More than 400 demonstrators across the country have been taken into police custody since last Thursday, when arrests at Columbia University in New York set off a wave of student activism nationwide.
The campaign is likely to have a negligible impact on the companies or Israel, but activists see divestment as a clear way to force colleges to take action on the issue.
Karen McDougal sold the rights to her story. Donald J. Trump and the publisher of The National Enquirer decided what would happen to it.
(left AP Photo/Evan Vucci, right Brian Zak/Sipa Press via New York Times)
There is a cold war of sorts between President Joe Biden and the New York Times, according to a new lengthy Politico report that features more than a few splashy details.
The report by Eli Stokols, based on two dozen interviews, details an increasingly tense relationship between Times staffers and the White House. Many in the White House, according to the report, see November as an “existential” choice between the president and Donald Trump and have taken more issue with how the Times portrays both candidates.
“Biden’s closest aides had come to see the Times as arrogant, intent on setting its own rules and unwilling to give Biden his due,” the report reads.
Among examples cited in the piece; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claiming she stopped hearing from White House officials after being behind a story about the president’s son, Hunter Biden. The frustration reportedly began in 2019 when the Times was not tipped off about an event where Biden was announcing his candidacy for president. Biden’s team reportedly later felt irked that the Times appeared to support more progressive candidates, giving them more positive coverage, something the paper denied.
“They’re not being realistic about what we do for a living. You can be a force for democracy, liberal democracy. You don’t have to be a force for the Biden White House,” New York Times washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller told Politico.
Here’s a look at the five splashiest details from the Politico report on the Biden vs. New York Times feud:
1. NY Times Staffer Claims Publisher AG Sulzberger “Quietly Encourages…Tough Coverage” on Biden’s Age Because White House Won’t Grant an Interview
According to Politico, New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger believes a long-form interview with Biden is the “birthright” of the Times and he’s been “aggrieved” that the president has refused to sit for one.
One unnamed Times reporter suggested to Politico that “tough reporting” on Biden’s advanced age and lagging poll numbers is “quietly” encouraged by Sulzberger in retaliation for Biden’s unwillingness to sit for an interview.
“All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,” the unnamed journalist told Politico. “It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”
2. White House Staff Feeds Material to the “NYT Pitchbot” Account Which Famously Spoofs the Gray Lady
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, according to two people familiar who spoke to Politico, has fed material to the “NYT Pitchbot” account on X, which relentlessly hammers the Times over its coverage of Biden and Trump.
Biden joked at last year’s White House Correspondents dinner that he “loves” the “NYT Pitchbot” account.
3. NY Times and Biden Camps Are Both Convinced the Other Side Leaked Details of an Off the Record Meeting in Which the Biden Team Scolded the Paper
There have been multiple meetings where White House staff have brought up issues directly with the Times about what they perceive to be overly negative coverage of the president and soft coverage of the former president, but both sides believe details of an off-the-record meeting were leaked by the other side.
Senior campaign officials reportedly met with staff from multiple outlets earlier this year and details of the Times meeting, which was not “productive,” ended up leaking.
“We had done over a dozen of these meetings leading up to the Times meeting and only got a press inquiry about the meetings less than 48 hours after the Times meeting,” a senior campaign official told Politico. Staff of the paper, on the other hand, believe only the campaign could be behind it because only they had knowledge of all the meetings.
4. An Off the Record Sitdown with VP Harris at NY Times Headquarters Went Sideways:
Sulzberger reportedly took minutes out of allotted time last May for an off-the-record meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris so he could ask why Biden was not agreeing to an interview. Harris was upset and later told aides the line of questioning was a waste of time for the meeting, which included dozens of staffers for the paper.
Harris told Sulzberger to contact the White House press office for his interview.
5. A Top Times Star is Furious With One of the Politico Report’s Key Details
New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan quickly took issue with a specific part of Politico’s reporting involving Sulzberger.
The report claims Sulzberger, according to multiple people familiar with his private comments, believes “only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
Swan claimed in an X post that Sulzberger’s words do not align with what he’s directly heard.
“I have spoken to AG over the past year about this topic & this caricature is unrecognizable,” he wrote. “I never usually comment on media stories but this irritated me bc it’s such a bs mischaracterization of his views about the importance of serious longform presidential interviews.”
Read the full Politico report here .
The post 5 Splashiest Revelations from Blockbuster Politico Feature on the Cold War Between the NY Times and the Biden White House first appeared on Mediaite .
NYT (“Live Updates: Harvey Weinstein’s Conviction Is Overturned by New York’s Top Court“):
New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges, a stunning reversal in the foundational case of the #MeToo era.
In a 4-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case had made a crucial mistake, allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses a series of women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him.
Citing that decision and others it identified as errors, the appeals court determined that Mr. Weinstein, who as a movie producer had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had not received a fair trial. The four judges in the majority wrote that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior.
Now it will be up to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg — already in the midst of a trial against former President Donald J. Trump — to decide whether to seek a retrial of Mr. Weinstein.
“It is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges,” Judge Jenny Rivera wrote on behalf of the majority.
When reached by phone, Arthur Aidala, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, said, “This is not just a victory for Mr. Weinstein but for every criminal defendant in the state of New York, and we compliment the Court of Appeals for upholding the most basic principles that a criminal defendant should have in a trial.”
Spokeswomen for the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was not immediately clear on Thursday morning how the decision would affect Mr. Weinstein, 71, who is being held in an upstate prison in Rome, N.Y. But he is not a free man. In addition to the possibility that the district attorney’s office may try him again, in 2022, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison in California after he was convicted of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel.
The result strikes me as obvious. One would think a judge assigned to a case this high-profile would be smarter than this.
Jodi Cantor (“Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was fragile from the start“) agrees:
The overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s New York sex crimes conviction on Thursday morning may feel like a shocking reversal, but the criminal case against him has been fragile since the day it was filed. Prosecutors moved it forward with risky, boundary-pushing bets. New York’s top judges, many of them female, have held rounds of pained debates over whether his conviction was clean.
Outside the justice system, evidence of Mr. Weinstein’s sexual misconduct is overwhelming. After The New York Times revealed allegations of abuse by the producer in 2017, nearly 100 women came forward with accounts of pressure and manipulation by Mr. Weinstein. Their stories sparked the global #MeToo reckoning.
But while Mr. Weinstein’s alleged victims could fill an entire courtroom, few of them could stand at the center of a New York criminal trial. Many of the horror stories were about sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Others fell beyond the statute of limitations. One of the original accusers was dropped from the trial because of allegations of police misconduct.
Manhattan prosecutors, under pressure for not pursuing charges earlier, made a series of gambles.
First, they proceeded with a trial based on only two victims, who accused him of sexually assaulting them but also admitted to having consensual sex with him at other times — a combination that many experts say is too messy to win convictions . To prove their case against Mr. Weinstein, who denies all allegations of non-consensual sex, the prosecutors had little concrete evidence.
So to persuade the jury, the lawyers turned to a controversial strategy that would ultimately lead to the conviction’s undoing. They put additional women with accounts of abuse by Mr. Weinstein — so-called Molineux witnesses — on the stand to establish a pattern of predation. The decision seemed apt for the moment: In a legal echo of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Weinstein was forced to face a chorus of testimony from multiple women.
The women’s testimony was searing, and when Mr. Weinstein was convicted in 2020, and then sentenced to 23 years in prison, it looked like the prosecutors had expanded the possibilities for holding sex offenders accountable.
“I did it for all of us,” Dawn Dunning , who served as a supporting witness in the trial, said in an interview afterward. “I did it for the women who couldn’t testify. I couldn’t not do it.”
But the move also risked violating a cardinal rule of criminal trials: Defendants must be judged only on the acts they are being charged with.
That became the main basis for Mr. Weinstein’s repeated appeals of his conviction. For years, his lawyers have argued that his trial was fundamentally unfair, because it included witnesses who fell outside the scope of the charges. In addition to the alleged sexual assault victims, prosecutors brought in character witnesses who portrayed Mr. Weinstein as a capricious, cruel figure.
In 2022, a New York appeals court dismissed those concerns and upheld his conviction, after a vigorous debate by the judges. They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends,” but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.”
This February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s latest and final appeal, the proceedings did not garner much attention . But they felt quietly dramatic: Seven of the state’s highest judges, four of them women, were debating whether the man whose alleged offenses formed the cornerstone of the #MeToo movement had been treated fairly in court.
Today the court decided, with a majority that included three female judges, to throw out the conviction and order a new trial. Mr. Weinstein remains convicted in California and will be moved to prison there.
“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the judges wrote in their decision on Thursday.
“No person accused of illegality may be judged on proof of uncharged crimes that serve only to establish the accused’s propensity for criminal behavior,” the opinion continued.
That the decision was only 4-3 is more of the same problem that led to this result: judges bending over backward to punish Weinstein for being a despicable human being. Alas, that’s not against the law.
Given that Weinstein is 72 and has a long sentence waiting for him in California—and that prosecutors thought this gambit was the only way to convict him in New York—it may well be prudent to simply let him rot away there.
New York’s highest court overturned a conviction on Thursday that tested how #MeToo cases could be tried.
New York’s highest court tossed out the 2020 sex crime convictions of Harvey Weinstein in a reversal of a case that ignited the #MeToo movement.
In a major speech, France’s president returned to a familiar theme, warning that “Our Europe is mortal” if it does not become more self-sufficient.
The Biden administration has expressed growing alarm that efforts to fight climate change could falter unless the electric grids are quickly expanded.
Venice is trying to mitigate overtourism with a small fee on busy days. City leaders hope it will make visitors more aware of the city’s fragility.