What happened
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) yesterday appointed state Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to oversee the newly reopened investigation into a woman’s allegation she was gang raped at Cornell University’s Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten revived the case this week, after a lawsuit filed by the woman prompted widespread scrutiny of his and Cornell’s handling of the incident. Cornell announced an independent outside investigation on Wednesday.

Who said what
“New information has raised serious questions about how this case was handled,” Hochul said on social media, “and I’ve lost faith” in Van Houton’s ability to “fairly oversee it.” Van Houton said when reopening the case that the information he initially received from Cornell campus police made the woman’s sexual activity sound “voluntary, conscious and consensual” and did not “allege she was drugged against her will or gang raped.” 

In a transcript of the woman’s hourslong 2024 interview with Cornell police, obtained by WCBS New York yesterday, she told a campus officer: “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.” Van Houton maintains that was not included in the condensed statement sent to his office along with other evidence

What next?
As special counsel, James may “prosecute any offenses arising” from her investigation and present evidence to a grand jury, Hochul said. 

What happened
The family of Renee Good (pictured above) yesterday filed two lawsuits against the federal government and multiple Trump administration officials over her fatal shooting by an ICE agent during the administration’s immigration surge in Minneapolis. The January shooting prompted “significant protest” across the Twin Cities and sparked “national outrage” over the administration’s deportation effort, said CNN. 

Who said what
The lawsuits accuse the government and its agents of “implementing a vast conspiracy” that caused her death, said The Minnesota Star Tribune. Good’s killing was “completely senseless,” her brother Brent Ganger said in a press conference. “And the fact that there’s been no accountability, no investigation, no expression of condolence, no change in policy is completely mind-blowing.”

Good’s death was the “predictable and intended product” of the White House’s deportation surge in Minnesota, the family said in one of the lawsuits. It followed a “carefully planned, coordinated effort” to make local immigrants the “object of aggression and abduction.”

What next?
A White House spokesperson said the administration will “vigorously defend these baseless civil lawsuits.” Good’s family will “face significant uphill battles” in their “complicated” lawsuits, University of St. Thomas law professor Rachel Moran told The Associated Press. But the conspiracy suit could unearth any involvement by “people very high up in the administration.”

The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles looks like a spaceship, which makes sense for the “colossal pet project” of the man behind “Star Wars,” said The Washington Post. George Lucas is thought to have spent an “eye-popping” $1 billion on the museum, and the art inside is a “dizzying mix” of Renaissance and baroque paintings, digital reproductions, a Naboo N-1 Starfighter and “great heaps of the finest dreck.”

The collection’s broad scope is intentional, as narrative art can be anything that “depicts the myths that anchor us” and the “stories that we believe in,” co-founder Mellody Hobson, Lucas’ wife, said at the museum’s official opening. But for many in the art world, this idea subverts the traditional principles of art and signals a worrying trend toward more superficial curation.

There’s “something so cinematic, commercial and kitsch” about the museum, as well as a “certain scorning of traditional expertise,” said The Economist. And while “snooty critics may sneer” at the lack of accompanying text to explain the exhibits why they are there, it’s a deliberate choice: Lucas wants people “looking at the image and not the history lesson.”

Disconnecting art from its history in this way “sidelines the moral, ethical and cultural content of the story,” said the Post. It’s as though the museum is dedicated to the “anti-intellectual proposition that art is feeling and experiencing, not thinking.” The jettisoning of “all the old hierarchies, categories and distinctions,” and replacing them with “anything that feels cinematic,” creates a “bewildering” and “astonishing pantheon of disparate but recognizable images,” the Post said. It will be “extraordinarily popular.”