CMYK
THE WEATHER
VOL. CLXXIII . . . . No. 59,969
INQUIRY WIDENS Democrats See
AS F.B.I. SEIZES Narrower Path
To Keep Senate
ADAMS’S PHONES
Manchin’s Exit Leaves
’21 CAMPAIGN SCRUTINY No Margin for Error
Agents Approach Mayor
After a Raid on His
Chief Fund-Raiser
This article is by William K. Rash-
baum, Dana Rubinstein and Mi-
chael Rothfeld.
F.B.I. agents seized Mayor Eric
Adams’s electronic devices early
this week in what appeared to be a
dramatic escalation of a criminal
inquiry into whether his 2021 cam-
paign conspired with the Turkish
government and others to funnel
money into its coffers.
The agents approached the
mayor after an event at New York
University on Monday evening
and asked his security detail to
step away, a person with knowl-
edge of the matter said. They
climbed into his S.U.V. with him
and, pursuant to a court-autho-
rized warrant, took his devices,
the person said.
The devices — at least two cell-
phones and an iPad — were re-
turned to the mayor within a mat-
ter of days, according to that per-
son and another person familiar
with the situation. Law enforce-
ment investigators with a search
warrant can make copies of the
data on devices after they seize
them.
A lawyer for Mr. Adams and his
campaign said in a statement that
the mayor was cooperating with
federal authorities and had al-
ready “proactively reported” at
least one instance of improper be-
havior.
“After learning of the federal in-
vestigation, it was discovered that
an individual had recently acted
improperly,” said the lawyer, Boyd
Johnson. “In the spirit of transpar-
ency and cooperation, this behav-
ior was immediately and proac-
tively reported to investigators.”
Mr. Johnson said that Mr. Ad-
ams had not been accused of
wrongdoing and had “immedi-
ately complied with the F.B.I.’s re-
quest and provided them with
electronic devices.” Mr. Adams
had attended an anniversary cele-
bration for the ASD Nest Support
Continued on Page A18
POLICING Some see a broken
promise by the mayor in the
N.Y.P.D.’s tactics. PAGE A18
South Korea Targets ‘Fake News,’
But Journalists Fear Censorship
By CHOE SANG-HUN
SEOUL — Allies of President
Yoon Suk Yeol are attacking what
they see as an existential threat to
South Korea, and they are minc-
ing few words. The head of Mr.
Yoon’s party has called for the
death sentence for a case of “high
treason.” The culture ministry has
vowed to root out what it called an
“organized and dirty” conspiracy
to undermine the country’s de-
mocracy.
In this case, the accused is not a
foreign spy, but a Korean news
outlet that has published articles
critical of Mr. Yoon and his gov-
ernment.
The president, a former pros-
ecutor, is turning to lawsuits, state
regulators and criminal investiga-
tions to clamp down on speech
that he calls disinformation, ef-
forts that have largely been aimed
at news organizations. Since Mr.
Yoon was elected last year, the po-
lice and prosecutors have repeat-
edly raided the homes and news-
rooms of journalists whom his of-
fice has accused of spreading
“fake news.”
INTERNATIONAL A4-12
Culture Wars Test Hungary
A government campaign against what it
calls “homosexual propaganda” is un-
settling booksellers. PAGE A4
Political Speech in Germany
The country’s authorities have banned
many pro-Palestinian rallies in the
name of fighting antisemitism. PAGE A9
Nxxx,2023-11-11,A,001,Bs-4C,E1
© 2023 The New York Times Company
By MICHAEL C. BENDER
and SHANE GOLDMACHER
Senator Joe Manchin III said he
decided to forgo re-election be-
cause he’d accomplished all his
goals. But for the Democrats he is
leaving behind in Washington, the
work to hold the party’s already
slim Senate majority is just begin-
ning.
While there are no guarantees
in politics, West Virginia is now a
virtual lock to flip Republican. The
state has become so conservative
that only Wyoming delivered a
wider Republican margin in the
2020 presidential race.
In the immediate aftermath of
Mr. Manchin’s announcement,
several well-placed Democratic
operatives said they couldn’t
name a single West Virginian who
could take his place on the ballot
and be even remotely competi-
tive, particularly if Gov. Jim Jus-
tice wins the Republican nomina-
tion.
“This is a huge impact,” said
Ward Baker, a former executive
director for the National Republi-
can Senatorial Committee, the
group that oversees Senate races.
“Manchin not running will save
Republicans a ton of money — and
it takes a seat off the board early.”
The path to holding power was
always going to be rocky for the
Democrats’ current 51-seat major-
ity, with or without Mr. Manchin.
Two incumbents are running
for re-election in red states, Mon-
tana and Ohio. A third senator,
Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who
was elected as a Democrat but has
since switched her party affili-
ation to independent, has yet to
declare her plans — leaving open
the prospect of an unusually com-
petitive three-way race. And the
party must also defend four Sen-
ate seats in four of the most con-
tested presidential battle-
grounds: Wisconsin, Nevada,
Pennsylvania and Michigan.
But Republicans face some po-
tentially divisive primaries and a
recent history of nominating ex-
treme candidates who have lost
key contests.
With West Virginia off the Sen-
ate chessboard next year, Demo-
crats must win every race they
are defending — and depend on
President Biden to win the White
House — in order to maintain a
majority. In a 50-50 Senate, the
vice president casts the tiebreak-
Continued on Page A15
YONHAP/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
President Yoon Suk Yeol.
Some South Koreans accuse Mr.
Yoon of repurposing the expres-
sion as justification for defama-
tion suits and to mobilize prosecu-
tors and regulators to threaten
penalties and criminal investiga-
tions. Many are exasperated that
their leader has adopted the
phrase, a rallying cry for strong-
men around the world that is also
further dividing an increasingly
polarized electorate at home.
South Koreans are proud of the
vibrant democracy and free press
Continued on Page A10
NATIONAL 13-19, 22
Trump Allies Take On Judge
After a narrow gag order was imposed
on Donald J. Trump in his civil fraud
trial, right-wing allies started going
after the judge on his behalf. PAGE A17
Facing an Uncertain Future
Consumed by grief and loss after the
deadly August wildfire in Lahaina,
Hawaii, many immigrants are wonder-
ing if they will have to move. PAGE A13
Pilot’s Account of Actions
An off-duty pilot, who is accused of
attempted murder, said he had feared
mental health treatments could disrupt
his career.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2023
Civilians continued to evacuate Gaza’s north on Friday as they heeded Israel’s orders to move south.
At College, Debating When Speech Goes Too Far
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
and STEPHANIE SAUL
In the days after the Hamas at-
tack on Israel, Max Strozenberg, a
first-year student at Northwest-
ern University, experienced a cou-
ple of jarring incidents.
Walking into his dorm, he was
startled to see a poster calling
Gaza a “modern-day concentra-
tion camp” pinned to a bulletin
board next to Halloween ghosts
and pumpkins.
At a pro-Palestinian rally, he
heard students shouting, “Hey,
Schill, what do you say, how many
kids did you kill today,” an echo of
a chant from the anti-Vietnam
War movement, now directed at
Northwestern’s president, Mi-
chael H. Schill, who is Jewish.
Mr. Strozenberg’s paternal
grandparents escaped the Nazis
Desires, and Grumbles, in a Cache of 18th-Century Love Letters
By JENNY GROSS
LONDON — The ink has barely
faded, and the paper has only
slightly yellowed. For nearly 250
years, the letters, more than 100 of
them, sat sealed in Britain’s Na-
tional Archives, unopened and un-
examined until a history profes-
sor stumbled upon them. He
found, to his delight, a treasure
trove bearing intimate details
about romance and daily life in
mid-18th-century France.
Unlike many other written doc-
uments from that era, most of the
letters were written by women —
the mothers, fiancées and sisters
of French sailors whose warship,
the Galatée, was captured by the
British Navy on April 8, 1758.
BUSINESS B1-6
A Country of Renters?
Switzerland’s nine million residents are
some of the wealthiest in the world —
and they are mostly renters as buying a
home is out of reach for most. PAGE B1
Hollywood Plays Catch-Up
With the industry hustling to make up
for lost time, juggling production sched-
ules will be quite complicated. PAGE B1
ARTS C1-6
Music Awards Take a Turn
This year’s class of Grammy contenders
is dominated by young women, includ-
PAGE A14 ing SZA and Olivia Rodrigo.
Administrators Aim to
Cool Disagreements
on Gaza Conflict
just before other family members
were taken to the concentration
camps. Now, he finds himself in an
eerie time warp, resisting his
grandmother’s pleas to take off
the small star of David that he
wears around his neck.
It’s not that he is feeling safe —
just defiant. The mood on campus
these days, he said, “is not pro-
Palestinian, it’s antisemitic.”
A switch has flipped on Ameri-
can college campuses since Oct. 7,
when Hamas killed more than
1,400 people in Israel. A long-sim-
mering tension is now openly and
Some letters contained accounts
of wives pining for their husbands
away at war, while others included
discussions of household fi-
nances, the birth of a child or ex-
pressions of resentment toward
sailors who had been out of touch.
Renaud Morieux, a European
history professor at the Univer-
sity of Cambridge who discovered
the collection of letters in 2004,
said he asked an archivist if he
could examine the contents of a
box only out of curiosity while
conducting research at the Na-
tional Archives in southwest Lon-
don.
Inside the box, Dr. Morieux
found three bundles of letters.
Only three of the letters had been
Continued on Page A12
TRAVEL C7-9
A Nation Seen From Above
Vietnam is home to four of the longest
cable cars in the world, all built in the
last decade, underscoring the transfor-
mation of its economy.
OPINION A20-21
PAGE C1 Paul Krugman
IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS
unrelentingly hostile, with several
protests devolving into physical
altercations. Both Jewish and
Muslim groups have reported a
dramatic increase in bias attacks.
The meaning of many demon-
strations — like the ones that rat-
tled Mr. Strozenberg — is bitterly
contested. Pro-Palestinian stu-
dents say that they are speaking
up for a marginalized, oppressed
people living in Gaza. But critics
say that many of the slogans and
protests have careered into sup-
port for terrorism and antisemi-
tism.
There seems to be little agree-
ment on what is acceptable lan-
guage, which may help explain
why the debate has hardened, and
why university officials are hav-
ing difficulty tempering the
rolling anger.
Continued on Page A19
RENAUD MORIEUX/THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
A letter from the bundle found in Britain’s National Archives.
PAGE C8
PAGE A21
Today, mostly sunny, brisk, cool,
high 52. Tonight, mostly clear, chilly,
low 35. Tomorrow, plenty of sun-
shine, remaining dry, chilly, high 47.
Weather map appears on Page A22.
Prices in Canada may be higher $4.00
GAZA’S HOSPITALS
BEAR THE BRUNT
AS BATTLES RAGE
LARGEST COMPLEX HIT
Israel Is ‘Closing In’ on a
Haven It Says Hamas
Uses as a Hideout
This article is by Thomas Fuller,
Aaron Boxerman, Malachy Browne
and Neil Collier.
Gaza City’s hospitals were in-
creasingly under siege on Friday,
with hundreds of seriously ill and
wounded patients and thousands
of displaced people stranded on
hospital grounds as intense, close-
quarters combat between Israeli
troops and Hamas fighters raged
around them.
The precarity of the hospitals
was made clear early on Friday
when projectiles struck inside the
Al Shifa complex, Gaza’s largest
hospital, and a video appeared to
show people being turned back by
gunfire as they tried to evacuate
another hospital.
Israeli tanks and troops have
surrounded several hospitals in
Gaza, hospital administrators and
the Gazan Health Ministry said on
Friday. A spokesman for the Is-
raeli military said of the hospitals,
“we’re slowly closing in on them”
and urged people to leave them.
Israel has long maintained that
Hamas uses the hospitals as
shields, operating from within
them, while thousands of Palestin-
ian civilians have taken refuge on
their grounds.
The chief of Al Shifa Hospital
said it was struck four times on
Friday, killing seven people, with
several others wounded. The
sources of the strikes and the ex-
tent of the damage were not im-
mediately known.
In what appeared to be his
strongest comments to date on
the dire state of Gazan civilians,
Secretary of State Antony J.
Blinken said on Friday that “far
too many Palestinians have been
killed.” His remarks edged as
close as he has come so far to criti-
cizing Israel’s conduct of the five-
week-old war.
“Much more needs to be done to
protect civilians and to make sure
that humanitarian assistance
reaches them,” Mr. Blinken told
reporters in New Delhi after a dip-
lomatic tour through Middle East-
ern and Asian nations. “Far too
many have suffered these past
weeks. And we want to do every-
thing possible to prevent harm to
them and to maximize the assist-
ance that gets to them.”
In a BBC interview on Friday,
President Emmanuel Macron of
France, who traveled to Israel last
month to show solidarity, called on
Israel to halt bombing that is
killing “these babies, these ladies,
these old people.”
In reply, Prime Minister Ben-
jamin Netanyahu of Israel said
that his country tries to minimize
Continued on Page A8
SPORTS B7-10
Women’s Soccer at Crossroads
Megan Rapinoe, a gifted player and
activist who helped define U.S. soccer
for a decade, is retiring. Emma Hayes,
Chelsea’s coach, wants to put her stamp
on the next decade. PAGE B10
Discipline for Michigan Coach
The Big Ten suspended Jim Harbaugh
from being on the sideline for games
through the end of the regular season
as punishment for an in-person scout-
ing and sign-stealing scandal. PAGE B9
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