Monday, October 7

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Climate Protesters March on New York, Calling for End to Fossil Fuels
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Climate Protesters March on New York, Calling for End to Fossil Fuels

Tens of thousands of people, young and old, filled the streets of Midtown Manhattan under blazing sunshine on Sunday to demand that world leaders quickly pivot away from fossil fuels dangerously heating the Earth.Their ire was sharply directed at President Biden, who is expected to arrive in New York Sunday night for several fund-raisers this week and to speak before the United Nations General Assembly session that begins Tuesday.“Biden, you should be scared of us,” Emma Buretta, 17, a New York City high school student and an organizer with the Fridays for Future movement, shouted at a rally ahead of the march. “If you want our vote, if you don’t want the blood of our generations to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”The Biden administration has shepherded through the United States’ most ...
How a Yale Student’s Rape Accusation Exposed Her to a Defamation Lawsuit
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How a Yale Student’s Rape Accusation Exposed Her to a Defamation Lawsuit

Naomi Shatz, a lawyer who has represented accusers and accused in other hearings, has noticed an uptick in such suits, but they are uncommon, she said. The accused usually wants to move on, especially if the case is not public. (Mr. Khan’s case had received significant news media coverage, including in The Times, before he filed his lawsuit.)“It’s a huge emotional and financial burden to be dragged into a defamation lawsuit,” she said, citing the successful lawsuit by the actor Johnny Depp against his former wife, Amber Heard. “Nobody wants to be in Amber Heard’s position, especially as a young college student without financial resources or social capital.”For his part, Mr. Khan, who is originally from Afghanistan, said that he was pleased with the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision. But...
In Risky Hunt for Secrets, U.S. and China Expand Global Spy Operations
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In Risky Hunt for Secrets, U.S. and China Expand Global Spy Operations

As China’s spy balloon drifted across the continental United States in February, American intelligence agencies learned that President Xi Jinping of China had become enraged with senior Chinese military generals.The spy agencies had been trying to understand what Mr. Xi knew and what actions he would take as the balloon, originally aimed at U.S. military bases in Guam and Hawaii, was blown off course.Mr. Xi was not opposed to risky spying operations against the United States, but American intelligence agencies concluded that the People’s Liberation Army had kept Mr. Xi in the dark until the balloon was over the United States.American officials would not discuss how spy agencies gleaned this information. But in details reported here for the first time, they discovered that when Mr. Xi learn...
Principals Made and Shared Meme of a Student’s Exposed Breast, Lawsuit Says
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Principals Made and Shared Meme of a Student’s Exposed Breast, Lawsuit Says

Aniya Harmon, 18, said she was distraught when she discovered in May that a rumor going around Sussex Central High School was true: Someone had created a meme that showed her nude breast and had shared it with school employees.Ms. Harmon and her mother, Tosha White, said in interviews that they later learned a disturbing detail. Two principals at the school in Sussex County, Del., they said, had used security camera footage to make the meme, superimposing Janet Jackson’s face on Ms. Harmon’s in a reference to the exposure of the singer’s breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.The mother and daughter detailed their claims in a lawsuit filed this week in Delaware Superior Court in New Castle County against the former Sussex Central principals, Bradley Layfield and Matthew Jones, who...
How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety.
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How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety.

Italy was in the grip of extreme heat waves, hellish wildfires and biblical downpours, and a nerve-wracked young Italian woman wept as she stood in a theater to tell the country’s environment minister about her fears of a climatically apocalyptic future.“I personally suffer from eco-anxiety,” Giorgia Vasaperna, 27, said, her eyes welling and her hands fidgeting, at a children’s film festival in July. “I have no future because my land burns.” She doubted the sanity of bringing children into an infernal world and asked, “Aren’t you scared for your children, for your grandchildren?”Then the minister, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, started crying.“I have a responsibility toward all of you,” he said, visibly choked up. “I have a responsibility toward my grandchildren.”Europe is a continent on the ve...
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Calls on Nation to Remember Ugly Past Truths
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Calls on Nation to Remember Ugly Past Truths

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday called on the nation to accept some of the ugliest truths in its history as she confronted the debates roiling the country about racism and violence against Black Americans.In a speech from the pulpit of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Justice Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court, said that she made her first trip to Alabama “to commemorate and mourn, celebrate — and warn.” She was the keynote speaker to mark the 60th anniversary of a bombing by the Ku Klux Klan that killed four young girls at the church as they arrived for Sunday morning service.“If we’re going to continue to move forward as a nation we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history,” J...
Russia-Ukraine War and Kim Jong-un’s Visit: Latest News
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Russia-Ukraine War and Kim Jong-un’s Visit: Latest News

In a photo released by Russian state media on Friday, Kim Jong-un, center, viewed a fighter jet in Russia’s Far East.Credit...Mikhail Degtyarev, Governor of Russia’s Khabarovsk Krai, via ReutersNorth Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, peeked his head into the cockpit of a fighter jet at a factory in the Russian Far East on Friday as he pressed ahead on a multiday tour of Russia that is enticing him at each stop with off-limits military technology.Although Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, hasn’t promised Mr. Kim any of the weaponry and has vowed to abide by U.N. sanctions banning their transfer, the tour carried an implicit threat — an example of what analysts have said is a growing danger posed by Mr. Putin’s increasingly warm relationship with authoritarian leaders who can pose problems f...
Professor Who Was Banned from Campus Sues SUNY Fredonia
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Professor Who Was Banned from Campus Sues SUNY Fredonia

Stephen Kershnar, a philosophy professor, is in academic purgatory.He is still employed by the State University of New York at Fredonia, but he has not taught or even been allowed on campus for more than a year — fallout from remarks he made in a 2022 podcast about whether it is ever moral for an adult male to have sex with a “willing” 12-year-old girl.“It’s not obvious to me that this is, in fact, wrong,” he said on the philosophy podcast, as part of a wide-ranging thought experiment about ethics and consent. (As a matter of law, he has said that it should be criminalized.)His remarks went viral after a right-wing social media account, LibsofTikTok, posted about it.The president of SUNY Fredonia, Stephen H. Kolison Jr., called the professor’s comments “absolutely abhorrent” and said that...
Texas Black High School Student is Suspended Over Hair Length
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Texas Black High School Student is Suspended Over Hair Length

Soon after starting his junior year last month at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas, Darryl George was separated from his classmates because of the way he wears his hair, his mother and a lawyer said.Since the term began on Aug. 16, Darryl, a 17-year-old Black student, has received multiple disciplinary notices that have culminated in more than a week of in-school suspension, where he sits on a stool in a cubicle and work is brought to him, according to his mother, Darresha George. Each morning, he is asked by officials at the school, about 30 miles east of Houston, whether he has cut his hair yet, she said.He has not.“He is actually getting singled out,” said Ms. George. “They are personally stopping him, ‘Did he cut his hair?’ Asking him at the door.”Darryl has locs, or lon...