On Wednesday, The New York Times published an article featuring two women accusing Donald Trump of touching them inappropriately years ago. Trump has denied the allegations and threatened to sue the paper for libel. Trump’s lawyer demanded the Times retract the story and issue an apology.

The New York Times ‘ response? “We decline to do so.” The no-holds-barred letter , written from the Times general counsel to Trump’s lawyer, continues:

The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation. Mr. Trump has bragged about his non-consensual sexual touching of women. He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He has acquiesced to a radio host’s request to discuss Mr. Trump’s own daughter as a “piece of ass.” … Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.

If Trump wants to bring the newspaper to court, the letter concludes, by all means: “We welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.”

Trump’s campaign has been scrambling since a video surfaced last week of Trump graphically describing how he touched women without their consent. Prominent Republicans have lambasted Trump’s words and actions (House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has not rescinded his endorsement, said he was “sickened”) and a growing number of party members have pulled their support. Meanwhile, several women have come forward with their stories of Trump’s inappropriate behavior. Lauren Hansen

A Rhode Island district court needed to instruct a jury full of potential Boston Red Sox fans not to hold a defendant’s New York Yankees hat against him, Universal Hub reports . Nevertheless, when David Alcantara received five years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit bank fraud and conspiracy to pass counterfeit currency, he blamed the baseball rivalry for making the jury biased against him.

Alcantara’s Yankees hat was brought up several times in the trial as he was wearing it when he committed the crimes. He protested about the bias to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which ultimately decided that Red Sox fans wouldn’t allow their judgment to be clouded by a baseball rivalry.

In the court’s words, “any possibility of unfair prejudice was ameliorated when the district court explicitly instructed the Rhode Island jury not to hold Alcantara’s wearing of a Yankees hat against him.” Yeah, good luck with that. Jeva Lange

That anger, Clinton told DeGeneres, had him “really trying to dominate” the debate hall — and prompted him to “literally stalk me around the stage. And I would just feel this presence behind me, and I thought, ‘Whoa, this is really weird.'” Trump, for his part, dismissed the whole thing by saying the “last space I want to invade is her space.”

Clinton talks a bit about her debate strategy and what it’s like to face someone like Trump, and she makes the requisite plea for voters to hit the polls. But really, if there’s one reason to tune in to the Ellen clip, it’s to see Clinton reenact her famous shimmy . Watch below.

In a newly unearthed 1994 interview with ABC’s Primetime Live , Donald Trump shed some light on why he talks about women the way he does. Rather than disagreeing with host Nancy Collins’ assertion that some people think he is a “chauvinist pig,” Trump explained that “with people in general, you get more with vinegar than honey.”

“People say, ‘How can you say such a thing?’ But there’s a truth in it, in a modified form. Psychologists will tell you that some women want to be treated with respect, others differently,” Trump said. “I tell friends who treat their wives magnificently, get treated like crap in return, ‘Be rougher and you’ll see a different relationship.'”

That claim came shortly after Trump insisted he had “great relationships with women,” and then proceeded to call a woman who claimed he’d told her “You have to treat women like sh-t” a “liar, extremely unattractive, lots of problems because of her looks.”

You can read the interview in its entirety over at The Hollywood Reporter . Becca Stanek ( Gallup )

Hillary Clinton took a hawkish stance on China in leaked excerpts of speeches she gave to Wall Street audiences, the Associated Press reports .

Clinton framed her comments with concern that neighboring North Korea, which has long looked to China — in name if increasingly not in practice a fellow communist regime — for aid and trade relationships, could develop the capacity to launch a nuclear missile that “could actually reach Hawaii and the West Coast theoretically.”

If that happens and China does not control the situation, she said in a 2013 speech, “We’re going to ring China with missile defense. We’re going to put more of our fleet in the area. So China, come on. You either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them.” Clinton’s expression of willingness to use U.S. military presence to force Chinese compliance with American demands could offer a preview of the foreign policy of a Clinton White House.

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