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Oct. 18, 2025, 7:00 AM EDTBy Carlo AngererRIGA, Latvia — They’re dotted on dozens of buildings across the Latvian capital: signal green signs with white stick figures of a family and the word “patvertne,” which means shelter.Installed everywhere from art deco buildings to wooden gates, the signs alert people to places to hide in the event of an attack — and have become one of many symbols of war preparedness in this charming city, which is crisscrossed with canals and looks nervously east at its Russian neighbor.After a string of recent aircraft incursions along NATO’s eastern flank and suspicious drones shutting down airports in several European countries including Germany, Denmark and Norway, fears about Russian aggression are growing in Latvia and its fellow Baltic nations, Estonia and Lithuania, already spooked by Moscow’s war in Ukraine.“We are on the front line. We are the eastern flank countries. We are neighboring Russia, an aggressive country,” Andris Sprūds, Latvia’s defense minister, told NBC News earlier this month at the Riga Conference, a meeting of international political and military leaders.A building marked “patvertne,” the Latvian word for “shelter,” in the capital, Riga.Carlo Angerer / NBC NewsHe added that Latvia, which launched a drone initiative earlier this year, had to some extent “already developed some resilience” in the face of any Kremlin aggression.Other attendees openly talked about a direct conflict between NATO and Russia. In an onstage discussion at the conference, Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to the organization, publicly theorized with his fellow panelists about weapons systems, including long-range missiles and strategic bombers, that could be used against the Kremlin’s forces.But he also emphasized that modern warfare begins before troops and military hardware are deployed.“The first shot of the next war is not going to be tanks through the Suwalki Gap,” he said in a separate interview with NBC News, referring to the narrow land bridge between Poland and the Baltic states, seen as a potential attack point in a Russian invasion. “It’s going to be a cyberattack. It’s going to be knocking out airports or critical infrastructure.”Latvia and other Baltic countries have been very receptive to recent NATO initiatives and are on track to reach defense spending targets soon, he said, adding that they were “investing in things that are going to field more capabilities for our defense and deterrence.”Emergency services have identified hundreds of existing shelters in Riga and authorities are planning to build new ones.Carlo Angerer / NBC News“The investments that make each individual ally stronger and therefore the collective alliance stronger are the important investments, and a country like Latvia is certainly doing it best in class right now,” he added.Adm. Rob Bauer, who chaired NATO’s military committee from June 2021 until January, also suggested that a new conflict with Russia would be fought “in a different way.”Ukraine, he said, lacked air power and strong naval assets, adding that NATO fighter jets had been carrying out missions over the Baltics from the USS Gerald Ford after it was deployed to the North Sea earlier this year.Others, like Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament, openly acknowledged that it took “way too long” for other nations to listen to Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, which were occupied by the Soviet Union for decades and more recently have been at the forefront of pushing NATO allies to take the Russian threat seriously.Airis Rikveilis, the national security adviser to Latvia’s Prime Minister Evika Silina, said his country was not only focusing on increasing military capabilities, but also on preparing civil society for conflict.“This is not going to be 1940,” he said, referring to the first Soviet occupation, when the Red Army was able to take over within weeks. “Should that battle start tomorrow, we’ll be ready to fight tomorrow with what we have,” he added.After Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there have been visible changes across Latvia, which has installed a fence along its 176-mile border with Russia. It has also cut itself off from the shared power grid with Russia and Kremlin ally Belarus, which sits to Latvia’s south, and is now relying on energy from its other neighbors.Ukrainian flags fly outside the Russian Embassy in Riga, Latvia.Carlo Angerer / NBC NewsIn Riga, officials have demolished the 260-foot victory memorial dedicated to the Soviet army and renamed the road where the Russian Embassy is located to Ukrainian Independence Street.The blue street sign sits at the corner building next to the embassy’s CCTV cameras and under its large flag. Dozens of Ukrainian flags fly in the square just across the road.Linda Ozola, who served as Riga’s deputy mayor for five years until this summer, oversaw the rebuilding of the shelter network, among other civil protection measures. She said her staff had to scout museums and archives for old documents, as well as reinspect old shelter spaces, some of which had fallen into disrepair.Emergency services have identified hundreds of existing shelters, and updated legislation has cleared the way to build new ones. Their locations are available on a website and cellphone app.Some of them will likely be funded by an 85 million euro ($99.4 million) deal signed on the sidelines of the Riga Conference by Arvils Ašeradens, Latvia’s finance minister, and European allies. The majority of that funding will be used to enhance the civil protection infrastructure, and some will also be used to install generators at health care facilities.Ozola said the city has also started to build up a stock of emergency supplies including canned food and sleeping cots. Riga has been an example for the other regions of Latvia and could also be one for cities across Europe, she said.“The truth is not good because we have a crazy neighbor who wants to destroy our country. And the neighbor is not hiding that, really,” she said. “They haven’t physically crossed the border, but they have crossed the airspace and they have cut our critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.”Carlo AngererCarlo Angerer is a multimedia producer and reporter based in Mainz, Germany.

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Sept. 22, 2025, 6:10 PM EDTBy Peter Nicholas and Matt DixonWASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s insistence that his attorney general bring charges against three perceived political opponents could backfire if any cases get to court, undermining his effort to see them punished, some legal experts said Monday.In a social media post Saturday, Trump pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi about three people who’ve raised his ire and who’ve not faced criminal charges to this point: Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.; New York state Attorney General Letitia James; and former FBI Director James Comey.He mentioned that he’d been impeached and indicted multiple times “OVER NOTHING!”“JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED NOW!!!” he wrote. He also cited unspecified “statements and posts” he’d read contending that the trio are “‘guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’”Because of Trump’s exhortation, defense lawyers could argue in court that their clients were targets of selective prosecution and did not receive constitutionally required due process, said Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham Law School who specializes in ethics issues.“If they’re picking these people not because they’re guilty of something … but because the president is out to get them because they’re Democrats and they made his life miserable previously, that’s an impermissible basis,” Green said.Another issue is whether Schiff, James and Comey could ever get a fair trial if it were to come to that, said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law.“He is his own worst enemy,” Gillers said of Trump.“Sometimes people make statements, but this is the president of the United States telling the court and an eventual jury that the people on trial before them are guilty. I can’t imagine that a court would let that go to a verdict. The prejudice from that kind of statement is enormous,” Gillers said.John Walsh, who served as the U.S. attorney in Colorado for six years ending in 2016, said in an interview: “It certainly gives the defense an argument that the charges are politically motivated and not based on the merits and the evidence and the argument. Some judges might find that persuasive depending on the motions that take place prior to trial.” But he added that even if the Justice Department understands this reality, officials could be pursuing a strategy that he described as, “Investigation is the punishment.” Enduring a federal investigation is costly to the target and can bring significant harm to one’s reputation, he said. “An investigation is a very serious thing against professionals, yes, there is a cost to even just defend yourself,” he added.Trump’s extraordinary weekend message to Bondi — “Pam,” as he called her — put the attorney general in a tough spot, said Jill Wine-Banks, a former general counsel to the U.S. Army and an assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.If Bondi accommodates the president and the Justice Department seeks indictments against Schiff, James and Comey, “who’s going to believe it wasn’t done for political purposes?” Wine-Banks asked rhetorically. “And if she doesn’t, she’s going to get fired. So, it’s a lose-lose, no matter what.”Trump tempered his message to Bondi later on Saturday.He posted that Bondi was doing a “GREAT job” while also later telling reporters in a press gaggle: “If they’re not guilty, that’s fine. If they are guilty, or if they should be judged, they should be judged. And we have to do it now.”All three of the people Trump singled out have rankled him for different reasons.Comey led an investigation into Trump’s possible ties to Russian leadership, which concluded that Trump’s campaign did not collude with Russian operatives. Trump fired Comey five months into his first term. Comey declined comment Monday.Schiff, then a House member, led the first impeachment of Trump during the president’s first term. Schiff posted a response to Trump on social media: “There’s no hiding the political retaliation and weaponization. It’s all out in the open.”James brought a successful civil suit against Trump in 2022 that accused him of overvaluing assets, including real estate, in loan applications. The suit’s financial penalty against Trump was later voided.James’ office declined a request for comment.At a press briefing Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt amplified Trump’s condemnation of the trio.“You look at people like Adam Schiff and like James Comey and like Letitia James,” she said, “who the president is rightfully frustrated.”She added that Trump “wants accountability for these corrupt fraudsters who abused their power, who abused their oath of office to target the former president and then candidate for the highest office in the land.”Trump has long contended that he was a victim of a weaponized judicial system when Joe Biden was in office. In his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, he pledged to end such practices. “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents — something I know something about,” he said. “We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again.”Bondi made a similar promise during her confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate in January. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end,” she said. “America must have one tier of justice for all.”Now, though, critics worry that Trump is erasing post-Watergate norms that were supposed to shield prosecutors from political interference.Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., told NBC News in a statement: “The president should not be directing the Attorney General to prosecute those who pursued him over the last six years. Lawfare is corrosive to a democracy and he is doing exactly what he has accused the Democrats of doing to him. We need to stop the cycle of lawfare and escalation. His public statements to the attorney general were not wise and they undermine the citizens’ confidence of our legal system.”A worrying development came last week, critics said, when the federal prosecutor tasked with investigating mortgage fraud allegations against James resigned after Trump said he no longer wanted him to serve in that position. (Trump said he fired the prosecutor, Erik Siebert.)Trump administration officials had been pressing Siebert to investigate potential mortgage fraud charges against James. Two federal law enforcement sources say prosecutors did not believe they had enough evidence to charge James with mortgage fraud over a Virginia home she purchased for her niece in 2023.Those same sources said prosecutors felt there was not enough evidence to charge Comey regarding allegations that he lied to Congress in 2020 about FBI investigations into the 2016 election.Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., a member of the Judiciary Committee, told NBC News: “‘Two wrongs don’t make it right but they do make it even’ is the sort of thing that happens in countries whose Powerball jackpot is 287 chickens and a goat. It’s not supposed to happen in America.”“President Biden’s administration started this ‘lawfare’, as the media calls it, and I worried then that they had unleashed spirits they would be unable to control,” he added. “I questioned Attorney General Bondi about this in her confirmation hearing, and she agreed with me. Any prosecution of a public official has to be based on objective, compelling evidence of criminal behavior, not based on that official’s political ideology.”Peter NicholasPeter Nicholas is a senior White House reporter for NBC News.Matt DixonMatt Dixon is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News, based in Florida.Katherine Doyle, Dennis Romero, Ryan J. Reilly, Michael Kosnar and Chloe Atkins contributed.

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Oct. 19, 2025, 7:00 AM EDTBy Margaret HethermanBorn into Victorian tradition in 1866, Alice Austen enjoyed a position in Staten Island society that gave her freedom to pursue what she dubbed “the larky life,” a whirlwind of fashionable gatherings and mischief that challenged social norms. But it was the gift of a wooden box camera from her uncle — and a chance meeting in the Catskills — that set the course for how Austen would be remembered beyond Gilded days: as one of America’s earliest and most adventurous women photographers and for her relationship with Gertrude Tate, which spanned more than half a century.Though her father abandoned her mother when she was an infant, Austen enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle with extended family in their home called Clear Comfort, overlooking the coastline of the New York City borough of Staten Island. She perfected imagery of her natural surroundings, social doings and “the sporting society set” in a darkroom fashioned from a closet. Her photos serve as a portal to the Gilded Age, with images of the annual regatta, boathouse bathers, charity balls and lawn tennis, a sport newly open to women who were too restricted by corsets to actually run for the ball.A self-portrait of Alice Austen on the front porch of Clear Comfort in 1892.Courtesy Collection of Alice Austen HouseWhen cycling took off, so did Austen, similarly constrained by long skirts that could catch in the spokes; even so, with heavy camera equipment mounted on her bicycle, she ferried to Manhattan, where she famously documented turn-of-the-century urban life, enshrining the likes of street sweepers, rag pickers, egg sellers and messengers to gelatin print — producing her 1896 “Street Types of New York” portfolio.As adept at arranging portraiture as igniting flash powder over a night bloom of flowering cactus, Austen also delighted in making gender-bending exposures of female friends. Nicknamed “The Darned Club,” they posed in undergarments with cigarettes, men’s suits with fake mustaches and together in bed in Victorian nighties.“She was in a period where she and her friends were really embracing this concept of the ‘New Woman,’” said Victoria Munro, executive director of the Alice Austen House, the original Austen residence, which also serves as a museum and exhibition space.“She created clubs with these new activities that women were able to do, unchaperoned by men — and they were safe spaces for her and her circle of women friends who were, many of them lesbian, able to be together and have fun and really celebrate,” Munro said. “There was also a certain amount of freedom in the 1880s and 1890s, because women weren’t yet considered to even have a sexuality … so they weren’t even suspected of this kind of perceived bad behavior.”

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