of other charges, Mr. Krasner said.

Mr. Krasner said Mr. Lewis would be held without bail.

Court records show a criminal record for a man named Eric Lewis, with the same birth date as the suspect. Past convictions included illegal gun possession, disorderly conduct and theft, misdemeanors dating back eight years or more. In 2015, as a part of his probation, Mr. Lewis was ordered by a judge to receive a drug and alcohol assessment as well as a mental health evaluation.

In a news briefing early on Saturday, Mr. Bethel said that the authorities received a call at 12:22 a.m. that a man with a gun was on the porch of a house in West Philadelphia. The two officers were dispatched and arrived a little more than 30 minutes later. When the officers stepped onto the porch, they took “significant fire,” Mr. Bethel said.

As the two were taken to a hospital, police officers and members of the SWAT team were sent to the scene. The gunman continued to fire at the police but was eventually captured after he climbed a tree. Police recovered a shotgun and two handguns, one of which the man had taken from one of the officers who had been shot on the porch.

"I am so damn proud of the men and women who serve in this department," Mr. Bethel said, his voice shaking. "Consistently, they go into danger and they give their lives for this job."

Over the course of the morning, scores of Philadelphia police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers lined up outside the hospital in a show of respect.

In a statement, Cherelle Parker, the mayor of Philadelphia, said the city was grieving with Officer Seiber's family. The state's two U.S. senators also expressed their grief over the killing and their gratitude to police officers.

In a post on social media, Gov. Josh Shapiro said that he was ordering flags across Pennsylvania to be flown at half-staff.

Sports

N

The New York Times

JAYNE KAMIN-ONCEA/GETTY IMAGES

He Has Not Homered Since Aug. 18, But They Feel Patience Will Pay Off

By ANDY McCULLOUGH

The Athletic

ATLANTA — During the final days of the regular season, after Shohei Ohtani had spent two weeks recuperating from injuries to his biceps, knee and neck, he conferred often with the Los Angeles Dodgers' first-base coach, Chris Woodward. For the past two years, as Ohtani attempted to remain a two-way player, he had stowed his interest in stealing bases. With the possibility of pitching foreclosed for 2026, Ohtani wanted to reincorporate that stowed-away skill.

"He obviously hasn't been getting on as much," Woodward said. "But he definitely is in physical shape to steal. Going into the playoffs, we had talked about it a lot, him being able to run. And he feels pretty good."

How Ohtani's body feels might be the most pressing question for the championship aspirations of the Dodgers, who took another step toward their third consecutive World Series title on Wednesday with a 4-1 victory to eliminate the Atlanta Braves in Game 4 of their National League division series. The Dodgers will now face the Brewers in the National League Championship Series, which begins on Sunday in Milwaukee.

Ohtani played a pivotal role in the early going of Game 4 of the division series: He scored his club's first run by taking a walk in the second inning, swiping a base off starter Tyler Mahle, advancing to third on a throwing error by catcher Sean Murphy and scoring two batters later on a fielding error by shortstop Mauricio Dubón.

The small-ball scrappiness represented progress for Ohtani, who has yet to emerge from a monthslong funk at the plate. He batted .154 against Atlanta. He supplied zero extra-base hits. He demonstrated little ability to drive the ball. Manager Dave Roberts dropped him in the batting order.

Yet by scampering around the bases on Wednesday, Ohtani offered evidence that while he might not be performing near his own elevated standard, he is still healthy enough to contribute. Which is why Dodgers officials have not considered removing him from the lineup, even

Andy McCullough is a senior M.L.B. writer for The Athletic.

as the feeble at-bats pile up, even after Atlanta's ace, Chris Sale, made him fish for sliders in Game 3. The Dodgers believe they simply must wait to see if Ohtani can once more perform like Ohtani.

"I think Sho is the most talented player who has ever played this game," the Dodgers' president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, said. "He was obviously going through it over the summer. Took time off, which I think helped in a lot of ways. That being said, some bad habits were formed. But every time he steps to the plate, I have all the confidence in the world that something big's going to happen."

In Game 3, Ohtani batted fifth, his lowest positioning in a lineup since 2020. With the right-handed Mahle on the mound on Wednesday, Roberts elevated Ohtani to the cleanup spot, with first baseman Freddie Freeman batting second behind Mookie Betts in Ohtani's former spot. Roberts suggested that alignment could continue as the Dodgers get deeper into October.

The manager brokered the lineup reconstruction with Ohtani after the team arrived in Atlanta on Monday. Ohtani took the relative demotion well, Roberts said: "He said, 'I was going to come to you in September and say, Why don't you hit me seventh?'"

(Like Betts and Freeman, Ohtani spent little time in the clubhouse after Game 4. He gave a brief statement to the Japanese television station NHK — "It never gets old; it's great every time" — before ducking out of the celebration.)

Ohtani was not putting up enough production to protest the change in the batting order. He has not homered since Aug. 18. He batted .157 during the final 18 games of the season. More troubling, he slugged .214. He chased pitches outside the zone and failed to square up mistakes. During the final weekend of the season, he cut down on the number of swings he took in the on-deck circle, which led to speculation about the lingering severity of his injuries.

"It's not what we all expect, what he expects from himself," Roberts said. "But I do feel that the talent, the care; it's going to happen. So I think it's just up to all of us to keep winning baseball games.

Ohtani supplied a spark in Game 4. He did not swing the bat in his first plate appearance against Mahle. He maintained his discipline as Mahle threw splitters that flirted with the zone. After taking a walk, Ohtani broke for second on a 3-2 pitch from Mahle. When Murphy's throw sailed into the outfield, Ohtani bolted to third. The gaffe by Dubón allowed Ohtani to tie the score.

"And then at some point, he's going to come to life."

His next three at-bats were less fruitful. In the fourth, he swung through a pair of elevated fastballs from Mahle for his fourth strikeout of the series. The last

BRETT DAVIS/IMAGN IMAGES

DALE ZANINE/IMACN IMAGES

swing propelled Ohtani in an almost 360-degree spin. In the seventh, he tapped a first-pitch splitter to the right side of the infield. In the eighth, he flied out to right.

A survey of scouts tasked with tracking the Dodgers this October revealed something of a consensus: Ohtani was not mechanically sound. He was not receiving much to hit. And he was still not someone to be trifled with. "He's in a funk," one rival evaluator said. "He will get out of it."

The Dodgers harbor the same belief. Friedman told a story about Ohtani's first season in Los Angeles. That September, as Ohtani drew closer to becom-

Shohei Ohtani batted .157 during the final 18 games of the season and slugged just .214. He celebrated briefly after the Dodgers' elimination of the Braves in Game 4, in which he contributed by scoring the first run after he stole second base. | N.L. Championship SeriesAll games on Fox or FS1 | GAME 1 | Sunday, 8 p.m.Dodgers at Brewers | GAME 2 | Monday, 5 p.m.Dodgers at Brewers | GAME 3 | Wednesday, 8 p.m.Brewers at Dodgers | GAME 4 | Thursday, 9 p.m.Brewers at Dodgers | GAME 5* | Friday, 9 p.m.Brewers at Dodgers | GAME 6* | Oct. 18, 8 p.m.Dodgers at Brewers | GAME 7* | Oct. 19, 8 p.m.Dodgers at Brewers | *If necessary | All times Eastern | ing the inaugural member of the 50-50 club, his bat went cold. On a visit to Atlanta, he scuffled through four unsightly games. Several members of the front office decided against flying to Miami for the next leg of the road trip, figuring Ohtani would reach the milestone upon his return to Los Angeles.

So they had to watch from afar as Ohtani did the improbable — stealing two bases, hitting three homers and driving in 10 runs to notch both legs of 50-50.

Friedman considered it a lesson learned. Even when Ohtani looks his most vulnerable, he is still capable of magic. The Dodgers will continue to believe that, for as long as they play this October.

"At some point, things are going to click back for him," Friedman said. "And we're going to be the beneficiaries."

PRO FOOTBALL | N.F.L. WEEK 5

The Season Is on the Line for Hurts and the Eagles Jones Is Bad, Rodgers Is Worse • Bears Will Beat Rivals • Texans Wake Up • 49ers Have Pieces in Place

By VIC TAFUR

The Athletic

CHUS SZAGOLA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jalen Hurts is set to lead Philadelphia against the Jaguars in London. The Eagles have been hurt by injuries (six starters on offense), a retirement and a trade.

It was less than two years ago that Jalen Hurts was smoking a cigar and on top of the world after winning the Super Bowl. Now it seems that the whole world is against him.

Hurts and the Philadelphia Eagles will get up early Sunday in London, with their season on the line as fans from across Europe show up in their Peter Warrick, Tim Tebow and Rolando McClain jerseys to cheer on the home team, the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Hurts thought everything would be fine once A.J. Brown packed up all of his books and split, but there have been a ton of injuries (six starters on offense), a retirement (Lane Johnson) and a trade (Cam Jurgens). And the play-calling still stinks. And yeah, Hurts has not played well, either.

When we say his season is on the line, we exaggerate a little bit — the Eagles' next six games are not that tough, actually. But maybe we see ourselves in Hurts, and it's a great time to make a stand, with the point spread up to 7.5 points and growing by the day.

The Jaguars are a little overrated — they were one play away from losing to a Cincinnati Bengals team without Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins — and they are only 7-7 overall at their second home in London.

So here's to the Eagles covering the spread and the world never counting out true winners who have had a bad run.

We are not overrated, ending up 7-8-1 against the spread overall and 2-3 on best bets last week. The Eagles, our upset special, led by 10 points facing third-and-goal from the 2-yard line with eight minutes left, and they lost. The Minnesota Vikings took a knee at the goal line three times (after T.J. Hockenson slid shy of the end zone) rather than cover the spread.

All odds are from DraftKings and are locked when the pick was made. All times are Eastern.

LAST WEEK'S RECORD 7-8-1 against the spread, 2-3 on best bets.

SEASON RECORD 26-36-2 against the spread, 6-14 on best bets.

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Philadelphia Eagles vs. Jacksonville Jaguars (-7.5)

9:30 a.m. Sunday, in London, NFL Network

I realize that it's not actually the whole world against Hurts. All those desperate fantasy types who had to claim someone named Will Shipley this week will be rooting for the Eagles' offense, too. The key to this game, said every coach every week, will be turnovers. The Jaguars rank first in the league with 38 points off takeaways.

THE PICK: EAGLES

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Minnesota Vikings (-1.5) at New Orleans Saints

1 p.m. Sunday, Fox

The Vikings are 4-0 but might have to make a quarterback change soon. It is practically impossible to not score a touchdown against the Miami Dolphins, but Kyler Murray pulled it off last week. He has another low bar this week against the poorly coached Saints. The New Orleans effort on Monday night was embarrassing, with the analyst Troy Aikman dropping the bomb that the defensive coordinator Brandon Staley intimated he had no idea how to stop the Atlanta Falcons.

THE PICK: VIKINGS

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Las Vegas Raiders at New England Patriots (-3.5) 1 p.m. Sunday, CBS

The Raiders are the only team that is 4-0 against the spread, but that streak should end after they heard all week what a great moral victory it was to lose a close game to the Kansas City Chiefs. Their lackluster running game and run defense (5.2 yards per carry allowed) will get them in a hole on the road, and the Patriots will avenge last year's season-opening loss.

THE PICK: PATRIOTS

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Indianapolis Colts at Pittsburgh Steelers (-2.5)

1 p.m. Sunday, CBS

The Colts are back from a trip to London, while the Steelers have had extra rest, and they are really trying to hook you in with the spread at only 2.5 instead of 3 or 3.5. Daniel Jones has been bad (5.7 yards per attempt), but Aaron Rodgers might be hopeless. The Steelers are bad on third downs, and one reason is that Rodgers has taken the most sacks (eight) while having the 12th-longest average time to throw (3.0 seconds).

THE PICK: COLTS

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New York Giants at Washington Commanders (-3.5)

1 p.m. Sunday, Fox

Picking against Jameis Winston last week was a mistake — he always comes through when you think he is finally toast. It's the next week that he reminds you how terrible he is. The Commanders should get a boost from the return of Jayden Daniels — their offensive line has actually been better of late and might protect him — and the emergence of the rookie Sonny Styles as one of the league's exciting young stars.

THE PICK: COMMANDERS

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Chicago Bears (-3) at Green Bay Packers

1 p.m. Sunday, Fox

It feels like the Packers are just waiting for Micah Parsons and Josh Jacobs to show up, while Bears Coach Ben Johnson is busy trying to troll everyone. It might not matter who is at quarterback for the Bears, whose running backs Kyle Monangai and D'Andre Swift are the first pair of N.F.L. teammates in 50 years to each rush for 300-plus yards in the first four games of a season. The Packers rank 30th in yards allowed after contact (3.7) and 31st in rushing touchdowns against (seven).

THE PICK: BEARS

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Cincinnati Bengals (-7) at Miami Dolphins

1 p.m. Sunday, Fox

I don't think it matters who plays receiver for Joe Burrow against the Dolphins. Or who plays defense for the Bengals. Dolphins quarterback Malik Willis has a 21 percent off-target rate, the second-highest rate by a starter through the first four games of a season since 2019. And he doesn't run like Justin Fields.

THE PICK: BENGALS

PATRICK GORSKI/IMAGN IMAGES

D'Andre Swift, above, and Kyle Monangai have both rushed for over 300 yards.

THEARON W. HENDERSON/GETTY IMAGES

Mike Evans is a weapon the 49ers didn't have against the Seahawks in the playoffs.

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Houston Texans (-7.5) at Tennessee Titans

1 p.m. Sunday, CBS

Here's a crazy stat: The Texans are 0-4, but their quarterback, C.J. Stroud, has yet to throw an interception this season. Their defense let them down again last week, but it should finally turn things around and resemble last year's dominant unit against a feeble Titans team, with Coach DeMeco Ryans taking over play-calling.

THE PICK: TEXANS

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Cleveland Browns at New York Jets (-2.5)

1 p.m. Sunday, CBS

We have had a good read on the Jets all season, and they should bounce back here against a suddenly overrated Browns team. Geno Smith will be the best quarterback on the field, and the Browns will be playing right into his hands. Cleveland has used man coverage on an N.F.L.-high 50 percent of opponent dropbacks, according to Next Gen Stats, while Smith ranks 11th in passer rating against man (101.8) the past two years.

THE PICK: JETS

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Denver Broncos (-3.5) at Los Angeles Chargers

4:05 p.m. Sunday, CBS

The Broncos are missing their two top cornerbacks, their offense stinks, and this is surely where Jim Harbaugh and Justin Herbert will make a stand, right? Nah. When do they trade Khalil Mack?

THE PICK: BRONCOS

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Detroit Lions (-5.5) at Arizona Cardinals

4:25 p.m. Sunday, Fox

The Lions are last in the league in pass defense (327 yards per game) and third- and fourth-down stop percentage. It gets worse — they are allowing 43 yards and 3.02

stop percentage. It gets worse they are allowing 43 yards and 3.02 points per drive, which ranks 862nd out

SUE OGROCKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Aaron Rodgers, left, has taken the most sacks (eight). Michael Penix Jr.'s inaccuracy will trouble the Falcons.

ELLA HALL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Byes

Carolina Panthers, Kansas City Chiefs

Best Bets

We're in go-against mode (Dolphins, Chargers, Packers and Titans), so we're taking the Bengals, Broncos, Bears and Texans. And then the Bills plus-3 seems logical, given that Matthew Stafford has not been all that sharp this season.

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Upset Special

The Jaguars are overpriced in London, so we're back on the Eagles at a whopping +280.

of 862 teams since the turn of the century. Laying 5.5 points on the road with that kind of defense is a sucker bet, but Arizona's can't-miss rookie Jeremiyah Love is banged up, and quarterback Jacoby Brissett was so bad last week that people are actually calling for Carson Beck. Yikes.

THE PICK: LIONS

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San Francisco 49ers at Seattle Seahawks (-3)

4:25 p.m. Sunday, Fox

The hungover Seahawks have a lot they are still trying to figure out — they tried to sign Joe Mixon until they remembered that he had to take a physical — while the 49ers are footloose and carefree despite a staggering number of injuries again. They have a lot of new (and old) pieces that were not on hand for last season's playoff massacre in Seattle. Mike Evans, Deebo Samuel, Dre Greenlaw and Osa Odighizuwa should do enough to get the win (or a 3-point loss and a push).

THE PICK: 49ERS

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Baltimore Ravens at Atlanta Falcons (-3.5)

8:20 p.m. Sunday, NBC

Two weeks ago, who would have thought the question for Baltimore, if Lamar Jackson cannot play, would be, "How do the Ravens keep pace with the Falcons' offense?" At some point, Michael Penix Jr.'s inaccuracy has to ground the Falcons, or else they should just play in prime time every week.

THE PICK: RAVENS

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Buffalo Bills at Los Angeles Rams (-3)

8:15 p.m. Monday, ABC/ESPN

Last week, Josh Allen and the Bills failed on what should have been light work in putting an end to the Patriots' season. This week, they will come through on the road, as Allen is 28-9 in games after a loss (11-3 since 2023). THE PICK: BILLS

PRO BASKETBALL | W.N.B.A. PLAYOFFS

COMMENTARY

Valkyries Storm Into Finals, Heralding New Era in W.N.B.A.

The Valkyries' Kaitlyn Chen, left, and Gabby Williams embraced after Golden State clinched a berth in the W.N.B.A. finals.

IAN MAULE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By BRIAN HAMILTON

The Athletic

LAS VEGAS — At 9:02 p.m. here on Friday, a group of players who did not belong stopped hugging and dancing to thank people who gave them a chance.

The Golden State Valkyries, after they had secured a spot in the W.N.B.A. finals in their second year of existence, waved to the dozens of fans who followed them to this city. A new world order for this league had arrived, rocketing through the old one.

An 87-77 overtime victory over the Las Vegas Aces. A playoff semifinal series sweep over a monolithic team and its five-time M.V.P. megastar. The defending champions, worn down and shoved aside by a group that does not know better.

The Atlanta Dream went first, actually, flushing the New York Liberty earlier in the evening. Then the Valkyries took their turn and their place. Both teams were top-four seeds. Both teams were capable of doing this. But history suggested that it was unlikely both would: Five of the past six W.N.B.A. finals have included either the Aces or the Liberty, or in the case of 2023, both.

This one will not. This year's finals look like the future, declaring itself as the now. Beginning Saturday in San Francisco, the league's championship round will set everyone's eyes on the promise of what's ahead.

"It feels special because this is

Brian Hamilton is a senior women's basketball writer for The Athletic.

a special group," said Gabby Williams, the Valkyries' emerging megastar. She added: "Nobody believed in us, but it honestly made us smile. Because we were like, all we need is each other. We felt we had something worth fighting for."

The Dream make sense. Adding Angel Reese to a roster with multiple All-Stars, then following with astute in-season moves like the acquisition of the veteran forward DeWanna Bonner, fits the profile of building a contender. But let's be plain: The Valkyries should not have happened. Expansion clubs should not emerge from the gestation chamber as title contenders in perfect order.

Because it has happened, the W.N.B.A. franchise archetype has changed, and the operational pressure on every other team is now very real.

Not every franchise can nail every personnel decision up and down the chart. Not every organization can support a group, from basketball resources to fan engagement to player experience, in the way the Valkyries do. But good luck if you don't. This can be done. Here in the desert, everyone saw how the bet paid off.

"I think everyone else's expectations were maybe a little bit farther down than ours," said Veronica Burton, the Golden State point guard who went from expansion draft castoff to all-league-caliber performer.

"Everyone just wanted to see what we were about. But anytime I'm on a team, I'm trying to win. And I think that's the same with every single person in this locker room and in this organization."

When the Golden State franchise was unveiled in October 2023, the team did not have a name, but it did have ambition. It did have a purpose.

"I'm telling you right now," Joe Lacob, the co-owner and chief executive of the N.B.A.'s Warriors, declared. "We will win a W.N.B.A. championship in the first five years of this franchise."

Easy enough to say, and utterly risk-free. So what if it doesn't work out? So what if it's a struggle for a first-time head coach leading an assortment of players other teams chose not to protect from the expansion draft?

The refurbished practice center with the Sephora signage, the glimmering 18,000-seat arena nicknamed Ballhalla, the 49

consecutive sellouts by an instantly smitten fan base — even these advantages could be incidental, taken by themselves. It could have been a group playing dress-up as a legitimately competitive and relevant W.N.B.A. team.

Instead, an ethos of effort — "So much of their character and identity is playing hard," Aces Coach Becky Hammon said earlier in the series — has been complemented by all the nice stuff to create a deep appreciation that grew into vast belief. The Valkyries' 23 wins in their debut season set a W.N.B.A. record for expansion franchises, and Natalie Nakase won coach of the year honors in 2025.

And then the belief metastasized everywhere in a league that is still more of a neighborhood than an empire.

Williams, the most impactful player in this semifinal series, was not here last year. She signed on for Year 2 because what she saw in Year I was so convincing, the style of play so enticing and the opportunity to be herself so appealing. "I've been very open since I first got to Golden State that I wanted to be on a team that contends." Williams said. "That's why I'm here. It was Nat's energy. I could feel it, how much she detested losing."

A star-making season followed, and Williams finished a scant 710 points behind A'ja Wilson in league most valuable player balloting. And then Williams sent Wilson and her team into the off-season one day after the M.V.P. trophy ceremony.

Predictably, the mantra that has echoed through Bay Area basketball for years — “strength in numbers” — pushed the Valkyries through.

"I told them I was proud of our whole team, all 14, because I saw another level of fight," Nakase said after Friday's overtime win. "We talked about leveling up one more, as a team. We really left it all on the floor. We really emptied the tank."

As she did after the previous two games, Golden State's coach walked toward the opposing coach for the customary rituals of sportsmanship. And just as she did after the previous two games, Nakase, who spent three seasons as an Aces assistant coach under Hammon, hugged her former boss tight.

Hammon loves her, and Nakase loves Hammon. Both understood that one was going to make the other miserable. "That," Hammon said afterward, "is a team."

The work has forced Nakase to her knees. In a first-round series against Dallas, in the middle of a conversation with an official, she collapsed in exhaustion. It was frightening, and at minimum a lesson in proper self-care. It also underscored what's behind all of this.

"When you know someone cares that much — it's not fluff," Burton said. "There's nothing she's doing that she doesn't genuinely believe in. We feed off that. When you have someone from the top leading it, it's easy to follow suit."

It took less than a minute for Nakase to leave the floor after the final horn, with zero emotion on her face. "I actually tried to walk through the tunnel with my head down, because there's so many people here I consider family," she explained. The rest of her team followed within three minutes, except for one.

Williams remained, hijacked by interview duties. And as she stood on the floor, the fans behind the visitors' bench serenaded her by screaming her name.

She turned. She laughed. She made a heart sign with her hands.

Atlanta awaits, with this Dream group also new to the finals and absolutely as formidable. But the incredible truth followed the Valkyries' best player off the floor.

"Literally," Nakase said, "this is a dream come true."

Two years, four wins from a championship, and counting.

ANALYSIS

Few Contenders For Ovechkin's Mark

By SHAYNA GOLDMAN and DOM LUSZCZYSZYN

The Athletic

Alex Ovechkin isn't done yet. Ovechkin, the Washington Capitals star who announced on Monday that this would be his final N.H.L. season, has 80 more games to extend his league record of 929 regular-season goals. He passed Wayne Gretzky, who scored 894, on the career list late in the 2024-25 season.

There is a reason Gretzky's record stood as long as it did, and there is a strong chance Ovechkin's entry will stand longer.

Ovechkin's consistency has been ridiculous. He has recorded 14 seasons with 40 goals or more, and his only season under 30 goals was because of the pandemic. From ages 27 to 39 (excluding shortened seasons), he scored 47 to 57 goals in all but three seasons.

His longevity has also been ridiculous. Most players peak between the ages of 24 to 26, and while that was true of Ovechkin's all-around game, he has also averaged 47 goals per 82 games during the 14 seasons after turning 26. He has scored 223 goals at age 35 or older.

His availability has been equally ridiculous. He has appeared in 95 percent of available contests, a high-water mark among his peers. In the N.H.L.'s salary-cap era, the best players average 92 percent, right where Connor McDavid lands. Some, such as Steven Stamkos (89 percent), Auston Matthews (88 percent) and Sidney Crosby (86 percent), end up lower.

Put it all together, and Ovechkin is unique offensively, perfectly tailored to be the N.H.L.'s career goal-scoring leader. Everything broke right for him, which is unlikely to happen to another player challenging his crown.

But if everything does go right, there is one potential threat who could have a real shot at Ovechkin's record years from now.

is not an ordinary 19-year-old; it took him only two seasons to join the conversation with some of the N.H.L.'s best.

The Sharks' Macklin Celebrini has the best chance to top Alex Ovechkin's career goals record. He's young and a high-volume shooter.

LEILA DEVLIN/GETTY IMAGES

DAN HAMILTON/IMAGN IMAGES

Enter Macklin Celebrini of the San Jose Sharks.

TONY AVELAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS

What kick-starts his chances of chasing down Ovechkin's record is that he has a 70-goal head start, which is rare for a teenager. It is a feat that only six other N.H.L. players share: Jimmy Carson, Dale Hawerchuk, Patrik Laine, Brian Bellows, Gretzky and Crosby.

The Maple Leafs' Auston Matthews looked like more of a threat early in his career, but his scoring fell off in the past two seasons.

Leon Draisaitl, left, and Connor McDavid of the Oilers are both in the mix, but Draisaitl is perhaps the best scorer in the league.

HOCKEY

A few things work in Celebrini's favor, such as playing in a high-scoring era without any impending work stoppages on the horizon. We're not projecting any 50-goal seasons because they are still rare: There have been 19 over the last 10 seasons. But the curve does have Celebrini approaching that space. His current projection is 40 goals per 82, but it rises to 48 at his peak, which is still a few years away. Add in the fact that player primes have extended, and he has a chance to move the needle here.

But as other teenage phenoms have shown, it's not that simple.

Laine's scoring pop was eventually overtaken by flaws in his game and his inconsistent availability. And that durability is pivotal here; Crosby, who scored 75 goals before turning 20, would be at 731 goals now, instead of 654, if he had Ovechkin's availability.

So Celebrini has to stay relatively injury-free and choose to be a true goal-scoring threat early in his career. Celebrini has the skill set to do the latter — he is a high-volume shooter with high efficiency, which is a dangerous combination that has more longevity than a pure sniper. But as McDavid and others have shown, sometimes players with goal-scoring chops often defer to other strengths.

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THE LEADING CONTENDER Macklin Celebrini

Even in a best-case scenario, Celebrini entered the 2026-27 season projecting to finish 106 career goals short of Ovechkin. And the fact that it's only Year 3 of what should be a long career leaves even more uncertainty ahead. But right now, that uncertainty works in his favor; in a group of long shots, he is the N.H.L.'s best bet.

Career goal forecast: 823

70 goals ahead of Ovechkin at same age

Averaged needed until age 40: 40.9 goals per season

Shayna Goldman and Dom

Luszczyszyn cover the N.H.L. for

The Athletic.

Usually, it would be silly to project a 20-year-old to score 800 goals after just two N.H.L. seasons. But Celebrini has shown he

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THE REST OF THE FIELD Leon Draisaitl

Career goal forecast: 786

41 goals behind Ovechkin at same age

Average needed until age 40: 45 goals per season

While Celebrini has the potential to emerge as one of the great goal scorers of his generation, Draisaitl is already there.

He has passed the 40-goal mark in six of the last eight seasons. The two seasons he fell short were both shortened seasons, in which he was on a pace to score around 45 goals.

Draisaitl is perhaps the best scorer in the league. Entering this season, he projected for a pace of 49 goals per 60 moving forward.

A few things set him up for long-term success. Obviously, there's the raw shooting talent, which is undeniable for a player who can score consistently from sharp angles. There is the fact that he does a lot of damage on the power play, as does Ovechkin, and that skill tends to age well. The durability factor is another key part of his success; excluding his rookie season, he has been available for 77.5 games per 82, which matches Ovechkin.

Then there's the McDavid factor, which amps things up even more for Draisaitl. While the Edmonton Oilers try to keep them split across two lines, they pair up at even strength for offensive emergencies and always team up on the power play.

Playing with the league's most productive playmaker makes Draisaitl's shooting even more dangerous, and sets him up to age the best.

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Auston Matthews

Career goal forecast: 764

6 goals ahead of Ovechkin

at same age

Average needed until age 40: 41.8 goals per season

For a while, it really did seem like Matthews could challenge Ovechkin. From 2019 to 2024, he averaged 60 goals per 82 games, a level even Ovechkin never reached. Matthews took advantage of the league's increased scoring and, despite missing a lot of action, held a 30-goal lead on Ovechkin at age 27.

That lead has dwindled to six. That is impressive given how poorly Matthews's last two seasons have gone. The hope is that he was merely "Dale Hunter-ed" by Craig Berube. If his new

coach with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Jim Hiller, can get Matthews back on track, he might have a shot again.

Still, that's hard to forecast, given that he is now three seasons removed from scoring 69, with some speculation that he just isn't the same scorer anymore. Ovechkin went through similar doubts at roughly the same age, and it is up to Matthews to prove he can still pot 50. His projected scoring rate is currently down to 44 goals per 82.

And with Matthews, that "per 82" does a lot of work. Availability is a major issue for him; he has scored 30 fewer goals than he would have at Ovechkin's games-played rate.

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Connor McDavid

Career goal forecast: 720

13 goals behind Ovechkin at same age

Average needed until age 40: 43.3 goals per season

Before the 2022-23 season, McDavid simply decided he would score more. And so he did, putting up a career-high 64 goals. Some players are born with it, others can apparently just decide to do it.

That's McDavid, and if he chooses to simply start scoring more, he has a better shot at the career goals record than one might initially suspect. Despite having only one season north of 50 goals, McDavid's consistency, availability and 46-goal head start have him within shocking striking distance of Ovechkin at the same age, with 409 goals after his age-28 season.

McDavid has the weakest goals-per-82 projection among the three veterans (42 goals per 82) and is expected to tail off quicker than the others as a result, finishing with just over 700 goals. But a few seasons scoring instead of deferring, and an extended prime, could put McDavid on the map. All he has to do is decide to do it.

APPRAISAL

Ditka Made a Myth That Will Live On Far Past Chicago

By JON GREENBERG

The Athletic

Mike Ditka was not the greatest coach in N.F.L. history. The Chicago Bears of the 1980s were not a dynasty.

But no coach or single team mattered more to the modern mythmaking of professional football than Ditka and his Bears, who ran roughshod over the N.F.L. in 1985, became legends, and capped it off with a dominant Super Bowl victory that stands alone.

They were truly the team of the '80s: flashy, self-promoting winners. They had a hit record and ended up being one-hit wonders. But what a hit.

So perhaps it is fitting that they own the one Super Bowl championship in Chicago (so far) because there was only one Ditka, who died Friday at the age of 86.

Maybe he outlived most of his peers in football through his indomitable stubbornness. He

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He led a team that embodied the '80s: flashy, self-promoting one-hit wonders.

and his wife, Diana, moved back to Chicago in recent years to live out his remaining time in the place that made him rich and famous. He died in a downtown high-rise, overlooking a city that he once owned.

The flat-topped, smart-mouthed, rough-and-tumble kid from Aliquippa, Pa., willed his way into becoming a Hall of Fame tight end for the Bears and the Dallas Cowboys and a Super Bowl-winning coach who was more famous than most of his players.

A kid who grew up in steel-mill country became "Iron" Mike Ditka in sweet home Chicago. It is a uniquely American story.

"I'm no special deal. Mike Ditka's a guy that came out of Aliquippa, you understand?" he told reporters after he was fired by the Bears in January 1993. "Figure this out, time out, I came out of Aliquippa in 1957 as a high school football player, went to the University of Pittsburgh, and my life has been a miracle since because of this game. No regrets."

He went to Pitt to be a dentist and left as a record-setting tight end who would redefine the position in the N.F.L. He won a championship with the Bears in 1963 and a Super Bowl with

Jon Greenberg is a senior columnist for The Athletic.

Dallas in 1971. When George Halas hired him off Tom Landry's staff before the 1982 season, it was a franchise-changing move.

With his snarling charm and gum-snapping wit, Ditka became a worldwide avatar for a certain kind of steakhouse masculinity. His interests seemed to be football, Scotch, cigars and golf, and not always in that order.

As they might say today, he had aura.

When you think of Ditka, it's him on the sidelines of a Bears game. The mustache, the slicked-back pompadour, the sweater vest and the aviator sunglasses — it's an iconic look. A Ditka costume is still popular today at Bears games. A radio station in Chicago hosted an annual "Ditkaween" party where fans would dress up as the coach. He seemed to get a kick out of it.

His fame continued to grow nationally after the Super Bowl largely because of "Saturday Night Live's" Super Fans sketches in the early 1990s, in which a bunch of Grabowskis (a term he created to describe hard-nosed Chicagoans) worshiped him like a God.

Over heart-attack-inducing food, they would debate the questions of the day, like if Mike Ditka could beat a hurricane if its name was Hurricane Ditka. They made "Da Bears" into a catch-phrase used by locals just as much as outsiders.

Robert Smigel, the brain behind those sketches, posted a fond remembrance of the human side of Ditka on Instagram and included a video of the time the Super Fans, led by George Wendt's character Bob Swerski, wrote an angry letter to the Bears decrying Ditka's firing.

The fictional letter noted that Ditka's "courage and good grooming set a standard for an entire city" and that he would rise again because he was "like the sun, only smarter."

Those sketches pilloried the sports-crazy culture of Chicago, a big city that acts like a small town, where the Bears were king and the fans were the simple-minded subjects. They resonated locally and beyond because they were only slight exaggerations.

In reality, fans knew that Ditka was far from a simple man. He had his defenders and his critics. After a dalliance in New Orleans, he went back and forth between Florida and Chicago and became more popular than ever just by being himself. He grew into the elder statesman of both the N.F.L. and Chicago.

He was sometimes perceived as a snarling egotist. Yet he was usually kind and friendly to the strangers who just wanted to meet him and bask in his reflected glory. He signed every autograph, took every picture

PRO FOOTBALL

Image was no small part of Mike Ditka's presence on the sideline: the mustache, the slicked-back hair and the aviator sunglasses.

CHARLES BENNET/ASSOCIATED PRESS

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ditka's Bears gave their dominant 1985 season a Super Bowl performance to match it in 1986.

and smiled.

"Going through airports is pretty interesting," Ditka said once. "I think I have an obligation to do those things. I think when you don't have time for people, you've got a problem."

He appeared as himself in a Will Ferrell movie. On ESPN's "NFL Countdown," he picked the Bears to win every week. He was a regular on ESPN 1000 after helping put "The Score," and sports radio, on the map in Chicago toward the end of his coaching career. His TV shows with his former teammate Johnny Morris are the stuff of legend in Chicago.

In his coaching days, he would snap at reporters, fans and radio callers. He once invited Neal from Northlake to meet him at his office ("250 North Worshington" in perfect Pittsburghese) to fight, and he told a heckling fan that his I.Q. was zero. And who can forget the picture of him, walking across the field brandishing a middle finger?

He could certainly be moody, mercurial even. His quarterback Jim McMahon used to call him "Sybil" after a made-for-TV movie about a woman with multiple personalities.

But thousands upon thousands of people have stories about meeting him at his eponymous steakhouses, golf courses or out on the town, and they came away with a picture and a handshake. I once stood in line with my kids at a children's boutique where he signed Ditka-branded clothing. He called my toddler daughter a "princess." He was such a charmer.

"I'm just having fun with it," he said of his popularity. "I can tell you honestly, probably the best thing that can happen is when you stop taking yourself so damn serious. And I quit. I don't take myself serious."

There was a time when he seriously thought about running against Barack Obama for an open Senate seat in Illinois. He would have lost, but those debates would have been memorable. Obama versus Hurricane Ditka.

Ditka's politics were, he said, "to the far right of Attila the Hun," but he cared deeply for others.

In his coaching days, he annoyed the Bears players by hoarding endorsement deals, but in his later years, he was well known for raising money for charities.

He espoused toughness and self-sufficiency, but he went after the league and the players' union for not taking care of the injured players who toiled before the league offered riches. And he wasn't just talk. He created a foundation to raise money for them that is still active.

On the air Friday, the ESPN 1000 host Carmen DeFalco remembered how Ditka would sign autographs at radio remotes and demand \$20 to be placed in a large bowl. He would donate the pot to a Chicago charity.

One of his famous quotes was "living in the past is for cow-ards," but he constantly told Jarrett Payton that he was sorry for not getting his father, Walter, a touchdown in Super Bowl XX.

After his firing from the Bears, he quoted both the Bible and Frank Sinatra.

"Scripture tells you that all things shall pass," he said. "This, too, shall pass. Regrets, just a few, but too few to remember."

Ditka died slightly more than a week shy of his 87th birthday with nothing to prove and hopefully just those few regrets. No one will ever rue that he made Chicago his home. He will be remembered here as "Da Coach" forever.

Not bad for a kid from Aliquippa.

COMMENTARY

On Watson Misconduct Allegations, a Broadcast Misses the Mark

SUE OGROCKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Amazon Prime's "Thursday Night Football" should have done a better job of discussing the accusations against Deshaun Watson.

By CANDACE BUCKNER

The Athletic

It must be hard to call a football game on national television when a team's starting quarterback has been accused of sexual misconduct against multiple massage therapists. No matter how experienced the broadcaster might be, even if he has worked the booth for eons and owns neckties older than most of the players on the field, lines like that don't easily roll off the tongue.

It's second-and-4, the Browns are backed up on their own 15, Deshaun Watson — who you remember, ya know, kinda had that whole thing a while back with some ladies, and had to resolve 27 civil lawsuits — throws incomplete. Third down.

Working in a player's sordid past isn't poetry. It sure isn't X's and O's, and it's not even close to being the kind of narration fit for the gridiron. If any team does make the mistake of signing Tyreek Hill, a player who has faced multiple allegations of domestic violence, do not expect an announcer to repeat his ex-wife's allegations that he once tried to punch her pregnant belly, as he is tearing up the zone coverage.

It's just not an easy topic to discuss. The job of an N.F.L. television broadcaster is to provide football analysis, not legal commentary. No one tunes into

Candace Buckner is a senior columnist for The Athletic.

these prime-time programs to gain moral clarity. So when is it a good time to mention the messy? Or should sportscasters just stick to what they do best?

It seems that some N.F.L. booths still can't figure out the solution. Nevertheless, this should not excuse a broadcast for clumsily handling players' legal troubles. Especially legal troubles as troubling as those of Watson.

During Cleveland's 27-24 win against Pittsburgh on Oct. 1, Amazon Prime's "Thursday Night Football" crew downplayed Watson's history of having been accused of sexually harassing or assaulting more than two dozen women during massage appointments. The play-by-play announcer Al Michaels assured viewers that "we don't have to go through the whole Deshaun Watson thing." The 81-year-old broadcaster then continued on about those "issues" and how "we all know what they were."

Michaels worked through this particular part of the broadcast briskly. His words were intentionally vague. As were those of the analyst Tony Gonzalez when he appeared on the postgame set and danced around the “adversity” from “on the field and off the field” and “stuff” that Watson had “gone through.”

Gonzalez could have been lumping in Watson's return to form after his season-ending shoulder injury in 2023, and his Achilles' tendon ruptures that cost him nearly the next two seasons, along with the "stuff" from 2022. However, Gonzalez never came close to clarifying what that "stuff" was. He was ambiguous just as Michaels was, leaving room for interpretation, as well as easy criticism.

The men on the Prime broadcast did not want to touch the subject, likely for one of several reasons. For starters, there is a kind of fatigue that comes with rehashing bad behavior. It's hard for a sports crowd to remain in a state of righteous anger forever, let alone for four whole years. Even Watson, who has demonstrated that his self-absorption knows no bounds, as he has continuously painted himself as a victim, might benefit from the passage of time. Apathy — and a 3-1 record in Cleveland — can go a long way.

There's also this: The play-by-play guy and the former jock might recognize how woefully unequipped they are to speak on issues that do not promote or evangelize the game. So any discussion about legal drama is best saved for the sideline reporter. (See also: the woman who has to handle the icky "stuff.")

In that Thursday night broadcast, Taylor Rooks served that role, having to ask the blunt question to Watson about how fans might perceive him as a person.

Also, back in 2022, the veteran N.F.L. reporter Aditi Kinkhabwala was given the responsibility of cajoling a modicum of remorse out of Watson, since he had failed to show any following the allegations.

"Look, I want to say that I'm truly sorry to all of the women that I have impacted in this situation," Watson rehearsed with a blank expression and flat voice before the 2022 season. "The decisions that I made in my life that put me in this position I would definitely like to have back, but I want to continue to move forward and grow and learn and show that I am a true person of character, and I am going to keep pushing forward."

It works having someone like Rooks or Kinkhabwala as the voice of the skeptic or simply the adult in the room, while the actual football broadcasts focus on the play on the field. And if the broadcaster and the football analyst find it easier to ignore a player's suspension over the personal conduct policy, or the real reason that a home crowd is booing its starting quarterback, then perhaps their silence would be better than soft-pedaling the issue. Even so, just stop framing legal troubles as redemption stories.

When Watson quarterbacked his team to a divisional win last Thursday, Gonzalez turned the Prime set into his public defense. These shows are filled with former players, and they tend to protect their own, yet Gonzalez went overboard. He proclaimed how "proud" he was of Watson. How "happy" he was about Watson's comeback after all the, well, "adversity." As though being accused of sexual misconduct is just part of a hero's origin story.

We get it — talking about allegations of sexual assault or domestic abuse is challenging, and it is a conversation dotted with land mines. When it comes

---

It's time to stop casting legal troubles as redemption stories.

to a player's past arrest or lawsuit settlement, there is no simple language, even for people who are paid to talk for a living.

But we know this: If Cleveland keeps winning, the Browns will be on national TV again. Hill might find employment. Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs, who is accused of throwing his girlfriend to the ground, might eventually leave the Commissioner's exempt list.

Between now and then, whoever's in that booth to call their games should think long and hard about the appropriate way to address the whole thing — you know, all that "stuff" these players have gone through — because Prime took a weak swing at it and completely missed.

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Gordon J. Davis, 85, Is Dead; Leader Revived Central Park

By ROBIN POGREBIN and SAM ROBERTS

Gordon J. Davis, a New York lawyer and civic leader who helped revive Central Park during his tenure as the city's first Black parks commissioner and elevated jazz to a permanent feature of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, died on Oct. 4 in Manhattan. He was 85.

The death, at a hospital, was from complications of emphysema, said his daughter, Elizabeth Cooper Davis.

A scion of Chicago's Black aristocracy, Mr. Davis delivered a legacy to his adopted city that included the establishment of the Central Park Conservancy, a successful public-private partnership, to restore and protect Manhattan's 843-acre verdant oasis, and the founding of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which formally enshrined America's original musical genre at one of the world's leading performing arts organizations.

At 6-foot-5 and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Davis was among the more conspicuous members of a crop of young idealists to join the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay in the late 1960s, and he became part of Mr. Lindsay's inner circle of advisers, including as special assistant and speechwriter. Mr. Davis was later a rare person of color who ascended the ranks of the city's most prestigious cultural institutions.

But it was his tenure from 1978 to 1983 as commissioner of the city's Department of Parks and Recreation — a job once held by the formidable Robert Moses — that firmly established his civic reputation. "Parks appeal to me," Mr. Davis told The New Yorker after being appointed. "They're one of the few places that are genuinely democratic."

To a sprawling city agency reeling in the wake of a citywide fiscal crisis, Mr. Davis was best remembered for the restoration of the Sheep Meadow, an expansive lawn in Central Park, and for bringing in the singer-songwriter James Taylor for a final concert before the field was closed to the public for a year of repairs. Mr. Davis helped obtain a substantial grant from the governor's office for the renovation project.

Mr. Davis also made possible Elton John's concert in the park in 1980 and a celebrated reunion concert between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel on the Great Lawn in 1981.

In running a department that included more than 4,000 employees, nearly 600 parks and 900 playgrounds, more than 100 swimming pools and 500 tennis courts, more than 10 golf courses, three zoos, dozens of recreation centers, several beaches and ice-skating rinks, and many hundreds of baseball, softball, football and soccer fields, Mr. Davis spoke of the exhaustive effort it took to try to please every constituency.

MICHAEL LOCCISANO/GETTY IMAGES FOR JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER

Gordon J. Davis and his wife, Peggy Cooper Davis, at a Jazz at Lincoln Center gala in 2018.

"The day after my appointment was announced, I got 40 calls from people telling me what's wrong at the tennis courts, at the rinks, with the trees," he told The New Yorker at the time.

He launched a corps of urban park rangers, appointed borough administrators, privatized many of the city's public golf courses, spurred the restoration of Bryant Park in Midtown, reintroduced a herd of sea lions to the Central Park Zoo, and was a founding trustee of the Central Park Conservancy, in 1980.

"It was Mr. Davis who perhaps best foresaw that the creation of the Conservancy as an institution was not simply an act of political and administrative will but a reaf-

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A force for an oasis in Manhattan, and a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

firmation of the social democracy that is the hallmark of our park and our city," Richard Gilder, another founding donor of the Conservancy, and Betsy Gotbaum, a subsequent parks commissioner, later wrote in a letter to the editor in The New York Times.

When Mr. Davis resigned from the parks department after five consequential years — citing “a gut uneasiness that comes in my case, perhaps, from being too familiar or too comfortable” — Mayor Edward I. Koch wrote a thank-you note saying he doubted Mr. Davis’s record of achievement “will ever be surpassed, and surely it will rarely be equaled.”

Diane M. Coffey, the former chief of staff to Mayor Koch, said Mr. Davis "woke up the parks department from what it was, which was terrible. He humanized it, and he brought a certain amount of class."

In 1983, Mr. Davis joined Lord Day & Lord as one of a handful of Black lawyers to be named partner in a major New York corporate law firm, and he later worked at Venable. During his legal career, he specialized in complex public-private and nonprofit developments, such as Amtrak's Moynihan station and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.

By all accounts, he moved with social ease through black-tie galas, the well-connected lunch crowd at Michael's in Midtown, and the exclusive Century Association, where he was a member. But Mr. Davis said he never lost sight of the fact that, as a Black man, he was an exception and worked to correct the inequity he experienced firsthand in worlds entrenched in white privilege.

CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES

By having exceptionally light skin, he said, he was often mistaken for white. He recalled countless times when peers in college and all-white law firms made racially insensitive or bigoted remarks in front of him. "You know that I am African American?" he made it a point to tell them.

“Maybe I'm self-contained, but it has nothing to do with race,” he said in a 1998 Times interview. “I grew up in a family that was very self-aware, and very confident in issues of race. My parents taught us that we were equal to, or sometimes better than, people who were white. We were never confused about what we were. Other people were confused, all the time.”

VINCENT LAFORET/THE NEW YORK TIMES

He served on the boards of not only Lincoln Center, where he was briefly president, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he was the founding chairman, but also the New York Public Library, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the American Museum of Natural History, the Public Theater and Dance Theater of Harlem. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Mr. Davis to a six-year term as a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

He tried to recruit people of color to the boards on which he sat and often spoke out about the lack of diversity among the trustees of New York's cultural institutions. "He was willing to speak up and stand up for racial justice in places where others were just happy to be in the room," said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation. "He was one of the few voices to call out the lack of diversity in for-profit and nonprofit organizations."

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said Mr. Davis "was consistent in his belief that cultural institutions and boards have to change to reflect the world around him."

Gordon Jamison Davis, the younger of two sons, was born on the South Side of Chicago on Aug. 7, 1941. His father, Dr. W. Allison Davis, and his mother, Elizabeth (Stubbs) Davis, were social anthropologists who published studies on caste and class in the American South in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mr. Davis took great pride in the fact that his father, who was a professor at the University of Chicago, in 1947 became the first African American to be granted tenure at any white college or university in the United States (a postage stamp to commemorate him was issued in 1994).

At Williams, a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts that his father had also attended, Gordon Davis co-founded a campus civil rights committee that raised money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other activist groups. He also was a star basketball player and graduated in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in political science.

Initially planning on a career in architecture, Mr. Davis did graduate work in city planning and public administration at Columbia University before deciding to switch to law on the advice of a friend.

"In those days, I thought build-"

ings changed society," he told The New Yorker in 1978. "The fact of the matter is, a good architect is a good planner. Still, it seemed to me that the best planners often tended to be lawyers."

At Harvard Law School, he was a founding member of the Harvard Black Law Students Association and contributed to the newly established Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

Soon after graduation in 1967, he became assistant to the budget director of Mayor Lindsay. After five years working as a labor and real-estate lawyer and serving part time on the city planning commission, Mr. Davis was named parks commissioner in 1978.

In 1968, he married Peggy Cooper, who became a professor at New York University Law School. In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by a brother, Allison S. Davis; and two grandchildren.

In 1987, Mr. Davis joined the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis; George Weissman, the chairman of Lincoln Center; and Albert Murray, a literary and music critic, in founding Jazz at Lincoln Center. Mr. Davis was named the founding chairman of the entity, which became a full-fledged con-

Mr. Davis in 2000 as the new president of Lincoln Center, and second from left with other Jazz at Lincoln Center leaders, including Wynton Marsalis, second from right.

stituent of Lincoln Center in 1996. Before he retired as chairman in 2001, he presided over the inception of Frederick P. Rose Hall, a venue that opened in 2004 as a center specifically designed for jazz performance, education and broadcast.

To The Times in 1998, he spoke of inheriting a love of jazz from his father, a learned academic who nonetheless considered Louis Armstrong's 1928 recording of "West End Blues" "the greatest thing American civilization has ever produced."

In 2000, after more than 20 years on Lincoln Center's board, Mr. Davis took over for the long-time president of the performing arts complex, Nathan Leventhal, but his stint at the helm lasted only nine months amid clashes with Beverly Sills, the acclaimed soprano then serving as the center's chairwoman.

Mr. Davis's presidency was complicated by the center's ambitious redevelopment project, which was initially rife with infighting among the constituent groups on the campus. And in serving on cultural boards, Mr. Davis could be a thorn in the side of some of his fellow trustees, frequently agitating for greater diversity and critiquing the slow pace of change.

At the same time, he inspired a fierce loyalty among colleagues and friends.

"If I were looking for honest, informed, wise counsel, I sought him out," said Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president emerita of Spelman College in Atlanta and the former executive director of the Studio Museum. "Gordon was someone I could count on for the unvarnished truth."

Ben Watson, 64, Expert On Apples and Cider

By MICHAEL S. ROSENWALD

Like dinosaurs and VHS tapes, certain apple varieties have gone extinct.

Ben Watson found that hard to digest.

As the author of "Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions and Making Your Own" — a book credited with helping to turn hard cider into a thriving slice of America's craft-beverage movement — he was an elder statesman in the apple world.

So in the early 2000s, when Mr. Watson learned that the Granite Beauty variety, a staple of his childhood in New Hampshire, was in danger of disappearing he commenced a rescue operation.

He found four surviving trees and took cuttings from them to

Frustrated that cider wasn't more popular, Ben Watson, known as Brother Apple to his friends, wanted to teach Americans about its history. His book had instructions on how to make hard cider.

IAN ALDERCH VIA WATSON FAMILY

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A catalyst for the renaissance of a craft beverage of yore.

graft new trees. He shared the young trees with friends and sent the cuttings to preservationists. Then he waited.

Years later, as fall rolled in, the payoff ripened on branches throughout New England.

"The white flesh is tender and juicy," he wrote on his website. "There is an initial flavor note of warm spice (curry, cardamom), which fades quickly on the palate, becoming sweet and slightly tart, like fruit drops."

Brother Apple, Mr. Watson played a pivotal role in elevating the apple as a worthy ingredient in alcoholic beverages — one that was more than capable of competing with grapes and barley for the attention of discerning palates.

Mr. Watson died on Aug. 15 at his home in Peterborough, N.H. He was 64. The cause was uveal melanoma, a cancer of the eye, his sister Deborah Watson said.

Known among friends as

"Before Ben, people really weren't talking about the apples," Ria Windcaller, a cider tour guide and the host of the "Cider Chat" podcast, said in an interview. "He geeked out about them in a way that people probably associate with grapes and wine."

Mr. Watson became intrigued by cider in the 1980s while writing for Yankee magazine. Traveling the back roads of New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts, he met orchard keepers and cider makers laboring in near obscurity.

One chilly February day, he took his first sip of real hard cider at a farmer's house.

"Everything on the kitchen table that Sunday afternoon had been grown or made within a stone's throw of where we were sitting," Mr. Watson wrote in "Cider, Hard and Sweet." "That cider was nothing short of a revelation to me and my poor unwitting taste buds; the full flavor of golden apples fairly burst in my mouth."

In the early 1990s, he met Terry and Judith Maloney, the founders of West County Cider in western Massachusetts. Among the first small-batch cider makers in the country, the Maloneys started CiderDays, an annual festival that draws producers and aficionados from around the world.

Mr. Watson was on the periphery at first but eventually grew more involved and organized the event's Cider Salon, a tasting of ciders from near and far.

"He was like the glue that brought everyone together," Ms. Maloney said in an interview.

Frustrated that cider wasn't more popular, Mr. Watson wrote

COUNTRYMAN PR

"Cider, Hard and Sweet" to teach Americans about the history of the beverage. Cider was regarded as preferable to water or milk among the country's early settlers. President John Adams drank large quantities every day. Cider was also currency

Cider was also currency.

“Especially in rural areas, cider became a common unit of exchange,” Mr. Watson wrote. “It was frequently used by farmers to pay the doctor, the schoolteacher, the minister and other local professionals for their services.”

The book included instructions on how to make hard cider — a process that is comparatively easier and less time-consuming than making wine or beer.

"You don't need a degree in chemistry or microbiology," he wrote. "You don't need to buy specialized brewing equipment like a wort chiller or a lauter tun; you don't even need to sacrifice half of your garage to the operation."

The main ingredients, he noted, "are nothing but good unpasteurized juice and a bit of patience."

When the book was published in 1999, hard cider was little more than an afterthought in the craft-beverage market. But Mr. Watson foresaw a renaissance, a conviction that was confirmed when the book became so popular that a second edition was published in 2008.

Five years later, he produced a third edition. In the introduction to that volume, he noted that hard cider sales in grocery stores had increased 65 percent from 2011 to 2012, outpacing the growth of wine and craft beer.

"Cider, suddenly, is almost everywhere," he wrote. "Many of the new cider drinkers are young, and about half of them are women. The future looks bright."

Mr. Watson and his book, Ms. Maloney said, were important catalysts: "I think he did a lot to make cider a larger thing, not a local thing."

Benjamin Alan Watson was born in Concord, N.H., on Dec. 3, 1961, to Howard Watson, a civil engineer for the state highway department, and Audrey (Evans) Watson.

He grew up near an orchard in Contoocook and picked apples with his three older sisters.

After school, he worked at a farm collecting bushels of McIntosh and Cortland apples that would be pressed into cider.

Mr. Watson's book was published in 1999. A second edition was published in 2008.

"I forget what we earned per bushel," Mr. Watson told The New Hampshire Union Leader in 1999. "Suffice it to say that it was not enough to retire on."

He studied English at Yale and graduated in 1983.

After his time working for Yankee, Mr. Watson became an editor at Chelsea Green, a publisher known for books on sustainable living. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, he acquired books on organic farming, fermentation, permaculture and natural building.

He also edited and contributed to books about the slow-food movement, including "The Slow Food Guide to New York City: Restaurants, Markets, Bars" (2003), which surveyed artisanal, sustainable cooking in the city.

"Ben was instrumental to our success because he always had his ear to the ground, networking and learning about these new movements," Margo Baldwin, a founder of Chelsea Green, said in an interview. "I think he helped change the culture in important ways."

Mr. Watson did not marry. In addition to his sister Deborah, he is survived by another sister, Cynthia Watson. His sisters Judith Anne Wood and Rebecca Watson predeceased him.

Many hard ciders have a citrusy taste. That disappointed some first-time drinkers.

"People say, 'I don't like this because it doesn't taste like apples,' Mr. Watson told The Burlington Free Press in 2014. "So I ask them if they expect wine to taste like grapes."

Wayne Lawson, 94, Dies; Was Called Vanity Fair's 'Secret Weapon'

By PENELOPE GREEN

Wayne Lawson in 2013, above, the year before he retired from Vanity Fair, and in the late 1950s, far right, with the film producer Chiz Schultz, left, and the theater director Philip Minor, center.

JUSTIN BISHOP

VIA WAYNE LAWSON

Wayne Lawson, the longtime executive literary editor of Vanity Fair, whose graceful and punctilious editing shaped the magazine's reporting on wealth, class and culture during its heyday — a 40-year run that began with the wretched excesses of the 1980s — producing a potent mix of Hollywood and Manhattan gloss, corporate and dynastic malfeasance, mayhem and murder, died on Sept. 23 in Manhattan. He was 94.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Ellen Kiell, a friend and former colleague.

Mr. Lawson, as Tina Brown often observed, was the magazine's secret weapon.

In 1984, when Ms. Brown took over the recently revived publication, a frothy pre-Depression-era title that had been shuttered since 1936, and recast it as an irresistible chronicle of the mechanics of power, she was just 30.

Mr. Lawson, a former playwright and skilled freelance book editor — he had molded the manuscripts of Gloria Swanson and Jerzy Kosinski — was 51. A dapper, Wisconsin-born child of the Depression, he was a Princeton graduate and Catholic convert with a wicked sense of humor, a steely mind and a taste for dry martinis (Beefeater with a twist), which he gave up only for Lent.

"That laid-back Midwestern style," Ms. Brown noted, "hid his rapier editing gifts. He was able to take the wild foamings of innumerable writers and dig out the gold."

Indeed, he edited many of the magazine's stars, shaping their most impactful work.

Those stars included Marie Brenner, who wrote about the whistle-blower who brought down the tobacco industry (her piece was adapted into the 1999 thriller "The Insider," starring Russell Crowe); the fall of Enron; and the dissolution of Donald Trump's marriage to his first wife, Ivana. (After the article came out, the future president poured a drink down Ms. Brenner's back at a Manhattan gala.)

There was also Maureen Orth, who relentlessly covered the dark side of Michael Jackson and Woody Allen, and was the first to detail the sexual abuse allegations against Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods (and the father of Dodi, Princess Diana's paramour).

And, famously, Dominick Dunne, whom Ms. Brown had met at Ms. Brenner's apartment a few months before the murder trial of the man who had strangled Mr. Dunne's daughter, Dominique. Ms. Brenner suggested that he keep a diary of the trial as a way to process the pain.

If he did, Ms. Brown said, she'd like to publish it.

Mr. Dunne informed her that he had never practiced journalism. She told him not to worry, and handed him over to Mr. Lawson.

"I don't think there's a more intensely personal piece that a writer could entrust to an editor," Mr. Dunne's son Griffin said in an interview.

His first article, published in March 1984, was titled simply, "Justice: A Father's Account of the Trial of His Daughter's Killer."

"Wayne got what the piece was about, and the man who wrote it," Griffin Dunne said. "His was a revered name in our household. I think Dad always felt that it was luck, that it was his good fortune, to be paired with Wayne. If it had been somebody else, who knows?"

Their work together became a kind of redemption for Mr. Dunne, recently sober and suffering from the end of both his marriage and his career as a Hollywood producer, as well as his sorrow and rage at the death of his daughter. Mr. Lawson taught him the craft of journalism, and over the next few decades, with Mr. Lawson's exacting help, Mr. Dunne covered the most explosive trials of the era, including those of the Menendez brothers and O.J. Simpson.

"I see them knee to knee at Wayne's cubicle," Ms. Brown wrote in her 2017 memoir, "The Vanity Fair Diaries," "and I know all will be right with the world."

Mr. Lawson edited, as one writer put it, not by the word but by the letter.

"He was a throwback to the old style of editing," said the writer and filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, who saved the manuscripts that Mr. Lawson had edited (on paper!), their margins embellished with comments delivered in perfectly formed cursive written with his signature red pencil. Mr. Lawson's proofreading marks, Mr. Tyrnauer said, were works of art.

"I studied what he deleted and where he moved paragraphs around. It was like getting a master class in the structure of language. He was like a walking 'Ele-

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He edited many of the magazine's stars, shaping their most impactful work.

ments of Style,' Mr. Tyrnauer said, referring to the classic primer on good writing.

"Some writers came in with copy and it needed work, but it had a beginning, a middle and an end," he continued. "Others came in with a shoe box full of notes, and Vanity Fair indulged that. Some of the superstars had the greatest reporting skills and access, but when it came time to turn in their copy, there was no copy. Wayne was the great organizer of these epic stories, and he never panicked, and he made it fun. Fun is not a word you associate with being edited, but he made it a joy."

As Ms. Brenner recalled, "If I was about to get a working-over, he'd say, 'Darling, put on the Manolos and get in here. We have a day to deal with all the questions.'"

Graydon Carter, who took over the magazine in 1992 after Ms. Brown decamped for The New Yorker, remembered: "He had all the big writers. He was both their muse and their docent in wending their way through these narrative tales."

Mr. Carter added, "He'd be closing a piece with Marie, and at the last minute she'd get a scoop and in it would go. He didn't break a sweat. My tie would be askew, my hair was on end, the wheels always seemed to be falling off the bus, but with Wayne you always had a sure extra hand on the wheel."

Wayne Albert Lawson was born on Feb. 9, 1932, in Ripon, Wis., the youngest child of Albert Lawson and Lucille (Tucker) Lawson.

His father ran a grocery store in Princeton, Wis., but lost it during the Great Depression, whereupon the family of five — Wayne had two older sisters — moved to Rip-on. There, his father worked as a produce manager for a grocery store and his mother was employed by the Knitting Works factory, which made leather gloves, footwear and mittens.

Wayne excelled in school and received a scholarship to Princeton, where he won the university's one-act play contest three years in a row, graduating in 1954. After earning an M.F.A. at the Iowa

Writers' Workshop in 1958, he spent two years in Paris and then returned to Princeton to begin work on a Ph.D. in English.

A few weeks later, fed up with being a student — and encouraged by a classmate to keep writing plays — he moved to New York, where he lived for a time in a third-floor walk-up apartment on East 14th Street. His roommates included the actors Peter Falk, James Carruthers and Wayne Rogers.

Mr. Lawson never wrote the plays he had left Princeton to write; he decided that he didn't have the talent or the drive. But the theater was his first love and throughout his life he remained steeped in it, reserving aisle seats most nights at the theater, the ballet or the opera, and often taking young Vanity Fair staffers along to give them their first taste of high culture.

Before moving to the magazine, Mr. Lawson worked for a time as an editor at Grolier, the publisher of encyclopedias, as a copy editor at The New York Times Book Review and as a freelance book doctor, notably for Mr. Kosinski and Ms. Swanson. In her admiring review of “Swanson on Swanson,” which appeared in 1980, when the actress was 81, Janet Maslin noted in The Times that Ms. Swanson “has led a longer and more interesting life than most, but it isn't her story that makes her book so sparkling: It's the way that story is told.”

A few days earlier, at her book party, the actress pulled Mr. Lawson aside, telling him, "Only you and I know who wrote this book. Thank you."

Mr. Lawson grew up Lutheran, but converted to Catholicism after college. The mystery of the Roman Catholic Church appealed to him. As he told one friend, there was no mystery in the religion of his youth. He was a regular at Mass and volunteered at homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

He found comfort in his faith, but was not exactly solemn in his devotions. One Easter he called a friend to say, "Have you heard? He is risen. We're hitting every bar in town to celebrate."

Mr. Lawson retired from Vanity Fair in 2014. He has no immediate survivors.

Ms. Brenner recalled that during a dark period in both of their lives, she once asked him, as she put it, "how he always dressed himself in such merriment."

He replied: "Darling, I reread Shakespeare and go to the Met to look at the masterpieces created during the Inquisition. It works every time!"

Cecily Gemmell, 97, Who Outlived All the Rest of Churchill's Secretaries

VIA CECILY GEMMELL

WINSTON CHURCHILL, VIA CECILY GEMMELL

From left: Cecily Gemmell in 1950 at a Christmas party in Morocco; the portrait of her that Winston Churchill painted; and in an undated photograph, long after she left for New York City.

By BARRY SINGER

Cecily Gemmell, Winston Churchill's last surviving personal secretary, who took down the British prime minister's speeches as he composed them aloud, died on Thursday in New York City. She was 97.

Her caretaker, Mary Pizzarelli, confirmed the death.

Ms. Gemmell, known as Chips, first entered Churchill's orbit in summer 1947 at age 18, arriving in the still-stunned aftermath of his 1945 general election defeat as Britain's wartime prime minister. His reputation as the man who had saved the world from Hitler's tyranny was titanic, but his electoral ejection from No. 10 Downing Street before final victory — Germany had surrendered, Japan had not — remained humbling.

Youth was a requirement for a Churchill stenotyping secretary. "The Old Man," as he was known, dictated so long and so late into the night, as a rule, that stamina was essential. Ms. Gemmell joined a team of extraordinarily bright and capable, if often exhausted, young women, and a proud line of exceptional Churchill personal secretaries (all but one of them female) that extended back through both world wars to 1902. At her death, Ms. Gemmell was the last.

Ms. Gemmell was ushered into Churchill's presence for the first time at his new postwar London residence, 28 Hyde Park Gate. Churchill was just back from a hospital stay. His bed had been moved into the downstairs dining room and he was sitting up in it, smoking a cigar. The teenage Ms. Gemmell was on the verge of graduating from the venerable Mrs. Hoster's Secretarial College, which the Churchills had long used as a kind of employment agency.

"I was terrified of him," Ms. Gemmell later said, but he was "very benign."

"How do you do, my dear?" he asked. I think I shook his hand."

she recalled for the oral history project at the Churchill Archives. "He seemed so incredibly friendly that I felt emboldened to talk to him." Jo Sturdee Onslow, Churchill's secretary in chief, "had to rush me away," she said. "But on that interview, my life started."

Ms. Gemmell was initially assigned to Churchill's literary assistant, Denis Kelly, cataloging the prime minister's World War II papers in anticipation of Churchill's

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Always at the ready to take dictation, whether or not he was in power at the time.

writing his war memoirs. The cache was housed at Chartwell, Churchill's country home in the county of Kent, and so a place was found for Ms. Gemmell to live in the nearby village of Westerham. She bicycled back and forth to Chartwell, pushing the bike up "an incredibly steep hill" that, at least, "was a cinch coming back down."

She worked in what she described as the semi-basement of the Muniment Room at Chartwell — “completely untrained,” but tasked with organizing the monumental paper trail of Churchill’s wartime existence. She saw virtually no one other than Mr. Kelly, along with "everybody's socks — the socks of the famous," from her obscured vantage. She would "look up and see Anthony Eden's pink socks leaving the room," she recalled, referring to the foreign secretary who would later briefly become prime minister. "All I saw of the famous were their socks."

The cataloging finally ended and, at last, Ms. Gemmell was summoned to work with Churchill himself one night after dinner at Chartwell. "There he was," she said, "sitting up in his four-poster bed in his little bedroom, with brandy and cigars, and there was a card table with a typewriter on it. 'Good evening,' he said. 'Put your paper in.'"

Her initial efforts were shaky. "The nervousness of someone dictating right onto the typewriter was enough," she later said in an interview, "but the fact that it was 'him,' and he was hard to hear, and I really couldn't understand all he said, but I couldn't stop and say, 'I can't hear you,' and the typewriters, which were 'silent' — very little clack — had a very hard action, which made it very hard to type.

"I just kept thinking, 'This is only a nightmare; I'm going to wake up, this isn't real.' And I think that thought kept me going."

Cecily Gemmell was born in Bangalore, India, on Dec. 25, 1928. Her father, Col. Geoffrey Woodburn Gemmell, was a map surveyor in the Indian Army, second to the surveyor general. Her mother, Winifred Grace Hall, accompanied and assisted her husband on his field trips. "My mother managed the domestic side of things," Ms. Gemmell said. "She loved camping and walking many miles a day. They were out in the jungles for a month or two at a time."

Named for her father's youngest brother, Cecil, who had been killed in France at the end of World War I, Ms. Gemmell would always be known to her family and friends by her uncle's nickname, Chips. She was educated at The New School (known as Harrow on the Hooghly), which had been founded in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the outset of World War II and then transported to Darjeeling, before disbanding in 1944.

The family returned to England in summer 1945. There, Ms. Gemmell completed her education at Mrs. Hoster's — initially in Lincolnshire, where the school had been evacuated to during the war, before returning with the school to London.

Ms. Gemmell was back again in London with Churchill when he was returned as prime minister in 1951. She accompanied her boss to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street; to the racecourses where his thoroughbreds ran; to Monte Carlo, where he gambled; to Blenheim Palace, where he was born; to Marrakesh, Lake Como and the Dolomites, where he painted.

One day Churchill asked Ms. Gemmell to sit for a portrait. It was quite an honor; he painted very few. Come Christmastime at No. 10, he planned to present the painting to her as a gift. "Do you know what you're getting for Christmas?" he chortled, unable to keep his own secret. "You're going to get your picture."

VIA MARY PIZZARELLI

Ms. Gemmell eventually volunteered to work for Churchill's wife, Clementine, where the strain was considerably less. She retired from active Churchill duty in 1953 and moved to New York City, securing a high-level secretarial job at Life magazine.

She remained with Life for nine years, and worked at Time Inc. in a similar role for many years more. During this time, she became a habitué of the jazz clubs near her Midtown apartment. ("I never wanted the party to end," she once explained, "and the jazz clubs stayed open the latest!")

One night, Ms. Gemmell met the pianist John Bunch, a long-time accompanist of Tony Bennett's, as well as a sideman with Benny Goodman. In spring 1977, she moved in with him. They were married on New Year's Day 1998. Mr. Bunch died in 2010; no immediate family members survive.

Ms. Gemmell's final year in the Churchills' employ, 1953, was the year that Winston Churchill was knighted.

"I ran across him in a corridor at No. 10," she later remembered. "I couldn't think what to call him; I'd been ruminating about it, with some consternation. Finally, I blurted out, 'Good morning, Sir Winston.' He gave one of his wonderful sort of inward chuckles and I heard him quietly say, 'Don't be so cheeky.'"

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Deaths

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BLUMENSCHINE—Leonard George Jr.,

of Tarrytown, New York, died on September 24, 2026. He was a major class of the American Catholic Party, who had been a folato, New York, in 1928, he was the only child to Leonard and George, who had been married with Ruby John Blumenschine. In 1935, his family moved to the Church of St. Patrick. He attended Momaroneck High School and The Lawrence-Classical Aircraft Association admitted to Williams College, where he mojored in English and French. He was married to Dorothea and then returned to her. He was married by 21, 1951, in the naval chapel at Newport, RI. Dorothea replied him to be a member of his wife until his passing. Leonard served in the U.S. Navy of St. Paul's Church, L.T. (i.g.) aboard the Essex-class aircraft carrier USS of St. Paul's Church. He is a successful career in print and television advertising as a result of the best service for a director and vice-president for major New York City advertising company. He also told that it is a successful career in print and television advertising as a result of the best service for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director and vice-president for a director. Jim Link, they created many new stations, were located in the United States and slogans, including the enduring breakfast cereal crop, which was also called "coca Puffs." Leonard was an avid model railrooder, published in 1935, by the National Model Railrooder magazine, including one in the December 1930s. The latest publication was a functional micro-sized model built out the bill by the California Department of Texas Bureau while serving in the navy. He also reported several specific articles and reports, including "Red Ryder," the Sportsman Journal of Chicago, 2000 in Aetlion: The Journal of Sport Literature. Leonard was born in 1935, and has been four years and three children: Leonard George Blumenschine, who had been employed in the British Columbia Blumenschine and Robert John Blumenschine. They referred to Mr. Edward J. Kennedy and father and a selfless and humble gentlemen being by those who knew him.

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CONASON—Leslie J.

Leslie J. Conoson found the extraordinary in the ordinary years, and was a great sense of wonder, playfulness, and enthusiasm. Leslie was born in New York, 1860, at a town, NY. Always a top student, she graduated more than his son, who had been a university, earned a master's degree in English Literature and literature. She was born and a JD from Fordham University School of Law. She had a car race as a centennial fraud litigator representing pension funds and institutions. She was also interested in many ways, she built a home with her own interests. He became an architectural icon, Leslie passed away on October 25, 1960, and he had been hatched that in her loving daughter by her side. She was prepared to be a good member of her love of her life, Robert Conoson. She is survived by her family (Gregory Dodell), beloved granddaughters, Roberto and Mrs. James B. Smith, and Charles Abramson (Barry Gottfried) and Carol Benson, niece, Jill D. Jones, daughter of Daniel Benson. David Gott

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Deaths

fried, Steven Gottfried, and Jonathan Gottfried. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in her memory to the NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center designated for Breast Cancer Research. Services Monday, 11:00am, at "The Riverside" 76 Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

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DAVIS—Gordon J.

DAVIS—Gordon J.

The board and staff of The

Board members, the loss of longtime board member, thought-partner, and fellow advocate for free access to the other. They are two parks, Gordon J., Dave E. G. Gordon joined the board in 1990 and since then has served as a tireless advocate for The Board. The board is also an existing provading guidance on numerous Public Theater projects ranging from governance to capital projects including renovation of the Delacorte Theater in Central Georgia and public spaces downtown and the recent renovation of the Delacorte Theater in Central Georgia and public spaces downtown and the recent renovation of Gordon's beloved wife Peggy, daughter Lizzy, grandchildren, family and friends.

Artistic Director; Patrick Willingham, Executive Director; Luis A. Miranda, Jr., Choir; Pat Fili-Krushel, Co-Chair

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DAVIS—Gordon J.

DAVIS Gordon J.

The Trustees and staff of The

Library, the public. Library

mourn the passing of Gordon

J. Davis, a beloved and dedicated member of the Library family. Gordon joined the Lib-

cation of the 1993 and became a Life Trust-

ee in 2016. A celebrated civic leader, Gordon played an instrumental role in shaping New York City, and his contribu-

tion to the library, as a profound impact on future generations of New Yorkers. At the Library, we are grateful for his expertise, generosity of spirit, and unwovering interests. The library is not a very vice. We extend our deepest sympathies to his wife, Peggy, their daughter, Lizzy, and their friends and family.

Evan R. Chesler,

Catherine Marron,

Neil L. Rudenstine,

Chair Emeriti

Anthony W. Marx,

President

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DEL ALAMO—Constancio.

Constancio del Alamo Martínez, December 10, 1945 - October 1, 2026. His life was a great mission of the United Kingdom, Benedictine monk and priest in the monastery of Santa Maria, which was an old prison in Spain, then as Curator at The Hispanic Museum and Libroso, in New York, 2021. At Silos he oversaw the cloister of Silos, one of the Second Staird Church, is a close cluster. His voice is on the famous recording Chont. After the last time, the President of New York in 1983, and had lived on Riverside Drive to the State of Minnesota, from the accomplishments. Constancio was much loved by those who were married with the President for his goodness, his warmth, and his mischievous of the state of Minnesota. He was revived by his wife, Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and his father, and also the President service for Constancio will be held at the Frank E. Campbell and the State of Minnesota Ave., 10am on October 31.

Blumenschine, L.

Conason, Leslie

Davis, Gordon

Del Alamo, C.

Dow, Peter

Ellis, Estelle

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DOW—Peter Anthony.

October 7, 1933 - September 3, 2026. Peter A. Pete Dow and James B. D. Brown, 2026 after a brief illness, Pete was born in Detroit, Michigan. The President of the Detroit and Louglas and Mary Louise Dow. From 1945 to 1950 he attended the School, Lawrenceville, NJ, graduating with honors. The President of the Detroit and Louglas, at Rugby School in Rugby, England on an English School, and the President of the Detroit at Rugby he won the Mills Barton Prize. He entered the President of the Detroit in full of 1951 and graduated in the University of the Bachelor of Arts. At Michigan was appointed President of his Fraternity and the President of the Detroit for four years, a member of student government and was elected to the President of the Detroit in Spinhin and the Hectoring honorary societies. From 1955 to 1960, he had been elected to the United States Navy as an Air Intelligence officer with Fighter and the President of the Detroit. He also received five different Aircraft Corners, Pete spent his working hours in 1958. He had returned to him he joined Campbell-Ewald as a trustee on the Chevrolet Ontario Club, which is named Physician, when the agency won the Plymouth account. He also served in 1960 and then returned to Chrysler Corporation where he ended up during the next year. He returned to Campbell Ewald as Executive Vice President of the President of the Company, named President, Chief Operating Officer and Chairman of the Department of the Department of Campbell-Ewald. In 1993 he was named Vice President of the Department of Campbell-Ewald. Pete was elected on outside Director's position in 1995. Professionally, he elected to Campbell Ewald as a trustee on two New York Stock Exchange, three NASDAQ, and one other than a senior executive in his community, he served as President of the Department of the Department of Eastern Michigan, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and also served as President of the Creative Studies, Trustee of Harper-Grace Hospital and Chief Executive Vice President of the United Way. He was a Trustee of The Lawrenceville University, who was elected to the Grossewick Foundation. The THA Foundation and Executive Committee were elected to the Presbury Church. Over the years his clubs included a company from Detroit, The Recruit Club, The Detroit Athletic Club, and The Fort Henry Club, The Grosse Pointe Club, The Old Club, The Islamorada Club, The Old Club of New York, Pete was married for 67 years to the first time. He was married for 67 years ago, who was predeceased him by five days. Survivors include his three children, Jennifer Don

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Deaths

Kontor, Lucille

Laubach, Gerald

Lubetsky, Stella

Manness, Andrew

Richardson, James

Smith, Sheilo

Smith, Vera

Spiro, Elaine

Stevenson, Howard

Stillman, Marilyn

Stock, Robert

Murphy (Devin), Peter Kinerslev Dow, Thomas Anthony Dow (Dr. Agata), a brother-in-law, Robert F. Ottovay, Charles A. O'Ortany Chang (Jake), Emilie Murphy Smith (C.J.I.), Margaret Molly Murphy, Tomek M. Dow Dr. Kathol, Dr. Jane Ann and William Dow (Dr.) and Alexander F. Dow, as well as five great-grandchildren and many dear nieces and nephews on the stage of the day was predeceased by his parents, his brothers Bryden Dow and Stuart Dow and his sisters Patricia Dow Ashurck, who had been married with Memorial Service for Pete and Jane will be Saturday, October 17, 2026, 10am, at Grosse Memorial Church, 16 Lakeshore Drive Gross Pointe Farms.

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ELLIS—Estelle B.

It is with deep sorrow that we announce the passing of Estelle B. Ellis, 98, our beloved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother on September 22, 2026. Estelle was a good friend to the great-grandmother's outstanding sense of style, grace and sophistication, and above all her keen intellect and stock market savvy. Estelle is her survived by her children. Andrea, Borbara, and Maiman (Madison), David Ellis, her grandchildren, Michelle Rogus (Adam), Samantha Houston (James), Dustin Luchmee, Shayne Senft, and Lauren, Robert and Amanda Ellis and Grace, Chinchon, Coleb, Chloe and Capri Houston and Eleanor and Diana Rosus.

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KANTOR—Lucille.

We mourn the loss of Lucille Kantor, former Board President, longtime mental health advocate, and valued friend. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the entire Kantor family.

The Board and Staff of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center.

LAUBACH—Dr. Gerald.

Dr. Gerald Laubach died peacefully in his home in New York, 1960, and 1970 at the age of 100. He was born in 1926 in Bethlehem, PA, and 1934 in the University of Chemistry from University of Pennsylvania in 1947, and 1950 in the University of Michigan in 1950 with a Doctorate in Chemistry. He received a high degree of medical education of Mount St. Mary's College, graduating in 1950, and having been a high school of Chemistry throughout his lifetime. In 1950 he started his career at the time of the hospital in their labs in Brooklyn, in 1972 he was named President William and also who had a major association into becoming a global pharmaceutical power company. He has recently returned to the Research and Development. He never forgot his roots in a particular way to be able to develop multidisciplinary approach to become a scientific scientist and toxicologists all working on the product pipeline. He has been a high school task. His new R&D method in the 70s led to many wells and well as well as well as 90's such as Feldene, Mini

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Deaths

press, Zoloft. He retired in 1990. In 1983, President Re-mentary and President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness. In 1984, the President of York City Mayor's award for Science and Technology and Education is a major medal from the Societies de Chemie Industrielle. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National School of Manufacturers Association (now PhRMA) where he sat on the Boards of CIGNA, Millipore Corp., the National Sciences Board, Advilson, and the National Capital-Cornell Center and the Board of Connecticut College, New York, NY. He also served Chairman, Gerry was an outdoors man all his life and accompanied by a well into his 90's when he wasn't reading Scientific treeple. He had been a lot of words and abiding belief in Science's benefits to humansknd as well as a long length of graphic memory. A witnessed and often retold story that he was not being taken in lengthy, detailed retirement speech of one of his scientists who were being a letter, word for word. He leaves his wife, Ruth, son, Stephen and Sirman, and has been (Bill Pyley) or Hilary, and grandchildren Emma and John Smith. He was born in Isabel Laubach. Contributions in his memory may be made in the Department of Career Development Professorship or to the Community Health Service of Southeastern Connecticut.

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LUBETSKY—Stella Fingerhut.

was born May 27, 1927 and died on October 6, 2026. Adored mother of Anita Lubetsky Marshall, grandmother of Julia and Daniel Marshall and the last of five amazing siblings. She cared for family, friends and community with love and passion. A clinical social worker who was kind and witty, she also loved jazz, chocolate, and a glass of sherry with friends. She remains in our hearts forever.

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MONNESS—Andrew J., "Andy"

I am heartbroken by the loss of my chosen brother, mentor, and business partner. I have been a great deal with Elisso, and an uncle to our children, Robbie, Michael, and Mara. We shared every time of her work, but they together in New York City, and spent summers in Atlantic cities. The team is highly successful, we will always cherish. Andy's greatest gift to us was his unwavering friendship. A man who has never heard of his own terms, spoke his mind, and was by far the people who are not willing to go in New York City. His unmistakable style was matched only by his generous heart. He loved him that he had a very few restaurants, yet he never forgot those less fortunate and were not interested in the other people he met had a meat, too. Andy, you brought so much to our lives. You will be already missed and forever loved.

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MONNESS—Andrew J. "Andy."

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The Crespi Family

It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Andrew J. Monness, Chairman and Founder of Monness Cresai Hardf & Co. Inc. A dynamic visionary. Andy built the firm from the ground up with relentless energy, creative thinking, and a steadfast commitment to our employees, our clients, and our friends in the industry. His passion and pioneering spirit will be truly missed, and his legacy and leadership will live on at the firm for many years to come.

Monness Crespi

Hardt & Co. Inc.

Neil Crespi, President

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Deaths

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RICHARDSON—James Francis.

Jim was born in the Bronx, NY on June 19, 1931. He died in 1940, and he had been in the Fort Beitz, AZ. He grew up in the Bronx with his grandmother, who had been married to Queens at age 16 allowed. Jim to find a peer group series of members of the city received his B.A., from long College in 1952, where his major class is not a good member of the doba. Jim determined that the goal of his life's work was made for him. He said that what Bohdan Chudoba had done for him. He served in the city with a great number of GI bill made graduate school a possibility. He earned the first time of his career and literature from New York University in 1961 where his family was still. He was also at NYU that he met Marie Bolfe, whom he had been married to the old man. Jim had five children. Jim and Marie both taught to support her. Jim moved to the city, Arizona to be close to two of their children. Jim spent his father and daughter, who died in 2014, and reading and rereading the story of the past typical philosophy and their commentators. His children were married as soon as accustomed to letters summarizing his reeding and writing of his mother's birth order the children are Moore, Pierce, Kiertes, Margotow, and Miss Lough, while the grandchildren are Ben, Brian and Don Richardson, Richard and Shoud Richardson.

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SMITH—Sheila

De-eyser Carey.

The following described study, 1, 1930 and died peacefully on September 29, 2026. She was born in the United States of America and France and Fredo Carey and attended schools there before entering into New York City, a senior field, MA. She had her first date with Corlles (Cork) Morayville, NY, and the University of Yale undergraduate or Yale University. They married in 1950 at the time of the last week, then moved to Philadelphia and ultimately New York City. He had been married in his past year, his distinguished career in book publishing and Sheila was the most successful museum for the number of museums including The Museum of the City of New York, and he left to her raised five children. Sheila was a volunteer and a member of the city of New York, and the number of museums including The Museum of the City of New York, who moved from her beloved New York City back to the old school. She was born in Lenox, MA in 2019. Sheila is survived by her children, four years ago, and she has been married with their spouses: Mark of Lenox, MA, Nick of San Francisco, MA, and Santa Barbara, MA. Boylie of Victor, NY and Tim of Boilecville, NY; by ten years ago, she was married with great-grandchildren, and was predeceased by a grand family of the young husband in 2004.

SMITH—Vera C., of New York City, died October 8, 2026, at the age of 96. Born in 1929, she was the first

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Deaths

in her family to attend college, earning a master's degree in education from Hunter College, a groundbreaking ceremony for the generation of her generation. She began her career as a teacher and, through tenacity and deterrence, with her family visiting a school principal. She and her late husband, Col. Howard E. Smith, USAF, were passionnance and was an opportunity that is instilling in their daughter a deep apreciation for learning and the opportunities it creates. She is survived by the old family of the Western Smith Spacek, her son-in-law Jason Spacek, her grandchildren Cooper and Colby and the former of the American Cemetery and family who loved her. Funeral service at The Abbev Funeral Directors, Interment at Arlington Nohondo Cemetery beside her husband.

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SPIRO—Elaine Ravel.

Elaine Ravel Spiro passed away in her sleep on the night of October 1, 2026. She was a lovely woman who was passionate about the things she cared for most in her life.

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STEVENSON—Howard H.

Howard H. Stevenson, the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business, Emeritus at the University of California, has passed away on September 27, 2026 at the age of 85, surrounded by a few years of interest in quality. Massachusetts home. Raised in Holladay, Utah, is also known as the state of Texas and his MBA and PhD degrees and a ground-breaking degree for the former of entrepreneurship (as well as several leadership leaders of the state). He is a career in finance, including a founding role at The Baupost University, who is a strong leader of successful hedge fund. Howard loved learning and sharing the economic success through his research, teaching, board memberships, and the past ten years of articles and case studies. In addition to his pioneering and successful education, he explored the nature of enduring success in people's lives (including the benefits of a nonprofit trustee and billion-dollar fundraiser. Howard was not able to see that it had and had many other interests (including model trains). He was not able to see that it was talent and treasure to impact communities and causes that they were being educated in education, the arts, health care and the environment. He was not able to see that it was a pride and pleasure, however, was his family. In addition to this chapter, Charles Derricko (Fredi), he leaves three years and their wives (Will and Richard) who are with friends and Hannah) and four step-daughters (Michon and Tim Kaden, Trevor Snow, in American States of Stefler Lindel), 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, who were born in America. After Suzie Burker, A memorial service is planned to Harvard have been announced to be shared closer to the event, near the end of the year. In addition to the events of our national nations may be sent to The New Bedford Symphony Orifice, which is an exception for online guestbook, please visit www.soundersdver.com

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Deaths

STILLMAN—Marilyn.

Age 86, died on Sunday, October 4, 2026. She was an exceptional mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, sister and wife. She and Charles Stillman were married for 67 wonderful years. Marilyn was a gifted interior designer and for good measure a talented pianist. May her memory be for a blessing.

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STOCK—Robert W.

2008, the committee and September 10, 2020 at his New York City Times, who has various articles included thirty years of The New York Times, where he was a member of the paper. He had several of the paper's Sunday sections. In 1973, Bob recently decided to hold for editing an entire special issue of The New York Times in the past year. He also held Watergate scandal. Later, his groundbreaking Times coupled with the new public's efforts affected its elderly. His memoir, Me and John H. He had been a great deal in 2023. Curious, well-read, and well-traveled, Bob was deeply understood that it was not a wide circle of friends. He is survived by his beloved son. He had been a great friend. Children and their families were born in the United States. Hazel Hoskin; Ani and Askold Bulk; Adam Stern and Julie Brown; and James F. Arson; and Ersoy; and by his grandsons, Jackson and Rian Stern. He had been a great daughter, Barbara Dolan. Bob was enamored of world leaders, and she had the claring and always, punts.

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In Memoriam

ANDERSON—Marilyn.

We think and speak about

you often, especially today

on your Birthday.

Love Your Family

BANK—Melissa.

Happy Birthday, Missy.

Forever Loved and Adored.

Missing You.

BENSON—Sean Robert.

Always in our hearts. You are so missed.

Love, Mom, Dad,

Ryan and Tara

---

PERRY—Alma.

PERRY: Almu.

January 27, 1945-October 11, 2019. You were gone way too soon with so much that you still wanted to do. Every day I miss your love, kindness, humor, creativity and wisdom. You are the most wonderful person I will ever know.

SOPHER—Joseph.

A tenor who sang all over the world. You always had my back.-Hank

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Weather Report

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Highlight: Significant Rain in Rockies

Tropical Rainstorm Rachel will continue to push into the Rockies early this week as it merges with another storm coming onshore from California. Heavy rain will spread from Idaho to northern Arizona. There may be flooding, particularly in low-lying and poor drainage areas. In higher elevations there may be mudslides. Burn scars will be particularly vulnerable. In Montana and Wyoming rain will transition into snow, accumulating up to 1 to 3 inches in the lower elevations.

High/low temperatures for the 16 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday, Eastern time, and precipitation (in inches) for the 16 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday. Expected conditions for today and tomorrow.

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Cities | C | Clouds | S | Sun | F | Fog | Sn | Snow | H | Haze | SS | Snow showers | I | Ice | T | Thunderstorms | PC | Partly cloudy | Tr | Trace | R | Rain | W | Windy | Sh | Showers | - | Not available | Little Rock | 86/60 | 0.08 | 93/65 | 92/66 | Los Angeles | 82/68 | 0.01 | 73/60 | 68/56 | Louisville | 70/59 | 0.29 | 71/58 | 96/65 | Memphis | 72/59 | 0.28 | 91/67 | 93/67 | New York | 92/54 | 0.16 | 78/61 | 91/74 | Milwaukee | 76/55 | 0 | 74/61 PC | 92/66 | Mits.-St. Paul | 88/66 | 0 | 87/63 | 78/53 | Mindsley | 67/57 | 0.87 | 66/64 | 86/52 | New Orleans | 84/63 | 0.03 | 89/66 | 88/67 | Nortok | 74/68 | 2.16 | 79/65 | 73/62 PC | Oklahoma City | 91/61 | 0 | 91/67 W | 90/72 | Omaha | 90/60 | 0 | 91/66 | 90/76 | Orlando | 91/75 | 0.26 | 86/69 | 88/68 PC | Philadelphia | 73/60 | 0 | 66/61 | 73/58 | Pittsburgh | 90/73 | 0.07 | 91/69 | 86/61 | Pittsburgh | 69/56 | 0 | 65/68 | 72/61 PC | Portland, Me. | 61/39 | 0 | 61/69 PC | 68/67 | Portland, Ore. | 61/42 | 0.03 | 67/42 | 67/44 | Rochester | 65/42 | 0.34 | 65/62 | 63/60 | Raleigh | 68/66 | 0.30 | 79/64 T | 82/60 PC | Reno | 76/43 | 0 | 58/61 4th | 52/58 | Rochester | 70/62 | 2.16 | 64/64 T | 77/58 | Rochester | 66/51 | 0 | 61/54 | 57/57 | Sacramento | 74/47 | 0 | 77/50 | 73/69 | Salt Lake City | 77/58 | 0.11 | 68/56 | 64/51 | Salt Lake City | 91/67 | 0 | 91/72 | 91/72 | San Diego | 77/70 | 0 | 72/66 | 71/60 | San Francisco | 66/51 | 1 | 68/53 PC | 71/53 PC | San Jose | 71/53 | 0.05 | 63/54 | 73/53 | San Juan | 88/76 | 0.10 | 90/78 R | 90/78 C | Seattle | 59/44 | 0.02 | 65/61 | 63/63 | Sioux Falls | 88/62 | 0.5 | 84/55 | 77/67 | Salem County | 56/47 | 0.04 | 87/63 | 81/61 | St. Louis | 80/55 | 0 | 87/67 | 94/72 | St. Thomas | 89/80 | 0.04 | 90/79 PC | 90/60 T | Subsea | 68/57 | 0.12 | 72/64 | 73/62 | Tampa | 88/79 | 0.26 | 84/72 | 89/72 PC | Toledo | 76/57 | 0 | 66/53 R | 83/63 PC | Tucson | 87/52 | 0.11 | 83/66 T | 85/64 T | Toronto | 62/65 | 0.02 | 71/71 | 71/71 | Virginia Beach | 73/69 | 2.17 | 77/66 T | 74/60 PC | Washington | 71/61 | 0.02 | 68/64 H | 75/60 PC | Wilmington, Del. | 90/65 | 0.02 | 88/64 | 94/61 | Wilmington, Del. | 71/58 | 0 | 66/60 R | 72/55 PC | United States | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | Albany | 61/41 0 | 60/51 R | 71/53 PC | Albuquerque | 79/59 0.4 | 81/58 T | 77/56 PC | Alpharetta | 48/60 0 | 48/60 P | 47/59 PC | Atlanta | 67/60 1.02 | 71/61 T | 87/62 S | Atlantic City | 68/63 0 | 68/61 R | 70/57 Sh | Baltimore | 95/60 0 | 95/59 PC | 95/58 PC | Baltimore | 72/60 0 | 67/61 R | 75/56 Sh | Baton Rouge | 88/60 0.01 | 92/60 S | 91/66 S | Birmingham | 70/60 0.40 | 79/56 PC | 88/59 S | Boston | 61/53 0 | 61/59 R | 89/59 PC | Boston | 64/49 0 | 63/54 PC | 68/53 R | Buffalo | 72/55 0 | 62/55 R | 66/62 PC | Glasgow | 57/53 0 | 53/53 C | 65/50 PC | Caspar | 78/50 0 | 65/47 C | 62/59 W | Charlotta | 67/64 0.55 | 75/61 T | 82/56 PC | Chicago | 71/54 0.54 | 72/58 PC | 78/58 PC | Chicago | 81/58 0 | 77/63 PC | 82/68 PC | Cincinnati | 73/58 0 | 69/57 R | 82/63 PC | Cleveland | 78/60 0 | 66/58 PC | 78/60 PC | Cincinnati Springs | 79/58 0 | 79/63 PC | 87/55 S | Columbus | 72/59 0 | 68/59 R | 78/62 PC | Concord, N.Y. | 51/37 0 | 62/49 0 | 69/48 R | Del Fort Worth | 92/57 0 | 90/59 T | 89/59 S | Denver | 83/61 0.01 | 91/57 C | 87/52 S | Des Moines | 87/61 0 | 86/67 S | 87/59 S | Detroit | 73/60 0 | 64/55 PC | 83/64 PC | El Paso | 87/65 0 | 91/69 S | 88/68 C | Fargo | 90/52 0 | 60/57 C | 54/44 R | Hartford | 46/62 0 | 59/51 T | 72/52 PC | Haliskulu | 88/74 0.01 | 88/52 S | 87/55 S | Houston | 91/67 0 | 92/71 S | 91/76 C | Indianapolis | 76/59 0 | 75/55 R | 86/66 PC | Jackson State | 79/60 0.13 | 82/61 S | 80/60 S | Jacksonville | 91/75 0.35 | 86/62 T | 87/62 PC | Kansas City | 87/63 0 | 88/69 S | 89/67 S | Kansas City West | 98/60 0.05 | 98/60 T | 90/60 S | Las Vegas | 89/66 0 | 74/61 T | 73/57 T | Lexington | 68/57 0.37 | 68/57 R | 82/63 PC | N.Y.C. region | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | New York City | 69/ 54 0 | 64/ 59 R | 70/ 58 PC | Bridgeport | 72/ 46 0 | 63/ 56 R | 71/ 56 Sh | Caldwell | 72/ 44 0 | 61/ 56 R | 74/ 55 PC | Darbury | 68/ 39 0 | 60/ 54 R | 71/ 52 PC | Irlip | 72/ 46 0 | 64/ 58 R | 71/ 56 PC | Newark | 75/ 47 0 | 64/ 58 R | 75/ 59 Sh | Tronton | 73/ 45 0/02 | 63/ 57 R | 72/ 54 PC | White Plains | 69/ 46 0 | 61/ 56 R | 70/ 55 Sh | Africa | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | Algiers | 78/ 56 0 | 82/ 57 S | 80/ 59 Sh | Cairo | 86/ 67 0 | 85/ 65 PC | 84/ 66 PC | Cape Town | 74/ 54 0 | 75/ 55 PC | 65/ 53 C | Dakar | 91/ 77 0 | 84/ 78 Sh | 88/ 80 T | Johannesburg | 83/ 54 0 | 81/ 56 T | 82/ 56 S | Nairobi | 79/ 63 0.30 | 79/ 59 T | 81/ 58 R | Tunla | 74/ 62 0.04 | 82/ 62 S | 81/ 65 Sh | Asia/Pacific | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | Baghdad | 99/77 0 | 100/76 PC | 96/80 Sh | Bangkok | 90/81 0 | 88/78 T | 92/80 R | Beijing | 83/55 0 | 80/55 PC | 78/55 PC | Demascus | 88/63 0 | 86/62 PC | 86/60 PC | Hong Kong | 88/78 0 | 90/79 S | 90/78 S | Jakarta | 95/77 0 | 94/79 Sh | 93/79 Sh | Jerusalem | 81/64 0 | 79/65 T | 79/62 PC | Karachi | 91/81 0 | 93/77 S | 96/77 S | Manila | 88/79 0.13 | 90/79 T | 92/79 T | Mumbai | 99/66 0 | 99/81 S | 100/82 PC | ---

National Forecast

As Post-Tropical Cyclone Isalas quickly moves over the United States today, rain will spread from Florida to New York and New England. Meanwhile, a second storm, Tropical Rainstorm Rachel, will move onshore in Baja California.

Rain will spread across the rest of the Rockies overnight. Rain will change over to snow across Montana and Wyoming. In the Plains and Mississippi Valley, it will be dry as warm air surges into the region. It will be cooler in the Pacific Northwest and along the West Coast.

Cooler air will also surge into the North-east. It will remain warm and humid across the Southeast even as Isaias' rain ends.

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Metropolitan Forecast

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TODAY

High 64. It will be rather cloudy as rain from Post-Tropical Cyclone Isaias reaches the area at midmorning. Soaking rain will continue and there may be flooding on streets and in poor drainage areas.

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TONIGHT

Low 58. Rain from Isaias will continue with a few rumbles of thunder possible. There may be slower travel and reduced visibility in any heavier band of rain.

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TOMORROW

High 71. It will remain cloudy with a shower in a few spots as Isaias remains nearby. Sunshine will filter through the clouds during the afternoon, Winds will be from the north at 7 to 14 miles per hour.

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TUESDAY

There will be some sunshine in the morning and then clouds will increase in the afternoon. There may be spotty showers late in the day or overnight. The high will be 73 which is above average.

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WEDNESDAY

It will be breezy with a mix of sunshine and clouds on Wednesday. The high will be 71. On Thursday there will also be a blend of clouds and sunshine. The high will be 62.

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Metropolitan Almanac

In Central Park, for the 16 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday.

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Heating Degree Days | Avg. daily departurefrom normalthis month......+1.2" | Avg. daily departurefrom normalthis year......-0.3" | Reservoir levels (New York City water supply)

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Precipitation (in inches)

Sun, Moon and Planets

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Recreational Forecast | Yesterday | 83% | Est. normal | 77% | First Quarter | Full | Last Quarter | New | Oct. 18 | Oct. 25 | Nov. 1 | Nov. 9 | Sun | RISE | 7:03 a.m. | Moon | R | 8:07 a.m. | SET | 6:22 p.m. | S | 6:31 p.m. | NEXT R | 7:04 a.m. | R | 9:14 a.m. | Jupiter | R | 2:15 a.m. | Mars | R | 1:03 a.m. | S | 4:08 p.m. | S | 3:32 p.m. | Saturn | S | 6:29 a.m. | Venus | R | 8:57 a.m. | R | 6:11 p.m. | S | 8:29 p.m. | Yesterday | 0.00 | Record | 2.18 | For the last 30 days | Actual | 4.51 | Normal | 4.39 | For the last 365 days | Actual | 46.09 | Normal | 49.52 | Air pressure | LAST 30 DAYS | High | 30.48 10 a.m. | Low | 30.31 1 a.m. | ---

Boating | High Tides | Atlantic City | 8:28 a.m. | 8:45 p.m. | Barnegat Inlet | 8:41 a.m. | 9:00 p.m. | The Battery | 9:11 a.m. | 9:30 p.m. | Beach Haven | 10:00 a.m. | 10:21 p.m. | Bedeport | 12:14 p.m. | City Island | 12:27 a.m. | 12:37 p.m. | Fire Island Lt. | 9:32 a.m. | 9:49 p.m. | Montauk Point | 9:51 a.m. | 10:15 p.m. | Northport | 12:17 a.m. | 12:27 p.m. | Port Washington | 12:37 a.m. | 12:45 p.m. | Sandy Hook | 8:46 a.m. | 9:03 p.m. | Shinnecock Inlet | 8:36 a.m. | 8:46 p.m. | Stamford | 12:11 a.m. | 12:22 p.m. | Tarrytown | 11:00 a.m. | 11:19 p.m. | Willets Point | 12:22 a.m. | 12:31 p.m. | From Montauk Point to Sandy Hook, N.J., out to 20 nautical miles, including Long Island Sound and New York Harbor.

Winds will be out of the southeast at 5-10 knots. Waves will average 1 foot or less on New York Harbor and on Long Island Sound and 2-3 feet on the open ocean as Isalas approaches. Rain will limit visibility. | An index of fuel consumption that tracks how far the day's mean temperature fell below 65 | Yesterday | 3 | So far this month | 35 | So far this season (since July 1) | 66 | Normal to date for the season | 79 | Trends | Temperature | Precipitation | Average | Average | Below | Above | Below | Above | Last | 10 days | 30 days | 90 days | 365 days | Chart shows how recent temperature and precipitation trends compare with those of the last 30 years.

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Northeast Foliage

Fall foliage is reaching peak color across portions of northern New York, Vermont and Maine. Widespread color extends farther south into central New York and northern Pennsylvania. Patchy color extends across the rest of the terrain of the Appalachians and into coastal New England.

Reporting from 50 states and 150 countries.

Our journalists go to the places they cover to provide firsthand accounts of issues across the globe. In a typical year, that includes every U.S. state and about 150 countries.

The singer has too often been overlooked. That's changing with her latest album, 'Popstar.' BY HARRY TAFOYA | PAGE 7

MYESHA EVON GARDNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

5 THEATER

Christopher Jackson, back as George Washington in 'Hamilton,' still has something to prove. BY SARAH BAHR

6 DANCE

Staging 'Pithoprakta,' a rarely seen Balanchine work set to an extraterrestrial score. BY GIA KOURLAS

12 ART

In a new exhibition, a Danish artist fascinated by wetlands brings the swamp to MoMA. BY FRANK ROSE

Inside Culture THIS WEEK FROM THE ARTS DESK

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IN THE ISSUE

LUISA OPALESKY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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THE AMPLIFIER

Paul Simon's Culture Clash Album, 'Graceland,' at 40

By LINDSAY ZOLADZ

Paul Simon's "Graceland" still generates new fans, and heated discussion, 40 years after its 1986 release. It's also the subject of Ashley Kahn's book "Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland." The album found Simon drawing inspiration from and bringing Western attention to South African artists like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Boyoyo Boys and General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters.

A singular kind of culture clash occurred when Simon added his own cosmopolitan American poetry atop the jubilant grooves of Soweto jive, sprinkling in some zydeco and Chicano rock for good measure. Whether the album is a work of common cultural appropriation or a rare example of cross-continental cooperation done right has long been a topic of debate. Here are a few songs that inspired Simon to create “Graceland.”

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1. JOHNSON MKHALALI: 'SUNSHINE BOOTS'

In the summer of 1984, Paul Simon often drove between New York City and Montauk, where he was building a beach house. His preferred soundtrack for these solo drives was a bootleg tape of South African music that had been lent to him by the singer-songwriter Heidi Berg. The early inspiration for what would become “Graceland” was kindled during those trips, as Simon became entranced by the bright sound and buoyant grooves of mbaqanga, a style that originated in segregated South Africa’s Black townships. Kahn suggests the bootleg included this instrumental tune by the accordionist Mkhalali.

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2. PAUL SIMON:

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'GUMBOOTS (WITH THE BOYOYO BOYS)'

In February 1985, Simon traveled to Johannesburg to jam with some of the musicians he had been listening to, in hopes that the sessions would generate material for his next album. One group he played with there was the Boyoyo Boys — including Mkhali — who were past their

RGB VERHORST/REDFERN, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Paul Simon performing on the Graceland tour in 1987.

prime but reunited for the occasion. Together they worked on the instrumental of what would become the fourth track on "Graceland," named for Simon's cherished bootleg tape, which itself had been named after the thick rubber boots worn by local gold miners.

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3. LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO: 'NXA EBIZWA AMAGAMA'

Simon started listening to tapes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the 10-piece South African choir led by Joseph Shabalala, while on a 1983 Simon & Garfunkel tour of Australia. Their richly resonant sound would be featured, quite memorably, on two “Graceland” tracks, the stirring a cappella number “Homeless” and the upbeat “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.”

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4. CLIFTON CHENIER: 'ACCORDION BOOGIE'

Though “Graceland” is most often associated with its South African collaborations, the album also draws from Simon's fascination with zydeco, the bluesy, accordion-heavy sound developed in southwest Louisiana. Kahn suggests that Simon's interest in zydeco was sparked by Arhoolie Records' late-60s compilations by Clifton Chenier. “Simon came to know and love the music; he writes, “and even used the name of Chenier's drummer — Robert St. Judy — to help title a song on his 1973 album, ‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.’ He called it ‘St. Judy's Comet.’”

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5. STIMELA: 'MAMA WAMI'

While in Johannesburg, Simon started playing with the guitarist Ray Phiri, who was a member of the popular group Stimela but would become a core member of Simon's regular "Graceland" band. Phiri was more directly influenced by American music than were the other musicians Simon met there (Phiri had previously been in a pioneering local soul outfit called the Cannibals), but as you can hear on this title track from Stimela's 1982 album "Mama Wami," his playing also had the bright, weightless quality that had drawn Simon to the South African sound.

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THE QUEUE

I'm the chief theater critic for The New York Times, and so most evenings (and matinees), I'm at a show. This has made me a bit of a theater monomaniac, so when I look for entertainment elsewhere, it must be all-consuming! Here are five things I recently watched or read that absorbed me. HELEN SHAW

Sienna Miller has spent years pursued by paparazzi. Carla Duval, the woman she plays in the new HBO series "War," is also an actress scrutinized by the media. "I found it would be interesting to play someone who operates in the world that I exist in with a very different personality," Miller said. PAGE 10

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LANTERNS TELEVISION

My favorite sci-fi usually consists of a team in which one person is a joke-cracking chaos generator (Captain Kirk, Han Solo) and the other (Spock, Chewbacca) is the personification of a weary sigh. I have therefore been easy pickings for

"Lanterns," in which Kyle Chandler ping- pongs around super-heroically as Aaron Pierre embodies the concept of "sheesh."

JOHN P. JOHNSON/HBO

Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler in "Lanterns."

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THE GODS OF NEW YORK AUDIOBOOKS

I cued up Jonathan Mahler's account of the outsize characters of 1980s New York — Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton — and I was shocked at how addictive I found it. The patterns in our national life were set in that tabloid-driven time, and Mahler outlines the era boldly for us as if it were a pop-art extravaganza.

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THE WORLD OF ODYSSEUS BOOKS

Like every other culture nut this summer, I was obsessed with all things Odyssean. I may not have loved Christopher Nolan's movie, but I definitely loved hypothesizing windily about it. The cure for my (baseless) pontificating was M.I. Finley's slim, temperate, wry book about the few things we can discern in the dark Homeric past.

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NO PICNIC FILM

Philip Hartman's 1986 shaggy-dog noir, shot by Peter Hutton in gorgeous neorealist black and white, shows a sweltering East Village I never knew — cold-water apartments, rent strikes, vacant lots yawning like mouths. Luis Guzmán, Steve Buscemi, Richard Hell all turn up; what a dirty wonderland it was.

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LEGEND FILM

I rewatched Ridley Scott's wackadoodle fantasy in honor of Tim Curry, who plays the Lord of Darkness as if he recently ate Shakespeare's villains and is still digesting them. In my favorite bit, he tries to woo Mia Sara's human character, who refuses a proffered throne. "Sit . . . OR STAND," he bellows, racking his Luciferian brain for date-appropriate conversation.

Tim Curry as the charm-challenged villain Lord of Darkness in "Legend."

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Matt Rife Resets With a Cold Plunge

JORDAN STRAUSS/INVISION VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

The comedian and actor Matt Rife had been to only one music festival — Coachella in 2017, which he decided maybe wasn't his scene — when an offer for "Rolling Loud: The Movie" came along. "That thing is pure chaos," Rife said of the annual hip-hop festival. He plays the dim-bulb sidekick to Owen Wilson's "cool dad," who takes his 13-year-old son to the festival and loses him. Filming took place, guerrilla-style, at the 2024 gathering in Miami. "People would be like, 'Matt Rife, Owen Wilson, no way' and want to take pictures, and we're like, 'We're literally rolling right now,'" Rife said. Rife, who appears next month in Netflix's "The Altruists," lives in Rhode Island with his dog, Hammer. These are edited excerpts from his list of essentials. KATHRYN SHATTUCK

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1 Uncrustables

My rider is protein shakes, immunity shots, gum, water and Uncrustables. I'm always on the go. I'm never on a proper eating schedule, and good, healthy meals are so few and far between. So they're just one thing that I get a little bit of nutrients from. I'd say they're 45 percent of my diet.

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2 Levi's Stores

I waste a lot of money on clothes, and Levi's is my go-to store. I think it stems from not having a lot of clothes growing up. I remember I got one pair of shoes a year, and I bought these shoes that were 85 percent bright green, and they went really, really well with my first-day-of-school outfit that I had planned — not thinking that I had to wear these shoes for the rest of the year with other outfits that they did not match.

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3 Hammer

He is a little pit bull rescue we found at a gas station in Arkansas, and we kind of foster-failed him. He's the smartest dog I've ever met in my life, and the neediest. He brings me a lot of joy and comfort. It's nice to just cuddle up with him and decompress.

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4 Working Out

I have a nice home gym in Rhode Island that I'm obsessed with. But on the road, a lot of times we get stuck with a hotel gym, so that plays a big part in where we stay if we have an option. But every now and then you'll find a Life Time on the road or an Equinox that has a day pass.

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5 A Cold Plunge

I do it at 40 degrees for five to six minutes every morning. I'm a terrible, terrible sleeper, so I wake up pretty miserable. The cold plunge is a nice reset for your brain and your body. It releases so much serotonin and so many endorphins that no matter how painful it is and how much I don't want to do it, 100 percent of the time that I get out, I feel amazing.

'It releases so much serotonin and so many endorphins that no matter how painful it is and how much I don't want to do it, 100 percent of the time that I get out, I feel amazing.'

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6 A Sauna

I have a really good sauna. It gets up to 230 degrees. I read somewhere that 15 minutes a day in a sauna reduces your chances of a heart attack by 50 percent. Sometimes it gets too hot and I'll tap out at 12.

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7 LMNT Electrolyte Drink Mix

They're little packages with 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 of potassium and 60 of magnesium. I drink one when I wake up and then when I go to the gym. Electrolytes are super, super important for your hydration as well as your kidney functions.

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8 Performing

During Covid, I went about four and a half months without performing at all, and I developed anxiety. Being trapped inside and waking up every day with no purpose or any creative or emotional or intellectual avenue for an output, it was just festering inside me. I realized it was because since the age of 15, I really hadn't gone more than a week without performing in some capacity.

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9 Sam Barber

He is a 23-year-old kid from Missouri. I've always considered him more folk-country, but somebody told me that that style is considered more Americana. When I cold plunge every morning, I listen to his music. I'm singing at the top of my lungs.

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10 Scary Movies

I love, love, love horror films. When I was a really little kid, my grandma was a big horror movie fan. She always had the Syfy channel on, and I just wandered in on so many of them. It gets my adrenaline going. I don't know why scary stuff does that. I don't like heights. I don't love a roller coaster, but I love a good scary movie.

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November 27 through January 2

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Classical

Cleareyed Rather Than Comforting

Giggles develop into the kind of laughter that precedes violence.

WORTH GMBH/ULSTEIN BILD, VIA GETTY IMAGES

UWE MAREK/PICTURE ALLIANCE, VIA GETTY IMAGES

From top: the German composer Hans Werner Henze in 1964; a production of his "The Prince of Homburg" at the Hamburg State Opera in 1960; rehearsing his "Bassarids" with the conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi, right, in 1966.

GERHARD RAUCHWETTER/PICTURE ALLIANCE, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Hans Werner Henze didn't try to reassure postwar audiences.

By JEFFREY ARLO BROWN

In 1943, the Henze family went for a picnic by the Elbe River in Germany. Franz, the father, would soon be deployed to the Eastern Front of World War II. Hans, his son, wanted to be a composer but was in training to become a tank radio operator.

Later, Hans Werner Henze recalled in his autobiography that his mother had an ominous feeling that afternoon, despite the good weather. When she started to cry, his father, a committed Nazi, forbade her from "any expression of vulnerability."

"We continued to sit in silence," he wrote, "until I returned to the barracks, a little relieved, before my leave was up." It was the last time he saw his father, who went missing in action.

Henze, whose centennial is this year, went on to become one of the most prolific and influential German composers of the 20th century. (He died in 2012.) In more than 350 compositions, he almost obsessively filled the oppressive silence of his youth with music. He won the 1990 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for his work, among other awards, and was inducted into Germany's Order of Merit and France's Legion of Honor. In Gütersloh, where he was born, a square is named after him.

Although Henze's music was widely performed, he also attracted sustained animus because he was gay and a leftist, and because he rejected many of the musical shibboleths of the German avant-garde. Still, he never relapsed into a hermetic traditionalism. His music faced the aesthetic and moral fissures of his time.

"He allowed himself to be an organic development of the heritage that he felt," the pianist Tamara Stefanovich, who performed some of Henze's works recently, said in a phone interview. "It's not a showcase of sentimentality. That I could not stand."

Henze considered the classical music tradition "a gift that we have to deal with, toward which we have to develop a position," said Detlev Glanert, a composer who studied with Henze. "We can reject it, we can continue it, but we can't ignore it."

At the same time, Henze's position was to develop tradition with pronounced skepticism. Though his wide-ranging output contains searing political operas, louche dances, electronic experiments and arrangements of Mozart, his works share a distrust of easy catharsis, banal feeling and comforting lies. Like few others, he captured the ambivalence of making art in the shadow of the 20th century.

HENZE WAS BORN TO a family of modest means. His father was a schoolteacher who played viola in a local chamber orchestra. His mother, Margarete, became a homemaker after marriage. In 1933, after the Nazi Party assumed power, functionaries closed the progressive school in Bielefeld where Franz Henze taught and transferred him to a village called Dünne.

There, Franz became increasingly enthusiastic about fascist ideology, and the once-happy Henze household turned suffocating. The children "had to swallow these changes, including the alienation from our parents, day by day like a poison," the composer later wrote. "As time passed, we lost our smiles."

A major source of conflict between Franz and Hans was the young man's budding sexuality. Michael Kerstan, Henze's last life partner, said that the composer realized early in life that he was gay. In elementary school, a teacher showed the class the Nazi propaganda film "The Making of a King." The movie is about Frederick William I, king of Prussia, trying to make a man of his son, who neglects military discipline in favor of playing the flute, reading French literature and spending time with a young lieutenant named Katte. The two men try to flee Frederick's control but get caught. The crown prince submits to his father's authority. Katte is executed.

The film was eerily similar to Henze's relationship with his father. "As his son Hans entered puberty, and it became increasingly clear that he was gay," Kerstan said, "he despised him more and more." Henze wrote an alternate ending to the movie in his school notebook — the two young men escape and live happily ever after — and passed it around to his classmates.

Music was his refuge. Henze began playing the piano at 5 and tried writing his first piece, a trio for some classmates, at 8. By 17, he had already tried composing a youthful opera.

To prepare him for military life, Franz threatened to send his son to a Waffen-SS music school. The young man dreaded learning military marches and playing the sousaphone. But a teacher intervened, and he was able to attend a conservatory in Braunschweig instead.

Henze was drafted in 1944 and learned to imagine new music in his head while doing drills and digging trenches. He also acted in propaganda films. But he detested the Nazis and military life, and in 1945 he surrendered to British forces in Denmark, leading to time in a camp for prisoners of war.

Almost immediately after returning home, he continued his musical training, playing piano in theaters and officers' clubs, and working on ambitious compositions. In 1950, he moved to Berlin with his first boyfriend and quickly fell in with the city's arts scene, where he watched Bertolt Brecht rehearse his play "The Tutor."

Still, his feelings about postwar Germany — with its doctrinaire music scene, bourgeois morality and loaded memories — remained ambivalent. In 1951, he traveled to Italy. One night outside Rome, he listened to the mingling of voices and swallows, he recalled in his autobiography, and decided that was where he wanted to live.

He moved two years later, living first on the island of Ischia, and then in Naples, Rome and finally in Castel Gandolfo, near Lake Albano south of Rome. He maintained a house there for the rest of his life.

Henze was a friend of and collaborator with some of the great artists of his time. The director Luchino Visconti staged one of his dance works. The actor Klaus Kinski performed in his pantomime ballet "The Idiot." The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno played him an original composition. (Henze called it an "intelligent forgery.") The poets W.H. Auden and Ingeborg Bachmann both wrote him opera librettos.

He also appreciated the simpler things. He did imitations and told dirty jokes, and "he loved good food, he loved alcohol, he smoked," Glanert said. Kerstan said that in Henze's last years, they watched the American version of the gay melodrama "Queer as Folk" together.

Henze's music became a part of the broader culture in a way that few other composers of his time managed. But he faced scalding rejection, from both radical and conservative corners of the music world. In 1957, the avant-garde composers Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono walked out of a performance of his piece "Nocturnes and Arias," presumably because they found it too traditional. In 1968, a choir in Hamburg declined to sing his cantata "The Raft of the Medusa" because of a dispute around leftist iconography at the performance, leading to riotlike scenes.

His music still provokes opposing responses. The conductor Ingo Metzmacher, who led Henze's opera "The Prince of Homburg" at the Salzburg Festival this past summer, said in a phone interview that he was "astonished at how sensually he composed." But the composer Georg Friedrich Haas has described Henze's music as cold and elusive. "I read in his autobiography that he only composed when he felt relieved of sexual tension," Haas has said. "And what I thought, a little wickedly, was 'Yes, you can tell.'"

And when Henze — hardly one to pull punches — accused the avant-garde composer Helmut Lachenmann of writing “antimusic,” Lachenmann penned a ferocious open letter in response. Just because a composer “thoughtlessly strips the tradition for parts,” Lachenmann wrote, “doesn’t mean his work is rooted in that tradition.” (They later reconciled.)

HENZE WAS A MASTER of his craft, but he was also alert against music's ability to feed clichés, evoke one-dimensional emotions and even deceive listeners. Glanert said that Henze taught him to prioritize "absolute honesty toward yourself."

A tango from Henze's brass band piece "Ragtimes and Habaneras" avoids a stereotypical version of Argentine passion. Instead, it sounds sleazy and clumsy: a tango for someone trying to seem as if he isn't waiting to be asked to dance.

His opera "The Betrayed Sea" emphasizes the dark undercurrent in easy laughter. At the beginning of the piece, a seething overture gives way to giggles and high percussion; you instantly mistrust the pleasantly tinkling sound. Later in the opera, Henze develops that laughter into precisely composed mechanical rhythms. It's unmistakably the kind of laughter that precedes violence.

Even his Requiem treats its most consoling music carefully. A gorgeous coil of straining strings reappears throughout the work, but rarely; only once, in the sixth movement, does it go on for long. This Requiem would rather remind listeners what they've lost than give them the illusion that it's still there.

What will remain of Henze is cleareyed music like this, as well as traces of his charismatic personality. Around 2000, Metzmacher invited Henze to Hamburg to give a lecture on his 10th Symphony. By now an eminent composer, Henze spoke softly. But he created a different kind of quiet than the stifling one he remembered from his youth.

"It was completely silent in the hall," Metzmacher said. "The people listened unbelievably closely."

Theater

PHOTOGRAPHS BY OK MCAUSLAND FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

10 Years Older, This Washington Is Even Wiser

Christopher Jackson reprises his Tony-nominated role in 'Hamilton' on Broadway.

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By SARAH BAHR

Christopher Jackson remembers the energy of the "Hamilton" stage-door crowds on Broadway in the summer of 2016.

The musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which tells the story of the rise and fall of Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury secretary, had just won 11 Tony Awards, including for best musical. Jackson had been nominated for his performance as George Washington. And tickets — if you could get them — were going for as much as \$849 a pop.

"It was challenging, and it was exhausting, and it was exhilarating," Jackson, 51, said during a recent conversation at Blake's Tavern, the bar next door to the Richard Rodgers Theater, where "Hamilton" is still playing.

In the musical, Washington has an avuncular gravitas, acting as a mentor to Hamilton (originally played by Miranda). For almost two years (including the show's Off Broadway run in 2015 at the Public Theater), Jackson's warm tenor carried some of the musical's most famous melodies on numbers like "One Last Time."

Now, nearly a decade later, he has returned to the role for 16 weeks on Broadway, through Jan. 3.

"This show was hugely impactful for my career," said Jackson, who has had roles in "Hell's Kitchen," a Broadway show inspired by the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys's teenage years in New York, as well as in HBO Max's "Sex and the City" spinoff "And Just Like That..." (Yes, there was a "Hamilton" joke.)

"I want to feel a challenge," Jackson said. "I want to sweat — it's really hard to find good roles out there." His former co-star Leslie Odom Jr. had similar reasoning for reprising his Tony-winning role as Aaron Burr in the show for sold-out runs over the past year on Broadway and in London.

In the years since his original run, Jackson has continued to delve into the life of Washington.

"I don't play him differently," Jackson said of Washington, "but I view him differently now."

Before a recent evening performance — during his second week in the show — Jackson reflected on what brought him back to the musical and why he still feels he has something to prove each night. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Top, Christopher Jackson at the Richard Rodgers Theater last month. Above, the actor onstage recently in the musical "Hamilton." He was nominated for a Tony Award for his first appearance in the show when it opened on Broadway, in 2015.

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How's it going so far?

I'm having a good time. It's a lot, though. You're not learning a show; you're remembering a show. Ten years is a long time, so there's not a lot of muscle memory.

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What brought you back?

Curiosity, the desire to work, the desire to touch it again. After the 10-year anniversary [performance at the Tonys] last year, and being with everyone and feeling the spirit of it, I wanted to see what the experience was going to be like. I watched Leslie move through the process. And then once I saw him do it, I just started feeling a little tap on my shoulder.

It's a rare thing to be part of a show that, one, would still be running 10 years later, and two, for it to be a role that I could approach from 10 years of life and experience and see it from a completely different angle.

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How so?

We've been through quite a bit in the last 10 years. The show was written in a time where hope was what we were striving for, holding on to, and the pandemic did a lot to diminish that and exhaust people and scare people. And so the kind of hope that we were aiming for in 2015 is quite different than the kind of hope that we need now.

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How are you personally in a different place?

I don't think there's a single part of my life that isn't different. My kids are almost grown. My wife [Veronica Vazquez] has thankfully been able to restart her career, and is going into the City Center production of "In the Heights." I'm probably more calm than I was back then. I wouldn't say I'm less worried. I'm just worried differently.

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What do you remember about that original run?

Every show held the potential to be the most important thing ever, because there was an audience that was waiting breathlessly to see it. The musical didn't exist in a movie form. It didn't even exist as a cast recording for a lot of that run. It was just this word-of-mouth excitement, this curiosity, and then we got to go prove to people what their friends had told them about it. Not in a means of trying to impress, but to fiercely tell the story in a way that would make them feel like it was because of them that we were able to do so, to allow them to see themselves inside of it.

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How much of the show did you still have memorized?

Almost none. "Hamilton" lives with this internal rhythm from the very first note. You're internalizing everybody else's parts while you're doing it because of the tempo. The moment that goes out of your head, it's so hard.

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You and Marcus John, the actor now playing Hamilton, are almost 20 years apart in age. Does an older Washington change the show?

All the stuff that the younger cast members have experienced isn't that far removed from the things that I'm experiencing every day. I'm a Black man in America. [But] I'm trying to break down the idea of, like, O.G. I'm like: No, I was here before, but I'm here new now. And they've all been very welcoming, very gracious.

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Was it challenging for you find a way into Washington?

It was the first time I'd ever played a role where there was so much source material. I went to Mount Vernon and walked the grounds, and I got to be in the house after everyone left. I bought the [Ron] Chernow biography, and every day on the bus and the train, I just started going through it. It was my Bible for seven or eight years.

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Do you feel differently about Washington now?

I know more. I didn't stop exploring the man and the times. I've always really been interested in history. I don't think the context of the show creates a means where I can have a completely different take on who this guy is. But personally, absolutely I do.

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It can be easy to forget what a jolt "Hamilton" was when it arrived on Broadway in 2015. In the decade since, people have

definitely become more willing to criticize it. I like that people challenge it. At this point, I've heard just about every real, developed criticism of the piece. But I always felt, 10 toes down, on the fact that it accomplishes the thing that it's supposed to accomplish.

The algorithm hit me with an Instagram post the other day by this young man who saw the show 20 times, quote-unquote hat-ing a lot of what Lin had chosen to include. And yet he couldn't wait to come and see it again. And I thought, well, [expletive], that's the coolest thing. That's art having an impact on somebody in real time.

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What's next for you?

I'm doing the music and lyrics for a new musical called "The Crossover," which is based on Kwame Alexander's Newbery Medal-winning book. And I've got the rights to a new book. It's on the New York Times bestseller list, but I can't talk about it yet. It's a civil rights-era musical.

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