An ex-sister-in-law of Pete Hegseth’s submitted a sworn statement to senators on Tuesday that accused Mr. Hegseth, President Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, of being so “abusive” toward his second wife that she once hid in a closet from him and had a safe word to call for help if she needed to get away from him. In a Capitol Hill office on Tuesday afternoon, senators were reviewing the affidavit, from Danielle Diettrich Hegseth, the former wife of Mr. Hegseth’s brother, which describes “erratic and aggressive” behavior by Mr. Hegseth that caused his second wife to fear for her safety. According to a copy obtained by The New York Times, it also asserts that he frequently drank to excess both in public and private, including on one occasion she witnessed when he was wearing his military uniform. The allegations, which Mr. Hegseth denied through his lawyer, surfaced as Republicans...

President Trump granted three different types of reprieve on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people who faced prosecution for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He issued formal pardons to hundreds of rioters convicted of any crimes connected to Jan. 6, starting at the low end with offenses like trespassing and disorderly conduct and increasing in severity to assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. Mr. Trump also commuted the sentences of 14 members of two far-right groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia. Most of those defendants were convicted on sedition charges and were serving prison terms of up to 18 years. Under the commutations, their sentences will be reduced to time served. In a separate but related move, Mr. Trump ordered his Justice Department to dismiss any criminal indictments that remained pending against Jan. 6 defendants. And he directed the Bureau of...

Tall and elegant, she was an engaging, charismatic speaker. “She spoke to you, rather than at you,” the journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen said in an interview on Monday, “a kind of authenticity with a touch of Texas.” During her 12-year-term, Ms. Richards orchestrated Planned Parenthood’s evolution into a potent political organization and the country’s largest provider of reproductive and women’s sexual health care. She grew its base of supporters and volunteers from 2.5 to 11 million. From the time President Trump was first elected in 2016, until early 2018, Planned Parenthood added 700,000 new donors, a record for so short a period. Yet it was during her tenure that the organization became increasingly embattled, as her home state led the charge to defund Planned Parenthood, barring clinics from offering state-funded programs that included contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and H.I.V. prevention. Texas finally stripped the organization of its...

Gail Collins: Well, Bret, here we are. Neither of us is crazy about staggering into another four-year Trump term, but I’ll bet you can come up with a more optimistic spin than I can. Go to it. Bret Stephens: Well, here’s one hope: Donald Trump’s return to power will serve as a wake-up call for a lot of liberals, including liberal journalists, who lost touch with the concerns and values of regular Americans — people who didn’t enjoy having their common sense insulted by being told that there wasn’t a crisis at the border, or that their inflation concerns were overblown, or that President Biden’s memory was fine, or that racial identity should be the dominant consideration in choosing a Supreme Court justice or a vice president. Maybe it will inspire Democrats to do better as an opposition party. Any chance? Gail: Hey, I see some excellent subjects for debate...

TikTok flickered back to life in the United States on Sunday after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app. The abrupt shift came after just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for U.S. users as a federal law took effect on Sunday. The company said in a post on X that in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.” Mr. Trump said in a Sunday morning post on Truth Social that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.” The ban stems from a 2024 law that requires app stores and cloud computing providers to stop distributing or...

Privacy can be hard to come by in India. Life is a communal swirl of relatives, neighbors and friends. Cities are crowded, and prying eyes are everywhere. Enter Oyo, a popular hotel-booking platform. The company, backed by big names in venture capital, built a hip reputation as a gateway to “love hotels” for unmarried couples. Inside its budget rooms, young lovers who might otherwise be left to steal furtive kisses in the nooks and crannies of public parks or shopping malls could exert their passions behind closed doors. Now, Oyo is stepping back from its image as a refuge for hookups. This month, it revised its policy guidelines to give some partner hotels the discretion to deny rooms to young couples unless they provide proof of marriage. So far, the change applies only to Meerut, a midsize city northeast of New Delhi. The company said the new policy was a...

Migrants used to gather by the hundreds in encampments in Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, waiting for a chance to cross into the United States. But as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office on Monday, few people could be found this past week on the once-teeming embankments. All that remained were extinguished campfires, discarded shoes, shirts and toothbrushes. One Mexican city after another has reported a similar situation along the border with the United States, where the number of migrants has steadily dropped in recent months. The decline has been attributed largely to hardened restrictions introduced by the Biden administration and by Mexican and Panamanian officials meant to deter migration. As President Biden came under increasing pressure during his re-election campaign to curb migration flows, he issued in June an executive order effectively blocking undocumented migrants from receiving asylum. That month, U.S. border...

The incoming Trump administration intends to carry out “post-inauguration” immigration raids in Chicago next week, according to two people familiar with the planning and correspondence reviewed by The New York Times, an opening step in President-elect Donald J. Trump’s goal to oversee the largest deportation operation in American history. The plan, called “Operation Safeguard” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would start on Tuesday, the day after Mr. Trump is inaugurated, and last until the following Monday, according to the people familiar with it and the correspondence. The dates were still being finalized, however, and could change. The size of the planned operation was unclear. ICE routinely conducts deportations in cities throughout the United States. But the agency was taking additional steps to ramp up enforcement for the operation and tied it to Mr. Trump’s inauguration in a message sent to personnel throughout the agency. Hundreds of agents were asked to...

On Wednesday afternoon, executives at Meta held a Q&A session with some of its employees about the state of American politics. Alex Schultz, the chief marketing officer, addressed questions about Meta’s embrace of the incoming Trump administration and what he said was the company’s precarious standing overseas, according to two attendees. He also said that Meta was paying close attention to the fate of one of its greatest competitors: TikTok. Depending on what happened to TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and faces a ban in the United States, Meta needed to prepare for what could be a seismic shift in how Americans used social media, Mr. Schultz said. Meta had the potential to benefit, but he said the company needed to be ready. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, has a particular interest in the outcome. The Silicon Valley giant — along with Google’s...

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, his re-election chances in doubt and a federal indictment looming over him, flew to Florida on Thursday to meet with President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago just four days before the inauguration. The mayor, a Democrat, made the trip with no advance announcement. His aides said only that the two men would discuss “New Yorkers’ priorities” when they meet on Friday. Mr. Adams joins a diverse roster of leaders from around the world who’ve made the trip to Mar-a-Lago since the election, and he is not the first Democrat. John Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, met with Mr. Trump last week. Other recent visitors have included Viktor Orban, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, and Justin Trudeau, the liberal prime minister of Canada, who is leaving office soon. The mayor requested the meeting, according to two people with knowledge of the trip....