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A New York judge has set March 25 as the start date in Donald Trump’s hush-money case, making it the first criminal trial against a former American president in U.S. history.

A dark, satiric sensibility is a basic qualification for anyone in the Russian opposition. Those leaders I knew in Moscow, before I left Russia in 2022, liked to crack jokes during interviews with journalists and to judges at court hearings.
Boris Nemtsov, though he had been arrested many times and knew he should worry for his life, would laugh at President Vladimir Putin’s Russia as the “gangster state of absurdity.

Nearly 20 years ago, during one of many family trips back to Ethiopia, I spent months wandering through the sprawling capital city. All summer, it seemed, the drivers and cyclists of Addis Ababa were blasting the Ethiopian pop star Teddy Afro’s “Promise,” an infectious, reggae-inflected ode more often referred to by the name of the musician it lionizes: “Bob Marley.

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Updated at 5:15 p.m. ET on February 17, 2024
This wasn’t supposed to be Patrick Mahomes’s year—that’s the scary part.
There were plenty of times this season when the Kansas City Chiefs and their star quarterback looked vulnerable, including a stretch when they lost four out of six games.

A New York judge fined Donald Trump $355 million today, finding “overwhelming evidence” that he and his lieutenants at the Trump Organization made false statements “with the intent to defraud.”
Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling in the civil fraud case is not fatal for Trump’s business empire, but it might be a near-death experience. The fine fell just short of the $370 million that New York Attorney General Letitia James sought.

Yesterday afternoon, OpenAI teased Sora, a video-generation model that promises to convert written text prompts into highly realistic videos. Footage released by the company depicts such examples as “a Shiba Inu dog wearing a beret and black turtleneck” and “in an ornate, historical hall, a massive tidal wave peaks and begins to crash.