U.S., Israel quiet on strike against Iran

In today’s edition … Biden finally weighs in on campus protests ... Trump aide Hope Hicks expected as witness in Trump hush money case.

Michael Cohen and Melissa McCarthy are just two of the famous names in this week's News Quiz. How much can you remember about the news from the past week? Try to get a perfect score!

The iPhone maker saw sales of its flagship mobile device drop, but had a positive outlook for the future.

Over 2,000 anti-Israel agitators have been arrested at college campuses across the United States since demonstrations began at Columbia on April 17 with students erecting a tent encampment.

More Americans trust former President Donald Trump than President Joe Biden to handle the Israel-Hamas war, though few call it critical in their choice of a candidate.

Portland police arrested at least 30 anti-Israel agitators after they re-occupied the library at Portland State University hours after it was first cleared out by law enforcement.

Nearly seven years after my mother's death, watching an abandoned bird find a new family in my Oregon neighborhood reminded me there's courage in moving forward.

Cities are frustrated by 911 calls from senior facilities to help residents off the floor or toilet. Some are now charging fees, but facilities keep calling.

Trump has had two gag order violation hearings in a week

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student speaks out about standing up for American flag while being pelted with objects from "Marxist" mob.

Like many rural counties, Merced is losing deputies to jurisdictions that pay more. The shortage is so dire, Sheriff Vern Warnke is sometimes the only one available to respond to calls for help.

Police officers cannot detain someone on the street just because that person acts furtively to avoid contact with them, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

Law enforcement fired 'less-lethal' rounds as the UCLA encampment was cleared, and protesters say they 'connected with heads and hands.'

"The Mandalorian," "Ahsoka" and 25 years of spinoffs show the stealth power of George Lucas' 1999 prequel, which, for all its controversy, laid the groundwork.

'Long Island' is especially rich because its characters are haunted by actions at the heart-twisting conclusion of the preceding novel, 'Brooklyn.'

RFK Jr., who recently qualified for the California ballot as a member of the American Independent Party, could draw votes from Biden and Trump.

'Blood at the Root,' LaDarrion Williams' first novel in a three-book deal — a series that centers on a Black boy in a YA fantasy saga — is the kind of fiction he wishes existed when he was a kid.

A cascade of decisions that Folt made this spring around USC’s commencement and Israel-Hamas war-related protests inflamed tensions and opened wounds, presenting the most significant test of her tenure.

Is an endless supply of student loans pushing up tuition? Readers discuss reasons behind higher college costs.

How much do you remember from our stories about Zendaya's new movie, the NFL draft and what's returning to Yosemite National Park?

‘The Old Oak,’ said to be the 87-year-old social realist’s final film, is a fittingly plainspoken yet poignant last act.

His comments sent me into a spiral. I was no longer sure of myself. I turned to friends to get their thoughts: What kind of salad was I?

Trump shows contempt for the rule of law and talks like a dictator. How is this spectacle supposed to woo undecided voters?

Facing a worsening housing crisis, the Hawaii Legislature overwhelmingly passed a measure that allows counties to phase out short-term rentals. Maui almost immediately announced efforts to transition vacation rental apartments into long-term housing.

Brightline West chooses Siemens Mobility as its preferred bidder to build a fleet of high-speed rail trains that will reach speeds of 220 mph.

'This is a cruel, vicious person who should not be let near dogs or voters,' says a reader in response to Kristi Noem killing her dog.

What are those blue things washing up on Southern California beaches? Velella velella, of course. Also known as by-the-wind sailors. They're kind of like jellyfish.

The money will be used to settle claims between the Automated People Mover contractor and Los Angeles International Airport.

The stand-up comic directs and stars in “Unfrosted,” a brand biopic spoof that includes Jim Gaffigan, Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy and Hugh Grant.

The chilling documentary “The Sixth” immerses us in the sensations and shock of Jan. 6, 2021. Civics lessons rarely come this disturbing or this convincing.

Students from the UNC-Chapel Hill fraternity Pi Kappa Phi protected the American flag from anti-Israel protesters and later joined Fox News primetime.

A new rom-com starring Anne Hathaway on Amazon Prime Video has a divorced mom and a Harry Styles-esque pop star meet at Coachella. Could it happen in real life?

The folk singer made her name with stripped-down recordings but has now found a bigger approach on “Here in the Pitch.” It wasn’t an easy road to get there.

The NBA is expected to give a slice of its TV package to Amazon's Prime Video, while league stalwart TNT could be left off the roster, in a blow to Warner Bros. Discovery.

College administrators hope that the end of the school year will diminish the protests, but the activists are making plans for the summer and beyond.

Ahead of the Met Gala, here is everything you need to know about the biggest night in fashion, including how to stream it, the theme and the guest list.

Just as women's reproductive rights are being restricted, a flurry of troubling reports about 'Ozempic babies,' egg freezing and more underscore the male bias in our healthcare system.

Investigators say a serial killer kept tokens of his victims in his home, including skulls, government IDs and notebooks that detailed his cruel acts against his female victims.

Where pro-Palestinian protesters on campuses across the country, from Columbia to UCLA, have been arrested, with some facing tear gas and stun grenades.

Workers have begun dismantling the largest dam on the Klamath River. Indigenous activists are celebrating a milestone in restoring a free-flowing river.

Journalists are being expelled, investigated and raided by the Modi government.

'At the cost of some bad publicity, USC's prudent actions have avoided possible calamity,' says a reader.

A forensic analyst who works for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will resume testimony Friday in former President Donald Trump's trial.

Courtesy of Donald Trump, America continues its journey into the political twilight zone.At an April 25 Supreme Court hearing, Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer was asked by Justice Sonya Sotomayor, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” To which Sauer responded, “It would depend on the hypothetical. We can see that could well be an official act.”Sotomayor emphasized that this hypothetical act would be done for personal reasons, not in furtherance of an official responsibility, nor to protect the country from a terrorist. “Immunity says even if you did it for personal gain, we won’t hold you responsible,” she said. And that is precisely what Trump’s legal team is arguing for: immunity even for acts of personal gain, including assassinating a political opponent. (For good measure, Sauer argued that a president would have immunity if he ordered the military to stage a coup or sold military secrets to a foreign adversary.)That is no surprise. In January, Sauer argued at an appeals-court hearing that a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and not face prosecution unless he were impeached and convicted first. (Trump lost the appeal unanimously.)[David Hume Kennerly: The danger of a small act of cowardice]“If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is for turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during the April 25 hearing.This raises the question: Would Trump ever actually try such a thing? And if he did, would the Republican Party stand with him?The answer to the first question is of course unknowable today, probably even to Trump, whose mental state seems more and more capricious and deranged. He is no Vladimir Putin, capable of coldly organizing hit jobs.All the same, in his 2:24 p.m. tweet on January 6, 2021, Trump spurred on an already violent mob that sought to hang Vice President Mike Pence. (Immediately after his tweet, the crowds both inside and outside the Capitol violently surged forward.)The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath that she recalls former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone saying to then–Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be effing hung.” And Meadows responded with something to the effect of, “You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”According to the January 6 committee’s report, several other White House aides also believed Trump’s tweet was an effort to inflame the mob. “It was essentially giving the green light to these people,” according to then–Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews.Additionally, in a recent CNN interview, former Attorney General Bill Barr—who’d previously said that Trump has gone “off the rails,” is“manic and unreasonable,” and has demonstrated “erratic personal behavior”—admitted that Trump would “lose his temper” and talk about people who should be executed. “I doubt he would have actually carried it out,” Barr said with a nervous laugh. “But he would say that on other occasions?” the anchor Kaitlan Collins asked. “The president, I think people sometimes took him too literally,” Barr responded.Perhaps Barr had the January 6 mob in mind.So why would we assume that Trump—a man of sociopathic tendencies, who appears unable to even think in moral terms, who inflamed a violent mob to try to hang his vice president—would automatically recoil from having a political opponent assassinated if the opportunity presented itself?In other words, although it may not be likely that Trump would order a political assassination—particularly if the Supreme Court rules that, as president, Trump would not have immunity—it is still possible. And that, in turn, raises another possibility, and maybe even a probability: Much of the Republican Party, including white evangelicals and fundamentalists, would line up in support of Trump even if he did order the assassination of a political opponent. If you don’t think so, you’re simply not familiar enough with the MAGA mind. You’re not listening closely enough to what Trump is saying to his supporters, and what they’re saying to one another.It’s easy to anticipate just how their argument would unfold: first, deny that any amount of evidence could be amassed to prove that Trump tried to assassinate anyone; second, dismiss the allegations because they are being made by “haters” who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome; third, point the finger at the “Biden crime family,” whose corruptions far exceed what we see from Trump and his kin; and fourth, insist that even if the former president did order the assassination of a political opponent, it’s essential that Trump retain the presidency, because his absence would lead to dystopia. Unfortunately, for the sake of America, some people must perish. Or so Trump supporters would say.[Isaac Arnsdorf: Trump has transformed the GOP all the way down]Context is important here. MAGA world has stood with Trump—in fact, its support for him has deepened—through everything he has done, including encouraging the January 6 mob to kill his vice president and being found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming a woman. And those are just a fraction of his legal and moral transgressions. Yet Republicans have never been close to taking the exit ramp away from the former president. The closer we get to November’s election, the more emphatically they will defend him. The identity of MAGA world has fused with Trump’s; to turn on him would be to turn on themselves. They won’t admit to themselves, and they certainly won’t admit to others, the sheer expanse of Trump’s degeneracy. To do so would be self-indicting; it would cause enormous cognitive dissonance. They made a Faustian bargain, and they’re not about to break it. They will follow him anywhere he goes.Where Trump might go in a second term is of course a matter of speculation. But if his actions track at all with his last months in office, with his rhetoric since his defeat, and with the actions his lawyers are saying their client might be legally immune for committing, we are heading to an exceedingly dark and dangerous place. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Jessica Gunning as “Martha” in Baby Reindeer. | Ed Miller/Netflix With the Baby Reindeer fallout, the paradox of true crime as entertainment strikes again. As a medium, autofiction has long been a source of controversy, but rarely has an autobiographical work of fiction come with as many built-in issues as Netflix’s hit Baby Reindeer. The show, a seven-episode limited series from British comedian Richard Gadd, chronicles Gadd’s history of allegedly being stalked for years by an older woman, as well as his experience of allegedly being sexually assaulted by a male mentor. The show is a breakout word-of-mouth phenomenon, drawing more than 13 million viewers in its first week of release and over 22 million in its second. Audiences and critics have praised the series for its wild twists and comedic yet vulnerable glimpses into a difficult story. Yet the real draw for many viewers seems to be less about Gadd’s experience and more about the mystery afforded by his extremely transparent depictions of other characters — particularly Gadd’s stalker. Gadd and his fellow cast members have quickly tried to staunch the public reaction, which has now escalated to doxing and harassing private citizens believed to be the real perpetrators behind the show’s events. The series’ grim real-life side effect seems to be both an epic case of viewers missing the point (don’t stalk people!) and an entirely predictable outcome based on Gadd’s treatment of the story. Should he have known better, or should we? Baby Reindeer combines two narratives of extreme stalking and sexual assault Baby Reindeer combines two different autobiographical plays that Gadd, an acclaimed comedian, actor, and playwright, wrote and premiered to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Both shows depicted deeply disturbing events in Gadd’s life through a lens of intentional overexposure. The first, 2016’s Monkey See Monkey Do, was similar to Hannah Gatsby’s Nanette in that it subverted audience expectations for comedy and instead treated them to a harrowing confessional. Ultimately revealing the details of a long-hidden sexual assault, Gadd traces his subsequent trauma through an onstage psychological meltdown accompanied by a visceral sensory overload. The second, 2019’s Baby Reindeer, forms the backbone of the Netflix show. In the show, Gadd plays a version of himself named Donny. The fictional Donny has a random encounter with frumpy, middle-aged “Martha,” a patron at a bar similar to the one where Gadd once worked. This brief interaction allegedly led to an intense four-year period of stalking in which Gadd claims she sent him exactly 41,071 emails, 106 pages of letters, 744 tweets, and a staggering 350 hours of voicemails. Over the course of the show, Gadd digs into her past and learns he isn’t her first victim — she has a documented criminal record for stalking at least two previous families. The Netflix adaptation of the two storylines has plenty to say about criminal justice, mental health, and gender. Gadd struggles to get the police to take Martha’s stalking seriously, even as he battles his own past history of trauma and abuse at the hands of his industry mentor. Gadd’s social awkwardness and PTSD emerge alongside a lack of systemic support for male victims of sexual assault. These are all complicated themes. But the main appeal, at least for the most active audiences, seems to be the real-life mystery of it all: Who are the real people Gadd based his story on? Gadd’s clues about his alleged sexual assault were somewhat oblique, but led to difficulty for one prominent British theatre director who wound up contacting the police after fans began harassing him, convinced he was the sexual predator being depicted in the show. Gadd has since been working overtime to clear the man’s name, insisting that he’s not the perpetrator. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be,” he posted in an Instagram story. “That’s not the point of the show.” Things with the woman Martha is based on are perhaps even more complicated. In an interview with GQ, published shortly after the show’s April 11 release, Gadd claimed he’d made his stalker an unrecognizable character. “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself,” he said. It’s reasonable to assume Gadd knew whereof he spoke. After all, in Baby Reindeer, he portrays his stalker as a classic sexist and anti-fat stereotype: the lonely, socially awkward middle-aged woman with higher weight who channels her unhappiness into obsession. The first thing he tells us about her, before we’ve even met her, is that “I felt sorry for her.” It’s a trope we’ve seen countless times before from Misery to Matilda; for Gadd’s stalker to fit so easily into it, you’d think that his fictional depiction of her is informed less by reality and more by cheap Hollywood distortion. Yet Gadd seems to have left so many clear identifying details in the series about the woman Martha appears to be based on — particularly the one about her previous criminal history — that audiences turned web sleuths were easily able to identify her, journalists were able to track her down and interview her, multiple British and US tabloids doxed her, and she’s now considering suing Netflix. Media coverage of the frenzy has included a fair degree of shock and skepticism. Even the Daily Mail, never a stalwart champion of ethics, pointed out that several of the details of the show were all but taken verbatim from the stalker’s real history, and questioned “how such a deft storyteller could not have foreseen the Netflix effect which amplifies the fall-out that comes from blurring fact and fiction.” While the Daily Mail declined to out the woman, it did publish a lengthy interview with one of her previous stalking victims, Laura Wray, a woman who claimed Martha’s real-life counterpart harassed her for over five years, culminating in death threats and a false report to have her family investigated for child abuse. Wray’s story was very similar to Gadd’s initial impression of his stalker — they each felt sorry for her and engaged with her because they pitied her. And even Wray, while discussing how powerful she found the validation Baby Reindeer offered to stalking victims like herself, also marveled that the resemblance between Martha and her real-life counterpart was so “uncanny.” “It must have occurred to him that people were bound to speculate on who Martha is — and whether she’s done this to anyone else,” she said. “Martha” may be just as much a victim as Gadd himself Baby Reindeer argues that both Gadd and “Martha” are victims. “I can’t emphasize enough how much of a victim she is in all this,” Gadd told the Independent in 2019, in a profile pegged to the original stage production of Baby Reindeer. Gadd went on to stress that she was mentally unwell and that mental health support was a major theme of the play. It’s perhaps worth asking, then, why he chose to further victimize her through a depiction of her — in an internationally distributed Netflix series, no less — that apparently hewed so close to real life that it enabled her not only to recognize herself but for her other stalking victims to recognize her as well. After all, while Gadd can be forgiven for sticking close to his real life in the play, he had nearly five years to fudge the details and make it less likely that people would discover who she was. That he failed to do so could be seen as a form of targeted revenge. There’s a real and obvious cruelty in the strength of the resemblance between the pair; the woman Martha is allegedly based on has since protested that she’s not as unattractive as her double (played by Jessica Gunning), and that of the two of them, she’s the real victim. Indeed, it feels more than a little disingenuous that Gadd became mutually obsessed with her to the point of writing a hit play about her and then funneling that success into even greater heights of fame. To be fair, Gadd is by no means the first creator to confront the slippery ethics around true crime. Subjects from Amanda Knox to Vili Fualaau and the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims have spoken out about the ways that fictionalized versions of their reality have revictimized them. It could also be the case that Gadd simply underestimated the power of the internet, the power of fandom, and the lure of a real-life puzzle. Many modern fans view media, even autobiographical media, as interactive texts, games they get to play, full of mysteries they have to solve — even if the “mystery” involves real life. For some Baby Reindeer fans, the sleuthing was of the traditional variety; fans analyzed the contents of the fictional Martha’s emails and found Easter eggs referencing the TV show Lost. But other fans took things further; they seemed to be motivated by the part of Baby Reindeer where Gadd’s character turns the tables and begins digging up dirt on his own stalker. As of May 2, one Facebook account claiming to be “Martha’s” doppelgänger has more than 12,000 followers, and what seems to be her apparently inactive Twitter account has over 13,000. Whether or not Gadd anticipated the show’s runaway success, it seems clear that he could have at least anticipated that if he couldn’t resist Googling his stalker, neither could anyone else.

We look into polling data that answers the age-old question: What is your favorite genre of music, and why is it classic rock?

The booming labor market is expected to extend a remarkable milestone in April, matching the last longest period of low unemployment on record.

Early voting begins May 3, with several competitive House races on the ballot.