Category: News

WASHINGTON — The Trump family business and President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee have jointly agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the attorney general for the District of Columbia, who claimed that the Trump International Hotel in Washington illegally received excessive payments from the inauguration committee.

The settlement in the civil suit came with no admission of wrongdoing by the Trump Organization, the former president or the inaugural committee.

But the payment amounted to nearly three-quarters of the $1.03 million that the lawsuit, filed by Attorney General Karl Racine of Washington, said had been paid to Mr. Trump’s hotel by the nonprofit inaugural committee to rent out space at what Mr. Racine asserted was an above-market rate and then use it in part to host a private reception for Mr. Trump’s children on the evening he was sworn in as president.

The settlement also came just days before the Trump family was slated to formally close on the sale of the Trump International Hotel, which will be converted to a Waldorf Astoria after Mr. Trump’s name is stripped from the landmark building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House.

Negotiations to settle the suit intensified earlier this year after a Superior Court judge in Washington set a trial date for September and rejected an effort by the Trump Organization to be removed from the lawsuit, making it likely that members of Mr. Trump’s family were going to be called in open court to testify.

“After he was elected, one of the first actions Donald Trump took was illegally using his own inauguration to enrich his family,” Mr. Racine said in a statement announcing the settlement on Tuesday. “Nonprofit funds cannot be used to line the pockets of individuals, no matter how powerful they are.”

Mr. Trump issued his own statement Tuesday morning, disputing the allegations.

“Given the impending sale of The Trump International Hotel, Washington D.C., and with absolutely no admission of liability or guilt, we have reached a settlement to end all litigation with Democrat Attorney General Racine,” Mr. Trump’s statement said. “This was yet another example of weaponizing Law Enforcement against the Republican Party and, in particular, the former President of the United States. So bad for our Country!”

Lee Blalack, a lawyer for the Trump inaugural committee, said the $750,000 payment was being split equally between the committee and the Trump family companies, a cost the inaugural committee decided was worth it given an estimate that the trial would have generated legal bills twice as high.

“Settlement was prudent simply to avoid the significant costs of litigating these baseless allegations through trial,” he said in the statement, adding that the inaugural committee’s payment was being covered by its insurance company.

The $750,000 from the inauguration case will be donated by Mr. Racine to two nonprofit groups that promote democracy and support youth in Washington, D.C., Mikva Challenge DC and DC Action, organizations that were founded by or run by former aides to President Bill Clinton, including Abner Mikva, a former federal judge, White House counsel to Mr. Clinton and Democratic member of Congress from Illinois.

Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., among many others, had to sit for depositions as Mr. Racine moved ahead in the case filed against the Trump Organization and the inauguration committee.

The settlement follows an action last year by the United States Supreme Court, after Mr. Trump left office, to dismiss separate legal claims that he had illegally accepted payments at the hotel from foreign government officials, in violation of the so-called emoluments clauses of the Constitution.

Those lawsuits were deemed to be moot because Mr. Trump no longer served as president, meaning the federal courts never concluded if Mr. Trump had violated the constitutional ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments.

In 2019, Mr. Trump agreed to a legal settlement in New York that he had misused charitable donations to benefit himself.

But the legal peril for Mr. Trump continues, with investigations ongoing in New York, where the state attorney general and two district attorneys have been examining statements that the Trump Organization made about the value of its properties, as well as other business practices; and in Georgia, where Mr. Trump and others are being investigated to determine if they criminally interfered with the 2020 presidential election.

Mr. Racine filed his lawsuit after an initial investigation by his office produced emails that showed that former aides to Mr. Trump’s inauguration questioned, even at the time the contract with the Trump hotel was being negotiated in December 2016, if the inauguration committee was overpaying the Trump family for the hotel rental.

“I am a bit worried about the optics of PIC paying Trump Hotel a high fee and the media making a big story out of it,” Rick Gates, the former deputy chair of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and a member of Trump’s inauguration planning committee, wrote in a December 2016 email to Ivanka Trump, referring to the Presidential Inauguration Committee, as they negotiated a deal to rent out ballrooms and other space at the Trump hotel.

The price that the Trump hotel proposed to charge the inauguration committee was reduced after these initial concerns were raised, but the fee remained much higher than what the same hotel had charged another nonprofit group during the inauguration, and still created concern among aides to Mr. Trump, emails collected during the lawsuit show.

The rental of the Trump hotel also included a special “friends and family” party sponsored by the adult children of Mr. Trump, Mr. Racine said in the lawsuit, a sign of how money donated to a nonprofit was being used for personal benefit.

The inaugural committee set up by Mr. Trump, which collected donations from corporations and individuals who later would often seek official action by the Trump administration to help their business interests, raised more than $107 million, far more than any previous inauguration.

The more than $1 million paid by the inauguration committee to the Trump hotel was seen by ethics watchdog groups as just the start of a pattern that lasted through the administration, with Mr. Trump and his family using his White House status to enrich themselves.

Under District of Columbia law, the attorney general oversees nonprofits, a power that the office has used in recent years to investigate a local nonprofit hospital and a theater company, among others accused of misuse of charitable funds.

Mr. Racine filed a motion on Tuesday asking Judge Yvonne Williams, of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, to dismiss his 2020 lawsuit, after lawyers for the Trump Organization and the inauguration committee signed a deal detailing the terms of the proposed settlement.

The agreement noted that none of the current officers at the inauguration committee are involved in other nonprofits in the District of Columbia, eliminating any need to impose restrictions on their involvement in other charities in the city, as the New York attorney general had done as part of the settlement there in 2019.

In the New York case, Mr. Trump was ordered to pay more than $2 million in damages for what Attorney General Letitia James described as “misusing charitable funds for his own political gain,” including money from the Trump Foundation to pay for a portrait of Mr. Trump that cost $10,000 and using foundation money for a political campaign event.

Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit group that tracked spending at Trump company operations, said the settlement was an important concession, even though the Trump Organization did not admit wrongdoing.

“Trump displayed from the first day of his presidency that the whole enterprise was a grift,” he said. “And much of that was in plain sight of the public.”

When “Gilded Glamour,” the dress code of the 2022 Met Gala, was announced, it seemed to be either a recipe for extravagant disaster or irony. After all, the current era has often been compared to the late 19th-century Gilded Age, that period between 1870 and 1900 when extreme wealth was concentrated in the hands of the very few, the robber barons came to the fore, and income inequality grew ever greater just beneath the gold veneer on the glittering surface.

That first gilded age came to a symbolic end with a famously ostentatious party, the Bradley-Martin Ball of 1897, in which many of the attendees, the good and great and greedy of New York society, dressed in full swag as Marie Antoinette. Also, Queen Louise of Prussia.

Was this really what the organizers were going for?

Or could it be, went one interpretation, that by evoking just such a moment, the orchestrators of the current famously ostentatious Met Gala were suggesting that guests dial it back, rewrite history, exercise some restraint. Stop dressing as if for a costume ball in which the goal is to out-Instagram one another.

That idea was blown off the table as soon as Blake Lively, a co-host, appeared in a gleaming copper Versace column festooned in swathes of bustled silk that later unfurled into a verdigris-toned train embroidered with the constellations of Grand Central Station. It was a medley of skyscraper dreams rolled into one magic morphing dress. Along with the gown she wore matching opera gloves and a tiara like the Statue of Liberty. Next to her, her husband (and co-host), Ryan Reynolds, in classic white tie, faded into oblivion.

It set the tone for the night.

Those who played it understated simply got lost in the excess. Even Elon Musk, richest man in the world, harbinger of the current gilded age, Twitter disrupter, doing his best to suggest a responsible steward of a public utility in his white tie and tails, barely made a ripple. There was just so much to see.

There was gold — gilt apparently without the guilt. (Of course; no one said interpretations of the theme had to be subtle.) So there was Cardi B, draped in more than a kilometer of body-conscious Versace chains and jewelry, and here was Megan Thee Stallion in gleaming feathers and brocade, like a 24-karat Moschino Valkyrie. There was Carey Mulligan, whose Schiaparelli bustier and train were embroidered with 79,000 gold sequins; and here was Chloe Bailey, whose metallic, strapless Area column recreated the exaggerated curves and hips of a corset and pannier without resorting to those body-shaping devices.

Though lots of others did.

Corsets were the accessory of the evening, along with capes, opera gloves (best on Kodi Smit-McPhee, who paired his red Bottega Veneta pair with a white tuxedo shirt and “jeans” made of leather), tiaras (Hamish Bowles wore a Verdura crown last seen in 1957 at Buckingham Palace) and trains.

In the waist-cinching stakes, the tightest statement may have been made by Billie Eilish as a sort of Gothic bordello madam in bustled Gucci satin and green lace — all upcycled from fabrics in the atelier. Lenny Kravitz, in leather and lace, Paloma Elsesser in a white Coach number, and Evan Mock in ice cream tones and a white neck ruff by Head of State, like a sorbet Little Lord Fauntleroy, came close.

Feathers were also a trend, on the honorary co-chair Anna Wintour (in Chanel), Nicola Coughlan (in Richard Quinn) and, in two relatively subtle looks, Emma Stone in a white Louis Vuitton slip dress and Hailey Bieber in white Saint Laurent.

They were the evening’s palate cleansers, the yin to the yang of the peekaboo black dresses with strategically placed period detailing of Vanessa Hudgens in Moschino, Phoebe Dynevor in Louis Vuitton and Precious Lee in Altuzarra wearing (yes) another corset. They were a reminder that, in fact, sometimes less is actually more, on an evening of rapacious ruffles seemingly dedicated to the opposite idea.

A reminder of a different sort came courtesy of Riz Ahmed, who said in a Vogue interview on the red carpet that his unbuttoned silk workwear shirt, tank top and trousers tucked into knee-high boots were “a homage to the immigrant workers that kept the Gilded Age going.”

That the outfit was by Prada, and the accompanying chain around his neck an 18-karat white gold, platinum, chalcedony, turquoise and diamond necklace by Cartier, somewhat complicated the point.

Less so Questlove, wearing a quilt by the Gee’s Bend quilters under his Zegna coat to represent “Black women who had sacrificed for their country.” Because, he said, “for African Americans in this country the gilded period’s a little bit different.”

They weren’t the only ones to try to add layers, at least conceptually, to their outfits. Hillary Clinton, attending the gala for the first time in two decades, wore a burgundy Altuzarra gown with the names of 60 American women who had inspired her embroidered on the hem, including Abigail Adams, Clara Barton, Rosa Parks — and her mother, Dorothy Rodham.

And Mayor Eric Adams of New York, whose decision to attend the gala was not without controversy given the state of the city, modeled a tailcoat by Laolu Senbanjo with the message “End Gun Violence,” as well as M.T.A. and other metropolitan symbols on the back and lapels.

As it happened, the city — or rather its skyline — was also the inspiration for Alicia Keys’s sparkling Ralph Lauren column and cape, which had the soaring silhouettes of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building picked out in silver on the hem, a nod to the equally soaring ambitions of the industrialists whose dicey legacy built this town. Ditto Kaia Gerber’s steel-silver Alexander McQueen, though the ripples of the Titian hair she wore with it evoked Lady Godiva even more than architecture.

Still, when it came to channeling history, Kim Kardashian, making the final entrance of the evening with Pete Davidson, topped them all. Not just because she managed to shoehorn herself into Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” nude dress — literally, the same one, which Ms. Kardashian wore to climb the steps, immediately swapping it for a copy in order to move on to dinner. Not just because for the first time the entire Kardashian female clan had been invited.

It was because, in receiving the honor of being the last to arrive, she, a pop culture figure born of reality TV who had once been barred from the gala guest list, conclusively demonstrated that it is influence and fame, not just pedigree and filthy lucre, that are the real currency of success; the keys that unlock the doors of even the most exclusive events. Today, even more than in the original Gilded Age.

A metal barrel containing the remains of a person killed in the 1980s was found on Sunday on the shore of Nevada’s Lake Mead, a discovery that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said was made possible by an ongoing drought.

“It’s really odd in the sense that had the lake never receded, we would never have discovered the body,” Lt. Ray Spencer of the Police Department said by phone on Monday.

Lieutenant Spencer said the police were trying to learn the victim’s identity. He declined to share details about the victim, including a possible age, sex or specific cause of death. It’s clear that the person “died as a result of a homicide,” he said, but he would not share how that was determined.

Based on items recovered inside the barrel, investigators believe the victim was killed in the 1980s, Lieutenant Spencer said. He declined to say what those items were.

The drop in the lake’s water level could result in other bodies being found at the lake, Lieutenant Spencer said. Rangers with the National Park Service find one or two bodies at Lake Mead every year, he said, “so it’s not uncommon to work a homicide out at the lake.”

Experts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will help them identify the remains and determine the age of the barrel’s metal, Lieutenant Spencer said.

Since the victim was killed in the 1980s in an area near Las Vegas, where mob-connected casinos dominated the Strip, investigators will “definitely not rule out” that the killing may have been Mafia-related, Lieutenant Spencer said.

“We are going to look at that potential possibility,” he said.

The barrel was discovered about 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon by people walking along the shoreline of Lake Mead — America’s largest man-made reservoir, which is about 40 miles east of Las Vegas and was formed by the construction of Hoover Dam.

They saw the corroded, rusted barrel embedded in mud, its beige exterior covered in barnacles, Lieutenant Spencer said. While the sun shined on nearby boaters floating in the water, they peeked their heads inside and discovered a skeleton.

“We were docking our boat to go home and heard a woman scream,” Shawna Hollister, a witness to the discovery, told KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. “My husband walked over and found the body. His shirt and belt were the only thing we could see over his decomposing bones.”

Photos of the barrel obtained by KLAS-TV show it on its side, close to the receding shoreline, with a boat floating in the background.

Witnesses called the National Park Service, which responded and confirmed that the contents inside were in fact human remains, Lieutenant Spencer said. The National Park Service then called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which is investigating.

Investigators also plan to scan missing-person cases from the 1980s to search for clues, Lieutenant Spencer added.

The investigation could take years because the police are starting “at square one,” Lieutenant Spencer said.

“In the 1980s, we did not have any of the DNA databases, so there was no DNA collection,” he said.

If investigators are able to recover DNA samples from the remains, it will take extensive genealogy work to determine the person’s identity, Lieutenant Spencer said.

Since 2000, the elevation of Lake Mead has dropped by nearly 150 feet because of “drought and climate change,” according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Recent conditions have resulted in more significant water level declines. On Sunday, the Southern Nevada Water Authority issued mandatory summer water restrictions.

In August, the federal government for the first time declared a water shortage at Lake Mead, triggering cuts in water supply for the region.

Nina Jankowicz’s new book, “How to Be a Woman Online,” chronicles the vitriol she and other women have faced from trolls and other malign actors. She’s now at the center of a new firestorm of criticism, this time over her appointment to lead an advisory board at the Department of Homeland Security on the threat of disinformation.

The creation of a board, announced last week, has turned into a partisan fight over disinformation itself — and what role, if any, the government should have in policing false, at times toxic, and even violent content online.

Within hours of the announcement, Republican lawmakers began railing against the board as Orwellian, accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth” to police people’s thoughts. Two professors writing an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal noted that the abbreviation for the new Disinformation Governance Board was only “one letter off from K.G.B.,” the Soviet Union’s security service.

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has found himself on the defensive. In a television interview on CNN on Sunday, he insisted that the new board was a small group, that it had no operational authority or capability and that it would not spy on Americans.

“We in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens,” he said.

Mr. Mayorkas’s reassurance did little to quell the furor, underscoring how partisan the debate over disinformation has become. Facing a round of questions about the board on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said it represented a continuation of work that the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had begun in 2020, under the previous administration.

Its focus is to coordinate the department’s response to the potential impacts of disinformation threats — including foreign election influence, like Russia’s in 2016 and again in 2020; efforts by smugglers to encourage migrants to cross the border; and online posts that could incite extremist attacks. Ms. Psaki did not elaborate on how the department would define what constituted extremist content online. She said the board would consider making public its findings on disinformation, although “a lot of this work is really about work that people may not see every day that’s ongoing by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Many of those criticizing the board scoured Ms. Jankowicz’s past statements, online and off, accusing her of being hostile to conservative viewpoints. They suggested — without basis — that she would stifle legally protected speech using a partisan calculus.

Two ranking Republicans on the House committees on intelligence and homeland security — Michael R. Turner of Ohio and John Katko of New York — cited recent comments she made about the laptops of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and about Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter as evidence of bias.

Ms. Jankowicz, 33, has suggested in her book and in public statements that condescending and misogynistic content online can prelude violence and other unlawful acts offline — the kinds of threat the board was created to monitor. Her book cites research into virulent reactions that prominent women have faced, including Vice President Kamala Harris after her nomination in 2020.

Ms. Jankowicz has called for social media companies and law enforcement agencies to take stiffer action against online abuse. Such views have prompted warnings that the government should not police content online; it has also motivated Mr. Musk, who has said he wants to purchase Twitter to free its users from onerous restrictions that in his view violate freedom of speech.

“I shudder to think about, if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would be like for the marginalized communities around the world, which are already shouldering so much of this abuse, disproportionate amounts of this abuse” Ms. Jankowicz told NPR in an interview last week about her new book, referring to those who experience attacks online, especially women and people of color.

A tweet she sent, using a portion of that quote, was cited by Mr. Turner and Mr. Katko in their letter to Mr. Mayorkas. The note requested “all documents and communications” about the creation of the board and Ms. Jankowicz’s appointment as its executive director.

The board quietly began work two months ago, staffed part time by officials from other parts of the large department.

According to a statement released on Monday, the department said the board would monitor “disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran, or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling organizations.” The statement also cited disinformation that can spread during natural disasters, like false information about the safety of drinking water during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

It’s not the first time the Department of Homeland Security has moved to identify disinformation as a threat facing the homeland. The department joined the F.B.I. in releasing terrorism bulletins warning that falsehoods about the 2020 election and the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, could embolden domestic extremists.

Mr. Mayorkas has defended Ms. Jankowicz, calling her “a renowned expert” who was “eminently qualified” to advise the department on security threats that germinate in the fecund atmosphere online. At the same time, he acknowledged mishandling the announcement of the board — made in a simple press statement last week.

“I think we probably could have done a better job of communicating what it does and does not do,” he told CNN.

Ms. Jankowicz has been a familiar commentator on disinformation for years. She has worked for the National Democratic Institute, an arm of the National Endowment for Democracy that promotes democratic governance abroad, and served as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

As a Fulbright fellow, she worked as an adviser to the Ukrainian government in 2017. Her 2020 book, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict,” focused on Russia’s weaponization of information. It warned that governments were ill prepared and ill equipped to counteract disinformation.

A quote posted on her biography on the Wilson Center’s website underscores the challenges for those who would fight disinformation.

“Disinformation is not a partisan problem; it’s a democratic one, and it will take cooperation — cross-party, cross-sector, cross-government, and cross-border — to defeat,” it says.

In New York, where landlords typically move to evict more people than in any other city in the nation, the housing courts sat in an unusual stupor for some two years. But as pandemic restrictions ease, they are beginning to hum anew.

The roughly 2,000 eviction cases filed by landlords every week since March are roughly 40 percent more than the number filed in mid-January, after the state’s eviction moratorium expired. Tenants have been thrown out of homes in more than 500 cases since February, according to city data, about double the number in all of the 20 months prior.

Judges are increasingly asking tenants to appear in court after months of remote interactions. Lawyers representing landlords are exasperated cases are not moving faster, while lawyers who defend tenants cannot keep up with a rising caseload.

The courts bear little resemblance to the frenetic, prepandemic past, when lines of beleaguered tenants spilled around the block and crowded hallways featured raucous settlement talks.

The number of cases is still below prepandemic levels.

On a recent Thursday, the pews in a Brooklyn courtroom sat mostly empty, with only a few lawyers mingling in deserted hallways as tenants queued in a cramped waiting area at what was once one of the city’s busiest courts.

But after the pandemic pushed thousands of people to the brink of losing their homes, the uptick in activity is raising questions about how well the housing system can continue to avoid a wider crisis of dislocation, as soaring rents once again underscore the city’s challenges with affordability, and whether some of the ugliest features of the city’s longstanding housing crisis, such as the chaotic court system, are set to return.

Already, a new, crucial protection — a service for free legal representation — is reaching a breaking point, advocates for tenants say.

For years, nearly all landlords used lawyers in housing court, while the majority of tenants did not — a power imbalance that many felt unfairly left tenants vulnerable to eviction. A new city law was passed in 2017 to provide free lawyers for low-income people, and went into full effect last year.

But several nonprofits tapped by the city to represent tenants, grappling with staffing shortages and the uptick in cases, say they are not ready to meet the need. A court spokesman said last week that legal groups had declined to take on nearly 1,400 cases since March.

In Brooklyn, for example, Legal Services NYC has had about 25 lawyers handling cases through the program since 2019. But compared with February and March that year, the number of cases in those months this year doubled to more than 300, the group said.

Several lawyers have resigned, and the group has struggled to hire and train enough new lawyers amid a tight job market, said Raun J. Rasmussen, the group’s executive director.

“Right now we’re trying really hard to grab every single May law graduate who doesn’t have a job, and we’re all competing with each other to do that,” he said.

To cope, Legal Services NYC limited its cases last month in Queens and the Bronx and stopped accepting new cases in Brooklyn. The Legal Aid Society, another nonprofit, gradually stopped taking new cases in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn last month.

“The fear today is that we’re going to have a lot of tenants going without full representation from counsel at a time when we’re trying to come out of the pandemic,” said Adriene Holder, chief attorney of civil practice at the Legal Aid Society.

The groups have called on the courts to slow the scheduling and pace of cases moving through the system.

The spokesman for the courts, Lucian Chalfen, said last week that the number of scheduled appearances in cases was down 41 percent compared with the first quarter in 2019, and the number of new cases filed was down 62 percent.

He said that a slowdown would “accomplish nothing,” as new cases would continue to pile up.

“Are the legal services providers really all of a sudden going to have an epiphany and be able to provide representation on all of those cases?” he said.

The new city law was meant to help tenants like Damian Winns, a security guard, who moved into a one-bedroom apartment in East New York just before the pandemic. At $1,200 a month, it was one of the few places he felt he could afford.

But Mr. Winns, 44, struggled to find work during the pandemic, and missed a few months of rent last year. He thought a pandemic rent relief program paid for the missed months.

Instead, Mr. Winns found himself at a hearing in a courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn last week after his landlord moved to evict him, claiming he still owed the money.

“Where else am I supposed to go?” Mr. Winns said in an interview.

Although he may have been eligible for a free lawyer, nobody was there to take his case, and a court official told him a legal group should reach out before his next court hearing this month — maybe.

New York City’s housing courts, located in a handful of buildings and offices across the boroughs, were created by the state almost 50 years ago to enforce the housing code and keep homes from deteriorating. But the bulk of cases have nearly always been eviction proceedings over unpaid rent.

Fifty housing court judges are appointed by New York’s chief administrative judge for five-year terms, based on recommendations made by a panel of representatives from tenant advocates, the real estate industry and the bar association, among others.

New York City has a reputation for being relatively tenant friendly: Eviction cases can take months or longer compared with a few days in other parts of the nation. But the sheer number of cases has prompted criticisms that the court system is overburdened.

In one year in the mid-1990s, landlords filed more than 316,000 eviction cases. In 2019, before the pandemic, there were more than 171,000 cases. Currently, there are about 75,000 active cases in the system, Mr. Chalfen said.

Eviction cases in the public housing system, which accounted for tens of thousands of cases every year before the pandemic, have largely been discontinued. The eviction moratorium and a massive rent relief program, which has paid out $1.8 billion to address the rent debt of more than 140,000 households, have also lightened the load of cases.

Still, the court process remains confounding for both landlords and tenants.

At a recent court hearing in Brooklyn, Salvatore Candela, a lawyer representing a landlord of a three-story building in Flatbush, expressed disappointment when a judge set a new hearing date for June to give more time for one of the tenants to find a lawyer.

The landlord, Robinson Cadet, a retired corrections employee, may go another month without a rental income, after he said he was already owed $57,000 over the past year and a half.

“It makes me feel like the whole system is against me,” Mr. Cadet said.

Meanwhile, Sasha Portilla, a taxi dispatcher, appeared in a Queens courtroom earlier this month, after her landlord said she had overstayed the term of her lease and moved to evict her. It was her first time in housing court, she said, and she worried that her eviction could happen within days.

For at least 30 minutes, Ms. Portilla, 32, watched another case unfold virtually on a television screen as a court official struggled to find remote interpreters to translate between a landlord who spoke Mandarin and a tenant who spoke Spanish.

When it was Ms. Portilla’s turn, she asked a court official how soon she could be evicted. A court employee said there were still several steps in the process, and that a pro bono lawyer should, in theory, reach out before her next hearing in May, to help her through the process, but to tell a judge if that did not happen.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that the City of Boston had violated the First Amendment when it refused to let a private group raise a Christian flag in front of its City Hall.

One of the three flagpoles in front of the building, which ordinarily flies the flag of Boston, is occasionally made available to groups seeking to celebrate their backgrounds or to promote causes like gay pride. In a 12-year period, the city approved 284 requests to raise flags on the third flagpole.

It rejected only one, from Camp Constitution, which says it seeks “to enhance understanding of our Judeo-Christian moral heritage.” The group’s application said it sought to raise a “Christian flag” for one hour at an event that would include “short speeches by some local clergy focusing on Boston’s history.” The flag bore the Latin cross.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for six members of the court, said the central question in the case, Shurtleff v. City of Boston, No. 20-1800, was whether the city had created a public forum by allowing private groups to use its flagpole or was conveying its own speech by choosing and endorsing the flags it approved. When the government is speaking for itself, it is immune from First Amendment scrutiny.

Justice Breyer concluded that the Christian flag was private speech in a public forum and that the city’s refusal to let “Camp Constitution fly their flag based on its religious viewpoint violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”

Both the Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union had filed supporting briefs siding with the Christian group’s position. “The city cannot generally open its flagpole to flags from private civic and social groups while excluding otherwise similar groups with religious views,” the administrations’s brief said.

The court should consider three factors in deciding whether a given message is government speech, Justice Breyer wrote: the history of the practice in question, whether observers were likely to believe that the messages reflected the government’s views and how much the government controlled the messages. The third factor was “the most salient feature of this case,” Justice Breyer wrote, and it cut sharply against the city.

“All told,” he wrote, “while the historical practice of flag flying at government buildings favors Boston, the city’s lack of meaningful involvement in the selection of flags or the crafting of their messages leads us to classify the flag railings as private, not government, speech — though nothing prevents Boston from changing its policies going forward.”

Justice Breyer stressed that governments must be free to take sides when they speak for themselves.

“When the government wishes to state an opinion, to speak for the community, to formulate policies or to implement programs, it naturally chooses what to say and what not to say,” he wrote. “That must be true for government to work. Boston could not easily congratulate the Red Sox on a victory were the city powerless to decline to simultaneously transmit the views of disappointed Yankees fans.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that he agreed with the majority’s bottom line but not its rationale. Instead of a three-factor test, Justice Alito wrote, courts should focus on a single question in deciding whether expression is government speech: “whether the government is speaking instead of regulating private expression.”

“Government speech occurs if — but only if — a government purposefully expresses a message of its own through persons authorized to speak on its behalf, and in doing so, does not rely on a means that abridges private speech,” Justice Alito wrote.

The Boston program, he wrote, “cannot possibly constitute government speech.”

“The flags flown reflected a dizzying and contradictory array of perspectives that cannot be understood to express the message of a single speaker,” Justice Alito wrote. “For example, the city allowed parties to fly the gay pride flag, but it allowed others to fly the flag of Ethiopia, a country in which ‘homosexual acts’ are punishable by ‘imprisonment for not less than one year.’”

He acknowledged that the Supreme Court has sometimes struggled to distinguish the government’s speech from private speech, and he criticized a 2015 decision involving the Confederate battle flag.

In that case, Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could refuse to allow specialty license plates bearing the Confederate flag because the plates were government speech and therefore immune from First Amendment scrutiny. The vote was 5 to 4.

Texas had permitted hundreds of specialty plates bearing all sorts of messages, including ones for college alumni, sports fans, businesses and service organizations. Others sent messages like “Choose Life,” “God Bless Texas” and “Fight Terrorism.”

All were government speech, Justice Breyer wrote for the majority.

In dissent at the time, Justice Alito questioned the notion that license plates saying “Rather Be Golfing” or supporting the University of Oklahoma conveyed a government message. The first cannot plausibly represent state policy, he wrote; the second, in Texas at least, bordered on treason during college football season.

On Monday, Justice Alito said the license-plate decision had produced the three-factor test and warped the law in the process. “The government did not have any purpose to communicate, and instead allowed private parties to use personal plates to communicate their own messages,” Justice Alito wrote. “This expansive understanding of government speech by adoption should be confined to government-issued IDs.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, who had been in the majority in the license-plate case, joined Justice Alito’s concurring opinion, as did Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

In his own concurring opinion, Justice Gorsuch said the city had rejected the Christian flag because it feared it would run afoul of the clause of the First Amendment barring government establishment of religion. He wrote that the Supreme Court bore part of the blame for that misunderstanding and that lower courts and local officials should not rely on Lemon v. Kurtzman, a 1971 decision that has been the subject of much judicial and academic criticism but has not been formally overruled.

The authorities in Beijing on Monday said that they had reopened a mass coronavirus isolation center, the latest in a raft of measures to try to stave off a citywide lockdown.

While Beijing has recorded only 400 cases since April 22, the move to start using the Xiaotangshan hospital, which has more than 1,000 beds, appears to be aimed at avoiding the fate of Shanghai, which is still under lockdown. The hospital was built in seven days in 2003 to treat patients of the SARS epidemic and was used again in 2020 to treat Covid-19 patients.

Officials in Beijing are under immense pressure to quickly stamp out outbreaks. In recent days, they have placed a temporary ban on dining in restaurants, closed schools indefinitely and ordered residents to show proof of a negative test within the past week to enter public spaces, including public transportation.

Universal Beijing Resort, one of the city’s major tourist attractions, was also ordered shut just as the five-day May Day holiday started on Saturday. And nearly all of the Chinese capital’s 22 million residents have undergone three rounds of testing.

So far, the scale of the outbreak appears to be limited. On Monday, officials announced 50 new cases down from the 59 reported on Sunday. At a news conference on Sunday, health officials said that they had successfully sequenced dozens of cases and established clear chains of transmission.

By acting early, officials in Beijing are hoping to avoid a punishing lockdown similar to the one in Shanghai during the past month. Since the beginning of March, Shanghai has reported more than 550,000 cases, leading officials to institute harsh quarantine measures that have resulted in shortages of food and supplies as well as protests.

Cases in Shanghai are now falling. On Monday, the authorities reported about 6,600 new infections, down from 7,800 the day before. In recent days, the local government has shuttered several mass quarantine sites that had been used to house patients.

Concerns remain about China’s population of older adults, who have emerged as one of the most vulnerable groups during the pandemic. Just over half of people 80 and older have had two shots, and less than 20 percent of that age group have received a booster, Zeng Yixin, a vice minister of the National Health Commission, said in March.

Over the weekend, the authorities were put on alert after several videos were widely shared on Chinese social media showing workers in protective suits unzipping a body bag and wheeling it back into a home for the care of older adults in Shanghai. On Monday, local officials confirmed that a person had been put into a body bag while still alive, according to Chinese state media. The officials added that the person had since been transferred to a hospital and was showing stable vital signs.

Chinese state media later reported that four people had been dismissed from their posts in connection with the incident, including two local officials overseeing care for older adults and the director of the nursing home.