The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to extend the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program for six years with minimal changes, rejecting a yearslong effort by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to impose significant new privacy limits when it sweeps up Americans’ emails and other personal communications.
The vote, 256 to 164, centered on an expiring law that permits the government, without a warrant, to collect communications of foreigners abroad from United States firms like Google and AT&T — even when those targets are talking to Americans. Congress had enacted the law in 2008 to legalize a form of a once-secret warrantless surveillance program created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The legislation approved on Thursday still has to go through the Senate. But fewer lawmakers there appear to favor major changes to spying laws, so the House vote is likely the effective end of a debate over 21st-century surveillance technology and privacy rights that broke out in 2013 following the leaks by the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.
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President Trump tweeted in support of an amendment to FISA on Thursday. It was the latest example of him contradicting his administration, his party and even himself.Published OnCreditImage by Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
In 2006, the endowments of Indiana University and Texas Christian University invested millions of dollars in a partnership, hoping to mint riches from oil, gas and coal.
The partnership was formed by the Houston-based Quintana Capital Group, whose principals include Donald L. Evans, an influential Texan and longtime supporter of former President George W. Bush. Little more than a year earlier, Mr. Evans had left his cabinet position as commerce secretary.
Though the group had an impressive Texas pedigree, presidential cachet and ambitions for operations in the United States, the new partnership was established in the Cayman Islands. The founders promised their university and nonprofit investors that the partnership would try to avoid federal taxes by exploiting a loophole called “blocker corporations,” which are typically established in tax havens around the world.
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Texas Christian University, which invested in an oil, gas and coal partnership established in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.CreditCooper Neill for The New York Times
A Turkish banker was convicted on Wednesday of taking part in a billion-dollar scheme to evade American sanctions against Iran, in a case that painted a picture of high-level corruption in Turkey and heightened tensions between the United States and a NATO ally.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was not charged in the indictment, but he seemed to loom over the Federal District Court case in Manhattan during the monthlong trial and even before it began. Testimony suggested that he had approved the sanctions-busting scheme.
Mr. Erdogan and other Turkish officials had bitterly denounced the charges against the banker, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, and eight co-defendants, and repeatedly urged American officials to drop the case. Mr. Erdogan even took the matter up with President Trump.
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A Halkbank branch in Istanbul. The defendant, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, was the bank’s deputy general manager for international banking.CreditChris Mcgrath/Getty Images
For the first time in half a century, visitors to the world’s largest cultural institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will have to pay a mandatory admission fee of $25 if they do not live in New York State under a new policy that begins March 1, the museum announced on Thursday.
The change reflects the Met’s efforts to establish a reliable, annual revenue stream after a period of financial turbulence and leadership turmoil, particularly given what the Met describes as a sharp decline in people willing to pay the current “suggested” admission price, also $25. But the move could provoke objections from suburbanites and tourists as well as outcry from those who believe a taxpayer funded institution should be free to the public.
“What we’re trying to do is find the right balance in generating revenue to support this enterprise and admissions income has fallen behind,” Daniel Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive officer, said in an interview. “Everybody who benefits from this institution is being asked to contribute to its well-being because we are fundamentally a community resource.”
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People on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday. Beginning in March, the Met will eliminate its pay-as-you-wish policy for people who do not live in New York, charging adults $25 for admission.CreditAndrew White for The New York Times
In this county of desert and sagebrush, Wilfred Jones has spent a lifetime angered by what his people are missing. Running water, for one. Electricity, for another. But worst of all, in his view, is that the Navajo people here lack adequate political representation.
So Mr. Jones sued, and in late December, after a federal judge ruled that San Juan County’s longtime practice of packing Navajo voters into one voting district violated the United States Constitution, the county was ordered to draw new district lines for local elections.
The move could allow Navajo people to win two of three county commission seats for the first time, overturning more than a century of political domination by white residents. And the shift here is part of an escalating battle over Native American enfranchisement, one that comes amid a larger wave of voting rights movements spreading across the country.
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A footbridge in San Juan County, Utah, damaged in spring floods and never fixed. Alicia Coggeshell, 52, who lives in the southern part of the county, said the bridge was so dilapidated that her neighbors sometimes fall into the icy water. “We asked the county and the county says: It’s not our responsibility.”CreditBenjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times
Federal immigration agents descended on dozens of 7-Eleven convenience stores across the country before daybreak on Wednesday, arresting undocumented workers and demanding paperwork from managers in what the Trump administration described as its largest enforcement operation against employers so far.
The raids of 98 stores in 17 states, from California to Florida, resulted in 21 arrests, according to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which signaled intensified efforts against companies that hire unauthorized workers.
“Today’s actions send a strong message to U.S. businesses that hire and employ an illegal work force: ICE will enforce the law, and if you are found to be breaking the law, you will be held accountable,” Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of ICE, said in a statement.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a 7-Eleven in Los Angeles on Wednesday.CreditChris Carlson/Associated Press
A day after powerful mudslides swept through the Southern California community of Montecito, rescue crews continued to search the wreckage for missing people on Wednesday.
The disaster left at least 15 people dead, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office tweeted Wednesday. At least 25 people have been injured in the mudslides, while more than 50 people were rescued by air, officials said. Over two dozen people were unaccounted for as of Wednesday morning, The New York Times reported.
And those numbers will likely rise, as authorities told the AP flash floods have destroyed 100 single-family homes and damaged 300 more in Santa Barbara County.
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Powerful mudslides swept through the Southern California
Harvey Weinstein built his complicity machine out of the witting, the unwitting and those in between. He commanded enablers, silencers and spies, warning others who discovered his secrets to say nothing. He courted those who could provide the money or prestige to enhance his reputation as well as his power to intimidate.
In the weeks and months before allegations of his methodical abuse of women were exposed in October, Mr. Weinstein, the Hollywood producer, pulled on all the levers of his carefully constructed apparatus.
He gathered ammunition, sometimes helped by the editor of The National Enquirer, who had dispatched reporters to find information that could undermine accusers. He turned to old allies, asking a partner in Creative Artists Agency, one of Hollywood’s premier talent shops, to broker a meeting with a C.A.A. client, Ronan Farrow, who was reporting on Mr. Weinstein. He tried to dispense favors: While seeking to stop the actress Rose McGowan from writing in a memoir that he had sexually assaulted her, he tried to arrange a $50,000 payment to her former manager and throw new business to a literary agent advising Ms. McGowan. The agent, Lacy Lynch, replied to him in an email: “No one understands smart, intellectual and commercial like HW.”
Canola oil, or canola for short, is a vegetable oil derived from rapeseed that is low in erucic acid, as opposed to colza oil.There are both edible and industrial forms produced from the seed of any of several cultivars of the Brassicaceae family of plants, namely cultivars of Brassica napus L., Brassica rapa subsp.
President Trump on Tuesday appeared to endorse a sweeping immigration deal that would eventually grant millions of undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship, saying he would be willing to “take the heat” politically for an approach that many of his hard-line supporters have long viewed as unacceptable.
The president made the remarks during an extended meeting with congressional Republicans and Democrats who are weighing a shorter-term agreement that would extend legal status for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Mr. Trump has said such a deal must be accompanied by new money for a border wall and measures to limit immigrants from bringing family members into the country in the future, conditions he repeated during the meeting on Tuesday.
But in backing a broader immigration measure, Mr. Trump was giving a rare public glimpse of an impulse he has expressed privately to advisers and lawmakers — the desire to preside over a more far-reaching solution to the status of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already living and working in the United States. Such action has the potential to alienate the hard-line immigration activists who powered his political rise and helped him win the presidency, many of whom have described it as amnesty for lawbreakers.
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President Trump said legislation around an immigration overhaul should come from love, while also pushing for stronger security measures.Published OnCreditImage by Doug Mills/The New York Times
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
President Trump tweeted in support of an amendment to FISA on Thursday. It was the latest example of him contradicting his administration, his party and even himself.
Powerful mudslides swept through the Southern California
Canola Field
