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To promote election and falsifying business records. Before we move on, I wanna ask you potentially a slightly annoying question. You mentioned that the second concealed crime here might be a violation of a state law surrounding the promotion of an election. How do you violate that law? And do the prosecutors say how Trump violated it? So this is what's so interesting about what prosecutors did today. They don't actually have to prove it. Why? They've gotten to the stage of their case where it's just baked into the charges. They are felony charges. And so all they have to do to win is to convince the jury that their story makes sense and that Trump falsified business records. Mhmm. And so on the front end, if they show you that he was trying to win the election by suppressing these stories, then on the back end, once they show you the records being disguised, they say that the jury will be persuaded of why they said he did it. Okay. Now that that complicated legal business is squared away, what else should we know about the prosecutor's opening statement? Colangelo then just walks the jurors through each witness they're going to hear from and how it builds back into the case they're trying to make. Got it. One of those witnesses is Michael Cohen, of course, who was a prominent member of what prosecutors said was a conspiracy, and one of the things that Colangelo does is he kind of cleans up for the prosecution what Cohen is going to be like. What do you mean? He says that you can expect that the defense lawyers will say Cohen is not credible and that he can't be trusted because he's this guy who's been convicted of federal crimes Which is true. Who's changed his story many, many times and what Colangelo says is, Look, this is a guy who worked with Trump and his story makes sense when, as a whole, you look at how Trump operated. He needed someone like this to go around and fix his problems. And so Cohen is, in fact, regard
Gone. Well, the reason it's become such a threat is because of how widespread it's become in wild birds. So, they keep reintroducing it to wild animal populations pretty much anywhere they go. So, we've seen the virus repeatedly pop up in all sorts of animals that you might figure would eat a wild bird. So foxes, bobcats, bears. We actually saw it in a polar bear, raccoons. So a lot of carnivores and scavengers, the thinking is that these animals sort of might stumble across a sick or dead bird, eat it, and contract the virus that way. But we're also seeing it show up in some more surprising places too. We've seen the virus in a bottlenose dolphin Uh-huh. In all places. Wow. And most devastatingly, we've seen enormous outbreaks in other sorts of marine mammals, especially sea lions and seals. So elephant seals in particular in South America were just devastated by this virus last fall. My colleague Apoorva Mandeville and I were talking to some scientists in South America who described to us what they called a scene from hell of walking out onto a beach in Argentina that is normally crowded with chaotic living, breathing, breeding elephant seals and the beach just being covered by carcass after carcass after carcass. God. Mostly carcasses of young newborn pups. The virus seemed to have a mortality rate of 95% in these elephant seal pups, and they estimated that it might have killed more than 17,000 of the pups that were born last year, so almost the entire new generation of this colony. These are scientists that have studied these seals for
Hi, everybody. It's Sabrina. Today, instead of a Sunday read, we're doing something different. This weekend, we've got an episode from our colleagues over at the Modern Love Podcast. If you don't know the show, it's hosted by Anna Martin. And like the New York Times column that the show is named for, the podcast explores the complicated love lives of real people. Today, we're sharing an episode from Modern Love's current season. It features Samin Nasrat, the chef and author whom you might know from her cookbook and TV series, salt, fat, acid, heat. In this episode, Nasrat talks about love, loss, and how we embrace joy. Okay. Here's the episode. And if you want more of them, search modern love wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe. Love. From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. And we're still celebrating our 20th anniversary, spotlighting our favorite love stories with our favorite writers, musicians, artists, and today, a chef. Cooking for someone is kind of the original way to say I love you. The labor, the time, the care, all that chopping and kneading and careful seasoning. So if food is love, then chef and writer, Samin Nosrat, just might be the most romantic person in the world. It's sweet. That's it. It's rich in flavor. Yeah. It's so good. It's so good. I it's bringing tears to my eye. It's so good. That's Celine on her Netflix show, salt fat acid heat, freaking out in the best way
Case about. So this case is about a small town in Oregon where 3 homeless people sued the city after they received tickets for sleeping and camping outside. And this case is the latest case that shows us growing tension, especially in states in the west, between people who are homeless and cities who are trying to figure out what to do about this. These cities have seen a sharp increase in homeless encampments and public spaces especially with people on sidewalks and in parks. And they've raised questions about public drug use and other safety issues in these spaces. And so the question before the justices is really how far a city can go to police homelessness. Can city officials and police use local laws to ban people from laying down outside and sleeping in a public space? Can a city essentially make it illegal to be homeless? So three homeless people sued the city of Grants Pass saying it's not illegal to be homeless. And therefore, it's not illegal to sleep in a public space. Yes. That's right. And they weren't the first people to make this argument. The issue actually started years ago with a case about 500 miles to the east in Boise, Idaho. And in that case, which is called Martin V Boise. This man, Robert Martin, who is homeless in Boise, He was charged with a misdemeanor for sleeping and some bushes. And the city of Boise had laws on the books to prohibit public camping. And Robert Martin and a group of other people who are homeless in the city they sued the city. And they claimed that the city's laws violated the 8 amendments prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
And what it is is the heart of jury selection. This is the point where the lawyers themselves finally get to interview the jurors. And we get so much information from this moment because the lawyers ask questions based on what they want out of the jurors. So the prosecution is asking all these different kinds of questions. The first round of voir dire is done by a guy named Joshua Steinglass, very experienced trial lawyer with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. And he's providing all these hypotheticals. I'll give you one example because I found this one really, really interesting. He provides a hypothetical about a man who wants his wife killed and essentially hires a hitman to do it. And what he asked the jurors is, if that case were before you, would you be able to see that the man who hired the hitman was a part of this crime? And then, of course, what he's really getting at is, can you accept that even though Michael Cohen Trump's fixer made this payment, Trump is the guy who hired him to do it. That's right. If there are other people involved, will jurors still be able to see Donald Trump's hands behind it all? Fascinating. And what were some of the responses? People mostly said, yes, we accept that. So that's how the prosecution did it. But the defense had a totally different method of Wadhir. They were very focused on their client, and people's opinions about their client. So what kind of questions do we get from them? Them? So the lawyer, Todd Blanch, is asking people, what do you make of President Trump? What do you think of President Trump? And what are some of the responses to that? Well, there is this incredible exchange with 1 of the jurors who absolutely refuses to give his opinion of Donald Trump. They go back and forth and back and forth, and the juror keeps insisting, you don't need to know my opinion of him. All you need to know is that I'm going to be fair and impartial, like I said. And Blanche pushes and the guy pushes back. And the only way the guy budgets is he finally kind of confesses almost at the end that, yes, I am a Democrat. Mhmm. And that's all we get. And what ends up happening to
