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Mike Donilon Had $4 Million Incentive to Secure a 2024 Biden Win

Mike Donilon was promised a bonus that would have doubled his payment for work on the campaign if the former president had been re-elected.

© Eric Lee/The New York Times

Mike Donilon was among former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s aides who resisted calls for him to end his re-election campaign, even after a damaging debate performance.
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Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein Associate, Moved to Minimum-Security Women’s Prison in Texas

The longtime Epstein associate, now serving a 20-year sentence, was relocated from a federal prison in Florida about a week after being interviewed by a Justice Department official.

© Go Nakamura/Reuters

The federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, where Ghislaine Maxwell has been moved.
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How U.S. Officials Grappled With the Release of a Triple Murderer

The decision to free an American convicted of murder in a prisoner swap with Venezuela threatened to undercut President Trump’s claims of keeping the worst of the worst out of the United States.

© Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Michael Kozak, a senior State Department diplomat, wondered in an email exchange whether, having obtained the freedom of Dahud Hanid Ortiz, a U.S. Army veteran convicted of murdering three people in Madrid in 2016, the U.S. government might extradite him to Spain.
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Why Trump’s Tariffs Are Closing Factories in Lesotho

The closure of a factory in the small southern African nation of Lesotho is an early effect of the global disruption caused by President Trump’s tariffs. John Eligon, the Johannesburg bureau chief for The New York Times, talks with Katrin Bennhold, a senior writer, about what he has seen there.
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Derk Sauer, Champion of Free Press in a New Russia, Dies at 72

He earned a media fortune in 1990s Russia with a “sex, news and rock ’n’ roll” strategy and defended press freedoms after the industry became beleaguered and unprofitable.

© DPPA/Sipa, via Associated Press

Derk Sauer in the Netherlands last year. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he became a champion of Russian journalists who had fled to escape repression.
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Trump Administration Cuts UCLA Funding Over Claims of Antisemitism, Chancellor Says

The university is the latest to be targeted by the federal government over accusations that it has not done enough to fight antisemitism on campus.

© Mark Abramson for The New York Times

A pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, in April 2024. Last year, U.C.L.A. was the site of one of the nation’s biggest protests against the war in Gaza.
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Trump Envoy Witkoff Visits Gaza as Aid Crisis Deepens

Steve Witkoff went to the Palestinian enclave amid growing pressure on Israel to ease a deepening hunger crisis there. Hamas derided the visit as a “propaganda show.”

© Reuters

Carrying handouts from the Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in central Gaza on Friday. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past two months while trying to secure aid.
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Corruption Scandal Puts Mexico’s President on Defense Against Trump

Mexico’s president, battling U.S. accusations that the cartels have gripped her government, is facing a scandal in which two former officials are on the run and their old boss is now a top senator.

© Luis Cortes/Reuters

Adán Augusto López Hernández when he was Mexico’s interior minister. He is at the center of a scandal around men he appointed to security positions in Tabasco State when he was governor.
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