Category: News

A Colorado paramedic convicted in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a young Black man whose case helped drive the national police reform movement, was sentenced on Friday to five years in prison.

The case was a rare criminal prosecution of emergency medical personnel, and stirred outrage among paramedics and firefighters across the nation who worry that urgent decisions made as part of their jobs can be criminalized.

The paramedic, Peter Cichuniec, 51, a former lieutenant with Aurora Fire Rescue, was convicted in December of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree assault for the unlawful administration of drugs. He was one of five police officers and paramedics prosecuted in state district court over three consecutive trials.

A second paramedic and a police officer were also convicted. In January, Randy Roedema, 41, a lieutenant in the Aurora Police Department officer at the time, was sentenced to 14 months in a county jail. Jeremy Cooper, the paramedic working with Mr. Cichuniec, is scheduled to be sentenced in April.

In a courtroom packed with Mr. Cichuniec’s family and dozens of firefighters from across the country, District Judge Mark Douglas Warner said he took many variables into consideration, including praise for Mr. Cichuniec’s character from those who knew him, weighed against the “death of a young man who is simply walking home from a convenience store.”

During more than an hour of character statements, family members, friends and colleagues testified that Mr. Cichuniec was a compassionate man and skilled leader with a “servant’s heart” who was emotionally wrecked by the death of Mr. McClain.

Handcuffed and wearing his striped inmate’s uniform, Mr. Cichuniec began his request for leniency by saying he had taken an oath 18 years ago to put other people’s lives before his own. “I wish I could look Ms. McClain in the eye and tell her that Elijah would be OK,” he said, adding his the young man’s death destroyed him as a person, a father and a parent. “I am sorry that Elijah McClain is no longer with us.”

The judge also heard an impassioned statement from Mr. McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, who said her son’s death was not a terrible tragedy but an avoidable murder. She said she thought of firefighters as “local heroes” until “I watched them murder my son,” she said.

She said the paramedics “did not save him” and “felt no need to stop the brutality.”

Ms. McClain emerged from the courtroom with her fist raised, and had no further comment.

Mr. Cichuniec was facing up to 16 years in prison, and the sentence he received was the most lenient based on mandatory sentencing guidelines. The judged added another year on a separate charge, to be served at the same time as the five-year sentence.

The convictions of the two paramedics shook the world of emergency workers who have typically been shielded from criminal prosecution — and it forced questions about the dynamic between the police and paramedics at a scene.

In August 2019, Mr. McClain, a 23-year-old massage therapist, was returning home from a store when he was confronted by police who were responding to a 911 call about a suspicious person. During a quickly escalating encounter, Mr. McClain was forcefully restrained by police and placed in a carotid chokehold, a neck restraint that has since been banned in Aurora and other police departments. Paramedics then injected him with an overdose of the powerful sedative ketamine. He died in a hospital several days later.

In three separate trials, prosecutors collectively argued the excessive force of police officers and the indifference of paramedics both played a role in killing Mr. McClain.

Though Mr. McClain was visibly distressed and in handcuffs, paramedics never spoke to him, touched him or checked his vital signs before diagnosing him with excited delirium, a controversial condition characterized by agitation and exceptional physical strength. Paramedics then injected him with what authorities later said was a dose of ketamine inappropriate for Mr. McClain’s body weight.

Lawyers representing both paramedics argued they followed protocol and should not have been held criminally responsible for making a split-second decision based on incomplete or inaccurate information from the police.

An 18-year veteran with the fire department and father of two, Mr. Cichuniec was the senior paramedic at the scene. Neither Mr. Cichuniec nor Mr. Cooper had ever administered the drug before treating Mr. McClain.

After the paramedics were convicted in December, the Aurora fire department took steps to lessen their paramedics’ exposure to criminal liability. And the department allowed paramedics the option of limiting their responsibilities and the medications they can administer. This means the department has fewer medical professionals who can perform advanced life-saving measures, said Dawn Small, a spokesperson for the department.

Aurora’s Fire Chief, Alec Oughton, said he worried that the threat of criminal prosecution may drive paramedics from the profession altogether and make communities less safe. “This exodus would be devastating to the department and could leave Aurora in a position where its fire department does not have adequate staffing levels to protect the community,” Mr. Oughton wrote in an email statement.

Ed Kelly, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, the largest firefighters union in the country, said some of its members have opted to retire or surrender their paramedic license because of the McClain case.

“It’s scared the hell out of paramedics,” said Mr. Kelly, whose organization represents more than 340,000 firefighters.

On Friday, Mr. Kelly traveled from Boston to Colorado to attend the sentencing. “Now they have to question whether or not they’re going to go to jail on split-second decisions that they are making in the streets,” he said.

After the sentencing, Mr. Kelly said, “Elijah McClain should be alive today; the circumstances that led to his death are awful, but at the end of the day these firefighters aren’t criminals. They didn’t kill him and they shouldn’t be going to jail.”

Community activists were disappointed by what they viewed as a light sentence.

“Anything less than the 16 years is simply an unfair price to pay for Elijah’s life,” said Thomas Mayes, an Aurora pastor who has helped organize protests after Mr. McClain’s death.

MiDian Holmes, a social justice activist who has followed the trials closely, said five years in prison showed that “the minimum is the only thing that we can be afforded when it comes to justice.”

In the aftermath of Mr. McClain’s death, several states, including Colorado, banned or restricted use of ketamine by paramedics. In some fire departments where the sedative is still used, a comprehensive assessment of the patient is now required. Many departments are also considering policy changes to clarify the relationship between the police and paramedics, and emphasizing that medical decisions should not be influenced by police officers.

James G. Hodge, law professor and director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, said departments since the paramedic conviction were exploring “in real time” what the relationship between the police and paramedics should look like when someone in police custody becomes a patient of the paramedics. The conviction, he said, “was a game changer.”

Three years ago, when Oregon voters approved a pioneering plan to decriminalize hard drugs, advocates looking to halt the jailing of drug users believed they were on the edge of a revolution that would soon sweep across the country.

But even as the state’s landmark law took effect in 2021, the scourge of fentanyl was taking hold. Overdoses soared as the state stumbled in its efforts to fund enhanced treatment programs. And while many other downtowns emerged from the dark days of the pandemic, Portland continued to struggle, with scenes of drugs and despair.

Lately, even some of the liberal politicians who had embraced a new approach to drugs have supported an end to the experiment. On Friday, a bill that will reimpose criminal penalties for possession of some drugs won final passage in the State Legislature and was headed next to Gov. Tina Kotek, who has expressed alarm about open drug use and helped broker a plan to ban such activity.

“It’s clear that we must do something to try and adjust what’s going on out in our communities,” State Senator Chris Gorsek, a Democrat who had supported decriminalization, said in an interview. Soon after, senators took the floor, with some sharing stories of how addictions and overdoses had impacted their own loved ones. They passed the measure by a 21-8 margin.

The abrupt rollback is a devastating turn for decriminalization proponents who say the large number of overdose deaths stems from a confluence of factors and failures largely unrelated to the law. They have warned against returning to a “war on drugs” strategy and have urged the Legislature to instead invest in affordable housing and drug treatment options.

“This Legislature did not pass real solutions,” said Sandy Chung, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “This is about politics and political theater.”

In recent decades, states across the country have moved to legalize medical and recreational marijuana. But no state other than Oregon had taken the step of removing criminal penalties for possessing hard drugs such as fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine.

Oregon’s decriminalization initiative, known as Measure 110, was driven by growing concern that drug laws were disproportionately incarcerating people of color and punishing people in need of addiction treatment. Under the measure, which was approved by 58 percent of voters, people found in possession of small amounts of hard drugs would be given a $100 citation that could be avoided by taking a health assessment.

But as law enforcement began handing out tickets, officials found that few people were opting for a health assessment, and the state stumbled in distributing funds to expand the availability of treatment options.

Meanwhile, fentanyl was flooding the region. In Portland’s downtown, streets already barren as a result of the pandemic felt threatening, with people using drugs openly or acting out in crisis.

Overdose deaths skyrocketed. From September 2022 to September 2023, deaths in the state rose an estimated 42 percent — the highest increase in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The fatality rate nationwide went up 2 percent.) Since the start of 2020, Portland’s Multnomah County has recorded more overdose deaths than Covid-19 deaths.

Decriminalization advocates pointed to research that found no link between the legal changes and rising overdose deaths over the first year of implementation. Instead, they argued, the crisis was rooted in the abundance of fentanyl, a lack of social services, the lingering effects of the pandemic, and, especially in Portland, widespread homelessness, all factors that tended to exacerbate dangerous drug use.

But the tide of public opinion was already turning.

The Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit that spent millions to support the 2020 decriminalization effort, had envisioned Measure 110 as the start of a series of similar campaigns in states like Washington, Vermont, Maine and California.

But over time, and as images of public drug use and widespread deaths continued to emerge from Portland, the Washington State initiative stalled and did not make it on the ballot. Nor did any other state advance a decriminalization plan. To the contrary, California may vote on an initiative this year that would increase penalties for drug possession and dealing. In Oregon, if lawmakers had not advanced the bill on Friday, a proposed new ballot initiative — backed in part by the Nike co-founder Phil Knight — would have sought to criminalize drugs once again.

“For me it has been incredibly frustrating to have this momentum on our side and then have these external factors so significantly shift the winds,” said Lindsay LaSalle, managing director of policy at the Drug Policy Alliance.

The debate in the Legislature this week became emotional at times, as legislators shared stories of addiction and fatal overdoses in their own families. The measure passed by a wide margin in the House on Thursday, although some Republicans opposed it for being still too lenient on drug users and some Democrats raised other concerns.

“It is an unacceptable compromise where we know there will be disparities that impact Oregonians of color,” said Jennifer Parrish Taylor, director of advocacy and public policy at the Urban League of Portland.

The plan approved by lawmakers creates a new misdemeanor crime of possession, which could result in jail sentences of 180 days. But the language focuses on a series of what lawmakers hope will be offramps from the criminal justice system.

The measure encourages the expansion of local programs so that law enforcement can choose to take someone directly to a treatment provider instead of jail. Those who do go through court can request probation and complete treatment to have charges dismissed. Those who do not complete the treatment can be sentenced to a more extended probation. If that fails, the person could face, instead of jail, a 30-day sentence that could be focused on treatment. Further violations could lead to a longer jail sentence, with the option of early release to treatment.

Lawmakers have added a range of other measures, including funding for mental health and substance abuse programs and policies making it easier for people to get access to withdrawal medications.

Kate Lieber, the State Senate’s Democratic majority leader and a key architect of the new plans, said the approach is unique — the product of difficult negotiations between Republicans who wanted to restore penalties and Democrats who wanted to prioritize treatment.

“I cannot stress enough: Inaction is not an option,” Ms. Lieber told her colleagues on Friday in urging them to support the changes. “Our current response to the drug crisis is not working.”

Several prominent Democrats have expressed support for a rollback, including Mike Schmidt, a progressive prosecutor in the Portland area. After the decriminalization initiative passed in 2020, Mr. Schmidt implemented its provisions early, saying it was time to move past “failed practices” to “focus our limited law enforcement resources to target high-level, commercial drug offenses.”

But he has reassessed his position, he said in an interview this week. The proliferation of fentanyl requires a new approach that treats addiction as a health issue while holding people accountable, he said. The open drug use downtown and near parks and schools has made people feel unsafe, Mr. Schmidt said.

“We have been hearing from constituents for a while that this has been really detrimental to our community and to our streets,” he said.

Mr. Schmidt said the new bill still prioritizes treatment and uses jail as a last resort. That, he said, could ultimately become the model Oregon offers to states around the country.

On Thursday, President Biden and Donald Trump separately toured strips of the border, flanked by federal and state agents. For both, there was an eerily similar use of border security backdrop, signaling the decisive role it and immigration will play in the election.

Their visits were but another reminder of how the border is used for political theater. Across South Texas, where I lived in recent years, I have repeatedly witnessed federal and state agents convert tiny slivers of the border into sites of violent spectacle. On a stretch of the Rio Grande where I went bird-watching, congressional delegations cruised the river in gunboats, wearing flak jackets.

To the west, in Eagle Pass, Gov. Greg Abbott authorized the installation of razor wire. He has accused Mr. Biden of attacking Texas and branded asylum seekers as invaders. He prevented federal Border Patrol agents from routine access to the riverbank, even after a Supreme Court ruling in January allowed agents to cut or remove the wire. In short order, Eagle Pass’s Shelby Park, where the drama has been centered, became a destination for militias and religious zealots.

The Wild West-style politics surrounding the standoff between Texas and the federal government over Shelby Park has once again cast the border as a political theater, a place where the nation’s violent frontier history has been enacted time and again. The re-creation of that history has made the routine processing of asylum seekers into a menacing scene.

Pleas for the humanity of immigrants, as are so often made by Democrats who note we are a nation of immigrants, do little to combat today’s border war mentality. Immigration policy appears to be ancillary or even irrelevant to the border warriors’ goals. “The goal should be zero illegal crossings a day,” said the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who criticized the bipartisan border deal that was dead on arrival.

To understand the political and cultural forces that inspire this mentality, we can look to the slogan “Come and take it,” used by Republicans to express the ethos behind Texas’ intransigence. The slogan refers to the 1835 confrontation between white immigrants in the town of Gonzales and Mexico, the governing nation, after Mexican soldiers attempted to reclaim a cannon.

With this war cry, the immigrants launched a rebellion; today, Republicans use it to defend razor wire.

The sentiment echoes through Representative Chip Roy’s characterization of upholding asylum law as an effort to “deluge our society and to undermine our way of life.” In 1836, Stephen F. Austin, one of Texas’ founders and an ideological ancestor of Mr. Roy and those who think like him, said this in his appeal for U.S. aid during the Texas war of independence: “A war of extermination is raging in Texas — a war of barbarism and of despotic principles waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.”

Traces of Mr. Austin’s doctrine are discernible in the photographs publicized last year by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, seemingly boasting about the number of asylum seekers arrested in a wildlife refuge in Brownsville.

It was also there in the images of state troopers posed in front of a crowd of Haitian asylum seekers in 2021, who were made to wait for processing for days under a Del Rio bridge — images that positioned the people as trophies, conquered.

These scenes, though not comparable, evoke the postcards created more than a century ago depicting Texas Rangers as warriors mounted on horseback, their ropes tied around the ankles of dead men, above the caption “Dead Mexican bandits.”

So many of these myths stem from distorted facts: The insurrectionists in Gonzales had no real claim to the cannon that inspired their battle cry; it belonged to the Mexican government. The “dead Mexican bandits” were in reality victims of land grabs or resisters against Jim Crow-style governing. And last year’s images of lined-up asylum seekers in the wildlife refuge were taken after they had peacefully turned themselves in.

Mr. Abbott regularly poses in front of cowboy-hat-wearing troopers. He boasts that the state is securing the border by apprehending immigrants under Operation Lone Star, the governor’s border-enforcement program. But much of the state’s immigration reporting is shrouded in secrecy. When I tried to obtain once publicly available records of immigrant apprehensions, I discovered that the state had reclassified them, placing them beyond scrutiny. When law clinics at Southern Methodist University and Cornell University fought for their release, the state refused, citing “homeland security.”

In the meantime, the governor recently announced that the state is building an 80-acre base camp in Eagle Pass for Texas National Guard members who are deployed for Operation Lone Star. The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, has moved to shut down Annunciation House, a 46-year-old Catholic-affiliated humanitarian center in El Paso that welcomes newly arrived migrants, claiming it is a “stash house.”

For their part, Democrats and their strategists are urging candidates to lean into the border issue by accurately pinning the recent failure of the bipartisan border bill on Republicans’ enforcement-first strategy.

The Democratic Party appears to be staking its claim on a vision of the border that ensures the conflict continues unabated. While proposals by immigration experts and activists envision a border where new migrant centers manage the influx of asylum seekers.

Currently, asylum seekers must make an appointment through an app run by Customs and Border Protection to present themselves at the customary ports of entry. The experts and activists argue that increasing the number who use the app will reroute people from the Rio Grande to those ports.

After living within view of the border’s natural beauty and a portion of the border wall built during the Obama administration, I have come to understand when South Texans defend their parks and riverfronts they are resisting a mentality that makes violence seem inevitable and that now threatens to upturn our political landscape. They are reminding Americans that we are not condemned to recreate our past. “The governor is not a dictator. He doesn’t have a right to come to our community and tell us how to behave, to tell us not to go to our parks,” said one Eagle Pass resident, Jessie Fuentes.

If the coming election is about defending the nation’s democracy, as Democrats claim, then the party must decide if the vision it is selling us is built with razor wire.

Michelle García is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book “Anima Sola.”

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The U.S. Department of Education said on Friday that it had opened an investigation into the Oklahoma school district where a 16-year-old student, Nex Benedict, died a day after an altercation inside a high school bathroom.

The department said in a letter on Friday that it was investigating whether Owasso Public Schools, outside Tulsa, had “failed to appropriately respond to alleged harassment of students” in violation of federal law, including Title IX. It said the investigation was in response to a complaint brought by the Human Rights Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group.

The death of Nex, an Owasso High School sophomore who was nonbinary, drew national attention after gay and transgender rights groups said Nex had been bullied at school because of their gender identity. Nex used they and them pronouns as well as he and him pronouns, friends said.

After the altercation, Nex spoke to a police officer at a local hospital and, according to a video of the interview released by the Owasso Police Department, described pouring water on three girls who had been picking on Nex and Nex’s friends for the way they dressed. The girls then attacked and fought with Nex, who told the police officer that they fell to the ground and “blacked out” at one point.

The next day, Nex’s grandmother and guardian called for an ambulance to rush Nex back to the hospital, where they were pronounced dead.

The cause of Nex’s death remains under investigation by the state medical examiner. The Police Department said in a statement last month that the death was not the result of trauma, but has not elaborated.

Nex’s death brought scrutiny to Oklahoma’s restrictive laws and policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students and to the bullying that family members and friends said Nex had suffered at school.

Karen E. Mines, an acting regional director with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, said in the letter that the opening of an investigation “in no way implies that O.C.R. has made a determination on the merits of the complaint.”

In a statement, the school district said that it was “committed to cooperating with federal officials” and that it “believes the complaint submitted by H.R.C. is not supported by the facts and is without merit.”

The Human Rights Campaign’s president, Kelley Robinson, said, “We need them to act urgently so there can be justice for Nex, and so that all students at Owasso High School and every school in Oklahoma can be safe from bullying, harassment and discrimination.”

At a vigil for Nex last month, Robin Ingersoll, a 16-year-old sophomore and friend of Nex at Owasso High School, said that Nex identified as transgender and that L.G.B.T.Q. students had struggled to find acceptance in their corner of Oklahoma.

“In Owasso, it’s worse than the bullying,” Robin said. “We could all learn more acceptance of others, and be better so something like this doesn’t happen again. We could all grow for Nex.”

Ben Fenwick contributed reporting from Owasso, Okla.

This image of Aleksei A. Navalny’s body in a coffin, at a church in southern Moscow, conveys many of the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, an institution that has bound itself closely to the Kremlin but that also counted opposition figures, including Mr. Navalny, among its faithful.

“I, to my shame, am a typical post-Soviet believer,” Mr. Navalny said in an interview in 2012. “I keep fasts, I got baptized at church, but I go to church quite rarely.”

Being an Orthodox Christian, he said, made him feel “like I am part of something big and shared.”

He added: “I like that there are special ethics and self-restraints. At the same time, it doesn’t bother me at all that I exist in a predominantly atheistic environment. Until I was 25 years old, before the birth of my first child, I myself was such an ardent atheist that I was ready to grab the beard of any priest.”

Those remarks reflected the circumstances of many Russians who came of age as the Soviet Union broke apart and as the Russian Orthodox Church again rose to prominence in public life.

Over the last two decades, the church has tied itself closely to the increasingly conservative and nationalist views espoused by President Vladimir V. Putin. That has forced critics like Mr. Navalny, and pockets of progressive believers, to try to reconcile their political dissent and their faith.

Mr. Navalny’s funeral on Friday took place at the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows. A funereal chaplet, typically a paper or fabric ribbon with the image of Jesus Christ, the Mother of God and John the Baptist, was lain on his head.

This church in southern Moscow where the Mass was held is not far from where Mr. Navalny lived until 2017 and where his family had an apartment.

In the image, Mr. Navalny’s father, Anatoly, sits facing the coffin. To the right of him is Mr. Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and a woman who some Russian media reports identified as his mother-in-law, a relative who has stayed away from the public eye.

Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and his children did not appear to be present. Ms. Navalnaya has vowed to carry on her husband’s political activities, which exposes her to arrest, and she and their children no longer live in Russia. His brother Oleg, who served time in prison in what was widely seen as a punishment for Mr. Navalny’s political activities, was also absent.

The Russian Orthodox Church has formally embraced Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which Mr. Navalny vehemently denounced. Patriarch Kirill, the church’s top official, has blessed soldiers being sent off to war and said that those who fight for their country will be rewarded in heaven.

However, the Orthodox church is relatively decentralized, so even as Mr. Putin cracked down on opposition and dissent, progressive priests remain at some parishes. Priests who have voiced opposition to the war have faced recriminations, in some cases expulsion, from church authorities, and even arrest.

The church where Mr. Navalny’s funeral rites took place has also appeared to endorse the war. Images shared on its social media pages in recent weeks announced that parishioners had donated a car to the soldiers fighting in what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation,” and organized letter writing campaigns for the troops. It also advertised a trip by parishioners and their children to a grand Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, which opened in 2020 and has become a symbol of the militarization of Russian society.

Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked the socks off the straight fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died on Friday in her home in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 102.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her estate, confirmed her death.

Calling herself a “geriatric starlet,” Ms. Apfel in her 80s and 90s set trends with clamorous, irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multicolored Bill Blass jacket with tinted Hopi dancing skirt and hairy goatskin boots; a fluffy evening coat of red and green rooster feathers with suede pants slashed to the knees; a rose angora sweater set and 19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt.

Her willfully disjunctive accessories might be a jeweled mask or a necklace of jade beads swinging to the knees, a tin handbag shaped like a terrier, furry scarves wrapped around her neck like a pile of pythons and, nearly always, her signature armloads of bangles and owlish spectacles, big as saucers.

She was tallish and thin, with a short crop of silver hair and scarlet gashes on lips and fingernails, a little old lady among the models at Fashion Week and an authentic Noo Yawk haggler at a shop in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia. Many called her gaudy, kooky, bizarre, even vulgar in get-ups like a cape of gold-tipped duck feathers and thigh-high fuchsia satin Yves Saint Laurent boots.

But she had a point.

“When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else,” Ms. Apfel told Ruth La Ferla of The New York Times in 2011 as she was about to go on national television, selling scarves, bangles and beads of her own design on the Home Shopping Network.

For decades starting in the 1950s, Ms. Apfel designed interiors for private clients like Greta Garbo and Estée Lauder. With her husband, Carl Apfel, she founded Old World Weavers, which sold and restored textiles, including many at the White House. The Apfels scoured museums and bazaars around the world for textile designs. She also added regularly to her huge wardrobe collections at her Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan.

The Apfels sold their company and retired in 1992, but she continued to act as a consultant to the firm and to be the otherworldly woman-about-town, a soaring free spirit known in society and to the fashion cognoscenti for ignoring the dictates of the runway in favor of her own artfully clashing styles.

In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, facing the cancellation of an exhibition and looking for a last-minute replacement, approached her with an audacious proposition: to mount an exhibition of her clothes. The Met had exhibited pieces from designer collections before, but never an individual’s wardrobe.

The show, “Rara Avis: Selections From the Iris Apfel Collection,” assembled 82 ensembles and 300 accessories in the museum’s Costume Institute: Bakelite bangles from the 1930s, Tibetan cuff bracelets, a tiger-pattern travel outfit of her own design, a husky coat of Mongolian lamb and squirrel from Fendi displayed on a mannequin crawling from an igloo.

“This is no collection,” Ms. Apfel said. “It’s a raid on my closet. I always thought to show at the Met you had to be dead.”

Harold Koda, the curator who helped organize the show, said: “To dress this way, there has to be an educated visual sense. It takes courage. I keep thinking, Don’t attempt this at home.”

Soon the show was the talk of the town. Under an avalanche of publicity, students of art, design and social history crowded into the galleries with the limousine society crowd, busloads of tourists and classes of chattering children. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld took it in.

“A rare look in a museum at a fashion arbiter, not a designer,” The Times called the show, adding, “Her approach is so inventive and brash that its like has rarely been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland put her exotic stamp on the pages of Vogue.”

Almost overnight, Ms. Apfel became an international celebrity of pop fashion — featured in magazine spreads and ad campaigns, toasted in columns and blogs, sought after for lectures and seminars. The University of Texas made her a visiting professor. The Met show traveled to other museums, and, like a rock star, she attracted thousands to her public appearances.

Mobs showed up for her bookstore signings after the 2007 publication of “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,” a coffee-table book of her wardrobe and jewelry by the photographer Eric Boman.

“Iris,” an Albert Maysles documentary, opened at the New York Film Festival in 2014, and in 2015 it was seen by enthusiastic movie audiences in America and Britain. The movie critic Manohla Dargis of The Times called it an “insistent rejection of monocultural conformity” and “a delightful eye-opener about life, love, statement eyeglasses, bracelets the size of tricycle tires and the art of making the grandest of entrances.”

In 2016, Ms. Apfel was seen in a television commercial for the French car DS 3, became the face of the Australian brand Blue Illusion, and began a collaboration with the start-up WiseWear. A year later, Mattel created a one-of-a-kind Barbie doll in her image. It was not for sale.

In 2018, she published “Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon,” an autobiographical collection of musings, anecdotes and observations on life and style. As she turned 97 in 2019, she signed a modeling contract with the global agency IMG.

Iris Barrel was born on Aug. 29, 1921, in Astoria, Queens, the only child of Samuel Barrel, who owned a glass and mirror business, and his Russian-born wife, Sadye, who owned a fashion boutique. Iris studied art history at New York University and art at the University of Wisconsin, worked for Women’s Wear Daily, apprenticed with the interior designer Elinor Johnson, and opened her own design firm.

She married Carl Apfel, an advertising executive, in 1948. They had no children. Her husband died in 2015 at the age of 100.

Their Old World Weavers had restored curtains, furniture, draperies and other fabrics at the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.

Ms. Apfel’s apartments in New York and Palm Beach were full of furnishings and tchotchkes that might have come from a Luis Buñuel film: porcelain cats, plush toys, statuary, ornate vases, gilt mirrors, fake fruit, stuffed parrots, paintings by Velázquez and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a mannequin on an ostrich.

The fashion designer Duro Olowu told The Guardian in 2010 that Ms. Apfel’s work had a universal quality. “It’s not a trend,” he said. “It appeals to a certain kind of joy in everybody.”

President Biden turned to an unlikely ally on Friday in his drive to build support for Ukraine’s war effort as U.S. aid falters, declaring during a White House visit by the far-right prime minister of Italy that the two leaders “have each other’s backs” and “have Ukraine’s back.”

The warm tone, a striking departure from Mr. Biden’s assessment of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni when she was elected, extended to a number of foreign policy fronts, as the leaders sought to portray themselves as united on topics including confronting global migration and trying to prevent a broader war in the Middle East.

“As you said when we first met here in the Oval, Giorgia, that we have each other’s backs,” Mr. Biden said. “We do, and you’ve demonstrated that from the moment you took office.”

But Mr. Biden highlighted their unity on Kyiv’s efforts to fend off an invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, creating a contrast with conservatives in Congress. “We also have Ukraine’s back,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s why I’m urging the House of Representatives to pass legislation” that would send billions of dollars to fund the war effort.

The meeting intensified an all-out assault by Mr. Biden to push stalled military aid for Ukraine through a reluctant Congress. He convened a meeting this week at which he sought to push Speaker Mike Johnson to allow a vote on aid. He has warned that the divisions over aid are a gift to Russia. And he has used meetings with European officials this year not only to ensure a united front against Russia’s invasion but also to pressure Congress.

In Ms. Meloni, Mr. Biden has found a surprisingly kindred spirit.

The Italian prime minister said on Friday that as the chairwoman of the Group of 7 nations, she was focused on “defending freedom and building peace for Ukraine.”

After being elected in 2022, Ms. Meloni has steered away from the most Russia-friendly elements of her coalition, and Italy recently agreed to sign a security agreement with Ukraine to help Kyiv’s defense industry.

Mr. Biden’s embrace of Ms. Meloni has come as a surprise after he expressed concern for democracy when she rose to power. Her party, the Brothers of Italy, has roots in the neo-fascist factions that emerged after World War II. She drew comparisons to former President Donald J. Trump after addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States in 2022.

“She hails from Europe’s far right, and her coalition contains influential voices that are much more pro-Russian and sympathetic to Putin than the European mainstream, yet she has bucked that trend and located Italy firmly in the trans-Atlantic camp that is committed to supporting Ukraine,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Europe adviser on the National Security Council in the Obama administration.

While she has advanced other far-right causes, such as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies, in Italy, Mr. Biden has seemed content to set those moves aside to secure an ally on critical foreign policy matters.

Ms. Meloni also could benefit from the global spotlight that comes with a visit to the Oval Office, Mr. Kupchan said, especially as she seeks to convince her own constituents of the importance of defending Ukraine.

“The domestic debate in Italy is, I would say, more skeptical of aid to Ukraine than in most other countries,” Mr. Kupchan said.

Ms. Meloni also stressed the need to discuss strategies to combat human trafficking driving global migration, particularly from North Africa. Mr. Biden too has recently made combating illegal migration a central focus of his administration. Just the day before his meeting with Ms. Meloni, he traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border to push Congress to enact sweeping changes there.

Wildfires burning out of control in the Texas Panhandle have left a path of devastation, with up to 500 structures destroyed as of Friday and ranchers facing crippling losses of cattle and grazing lands. Officials warned that warm, windy and dry weather was expected to return over the weekend and could fan the flames.

“When you look at the damages that have occurred here, it’s just completely gone, nothing left but ashes on the ground,” Gov. Greg Abbott said as he traveled to the region to survey the damage. “Those who are affected by this have gone through utter devastation.”

The National Weather Service forecast “critical fire weather conditions” on Saturday and Sunday, and urged residents to refrain from outdoor activities that might generate sparks or flames over the weekend, which includes Texas Independence Day on Saturday.

Already, one death has been confirmed, a second has been reported by family members and several firefighters have been injured, officials said.

New questions were being raised about the origins of the biggest blaze, known as the Smokehouse Creek fire, which has charred at least 1,075,000 acres of land and become the largest wildfire on record in Texas history.

Lawyers for property insurers and landowners have asked an electric company to preserve a fallen power pole that they believe could have ignited the fire, which remained only 15 percent contained on Friday.

Salem Abraham, who owns 3,500 acres of hay land that burned outside of Canadian, Texas, said he and several other landowners were finalizing a lawsuit that they expected to file later on Friday against the electric company, Xcel Energy, which operates power lines throughout the area.

He said that investigators sent by his lawyers had located a downed pole outside of the town of Stinnett, Texas, that showed signs of having been pushed over by the high winds on Monday, putting live electricity in contact with dry brush and grass.

State officials have said they are still investigating the cause of the fire and did not comment directly on the landowners’ claims. Xcel Energy have notified regulators of the lawyers’ letter.

“We will cooperate with officials while conducting our own investigations to determine the causes of the fires,” the company said in a statement on Friday.

Mr. Abbott said early assessments suggested that about 400 to 500 structures had been destroyed, and he cautioned that the number could rise as surveys continued.

W. Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said that several firefighters and other emergency workers had been injured.

Mr. Abbott also warned of the weather conditions expected over the next couple of days.

“Everybody needs to understand that we face enormous potential fire dangers as we head into this weekend,” he said. “No one can let down their guard, everyone must remain very vigilant.”

A brief period of light precipitation slowed expansion of the fires on Thursday and Friday, but the forecast for dry, windy weather prompted warnings for Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening, covering the Panhandle region and nearby parts of Oklahoma. Wildfires in that state have already caused “heart-wrenching devastation,” according to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture.

Five fires were still active in the area as of Friday afternoon, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. Three of them were more than 50 percent contained, the authorities said.

The Panhandle is cattle country, and ranchers have been able to do little but watch as the grasslands that their livestock rely on for food have been burned. Thousands of cattle may have died in the blazes or been so badly injured that they would have to be killed, the authorities said.

As of Friday afternoon, just over 500 customers in Hemphill County, one of the hardest hit by the wildfires this week, were without power, according to PowerOutage.us. On Wednesday, North Plains Electric Cooperative said in a statement that it had around 115 miles of power lines to rebuild.

“Our goal is to have ALL that are without power restored by Monday, March 4,” the company said.

Mr. Abbott granted temporary waivers on Thursday to three state agencies, freeing them to use all available resources to support communities affected by the fires.

In a speech on Thursday at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, President Biden said that he had deployed federal resources to help fight the flames, in response to requests from state officials. He urged residents of the area near the fires to listen to their local officials.

“When disasters strike, there’s no red state or blue state where I come from,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “We’re standing with everyone, everyone affected by these wildfires, and we’re going to continue to help you respond and recover.”

Other areas were also affected by wildfires this week.

In Nebraska, a wildfire burned over 70,000 acres, but as of Thursday the fire was 98 percent contained, according to the state’s Emergency Management Agency.

An initial damage assessment showed that the fire had destroyed four homes and “countless outbuilding and agricultural infrastructure,” the agency said. No fatalities or injuries had been reported.

In Kansas, the forest service responded to a large fire in Saline County on Thursday. Local officials issued an evacuation notice for residents in the afternoon, but it was lifted about an hour later. Firefighters were still in the area to prevent further problems, county officials said on Thursday.

Ivan Penn contributed reporting.

A federal judge in Florida held a hearing on Friday to consider a new date for former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of mishandling classified documents, but made no immediate decision about a choice that could have major consequences for his legal and political future.

The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, previously said she was inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the trial, which was originally scheduled to start on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla. Several decisions Judge Cannon has reached in recent months about the pacing of the case have made it all but impossible for the trial to start in May.

What remained to be seen at the completion of Friday’s hearing was just how long of a delay Judge Cannon would end up imposing. She did not give an indication of her thinking or provide a sense of when she would announce a date.

On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, sent Judge Cannon their proposals about when the trial should begin.

Mr. Smith’s legal team, hewing to its long-held position of trying to conduct the trial before Election Day, requested a date of July 8. But after months of seeking to delay the trial until next year, Mr. Trump’s lawyers suddenly suggested that they would be willing to go along with a date of Aug. 12.

The hearing in front of Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump in his waning days in office, is being held just days after a decision by the Supreme Court that increased the possibility that the former president might not face trial before Election Day in his other federal case — the one in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The justices agreed to decide whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution on the election interference charges, scheduling arguments for the end of April and keeping the proceedings in the trial court frozen until they resolve the issue. As a practical matter, the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case meant that the election trial was unlikely to begin before September, in the heat of the general election campaign.

Judge Cannon’s decision about whether to go with a July date, an August date or something later in the documents case could have an effect on the timing of the election case, as well. Mr. Trump attended the hearing on Friday.

It was not clear why Mr. Trump’s legal team said it would be open to August after long seeking to postpone the trial until next year. But one possibility was that the lawyers, by proposing to spend much of late summer and early fall in court on the classified documents case, were seeking to reduce the chances of there being time for the election case to go to trial before Election Day.

Only months ago, it seemed that Mr. Trump would spend much of 2024 in front of a jury, fending off four separate criminal indictments in four different cities.

At this point, however, only one of his criminal trials has a solid start date. Last month, a state judge in Manhattan picked March 25 for commencing his trial on charges of arranging hush money to a porn star in an effort to avert a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s fourth criminal case, in which he stands accused of tampering with the election results in Georgia, has not yet been set for trial. It is currently in turmoil as a judge in Fulton County considers whether to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney who filed the indictment, from the case over allegations of financial misconduct surrounding a romantic relationship she had with one of her deputies.

The hearing in Florida touched on more than scheduling issues.

Judge Cannon has asked the defense and prosecution to be ready to discuss Mr. Trump’s unusually broad and highly politicized motion for additional discovery, which was filed in January. In the motion, the former president’s lawyers suggested that, as part of their defense at trial, they intended to argue that federal officials — chief among them those from the intelligence community — were “politically motivated and biased” against Mr. Trump.

The parties are also set to debate an effort by Mr. Smith to keep under seal the names of about two dozen potential witnesses who could testify at trial.

Judge Cannon briefly agreed to a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to include the witnesses’ names in a public court filing. But she put that decision on hold after Mr. Smith accused her of having made a “clear error” and said the witnesses could face threats or harassment if their identities were revealed.

Even amid discussion of these other issues, the question of the trial’s timing was arguably paramount.

If Judge Cannon were to postpone the proceeding into next year, she would probably face a tidal wave of criticism. It is possible she could also provoke Mr. Smith’s first appeal since the indictment was returned in June, even though rulings related to scheduling matters are generally not subject to a challenge in higher courts.

When Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case last spring, she was already under fire for having issued a ruling in an early part of the inquiry that was favorable to Mr. Trump, but so legally questionable that an appeals court sternly rebuked her in reversing it.

After the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, for classified documents in August 2022, Judge Cannon appointed an independent arbiter to figure out whether any of the materials collected by the agents were privileged and should be kept out of the hands of investigators.

But she accompanied that relatively typical decision with another that was all but unheard of, effectively freezing the government’s investigation of Mr. Trump in place until after the arbiter, known as a special master, completed his work.

Prosecutors were outraged by the move, accusing Judge Cannon not only of lacking the power to insert herself into the case so extremely, but also of treating Mr. Trump differently than a normal criminal defendant.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta ultimately agreed, unanimously reversing her decision and pointing out that she appeared to have granted “a special exception” for Mr. Trump in defiance of “our nation’s foundational principle that our law applies to all.”

Still, in some of her more recent rulings, Judge Cannon has shown herself willing to buck Mr. Trump.

On Wednesday, for example, she denied a highly unusual request from his lawyers to gain access to a secret government filing detailing a trove of classified discovery evidence that prosecutors said was neither helpful nor relevant to his defense.

If Judge Cannon had permitted the request, legal experts said, it would have fallen far outside the normal procedures laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, the federal law governing the use of classified materials at public trials.

But even while ruling against Mr. Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to suggest that he was different from most criminal defendants. She did not quite agree with Mr. Smith’s position that the facts in this case did not “remotely justify a deviation from the normal process.”

“The court,” she wrote, “cannot speak with such confidence in this first-ever criminal prosecution of a former United States president — once the country’s chief classification authority over many of the documents the special counsel now seeks to withhold from him.”