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Trump cancels news conference to release report on 2020 election

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(Reuters) – Former U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he had canceled a press conference scheduled for next week to release a report into the 2020 election in Georgia, saying his attorneys would put his arguments in court filings instead.

Trump said earlier this week that he would hold the press conference on Monday to release a detailed, 100-page report into what he described as “election fraud” in the state of Georgia during the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

He has been charged in Georgia and in federal court with attempting to overturn those election results.

“Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings,” Trump said on Truth Social.

Therefore, he added, the news conference was no longer necessary.

Since his defeat in 2020, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the election was marred by widespread fraud. Those claims have been rejected by courts, state reviews and members of his own administration.

(Reporting by Eric Beech and Dan Whitcomb)

How the Drama of ‘The Blind Side’ Helped Sports Fans Look Past Questions

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Of course America loved “The Blind Side,” the 2009 movie about a homeless and hapless Black teenager rescued from a bleak future by a wealthy, white family. It was based on the true story of the Tuohy family, led by Sean and Leigh Anne, who took the future N.F.L. player Michael Oher into their home and raised him proudly as he made it to college and beyond.

It’s the type of story we’re used to in sports, one that undergirds our beliefs about sport’s power to create lifelong bonds, help its participants overcome hardships, and build character. It’s also a simplified rendering of race in America, one that hinges on the trope that white people can be magically redeemed by coming to the aid of a Black character.

Audiences sucked it up. The film took in over $300 million and Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, self-possessed belle of the New South.

But “The Blind Side,” based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, renders a complicated reality in the most digestible format. This week, surprising news of a lawsuit filed by Oher against the Tuohys spurred many to reconsider the movie, searching for answers to questions raised by the legal claim and obscured by the film’s comfortable, tidy narrative.

Oher is suing the couple for a full accounting of their relationship. He claims that when he thought he was being adopted at 18, the Tuohys urged him to sign a conservatorship that gave them control to enter into contracts on his behalf. He says that the familial bond, warmly portrayed in the movie, was a lie and that the Tuohys enriched themselves at his expense.

The Tuohys have defended their actions, arguing in a statement that the conservatorship was a legal necessity so Oher could play football at the University of Mississippi without jeopardizing his eligibility.

In a story with at least four versions — those of Lewis, the movie studio, Oher and the Tuohys — it’s almost impossible to discern who is telling the truth.

Until this week, I must admit, I had never seen “The Blind Side.” I’d purposefully avoided it. I’m leery of movies that lean on simple racial clichés — a fatigue that began as a child, when so many of my Black heroes died at the end of films so white heroes could live.

News of Oher’s lawsuit convinced me that it was time to plop down on the couch and take in the film, with the benefit of 14 years of hindsight — 14 years in which race and sports have re-emerged as essential platforms for the examination of America’s troubles.

My assumptions were proved correct early in the film, while Oher’s character was taking shape. As the story unfolds, he is shown as a lost cause before meeting the Tuohys and attending a well-to-do Christian school in Memphis. The film portrays him in easy terms: as a body, first and foremost — a gargantuan Black teen whose I.Q., we are told, is low, and who has no idea whatsoever about how life operates in worlds that are not swamped in poverty and despair.

The Oher of the film, particularly early on, has little agency and no real dreams of his own. When I saw that, it felt like a gut punch. “What?” I muttered. “There’s no way this characterization is true.”

The Baltimore Ravens selected Oher in the first round of the 2009 N.F.L. draft. No one makes it that far in sports without a foundation of years of motivation and training, which gives credence to Oher’s long-held criticism of his portrayal in the film. He is an intelligent person, Oher has said, again and again, and he was a skilled football player well before meeting the Tuohys.

Not someone who needed the Tuohys’ young, pint-size son, Sean Jr., to teach him the game in the easiest of terms — by using bottles of condiments to show formations and plays. We watch Sean Jr. at a park, delighting in putting a clueless Oher through workouts.

The movie also shows the Tuohys using sports as a vehicle for Oher to develop confidence, enter a world of prestige and riches — and eventually to attend Ole Miss, the couple’s alma mater, where Sean Tuohy once starred in basketball.

Oher protects Leigh Anne Tuohy when they dare to go to the neighborhoods where he’d grown up — “That horrible part of town,” she says. He saves Sean Jr.’s life when the two are in a car crash by using his massive arm to shield the young boy from the force of an airbag. When Oher struggles on the practice field as he learns the game, Leigh Anne Tuohy bounds from the sidelines and drills him with firm instruction: He must shield the quarterback the same way he guarded her and her son.

“Protect the family,” she insists.

A lesson delivered to Oher by a feisty white woman as if he were a first-grader (or a servant) is a turning point. Oher begins transforming from a football neophyte raised on the streets into an offensive lineman with the strength of Zeus, the nimbleness of Mikhail Baryshnikov and the size of an upright piano.

Soon, we watch him play in a game, enduring aggressive and racist taunting from an opponent who initially has his way with an inexperienced rival.

Suddenly, Oher snaps. He does not just block the opposing player: Enraged, Oher lifts him and drives him across the field and over a fence.

“Where were you taking him, Mike?” his coach asks as Oher stands on the sidelines.

“To the bus,” Oher deadpans, his tone innocent and childlike. “It was time for him to go home.”

By the film’s end, the transformation is complete. We learn that under the watch of a wealthy white family, Oher’s I.Q. has improved to an average level! We see him become a high school champion! We watch a parade of coaches — real coaches, playing themselves in the film — fawn over Oher as they try to persuade him to suit up for their school.

It is hard to figure out, by the movie’s telling, Oher’s motivation, or his savvy, because he continues to be portrayed as a prop — quiet, docile, a young man who, for the most part, does as his newfound family says. This, by the way, makes it hard to even figure out, all these years later, the truth of his lawsuit.

What we do see in the movie is that he shines in college and the pros. There he is in the N.F.L., in his Baltimore Ravens gear. He had made it to the sports Promised Land and through it all, the Tuohy family was at his side.

This film had everything.

The dumbed-down trope about race and class in America that Hollywood has always peddled.

The simplified narrative that uncritically hails sport and its purity, the way it can change lives, always for the better, by shaping diamonds in the rough into jewels. The shadowy side of sports — the cheating, the lies, the broken promises, which, in this legal tussle, could be coming from either side — never encroach on the fairy tale.

Trump’s Lawyers Seek April 2026 Start to Jan. 6 Trial

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Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Thursday to reject the government’s proposal to take Mr. Trump to trial in early January on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election and to instead push back the proceeding until April 2026 — nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election.

The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed because of the historic nature of the case and the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through — as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a filing to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case.

In a bit of legal showmanship, Gregory M. Singer, the lawyer who wrote the brief, included a graph that showed how 11.5 million pages of documents stacked atop one another would result in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.”

That, Mr. Singer pointed out, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”

“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” Mr. Singer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”

Mr. Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington — a strategy he has pursued in all of the criminal cases he is facing — followed an equally ambitious proposal made last week by prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to get the case in front of a jury by the first week of 2024.

Now that Mr. Trump has been indicted four times in four separate cases — most recently, on Monday in Fulton County, Ga. — prosecutors have started jockeying with one another to determine when the trials will be held. Complicating matters, Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule is set to pick up significantly this winter and spring with a series of primary elections just as he will be obliged to be in various courthouses in various cities as a criminal defendant.

The judge in the other federal case that Mr. Trump is facing — one in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after he left office — has slated the matter to go to trial on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.

On Wednesday, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, proposed starting the sprawling trial of Mr. Trump and 18 others on charges of tampering with Georgia’s state election on March 4.

And that was only three weeks before the March 25 start date for Mr. Trump’s fourth trial — one that will take place in Manhattan on charges related to hush money payments made to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.

If the prosecutors all get their way — and there is no assurance they will — Mr. Trump could be on trial more or less nonstop, with a few weeks’ hiatus here and there, from early January through perhaps mid-June at a time when his campaign advisers will surely want him out on the trail holding rallies and meeting with voters.

Some of the former president’s advisers have made no secret of the fact that he is looking to win the next election as a way to try to solve his legal problems. If Mr. Trump, who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push the federal trials until after the election and prevail, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matter altogether.

To that end, his lawyers have sought various ways to slow prosecutors in their race to get to trial and have tried to delay the proceedings where they can.

Last month, for example, they asked the judge in the documents case, Aileen M. Cannon, to postpone that trial indefinitely, arguing that it should not begin until all “substantive motions” in the case had been presented and decided. At a subsequent hearing, they told Judge Cannon that she should push back the trial until after the 2024 election because, among other reasons, Mr. Trump could never get a fair jury in the maelstrom of news media attention surrounding the race.

The lawyers tried that gambit again on Thursday with Judge Chutkan.

Mr. Singer noted in his filing that not only were the discovery materials expansive, but the case also involved several novel aspects that made it, as he put it, “terra incognita.”

“No person in the history of our country has ever been charged with conspiracies related to the Electoral Count Act,” he wrote, referring to the post-Civil War era law that governs the counting of electors to the Electoral College.

“No president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office,” he continued. “No major party presidential candidate has ever been charged while in the middle of a campaign — and certainly not by a Justice Department serving his opponent.”

Mr. Singer also mentioned Mr. Trump’s increasingly crowded legal calendar, noting that the government’s proposal to go to trial in January “presents numerous conflicts” with what he genially described as “other pending matters.”

As an example, Mr. Singer pointed out that the judge in the Florida-based classified documents case has scheduled a pretrial hearing for Dec. 11 — the same day the special counsel’s office has proposed starting jury selection in the Washington-based election interference case.

“President Trump must prepare for each of these trials in the coming months,” Mr. Singer wrote. “All are independently complex and will require substantial work to defend. Several will likely require President Trump’s presence at some or all trial proceedings.”

North Koreans Are Starved and Forced to Work, U.N. Hears

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The United Nations Security Council on Thursday took up North Korea’s human rights record for the first time in six years, with officials painting a grim picture of extreme hunger, forced labor and medicine shortages in the country.

The United States, which holds the rotating monthly presidency of the council, had sought the meeting along with Albania and Japan.

In addition to reports from U.N. officials, delegates at the meeting heard testimony from Ilhyeok Kim, a North Korean who had fled with his family to South Korea. He described being forced to work as a child and growing up under a “reign of fear.”

“The government turns our blood and sweat into a luxurious life for the leadership and missiles that blast our hard work into the sky,” he said.

Predictably, news of the U.N. meeting did not go down well in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, where the government on Tuesday criticized the American-led discussion as “despicable,” saying that the only purpose of the meeting was to help Washington achieve its geopolitical goals.

The discussion also emphasized the current divides among world powers. The Russian delegate denounced the meeting, calling it “propaganda,” and China’s representative accused the council of overstepping its purview.

Those comments contrasted with the dire situation outlined by U.N. officials. Volker Türk, the bloc’s high commissioner for human rights, said that policies introduced by Pyongyang ostensibly to contain the spread of Covid-19 had grown ever more extensive and repressive, even as cases had waned.

Rarely had North Korea “been more painfully closed to the outside world than it is today,” Mr. Türk said, adding that North Koreans were becoming “increasingly desperate,” and that fears of state surveillance, arrest and interrogation had increased.

As economic conditions worsened, Mr. Türk said, forced labor for little or no pay — including putting children to work in some cases — was used to maintain key sectors of the economy. He said that many rights violations stemmed directly from the country’s militarization.

“The widespread use of forced labor — including labor in political prison camps, forced use of schoolchildren to collect harvests, the requirement for families to undertake labor and provide a quota of goods to the government, and confiscation of wages from overseas workers — all support the military apparatus of the state and its ability to build weapons,” he said.

He noted that while North Koreans had suffered poverty and repression before, “currently they appear to be suffering both.”

“Given the limits of state-run economic institutions,” he added, “many people appear to be facing extreme hunger as well as acute shortages of medication.”

Elizabeth Salmón, a Peruvian legal scholar and the U.N.’s special rapporteur on rights in North Korea, said women and girls in the country had been detained in inhumane conditions and subjected to torture, forced labor and gender-based violence. Female escapees who have been forcibly repatriated were subjected to invasive body searches, she said.

“The preparation for any possible peacemaking process needs to include women as decision makers, and this process needs to start now,” she added.

While many Western countries at the meeting said that they were appalled by the allegations of abuse, Russia and China took aim at the council instead.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, called the meeting a “provocation” and “a shameless attempt” by the United States and other Western countries “to use the council to advance their own self-serving politicized agenda.”

Geng Shuang, the Chinese ambassador to the U.N., took a different tack, arguing that human rights issues were beyond the scope of the council’s mission because the conditions in North Korea did not “pose a threat to international peace and security.”

But Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. envoy, said that she was inspired by Mr. Kim’s bravery and that Thursday’s meeting was long overdue.

“We must give voice to the voiceless,” she said.

Despite the vivid portrayals of the suffering in North Korea, there was no agreement to take any action and no mention of Pvt. Travis T. King, the American soldier who fled across the inter-Korean border into North Korea in July.

In the Vermont Woods, a Loftier Place for Leaf-Peeping

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The first cabin constructed in Kerlingarfjöll, a mountain range in central Iceland bracketed by two glaciers and threaded with geothermal steam, was completed in 1937 and gave hikers a launchpad from which to wander the otherworldly landscape. Then, in the ’60s, a summer ski school and hostel operated on its slopes. The school is long gone, but the adventuring spirit remains, and now intrepid travelers have a sophisticated new place to stay. The hospitality company Blue Lagoon Family — responsible for the first luxury hotel at Iceland’s famed Blue Lagoon — recently debuted Highland Base, a collection of accommodations that include that original cabin, seven salvaged rustic A-frames, six stand-alone lodges and a hotel with 46 rooms and two suites with their own hot tubs on private terraces. Picture windows in all of the rooms and lodges offer views of the surrounding terrain, which can be explored on foot in the summer and by snowmobile in winter. The hotel, about a three-hour drive from Reykjavík, will be open year round, though in the colder months visitors must hire a professional driver in a four-wheel-drive super jeep to reach the property, thanks to the unpaved highland roads. Once there, guests will find underground passageways connecting the hotel with the restaurant and thermal baths (scheduled to open this winter) to help them stay warm in between expeditions. Rooms from $450 a night, highlandbase.is.

Drink This

For his latest act, the chef and artist Gerardo Gonzalez has steeped and brewed New York City into a digestif. At his exhibition Into an Isle, opening on Aug. 23 at the Ace Hotel New York, Gonzalez will present three batches of amaro, an Italian liqueur infused with citrus, spices and a mixture of herbs. Each of Gonzalez’s bottles is made with plants from one of three areas around the city: Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, Grand Concourse and Williamsbridge Oval park in the Bronx and a corridor of East Ninth Street in the East Village of Manhattan. Gonzalez biked over 350 miles through the city during the month of July, collecting edible material for his infusions, including arugula, mulberry leaves and wild mugwort. “The whole purpose was to synthesize a flavor based on my experience at each site,” says Gonzalez. Before his residency at the Ace, Gonzalez was the chef of El Rey and Lalito in Manhattan and, most recently, part of the culinary events team at Grand Cayman’s Palm Heights hotel. At the opening reception for the exhibition, attendees will be able to sample each amaro and view Gonzalez’s installation of the three liqueurs, displayed in large Italian glass fermentation bottles perched on podiums alongside examples of the vegetation he used. Gonzalez has also transcribed his bike routes on the walls of the exhibit in pencil. Opening reception Aug. 23, 7 to 9 p.m. at the Ace Hotel New York, acehotel.com.

Last week in Copenhagen, Denmark, members of the fashion crowd were spotted wearing cloudlike dresses, trending trainers and street-sweeping trench coats to see the spring 2024 runway shows from Nordic designers. Copenhagen Fashion Week has distinguished itself from other fashion events around the world by establishing a set of Minimum Sustainability Standards: Among other requirements, 50 percent of the materials from each collection must meet globally recognized sustainability certifications or be made from any of a list of preferred or reused materials; unsold clothing or samples should be preserved; and the sets produced for each show should incur zero waste. The Danish designer Amalie Røge Hove kicked off the shows at the Design Museum with a collection of knitwear from her label A. Roege Hove. Woven in Italy, each garment is created through a process that tries to eliminate all excess fabric, producing only exact quantities. In the Finland room of the Radisson Blu Hotel, the Helsinki-based designer Ervin Latimer presented the latest from his brand Latimmier: reconstructed suits and button-down shirts influenced by queer ballroom culture and made to inspire various expressions of masculinity. “We use as much local material production and dyeing as we can, such as vegetable tanned leathers and naturally dyed silks and cottons,” Latimer says. And another environmentally minded young designer, the Copenhagen-based Nicklas Skovgaard, showcased a series of one-of-a-kind garments, such as a high-neck, broad-shouldered coat made from a brushed wool and mohair textile. “All of the hand-woven fabrications are designed, developed and woven locally in our studio in Østerbro,” Skovgaard says.

Visit This

Sixty years after the death of the Surrealist French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, the house that was his refuge has been saved for good. Cocteau bought the house in the small town of Milly-la-Forêt, 31 miles west of Paris, with his lover, the actor Jean Marais, in 1947. Working with his friend the French interior designer Madeleine Castaing, he decorated it with set pieces from his plays and art by Man Ray, Modigliani, Picasso and Warhol. In his study, the side table and a cork bulletin board were covered with photographs, drawings and various souvenirs, among them a bust of Lord Byron, a signed photograph of Orson Welles as Othello and a drawing of Charles Baudelaire by Manet. The walls were covered in leopard-print fabric. Cocteau spent the last 17 years of his life here, “learning about the magnificent stubbornness of the vegetal kingdom,” as he wrote to a friend, in the gardens he created. After his death in 1963, his adopted son preserved the house and the contents of its rooms as they were. The building was further restored by the foundation of Pierre Bergé, the former president of Yves Saint Laurent, who reopened it to the public in 2010. When Bergé died, the house’s future was in doubt. Ultimately, it was purchased by the Île-de-France Regional Council in 2019. Covid closures and budgetary constraints created further uncertainty about whether it would survive but, following a trial reopening in 2022, it was announced this year that the houses’s seasonal opening and cultural programs would officially be made permanent. Open this year until Oct. 29, 2023, Thursday through Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., maisonjeancocteau.com.

Perch Here

Twin Farms, the luxury resort set on 300 thickly wooded acres in Barnard, Vt., plans to open eight new tree houses this fall, in time for its 30th anniversary. To access the lofty accommodations — each one sleeps two — guests will traverse a wooden bridge suspended 20 feet in the air. Inside, a neutral palette and oversize windows are meant to direct all attention outdoors. The décor includes dining tables made by local master craftspeople, and decorative objects like bread boards, or wooden bowls from the Vermont-based artist Andrew Pearce, that are seconds — slightly flawed and one-of-a-kind. Those who stay in the tree houses will have access to all of Twin Farms’s activities (which include picnicking, hiking and kayaking) in addition to their own exclusive options: From an Adirondack chair on the deck or a soaking tub next to a window, guests can listen for the 250-odd species of warblers that make their homes in the surrounding woods. From $3,500 a night, all inclusive, twinfarms.com.

Texas woman accused of threatening to kill judge overseeing Trump election case and a congresswoman

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HOUSTON (AP) — A Texas woman was arrested and has been charged with threatening to kill the federal judge overseeing the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Washington and a member of Congress.

Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, called the federal courthouse in Washington and left the threatening message — using a racist term for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — on Aug. 5, court records show. Investigators traced her phone number and she later admitted to making the threatening call, according to a criminal complaint.

In the call, Shry told the judge, who is overseeing the election conspiracy case against Trump, “You are in our sights, we want to kill you,” the documents said. Prosecutors allege Shry also said, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you,” and she threatened to kill U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat running for mayor of Houston, according to court documents.

A judge earlier this week ordered Shry jailed. Court records show Shry is represented by the Houston public defender’s office, which did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Wednesday.

Trump has publicly assailed Chutkan, a former assistant public defender who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, calling her “highly partisan” and “ VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!” because of her past comments in a separate case overseeing the sentencing of one of the defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Chutkan in a hearing Friday imposed a protective order in the case limiting what evidence handed over by prosecutors the former president and his legal team can publicly disclose. She warned Trump’s lawyers that his defense should be mounted in the courtroom and “not on the internet.”

After Maui’s Wildfire Horror, Residents Search for a Way Forward

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As Vene Chun guided his Hawaiian canoe to shore past tourists learning to surf at one of Maui’s public beaches, his thoughts were a jumble.

He had just come from spreading ashes at sea with a family devastated by the fire that scorched the town of Lahaina farther west. For days, he and his outrigger canoe were right there, too, bringing food, water, whatever survivors needed.

And the surfers? Mr. Chun, 52, stood beside his canoe in a grassy park 20 miles from the ashen disaster wearing a wreath reflecting his Native Hawaiian roots. Somehow, the flopping beginners on longboards made him smile.

“There’s got to be some normalcy,” he said. “We’ve got to move on — and constantly help each other at the same time.”

While the search effort in Lahaina continues, life ticks on in most other parts of Maui, forcing residents to make sense of loss and death alongside life and tourism. On an island of magnificent beauty, where a wildfire as fierce as a blowtorch has left hundreds dead or missing in a redoubt of 19th-century Hawaiian kings, many local residents are crying with friends one moment, working to please vacationers the next.

“It’s super weird,” said Niji Wada, 17, a surf instructor in Kihei, where Mr. Chun keeps his canoe. “We have super close friends whose house burned down.”

Native Hawaiians often talk about the historical trauma of losing their land to colonization, and the problems that come with pink hotel towers and invasive species. There were “two Mauis” even before the fires that seem to have torn out the island’s cultural heart — one for visitors with money, another for workers struggling with a shortage of affordable housing.

But the sudden and near-total destruction of Lahaina, a seaside town of 13,000 people, has sharpened the divide and flummoxed both elected officials and residents whose lives rely on both Maui worlds.

Immediately after the fires, the message sounded clear enough — if you’re not from Maui, stay away. Since then, there has been a push for geographic nuance.

Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii stressed on Monday that only West Maui — Lahaina, along with about a dozen hotels and resorts nearby that were not damaged — should be considered closed to visitors. Other areas to the southeast are still open, he noted.

“It would be catastrophic if no one traveled to the island,” he said.

The disaster’s damage — to families, businesses and psyches — has mostly rippled outward in concentric circles, similar to an earthquake. The epicenter of burned buildings and bodies, which some call ground zero, has been cordoned off like a crime scene. Just outside, where buildings are intact, hundreds of West Maui residents have tried to remain in their homes, stay with neighbors or even camp on the shoreline.

There, electricity, water and internet service were out for days, and it has been difficult to travel in and out for supplies, leaving residents and evacuees to rely heavily on whatever people from unaffected parts of the island can carry in with their cars, trucks or boats.

On Monday, at the home of Archie Kalepa, a former head of Maui County’s ocean safety division, dozens of neighbors and volunteers gathered at the edge of the fire zone to organize donations. Generators, water, snacks and diapers packed the yard, on shelves with superstore-level organization. Under a tarp, a man and a woman taped a neighborhood map onto cardboard to track which homes were damaged, destroyed or still intact.

During a nightly briefing, plans were laid to fix roofs and build a fence to block rancid dust before tropical storms arrive later this week.

Kaala Buenconsejo, one of the community leaders, said working with the tangible — wood, water, finding homes for the suddenly homeless — was itself a form of shared solace.

“Right now, that’s nearly everything,” he said.

But for many, it was not enough. There was still a need to work, and in Maui County that usually means serving tourists, who provide 70 cents of every dollar generated there.

Kihei, which offers a more modest Maui experience for middle-class travelers, was untouched by the wildfire that devastated Lahaina a half-hour’s drive away.

Still, signs of extreme emotional labor were everywhere. Hotel managers said they were gathering donations from some workers and distributing them to others. A handwritten note from someone named Jessica at a small shop in Kihei that offered snorkel rentals said: “Closed today to volunteer.”

“I can still get you gear after 12 pm,” the note added. “Call or text me.”

In the craft market nearby, some of the shop owners said they were worried that the initial warnings to visitors had already scared them off. Phrases like “Stay away from Maui” — an early mantra — rattled around their minds, as they wished they could rewrite the messaging with more clarity and perspective.

“Have enough supply for locals first, on that I agree,” said Sarah Guthrie, who owns four souvenir stalls with her husband. “But how dare you say, ‘Don’t come if you’re a tourist.’”

Noting that she was having her worst sales week of the year, she asked: “If I lose my business, how can I help anyone?”

Scott Taylor, another merchant, said he, too, was struggling to balance assistance for local residents with the charms of retail. Sitting in a kiosk offering handcrafted bowls, he said he wished the island could just take a break for a few weeks — but short of that, he mostly hoped tourists would avoid “grief tourism” by staying away from Lahaina.

“Respect,” he said, “that’s what it comes down to.”

Many visitors have tried to comply by leaving West Maui, opening up hundreds of hotel rooms for evacuees. Others have added making donations to their itinerary.

At the Maui Food Bank, Marlene Rice, the development director, said a family of tourists went to Costco and delivered a car’s worth of items — before starting their vacation. Some flight attendants from Texas delivered suitcases packed with fancy toiletries and luxury clothes.

“It was just what we needed,” Ms. Rice said. “Something different from what we had seen.”

She fought back tears. Many others did too, as they struggled to explain the sorrow and everything else the tragedy had unleashed.

“It is quite a jumble, and that’s what you’d expect,” said Tony Papa, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. “There are so many different things happening.”

He recalled a study he had worked on about coping skills, in which researchers found that some people mixed stories of horror with dashes of humor. He remembered one in particular, a woman who was talking about how her husband died and then blurted out, “Now at least I don’t have to pick up his goddamn socks.”

The study found that those who confronted darkness and left room for light were the ones who managed best.

Many near Lahaina do not feel ready for that. They talk in hushed voices about the possibility that a number of children died in the fire, possibly stuck at home while their parents were at work. Along with an official death toll of 110, more than 1,000 people were still unaccounted for as of Wednesday.

Amid such wrenching expectations, the idea of visiting the island, or seeing anyone enjoy the beaches and mountains that make it so magnetic — it just feels wrong to those who survived the catastrophe.

And yet, there are hints of it beginning to feel OK for some local residents. At Mr. Kalepa’s neighborhood pod, known as “Archie’s House,” an older man whispered to a friend on Monday that he had gone for a swim, sighing and looking skyward as he explained the feeling of having been renewed.

A rainbow appeared a half-hour later, drawing smiles from those who noticed it.

Mr. Chun, like many others, called for a shift in focus, “to rise like the sun.”

On Tuesday, he was back on the water, carrying supplies to Lahaina in his canoe. He noted that the man who had hired him to help spread his mother’s ashes had thanked her for moving to Maui and making the island a part of their lives.

Mr. Chun said the family had lost the mother’s home in the blaze, but he wasn’t sure if she had died in the fire or just before.

“I didn’t ask,” he said. Nor did he think it mattered.

“We have to move forward.”

U.S. Women’s Soccer Coach Vlatko Andonovski Resigns

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Vlatko Andonovski, the head coach of the United States women’s national soccer team, has resigned, three people with direct knowledge of the situation said Wednesday, ending a relatively tumultuous tenure managing what was once the world’s pre-eminent team.

The U.S. Soccer Federation plans to announce Andonovski’s departure as coach on Thursday, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the move publicly.

Andonovski’s four-year contract was scheduled to expire at the end of the year. U.S. Soccer will appoint an interim coach for two friendly matches this fall but hopes to have a permanent replacement named by the end of the year in order to begin preparations for next summer’s Paris Olympics.

Andonovski’s resignation was not unexpected. The United States greatly underperformed at this year’s Women’s World Cup after winning the previous two tournaments. The team had its earliest elimination in tournament history after losing a penalty shootout to rival Sweden in the round of 16. The United States scored only four goals in a World Cup it entered as one of the favorites, beating only one of its four opponents, Vietnam, and drawing with the Netherlands and Portugal during the group stage.

Andonovski, 46, had been a head coach in the National Women’s Soccer League for seven years before U.S. Soccer announced his hiring in October 2019. His predecessor, Jill Ellis, stepped down after five years with the team after the United States won the 2019 Women’s World Cup, making Ellis the first coach to win back-to-back Women’s World Cups.

Andonovski won the first 16 games he coached, including titles in 2020 at the Concacaf Olympic qualifying tournament and the SheBelieves Cup. The coronavirus pandemic struck six months into Andonovski’s tenure, pushing the Tokyo Olympics back a year to 2021 and complicating his first two years on the job. Once the Games came around, the United States entered as favorites but won only a bronze medal.

As the World Cup began, the United States’ ability to capture an elusive three-peat — no team has won three titles in a row since the tournament’s inception in 1991 — was called into question almost immediately. The Americans beat Vietnam in their opening game, but by a comparatively modest 3-0 margin, nothing like the 13-0 romp over Thailand that opened their 2019 title run. The Americans would score only once more, on a header from Lindsey Horan that evened the score with the Netherlands, 1-1.

A scoreless tie with Portugal was enough for the United States to advance but not win its group, spurring the need for a “Belief” social media campaign heading into the round of 16 and opening the national team up to criticism from its own, with former players such as Tobin Heath and Carli Lloyd voicing dissatisfaction with the team’s style of play.

Andonovski was criticized for his tactical decision-making, including his decisions on substitutes. He also had star players like Alex Morgan and Julie Ertz playing different roles than they had in the past, with mixed results. Exciting newcomers like Ashley Sanchez and 18-year-old Alyssa Thompson barely played.

In the end, a millimeter was the threshold to let Sweden advance and stop the United States — and Andonovski — miles short of expectations.

Appeals Court Upholds Legality of Abortion Pill but With Significant Restrictions

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A federal appeals court panel said on Wednesday that the abortion pill mifepristone should remain legal in the United States but with significant restrictions on patients’ access to it, setting up a showdown before the Supreme Court on the fate of the most common method of terminating pregnancies.

The decision, which would prohibit the pill from being sent through the mail or prescribed by telemedicine, is the latest development in a closely watched lawsuit that seeks to remove abortion pills entirely from the market by invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone. But for now, the ruling will have no real-world effect: In April, the Supreme Court said mifepristone would have to remain available under the current rules until the appeals process concludes.

Anti-abortion groups filed the lawsuit last year, several months after the Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Shortly after the appeals court ruled on Wednesday, the Justice Department said it would ask the justices to hear the case.

The court is likely to act in the coming months. It could deny review, leaving in place the appeals court’s ruling, curbing but not eliminating access to the pill. Or it could agree to hear the appeal, returning to contested terrain that at least some of the justices might prefer to avoid.

The justices will be navigating against the backdrop of their decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade, a ruling that led to a sharp drop in the court’s approval ratings, questions about its legitimacy and a political windfall for Democrats.

In that 6-to-3 decision, the conservative majority made a kind of promise, saying that the court was ceding the question of the availability of abortion “to the people and their elected representatives.” That could indicate a reluctance of hear a new abortion case.

On the other hand, a question of such significance would seem to warrant a ruling from the nation’s highest court. The case could also have implications beyond abortion, calling into question the F.D.A.’s regulatory authority over other drugs.

In the new ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld part of a sweeping decision issued in April by a federal judge in Texas. That decision, by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump and has publicly espoused anti-abortion views, effectively nullified the F.D.A.’s approval of the pill.

But the appeals court decision kept the F.D.A.’s approval in place. It also kept in place a later F.D.A. approval of the generic version of the drug, which now accounts for about two-thirds of the mifepristone sold in the United States.

The main impact of the appeals court’s decision, if it is upheld by the Supreme Court, would be to reverse changes made by the F.D.A. in recent years that greatly increased access to the pill, partly by allowing some health care providers who are not doctors to prescribe mifepristone and allowing patients to obtain the pill without visiting a provider in person. The appeals court ruling would mean that patients would have to make three visits to a doctor to get mifepristone and could not receive it in the mail.

The ability for patients to use telemedicine and get the prescribed pills shipped to them has significantly expanded the use of medication abortion, which is now used in more than half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.

The lawsuit was filed against the F.D.A. by several anti-abortion doctors and a consortium of anti-abortion medical groups called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which was incorporated in Amarillo, Texas, soon after Roe had been overturned. The case was filed in Amarillo.

The appeals court majority wrote that the statute of limitations appeared to bar a challenge to the F.D.A.’s initial approval of mifepristone in 2000. It said that the approval of generic mifepristone in 2019 should also remain in effect because the plaintiffs had not shown that they had been adversely affected by that approval.

Judge Jennifer W. Elrod, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Judge Cory T. Wilson, who was appointed by Mr. Trump. The decision said that changes the F.D.A. had made in 2016 and 2021 should be rolled back.

“In loosening mifepristone’s safety restrictions, F.D.A. failed to address several important concerns about whether the drug would be safe for the women who use it,” Judge Elrod wrote. “It failed to consider the cumulative effect of removing several important safeguards at the same time.”

Among the changes the F.D.A. made in 2016 were to allow nurse midwives and certain other providers, not just doctors, to prescribe mifepristone and to reduce the required number of in-person visits to one. Another change was to extend the time frame for mifepristone use, authorizing it until 10 weeks into pregnancy instead of seven weeks. (The appeals court decision would have less practical impact on that time frame, however, because physicians in most states can legally use medical discretion to prescribe mifepristone until 12 weeks into pregnancy, as there is scientific evidence that abortion pills are safe and effective within that time frame.)

In 2021, the F.D.A. lifted the in-person dispensing requirement altogether, allowing abortion pills to be prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to patients. That decision paved the way for numerous telemedicine abortion services, which have increasingly been supplying the pills to patients.

More than five million women in the United States have used mifepristone to terminate their pregnancies, and many studies have found it to be highly safe and effective. Years of research has shown that serious complications are rare, resulting in fewer than 1 percent of patients needing hospitalization, medical experts have said. The F.D.A. applies a special regulatory framework to mifepristone, meaning that it has been regulated much more strictly and studied more intensively than most other drugs. The drug is also approved for use in dozens of other countries.

In the United States, the medication abortion protocol typically involves taking mifepristone — which blocks a hormone that allows a pregnancy to develop — followed one or two days later by another drug, misoprostol, which causes contractions similar to a miscarriage to expel pregnancy tissue.

If access to mifepristone were limited, abortion providers might have to rely solely on misoprostol, which can be used on its own but is somewhat less effective and more prone to causing side effects.

Judge James C. Ho, another Trump appointee on the appeals court panel, wrote a caustic partial dissent, saying he would invalidate the approval of mifepristone in 2000.

“Scientists have contributed an enormous amount to improving our lives,” Judge Ho wrote. “But scientists are human beings just like the rest of us. They’re not perfect. None of us are. We all make mistakes. And the F.D.A. has made plenty.”

Two American Tourists Caught Sleeping in the Eiffel Tower

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Reporters News Wire
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The opening of the Eiffel Tower was delayed on Monday morning after security officials found two American tourists sleeping in the monument overnight, officials said.

“They were detected in the early morning by the Sete security service, during daily rounds of checks carried out before the monument was opened to the public,” according to the Eiffel Tower’s operator, Sociéte d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, also known as Sete. The operator said it would file a complaint about the two intruders, who posed no threat and were handed over to the police.

The Paris prosecutor’s office was informed on Monday morning that two American men had been found sleeping on the site of the Eiffel Tower after entering with tickets on Sunday night, according to a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, who said that alcohol was involved. She did not know where in the Eiffel Tower the men were discovered.

One of the world’s most recognizable landmarks, the Eiffel Tower was built from 1887 to 1889 to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution and stands at 1,083 feet. It receives about seven million visitors a year.

American tourists have been flocking to Europe this summer. The number of planned air arrivals to Paris for July and August has increased 14.4 percent this year, and is now nearly 5 percent above the level in 2019, before the pandemic.

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