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The Front Page

- How J.D. Vance Won Over Donald Trump

- Biden Called ‘More Receptive’ to Hearing Pleas to Step Aside

- ‘Our Nation Is Not Well’: Voters Fear What Could Happen Next

- A Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump

- Promised Cures, Tainted Cells: How Cord Blood Banks Mislead Parents

- Amtrak Passengers Face Record Delays From Extreme Weather

- Biden Tests Positive for Covid

- ‘The Buck Stops With Me’: Secret Service Director Soldiers On

- Families Say Shelters Without Air-Conditioning Are Like ‘Living in Hell’

- Bird Flu Is Spreading. Why Aren’t More People Getting Tested?

- ‘Memory Saved Us’: How France Blocked the Far Right

- ‘Sinners’ and ‘Russian Talibans’: A Holy War Roils a Once Placid Village

- A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It.

- To Revitalize Britain’s Economy, a Plan for a Stronger Government Role

- Why Donald Glover Is Saying Goodbye to Childish Gambino

- Men Wear Short Shorts. And Long Shorts. And Everything in Between.

How J.D. Vance Won Over Donald Trump

It started with a meeting at Mar-a-Lago more than three years ago. Later, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and other key allies made direct appeals on his behalf.

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio was among a wide field of candidates Mr. Trump courted as potential running mates.

By Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman  16 Jul, 2024

The meeting got off to a bad start.

J.D. Vance walked into Donald J. Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago on a warm winter afternoon in February 2021. The former president had a thick stack of papers on his desk: printouts of Mr. Vance’s copious broadsides against Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s past criticisms had included an essay in one of Mr. Trump’s least favorite magazines, The Atlantic, where Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin” — a purveyor of false promises to the white working class.

Mr. Trump, using an expletive, bluntly told Mr. Vance: You said some nasty stuff about me. The discussion that followed was described in detail by two people with knowledge of the meeting who insisted on anonymity to talk about a private conversation.

Mr. Vance’s next move was crucial. This was the first time he was meeting Mr. Trump, and Mr. Vance needed the former president to like him or at least leave the meeting with an open mind. Mr. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir about his troubled upbringing and the struggles and pathologies of the white working class — was running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio as a Republican populist, a Never Trumper turned pro-Trumper.

Mr. Vance decided to immediately apologize. He told Mr. Trump that he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong. Of all people, Mr. Vance told Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance himself should have understood.

Mr. Trump agreed, telling Mr. Vance that he should have understood because Mr. Vance had written the “Hillbilly Elegy” book. His implication was that Mr. Vance should have supported him because Mr. Trump’s own base of non-college-educated voters angry about globalization, immigration and foreign wars were exactly the people Mr. Vance purported to represent.

At that point, Mr. Trump seemed disarmed, and the meeting went on for almost two hours. They discussed the 2020 election and the Ohio race, but mostly they talked about the difficulties of politics. It had been less than a month since Mr. Trump left the White House a pariah, in the wake of a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol after the president had spent two months lying about a stolen election.

Mr. Trump closed the conversation by asking Mr. Vance what he wanted. Mr. Trump told him that everyone else had already been down to Mar-a-Lago begging for his endorsement — a reference to Mr. Vance’s potential opponents in the Ohio Senate primary.

Mr. Vance, who along with a spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article, told the former president he wasn’t going to do that.

Mr. Trump, surprised, asked Mr. Vance if he wanted the endorsement.

Mr. Vance said that of course he wanted it, but that Mr. Trump should let him run his race, and see how he did. Mr. Vance said he would not be the type of candidate who would attack the former president when the media came after him.

Mr. Trump seemed intrigued. All right, Mr. Trump replied, telling Mr. Vance, whom he called J.D., to take care and check in from time to time.

J.D. Vance signing a copy of “Hillbilly Elegy,” his best-selling memoir, on the campaign trail in 2021.

Mr. Trump had relatively little personal contact with Mr. Vance after that first meeting, but he took note as Mr. Vance kicked off his Senate campaign in July 2021, ran circles around his primary opponents in debates and became a frequent presence on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” at the time the top-rated show on cable television.

Mr. Trump was impressed. He told allies he thought Mr. Vance was smart and handsome — “those beautiful blue eyes,” he’d say repeatedly — great on TV and a killer at the debates. Mr. Trump, who split with allies at the influential conservative group Club for Growth in backing Mr. Vance, felt validated when Mr. Vance won the general election against his Democratic rival, Representative Tim Ryan, and then immediately became one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters in the Senate.

When Mr. Trump announced his third campaign for president, in November 2022, at a time when most Republicans wanted nothing to do with him, Mr. Vance distinguished himself by immediately signaling to Mr. Trump’s staff that Mr. Vance was all in.

Since then, Mr. Vance has played his cards nearly perfectly, making himself visible at key moments, promoting himself assertively but not too much, publicly backing Mr. Trump during his Manhattan criminal trial and having the right people champion him to the former president at the right time.

That day in early 2021, Mr. Vance was ushered into Mr. Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago by one of the most secretive donors in G.O.P. politics: Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal who broke with Silicon Valley to support Mr. Trump for president in 2016. Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was at the meeting, too.

Though initially skeptical of Mr. Vance’s loyalty, Donald Trump Jr. became close friends with him over the course of the Senate campaign. He became a huge asset when allies of Mr. Vance’s rivals for running mate tried desperately to undermine Mr. Vance with a pressure campaign aimed at changing the elder Mr. Trump’s mind.

Now, the 39-year-old Mr. Vance has become the party’s vice-presidential nominee.

An experienced fighter in the modern culture wars, Mr. Vance is in many ways a different type of running mate from the one Mr. Trump selected in 2016: Mike Pence was a Ronald Reagan conservative and evangelical governor whose penchant for spontaneous prayer unnerved the man under whom he served. In Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump is picking someone whose impulses for fighting against existing institutions and challenging global systems match his own.

Yet the arc of how Mr. Trump made his choices in 2016 and in 2024 had similarities. He had described both Mr. Pence and Mr. Vance as “out of central casting.” Then Mr. Trump began to question his options and solicited the opinions of everyone he spoke to, before ultimately returning where he began.

But the lead-up to Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Vance was even more chaotic than it was with Mr. Pence. It was uncertain down to the final hours, with a frantic lobbying effort until the last possible moment by anti-Vance forces, including Rupert Murdoch and his allies, with some of it playing out in public.

Mr. Trump seemed uncertain right until the end, privately raising some of the negative comments Mr. Vance had made about him in the past. Allies of Mr. Vance, including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, ran a counter campaign to reassure Mr. Trump about the selection, with supportive calls to the former president continuing until the moment Mr. Trump finally told Mr. Vance of his decision, on Monday afternoon, less than half an hour before he announced his choice on social media.

Although he initially questioned Mr. Vance’s loyalty, Donald Trump Jr. became close friends with him over the course of Mr. Vance’s Senate campaign.

The Debate Moment

Six months into his Senate campaign, Mr. Vance was seen by most as the walking dead.

Throughout the fall of 2021, he was savaged in the Ohio Republican Senate primary by television commercials that re-aired his past condemnations of Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s support fell precipitously in private polling, and even Mr. Trump privately voiced concerns about the impact the ads were having in the race. Many Republican operatives believed Mr. Vance’s chances of surviving the onslaught were close to zero.

He began his comeback on a debate stage.

At a March 2022 debate among the crowded Senate Republican field, Mr. Vance’s two main rivals — Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state representative and treasurer, and the businessman Mike Gibbons — nearly came to blows on the stage.

Mr. Vance seized the moment. He described their fight as “ridiculous” and confronted Mr. Mandel for using Mr. Mandel’s military service as a “political football” earlier in the debate, calling it “disgraceful,” setting off a burst of applause in the room. The moment presaged Mr. Vance as a deft performer on his feet, one who would eventually eviscerate his general election rival, Mr. Ryan, on the debate stage.

Mr. Trump relished that primary debate confrontation and felt that it showed Mr. Vance had what it took. Mr. Trump has always paid close attention to debate performances, crediting his own showing in the 2016 debates for his victory over Hillary Clinton. He told allies he liked what he’d seen from Mr. Vance. One month after the debate, Mr. Trump formally endorsed him.

Mr. Vance was helped in that race also by conservative media relationships that would prove not just durable but critical in helping him become Mr. Trump’s running mate.

The most important of those relationships have been with Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News host; the reporter Matthew Boyle at Breitbart; and the political activist Charlie Kirk. Their support meant that in the conservative media ecosystem — the arena that decides the political life span of the average Republican — Mr. Vance was a made man.

Mr. Trump visited East Palestine, Ohio, after a train derailment spilled hazardous chemicals.

The East Palestine Visit

Mr. Trump announced his own candidacy for president a week after the November 2022 midterms.

His campaign launch was a disaster.

High-profile MAGA candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump had lost midterm races they should have won. Mr. Trump was blamed for the disappointing results, and most Republican elected officials stayed away from his presidential kickoff event at Mar-a-Lago.

Shortly after he announced his campaign, Mr. Trump ignited a string of controversies, including calling for the termination of parts of the Constitution to overturn his 2020 defeat and dining with Kanye West, a rapper whose stream of vitriol against Jews stirred outrage, and Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist.

Mr. Trump found himself abandoned by many in the Republican-leaning media, with Fox News extolling his main presidential primary rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and his favorite newspaper, The New York Post, giving Mr. DeSantis the headline title: “DeFuture.” A chorus of prominent conservatives was saying it was time for fresh blood.

Mr. Vance was not among them.

He signaled privately to Mr. Trump’s team, shortly after the midterms, that he planned to endorse the former president. He said he wanted to make an intellectual argument for Mr. Trump that would resonate with the donor class and other elites, according to a person briefed on the exchanges. He ended up announcing his endorsement in late January 2023 in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, praising Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. The proactive support was reassuring to the Trump team amid so many threatened defections at a time when the campaign seemed rudderless.

The Trump campaign found its direction a month later, in February. It started with a visit to a derailment site of a train that had been carrying hazardous chemicals through East Palestine, Ohio.

President Biden and his advisers had been criticized for days for not visiting the site, and Mr. Vance was among the most vocal critics of the federal response. Mr. Biden’s administration blamed policy rollbacks from Mr. Trump’s era for the derailment.

Mr. Trump’s son Don Jr. soon had a thought: What if his father visited the site? He ran the idea past both Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump’s top adviser, Susie Wiles, and a plan was soon in place. Flying aboard his plane, dubbed Trump Force One, from Florida to Ohio for the event, Mr. Trump was watching Fox News. Mr. Vance was on the air. The former president turned to his son and observed that Mr. Vance had been “incredible, hasn’t he?” — using an expletive to underscore the point.

When the plane landed, it was clear that Mr. Trump was stepping into a media vacuum created by Mr. Biden’s absence. Walking down the movable stairs from his plane on the tarmac, Mr. Trump appeared on the extensive television coverage as if he were still president.

He traveled in a motorcade, distributed red MAGA caps to local residents and delivered water bottles to the community — all on TV. He bought burgers for first responders at a local McDonald’s.

Mr. Vance stood alongside him throughout the day, the two men condemning federal officials they said had left the region behind. It was an early test of what they might be like on a campaign trail together.

Mr. Vance helped pave the way for Mr. Trump with Silicon Valley donors during his presidential campaign.

The Decision

By the fall of 2023, chatter was growing that Mr. Vance was a top contender to be Mr. Trump’s running mate. But while advisers to both men had discussed the possibility informally, it had not become a topic of conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance.

Mr. Trump plainly liked Mr. Vance, according to people close to the former president. The chemistry between the two — one of the ingredients in a hire that Mr. Trump values most — was clear.

Mr. Vance had approached the relationship differently from a number of people who have grown close to Mr. Trump over the years. He valued scarcity. He did not call Mr. Trump constantly, and his list of requests was extremely limited. He sought help from Mr. Trump on only two matters: He asked him to endorse the businessman Bernie Moreno in his run for the Senate in Ohio, and he asked Mr. Trump to support a rail safety bill that Mr. Vance cosponsored with the state’s Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown. Mr. Trump did both.

Mr. Vance was slow to believe Mr. Trump would actually pick him as a running mate, people close to him said. His view started to change around the New Hampshire presidential primary in late January, as he campaigned for Mr. Trump in the state and drew a warm response.

He also began to fit the part more visibly. Mr. Trump commented to allies on how good Mr. Vance was looking — how his beard appeared more groomed, how his suits fit better and how he’d lost weight. Mr. Vance had been working out and going for long runs.

Mr. Trump has also been solicitous of Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha. About a month ago, the Vances were at an event with Mr. Trump when he asked Usha how she liked political life. When Ms. Vance gave an anodyne answer, Mr. Trump replied that his wife hated it, too, adding an expletive. Ms. Vance laughed at Mr. Trump’s answer, according to a person briefed on the interaction.

Mr. Vance’s allies began an aggressive strategy to show he could be successful in two areas that preoccupied Mr. Trump: performing well in adversarial interviews on mainstream news channels, and bringing in new financial supporters.

Mr. Vance’s advisers booked him on a slew of shows on CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS, including one appearance that caught Mr. Trump’s eye, with the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, shortly after Mr. Trump was convicted in his Manhattan criminal trial. Mr. Vance was the first vice-presidential hopeful to show up in court to support Mr. Trump, and he stepped up his aggressive televised defense of Mr. Trump after the conviction.

Mr. Vance helped pave the way for Mr. Trump with some Silicon Valley donors. He spent months working on David Sacks, an entrepreneur whom Mr. Vance has called “one of his closest confidants in politics,” to support Mr. Trump. That effort resulted in a $12 million event for the Trump campaign. Mr. Sacks said at the event that it “would never have happened” without Mr. Vance’s support, according to a person familiar with his remarks.

Mr. Musk, one of the world’s richest men and the owner of the website X, has emerged as a quiet ally of Mr. Vance’s, according to two people briefed on the relationship. Mr. Musk has viewed Mr. Biden’s re-election as an existential crisis for the nation and told Mr. Trump directly that he should choose Mr. Vance as his running mate, describing the Trump-Vance pairing as “beautiful,” according to one of the people with knowledge of their relationship. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Yet it was Don Jr. and his allies who pushed Mr. Vance most insistently — publicly and privately.

For most of the year, Mr. Trump’s associates have said that the former president was not especially enamored of any of his V.P. choices, doubtful that any of them would make much of a difference to his chances in November. And yet in recent weeks, he told people that he liked the idea of someone who could carry on his MAGA legacy, something Mr. Trump believed the two other top contenders — Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota — were not as well positioned as Mr. Vance to accomplish.

Mr. Trump continued playing Hamlet of sorts, polling nearly everyone he encountered about what they thought he should do.

That was reminiscent of 2016, when Mr. Trump had told everyone for weeks that Mr. Pence was “out of central casting,” but still insisted he hadn’t made up his mind and was receptive to last-minute pitches from allies of Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie. He ultimately offered the job to Mr. Pence while telling Mr. Christie that he hadn’t done so, before finally making the choice public.

Mr. Trump listened to a number of last-minute efforts to block Mr. Vance’s selection.

The anti-Vance campaign was intense, widespread and carried right up until the final hours before Mr. Trump announced his choice. Several major Republican donors, including the hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin, as well as the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, tried to persuade Mr. Trump not to choose Mr. Vance. (A Griffin spokesman wouldn’t address what he told Mr. Trump, saying only that there were a number of good options and that Mr. Trump and his team had been “thoughtful.”)

Mr. Murdoch even went so far as to dispatch senior executives and columnists at The New York Post to meet with Mr. Trump and dissuade him from picking Mr. Vance. Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager who is also close to Melania Trump, argued privately that other options, such as Mr. Rubio, were better, according to several people with knowledge of her outreach effort.

The Murdoch crowd lobbied aggressively for Mr. Burgum, in private and in editorials in The New York Post. When the anti-Vance forces made their arguments to Mr. Trump, they focused on Mr. Vance’s prior criticisms of the former president and on Mr. Vance’s youth and inexperience. But in many cases, these G.O.P. donors were motivated because they loathed Mr. Vance’s ideology and policy positions, especially his staunch opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia.

Old comments made by Mr. Vance about Mr. Trump began to circulate on social media, and were put in front of the former president, who indicated to associates that they had given him pause.

But Mr. Trump was repelled by a Daily Mail article describing Mr. Burgum weeping at various moments — “When I see a man cry I view it as a weakness,” he once said. Allies also brought to Mr. Trump’s attention the fact that Mr. Burgum had signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, a point that could become a liability in a general election.

Mr. Trump told associates that he viewed Mr. Rubio as disloyal for having campaigned in 2016 against Mr. Rubio’s friend and mentor, Jeb Bush, and wondered whether he could be trusted.

In the final days, all three leading candidates made direct pitches to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Burgum let it be known that he had no interest in serving in another role in the Trump administration, a stance that did not play well with Mr. Trump, who had mused about making him the secretary of energy, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Vance was flown to Mar-a-Lago late last week aboard the plane of Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor and one of Mr. Trump’s few close friends.

When word got back to Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago that Mr. Trump might be wavering on Mr. Vance, he intervened. Mr. Carlson, who was visiting Australia on a speaking tour, phoned Mr. Trump and delivered an apocalyptic warning, according to two people briefed on their conversation. He told Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio could not be trusted — that he would work against him and would try to lead America into nuclear war. Mr. Carlson, who declined to comment for this article, told Mr. Trump that Mr. Burgum could not be trusted, either.

Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neocon” as his V.P. — an abbreviation for Republicans who favor using U.S. power to implant democracy abroad — then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.

He also warned against listening to the advice of allies of Mr. Carlson’s former employer, Mr. Murdoch. “When your enemies are pushing a running mate on you,” Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump, referring to the Murdoch empire, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”

Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.

Biden Called ‘More Receptive’ to Hearing Pleas to Step Aside

The president has given no indication that he is changing his mind about staying in the race but is said to be more willing to listen to the case for bowing out.

President Biden continues to face discontent from within his party over his decision to proceed with his campaign.

By Carl Hulse, Michael S. Schmidt, Reid J. Epstein, Peter Baker and Luke Broadwater  17 Jul, 2024

President Biden has become more receptive in the last several days to hearing arguments about why he should drop his re-election bid, Democrats briefed on his conversations said on Wednesday, after his party’s two top leaders in Congress privately told him they were deeply concerned about his prospects.

Mr. Biden has not given any indication that he is changing his mind about staying in the race, the Democrats said, but has been willing to listen to rundowns of new and worrying polling data and has asked questions about how Vice President Kamala Harris could win.

The accounts suggest that Mr. Biden, privately at least, is striking a more open-minded posture than he did last week when he lashed out at a number of House Democrats who pressed him to step aside.

One person close to the president said that it would be wrong to call him receptive to the idea of dropping out but that he “is willing to listen.” But this person emphasized there was no sign that Mr. Biden was changing course at this point.

The descriptions emerged after Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the two top Democrats in Congress, each told Mr. Biden privately over the past week that their members were deeply concerned about his chances in November and the fates of House and Senate candidates should he remain at the top of the ticket, according to two people briefed on the conversations.

The White House suggested that Mr. Biden was unmoved by their discussions.

“The president told both leaders he is the nominee of the party, he plans to win and looks forward to working with both of them to pass his 100 days agenda to help working families,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman.

The separate exchanges between Mr. Biden and the congressional leaders, described on the condition of anonymity because they were confidential discussions on an exceedingly sensitive topic, came to light as Democrats’ rebellion against Mr. Biden intensified on Wednesday.

Mr. Schumer and Mr. Jeffries, both of New York, privately prevailed upon party officials to delay the start of Mr. Biden’s nomination by a week, prolonging the debate over the viability of his candidacy.

Representative Adam B. Schiff of California became the highest-profile Democratic lawmaker to call on Mr. Biden to end his run. And Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chairman of the Biden campaign, told the president that donors had stopped giving to his campaign, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange.

With his campaign mired in crisis, Mr. Biden tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday evening. That sidelined the president just as his campaign was hoping to step up his public appearances in a bid to show he is up to remaining in the race.

After a brief pause in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump, conversations among Democrats on Capitol Hill and elsewhere about replacing Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket have resumed with vigor. The details of Mr. Schumer’s private talk with Mr. Biden last week at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., reported earlier by ABC News, were the latest indication that top Democrats are seeking to make a compelling case to the president, who has so far refused to heed calls that he must step aside not only for his own good, but for that of his party as well.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, the majority leader, did not deny ABC’s report but called it “idle speculation,” adding: “Leader Schumer conveyed the views of his caucus directly to President Biden on Saturday.”

Mr. Jeffries, the minority leader, told House Democrats last week that in a visit to the White House on Thursday night, he had “directly expressed the full breadth of insight, heartfelt perspectives and conclusions about the path forward” among them to Mr. Biden.

Both Mr. Schumer and Mr. Jeffries made clear during their conversations with Mr. Biden that they wanted to convey their assessments to him privately but that they would not necessarily stay that way for long, according to a Democrat close to congressional leadership.

Both leaders were frustrated that Mr. Biden did not appear to be listening to their dire warnings, the Democrat added. The subsequent sense among some Democrats that Mr. Biden had become more willing to listen was first reported on Wednesday by CNN.

Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, his uneven public appearances and his struggles in the polls have fueled deep worries among Democrats. Nearly two-thirds of Democrats want him to quit the race, according to a survey released on Wednesday by The Associated Press and NORC, an independent research institution at the University of Chicago.

Even more concerning to Democrats is data they have received in recent days that reveals the extent of the political damage that could come to the party’s incumbents from remaining supportive of Mr. Biden, with one poll suggesting that voters are deeply distrustful of elected officials who vouch for the president’s mental capacity and endorse him.

One Biden adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions, said that the decision came down to hard facts and that there were three that mattered: polling, cash and which states are in play. And, as this adviser put it, none of those are trending in the right direction for Mr. Biden.

It was against that backdrop that Mr. Schumer weighed in this week to appeal to party leaders to hold off on beginning a swift virtual roll call they had considered starting as soon as next week to cement Mr. Biden as the nominee, according to a person familiar with his thinking who insisted on anonymity to describe it. The Senate leader spoke with Mr. Jeffries, and both agreed to push the party to put off the start of that process, according to a second person familiar with their involvement, who also declined to be named discussing it.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the co-chairman of the party’s rules committee, which determines when and how the nomination will proceed, called Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign chief, on Tuesday afternoon to inform her that the roll call should be delayed, according to a person made aware of the call who described it on the condition of anonymity.

Bowing to the pressure, top Democratic National Committee officials announced on Wednesday that the virtual roll call would take place during the first week of August instead.

Mr. Schiff, a candidate for Senate in the state and a top ally of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called on Mr. Biden to drop out of the race.

“Our nation is at a crossroads,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”

Mr. Biden insisted again, in an interview with BET News that aired on Wednesday, that he had no intention of leaving the race and that he would consider doing so only if a doctor informed him he had a medical condition that made it necessary.

Representative Jared Huffman of California, who in recent days had organized fellow Democrats to pressure the D.N.C. to delay nominating Mr. Biden, called the party’s new, slower timeline “a positive step,” but said it was not likely to alleviate concerns about Mr. Biden’s viability.

“It’s a heck of a lot better than a jammed process that will tear us apart next week,” said Mr. Huffman, who had spearheaded a letter that he said dozens of congressional Democrats were ready to sign calling for a delay.

Mr. Huffman scrapped his plans to send the letter after the party announced the delay, but he suggested that Mr. Biden was delusional about his political standing.

“Many of us are perplexed that he continues to say he’s either tied or winning in the polls,” Mr. Huffman said. “We don’t understand what factual universe that is coming from.”

Democratic leaders have come to their conversations with Mr. Biden armed with grim new data. According to a poll from Blue Rose Research, a firm that formed from but is no longer affiliated with Future Forward, the super PAC supporting Mr. Biden, just 18 percent of voters and only 36 percent of people who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 believe he is mentally fit and up to the job of being president.

Mr. Schumer, according to the Democrat close to him, was also given data from a leading Democratic super PAC showing Mr. Biden’s deficit growing to 5 percentage points or more in the must-win states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and his deficit in three other key states — Nevada, Georgia and Arizona — outside the margin of sampling error.

So far, just 20 members of the House and one senator have publicly called on the president to withdraw from the race. But privately, many more have expressed deep concerns and said they believe he is on track to lose the White House and drag down their chances of controlling Congress.

Those concerns bubbled up during a tense exchange between Mr. Biden and members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition on a video call on Saturday, one of several the president conducted with various Democratic groups on Capitol Hill. The president grew noticeably agitated with House Democrats who questioned his fitness to run and chances of winning.

During the meeting, Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, told the president that voters in his district were concerned about national security should Mr. Biden serve again, and “want a commander in chief who can project strength, vigor and inspire confidence at home and abroad,” according to a partial transcript obtained by The New York Times. Fair or not, despite his successes and the dangers posed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Crow told the president, “many voters are losing confidence you can do this in a second term.”

That prompted Mr. Biden to lash out at Mr. Crow, a former Army Ranger, calling him “dead wrong,” before rattling off his foreign policy accomplishments.

“Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “Tell me who the hell that is.”

Mr. Biden’s exchange with Mr. Crow was reported earlier by Puck News.

Annie Karni contributed reporting from Milwaukee.

‘Our Nation Is Not Well’: Voters Fear What Could Happen Next

There is growing anxiety that the country’s political divide is nearly beyond repair, and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump only made things worse.

National discord has descended on Butler with force after the attempt on the former president’s life.

By Emily Cochrane, Shawn Hubler, Rick Rojas, Kurt Streeter and Amy Qin  17 Jul, 2024

Before Saturday, when Butler, Pa., became the latest stunned backdrop for the nation’s political fury, Mayor Bob Dandoy thought of his town as a place that had learned to work around party lines. A Democrat in a Republican stronghold, he had campaigned on consensus.

“I’ve never seen a Republican or Democratic pothole,” Mr. Dandoy, 71, a retired high school English teacher, would tell voters. “Or a Republican or Democratic playground. Or a Republican or Democratic fire that the fire department needs to put out.”

He was at dinner with his family on Saturday when a city councilman texted. One spectator was dead at Donald J. Trump’s campaign rally on the farm show grounds, two more were critically injured. The former president’s right ear had been grazed by a bullet. The gunman, an isolated 20-year-old with an AR-15-style rifle, was fatally shot by the Secret Service. All this, in the town of about 13,000 where Mr. Dandoy has lived “all my life.”

Since then, national discord has descended on Butler with such force that this week it crashed the town’s website. E-mailers charged that the city failed to protect Mr. Trump, maybe even wanted him to be a target. Callers demanded that the city admit that Mr. Trump’s supporters staged the shooting. The mayor has tried to remind everyone that Butler is a community that accomplishes good things, that has worked through disagreements together. And yet, he said, the trauma has been overwhelming.

“People are in a state of shock,” he said. “And I can’t lob a platitude or give a speech and say everything is fine.”

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, that unease is not limited to Butler. In interviews from the West Coast to the Deep South, Americans across party lines say they are deeply apprehensive, and not just because of last weekend’s attempt on a presidential candidate’s life.

“People are in a state of shock,” said Bob Dandoy, the Butler mayor.

Roiled by culture wars, reeling since the pandemic, broiling under biblical heat and besieged by disinformation, voters and community leaders say they already are on edge in ways for which their experience has not prepared them. Gaza. Ukraine. Migrants. Home prices. Climate change. Fentanyl. Gun violence. Hate speech. Deep fakes.

And overlaying it all is a nonstop barrage of political hostility and vilification, and the sense, for a third straight presidential election, that something essential is broken in our politics.

“It’s like this dark cloud is looming over us, and it’s just not ending,” said Fredes Asuncion, 34, the owner of a small business in Sacramento, Calif.

“It’s time for us to have, no pun intended, a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting,” said the Rev. Dr. Jamal Bryant, the senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Ga., calling the shooting an “unrolling of the moral code of the country.”

Brent Leatherwood, the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm in Nashville, said he had heard from several conservative church leaders since the shooting, their concerns a chorus he echoed. “Our nation is not well,” he said.

National polls do not yet fully reflect the shooting on Saturday or President Biden’s call the next day to “lower the temperature in our politics.” Nor do they yet factor in the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. presidential nominee, named Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate. On Saturday, Mr. Vance, without evidence, wrote on the social media site X that Biden campaign rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Trump campaign advisers have said that the former president — whose tenure opened with warnings of “American carnage” and was capped by the Jan. 6 insurrection — will call for unity on Thursday when he speaks at the convention. Yet they have also said that Mr. Trump would focus on “what I did and how I’m going to do it again.”

Capturing the partisan divisions: the news media near the entrance to the Butler Farm Show grounds, where the Trump rally was held.

There’s no missing the nation’s deep ideological, cultural and partisan divisions. Polling shows Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump locked in a tight race. Neither turmoil over the president’s age and mental acuity nor Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts over hush-money payments has inspired that much change.

Nearly two-thirds of American adults told The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in December that democracy itself could depend on who wins the November presidential election. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats said Mr. Trump would weaken democracy if he were re-elected, and 82 percent of Republicans said the same about President Biden.

At the same time, voters have bristled at the fall ticket — a majority told the Pew Research Center that if they could, they would replace Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden. They disapprove, decisively, of the Supreme Court and Congress.

And even before the shooting in Pennsylvania, Americans “were barely on speaking terms with each other,” noted Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian who teaches at Columbia University. The result, he said, has been a national mood that has been “unstable, restless, uncertain, irritating and anxious” since the 2016 election.

In May, a Marist poll found such dug-in disdain that many Americans considered a second civil war likely or very likely in their lifetime.

Since the shooting, political leaders across the spectrum, including Mr. Biden, have condemned political violence. But they are undercut by partisan fury.

The Rev. Dr. Jamal Bryant of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Ga.

“Democrats wanted this to happen,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted. A state senator from Tennessee wrote, and then deleted, a post saying that “the extremism from the MAGA regime has brought us to this moment.” On Facebook, a field director for Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, wrote, and then deleted, “please get you some shooting lessons.” The congressman’s office disavowed it.

In Tennessee, the Democratic mayor of Nashville, Freddie O’Connell, said that in recent days, a rainbow crosswalk painted in honor of the city’s L.G.B.T.Q. community had been defaced. White supremacists waving Nazi flags had made repeated appearances downtown. “My biggest fear,” he said, “is that social fabric, even at the local level, continues to deteriorate.”

In Wisconsin, Dan McNeil, 71, a Democratic school board member in the farming town of Barron, called the situation “scary.” “You walk into a place in town, and it is, like, ‘Whose side are you on? Are you a liberal Democrat or a Trumper?’”

An hour away in St. Croix County, Scott Miller, 42, who said he is a member of the local Republican Party, wondered if it was already too late: “These corporations are putting out millions and trillions in profits, donating unlimited amounts to politicians,” he said. “How can the average person compete?”

In California, Frank Xu, 46, of San Diego, expressed deep disillusionment in the dysfunction he saw in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, a far cry from the political and civic wonderland he embraced when he moved to the United States in 2005 from China. Like many young Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, he had been conditioned to stay out of politics and to be suspicious of political officials and their motives. A Republican, he had organized against affirmative action in his state, wide-eyed at the difference one person could make in this country.

Then came the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, which left him wondering whether to leave his presidential ballot blank in November. He has leaned back toward voting for Mr. Trump since the shooting. But like many other naturalized citizens, he has been viscerally reminded of the instability and violence he sought to escape in the United States.

“It’s like this dark cloud is looming over us, and it’s just not ending,” Fredes Asuncion, from Sacramento, Calif., said.

Garen Wintemute, an emergency physician who directs the California Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis, said Americans who are not extremists urgently needed to become more assertive.

In a national study that is now in its third year, two-thirds of Americans in 2022 and three-fourths in 2023 rejected political violence as never justified, and even among those who condoned political violence, a vast majority said they would not commit it themselves. Many people not only recoil from political fights, but avoid politics entirely, Dr. Wintemute noted.

“Americans in the middle have been acting like spectators at a train wreck, but we’re all on the same train,” he said. “And if the train goes over a cliff, we’ll all go with it.”

Like any unhealthy behavior, he said, political violence can be largely deterred if a majority explicitly rejects it.

“A person’s decisions about their health behaviors are powerfully influenced by what their family, friends, communities, clergy members and so forth say and do,” he said. “We need to say, I will not accept political violence. I will not be part of it.”

That goes for the candidates, Dr. Naftali, the presidential historian, said.

“Where we go now will depend on a number of factors,” he said. “But if previous cycles of political violence tell us anything, one of those factors will be how our leaders — and I define that broadly — explain to themselves, and to us, where we are and where we are going. And one of the most important voices will be the voice of the victim himself.”

He said President Biden had already made the traditionally appropriate gestures, calling Mr. Trump to wish him a speedy recovery and making a televised address deploring the attack and insisting that “we can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

Now, he said, it is Mr. Trump’s turn, even though history shows that he often ramps up rhetoric, rather than tones it down.

“I’m not naïve,” he said. “Not everybody can be changed. But when we think of where we go from here, we have to keep in mind that Donald Trump has it in his power. Because he was the victim, and because of the devotion of his followers, and because his convention is first, his will be the loudest and most influential voice in determining the direction the country takes at this inflection point.”

“Sometimes it takes a crisis for Americans to break a stalemate," he added. “Of course, I thought that crisis would be Jan. 6. And that obviously wasn’t enough.”

In Butler, Mayor Dandoy said he wished the candidates would transcend the toxicity of the past three election cycles.

“Harry Truman was president when I was growing up,” he said. “Then Dwight Eisenhower. Then J.F.K. Inspirational men. Where are they now? Where are Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill settling things at the end of the day with a hidden bottle of Irish whiskey? I want leaders to step up.”

A Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump

Even though local police were on the lookout for a suspicious man, critical minutes ticked by, allowing a would-be assassin to slip past, a Times analysis found.

Former President Donald J. Trump was allowed to take the stage for his speech despite reports of a suspicious person in the vicinity.

By David A. Fahrenthold, Glenn Thrush, Campbell Robertson, Adam Goldman and Aric Toler  18 Jul, 2024

About an hour before a gunman let loose a volley of bullets that nearly assassinated a former president, the law enforcement contingent in Butler, Pa., was on the verge of a great policing success.

Among the thousands of people streaming in to cheer former President Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday, local officers spotted one skinny young man acting oddly and notified other law enforcement. The Secret Service, too, was informed, through radio communication. The suspicious man did not appear to have a weapon.

Remarkably, law enforcement had found the right man — Thomas Matthew Crooks, a would-be assassin, though officers did not know that at the time. Then they lost track of him.

Twenty minutes before violence erupted, a sniper, from a distance, spotted Mr. Crooks again and took his picture.

As time slipped away, at least two local officers were pulled from traffic detail to help search for the man. But the Secret Service, the agency charged with protecting Mr. Trump, did not stop him from taking the stage. Eight minutes after Mr. Trump started to speak, Mr. Crooks fired off bullets that left the Republican presidential nominee bloodied and a rally visitor dead.

Secret Service snipers surveilling the surrounding area before Mr. Trump began to speak.

The call to let the rally go ahead while law enforcement looked for a potentially dangerous person is one of many Secret Service decisions now being called into question. The agency is also under scrutiny for allowing a building within a rifle’s range to be excluded from its secure perimeter, creating a blind spot close to the former president that the gunman exploited.

“I am appalled to learn that the Secret Service knew about a threat prior to President Trump walking onstage,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, posted Wednesday on X, after a private briefing with the Secret Service and the F.B.I.

Multiple investigations into the lapses are underway, including one announced by President Biden Sunday. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas called the shooting, which killed one rally visitor and hospitalized two others, a security failure, though he has said Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle still has his support.

Ms. Cheatle in an interview with ABC News said she takes full responsibility.

Even as investigators continue to examine what happened, it is already clear that there were multiple missed opportunities to stop Mr. Crooks before the situation turned deadly. This account is based on video footage from the rally and statements from numerous federal officials, local law enforcement officers in Butler and members of Congress who were briefed by the F.B.I. and the Secret Service.

On July 8, an advance team walked the site, the Butler Farm Show grounds, to assess a security threat. Agents worked with local law enforcement and explained what the Secret Service would handle and what law enforcement would be expected to do. Crucially, the Secret Service decided that a group of warehouses to the north of the stage would be excluded from the security zone, despite being only about 450 feet from Mr. Trump’s podium. That was within a rifle’s range.

Despite his photo being circulated, the gunman was able to climb onto the roof of a nearby warehouse after law enforcement officials lost track of him.

That meant the warehouses were assigned to local law enforcement to secure. The Secret Service and the local police had treated the complex of warehouses just north of the rally site as an observation post. It was considered a place from which to watch Mr. Trump’s crowd — not a place that needed to be watched, itself.

But that created a blind spot, outside the security perimeter but well within rifle range of Mr. Trump. It was exploited by a gunman with no military training and little subtlety, who showed up early and acted oddly enough that police photographed him and distributed his picture, though with no weapon in view.

“I don’t know whose responsibility that building was,” Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said. “But somebody should have been there.”

It was also unclear how long in advance Mr. Crooks had prepared. Mr. Trump announced his rally in Butler on July 3.

But in the aftermath, when the F.B.I. was able to finally access Mr. Crooks’s cellphones and other electronic devices, agents could see that he had searched for images of Mr. Trump as well as President Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and even F.B.I. Director Christopher A. Wray.

Mr. Crooks also typed in “major depressive disorder” and searched for dates and places for appearances for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.

One of Mr. Trump’s planned appearances happened to be about 50 miles from Mr. Crooks’s house in Bethel Park, Pa.

On Friday, July 12, the day before the attempted assassination, Mr. Crooks went to a shooting range, according to an investigative summary prepared by the F.B.I. The next morning, he bought a ladder at a Home Depot and then later that day he purchased 50 rounds of ammunition from a gun shop near his home, according to the F.B.I. document and federal law enforcement officials.

During Mr. Trump’s speech, the attention of the security teams around him pivoted to the area to the north, from where the shots would eventually come. The gunman was on a warehouse roof, but it is unclear if the Secret Service snipers could see him.

In his car, a Hyundai Sonata, Mr. Crooks brought an AR-15 style rifle, bought by his father more than a decade earlier. And he brought two homemade bombs, in which a potentially explosive mixture of fertilizer and fuel was packed inside empty ammunition cans that were roughly the size of a toolbox.

The bombs were fitted with a remote-control receiver — the type typically used to set off fireworks displays remotely — according to another federal government report seen by The Times. The report said the bombs appeared designed to be set off by a remote control. He brought that, too.

Mr. Trump’s rally in Butler was supposed to start at 5 p.m., though Mr. Trump did not go onstage for another hour after that. Video obtained by Pittsburgh’s WTAE-TV appears to show that Mr. Crooks was there by at least 5:06 p.m.

The video suggests that Mr. Crooks walked around in front of the warehouse building he would eventually use as a sniper’s perch. He appeared unarmed and unhurried, looking toward the rally site with a hand in his pocket.

The officer took a photo of him and circulated it around officers at the rally. The official said that local officers tried to follow the suspicious man, but lost track.

It was about 20 minutes before the shooting.

At some point, Mr. Crooks climbed onto the roof of a warehouse, building No. 6 of a complex of interconnected corrugated-metal buildings used by an equipment company, AGR International.

The location had obvious advantages to a would-be sniper: a clear, elevated line of sight toward the stage where Mr. Trump would stand. Ms. Cheatle said no officers were stationed on the roof itself because of safety concerns arising from the roof’s slope.

The aftermath of the shooting last week.

There were conflicting accounts of how Mr. Crooks got up to the roof. A Secret Service spokesman said Wednesday that he had climbed up to the roof on his own, perhaps by using an air-conditioner. Federal investigators believe that he did not use a ladder even though Mr. Crooks had bought one that morning.

At 6:03 p.m. Mr. Trump appeared, waving to the cheering crowd. Six minutes later, with Trump now energetically speaking onstage, witnesses noticed Mr. Crooks crawling into position on the roof. They alerted local officers, who patrolled the area outside the Secret Service’s perimeter.

It was two minutes before the shooting.

Onstage, Mr. Trump continued speaking, seemingly unaware.

But around him, the Secret Service contingent frantically began to respond, shifting its focus from scanning the crowd to scanning the area north of the security perimeter. The sprawling warehouse complex just to the north — the blind spot — was now everyone’s focus.

On a barn directly behind Mr. Trump, a Secret Service counter-sniper team quickly clambered from one side of the peaked roofs to the other. Now, they pointed their rifles at the warehouse about 450 feet to Mr. Trump’s right.

Mr. Crooks was on the warehouse roof, but it is unclear if the Secret Service counter-snipers could see him. A New York Times visual analysis showed that the view for these snipers was likely blocked by the gentle peak of the warehouse’s roof.

Mr. Crooks was still hidden, low-crawling up the other side.

On the ground, officers from the small Butler Township Police Department had been assigned to direct traffic near the warehouse. According to a social media post from Butler Township Commissioner Edward Natali, at least two of the officers left their traffic posts to help look for the suspicious person.

Two officers went to the warehouse, and one officer boosted the other up, so that his head was above the roofline. He and Mr. Crooks saw each other. Mr. Crooks “turned his firearm,” Mr. Natali wrote, but the officer could not fire back: He was holding onto the roof with both hands.

The officer fell backward and was injured, Mr. Natali wrote.

Mr. Crooks reached the peak of the warehouse roof, high enough to see over the top. A witness on the ground yelled: “He’s on the roof! He’s got a gun!”

Then time was up. Mr. Crooks fired his rifle eight times, according to a Times analysis of audio from the scene. His first shot appeared to graze Mr. Trump, bloodying his right ear. Two other rallygoers were injured, and a 50-year-old retired firefighter, Corey Comperatore, was killed.

Afterward, a Secret Service sniper on the south barn killed him with one shot. A local police officer in another part of the area also fired at him, but it was unclear if his bullet struck Mr. Crooks, according to the Butler County district attorney.

When the police reached Mr. Crooks’s body on the roof, he had no identification on him. Officers traced the serial number on his rifle to his father. In his pocket, he carried a remote control to the bombs in his car.

It was not clear if he had tried to use it, or if the bombs were made well enough to explode.

Eduardo Medina and Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from Butler, Pa., Chelsia Rose Marcius from Bethel Park, Pa., Mark Walker and John Ismay from Washington, and William K. Rashbaum from New York.

Promised Cures, Tainted Cells: How Cord Blood Banks Mislead Parents

Families pay thousands of dollars to store their children’s stem cells with the hope of a healthier future. But the cells are rarely useful, and sometimes contaminated.

Anna Lazos with her son and their dog. After spending thousands of dollars on cord blood storage, Ms. Lazos asked to withdraw a sample to enroll him in an autism clinical trial. The company told her that the cells were contaminated with E. coli.

By Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi  15 Jul, 2024

Millions of pregnant women get the pitch through their OB-GYN: Put a bit of your newborn’s umbilical cord on ice, as a biological insurance policy. If your child one day faces cancer, diabetes or even autism, the precious stem cells in the cord blood could become a tailor-made cure.

[Embedded audio available]

Many families are happy to pay for the assurance of a healthy future. More than two million umbilical cord samples sit in a handful of suburban warehouses across the country. It’s a lucrative business, with companies charging several thousand dollars upfront plus hundreds more every year thereafter. The industry has grown rapidly, bolstered by investments from medical device companies, hospital partnerships and endorsements from celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Chrissy Teigen.

But the leading banks have consistently misled customers and doctors about the technology’s promise, an investigation by The New York Times found. Doctors rarely use cord blood anymore, thanks to advances that have made it easier to transplant adult stem cells. And the few parents who try to withdraw cord blood samples often find that they are unusable — either because their volume is too low or they have been contaminated with microbes.

When the first cord blood banks opened three decades ago, doctors were optimistic about turning the stem cells, otherwise discarded as medical waste, into a powerful new treatment for patients with leukemia and other blood disorders. Private banks promised peace of mind for anxious parents-to-be, knowing the cells would be ready and waiting if their child ever got sick.

That potential has not materialized. Just 19 stem-cell transplants using a child’s own cord blood have been reported since 2010, according to the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research. Newer research has led many doctors to abandon cord blood in favor of adult stem cells.

Yet private banks trumpet the cells’ lifesaving possibilities, and legions of their sales representatives peddle cord blood as if it were at the medical vanguard. They woo customers in hospital pregnancy classes and offer obstetricians free lunches, gift cards and payments of up to $700 for each sample.

Cord Blood Registry, in Tucson, Ariz., stores more than one million samples, double the number it had in 2014.

The marketing seems to have worked. Cord Blood Registry, or CBR, stores more than one million samples, double the number it had in 2014. Its two main competitors, ViaCord and Cryo-Cell, each have more than 500,000 samples in storage.

The banks say that the cells have saved children’s lives and that no one knows what scientists may one day discover. “We believe in the future of cord blood,” said David Portnoy, co-chief executive of Cryo-Cell. Chet Murray, a spokesman for Revvity, which owns ViaCord, said, “The potential for future scientific advances in addition to the current clinical uses is enormous.” A representative for CooperSurgical, which owns CBR, pointed to customer testimonials on its website.

The overwhelming majority of cord blood cells sit indefinitely in liquid nitrogen tanks. Withdrawals are usually requested by parents trying to get their child into experimental trials for cerebral palsy or autism. But doctors involved in those trials have rejected about half of cells from private banks because the samples were tainted or too small.

Two of the big banks — ViaCord and CBR — have struggled with contamination, according to customers of the companies who were rejected from trials because of it.

In January, inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration found troubling signs of bacterial growth at CBR’s sole warehouse, in Tucson, Ariz. Reviewing records going back to 2018, they reported bacteria in a supposedly sterile processing area, as well as leaky bags used to collect cord samples.

Jenna Edwards, a high school administrative assistant in Parkland, Fla., spent more than $3,000 storing her son’s cord blood at ViaCord’s bank outside Cincinnati. When she tried in 2017 to withdraw the cells for a clinical trial to treat her son’s cerebral palsy, she learned that the company had found bacteria in the sample within weeks of receiving it, but still charged her for the next two years.

“They were totally fine with continuing to bank it and taking our money,” Ms. Edwards said.

She terminated the contract. But assuming the contamination was bad luck, she stored her next baby’s cord blood at the bank as well, spending another $650 on collection fees. But within weeks she discovered that it, too, was worthless: It had too few cells.

Mr. Murray said that ViaCord’s current policy was to inform customers when samples were too small or contaminated. The company offers refunds for samples below a certain volume. As for contaminated cells, he said that ViaCord does not control clinical trial protocols, and that as research progresses, “it becomes more feasible that a contaminated unit may be used.” Doctors who run such trials, however, said using contaminated cells could risk a patient’s life.

When Jenna Edwards tried in 2017 to withdraw the cells for a clinical trial to treat her older son’s cerebral palsy, she learned that the company had found bacteria in the sample, but still charged her for the next two years.

The Cord Blood Heyday

In 1988, doctors at Duke University were desperate. A 5-year-old boy was facing death from a rare blood disorder and they couldn’t find a match for a bone-marrow transplant. The boy flew to Paris for an experimental treatment of chemotherapy followed by an infusion of cord blood from his baby sister. Within three weeks, his bone marrow began producing healthy blood cells. He was cured.

“His transplant was really proof that there are blood stem cells in cord blood,” said Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, one of the Duke doctors and now a leading expert in the field and Cryo-Cell’s medical director.

Once infused into a patient’s blood, cord blood stem cells find their way to the bone marrow and begin producing new blood cells, making them a powerful treatment — when paired with chemotherapy — for blood diseases like sickle cell anemia and leukemia.

Subsequent transplants revealed that a sick patient could receive cord blood from an unrelated donor, an advantage especially for ethnic minorities who had trouble finding immunological matches.

Cord blood banks began storing cells in 1992. Private banks charged families to freeze their children’s cells for personal use, whereas public banks collected cells from anonymous donors, to be used by anyone in need.

By 2005, the technology seemed so promising that the federal government devoted $79 million to building a national network of public banks. More than two dozen states have passed laws requiring that obstetricians educate pregnant women about cord blood banking.

Cord blood transplants reached their peak in 2011, with 896 reported in the United States.

But the excitement was short-lived. Around 2008, researchers discovered that, with the right drugs to suppress the immune system, patients could safely receive stem cells from the blood or bone marrow of relatives who were only partial matches. Many doctors found those cells preferable to umbilical stem cells, which were twice as expensive and often yielded too few cells for treatment.

As this medical innovation took off, cord blood transplants tumbled. Just 346 were reported in preliminary data for 2023, the lowest number in more than a decade.

“It’s not the preferred source of stem cells at virtually every institution in the United States,” said Dr. Robert Brodsky, chief of the hematology department at Johns Hopkins University.

Small studies have tested umbilical cord cells as treatments for conditions other than blood disorders, such as autism, diabetes and hearing loss. Most have not advanced beyond early stages of testing.

The most favorable study infused cord blood into dozens of children with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that causes muscle weakness and an unsteady gait. A year after treatment, children saw enough improvement in their motor function for the study to advance to the largest and most rigorous stage of testing, known as Phase 3.

With cord transplants drying up, public banks found themselves in dire financial straits. The Cleveland Cord Blood Center began selling off some of its donated cells to researchers and biotechnology companies in 2018 in order to make ends meet. The New York Blood Center, the nation’s largest public bank, stopped collecting cord blood in 2020.

Privately banked cord blood proved even less medically useful. If a child developed leukemia, for example, her own stem cells would be genetically predisposed to become cancerous.

For some diseases, such as lymphoma, doctors do use a patient’s own stem cells. But they can almost always get those cells directly from the patient’s blood. There was just one transplant using a patient’s own cord blood reported in 2023, compared with more than 16,000 done with stem cells from a patient’s own blood.

While private banks disclose in small print that the odds of using the cells are low, or that clinical trials may not pan out, they have nevertheless prospered by selling parents the hope of a “healthier tomorrow.” CooperSurgical, a major medical device company, purchased CBR’s parent company in 2021 for $1.6 billion, attributing two-thirds of its value to umbilical cord storage.

“It’s a good space, has good margins, solid growth characteristics,” Albert White, the chief executive of CooperCompanies, told investors at a San Francisco health care conference in 2022. “I should say, really strong margins.”

Paying Doctors and Celebrities

Chrissy Teigen, a model with 42 million Instagram followers who often shares about her children and pregnancies, joined a CBR social media and television campaign last year.

When Stacy Seaver was a sales representative for CBR, from 2018 to 2019, her biggest client was Northside Hospital in Atlanta, which says it delivers more babies than any other in the United States. She stocked collection kits in supply rooms and regularly brought the obstetricians lunch.

What the hospital didn’t tell parents: CBR paid the doctors about $250 for every baby’s sample they collected.

All three of the largest cord blood banks offer such “collection fees,” ranging from $150 to $700, according to 11 doctors and current and former bank employees.

The banks employ sales representatives like Ms. Seaver to visit obstetricians and tout their products. But unlike their peers from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries — who operate under strict laws prohibiting kickbacks to doctors — cord blood representatives are largely exempt because insurers do not cover their product.

Mr. Murray, the ViaCord spokesman, and Mr. Portnoy, the head of Cryo-Cell, said that physicians should be reimbursed for their time. CBR did not respond to questions about doctor payments.

Northside directed questions about payments to Dr. Jeffrey Marcus, the chief medical officer of Atlanta Women’s Health Group, which delivers babies at Northside. He said that collecting the cord takes less than five minutes.

“You put a needle in the cord, you tie it off, you fill out one piece of paper and you make $150 or $200,” he said. “It’s virtually no work.”

But Dr. Marcus did not think the payments were enough to change doctors’ behavior, noting that his practice does not generally recommend cord blood storage. “It’s not enough money to do something that you wouldn’t do otherwise,” he said.

Former sales representatives, however, said that collection fees were unquestionably helpful in luring some doctors to recommend a service with little medical evidence behind it.

“You’ll unfortunately have some doctors just wanting to know how much more they can make,” said Claudia D’LaRotta, who worked as a sales representative for CBR from 2005 to 2014.

The banks also market directly to parents.

Each month, CBR hosts webinars for pregnant women, providing a $25 gift card for attendance. A labor and delivery nurse in Orange County, Calif., led one such presentation in May that The Times observed. She told the group she first got interested in stem cells because her child had autism. The condition is not life-threatening, she acknowledged. But the cells work “like little ambulance drivers,” traveling through the body to help spur healing.

Frozen samples at the Cord Blood Registry offices in Tucson in 2006.

Duke University carried out a clinical trial of cord blood for autism, but it did not show improvements in socialization skills. There are no F.D.A.-approved stem cell treatments for autism.

Billy Russell, who worked in CBR’s customer support from 2019 to 2021, said the sales team routinely touted the possibilities of using stem cells for autism. But when customers asked to withdraw their samples for unapproved autism treatments, he had to tell them that wasn’t possible. (The company releases cells only for transplants or clinical trials approved by the F.D.A.)

“They were promised their stem cell storage would be this miracle medicine, and that wound up not being true,” he said.

Last year, CBR started a social media and television campaign with Chrissy Teigen, a model with 42 million Instagram followers who often shares about her children and pregnancies. That campaign brought in more than 5,800 new customers and $6.6 million in revenue, according to an entry submitted for a marketing award.

“Those stem cells can be used to treat over 80 different conditions,” Ms. Teigen said on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” in a segment that was featured in the award entry. “Right now 80 — and as you know, science is ever evolving.”

When asked for a citation for the 80 conditions, a CBR representative pointed to a study, which cited another study, which cited a list of mostly blood and immune diseases compiled by a nonprofit organization, Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation.

Frances Verter, the group’s founder and the author of the list, said that most of the conditions were exceedingly rare. What’s more, she included diseases that the F.D.A. allowed to be treated with various types of stem cells — not necessarily from cord blood.

“The marketing is hype,” Dr. Verter said. And yet, she is still hopeful the technology will become useful. For decades she has paid to store the cord blood of her own adult children and grandchildren.

CBR, ViaCord and Cryo-Cell say on their websites that one in 217 people will need a stem cell transplant by the time they turn 70, citing a paper published in 2008.

But Dr. Mary Horowitz, the author of that study, said that the calculation was based on stem cells from all sources, including blood and bone marrow. “It’s misleading,” said Dr. Horowitz, the deputy director of a cancer center at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “It is extremely unlikely,” she said, that cord blood cells will ever be used.

Mr. Portnoy, the chief executive of Cryo-Cell, said he would welcome a conversation with Dr. Horowitz to “clear up any ambiguity in understanding the results.”

‘My dreams got ruined’

Ms. Lazos at home in Egg Harbor Township, N.J.

Anna Lazos first heard about cord blood banking in 2006, when she was pregnant with her first child. Finances were tight. She was unemployed and her husband worked as a plumber.

But they scraped together $1,600 and signed up with ViaCord. Eleven years later, after spending about $1,300 on storage fees, Ms. Lazos asked ViaCord to withdraw the sample so that her younger son could join an autism clinical trial. That study’s researchers told her that the cells were contaminated and unusable. They were growing E. coli.

“My dreams got ruined,” said Ms. Lazos, 43, now a G.E.D. instructor in Egg Harbor Township, N.J.

Mr. Murray, the spokesman, said that the cells were banked before Revvity acquired ViaCord.

Dr. Kurtzberg, the cord blood pioneer at Duke, was running the autism trial. She said that Ms. Lazo’s experience was not uncommon.

Her clinic continues to offer the experimental infusion for cerebral palsy. But of the 254 patients who were evaluated for treatment this year, she said more than half were rejected because of low-quality cells from private banks. She said the new stage of the cerebral palsy trial would allow cord blood only from public banks because the F.D.A. wanted a standardized manufacturing process for all samples.

The Times interviewed a dozen ViaCord or CBR customers who discovered their cell samples were too small or contaminated.

Renee Johnson received a letter from ViaCord after she banked in 2014 that suggested all had gone well. “Your baby’s cord blood and tissue have been processed, tested, frozen, and secured in our storage vault,” it said. But when she tried to withdraw the cells two years later, she learned they had tested positive for E. coli.

Mr. Murray said that ViaCord updated its policy in late 2020 to inform customers in writing of contaminated samples.

Renee Johnson banked her son’s cord blood with ViaCord in 2014 and learned years later the cells were infected with E. coli.

Kristin Prins banked her new baby’s cells at CBR in 2021 because she wanted to enroll her older son in the cerebral palsy clinical trial. (CBR has a program that offers families in these situations free banking.)

Eighteen months later, a CBR representative told her by email that her baby’s sample was contaminated on arrival. “This sometimes happens given that the delivery room is not a sterile environment,” the representative wrote.

But at the time those cells were banked, CBR employees tasked with quality control were raising concerns about subpar environmental conditions at the Tucson warehouse.

Because samples were shipped without temperature monitors, quality control specialists could not check if the cells ever got hot enough to encourage bacterial growth while en route, according to three former members of the quality assurance team, who requested anonymity to discuss problems within the factory. Two recalled telling management to add thermometers to the samples, to no avail.

This January, F.D.A. inspectors faulted CBR for five violations of quality control standards at the Tucson warehouse.

In their report, the inspectors said CBR had failed to ensure “appropriate shipping conditions,” leading to multiple cases in which the stem cells arrived warmer than the accepted threshold. They also found that, for two years, the company’s test for contamination had not worked properly and was failing to catch bacterial growth.

CBR did not respond to questions about the F.D.A. report or about quality control at its warehouse.

Two former F.D.A. inspectors who reviewed the report for The Times said it showed significant failures. “The response should be we are recalling all the products still on the market, made during this time,” said Vincent Cafiso, one of the former inspectors.

When CBR customers called to complain about contaminated cells, Mr. Russell, the customer support employee, tried to talk them down. Part of his job, he said, was to persuade them to keep paying for storage.

He would tell parents, he recalled, that “maybe we’ll be able to fix it with future medicine.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Read by Sarah Kliff

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.

Amtrak Passengers Face Record Delays From Extreme Weather

The dated U.S. rail infrastructure is struggling to stay operational as climate change accelerates and intense heat waves, downpours and high winds become more frequent.

By Minho Kim  17 Jul, 2024

On June 20, after millions of Americans had suffered through a sweltering heat wave for three days, Amtrak sent an ominous warning over social media: Trains connecting the largest cities in Northeast could face up to an hour of delay from high temperatures.

Later that afternoon, after the temperature peaked at 96 degrees in Newark, Amtrak lost electricity near the New Jersey side of the Hudson River tunnels. The power failure soon shuttered a 150-mile stretch of the busiest rail corridor in the United States for more than three hours. The impact reverberated until the next day, when trains chugged through with hours of residual delays.

As the planet rapidly warms, train delays and breakdowns are becoming more frequent as America’s antiquated rail infrastructure struggles to remain functional during prolonged extreme weather events that were not typical when the system was constructed.

A New York Times analysis of Amtrak data found that the rail service’s passengers have faced record delays in recent years caused by inclement weather such as heat waves, storms, floods, high winds, low temperatures, tornadoes, lightning and wildfires.

Extreme weather events bogged down Amtrak trains for more than 4,010 hours in the 2023 fiscal year, which began in October 2022 and ended in September 2023, according to a Times analysis of more than 313,000 individual train delay data dating to September 2003. That was the highest number of weather-related delays in at least 20 years.

Passengers waiting at Penn Station in New York after a brush fire along the Northeast Corridor caused delays in June.

The biggest contributor has been intensifying heat waves. About 30 percent of trains that arrived late in the 2023 fiscal year were delayed for heat reasons, accounting for nearly 1,200 hours of overall delays. Heat delays more than doubled from the 2018 fiscal year, when Amtrak passengers spent 530 additional hours in trains after high temperatures slowed down rail travel.

Railways made from steel are prone to deformities when exposed to direct sunlight during heat waves. The changes, known as sun kinks, occur when the steel overheats and buckles, creating wobbly and dangerous curves that require railroads to drastically reduce the speed of their trains to avoid derailments.

“You get a sun kink when the train’s on it — you’re dead,” said Louis S. Thompson, a former director of the Federal Railroad Administration who led efforts to revamp Amtrak service in the Northeast. “It’s going to go off the rails.”

Amtrak said the heat wave did not directly cause the power failure in June, but many rail experts said scorching sunlight on dangerously warm afternoons made unexpected breakdowns more likely to occur.

The rail infrastructure “just crumbles in the heat,” said Jim Mathews, the president and chief executive of the Rail Passengers Association, an advocacy group pushing for better reliability and an expansion of passenger rail service in the United States.

Olivia Irvin, a spokeswoman for Amtrak, said in a statement that “heat waves may create additional strain on power systems and related infrastructure generally” but that none of “the recent N.E.C. delays were heat-caused,” referring to the Northeast Corridor rail route.

Still, she acknowledged that a warming planet was creating challenges for the system.

“Amtrak is beginning to see climate conditions impact on-time performance and is taking action,” Ms. Irvin said in a statement. In 2022, Amtrak conducted an assessment of overall climate risks to its infrastructure in the Northeast as part of an effort to improve its response to adverse weather, she said.

Rail experts said scorching sunlight on dangerously warm afternoons made unexpected breakdowns more likely to occur.

Extreme weather that slows Amtrak trains in the Northeast also affects the region’s heavily used commuter rail systems, such as New Jersey Transit, SEPTA in Pennsylvania and MARC in Maryland, which all share tracks that Amtrak owns.

Without major investments in the centuries-old rail system, delays would only increase in the coming years, Mr. Thompson said.

“The B&P Tunnel going through Baltimore is a catastrophe waiting to happen, especially in heavy rains and high temperatures,” he said. Amtrak had weak points “that climate change is already attacking,” he added, such as the Hudson River tunnels that flooded in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy shut down rail traffic for days and forced months of service cuts during repairs.

Scientists say climate change is exacerbating the severity of storms as ocean temperatures rise, providing more energy and moisture that fuel stronger winds and downpours.

Amtrak, a federally owned passenger-rail company, is building new tunnels in Baltimore and under the Hudson River to replace the century-old structures. But neither is scheduled to be complete for another 10 years.

Abnormally high temperatures have accounted for an even larger share of weather delays along the Northeast Corridor, which runs between Boston, New York and Washington. About 2,200 trains carry more than 750,000 passengers daily along the route, which is the busiest in the United States.

Last year, heat was responsible for nearly 60 percent of delays attributable to a specific weather-related cause, adding more than 230 hours of travel time for Amtrak trains in the Northeast. Heat-delay hours in the region steadily increased since the 2018 fiscal year, when high temperatures slowed trains by 83 hours.

“You could live with it back when you had four or five really hot days in the summer,” said Mr. Mathews. “But now, there are so many heat days.”

The Times analysis on heat delays might be an undercount, Mr. Mathews said, because mechanical failures on a hot afternoon are sometimes recorded as a technical issue rather than a weather delay.

Other extreme weather events that had previously affected trains only a few times per year have also begun to increase. High tides, tornadoes, lightning strikes and wildfires each held up trains as much as 10 times more than in previous years, resulting in more than 200 hours of combined delays in fiscal year 2023.

That includes days like July 6, when a heat advisory was in effect throughout the Northeast. Lightning struck Amtrak’s power system, causing cancellations and delays between New York and New Haven, Conn., for hours. Climatologists say high temperatures make lightning strikes more frequent.

Railway tracks in Nevada. High temperatures can cause “sun kinks,” or buckles in the steel, forcing trains to drastically reduce their speeds to avoid derailments.

The delay records that The Times analyzed contain notes from Amtrak conductors that provide a detailed account on how extreme weather stalls train operations. One note from August 2023 cites a heat order that kept trains from going over 25 miles per hour, which led to a 2.5-hour delay between Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Meridian, Miss.

Amtrak does not own tracks outside the Northeast and small pockets of the Midwest, and freight railroads that host Amtrak often put out stringent speed restrictions during heat waves that affect passenger trains.

In the Northeast, once steel tracks reach 128 degrees Fahrenheit, Amtrak limits train speeds to 100 miles per hour. When tracks heat up to 135 degrees, train speeds are capped at 80 m.p.h. — around half of the top speed of Acela express trains. Those restrictions are often imposed when ambient temperatures reach 95 degrees or higher.

“These blanket speed orders can cause huge costs from delay,” said Jacob Helman, a senior data consultant at Resilient Analytics, a research group that builds models to predict future effects of climate change on various infrastructure.

A study that Mr. Helman coauthored estimates that train delays from heat waves will cumulatively cost at least $103 billion by 2100, as more passengers and freight are stalled every year. Across the country, railroads move roughly 40 percent of long-distance freight that requires traveling hundred of miles — the largest share among all means of transportation.

“Heat waves can take up entire regions, so you see huge impacts,” Mr. Helman said.

Tracks are not the only rail infrastructure that frequent heat waves threaten. Amtrak’s overhead power lines use a technology from the 1930s, and they sag under intense summer heat and interrupt electric transmission between train pantographs and wires.

Amtrak’s vulnerability assessment for the Northeast from 2022 designated the entire route from south of New York to Washington as highly susceptible to overhead power line malfunctions during heat waves. The study labeled New York as “a notable vulnerability hot spot” for a confluence of problems in rail operations caused by heat and heavy rain, including flooding, sun kinks, equipment malfunction and power outages.

Technical solutions exist, said Allan Zarembski, a professor in rail engineering at the University of Delaware. Steel tracks can be adjusted for higher temperatures by exposing them to heat before installation, a process that allows steel to endure more thermal stress.

“We have railroads going through the Mojave Desert and Death Valley,” Mr. Zarembski said. “It’s not that” railroad companies “don’t know how to deal with it.”

What is lacking is the political will to fund infrastructure upgrades that are crucial in the age of worsening climate change, not adequate technology, Mr. Mathews said. Last week, House Republicans advanced an appropriations bill that would cut funding for rail by more than $300 million. Last year, Republicans tried to slash Amtrak funding by 64 percent — and reduce the money allocated to the Northeast Corridor by 92 percent.

Amtrak is already struggling to secure sufficient funding to revamp its old rail system. Modernizing the Northeast Corridor, for example, has a price tag of $117 billion, mostly for repairing tracks and increasing capacity. The bipartisan infrastructure law Congress passed in 2021 devotes $30 billion for the Northeast Corridor, which needs new trains, bridges, tunnels, tracks and power systems. Amtrak can seek extra funding by applying for federal grants, which could provide a few billion dollars for projects in the Northeast.

The rail funding from the infrastructure law expires after the 2026 fiscal year.

“The fundamental dilemma of Amtrak is that Congress wants them to do big things, but they only want to fund small things,” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s always been a day late and a dollar short.”

Biden Tests Positive for Covid

President Biden will “self-isolate and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time,” a White House spokeswoman said.

[Embedded video available]

By Michael D. Shear  17 Jul, 2024

President Biden tested positive for Covid on Wednesday, forcing him to cancel a campaign event in Las Vegas and likely sidelining him for days following the conclusion of former President Donald J. Trump’s nominating convention on Thursday.

The illness, which the president’s doctor said had produced only mild symptoms so far, was diagnosed even as the Democratic revolt over his candidacy got louder, with more of Mr. Biden’s allies and supporters calling on him to drop out of the race, citing concerns about his ability to defeat Mr. Trump.

Mr. Biden told reporters, “I feel good,” as he boarded Air Force One in Las Vegas to fly back to his beach house in Delaware, where he plans to recuperate. He was not wearing a mask, nor were the people closest to him on the tarmac.

But having Covid is all but certain to complicate the president’s ability to answer his critics, many of whom have said they want him to show that he still has the vigor and energy to prosecute the case against Mr. Trump in campaign rallies, interviews and other events.

If Mr. Biden continues to test positive for the next week or more, it could keep him off the campaign trail. And if he continues to have congestion and a cough, as his doctor reported on Wednesday, it could hamper his ability to perform well in any interviews that his campaign could schedule from his home.

The president and his campaign strategists had hoped to use a two-day visit to Las Vegas to sell his economic and immigration policies to Latino voters in the crucial battleground state of Nevada as he tries to re-energize his campaign after three weeks of instability. In a parallel effort to reach Black voters, on Tuesday he spoke at an N.A.A.C.P. conference and sat for an interview with BET News that was released on Wednesday.

He was scheduled to speak at the annual conference for UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, but canceled after an hourlong delay when his Covid test came back positive.

Mr. Biden is trying desperately to end the conversation about his cognitive capacity and address what polls suggest are three of his biggest political weaknesses: immigration, the economy and slipping support among Latinos. But the Covid diagnosis means he will not be able to mount an aggressive campaign push in the coming days.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that “earlier today, following his first event in Las Vegas, President Biden tested positive for COVID-19.” She added that “he is vaccinated and boosted and he is experiencing mild symptoms.”

The White House said Mr. Biden planned to remain at his beach house in Rehoboth, Del., to self-isolate and recuperate. Ms. Jean-Pierre said the president would continue to carry out his duties as president from Delaware.

Mr. Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, said in a release from the White House that the president had a runny nose, a cough and “general malaise” starting Wednesday afternoon. Dr. O’Connor said that he was given a rapid test for Covid because he was still not feeling well later in the day, and the results were positive for the virus.

“Given this, the president will be self-isolating in accordance with C.D.C. guidance for symptomatic individuals,” he wrote. He added that the president’s temperature was normal and his blood oxygen was normal as well.

Mr. Biden has received an initial dose of Paxlovid, a treatment that may lessen the symptoms of the virus.

Before announcing the test results, Mr. Biden stopped at a restaurant earlier in the day. Reporters with him said he looked slower and a bit more pale than the day before, when he delivered a speech at the N.A.A.C.P. convention.

Reporters traveling with the president said that there was a lengthy, unexplained delay in the afternoon leading up to the president’s scheduled appearance at the UnidosUS conference.

The first indication of Mr. Biden’s diagnosis came not from the White House but from Janet Murguía, the chief executive of Unidos, who addressed the conference more than an hour after Mr. Biden had been expected to speak.

“Regrettably, I was just on the phone with President Biden. And he shared his deep disappointment at not being able to join us this afternoon,” she said. “The president has been at many events, as we all know, and he just tested positive for Covid.”

Mr. Biden first tested positive for Covid in July 2022 and experienced mild symptoms for about a week. After testing negative, Mr. Biden tested positive again about a week later in what doctors said was a rebound case of Covid.

The president’s trip to Las Vegas came as Republicans focused on their national convention in Milwaukee this week.

During an interview with BET News on Tuesday, Mr. Biden dismissed concerns over signs that his support among Black and Latino voters was declining. “If you notice, whether it’s young Blacks or young whites or young Hispanics or young Asian Americans, they’ve never focused till after Labor Day,” he said. “I mean, the idea they’re focused intently on the election now, it’s not there.”

On Wednesday morning, he announced that starting Aug. 19, undocumented spouses of American citizens would be able to apply for a new program that would shield them from deportation. Last month, he announced the creation of the program, which could shield 500,000 people from deportation and give them a pathway to citizenship and the ability to work legally in the United States. In June, he also issued an executive order suspending asylum for most migrants at the border, in an attempt to strike a balance on an issue that has been a major political vulnerability.

‘The Buck Stops With Me’: Secret Service Director Soldiers On

Kimberly Cheatle returned in 2022 to lead the agency she had served for nearly 30 years. Now, an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump has thrown her tenure into uncertainty.

An assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump has thrown Kimberly Cheatle’s tenure into uncertainty.

By Kate Kelly  17 Jul, 2024

In the summer of 2022, Kimberly A. Cheatle, who handled global security at PepsiCo, delivered surprising news shortly before a board of directors meeting, according to a colleague at the time: President Biden had asked her to run the Secret Service.

The opportunity to return to an agency she had served for a quarter century was one she could not resist, the colleague recalled Ms. Cheatle saying.

She was sworn in that September. Now, less than two years later, an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump has thrown her tenure into uncertainty.

Since a gunman’s bullet grazed Mr. Trump’s ear at a campaign rally on Saturday, Ms. Cheatle has been forced into an uncomfortable limelight. Critics have questioned how the agency could have missed a man with a gun on a rooftop less than 500 feet from the former president — especially when law enforcement was amassed just below.

An influential congressional panel will press Ms. Cheatle for answers at a public hearing next week on the first shooting of a current or former American president since 1981.

On Wednesday night, two Republican senators, John Barrasso of Wyoming and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, personally confronted Ms. Cheatle in a suite at the Republican National Convention, where she is the senior security official. When she attempted to leave, they followed her down a corridor and up a flight of stairs yelling questions that she did not answer.

Mr. Barrasso is seen in a video of the encounter berating Ms. Cheatle and accusing her of putting Mr. Trump “within less than an inch of his life.”

“She can run; she cannot hide,” Ms. Blackburn said.

In a television interview with ABC on Monday, Ms. Cheatle appeared abashed over the security lapses that preceded the shooting.

“The buck stops with me,” she said. “I am the director of the Secret Service. It was unacceptable, and it’s something that shouldn’t happen again.”

Secret Service agents surrounding Mr. Trump after he was wounded by gunfire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday.

She added that she planned “to stay on” despite public calls for her resignation and that she had expanded Mr. Trump’s tactical security detail.

A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department said that Ms. Cheatle was not available to comment. But in an interview on Tuesday, the department’s secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, who oversees the Secret Service, stood by her.

“I will tell you that my confidence in Kim is 100 percent,” he said.

He declined to speculate on whether the findings of an independent review Mr. Biden has called for into the security lapses surrounding the assassination attempt might affect his stance.

Despite Mr. Mayorkas’s support, the days ahead are certain to be rocky for Ms. Cheatle, who pursued a career in law enforcement after her brother, who had planned to become a state trooper, died in a car crash in 1988 while she was an undergraduate at Eastern Illinois University.

Some people who have worked with Ms. Cheatle described her as professional, competent and so focused on her job that they had no idea about her hobbies or interests outside of work. She gives only occasional interviews and said nothing publicly for a day and a half after the assassination attempt

When she broke her silence, it was with a written statement extending condolences to the family of a man was killed in the shooting and promising to participate in the review, the details of which have not been disclosed.

During her 22 months as Secret Service director, Ms. Cheatle may be best known for two initiatives: a push to build replica of the White House at the agency’s center in Maryland for training purposes and her embrace of a national policing mandate to push for 30 percent of the Secret Service’s work force to be female by 2030.

An congressional panel will press Ms. Cheatle for answers next week at a public hearing on the first shooting of a current or former American president since 1981.

The Secret Service has been in tumult in recent years, veteran agents say.

“Kim came into an agency that was under rapid change,” said Donald Mihalek, who was a Secret Service agent for two decades and worked with Ms. Cheatle before retiring in 2019.

He said Ms. Cheatle had to tackle the agency’s expanding priorities, like financial crimes involving digital currencies, and faced “a threat environment that has been widely reported is through the roof.”

The Secret Service has been dogged by scandal for years. During the Obama administration, agents hired sex workers during a presidential summit in Colombia, and an intruder carrying a knife made his way into the White House before being caught. The agency deleted text messages Congress had requested related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, removing evidence that could have helped reconstruct the day.

Ms. Cheatle now oversees more than 8,000 agents and other personnel and a budget of more than $3 billion. That figure represents an all-time high but is still not enough, according to agency observers, to cope with staff shortages and the demands of a politically charged environment, especially in an election year.

Former agents say she has tried to make the agency, where workers deal with intensely stressful situations, more compassionate. She has taken steps to help employees repay student loans and defray the cost of child care, said Bill Glady, a former assistant director who recently retired and knew Ms. Cheatle for most of his 28 years on the job.

“She leads from the front,” he said. “She’s personal. She’s not going to give you a task that she won’t take on herself.”

Behind the scenes, Ms. Cheatle was not afraid to stand her ground, Mr. Mayorkas said. She did so at one point after he raised a concern about the agency. At the time, he said, the director pushed back and explained the issue from her perspective.

“I both appreciated the advocacy, was incredibly impressed with her consideration of many more issues than those of which I was aware,” he said.

Some Secret Service employees have complained that Ms. Cheatle’s emphasis on diversity in hiring has detracted from other priorities. The director has said that increasing the number of women at her agency could help combat its persistent recruitment and retention challenges. But since the shooting on Saturday, a pitched argument has broken out over whether her attention has been misplaced.

Some Secret Service employees have complained that Ms. Cheatle’s emphasis on diversity in hiring has detracted from other priorities.

“I think that all agents, they want to have a leader that feels their pain and that they can respect,” said Bill Pickle, a retired Secret Service agent who keeps in touch with former colleagues. But in recent years, he added, “a lot of social agendas that have been imposed,” including the gender-diversity focus, “have kind of hurt the service.”

“There is absolutely a need for female agents because security details have to represent the communities in which protectees live and travel in,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman. He cited the daughters of former presidents, who needed protection on college campuses and in athletic settings, as examples.

Ms. Cheatle began her career at the Secret Service in the 1990s as a field agent in Detroit in a lesser-known area of the agency’s purview: investigating financial crimes. She was also assigned to protecting officials, such as when she was tasked with helping to protect President Bill Clinton during a trip through Michigan by train in 1996.

After nearly five years in that job, she transferred to Washington, where she was assigned to the team protecting Vice President Dick Cheney. On Sept. 11, 2001, she helped whisk Mr. Cheney to a secure bunker after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

At moments like that, she told The News-Gazette in Champaign, Ill., in an interview last year, law enforcement agents have an innate sense of what to do: “That sort of calmness sets in and you fall back on your training, and you think about it later.”

Ms. Cheatle began her career at the Secret Service in the 1990s as a field agent in Detroit, before working on teams protecting Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Ms. Cheatle worked on Mr. Biden’s security detail when he was vice president during the Obama administration. During that time, Mr. Biden said in 2022, she had earned his and the first lady’s “complete trust.”

After several years in the West Wing, Ms. Cheatle returned to Secret Service field work in Atlanta, where she was the special agent in charge of that office and helped prosecute financial crimes involving identity theft and ransomware. In one high-profile case, she was part of a team that exposed a 16-person crime ring that stole $10 million worth of government checks from the mail and cashed them at grocery stores.

She ultimately rose to become an assistant director in charge of the Office of Protective Operations — a role that involved a budget of more than $130 million — before retiring from the Secret Service for a job in the private sector.

In 2019, Ms. Cheatle became a senior director in global security for PepsiCo’s North America operations. The job involved protecting corporate executives, said a colleague who worked with her at the time, and securing PepsiCo’s offices in three states and its enormous logistical operations, including the delivery of goods from warehouses and factories by land and air.

Three years later, she received a call from Mr. Biden’s White House staff during a meal with her parents at a restaurant.

Word soon circulated that Ms. Cheatle was Washington-bound, a former co-worker recalled.

Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Families Say Shelters Without Air-Conditioning Are Like ‘Living in Hell’

In many New York City homeless shelters, families need a doctor’s note to have air-conditioners. But some residents say shelters still make it difficult to get them.

Fans cool some of the rooms at the Doña Elsie Family Residences, a 101-unit family shelter in the Bronx.

By Andy Newman and Julian Roberts-Grmela  16 Jul, 2024

The sun was about to set Monday evening and the temperature was still 90 degrees. The air was thick and oppressive. Shaasia Wood and her 4-year-old son were hanging out on the sidewalk, hoping for a breeze, near the homeless shelter where they live in Upper Manhattan.

That was because inside their un-air-conditioned room, “It feels like living in hell, really,” Ms. Wood said.

Ms. Wood, a 40-year-old home care aide, has plenty of company in her misery: Thousands of families with children live in New York City shelters that lack air-conditioning in the rooms where people live and sleep, even in the depths of a heat wave. On Monday, no air-conditioners were visible above the ground-floor offices of her shelter, the Hamilton Family Residence.

At the Doña Elsie Family Residences in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx, Floyd Perkins, 56, who lives with his partner and seven children, said, “All I know is that we’ve been sweating ever since summer came, and sweating, sweating, sweating.”

Some family shelters are in former hotels that are fully air-conditioned, but many of those shelters house newly arrived migrant families. Shelters for the rest of the homeless population are typically in buildings that do not have air-conditioning, the city said.

Mayor Eric Adams, who on Monday reminded New Yorkers that “a heat wave can be deadly and life-threatening if you are not prepared,” recommended on Tuesday that shelter residents simply suck it up.

“Everyday New Yorkers don’t have air-conditioners,” he said in response to a question about shelters at a news conference, “We make do: fans, paper fans. When I grew up as a kid, an air-conditioner? I didn’t even know what that was!” He said that when he was a child, his mother had told him to stick his head in the refrigerator when it was hot.

The city allows air-conditioners in units in the shelters that are not in hotels, but only if residents obtain a note from a health care provider saying that air-conditioning is medically necessary.

At least that is how the process is supposed to work. Mr. Perkins’s partner, Juanita Sanders, 43, said that about three weeks ago she had given staff members at the Doña Elsie shelter a doctor’s note stating that one of her sons had severe asthma and that he could end up in the hospital unless he sleeps in an air-conditioned room. No relief has materialized, she said.

“You’re going to approve it at the end of the summer?” she said. “Then we don’t even need it.”

One of Ms. Sanders’s neighbors, Sylvania Cordova, 35, said that she had provided a doctor’s note confirming that she and her daughter had asthma but that staff members had repeatedly refused to install an air-conditioner. “They said I will have to wait until I move,” Ms. Cordova said.

The city’s Department of Homeless Services said it was looking into Ms. Cordova’s case.

Shelters typically have an air-conditioned common area, but those rooms do not offer places to sleep. City officials said that many family shelters are in older buildings where the wiring could not handle air-conditioners in every room.

Sylvania Cordova, 35, lives at the Doña Elise shelter with her three children. There is no air-conditioning in their unit.

The city’s policy is in line with guidance from the state agency that oversees shelters, the Office of Temporary Disability Assistance. A 2021 memorandum from the agency says that “during times of extreme heat and humidity, shelter operators should provide fans as needed for the comfort of residents, provide information on area cooling centers to the extent available and remind residents to stay hydrated by drinking plenty of fluids.”

By 2 p.m. on Tuesday, the temperature in the city was 92 degrees and the heat index stood at 98. The mercury is not expected to drop below 78 on Tuesday night, though thunderstorms may provide some relief. The city is under a heat advisory until Wednesday night, as well as an air-quality alert until the previous night.

At the Doña Elsie shelter, Mr. Perkins said he had tried covering the windows with blankets during the day, “to keep the sun from coming in, just to keep some shade in place.” But it did not work, he said.

At the Hamilton Family Residence, Ms. Wood said that the shelter had supplied a box fan. “It’s just blowing hot air,” she said.

“Unfortunately, everybody doesn’t have asthma,” she added ruefully.

In her living quarters, she said, “We have to be down to our underwear because it’s so baking hot.” She said that in the downstairs offices where the shelter employees work, the air-conditioning operated fine.

“It’s cool for them,” she said, “but they get to go home. We live here.”

Bird Flu Is Spreading. Why Aren’t More People Getting Tested?

Even as the H5N1 virus evolves, gaps remain in the nation’s contingency plans for human testing, scientists say.

While officials have tested thousands of cows and are monitoring hundreds of farmworkers, just 60 people have been tested for bird flu.

By Apoorva Mandavilli  17 Jul, 2024

The first step in combating any infectious disease outbreak is detection. Without widespread testing, health officials have little sense of who is infected, when to treat patients and how to monitor their close contacts.

In that sense, the bird flu outbreak plaguing the nation’s dairy farms is spreading virtually unobserved.

As of Monday, the virus had infected 157 herds in 13 states. But while officials have tested thousands of cows and are monitoring hundreds of farmworkers, only about 60 people have been tested for bird flu.

Officials do not have the authority to compel workers to get tested, and there is no way for workers to test themselves. In the current outbreak, just four dairy workers and five poultry workers have tested positive for H5N1, the bird flu virus, but experts believe that many more have been infected.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the mpox (formerly monkeypox) outbreak in 2022 revealed deep fissures in the U.S. approach to testing for emerging pathogens. Those failures prompted federal agencies to move toward policies that would allow rapid scaling of testing during an outbreak.

But progress has been sluggish, interviews with more than a dozen academic and government experts suggest.

“The timeline seems slow, given the number of infectious disease emergencies is clearly increasing,” said Dr. Jay Varma, the chief medical officer at SIGA Technologies and a member of a committee that evaluated lab operations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fumbles with testing set back the response to Covid in the crucial early weeks of the pandemic. The nation was slow to develop the rapid tests that for many became mainstays of pandemic life.

During the outbreak of mpox, federal officials already had a diagnostic test. But for many weeks, clinicians needed to order it from public health laboratories, which created painful delays in diagnosis.

It took the C.D.C. several weeks to engage with commercial labs to make mpox tests more widely available.

This time around, tests for bird flu are plentiful: There are 140,000 of them at public health labs, 750,000 additional tests available if needed, and another 1.2 million on the way.

Federal officials said that the number of tests at hand was more than adequate. But the tests that can pinpoint H5N1 are again available only at public health labs.

Most clinics have tests for influenza generally, but they must send samples to one of the labs or to the C.D.C. to confirm infection with bird flu in particular.

“It doesn’t matter how many tests you can do if they’re not in the right place,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.

An electron microscope image of a H5N1 virion.

Federal officials have repeatedly said that H5N1’s risk to the general public is low. But the virus has adapted to new hosts at an alarming pace. It may yet mutate to spread among people, some experts have warned.

If that were to happen, the nation would need tests not just in public health labs, but in homes, schools, workplaces and wherever else people might need speedy answers.

That requires federal officials to rapidly scale up by helping academic, commercial and hospital labs develop, manufacture and distribute tests.

A full-throated response to outbreaks would include a variety of tests to suit people’s needs and preferences, said Mara Aspinall, an expert in clinical diagnostics and a partner at Illumina Ventures, which invests in health care start-ups.

“One solution is not enough for this country,” she said. “The implementation of a testing plan cannot be single threaded.”

As the pandemic receded, several independent teams of experts called on the C.D.C. to establish flexible partnerships with commercial manufacturers that would begin at the first signs of an outbreak. The manufacturers would be asked to allocate production capacity to bird flu tests as soon as needed.

“We’ve been making these recommendations for some time,” said Susan Van Meter, the president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, which represents 40 commercial labs. “While there has been increased pace of getting work done to ensure responsiveness, we think there are many more steps that could be taken,” she added.

Bureaucracy and lack of funding may have hobbled progress. The C.D.C. has been discussing tests for H5N1 with 15 companies since last year. Eight have signed licenses to adapt the agency’s test. None have released a test yet.

The C.D.C. has “started having very preliminary conversations” about the technology, and the sensitivity and the specificity required for rapid tests, said Dr. Nirav Shah, the agency’s principal deputy director.

Dr. Shah disagreed with the notion that the process had been slow. Federal officials have to “think carefully” about whether a new test should be specific to H5 flu viruses, including H5N1, or should also detect others with pandemic potential, he said.

In the meantime, he said, the current testing process is adequate for picking up H5N1 cases.

Most clinics have tests that can pick up flu, but do not distinguish between seasonal flu and unusual strains like H5N1.

Public health labs analyze a subset of these tests as part of routine surveillance. Since March 3, the labs have tested roughly 30,000 samples, of which only four were positive for H5N1.

Large hospitals may send samples for further testing once a week, and smaller clinics once a month. But if a patient comes in with flulike symptoms and known risk for bird flu, “there’s no medium speedboat, there’s no slow boat,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the C.D.C.’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

In that situation, the doctor would instantly alert the local or the state public health department or the C.D.C., and the agency could turn results around in about six hours, he said.

But other experts said that strategy was based on a series of assumptions.

For it to work, farmworkers must know about their risk of H5N1, recognize the symptoms, get to a clinic with an affordable consultation fee and be comfortable having their employer potentially find out the results, said Bethany Alcauter, the director of research and public health programs at the National Center for Farmworker Health.

“We have heard from many sources that there’s herds that are infected where public health agencies aren’t necessarily monitoring the workers, for a variety of reasons,” she said. “Workers aren’t getting any education in those situations, and they’re definitely not getting any testing.”

Six dairy workers in four states, including four from counties with infected herds, recently told Dr. Alcauter they had never heard of the bird flu virus.

The federal strategy also presumes that clinicians, even those in remote areas where dairy farms tend to be, would think to test for flu after the flu season has ended, are familiar with the procedure to send samples to public health labs and have the time to do so.

Distributing rapid tests to farmworkers and the organizations they trust can circumvent all these potential hurdles, Dr. Alcauter said: “The fewer steps in the process, the fewer chances for it to break down.”

A warning outside a Michigan farm. Federal officials have repeatedly said that H5N1’s risk to the general public is low, but the virus has adapted to new hosts at an alarming pace.

Dr. Nuzzo and colleagues from multiple organizations, including the Association of Public Health Laboratories, interviewed dozens of experts within and outside the government and compiled a playbook for diagnostic testing.

Their recommendations set a high bar. They call for deployment of tests for a new pathogen to more than 120 labs in the C.D.C.’s network within 48 hours and to hospital and commercial labs within one week, and the development of point-of-care tests — which can be done in a doctor’s office or even at home — within 30 days.

By contrast, the National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan, developed by the White House, sets a 30-day goal for deployment of new tests and a 90-day target for point-of-care tests.

Part of the problem is that the C.D.C. has not historically asserted itself as a leader that can convene commercial and academic labs, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the committee that evaluated the C.D.C.’s lab operations.

In February 2023, the committee reported that within the agency “there was no clear leader responsible for emergency planning for laboratories” and that major decisions about tests required input from more than 100 people.

In response to the committee’s recommendations, the C.D.C. has streamlined some of its lab operations. “My sense is very much that it is shifting,” Dr. Sharfstein said, referring to the C.D.C. The agency “is a lab organization and is now really starting to act like one.”

But the agency’s many fiefs remain, according to several people with knowledge of its operations.

In a report from November 2023, C.D.C. officials said the agency had hired a firm to create a road map for teaming up with commercial and academic laboratories for testing. A draft of the plan should be available late this year, according to a spokesman.

The C.D.C. also asked potential partners what they would need to enter into advance agreements that could be activated during outbreaks. That information is being assessed, and a request for proposals will be posted in the coming weeks, according to the spokesman.

Some experts questioned the need for more research before taking action.

“I don’t think it needs to be further studied,” said Dr. Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “This is the kind of thing that should be hammered out very quickly.”

But others said the C.D.C. was doing its best with limited resources.

“Do we all wish our government did move faster?” said Jill Taylor, the senior adviser for scientific affairs at the Association for Public Health Laboratories and another member of the lab work group. “You bet. But I do think that they are absolutely moving in the right direction.”

“It must be recognized that the C.D.C. has received no funding to support this initiative,” she added. “I think they are doing what they can on fumes.”

‘Memory Saved Us’: How France Blocked the Far Right

The French had a far-right government before, one that collaborated with the Nazis. When casting ballots even today, that is not an easy thing to forget.

Posters showing candidates for France’s second round of legislative elections outside the City Hall in Saintes last week.

By Adam Nossiter  17 Jul, 2024

Until the last ballot box came in from a nearby suburb, Fabrice Barusseau bit his nails: Would he or his far-right opponent be sitting in the French Parliament in Paris?

It didn’t look good. This sun-dappled district of white stone and vineyards in France’s southwest, the historical home of centrist voters, seemed to be swinging sharply right like the rest of the country. In the first round of France’s legislative elections, on June 30, the candidate for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally received over 40 percent of the votes cast. Mr. Barusseau, 54, a socialist candidate, got barely more than 28 percent.

In the second-round voting, just a week later on July 7, even toward evening, “it was extremely tense,” said Mayor Françoise Mesnard of Saint-Jean-d’Angély. “The carrots seemed to be cooked.”

But by late Sunday night, something remarkable had happened. A last-minute wave of voters rallied in what in France is called the “Republican Surge,” to vote against the far right and defend the values that many French say it threatens. It washed over the Third District of the Charente-Maritime department, just as it did elsewhere in France, lifting Mr. Barusseau to victory in the third-closest result in the country.

Many people in Saintes said they had trouble deciding whom to vote for in legislative contests.

Fabrice Barusseau, center, Mayor of Villars-les-Bois and elected candidate for the left-wing New Popular Front, in his office in Villars-les-Bois.

That surge gave a slim, unexpected victory to the left, though not enough to form a government, and has led to messy haggling over who will govern France. But it has also reinforced France’s idea that when push comes to shove, voters will turn out to keep the far right out of power. The weekly newsmagazine “Nouvel Obs” put the word “Surge” on its cover this week in bold letters.

The feelings of uncertainty in France were heightened on Tuesday as President Emmanuel Macron accepted the government’s resignation, including that of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, according to a statement from the Élysée Palace. The statement added that the old government would continue to “handle current affairs until a new government is appointed.” When that will be, though, is anybody’s guess, as the left’s factions remain deeply divided. Mr. Macron urged “Republican forces” to come to an agreement “as soon as possible.”

Voters and officials say the Republican Surge is a uniquely French phenomenon dictated by national history, along with an almost cultlike devotion to the institutions of the Republic, which many French accuse the National Rally of wanting to undermine.

The surge was given momentum before the second round of the election by simplifying the choice for voters, when officials including Prime Minister Attal called on third-place finishers in the first round to stand down, allowing opponents of the National Rally to combine forces.

“The National Rally didn’t make it because people got scared,” said Patrick Pineau, a medical test lab worker having an afternoon glass in a cafe in downtown Saint-Jean-d’Angély, a subprefecture in the district.

Stéphane Morin, the National Rally candidate, told the local newspaper Sud-Ouest after the results were in that voters shared his disappointment. “They were expecting a big change,” he said. “They were highly motivated because the stakes were so high, and what they saw was a lot of nonsense, an electoral stickup.”

Behind the surge is a collective memory of the national trauma of the Nazi occupation of France 80 years ago, which has been shaped by France’s centralized national education system and by what parents and grandparents have passed on to younger generations. Elected officials interviewed said it was not just distant memories of World War II but the experience of having lived under the collaborationist Vichy regime that helped mold voters’ perceptions in national elections.

“Happily, in France, we have that memory,” said Mr. Barusseau. “And I think it was memory that saved us. You see, we have already known that,” a reference to far-right government. “We had that collaborationist regime. And also happily, we have public education that is still vigorous. You can’t really understand until you have had a war on your own soil.”

Françoise Mesnard, Mayor of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, in her office in the City Hall in Saint-Jean-d’Angély.

Alain Chuteau, behind the bar of his cafe in Saint-Jean-d’Angély, said he cast a blank ballot in protest. “People have to be given confidence again,” he said. “People are afraid of crime now.”

The modern-day National Rally of Ms. Le Pen has disavowed the links that the party’s founder, Jean Marie Le Pen, her father, had maintained with wartime collaborators. Some of them helped him start National Rally’s immediate predecessor, the National Front, in 1972. Despite Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to burnish the party’s image, the far right’s association with Nazi collaboration is not something the French can forget.

That translates to fervent adherence to the values of the current Republic. The bare whitewashed meeting room in Mr. Barusseau’s diminutive city hall here contains a single decoration, presiding from a raised shelf: a bust of the symbol of the French Republic, Marianne, wearing a tricolor sash.

In her city hall office in Saint-Jean-d’Angély, pop. 6,700, a perfect relic of France’s foundational 19th-century Third Republic with its dark, patterned cloth wall hangings, Ms. Mesnard, who would replace Mr. Barusseau in Parliament were he absent, ill or unable to serve, concurred. Memory was central to the Republican Surge.

“My parents, my grandparents, they all knew the war,” she said. “And the French are still very marked by this. The Germans, they were right here. So we saw the war. And that memory remains.”

“And by the way, Hannah Arendt is very much taught and appreciated, the ‘banality of evil,’” Ms. Mesnard said, referring to the German American political scientist and her most famous doctrine about Nazism.

She has vivid memories of her grandfather’s tales of being a police officer during the war, forced by the Germans to hunt members of the Resistance, and quietly refusing to do so. “He deliberately didn’t find any,” she said.

The war “is still relatively close,” said Maurice Perrier, the right-leaning mayor of nearby Loulay, pop. 760, who also swung to Mr. Barusseau’s side. “Something remains from that dark period. It’s the memories, the memories of my parents. They talked to me about all that. I was very afraid of arriving at a situation of authoritarianism,” he said. “So, it was out of the question that I vote for the National Rally. These are extremists.”

Mayor Bruno Drapron of Saintes said people asked him whom they should vote for.

“There was a real fear of the consequences of voting National Rally,” said Mathieu Ancelle, serving customers at his cafe in Saint-Jean-d’Angély. “There was a real consciousness-raising.”

Up until the last week of the vote, the right-leaning electorate in southwestern France, faced with a choice between Ms. Le Pen’s candidate and a man of the left, was permeated by indecision.

“People were asking me, who should I vote for,” said Bruno Drapron, the mayor of Saintes, in his office under the looming bell tower of the 15th-century cathedral. “They finally said, ‘This is playing with fire.’”

In the end some 75 percent of the supporters of President Macron, whose candidate dropped out to help Mr. Barusseau in the second round, swung left. The district’s two major towns gave around 60 percent of their vote to Mr. Barusseau.

“For now, we’re a country where people still live together,” said Mathieu Ancelle, behind the bar at Rum Runners, a cafe in the center of Saint-Jean-d’Angély. Mr. Ancelle voted for the left. “The choice was simple,” he said. “And in the end, the youngest voters woke up and realized, they had to vote in the second round.”

Some did so reluctantly. Maud Trolliet, a chocolate store vendor nearby, voted against the National Rally. “Relieved, yes. Happy, no,” she said.

In the smallest villages though, where the electorate was heavily in the far right’s camp, discontent with the narrow outcome rumbles.

Maryline Menard, 60, right, the owner of the only cafe in Burie, a small village that turned out heavily for the National Rally. She was disappointed at the election’s outcome.

A defaced election poster is seen outside the City Hall in Villars-les-Bois.

“I was sick because of it,” said Maryline Menard, 60, the owner of the only cafe in Burie, which voted heavily for the National Rally. She was all for the far right, “300 percent,” she said. “It’s not racism. I’m for everybody. But we’ve got to stop helping all these people who don’t do a bloody thing. And there are so many foreigners who come here to work, while the French are just sleeping.”

Not a single foreigner, nor anyone else, was visible on the little town’s quiet streets. Just down the road, Mr. Barusseau worried about the roots the far right was planting in those places where bus service, doctors, stores and cafes had all disappeared.

“The results weren’t that clear,” he said. “We haven’t listened to people. We’ve got to make sure their daily worries are taken care of. If you’re in survival mode, you’re going to worry a lot less about your neighbor.”

For now, though, it is “what the National Rally represents in our history” that turned voters away from it, he said. “This is why the Republican Front persists.”

The quiet streets of Saint-Jean-d’Angély.

‘Sinners’ and ‘Russian Talibans’: A Holy War Roils a Once Placid Village

A battle has erupted in Moldova over its links to the Russian Orthodox Church, seen by many as a tool of Moscow’s influence abroad.

A Sunday mass at the church in Rautel, Moldova. The community has been divided by differences over the Russian Orthodox Church.

By Andrew Higgins  17 Jul, 2024

The village was a placid place until the local priest, disoriented by the war in Ukraine, succumbed to Satan, according to the retired teacher in northern Moldova. Before that, people got on well and attended Sunday services at the same Russian Orthodox Church.

Now, said Tamara Gheorghies, the teacher, “they don’t even say hello to each other.” The reason, at least in her telling, is simple: a decision by the village priest to sever his allegiance to Patriarch Kirill in Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Moscow Patriarch has for decades commanded the loyalty of Orthodox Christians across the former Soviet Union. But in March, the village priest joined a rival ecclesiastical hierarchy based in neighboring Romania, a member of the European Union.

“He has taken the path of terrible sin,” said Ms. Gheorghies, a member of a group of residents who are fighting to restore the primacy of the Russian church and defeat what they see as a rush to ally with decadent Western forces.

The rift over ecclesiastical allegiance in Rautel, a village of around 4,000 people 50 miles from Moldova’s northeastern border with Ukraine, is just one of many now playing out across the country and in other former Soviet Republics. Patriarch Kirill is a zealous ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. He has been pressing to maintain the loyalty of Orthodox faithful beyond Russia’s borders, and with it, Russian influence.

Children playing in a Rautel Park, next to the village’s Orthodox church. The Moscow Patriarch has for decades commanded the loyalty of Orthodox Christians across the former Soviet Union.

“This is not about religion or faith. It is about geopolitics,” said Victor Gotisan, a former theology student in Moldova who researches church issues.

The rival hierarchies share the same theology and the only significant difference between them is their choice of calendar. The Russian church uses the old Julian system, while the Romanian one favors a revised calendar that puts Christmas on Dec. 25 instead of Jan. 7, the date traditionally celebrated in Russia and Moldova.

Though identical in many ways, the Russian and Romanian churches have become proxies in an escalating struggle for influence between East and West that has convulsed the former Soviet territories since 1991.

The conflict in Ukraine, which Patriarch Kirill hails as a “holy war” against Satanism, has sharply intensified that struggle. Dozens of Orthodox priests have defected from the church since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Russia is fighting to keep its grip,” Mr. Gotisan said. But to do that, he added, it needs to keep its grip on Moldova’s Orthodox Christian church, and with it, the power to appoint its bishops and other senior clergy.

What priests say in their services will influence the outcome of a critical October presidential election in Moldova as well as a referendum on joining the European Union, he said.

“Priests enjoy authority in places that politicians have difficulty reaching. People listen to what they say,” said Maxim Melinte, a priest in Ghidighici, a village near the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. Mr. Melinte broke with Patriarch Kirill last year. Since then, he has received threats and venomous insults from pro-Moscow zealots. He described them as “Russian Talibans.”

Victor Turcano, center, the priest in Rautel, defected in March, outraged by the Russian church’s support for the invasion of Ukraine.

Victor Turcano, the priest in Rautel, defected in March, outraged by the Russian church’s support for the invasion of Ukraine. He immediately faced a barrage of attacks from Bishop Marchel, his superior and a loyalist of Patriarch Kirill in the nearby city of Balti.

The bishop denounced Mr. Turcano as a womanizer and home breaker — “lies and slander,” responded the priest — and ordered him defrocked. In June, the bishop mobilized dozens of like-minded Orthodox clerics from across the region to try to take the Rautel church back by force and install a new priest faithful to the Moscow Patriarch.

The effort failed after Rautel’s mayor, Tudor Istrati, who had applauded Mr. Turcano’s decision, called in extra police officers to prevent a storming of the church.

Not a churchgoer himself, the mayor said he had no interest in ecclesiastical quarrels but supported Mr. Turcano because he was backed by most of his parishioners. The priest’s opponents, he added, “are just trying to get people riled up.” Moscow, he added, “has given nothing to the village” but the European Union has funded road, water and other projects.

Rautel’s mayor, Tudor Istrati, has applauded Mr. Turcano’s decision to leave the Russian church.

In an interview in his office, decorated with photographs of Patriarch Kirill, and other Russian church leaders, Bishop Marchel derided the mayor and defecting priests as victims of “Russophobia well paid by the West.”

A fervent opponent of Moldova joining the European Union, the bishop said he wants his country to be part of Europe, but “not the Europe of Sodom.” In the battle over values, he added, “Russia is on the side of God.”

The Russian church has a long history of serving the Russian state, an alliance that has become ever tighter under President Putin.

Mr. Putin, hailed by Patriarch Kirill as a “miracle from God,” presents Russia as a bastion of traditional Christian values in the hope of expanding its reach and influence through opposition to liberal democracy, feminism and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

The war in Ukraine, however, has blunted Russia’s once potent religious weapon, sundering Orthodox communities around the world and prompting widespread defections from the Patriarch.

Maxim Melinte, center, a priest in Ghidighici, also broke with Patriarch Kirill last year.

In a letter to Patriarch Kirill last year, Metropolitan Vladimir, the head of the Moldovan Orthodox Church — a largely autonomous institution but ultimately subordinate to Moscow — warned that his church was rapidly losing support because “it is perceived in Moldovan society as an outpost of the Kremlin and a supporter of the Russian intervention in Ukraine.”

This, he said, was pushing more believers to shift their allegiance to the Metropolis of Bessarabia, a rival Orthodox hierarchy subordinate to Romania’s patriarch. “We are in a situation of institutional bankruptcy,” he warned.

Russia’s allies in the Moldovan church dismissed the letter as part of a conspiracy led by pro-Western clerics.

The Russian church’s crisis has been festering since the 1990s but intensified greatly after Mr. Putin’s invasion. Mr. Gotisan, the researcher, estimated that nearly 10 percent of Moldova’s Orthodox parishes have since changed sides. Many more will follow, he predicted, because of anger at Patriarch Kirill’s blessing of Russian soldiers.

Bishop Marchel at his office decorated with photographs of the Moscow Patriarch.

It was Kirill’s support for the war, said Mr. Turcano, the priest in Rautel, that pushed him to shift his church’s allegiance.

Soon after the war started, he said, parishioners started complaining that, at the end of each service, he included a brief prayer for Patriarch Kirill. Such prayers are a routine show of respect in Orthodox churches affiliated with Russia, but for parishioners in a village with deep kinship ties to Ukraine across the border, they now seemed deeply offensive.

“Father, how can you pray for Russia when it is killing our family next door?” Mr. Turcano recalled being asked. He held a vote on whether to stick with the Patriarch or jump ship. Those favoring a change won easily, he said. His opponents say the vote was not fair because it was held without advance notice.

Tatiana Palaghiuc, a Rautel resident who wants to stick with Patriarch Kirill, said she has collected more than 600 signatures calling for legal action to stop Mr. Turcano from “leading us all astray.”

Tatiana Palaghiuc, a Rautel resident, said she has collected more than 600 signatures calling for legal action to stop Mr. Turcano from “leading us all astray.”

On a recent Sunday, the Rautel church was crowded with worshipers, but the dissidents all stayed away. They now go to church in Balti, Bishop Marchel’s pro-Russian bastion.

Silvia Popovic, 60, another Rautel resident, said the war in Ukraine had left her in no doubt about which side to choose. “One patriarch splashes Russian tanks with holy water. The other side calls for the bombing and killing to stop,” she said after a recent Sunday service.

“For me, it is an easy choice,” she said.

A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It.

The deposit, in Zambia, could make billions for Silicon Valley, provide minerals for the energy transition and help the United States in its rivalry with China.

An exploration site run by KoBold Metals in Chililabombwe, Zambia, in June.

By Max Bearak  11 Jul, 2024

Peering into their computer screens in California last year, the data crunchers watched a subterranean fortune come into focus.

What they saw transported them 10,000 miles across the world, to Zambia, and then one more mile straight down into the Earth. A rich lode of copper, deep in the bedrock, appeared before them, its contours revealed by a complex A.I.-driven technology they’d been painstakingly building for years.

On Thursday, their company, KoBold Metals, informed its business partners that their find is likely the largest copper discovery in more than a decade. According to their estimates, reviewed by The New York Times, the mine would produce at least 300,000 tons of copper a year once fully operational. That corresponds to a value of billions of dollars a year, for decades.

The New York Times also reviewed an independent, third-party assessment of KoBold’s claims, which, while slightly more conservative than KoBold’s own, largely corroborated the size of the deposit. In a statement, KoBold said it expected the value of the mine to grow because it had yet to map the full extent of its highest-grade ore.

It’s the first confirmed success for a company that hopes to radically transform the way we find metals critical not only to the tech industry but to the fight against climate change. The geopolitical significance is vast. KoBold’s find comes as the United States and China are increasingly clashing over global access to the minerals needed to manufacture clean-energy technologies.

KoBold originated half a decade ago in the belated realization among Silicon Valley’s barons of what lay ahead.

Their products had become the backbone of the United States economy. But their businesses couldn’t grow much further without a gargantuan increase in the mining of a handful of raw materials that make batteries, without which everything from cellphones to electric trucks simply can’t function. They needed far more copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel.

KoBold workers drilling a core sample in Chililabombwe.

Evaluating core samples and entering the results into a database.

A brickmaking operation in Kawama, Zambia. There is little employment in the area.

Hundreds of new mines would be necessary, analysts calculated. And not just for consumer products, but for the house-sized lithium-ion batteries needed for backup on the nation’s power grids as solar and wind power ebbs and flows.

A.I. data centers demand huge amounts of copper. Advanced weaponry requires nickel and cobalt.

Over two decades of production, KoBold’s find in Zambia would yield enough copper for 100 million of today’s average-size electric vehicle batteries.

“The more you realize how dependent we are on these technologies, the more you ask: How the hell were we so slow to the fact that we needed vast amounts of raw material to make it all possible?” said Connie Chan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the biggest venture capital firm in the United States and an early investor in KoBold.

The traditional mining industry lacked a convincing solution. Using exploration techniques largely unchanged in a century, the cost of new discoveries was rising while the pace of the finds slowed.

Around the same time, the U.S. government had a similar lightbulb moment. America had become far too reliant on China for these essential resources.

China had been heavily investing in global mining and metal processing, and controlled the production of 20 to 80 percent of its supply chains. The United States, on the other hand, has relatively few processing plants or mines, domestic or foreign, for most battery metals.

The International Energy Forum, a research organization, recently estimated that the world would need between 35 and 194 large new mines for copper alone through 2050. That translates to between one and six new copper mines, every year, the size of the one KoBold plans to dig in Zambia.

Kurt House, the KoBold chief executive.

KoBold employees on the Stanford University campus pointed out geological peculiarities on a stone bench.

Connie Chan, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, discussed KoBold’s technology at Stanford.

Investors from American and European private equity funds that collectively manage trillions of dollars in assets, including ones started by Silicon Valley giants like Bill Gates and Sam Altman of OpenAI, were joined by more traditional industrial companies in putting hundreds of millions of dollars into KoBold.

It already has 60-odd exploration projects in various countries. In some cases, like Zambia, where production is expected to begin in the early 2030s, it plans to own stakes in the mines themselves.

Its chief executive and co-founder, Kurt House, embraces the moneymaking potential of KoBold’s technology, which is the company’s alone to profit from. He is fond of saying “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist.”

The work is about to get a lot less theoretical.

KoBold is pumping $2.3 billion into its first mine and is negotiating tricky partnerships with contractors and governments alike. It is relying on the U.S. government to finance a new railway to export the copper. And, like the mining barons of yore, its leaders will soon be exposed to the social and environmental trade-offs that almost all mining poses.

Mining and muon detectors

Daniel Snowden-Ifft, left, prepared to lower the muon detector into the ground for a test in Los Angeles.

On a quiet residential street in Oakland, Calif., Tom Hunt, who leads a team of data scientists at KoBold, gathered colleagues on Zoom. His setup was quintessentially white-collar. He and his wife, Lauren, share a work-from-home space. When he got animated explaining something, she peeked in from the porch.

The few clues to his life and work were on his desk, where a miniature model of the copper find in Zambia sat below a note from Lauren saying how much she loved him.

Beaming in from Southern California was Daniel Snowden-Ifft, head of the physics department at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He had dedicated much of his career to looking for dark matter. “I spent 20 years and never found any,” he said. Now, he’s developing a device that KoBold might use to find especially valuable members of the periodic table.

His gadget would be lowered into a drill hole, from where it would identify muons, infinitesimal subatomic particles, and send back density readings of the hidden underground world.

It’s a technique that would be new to mining, but it has a proven, if unusual, record. Previously it’s been used to suss out the location of burial chambers in Egyptian pyramids. Researchers have studied its potential for pinpointing illegal cross-border tunnels.

Tom Hunt and a colleague showed a digital model of drilling locations in Zambia.

The muon detector on the Occidental College campus in Los Angeles.

Mr. House, at Stanford University, explained how KoBold is looking for lithium in Canada.

The muon detector is at the futuristic end of KoBold’s growing database, called TerraShed. At the other are yellowing paper maps and typewritten reports gathering cobwebs in Zambia’s mining archives, many a century old or more, which KoBold is digitizing. Elsewhere, KoBold collects its own radar and magnetic readings by flying modified Cessnas over promising territory.

TerraShed includes tens of millions of documents that can be overlaid to yield three-dimensional models of what might lie below.

“We think we’re mostly done with the easy era of mining,” said Mr. Hunt, who joined KoBold after working at Google and other Silicon Valley companies.

KoBold’s discovery is a case in point. The area of Zambia where it was found is known for copper. In fact, its name is Copperbelt Province. Still, nobody had been able to home in on this mile-deep vein until KoBold did, right under everyone’s noses.

An abandoned open-pit mine in Chingola, Zambia.

An exploration map of the KoBold site in Chililabombwe.

A mining archive in Kalulushi, Zambia.

The economies of Zambia and its colonial-era predecessor, Northern Rhodesia, have long been defined by copper, a material that humans have sought for millenniums. Well before wire heralded the modern age of electricity, copper was essential to Bronze Age toolmaking. Many of Zambia’s best mines were originally spotted simply because colonial officials noticed that local people had already been mining them, sometimes for centuries.

Finding other battery metals will present bigger challenges.

Lithium, for instance, wasn’t widely sought until a few decades ago. Mr. House, the KoBold chief executive, said this was exactly why the exploration industry needed to get creative. “We don’t drill for metals, we drill for information,” he said. “It puts the science into eureka.”

Mr. House estimated that TerraShed contained about 3 percent of the world’s available geological data.

Back on Mr. Hunt’s Zoom screen, Audrey Lawrence, who manages TerraShed, raised her hands above her head and spread them out in trying to explain how big 3 percent already is. In doing so, she set off Zoom’s automatic fireworks reaction.

Will Zambians benefit?

A core-drilling rig at the KoBold site in Chililabombwe.

KoBold’s find looks like a proof of concept with potentially huge payout for investors. And the company’s partners include Zambia itself: The state mining company owns 20 percent.

That Zambians will benefit, though, is far from a foregone conclusion. Mining has left waste piled across Copperbelt Province, spawning lawsuits. One case alleges that local rivers at one point ran bright blue with copper tailings. And despite a century of mining, Zambia remains one of the world’s least-developed and most indebted countries.

“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” said Grieve Chelwa, a Zambian economist. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”

KoBold’s biggest investors are the heirs of that legacy of inequity. Copper from Zambia helped build the economies on which Silicon Valley fortunes are based. KoBold says it aims to uplift local communities, and has attracted some of Zambia’s top geologists back to the country from overseas.

But given the specific type of mine KoBold plans to dig, it’s unclear if many locals will get hired. Underground mines, like this one will be, typically employ far fewer people than open-pit mines.

Kennedy Bondola, 40, worked in a nearby open-pit mine for 15 years before it was nearly exhausted. He lives in Kawama, a village directly above KoBold’s find. Kawama is poor but resourceful. Its main road was busy with welders repairing household goods on a recent afternoon. Bar owners made their own liquor. Others smuggled maize flour into Congo, a mile or two away, where it can fetch double the price.

Kasumbalesa, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kennedy Bondola at his hardware store in Kawama.

A farmer near Kawama. Agriculture is one of the few ways to make a living in the area.

With a new mine, Mr. Bondola said, there was only one way Kawama could go: up. “Maybe it will become a real town,” he said.

KoBold’s team is still determining exactly where to dig the mine’s shaft. There is a lake directly above the ore, and a major highway, along with the village of Kawama.

“For a find this valuable, there’s nothing on the surface we can’t move,” said George Gilchrist, a South African geologist who is leading KoBold’s exploration in Zambia.

In an interview in the capital, Lusaka, the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema, said one way to ensure greater benefits was for his country to own more of the mine. He said he was pressing KoBold to increase the share owned by the state mining company to above one-third. The extra money “will allow us to invest in sectors that ordinarily are difficult for us,” he said.

Mr. Hichilema is desperate for revenue.

More than a third of his budget goes toward repaying international debts, leaving little for health and education. Most of the capital gets only a few hours of electricity per day. It will take more than a slightly bigger stake in one mine, however large the mine may be, to solve that.

“The benefits of this mine for Zambia,” Dr. Chelwa said, “are purely theoretical at this point.”

President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia.

KoBold investors met with Mr. Hichilema last month in Lusaka.

Mfikeyi Makayi, center, head of KoBold Africa, and Mr. House, right, at the president’s official residence in Lusaka in June.

For the United States government, the benefits are far more clear.

“We are the American beachhead in Africa,” said Jennifer Fendrick, KoBold’s director for government affairs. “And that’s how the government sees it.” Before joining KoBold, she was a senior State Department strategist on critical minerals.

While the U.S. government hasn’t directly invested in KoBold, it is partially underwriting a $2.3 billion railway to the Angolan coast from Copperbelt Province, enabling copper to be more easily shipped to the United States. It’s Washington’s single-biggest investment to catch up to Beijing in Africa’s battery-metal sweepstakes.

Recently, Mr. House prepared to meet face-to-face with Mr. Hichilema. He was accompanied by his main investors along with Linnisa Wahid, the acting U.S. ambassador. Mr. House, wearing a lapel pin with the American and Zambian flags, asked for Ms. Wahid’s help when he brought up the railway.

“Your affirmation at that moment would be great,” he said.

George Gilchrist examined a core sample.

Workers photographed core samples.

The photos will be used in the A.I.-powered database.

While U.S. mining interests in Zambia are progressing, accessing neighboring Congo’s cobalt reserves is trickier. China-based companies own or have major stakes in most cobalt-producing sites in Congo, which produced 76 percent of the world’s supply last year.

Biden administration officials are debating whether to lift sanctions on a billionaire Israeli mining executive accused of creating a web of corrupt practices in Congo’s mines. The sanctions have dissuaded American companies from investing there.

There are other ways the United States could procure battery metals, but they face big obstacles. Parts of the seabed are rich in critical minerals, but a dispute has raged for years over how, or whether, oceans should be mined. And more mines could be opened within the United States itself, but that prospect has drawn objections, particularly from Indigenous communities.

Whether the United States sticks with its climate goals also hinges on this year’s presidential election. A win by former President Donald J. Trump would very likely severely curtail energy transition incentives.

For now, the Biden administration is pushing ahead.

“We need 25 times as much cobalt as we currently mine,” said Jose W. Fernandez, the State Department’s top energy official, in an interview in New York recently, not to mention all the other metals and minerals reshaping the global economy. “We’ve got to get into the ring. We’ll be skewered if we fail.”

To Revitalize Britain’s Economy, a Plan for a Stronger Government Role

The Labour Party’s economic agenda, like many other programs around the world, puts political leaders more firmly in charge of industrial policy.

The challenges facing Britain are formidable, including slow economic growth, low productivity and investment, and high taxes.

By Patricia Cohen  17 Jul, 2024

The last time a freshly minted Labour government unabashedly campaigned on an ambitious national industrial policy to revive the British economy was 50 years ago, and the results were generally viewed as disastrous.

The 1974 program of subsidies, state ownership and power sharing among business, unions and government resulted in strikes that paralyzed the nation. And the government’s goal of picking industrial winners turned into a policy of backing losers like the automaker British Leyland and British Steel Corporation.

The current Labour Party has clearly jettisoned that ’70s era legacy. Keir Starmer’s new government, which formally laid out its economic agenda as Parliament opened on Wednesday, is nonetheless embracing the idea that the government must play a key role in driving Britain’s stagnant economy.

Policies that put political leaders more firmly in charge of the economy have taken hold all over the world. India, Brazil, Malaysia and many European capitals have all signed on. Leading the way is the United States, which for decades had spearheaded the campaign for open markets and hands-off government. The movement is largely aimed at challenging China, which has used top-down planning to move firmly into the No. 2 spot among global economies, as well as financing programs to stem the ravages of climate change.

Keir Starmer, the day after Labour’s landslide win. His government is planning to play a big role in driving Britain’s stagnant economy.

The growing lineup of government interventions inevitably means they will end up competing to some extent with one another. With one of the world’s largest advanced economies, though, Britain’s latest experiment is being watched particularly closely.

Labour’s industrial policy is getting a belated start and has severely limited funding, but it is likely to have easier politics to navigate than some other governments do. Mr. Starmer’s landslide victory gives him a comfortable parliamentary majority.

Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels, ticked off some of the actions taken just since the election less than two weeks ago: the launch of a public company investing in renewable energy projects, the announcement of a National Wealth Fund and the creation of cross-governmental panels led by the prime minister.

It “all represents a textbook example of how modern industrial policy should be structured,” Mr. Tagliapietra said. “And not many countries have done it all in once.”

The challenges are still formidable. The economy is suffering from lackluster growth, public services starved of funds, and anemic productivity and investment. Taxes are already the highest they have been in decades, while the government’s debt adds up to more than 90 percent of its total output.

A National Health Service hospital in Ilford, England. Public services in Britain, including the N.H.S., have been underfunded for years.

Labour is responding with a small-budgeted spinoff of a multibillion-dollar industrial policy put in place by President Biden, whose administration seeks to build up critical advanced technologies like semiconductors and electric batteries.

Washington’s policy is much better funded, but Mr. Starmer’s 174-seat majority means he will not have to battle nearly as much over green initiatives. With a lack of bipartisan consensus on climate and just a single-seat majority in the U.S. Senate, the Biden administration has had to negotiate with the critical swing vote — Senator Joe Manchin III, a conservative from West Virginia who railed about the administration’s “radical climate agenda.”

Mr. Starmer, by contrast, is likely to avoid such combat.

Ed Miliband, Britain’s new energy secretary, already announced approval of three solar farms that could power 400,000 homes despite opposition from members of Parliament and the communities they represent. He added that the government would end rules that in effect allowed communities to ban onshore wind projects in England.

A wind turbine factory in Hull, England. In a move to jump-start infrastructure spending, the new energy secretary announced approval of three solar farms that could power 400,000 homes.

In a speech last week, Rachel Reeves, Britain’s new chancellor of the Exchequer, said the overall approval process on critical infrastructure would be reviewed. That could mean decisions about where to install projects like large wind farms would be made on a national level, sidestepping local opposition.

Such resistance has frustrated wind development throughout the European Union despite emergency measures that were created to speed approval of renewable energy projects. In the Netherlands, dozens of projects were canceled or delayed in recent years because of local opposition that cited concerns about health, noise and the ruin of natural landscape, according to the Energy Monitor.

Ms. Reeves said the government would also reinstate requirements that local authorities build a minimum number of new homes, a mandate that the previous government scrapped. Labour has set a goal of building 1.5 million homes over the next five years. To help, 300 new planning officers will be dispatched to assist.

George Dibb, associate director for economic policy at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London, listed other actions that the Labour government could quickly take, such as tightening regulations on internal combustion engines and phasing in a requirement that households and businesses replace gas boilers with heat pumps.

Britain has a wider set of policy tools than the United States, Mr. Dibb said. A lot of incentives like tax breaks were included in the American plan, he said, but not many punitive measures like a carbon tax or a cap on emissions.

The Labour government has set a goal of building 1.5 million homes a year over the next five years.

Other economists expect that Labour will try to encourage reluctant private investors to develop green technology by limiting risk through loans and other government guarantees.

The European Union, too, has assiduously worked to put together a better coordinated and financed industrial strategy. Last year, it passed a Green Deal Industrial Plan focused on the energy transition. And this year, it approved its first industrial policy for defense, and approved regulations to step up production of essential raw materials within the bloc.

But the 27 nations that make up European Union must agree on any joint industrial strategy brick by brick despite often different priorities and outlooks.

And now there are more hurdles. Elections last month for the European Parliament increased the number of seats held by right-wing parties with strong nationalist agendas and skepticism toward green initiatives. The political center’s reduced majority could also slow progress on some of the European Union’s most ambitious proposals, including the creation of a single capital market and joint investments in green technology and defense.

Rising costs and regulations affecting farmers, which spurred angry protests in Belgium, France, Germany, Poland and Spain, have already caused some backtracking on the green agenda.

There are also deep divisions between Germany and France over issues like how much preferential treatment European-made products should receive when it comes to government contracts and how much industrial consolidation is required.

The European Union is also developing an industrial strategy, but the 27 nations that make up the bloc must agree on any joint policy despite often different priorities and outlooks.

In the United States, spending is already underway, and many projects are likely to continue to attract support if former President Donald J. Trump wins the November election. Still, it is possible that green projects involving public transit, renewable energy, electric vehicles and pollution controls could be scaled back or abandoned.

Of course, Britain faces its own set of hurdles. Diane Coyle, a professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge who has analyzed the country’s history of industrial policies, pointed to examples like a fragmented set of institutions and the lowest investment rate among the Group of 7 countries.

But “when there are huge transformations in digital and energy, not having an industrial policy,” she said, is “just a bad choice.”

Why Donald Glover Is Saying Goodbye to Childish Gambino

“Bando Stone & the New World,” his new album due Friday, tells a story about the potential end of the world — and the conclusion of his pseudonymous musical project.

“It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done,’” Donald Glover said, of realizing his musical alter ego was over. “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”

By Reggie Ugwu  17 Jul, 2024

Donald Glover had been walking a New York City street only a moment when a young man, perhaps in his early 20s, called out to him from several yards away.

“Yo, Donald Glover, bro, I love you, man!”

Glover nodded and said thank you.

“I listen to Childish Gambino like every day,” he continued.

“I appreciate it,” Glover replied.

“You’re seriously my favorite, bro,” the man shouted, seemingly struggling for something else to say. Finally, he added, “Since I was a little kid!”

Glover chuckled to himself. “A ‘little kid’?” he said, after a beat. “That doesn’t make me feel old, I just know that I am old.”

Time comes for everyone. It has mostly been kind to Glover, the multiple Emmy- and Grammy-winning actor, musician, writer and director, who turned 40 last September. He has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years, since his college sketch comedy troupe, Derrick, found an audience on early YouTube in 2006. And he has been famous for 15, since starring in the hit NBC comedy series “Community.”

Childish Gambino, his rap alter ego, caught the attention of the hip-hop blogosphere in 2010, making it old enough to be sent off to high school. And now, after the release of his sixth album, “Bando Stone & the New World,” on Friday, he’s officially retiring the moniker.

“It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done,’” he said, describing the moment of realization. “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”

Childish Gambino has always been the rawest expression of Glover’s art. His work as a television creator, most notably “Atlanta,” tends toward the cerebral and abstract. And his biggest film roles have come as a cog in enormous franchise machines (“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” “The Lion King,” various Spider-Man vehicles). But his early Gambino mixtapes, “I Am Just a Rapper,” “I Am Just a Rapper 2” and “Culdesac,” were gleefully unfiltered, exposing the id of a talented but embittered outsider determined to pole vault his way onto the A-list.

Glover’s early themes on those projects, and his debut album, “Camp,” seemed to win him fans and critics in equal measure. Raised a Jehovah’s Witness in a suburb of Atlanta and sent to a majority-white high school, he needled preconceptions about cultural Blackness, lashing out at unnamed critics who called him an “Oreo” for failing to present as Black enough. As if to provoke the issue, he wreathed himself in totems of 2010s white hipsterdom, commandeering tracks from Pitchfork darlings (Sleigh Bells, Grizzly Bear, Yeasayer), declaring his preference for A.P.C. jeans and Sperry Top-Siders and deploying a nasal and overly articulate vocal style — Lil Wayne with a wedgie.

“I think that kid really wanted a home,” Glover said in a restaurant in TriBeCa in the first of three conversations this month, flecks of gray spotting his beard. “I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s — there was Oprah, Michael Jordan, Eddie Murphy; not a lot of alternatives” for Black people.

Before the internet, he said, it was hard for him to find a like-minded community. “‘Baduizm’ comes out and I go, ‘Where are these people?’” he recalled, referring to Erykah Badu’s 1997 album. “I remember going to an N.E.R.D. show with my girlfriend and we were the only two Black people there. I feel like I was just looking around like, ‘Where is everyone? Am I an alien?’”

Glover onstage at the BET Awards in June,

Glover’s sense of isolation was exacerbated by his experiences in network television comedy; on “Community,” and in his first job, as a writer on “30 Rock,” he was often the only Black voice in the room. The music industry was hardly more accommodating. Glover said he clashed with Daniel Glass, the head of his former record label Glassnote Records, over the marketing and promotion of his first three albums. (In 2019, he and the label settled a legal dispute over royalties.)

“I used to get so mad at what he was doing that I would have stress dreams where I went into his record company with a bat and just bashed all the windows,” he said.

“Atlanta,” set in a fictionalized version of his hometown and partly inspired by his frustrations with the music business, became a ballast. Glover hired a team of fellow young Black creatives — including his brother, Stephen — and negotiated an unusual degree of creative control from FX. As the show flourished, becoming both a critical darling and a breakout ratings success, his music as Gambino got looser and more inventive. His third album, the Parliament-Funkadelic-inspired “Awaken My Love,” released during the show’s first season in 2016, spawned the surprise radio hit “Redbone,” which won Glover his first Grammy, for best traditional R&B performance.

The single “This Is America,” released two years later with an allegorically loaded video directed by his frequent collaborator Hiro Murai, became a protest anthem and won four Grammys — including record and song of the year — beating out Kendrick Lamar, Drake and Lady Gaga. In the same period, Glover experienced transformative change in his personal life. His father, Donald Sr., died in November 2018, months after the arrival of Glover’s second son (a third was born in 2020). Becoming a parent and losing his own father made him further reconsider where he was devoting his energy.

Glover made both the film and the album “Bando Stone & the New World,” ostensibly its soundtrack, after “Atlanta” wrapped its final season in 2022.

“I’m not 25 anymore, standing in front of a boulder like, ‘This has to move,’” he said. “You give what you can, but there’s beauty everywhere in every moment. You don’t have to build it. You don’t have to search for it.”

“Bando Stone & the New World” coalesced around a feature film idea he had years ago, about a musician recording his masterpiece on a remote island when a global calamity strikes. Glover made both the film and the album, ostensibly its soundtrack, after “Atlanta” wrapped its final season in 2022. Telling a story about the potential end of the world was a way for him to explore ideas about character and the meaning of work.

“I thought there was a really great journey in somebody making music and not knowing what the purpose of it was,” he said. “I feel like everybody goes through that, not just artists. That feeling of like, ‘What is any of this for?’”

Making the album forced Glover to answer those questions for himself. One factor in his decision to retire Childish Gambino was the increasing logistical difficulty of making any album — let alone one that lived up to his standards — amid multiplying obligations, including to his family, his film and television projects and a new creative incubator and production company called Gilga. The same was true for many of his collaborators, including the producer Ludwig Goransson, who has been his key creative partner on every album since “Camp” but appears on only a few songs on “Bando.”

And then there were the macro challenges facing every popular musician today — the continued decline of album consumption, disruptions in the touring business and the difficulty of capturing a mass audience in a heavily fractured media environment. Rather than trying to reclaim the chart positions of “Redbone” and “This Is America,” Glover defined success for his new album in more personal terms.

“Success to me is, honestly, being able to put out a wide-scale album that I would listen to,” he said. “For this album, I really wanted to be able to play big rooms and have big, anthemic songs that fill those rooms, so that people feel a sense of togetherness.”

“Bando” plays like a curated archive of the Childish Gambino experience — stylistically promiscuous, aesthetically astute, lyrically provocative — with an added dose of grown-up equanimity. Its first single, “Lithonia,” channels Rivers Cuomo in the ’90s for a barroom singalong tuned for the end times; the opener “Hearts Are Meant to Fly” is an electro-punk battle cry pitched between Kanye West’s “Yeezus” and the Prodigy; and the shape-shifting soul/funk standout “No Excuse” skillfully marries Marvin Gaye and Fela Kuti.

Fam Udeorji, Glover’s longtime co-manager, said their ambition was to create a body of work that will live with fans for the long term, citing SZA’s “SOS” as an example. “If people listen to this album and it becomes a part of their identity, if they look back a year later and are reminded of how much they listened to it and what that felt like in the summer of ’24 — that kind of real estate is way more valuable to me” than chart metrics, he said.

Guests on the album include a farm team of rising young R&B and rap artists, among them Amaarae, Jorja Smith, Fousheé, Flo Milli and Yeat. Michael Uzowuru, a producer and composer who worked closely on the project with Glover, said the vibe in the studio was more rec room than rock star.

“We’d get there around 11 a.m. and we’d all have our Erewhon Hailey Bieber smoothies and immunity shots,” Uzowuru said. “Amaarae came in one time and she was a bit bewildered, like, ‘Y’all don’t get lit in here? Where the hoes at?’”

The wholesome energy extends to the music itself, which features several references to children and fatherhood, and a memorable performance from Glover’s first son, Legend, on the poignant two-hander “Can You Feel Me?”

Glover said that some who were around for the making of the album questioned its more tender or earnest moments. But he ultimately overruled them. At 40, there is no one left for him to be but himself.

“I think grace is undervalued in the world,” he said. “When I put my son on my shoulders, I feel deep joy. That’s real. No one on their deathbed is going to look back and say, ‘Thank God I avoided being cringe.’”

Men Wear Short Shorts. And Long Shorts. And Everything in Between.

Micro-inseams are trending, but almost any length goes.

Some men are opting for thigh-baring lengths.

By T.M. BrownPhotographs by Dolly Faibyshev  8 Jul, 2024

Nickelson Wooster, a fashion consultant and a frequent subject of street style photographers, is known, among other things, for his taste in shorts. He wears them long and short, loose and tight, in leather, wool and twill.

“Shorts are like skirts, and I think any woman will tell you there is no one length or shape that fits every single person,” said Mr. Wooster, 63, who goes by Nick.

On the surface, it might seem like shorts suffer from a case of nominative determinism — their name tries to tell us what to expect from their appearance. In practice, the length of shorts can vary wildly. They can reach down to the top of the shins or stop a few inches from the hip.

Still, every few years, the same question surfaces: How short should they be?

Recently, thanks in part to widely circulated photos of the actor Paul Mescal in thigh-baring shorts, there’s a clear answer: pretty short.

In Central Park, a pair of shiny pink short-shorts stood out.

On the Upper East Side, a longer inseam prevailed in another all-pink outfit.

Ross Figlerski, 32, recently started leaning into truncated inseams. “I’m a bigger guy, and I find them a lot more flattering and reliable for whatever outfit I end up wearing,” said Mr. Figlerski, who lives in Brooklyn.

His fiancée also influenced his thinking about shorts. “She demanded to see more thigh,” he said.

Inseam trends move up and down like an accordion. In the 1950s, flared, foot-long Bermuda shorts washed up on American shores. Shorts shrunk from there until they crested with Dolfin shorts, the ubiquitous and tiny cotton athletic shorts worn by Richard Simmons and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s. Inseams had nowhere to go but down.

The 1990s and 2000s were dominated by denim, cargo and basketball shorts, all worn long and baggy. Look no further than ’N Sync, the basketball player Allen Iverson or the outfits in movies like “Clueless” and “Can’t Hardly Wait.”

A group of sunbathers in the park displayed a spectrum of short lengths, from the short, black pair on the far left, to the long, denim ones on the right, grazing the knee.

The recent short-shorts trend seemed to start around the time that the hashtag #5inchseam began circulating on TikTok in 2020. Suddenly, the social media platform was filled with people clamoring for more men to show a little leg. (“5 inch shorts are the male version of cleavage,” reads the caption on a video with more than 30,000 likes.)

Since then, so-called thirst trap shorts have become a more broadly popular summertime staple for men, with some of the more adventurous adopting side-split running shorts that leave little to the imagination.

The designer Willie Norris said she was interested in “why the short inseam vigor is so strong with straight men.” Gay men, Mx. Norris added, have long chosen their inseam lengths without the same sort of heated debate: “This type of granular sartorial stance is something I see straight men participating in far more than gay men.”

“These shorter inseams have sort of seeped into the mainstream in the last few years,” said James Harris of the men's wear podcast “Throwing Fits,” where he and his co-host, Lawrence Schlossman, regularly lampoon the discourse over what constitutes a fashionable inseam.

Mr. Harris suggested that five-inch inseams had become more widespread partly as a result of young women swooning over them on social media. For his part, he prefers either three-inch or nine-inch inseams.

“The longer inseams feel kind of familiar to me growing up in the 90s and 2000s,” Mr. Harris said. “It goes along with the baggier silhouette we’re seeing in men’s wear generally.”

Others donned denim shorts well below the knee.

Ditto here, uptown, where a light-wash pair was paired with a soccer jersey.

Nostalgia isn’t the only thing driving inseam choices. Liam Burack, a 15-year-old high school sophomore from Johnstown, Colo., says that “quite short” shorts have been popular among his friends since the pandemic, largely for practical reasons.

“Shorter shorts to me are more comfortable,” he said. “Longer ones are just too heavy and too baggy.”

There are signs that shorts’ hems are slowly getting pulled back to earth, though. New collections from Louis Vuitton and Lemaire shown at the men’s wear shows in Paris last month featured inseams drooping past the kneecap.

Mel Ottenberg, a stylist and the editor in chief of Interview magazine, said he thinks “short shorts on the masses are great,” but that he was glad to see “longer, conservative and boring shorts again.”

“Apparently my taste in dad shorts is very on trend,” he added.

Mr. Wooster attributed the appearance of longer shorts at recent runway shows to high-fashion brands’ tendency to go against the grain once a trend goes mass market. “The minute the pendulum swings one way, I feel like the natural reaction is for things in those rarefied airs to change,” he said. “The true tastemakers end up going the opposite way just because.”

“These shorter inseams have sort of seeped into the mainstream in the last few years,” said James Harris, a host on the podcast “Throwing Fits.” But “everyone is doing everything” when it comes to men’s wear, he added.

Some designers aren’t thinking too much about which way the wind is blowing. Daiki Suzuki, founder of the brand Engineered Garments, was a bit surprised to learn about the shifting style in short lengths. Mr. Suzuki, whose label specializes in adventurous and coveted interpretations of Ivy style and American work wear, said that he typically keeps inseams between nine and 11 inches when he’s designing a new pair.

“I view shorts as a distinct item,” he said. “Just as women choose between pants and skirts, I approach shorts as a separate category. While length is crucial, so is the width of the leg opening and the thickness of the shorts. I don’t think about trends that much.”

A bright pink T-shirt picked up the fuchsia flowers in these patterned boxer shorts spotted in SoHo.

A pair of running shorts with a micro-inseam can be fashionable and functional.

But even as some trends seem to dominate, there seems to be variety among every possible social group.

Zach Pollakoff, 39, remembered when, as a college student, it seemed like a “big statement” if someone was wearing super short shorts. “It was like, OK, he’s not a frat dude, he’s not an academic. That’s an indie music kid.”

But in recent years, he said, it has become harder to use clothing as a shortcut to grasp someone’s taste in music, for example. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“The rules about things like inseams have become a moving target,” Mr. Pollakoff said. “And it makes it sort of irrelevant to have a rule in the first place.”

The more popular short shorts become, the more likely it is to see much longer inseams — a result of the style pendulum swinging back the other way. The wearer of these shorts, Javi Irizarry, called them a “mirt,” a man skirt.

Mr. Harris, the “Throwing Fits” co-host, said that was indicative of the general direction of men’s wear these days. “Everyone is doing everything,” he said.

As people seek style inspiration from an array of newsletters, social media influencers, glossy magazines and other cultural authorities, there is no universal idea about what is right or wrong to wear.

“There’s not one dominant market; there’s not one dominant archetype,” Mr. Harris said.

But for the guys who may still be debating how much leg to show this summer, Mr. Wooster had a piece of fashion advice.

“I’m wearing a length that is right at the knee,” he said. “Not below or above — right at the knee. I feel like that’s foolproof. It’ll never be bad. That’s the Teflon length.”

Business Day

- Trump-Vance Administration Could Herald New Era for Dollar

- How a Network of Tech Billionaires Helped J.D. Vance Leap Into Power

- Amazon Workers Narrowly Reject Union Drive at British Warehouse

- Chinese Billionaire and Bannon Ally Is Convicted of Fraud

- Elon Musk Says He Will Move X and SpaceX Headquarters to Texas

- Britain Approves Lab-Grown Meat for Pet Food

- U.K. Inflation Steady as Economists Puzzle Over ‘Taylor Swift Effects’

- J.D. Vance’s A.I. Agenda: Reduce Regulation

Trump-Vance Administration Could Herald New Era for Dollar

Both candidates on the Republican ticket have argued that the U.S. currency should be weaker to support American exports.

Senator J.D. Vance has described the dollar’s status as the reserve currency as a subsidy for U.S. consumers but a tax on American manufacturers.

By Alan Rappeport  16 Jul, 2024

Donald J. Trump’s selection of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio to be his vice-presidential nominee pairs him with a kindred spirit on trade, taxes and a tough stance on China. But it is their shared affinity for a weak dollar that could have the most sweeping implications for the United States and the global economy.

In most cases, Mr. Trump likes his policies to be “strong,” but when it comes to the value of the dollar, he has long expressed a different view. Its strength, he has argued, has made it harder for American manufacturers to sell their products abroad to buyers that use weaker currencies. That’s because their money is worth so much less than the dollars that they need to make those purchases.

“As your president, one would think that I would be thrilled with our very strong dollar,” Mr. Trump said in 2019, explaining that U.S. companies like Caterpillar and Boeing were struggling to compete. “I am not!”

The dollar has been the world’s dominant currency since World War II, and central banks hold about 60 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The United States has maintained a “strong dollar” policy since the 1990s, when Robert E. Rubin, the Treasury secretary at the time, declared that he did not view it as a threat to the ability of American business to compete abroad. The United States avoids taking measures to steer the strength of the dollar, and Treasury secretaries tend to argue that currency values should be determined by market forces. When countries, such as China, have acted to weaken their currencies, the U.S. has shamed them as currency manipulators.

It is not clear how Mr. Trump would go about weakening the dollar. His Treasury Department could try to sell dollars to buy foreign currency or try to persuade the Federal Reserve to just print more dollars.

A concerted shift in policy could have reverberations for international commerce of all kinds. The depreciation of the dollar, along with Mr. Trump’s plan to increase tariffs on imports, could also reignite inflation when price increases are finally easing.

“Depreciation would add to inflation,” said Mark Sobel, a former longtime Treasury Department official who is now the U.S. chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. “So would tariff hikes. Plus, a highly expansionary fiscal policy would add to demand pressures.”

Skeptics of a strong dollar say it is responsible for making U.S. exports too costly abroad at the expense of American workers, and seeking to devalue it aligns with the populist ethos of Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance.

At a Senate hearing last year, Mr. Vance echoed Mr. Trump’s concerns while questioning Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair. He said the dollar’s status as the reserve currency, which means it is widely held in central banks around the world and accepted for most kinds of transactions, was a subsidy for U.S. consumers but a tax on American manufacturers.

“I know the strong dollar is sort of the sacred cow of the Washington consensus, but when I survey the American economy, and I see our mass consumption of mostly useless imports on the one hand and our hollowed-out industrial base on the other hand, I wonder if the reserve currency status also has some downsides, and not just some upsides as well,” Mr. Vance said.

Mr. Powell responded by noting that the United States benefits from its reserve currency status, which makes it possible to buy goods all over the world with dollars. He also said there was not an obvious currency to replace it.

The strength of the dollar has gained global attention this year as its value appreciated compared with other countries’ currencies as a result of higher interest rates. That can complicate matters for central banks around the world that are grappling with inflation, and by making American exports more expensive, it can widen the U.S. trade deficit, which Mr. Trump loathes.

The 2024 Republican Party platform calls for keeping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance could still try to weaken it if elected this year. Robert E. Lighthizer, Mr. Trump’s former trade adviser, who could be a candidate to be his next Treasury secretary, has been mulling ways to devalue the dollar if the former president wins, Politico reported this year.

Mr. Trump could try to devalue the dollar either by signaling a policy shift, appointing a new Federal Reserve chair when Mr. Powell’s term ends in 2026 who is likely to cut interest rates, or by trying to use the threat of tariffs to compel other countries to act to strengthen their own currencies.

Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in the Biden administration’s trade office, said the Trump-Vance team faced a “core contradiction” in its economic agenda. He noted that Mr. Trump’s proposed tax cuts would probably widen the fiscal deficit and push up interest rates, supporting the dollar. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s trade agenda would most likely encourage other countries to weaken their currencies relative to the dollar in response to his tariffs.

Mr. Trump has called for imposing a 10 percent levy on all imports and a 60 percent duty on imports from China.

“If you punish other countries, hit them with tariffs, reduce the value of their exports, the effect tends to be their currencies weaken,” Mr. Setser said.

Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, said a move to devalue the dollar could lead to “stagflation” — when prices rise and growth slows.

“If a country’s government does not care about the value of its money, why should anyone else?” Mr. Summers said. “Raising tariffs while devaluing the dollar are self-imposed supply shocks.”

Despite his interest in a weaker dollar, Mr. Trump has given mixed messages on the matter.

In 2017, he told The Wall Street Journal that the dollar “is getting too strong.” The next year, however, Mr. Trump told CNBC that “ultimately I want to see a strong dollar” after remarks by his Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, suggesting that a weaker dollar could be good for trade led to a sharp decline in the dollar index.

But this April, as the dollar surged against the yen, Mr. Trump said the strength of the dollar was going to put American companies out of business.

“It sounds good to stupid people, but it is a disaster for our manufacturers and others,” Mr. Trump said on social media.

How a Network of Tech Billionaires Helped J.D. Vance Leap Into Power

Mr. Vance spent less than five years in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, but the connections he made with Peter Thiel and others became crucial to his political ascent.

David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur and podcaster, left, and J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator and vice-presidential hopeful, middle, at the Republican National Convention on Monday.

By Ryan Mac and Theodore Schleifer  17 Jul, 2024

Last month, J.D. Vance flew to San Francisco to hold a fund-raiser for Donald J. Trump and to host a private dinner afterward with two dozen tech and crypto executives and investors.

The location was the opulent Pacific Heights mansion of David Sacks, an entrepreneur and podcaster whom Mr. Vance had met through the tech investor Peter Thiel. Mr. Vance, now 39 years old, had worked for one of Mr. Thiel’s investment firms in San Francisco in 2016.

During the $300,000-a-person dinner that night, Mr. Trump, seated between Mr. Sacks and another tech investor, Chamath Palihapitiya, informally polled the room about whom to choose as his running mate. Even with another vice-presidential hopeful, Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, in attendance, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Palihapitiya and others all had the same answer: Pick Mr. Vance, they told Mr. Trump, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange.

A screenshot from a video of a June fund-raiser for former President Donald J. Trump at the home of David Sacks.

Mr. Vance, the Ohio senator selected by Mr. Trump this week to be his running mate, spent less than five years in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, where he worked as a junior venture capitalist and a biotech executive. But while he made little mark on the tech scene, it was a formative period that has powered Mr. Vance’s stunning ascent in the Republican Party — and is likely to influence his political future.

Mr. Vance’s stint in tech was crucial for forging connections with billionaire executives and investors, including Mr. Thiel, Mr. Sacks and Elon Musk, who owns X. Over and over, those men have funded Mr. Vance’s political ambitions, raised his profile among other wealthy donors and on social media, and lobbied Mr. Trump to choose him as his running mate.

Before the 2022 midterm elections, Mr. Thiel gave $15 million to support Mr. Vance’s campaign for the Senate. Mr. Sacks donated $1 million to a political action committee backing Mr. Vance’s run. In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Mr. Trump cited Mr. Vance’s “very successful business career in Technology and Finance” as one reason he was chosen as his running mate.

Mr. Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday. “This is who I want by Trump’s side,” he posted on social media about Mr. Vance.

“His experience in tech has absolutely influenced his thinking,” Nathan Leamer, the chief executive of Fixed Gear Strategies, a tech policy consulting firm, said of Mr. Vance. “He built rapport with some important influencers now onboard with Trump.”

Yet if Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are elected to the White House in November, it is unclear whether Mr. Vance will be on the same page with Silicon Valley’s interests. He has praised the Federal Trade Commission, which has brought antitrust cases against tech’s biggest companies, and called for the breakup of Google because it was an “explicitly progressive technology company.”

Representatives for Mr. Vance, the Trump campaign and Mr. Sacks did not respond to requests for comment.

“J.D. is an exceptional pick,” Mr. Palihapitiya said in a text message. “We will all be better off as he works on all of our behalfs.”

Mr. Vance’s path to the tech industry began when he was a student at Yale Law School. In 2011, he met Mr. Thiel after the investor delivered a speech at Yale, where he derided the professional prospects of law students and argued that their time might be better spent in Silicon Valley.

“Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Mr. Vance wrote in a 2020 essay for a Catholic literary journal.

Mr. Vance, who graduated from Yale Law in 2013, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as an executive at Circuit Therapeutics, a biotechnology company.

Frederic Moll, the chief executive of Circuit at the time, said he hired Mr. Vance because “he was a very smart guy with an impressive background in the law, but also it was a favor to Peter,” referring to Mr. Thiel. Mr. Thiel’s venture capital firm had previously invested in one of Dr. Moll’s companies.

Mr. Vance kept in touch with Mr. Thiel, who wrote a promotional blurb for Mr. Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Mr. Thiel also encouraged the hiring of Mr. Vance for a role at Mithril Capital, a venture firm that Mr. Thiel co-founded, a person with knowledge of the situation said.

Mr. Vance joined the firm in 2016 as a principal. Colleagues mostly remember him for introducing them to the ultra-sweet Big Red soda, a far cry from the La Croix seltzers that define Silicon Valley culture, one fellow investor said.

Peter Thiel, a tech investor, backed Mr. Vance’s run for the Senate and helped introduce him to Mr. Trump.

Around then, Mr. Vance’s profile began rising as “Hillbilly Elegy” became a best seller. While Mr. Thiel had gained attention for his support of Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance went in a different direction, calling himself a “never-Trump guy” in an interview with Charlie Rose that fall.

Several months later, Mr. Vance left Mithril Capital after butting heads with the firm’s managing partner, Ajay Royan, three people familiar with the situation said.

“J.D. is a friend, and he was a talented, valued member of the Mithril team,” Mr. Royan said in a statement.

In 2017, Mr. Vance became a partner at Revolution, a venture firm founded by the America Online co-founder Steve Case, and began splitting his time between Ohio and Washington, where the firm was based. He worked there for about 18 months.

In interviews, Mr. Case has said Mr. Vance “wasn’t really working that much” at Revolution. Mr. Case declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

In 2020, Mr. Vance founded his own venture firm, Narya Capital, in Cincinnati. He turned to his tech connections, including the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen and Mr. Thiel, to raise a $120 million fund. Mr. Thiel agreed to serve on Narya’s leadership advisory committee, a person with knowledge of the relationship said.

During this time, Mr. Vance became interested in backing tech platforms favored by conservatives, including the social network Parler. He advised Rebekah Mercer, Parler’s controlling shareholder and a major Republican donor, and considered investing in the company, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Narya did not ultimately invest in Parler, but invested alongside Mr. Thiel in Rumble, a YouTube competitor favored by conservatives, in 2021. Narya also invested in AppHarvest, a Kentucky-based indoor farming company, which went public in late 2020. AppHarvest filed for bankruptcy last year.

Around that time, Mr. Vance co-founded a network of major conservative donors with some tech leaders, called the Rockbridge Network. In July 2021, he announced a run for Ohio’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat. Mr. Thiel agreed to back him and brokered talks between Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance, who sought support from the former president.

“Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades,” Mr. Trump said when he eventually endorsed Mr. Vance’s Senate run.

Mr. Thiel’s relationship with Mr. Trump has since soured while Mr. Vance’s ties to the former president have strengthened. At a conference in Aspen, Colo., last month, Mr. Thiel said he would vote for Mr. Trump only “if you hold a gun to my head.”

Mr. Thiel placed calls to encourage Mr. Trump to choose Mr. Vance, two people briefed on the calls said. With Mr. Vance now Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Thiel is significantly more likely to back the ticket, two other people close to the investor said. After Mr. Trump announced Mr. Vance as his pick on Monday, Mr. Thiel messaged close associates to express his excitement, they said.

Mr. Vance “was very much a friend of the Thiel network going back years,” said Crystal McKellar, a venture capitalist who worked with Mr. Vance at Mithril Capital. “It seemed like Peter saw something really special in him and wanted to encourage it.”

Mr. Musk also encouraged Mr. Trump to choose Mr. Vance in private communications recently. On Monday, Mr. Musk called Mr. Vance’s selection an “excellent decision.”

Mr. Vance has relied on Mr. Sacks, whom he called “one of my closest confidants” in politics at a gala this spring. After that event, Mr. Vance introduced Mr. Sacks to Mr. Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

The former president has been impressed by Mr. Sacks’s wealth and media profile, a person familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking said, and Mr. Sacks spoke on Monday at the Republican National Convention.

At the San Francisco fund-raiser for Mr. Trump last month, Mr. Sacks returned the favor to Mr. Vance. The high-profile event, which raised $12 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign, would not have happened without Mr. Vance, Mr. Sacks said, according to a person with knowledge of his remarks there.

“This is who I want by Trump’s side,” Mr. Sacks posted on X on Monday, adding, “God bless JD, God bless Trump, and God bless the USA.”

Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Amazon Workers Narrowly Reject Union Drive at British Warehouse

The vote, which would have forced the tech giant to negotiate collectively with workers, was the closest an Amazon center in Britain had come to being unionized.

More than 3,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Coventry, England, were eligible to vote on the union drive.

By Eshe Nelson  17 Jul, 2024

A fight to form the first union at an Amazon warehouse in Britain came to an end this week, as organizers of the effort fell short by just 28 votes.

About 2,600 employees at the warehouse in Coventry, in the Midlands of England, took part in a ballot for union recognition, which would have forced Amazon to negotiate collectively with the bulk of workers there over working conditions, as well as pay, holiday and other benefits. More than 3,000 Amazon workers were eligible to vote.

But in the end, the effort failed, with only 49.5 percent voting in favor in a poll approved by the Central Arbitration Committee, a government body. It is the closest any Amazon center in Britain has come to being unionized.

The results come amid accusations by GMB, a nationwide union, lawyers and some workers that the American tech giant had been heavy-handed in its efforts to discourage unionization. Amazon has a history of pushing back against union movements. In the United States, only one warehouse, on Staten Island, has a formally recognized union. A labor union in Germany has been trying to get collective bargaining powers for more than a decade.

The vote fell “agonizingly short” of a majority, said GMB, which counts Amazon employees among its 500,000 members from various occupations.

“Amazon bosses have created a culture of fear for low-paid workers trying to improve their pay, terms and conditions,” said Stuart Richards, an organizer at GMB.

Striking workers outside the Amazon depot in Coventry last year.

Amazon defended its workplace practices. “We place enormous value on engaging directly with our employees,” said Tim Hobden, a spokesman for Amazon, adding that the company has “always worked hard to listen to them, act on their feedback and invest heavily in great pay, benefits and skills development — all in a safe and inclusive workplace.”

GMB cannot make another bid for formal recognition for three years, but workers are continuing a legal claim that accuses Amazon of illegally trying to induce employees to quit the union.

Workers claimed the company pressured them to attend several seminars that suggested the union would jeopardize employees’ pay and benefits. They also said the company liberally displayed QR codes to make it easy to cancel union membership, which lawyers said was a breach of British law that prohibited companies from making offers to employees to not be in a union. Amazon said that attending the meetings was voluntary and that GMB also held meetings in the warehouse.

“Amazon has thrown everything at it,” said Rosa Curling, a director at Foxglove, a legal group whose cases focus on big tech companies and is representing about 900 Amazon workers in a claim against the company.

Paramanathan Pradeep, 42, has worked at the Coventry warehouse for about six years alongside his wife and parents. He said the company had tried “scaring” workers by suggesting that union recognition could mean the end of overtime, an important source of additional income for many workers.

Over the past two years, about 1,200 workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry signed up for the GMB union.

In the Coventry warehouse, union activities have been intensifying for the past two years. But the fight for unionization has been a long and halting journey. In August 2022, employees walked off the job to protest a pay increase that they felt was insulting after working during the hectic days of the pandemic. Impromptu cafeteria sit-ins broke out in several locations. Since then, about 1,200 workers in Coventry signed up with GMB, which gives them individual representation in the workplace but not collective bargaining powers.

“The last two years have been monumental for us,” said Amanda Gearing, a GMB organizer who has been supporting Amazon workers for more than a decade. “These workers have taken off on a massive journey.”

At the warehouse, which is about 400,000 square feet spread over two floors, employees tend to work 10-hour shifts, four days a week, as well as overtime. The site handles only small packages, filled with things like candles, hand soap and baby clothes, which arrive from suppliers and are sorted and sent out to other distribution centers within a few hours.

In the past year and a half, there have been more than 30 days of strikes as some employees are calling for the higher hourly pay of 15 pounds (about $19.50). The wage for associates, a majority of the workers at Amazon facilities, is £12.30 to £13 per hour, depending on the location. That has increased 20 percent in the past two years and is above the national minimum wage of £11.44.

Chinese Billionaire and Bannon Ally Is Convicted of Fraud

A federal jury found that Guo Wengui defrauded investors, many his own fervent supporters, of hundreds of millions of dollars. He could face decades in prison.

Guo Wengui, at his $68 million Manhattan apartment in 2017, was found guilty on nine of 12 charges.

By Michael Forsythe  16 Jul, 2024

Guo Wengui, the exiled Chinese billionaire who transformed himself from a Beijing insider into a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party and a favorite of the American right, was convicted on Tuesday of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Guo, also known as Miles Guo, was accused of using a number of schemes — club memberships, cryptocurrencies, a sale of private shares in his media company — to fleece his followers and maintain a lavish lifestyle. On the fourth day of deliberations, a jury in the Southern District of New York found him guilty on nine of 12 charges, including racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Set to be sentenced on Nov. 19, Mr. Guo could face decades in prison or the remote possibility of extradition to China.

In a trial lasting almost two months, government prosecutors highlighted rambling videos Mr. Guo had made for his thousands of supporters, often guaranteeing no losses on their investments. The proceeds helped pay for a mansion in New Jersey, a Lamborghini roadster and a $100 million investment in a hedge fund. Prosecutors also drew on bank records, invoices and the testimony of Mr. Guo’s former employees and jilted investors, who had been drawn to a wealthy Beijing expatriate dedicated to ending the seven-decade rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

“Is Miles Guo a real political activist or not? I don’t know, I don’t care, and neither should you,” Juliana Murray, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury on Thursday. “He’s an opportunist. He’s a fraudster.”

The conviction is the end point of a remarkable trajectory for Mr. Guo, who made his original fortune in China building hotels and acquiring a brokerage company. Along the way, he allied himself with Ma Jian, a senior intelligence official in the country’s feared Ministry of State Security. Mr. Guo used his access to sensitive information to take down people who stood in his way, including a deputy mayor of Beijing who opposed his plans to build a massive office and hotel complex next to the site of the 2008 Olympic Games.

Mr. Guo’s time in China came to an abrupt end in 2015, after Mr. Ma was detained by the government. Mr. Guo fled to America and bought a $68 million Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park, winning the approval of the building’s co-op board with the help of a recommendation letter from the former British prime minister Tony Blair.

Mr. Guo may be unique in that he thrived — until he didn’t — in two very different political systems. When he came to the United States, he cultivated political relationships to burnish his image, but this time it was with members of the American right, especially Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump. By early 2017, shortly after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Guo was a member of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.

That year, Mr. Guo applied for political asylum and publicly accused senior Chinese leaders of corruption. China sought to extradite him, enlisting the support of a senior Republican official in a failed attempt to lobby the Trump administration. Beijing also leveled its own charges against him, including bribery and rape, aided by testimony from his former patron Mr. Ma.

Mr. Guo, whose age has been described as anywhere from 54 to 57, did not take the stand in his trial. His lawyers argued that his businesses were legitimate and were designed to further his anti-Communist crusade. His efforts included running a Chinese-language streaming site and a Twitter-like social media platform, both popular with exiles. The three counts on which Mr. Guo was found not guilty were related to his media company GTV: wire and securities fraud, and “unlawful monetary transactions.”

Mr. Guo was the leader of a “political enterprise of people banded together to bring down one of the world’s most powerful governments, and so that’s what they set out to do,” Sidhardha Kamaraju, one of Mr. Guo’s lawyers, said in closing remarks last week. “They started setting up the infrastructure to help carry that movement forward.”

But prosecutors countered the portrayal of Mr. Guo as a principled anti-Communist leader with recordings, made by a former employee, of a heated conversation in 2021 about how to execute some planned money transfers. Mr. Guo could be heard screaming at his employees in Mandarin, yelling “scumbag” and “go to hell” and a string of other epithets. Prosecutors played the tape to jurors on Wednesday and again on Thursday to drive home the point.

“That’s the boss of a criminal enterprise,” Ms. Murray said.

Mr. Guo’s defense was also undermined by the behavior of his followers, so-called fellow fighters who were deployed far and wide to attack his perceived enemies, including a prominent Chinese dissident.

They demonstrated outside the Cambridge, Mass., home of a government witness, the son-in-law of a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee for Mr. Guo, handing out inflammatory pamphlets with a Communist hammer-and-sickle. They also went to the school where the witness’s wife was a third-grade teacher. She was “really panicked, really upset, just really, you know, crying and unsettled and just kind of overcome with fear,” Daniel Copeland, the witness, told the court.

Throughout the trial, prosecutors worked to associate Mr. Guo with Mr. Bannon, named a co-conspirator by the government but not indicted. Mr. Bannon had a $1 million consulting contract with one of Mr. Guo’s companies and had a hand in creating three organizations that were central to the government’s case. On multiple occasions, his picture was shown on screens placed in front of the jurors.

Mr. Bannon, who recently began serving a prison term for contempt of Congress, declined to speak on the record about the trial.

Prosecutors emphasized Mr. Guo’s close relationship with Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump.

In June 2020, he appeared alongside Mr. Guo on a boat in New York Harbor to announce the formation of the New Federal State of China, which aimed to supplant the Communist government.

That August, Mr. Bannon was arrested on Mr. Guo’s yacht on unrelated federal charges of defrauding donors to a private fund-raising effort called We Build the Wall. He was pardoned by Mr. Trump in the final hours of his presidency but still faces similar state charges in New York.

As Chinese officials began to seize Mr. Guo’s properties and bank accounts in China and Hong Kong, Mr. Guo turned to those supporters to fund his opulent lifestyle, according to witnesses at the trial.

Mr. Guo was arrested at his New York penthouse in March 2023. Even after the dozen charges against him, he retained fervent followers around the world, dozens of whom showed up to watch the trial and await the verdict. Last week, his two most prominent Chinese supporters, the former soccer star Hao Haidong and his wife, Ye Zhaoying, once the world’s top-ranked women’s badminton player, were in the gallery among dozens of others. The New Federal State of China website posted daily trial transcripts in English and Chinese.

Mr. Guo, dressed in a dark double-breasted suit, sat expressionless as he listened over headphones to a translation of the judge reading the verdict. After the jury of eight men and four women was dismissed, he shook Mr. Kamaraju’s hand and hugged another of his lawyers.

The jury began deliberating on Thursday afternoon, but hit a snag on Friday when a juror was dismissed after conducting an internet search for information about one of Mr. Guo’s indicted co-conspirators, who is now a fugitive. The jury had to pause deliberations while an alternate was called in.

Three floors below their deliberations at the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, another jury was deciding the fate of Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat accused of bribery, obstruction of justice and other crimes. On Tuesday he was found guilty on all counts.

In a statement after the Guo verdict, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Damian Williams, said: “Thousands of Guo’s online followers were victimized so that Guo could live of a life of excess. Today, Guo’s schemes have been put to an end.”

Elon Musk Says He Will Move X and SpaceX Headquarters to Texas

The social media and rocket companies are based in California, which the billionaire criticized for its recent transgender legislation.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket at the company’s facilities in Boca Chica, Texas.

By Kate Conger and Eli Tan  16 Jul, 2024

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that he would move the headquarters of two of his businesses, the social media platform X and the rocket manufacturer SpaceX, to Texas, escalating an increasingly contentious fight with California.

Mr. Musk blamed a California law, signed on Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, that bars school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their children change their gender identification. Mr. Musk called the law “the final straw” and said he had warned Mr. Newsom that such legislation would “force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”

Mr. Musk said SpaceX would move its headquarters from Hawthorne, Calif., to its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. X, which is based in San Francisco, will move to Austin.

SpaceX, X and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Newsom’s office responded by pointing to a Tuesday post on X in which he implied that Mr. Musk was pandering to Donald J. Trump. Mr. Musk endorsed the former president on Saturday.

Mr. Musk has long had a love-hate relationship with California, chafing at what he says is overzealous government intervention in the state. He previously moved the headquarters of his electric car company, Tesla, from Palo Alto, Calif., to Austin in the wake of the Bay Area’s coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Mr. Musk called restrictions that made Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., shut down “fascist.”

He has also criticized the state for being slow to innovate and delaying civil improvement projects by overregulating. And he has said crime and drug use in San Francisco has made it difficult for him to come and go unencumbered from X’s office. He has sparred with local politicians and said the city has fallen into a “doom loop.”

But he has been hesitant to abandon California entirely, continuing to tap Silicon Valley and its technical talent for his artificial intelligence and engineering efforts.

Texas has no state income tax or capital gains tax, making it an attractive home for high earners like Mr. Musk and some of his employees. The governor’s office there did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Still, moving the headquarters will have limited impact on the underlying financials of Mr. Musk’s companies, said Eric Talley, a corporate law and governance professor at Columbia Law School.

“The optics of this whole thing is that Mr. Musk is making this announcement as kind of a protest statement, something that has nothing to do with corporate law,” Mr. Talley said. “I would be surprised if either SpaceX or X ends up completely evacuating the state.”

Mr. Musk has been outspoken on transgender issues. He has complained online, posting on X in 2020 that “pronouns suck.” He has instructed employees who police hate speech on the platform to consider “cisgender,” a word that refers to people who are not transgender, a slur, he said in a post on X.

In 2022, one of Mr. Musk’s children filed paperwork to officially change her name and gender. According to Mr. Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, she had tried to hide her gender identity from her father, but he found out from another member of the family. On paperwork related to her name change, the daughter wrote, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

The new California law is intended to protect transgender children from being outed to their parents. Several school boards in California have enacted policies that require school employees to inform parents if their child moves to change their name or gender identity, but the new law would prevent that.

Tennessee and North Carolina have enacted similar policies mandating that teachers inform parents as part of a “parental rights” movement backed by national conservative organizations.

In addition to avoiding California laws by threatening to move some of his companies’ physical headquarters to Texas, Mr. Musk has worked to remove his firms from the legal oversight of Delaware courts. While many of his companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and X, have had physical headquarters in California, the businesses claimed Delaware, a state that corporations typically choose for its tax system and business-friendly courts, as their official legal home.

Tesla was sued in a Delaware court over Mr. Musk’s pay package as the carmaker’s chief executive. In January, a Delaware judge voided the compensation package, saying it was excessive. Tesla shareholders responded by approving the package, valued at roughly $46.5 billion, and moving the company’s legal home to Texas.

Britain Approves Lab-Grown Meat for Pet Food

British dogs and cats are set to become the first animals in Europe to chow down on meat cultivated from chicken cells.

Meatly, a British company that grows meat from chicken cells for pet food, won approval to sell its products in Britain.

By Amelia Nierenberg  17 Jul, 2024

Britain has approved the sale of lab-grown meat for pet food, becoming the first European nation to give its blessing to a process that has prompted opposition in other countries.

The move, which became an opportunity for entrepreneurs after Britain’s split from the more-regulated European Union, is a victory for the biotech industry, which the British government hopes to build into a superpower.

The landmark approval went to Meatly, a British company that grows meat from chicken cells for pet food. Its product, which will begin feeding trials in August, arrives at a time when the worldwide market for pet food is expected to grow 5 percent this year to $151 billion, according to the research firm Statista.

And it is more sustainable and kinder to animals, said Owen Ensor, the chief executive of Meatly.

“It allows you to still feed the meat that your pets crave and that you want to feed your pet — while providing all the nutrients that your pet needs,” said Mr. Ensor, who added that he had fed the product to his cats, Lamu and Zanzi.

When it comes to lab-grown meat, Britain is ahead of countries in the European Union primarily because it is no longer beholden to the bloc’s tighter regulations and often slow-moving approval process for technological developments, advocates of alternative proteins said.

“Europe is cutting itself off from innovation,” said Linus Pardoe, the U.K. policy manager at the Good Food Institute Europe, which works to advance technological alternatives to animal proteins. “The U.K. has a much more straightforward system now that we’ve left the European Union.”

That has been wielded as a political win for Brexit fans, said Tom MacMillan, the chair of rural policy and strategy at the Royal Agricultural University, who has studied farmer perceptions of lab-based meat.

“The last government had a bit of an exercise of hunting around for dividends for Brexit,” he said, adding that food regulations were one of the few areas in which Britain and the European Union might be able to diverge.

Britain has also recently stepped up a push to expand its biotech sector, which includes lab-grown meat.

The market for pet food is expected to grow 5 percent worldwide this year to $151 billion.

And many of the top British science universities are used to working closely with the country’s biotech companies, Mr. Pardoe said. “The U.K. has got a big scientific brain that it can apply to developing and scaling cultivated meat,” he said.

Advocates said the shift would have climate benefits. Farming is a major source of pollution and requires an enormous amount of water and land use.

“We also need to be considering the environmental impacts of pets,” said Andrew Knight, a veterinary professor affiliated with Murdoch University School of Veterinary Medicine in Australia and an expert on the sustainable pet food sector.

Various studies, he said, show “that a medium-sized dog has a dietary paw print that is equivalent to that of an average person.” In 2020, dogs and cats in the United States consumed an average of 20 percent of all the livestock bred for consumption in the country, according to his research. Globally, dogs and cats ate about 9 percent in 2018.

Entrepreneurs say they can solve what is sometimes called “the animal-lovers paradox” — people love their pets, but do not want a chicken to die in a factory farm to feed them.

“We don’t need to raise or kill any animals,” Mr. Ensor said, laying out the vision for Meatly, which got its cells from a single chicken egg. “Instead of 50 billion chickens a year, it’s one egg, one time, and we’ve created an infinite amount of meat.”

But lab-grown meat and other alternative proteins (along with oat, soy and almond milks) have become a political football in both Europe and the United States.

Italy, a gastronomic tinderbox, banned the sale of cell-cultivated meat last year, as right-wing lawmakers argued that they were protecting the country’s farmers and national heritage. France is trying to police the language around lab-grown meat, banning what it calls “foodstuffs containing vegetable proteins” from being labeled “filet” or “steak,” among others; Austria and Hungary are holding similar debates.

In the United States, lab-grown meat has become a temperature check for both the right and the left. Florida banned the food in May after two California companies received approval to start selling their meat last year.

Britain, notably, has not yet approved the meat for human consumption.

That’s partly because of regulatory challenges — and partly because it may not pass a national ick-test: A study in 2022 by the University of Winchester found that about 40 percent of meat-eaters would be willing to try cultivated meat. But about 81 percent of them would feed it to their pets.

To Meatly, that’s good news for its product. “Pet food allows us to sidestep some of those issues,” Mr. Ensor said.

U.K. Inflation Steady as Economists Puzzle Over ‘Taylor Swift Effects’

Consumer prices rose 2 percent in June from a year earlier, a bit higher than economists expected, with a big jump in hotel prices coinciding with a blockbuster series of concerts.

By Eshe Nelson  17 Jul, 2024

Inflation in Britain held steady in June as the Bank of England inches toward its first interest rate cut in years and economists pondered whether a global pop star helped keep services prices higher.

Consumer prices rose 2 percent from a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday, the same rate as in May, and in line with the central bank’s target. Inflation was pulled down by cheaper clothing but offset by a jump in the price of hotel rooms. Food inflation also slowed, with prices rising just 1.5 percent compared with a year ago.

The inflation report and data on wage growth expected on Thursday are being closely watched by investors, who had been betting on a 50 percent chance the central bank will cut rates at its meeting in early August.

But the June inflation data came in slightly higher than expected. Core inflation, which excludes energy and food prices, was expected to dip but remained at 3.5 percent in June. Traders reduced their bets on an August rate cut, giving it about a 35 percent chance.

Inflation in the services sector, which includes categories like hospitality, held steady at 5.7 percent in June, defying economists’ expectations for a fall. Wage costs make up a significant proportion of services inflation, meaning once those costs start to rise, it can be hard to bring prices down.

The increase in hotel prices in June — up almost 9 percent from the previous month — coincided with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour landing in Britain. The tour has become something of an economic phenomenon, with potentially inflationary consequences. Ms. Swift performed 10 shows in Britain in June, and is returning in August.

Taylor Swift brought her stadium-filling Eras Tour to Britain in June.

“While difficult to fully untangle, it’s certainly very possible that some Taylor Swift effects were at play here — and could very well reverse out next month,” Sanjay Raja, the chief U.K. economist at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note.

Strategists at TD Securities noted that Ms. Swift’s tour probably pushed up services inflation a little because live music prices were higher, but it was harder to tell whether her tour was responsible for the jump in hotel prices. Britain’s statistics agency collected data on overnight hotel room costs on June 11 and there was no concert on that day, they noted.

Central banks around the world are tentatively lowering rates or suggesting cuts in a sign that the worst of the recent inflation crisis is over, but policymakers are wary that rising energy prices, strong wage growth or other price pressures could keep inflation uncomfortably high. The European Central Bank cut rates last month but is expected to hold off in its meeting this week. The Federal Reserve has avoided giving any timing on rate cuts, even after signaling they were likely to come.

For nearly a year, policymakers at the Bank of England have held interest rates at the highest level since 2008. But in recent months, as inflation has slowed considerably, pressure has grown on the bank to cut rates, which would ease the burden on mortgage holders, potentially reignite construction activity and make it cheaper for businesses to get loans. The last time rates were reduced was in March 2020, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when rates were cut to 0.1 percent. They have since been raised to 5.25 percent.

Most members of the nine-person rate-setting committee have resisted the pressure to cut rates. Even as the headline rate of inflation has dropped, inflation in the services sector has been stubbornly high and wage growth has been strong. Central bank officials, doubting whether inflation will stay sustainably low, have not wanted to risk cutting rates prematurely.

Resistance to rate cuts from some policymakers had begun to abate. There are tentative signs that the labor market is cooling, with data this week expected to show wage growth slowing. The minutes from the Bank of England’s last policy meeting, in June, emphasized that the decision for some officials to hold rates was “finely balanced,” suggesting that barring major surprises, they could switch their vote to a cut.

But whether the June inflation data is enough to sway them toward a rate cut is unclear.

For the majority of the rate-setting committee, “today’s inflation report won’t be as encouraging as it may have anticipated,” Mr. Raja said, adding that higher-than-expected services inflation “raises the bar” for an August rate cut.

Swati Dhingra, a member of the policy committee and one of the strongest proponents of cutting rates, said this week that the bank needed to start normalizing interest rates to “stop squeezing living standards” in an effort to lower inflation.

At the other end of the spectrum, Jonathan Haskel said last week that he would “rather hold rates until there is more certainty that underlying inflationary pressures have subsided sustainably.”

But only five votes are needed for a rate cut, so if other members, including a new policymaker, Clare Lombardelli, join Ms. Dhingra, a gradual lowering of interest rates could begin in just a few weeks.

J.D. Vance’s A.I. Agenda: Reduce Regulation

Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick has indicated he favors a hands-off approach to A.I. but also wants to increase scrutiny of the biggest tech firms in the field.

J.D. Vance, former President Donald J. Trump’s pick for vice president and a former tech investor, is expected to take a more laissez-faire approach to A.I. regulations than the Biden administration.

By Cecilia Kang  17 Jul, 2024

Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, is a strong skeptic of regulating artificial intelligence. He’s also in favor of reining in Big Tech, companies he says have grown so powerful that they stymie smaller companies’ ability to succeed.

That seeming contradiction could play a role in shaping the Trump administration’s stance on A.I. policy if former President Donald J. Trump is elected later this year. Mr. Vance — the Republican pick for vice president and a former tech investor — has pushed for looser regulations and has vocally supported open-source A.I., the public release of underlying code that can be copied and altered to create new technology.

But he has also broken with his party to support Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, for her aggressive stance on antitrust action against Big Tech. And he has strong ties with some of the tech industry’s most powerful backers, many of whom fund smaller A.I. start-ups.

Last week, during a committee hearing on privacy and A.I., Mr. Vance accused Big Tech companies of predicting that A.I. could destroy humanity in order to solicit new regulations that only the largest companies could comply with.

Those regulations would “entrench the tech incumbents that we actually have, and make it actually harder for new entrants to create the innovation that’s going to power the next generation of American growth” and jobs, Mr. Vance said.

Mr. Trump has not said whom he would ask to lead the administration’s policymaking on A.I if he reclaims the presidency in November. But Mr. Vance could heavily influence the growing industry.

Tech policy experts expect that Mr. Vance would take a more laissez-faire approach to A.I. regulations compared with the Biden administration’s. The president has issued an executive order requiring safety testing and urged further regulation. Mr. Vance would most likely favor rolling back some of the current A.I. guardrails in place for the U.S. military, which has taken a cautious approach to using the new technology. He has also urged more investment in U.S. companies to help them compete against China, which is racing to dominate A.I.

Still, Mr. Vance’s competing visions for looser regulation on A.I. and strong accountability for Big Tech, which is currently leading in creating and improving the technology, may be hard to balance, the experts say.

“Vance is of two minds and I don’t know if he can reconcile those things,” said Matt Mittelsteadt, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Mr. Vance did not respond to a request for comment. He hasn’t previously directly addressed the apparent contradiction in his regulatory views.

Generative A.I., a form of the technology that powers humanlike chatbots and creates realistic images, has prompted concerns worldwide that the technology could wipe out jobs, fuel disinformation and eventually replace the need for humans completely.

The resulting scramble to regulate the industry has led to laws in Europe that ban the riskiest uses of A.I., such as the collection of biometric data by law enforcement, and force companies to reveal when A.I. is being used on consumers. Domestically, dozens of states have passed or are in the process of creating laws for A.I. that require security testing and transparency for consumers.

While Congress has held forums and hearings with A.I. creators, academics and company chiefs, there hasn’t been movement on federal legislation.

Mr. Vance has participated in policy forums hosted by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, on how A.I. will affect security, copyright, discrimination and labor. He previously worked for Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, and was recently a co-host of a Trump fund-raiser with David Sacks, a venture capital investor.

In 2020, Mr. Vance founded Narya Capital, a venture capital firm based in Cincinnati and backed by Mr. Thiel and other Silicon Valley investors.

Mr. Vance said he was hoping to find a company to compete with Google’s ad tech business, but realized it was too dominant.

“We want innovation and we want competition, and I think that it’s impossible to have one without the other,” he said in February.

He has criticized Meta and Apple for “parasitic” business practices and has called for the breakup of Google, but hasn’t specifically addressed what to do about the most powerful A.I. companies, which include private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Kara Frederick, the director of the Tech Policy Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Mr. Vance would most likely buoy the A.I. industry and prioritize start-ups in the field.

“He has more firsthand experience to understand how new entrants have not been able to compete in a genuine free market,” Ms. Frederick said.

Editorials, Op-Ed and Letters

- ‘This Is the Pick of a Very Confident Presidential Nominee’: Four Columnists Size Up J.D. Vance

- Republicans’ Depressingly Effective Minority Outreach Strategy

- Can Democrats Find the Courage to Tell Biden the Truth?

- Why the False Narratives About Trump Are Likely to Spread

- Why MAGA Nation Embraces Trump

‘This Is the Pick of a Very Confident Presidential Nominee’: Four Columnists Size Up J.D. Vance

By Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Bret Stephens  15 Jul, 2024

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Bret Stephens to discuss Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate — why Mr. Trump picked him, how Mr. Vance could help the ticket, what’s surprising and unusual about the vice-presidential nominee, and what if anything worries our columnists about Mr. Vance.

Patrick Healy: The answer to one of the biggest questions of the presidential election has now been revealed: Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate. What was the first thing that popped into your minds when you heard Trump had picked the first-term senator from Ohio and why?

Bret Stephens: My first thought was a memory: In 2016, on the eve of the election, Vance and I were guests on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show. At the time, he was still a Never Trumper. Later, we took a walk around Columbus Circle and commiserated about the sad state of the Republican Party with Trump as its leader. Another reminder that what was once a unified anti-Trump conservative movement wound up moving in very different directions.

Ross Douthat: If elected he will be the first vice president of the United States with whom I was friends before he became a politician. That’s quite a strange feeling and one that mostly inspired me to say some prayers for him and for the country.

Michelle Goldberg: God help the people of Ukraine. As Vance told Steve Bannon, “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

David French: I share your concerns about Ukraine, Michelle, and that was my first thought as well. A century from now, historians will be talking about the war in Ukraine. Trump’s choice sends a message to America’s allies, especially Ukraine, that they might find themselves facing Russia largely on their own. To the extent that Vance will have a real voice in the administration (and we should never assume that of any vice president), he’ll be pushing Trump away from Ukraine. He’ll be a China hawk, but that’s cold comfort to the Ukrainian people or to the European alliance.

Healy: My mind went to two things: the Electoral College map and the Republican Party’s future. Presidential politics boils down to getting to 270 Electoral College votes, and Vance could help Trump in the industrial Midwestern states that are those must-win “blue wall” states for President Biden. Trump-Vance will pack a wallop in Michigan, western Pennsylvania, parts of Wisconsin. And Vance strikes me as a vision pick too — offering a more fully formed and, I would argue, ideological vision for the party’s future than Trump. David, are you surprised by the pick?

French: I’m not. From the beginning of the selection process, the real question was whether Trump was going to select someone who could perhaps reach the middle or someone who would help him double down on the MAGA ethos and MAGA ideology. Trump’s obviously chosen to double down. This is the choice of a man who’s confident he’s going to win.

Stephens: I am surprised, though I shouldn’t be. From an electoral standpoint, Vance doesn’t seem to bring a lot to the ticket: Ohio is already in Trump’s corner, and Vance represents the voters who are the Trumpiest part of Trump’s base. Especially after the assassination attempt, Trump had an opportunity to widen his base geographically by choosing someone like Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, given that Trump is running only a point behind Biden there in the polling average, or culturally by choosing someone like Marco Rubio, helping to make inroads for Republicans among Hispanic voters, or ideologically by reaching out to Nikki Haley, thereby appealing to more centrist-leaning voters who thought of her as the sort of Republican they could get behind. Instead, Trump went with the guy who’ll play well at his rallies and will never cross the boss. Again, why am I surprised?

Goldberg: I’m not surprised only because everything was telegraphing this choice, including the fact that Vance’s friend Don Jr. was slated to introduce him at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, and that the mayor of East Palestine, Ohio — the site of a toxic train derailment that Republicans accuse Biden of ignoring — is also scheduled to speak there.

Douthat: The choice had been telegraphed, but it is still a striking choice. I agree with David that the pick signals that Trump thinks he’s going to win; Vance might help him in the Rust Belt but it’s much less of a signal of outreach than, say, picking Youngkin would have been, because Vance has a more combative and polarizing persona, and it carries more political risks than picking a cipher like Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. More important, though, it sends an unusually clear policy signal about Trump’s second term — indicating that on at least a subset of issues, from trade and tariffs and immigration to foreign policy, he intends to govern in a more focused and intentional way than he ever did in his first term, as a populist in full.

Healy: Ross, you recently had that fascinating in-depth interview with Vance where I felt that I was reading a far more coherent vision of conservatism and the future of the G.O.P. than anything Trump has articulated. What stood out to you the most from your conversation with Vance and what he represents for Republicans and conservatives?

Douthat: The interview tried to cover a lot of ground, because I think his personal odyssey is inherently fascinating — from writing a best-selling book about working-class dysfunction that made him the toast of the establishment to deciding that the establishment was rotten and aligning with their great enemy, Donald Trump. But for the purposes of a potential vice presidency, the most important parts of our conversation are obviously his breaks with pre-Trump G.O.P. policy orthodoxy, his anti-libertarianism on economic policy and his vision of an American empire that’s overstretched and needs to rebalance and rebuild its strength, and then his willingness to defend Trump (almost, not unto Sidney Powell territory) all the way on the attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 election.

Goldberg: There’s one point Vance made in that interview that has stuck with me: “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power.” I can tell you for a fact that lots of liberals have not in fact read that infamous Nazi jurist, even if, as Jennifer Szalai wrote in a great recent piece, he has some currency in the academic left. But it’s telling that Vance imagines that liberals are operating according to Schmittian principles, in which all law derives from the leader, equal justice is a joke, and what matters is the friend/enemy distinction. It’s pure projection.

At a moment when Trump seemed likely to lose, Vance texted a former roommate that Trump would either be “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.” But Vance is an ambitious guy, and once Trump was in power, he had good reason to hop on the MAGA train. To justify doing so, he had to convince himself that he was fighting diabolical forces, and that because his enemies betrayed liberal democratic values, he needn’t be bound by them either. It’s an ideology of Caesarism disguising itself — as all authoritarian creeds do — as self-defense.

French: The thing that stood out to me about Ross’s conversation is that Trump has impulses, whereas Vance has an ideology. He’s done more work than just about any politician in America to create something coherent out of MAGA’s concerns and MAGA’s grievances. He doesn’t just want to possess power, he wants to wield it in quite specific ways. To the extent that MAGA has ideological legs after Trump leaves the scene, it will in large part be because of Vance.

Healy: What stands out to you most about Vance — his ideas, ideology, record, history?

French: In many ways, Vance is an avatar for countless Republicans who’ve significantly changed their assessments of Trump since 2016. Trump loves it when his previous critics bend the knee, and few people have bent the knee more deeply than Vance. He’s gone from being vitriolically Never Trump to perhaps his most enthusiastic supporter in the Senate. I’ve personally known a number of Republicans who’ve made the exact same transition.

Stephens: It’s his isolationist instincts that stand out the most, and worry me the most. Vance really is one of those Republicans who think that practically the only foreign policy we need as a country is a secure, militarized southern border — and perhaps a northern one, too. He has been a vociferous critic of our support for Ukraine, making a case in the pages of The Times that reminds me of how one of his predecessors in the Senate, Robert Taft of Ohio, made the case before the Pearl Harbor attack against helping Britain defeat the Nazis. A Vance vice presidency is likely to consolidate the G.O.P.’s reversion to that disastrous pre-World War II form.

Douthat: I think Vance has more of an isolationist streak than most recent contenders for high office, but in practice I expect him to be much more of an Asia-first Republican and would-be Nixonian or George H.W. Bushian figure than a Pat Buchanan-style, “Come home, America” paleoconservative. He portrays himself as a foreign policy realist (including in our conversation) and he’s frequently couched his critiques of Biden administration policy in terms of limited U.S. resources and the need to prioritize other threats — meaning China’s threat to Taiwan above Russia’s threat to Ukraine. How that stance actually cashes out will be an open question, but that’s going to be the framing of a Trump-Vance administration foreign policy: try to forge an armistice in Eastern Europe to enable the pivot to Asia that every administration since Barack Obama’s has arguably sought.

Healy: What does Vance do to help Trump win?

French: To the extent the pick matters at all, it’s a net negative for the ticket. In 2022 in Ohio, the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, won by 25 points; Vance won by only six points. Vance underperformed DeWine by almost 400,000 votes. He’s drunk deeply of MAGA grievances and the MAGA ethos. He’s the vice-presidential pick for the base, for the people who want to see revolutionary disruption in the American government. This is the pick of a very confident presidential nominee.

Goldberg: Vance does nothing to help Trump: He is loved by MAGA but no one else. He’s as demagogic as Trump but entirely lacks his dark charisma. I also imagine Vance will energize an opposition that’s in desperate need of a boost. Speaking to Ross, Vance suggested that there was a legitimate path to trying to overturn the 2020 election. He will be in every way a Trump enabler, and if Trump wins, I can’t imagine him certifying a Democratic victory in 2028.

After the assassination attempt against Trump, Vance has been trying to intimidate Democrats out of talking about the ex-president’s authoritarian tendencies, pretending that telling the truth about Trump constitutes incitement to violence. But with Vance on the ticket, Democrats are going to have to talk about how democracies devolve into systems of what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism.

French: Michelle, I’m glad you brought up his inflammatory post-assassination rhetoric. We’ve been seeing reports that Trump might be wanting to change the tone after his genuinely terrifying experience last Saturday. But Vance is the attack-dog choice. At the same time, however, he’ll take his cues from Trump, and if Trump wants him to moderate his tone, Vance will obey.

Stephens: Much as I think that Trump made a serious mistake in choosing Vance, it’s worth considering his strengths. He has a compelling life story, which he turned into a best-selling memoir. He’s smart and has had an important range of life experiences: not just his “hillbilly” upbringing, but his time in the Marine Corps, including service in the Iraq war, his Yale Law School degree, his stint in venture capital. He fared well in his Senate debates with Tim Ryan, a capable Democratic opponent, and beat him handily. He speaks for millions of Americans who feel forgotten, disdained, condescended to or despised by the proverbial coastal elites.

And he’s young: He turns 40 next month. It will underscore the idea that the Trump-Vance ticket represents the future, while Biden and Kamala Harris speak for the past.

Douthat: You would assume that Vance could have upside for the Trump ticket with some (not all) persuadable voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan. It’s also possible that Trump himself intends to go further in his own outreach to swing voters: He already dialed back the ideological conservatism in his party platform, he’s promising a more unifying convention speech after the assassination attempt (we’ll see), and you could imagine a world where he spends the next few months promising ideological flexibility and Vance helps him mostly by being more right-wing and reassuring parts of the MAGA world that Trump isn’t going wobbly. (The traditional V.P. role, in a sense — though there are parts of movement conservatism that strongly dislike everything Vance represents, so his reassurance won’t sell everywhere.)

I agree that Vance’s youth and smarts help make a contrast with the Biden-Harris ticket. And there’s even a way in which his having been a prominent Never Trumper could help him sell Trump to others, by saying, “Look, I used to hate him too; here’s what you’re missing.”

Fundamentally, though, I don’t think this is the pick you make if you’re just trying to add votes to your coalition. It’s a pick that sets governing priorities, a pick that probably reflects Trump’s personal preferences and comfort levels, and a pick made by a candidate who felt that his last vice president was foisted on him and this time he’ll have someone he likes and someone who likes him.

Healy: What do you think a Vance-Harris debate might be like?

French: To the extent that Vance can help Trump at all, it will be at the debate. Vance might be extreme, but he’s also a very effective communicator. He makes the policy case for MAGA far more comprehensively than Trump can, and he’ll be ready to answer questions about his Never Trump past.

Stephens: David makes an important point. Vance is sharp, shrewd, quick on his feet. And his debate will count more than most vice-presidential debates do, because many people will think that Harris will eventually be president if she and Biden win.

Goldberg: He’s smart and cutting, so imagine he’ll hold his own. But Kamala Harris — assuming she’s still the V.P. and not the Democratic presidential nominee — will enjoy reminding people, over and over, that Vance argued against exceptions to abortion bans for rape and incest victims.

Vance has a particularly bitter contempt for women without children; he’s railed against “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” It will be interesting to see if Harris can draw his misogyny out for all to see.

Healy: How is Vance like Trump — and not like Trump? This is a running mate who once scorned the former president.

French: Don’t underestimate the power of his personal story. Trump was born with an immense amount of power and privilege. Vance was born into an incredibly challenging family situation, and he showed tremendous grit and determination to reach the Senate and now the vice-presidential nomination. People connected to his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” for good reasons. He’s overcome a lot in his life, and when he highlights his story, a lot of working-class voters will identify his past and see themselves in him. He’s got a much more relatable story than Trump, he’s younger than Trump, and he’s far more informed about policy than Trump.

Goldberg: They’re similar in that they’re both somewhat ideologically labile, and both seem to simultaneously hate and resent traditional elites and long for their respect. But Vance is clearly more disciplined and methodical.

Stephens: Michelle makes an important point: Vance, like Trump, represents the same reflexive disdain for the allegedly soft and self-satisfied elites typified by people like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. In that sense Vance and Trump have more in common with the brooding resentments of Richard Nixon than they do with the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan or the noblesse oblige instincts of George H.W. Bush.

Douthat: The expectation will be that Vance will win any debate on points, since Harris has her well-earned reputation for “Veep”-like stumbles and he’s very fluent and policy-oriented and, as Michelle says, disciplined. I think the main question will be the mood he brings to the debate: Does he seem too dark and mordant and apocalyptic (a vibe that all bearded conservative populists carry with them), or can he be not just sharper than Harris but come across as an optimist as well?

Healy: One dynamic for any Trump V.P. is, of course, navigating Trump himself. Should he win, Trump will automatically be a lame duck president, and his vice president will be as close to an heir apparent as American politics usually get. What has Vance shown us about his ability to navigate Trump? And do you see any rough waters for him?

Stephens: I’m glad you think Trump would automatically be a lame duck if he wins and won’t set about repealing the 22nd Amendment!

Douthat: Several of us have talked about Vance’s loyalty to Trump. In that sense he’s a lower-risk pick for Trump than someone like Youngkin, who’s never fully committed himself to a MAGA worldview. But Vance also, much more than some of the others who might have received the nomination, has a real identity and persona and celebrity that’s separate from his new boss. There are lots of people on the right who like Vance for being Vance, the young populist who turned his back on the liberal elite, and who are excited for this pick in a way that nobody was going to be excited about, say, Burgum or Elise Stefanik. And that means that as a Trumpian second term wears on, Vance will have a stronger spotlight on him, a bigger cheering section (and more enemies) than another vice president might have had — which could create certain tensions with Trump and within his administration that you wouldn’t have with a different, more fully Trump-dependent pick.

Goldberg: People clash with Trump to the extent that they’re not willing to completely subordinate themselves to his will. Maybe Vance will eventually discover that he has interests separate from Trump. But he could just as easily become a Stephen Miller-type figure, existing wholly in relation to the source of his power.

Stephens: Vance will soon find, if he hasn’t already, that Trump will not only demand complete fealty but also insist on a fealty that involves self-abasement and a willingness to do anything for the boss, including violating his oath of office. Then again, the political prize that awaits Vance if the ticket wins in November might be worth the humiliation. I mean, to borrow the line from “A Man for All Seasons”: “It might profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales!”

Goldberg: I have been referring to this quote for eight years, but I think we’ve seen that, when it comes to Trump, a lot of people are willing to give their souls for even less than Wales!

Republicans’ Depressingly Effective Minority Outreach Strategy

Representative Byron Donalds of Florida speaks with the press at an event honoring Black delegates and alternates to the Republican National Convention at the Iron Horse Hotel in Milwaukee on July 16.

By Charles M. Blow  17 Jul, 2024

The 2020 Republican National Convention featured a procession of minority speakers that was, as reported at the time, almost certainly unprecedented.

The 2024 R.N.C. lineup may rival or exceed it.

It would be easy to mock this week’s lineup of speakers of color as mostly performative, but you would be wrong to do so. Republicans are strategically — almost surgically — trying to carve away minority voters from Democrats. And to some degree they’re succeeding.

Let’s recall how we got here: In 2013, not long after losing a second presidential election to Barack Obama, Republicans produced a 100-page report titled the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” often called the Republican autopsy.

It chastised the party for “driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac” and insisted that it must broaden its appeal to minority voters: “We need to campaign among Hispanic, Black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too.”

Of course, in 2016, Republican voters spurned a crowded and relatively diverse Republican field in favor of Donald Trump, the man who mainstreamed birtherism and who traffics in racially and ethnically inflammatory statements — “I think Islam hates us,” “look at my African American over here” and so on. It felt like a full rejection of the autopsy.

But as time went on, the party began achieving its diversity objectives while seemingly spurning them: According to an April report from the Pew Research Center, “White voters make up 79 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners. In 1996, they constituted 93 percent of the party’s voters.”

Republicans — driven for much of that span by Trump and MAGA — seized upon an uncomfortable but (for them) beneficial reality: Racial and ethnic tension extends well beyond the white-nonwhite binary.

They didn’t have to dial down their zero-sum take on race in America; they simply had to make more people believe that they had a stake in it.

Nine years after giving the campaign announcement speech in which he infamously said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” the Trump Republican approach has gelled into a strategy with at least four pillars.

Portray Immigrants as a Threat to Minorities

Republicans have realized that an anti-immigrant message doesn’t just appeal to xenophobes and white nationalists. It also appeals to some people of color, including some relatively recent immigrants, who worry about what Republicans portray as the negative effect of new arrivals on their socioeconomic status.

That’s why, for instance, during last month’s debate, Trump said of new immigrants, “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.” The line was roundly and appropriately mocked, but there’s no question that it landed with some voters.

It’s part of a broader scaremongering effort: As Robert Bartels Jr., a New York union leader, told the convention crowd on Monday, “We have an open border inviting illegal immigrants to take our American jobs and lower our wages.”

It recasts fear of immigrants as a pan-racial struggle against financial — and cultural — diminution.

Wave Away American Racism

In his convention speech on Monday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina predictably repeated his frequent refrain that “America is not a racist country.” Representative John James of Michigan expanded on that theme: “Even though they endured racism, it did not define the nation they loved,” he said of his parents. “They taught me I could do anything I set my mind to.”

Their dismissal of the existence and persistence of systemic racism is a means to absolve its beneficiaries of any responsibility to combat it. And though their pitch — Just like me, you too — is a craven gloss on history and present-day reality, it also appeals, almost certainly, to many white Republicans as the proper way for minorities to process racism and helps make all the overt minority outreach more palatable.

Highlight Supposed Racial Conversions

For Republicans, it has become standard to enlist celebrities to offer testimonials that pooh-pooh the idea that there’s any racial animus associated with Trump and his movement. In simple terms, it’s an attempt to neutralize G.O.P. negatives.

At the convention on Monday, the entertainer Amber Rose, who is multiracial, said that in the past she believed “left-wing propaganda that Donald Trump was a racist,” but after doing her “research,” she “realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you are Black, white, gay or straight. It’s all love.”

Her framing places the charge that Trump is a racist in the category of liberal conspiracy, a mere tactic meant to guarantee minorities’ allegiance to Democrats, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Make Patriarchal Appeals to Minority Men

For some men of color, the perquisites of the patriarchy are a stronger draw than racial oppression is a repellent. Trump has tapped into that. He has crafted a persona that sends the message that toxic masculinity can be flaunted unapologetically and without consequence.

To some, that makes him a hero — a video game version of a man. In his convention speech, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, called Trump “the Braveheart of our time.”

Most minority voters reject these overtures as displays of rank cynicism, but Republican success doesn’t require a mass defection, only a gradual erosion. If Republicans can shave a few percentage points away from Democrats, it may not only mean that they’re slowly gaining ground philosophically, it may also be enough for them to win this year.

Democrats have to stop laughing at this strategy and soberly combat it; if not, they may soon need an autopsy of their own.

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Can Democrats Find the Courage to Tell Biden the Truth?

By Nicholas Kristof  17 Jul, 2024

Before I get to President Biden, let me tell you about my love for a different presidential candidate.

In 1972, when I was 13 years old, I knocked on doors to canvass for George McGovern, the Democratic senator who wanted to end the Vietnam War. McGovern was an honorable man but was regarded by much of the public as too leftist.

We dismissed skeptics. How could voters instead re-elect a crook like President Richard Nixon? When more sober-minded Democrats pushed to nominate former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had the virtue of being electable, the McGovern faithful fought back and Humphrey’s bid collapsed.

At the time of the 1972 Democratic National Convention, McGovern was down 20 points in a Harris poll. But we cheered McGovern and believed in him — until Nixon won that November by a 23-point landslide, carrying 49 states.

So in 2024 will Democrats again be loyal to a flawed candidate who is likely to lose — and whose nomination might well lead to G.O.P. control of both houses of Congress — or will they be loyal to the goals they believe in?

We can’t be sure that Biden will lose just because polls show him behind nationally and in most or all of the battleground states. The betting markets give Biden almost a one-in-five chance of being elected. But they give Trump a two-in-three chance of being elected, and is that a risk that Biden wishes to accept as his legacy?

Polling and election history suggest that Trump is a weak candidate but that the Democrats are on course to nominate one who is even weaker. There is a surprising subservience within the Democratic Party to the person of President Biden over the goals that Democrats say they are committed to achieve.

In part, I fear, that’s cowardice.

It’s hard to buck a system and challenge a president; it’s easier to flatter power and bask in its glow, so the tendency is to avert one’s eyes and let someone else speak up. Democratic officeholders understand that the party is probably on a trajectory toward disaster; Representative Adam Schiff of California reportedly told donors in a private meeting over the weekend that the party was on course for a wipeout. Yet most officeholders are passive, waiting for the avalanche rather than helping the party escape it.

This is a failure of leadership in the Democratic Party. For a party that insists that Trump poses a fundamental threat, how is such loyalty to a losing candidate in the national interest?

In 2020, Biden was chosen as the Democratic nominee not because he was the most beloved of candidates but because he was the one most likely to beat Trump — and that is no longer true.

We’ve seen this before, this deference to a president of one’s own party, the pretense that the emperor is clothed — but previously we saw it in the Republican Party, and Democrats rightly excoriated this deference.

Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and many other Democrats scolded the Republican Party for becoming a personality cult, elevating one person above issues, goals and common sense. But there were a few Republicans brave enough to resist, and their words should remind Democrats of their duty. “Keeping your head down in capitulation to a rogue president makes you little more than furniture,” former Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, wrote in 2021. Ben Sasse, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, said the same year, “Politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.”

I recognize that Biden may not withdraw, and in that case this debate within the Democratic Party may increase the likelihood of a Trump victory. But it’s worth doing everything possible to encourage Biden to make the right decision for his nation and his legacy, and in any case it’s important for the integrity of the party to have this discussion.

The risk with Biden is not just that he will lose in November but also that he may not be able to perform the job for the next four years. The issue is not just politics but also national security.

The evidence on Biden’s capacity is mixed. None of us can be sure, but it seems clear that Biden is mostly “on” but that the televised catastrophe of a few weeks ago was not just a one-off or simply a bad debate night, as former President Barack Obama put it. Given that Biden’s capacity appears to have diminished since 2020, it’s reasonable to expect further deterioration.

True, I’m confident that Biden and his aides would handle a crisis better on a bad night than Trump would on a good night. But that’s an evasion, not an answer.

For years, the Republican responses to questions about Trump have been diversions such as “What about Hunter Biden?!” It’s sad to see Democrats now engage in similar question-dodging and whataboutism.

Many Republicans know in their hearts that Trump isn’t fit to be elected president in November, and increasingly many Democrats fear the same is true of Biden. Yet too many in both parties are silent, placing comity and ties to power over the national interest. Finally, sadly, we see something in America that is truly bipartisan: leadership failure.

Democrats may be reluctant to acknowledge it, but Trump handled the assassination attempt with courage and aplomb, and it may well make the polling even more skewed. That’s all the more reason for Democrats to press Biden to stand down and make way for Vice President Kamala Harris or (as I have suggested) Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. I hope party leaders and elders — Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama — are working behind the scenes to save the day.

Families all across America are responsible enough to engage in difficult conversations about taking the car keys from beloved elderly parents who think they can still drive. If the humblest household can manage this conversation, so can Democratic leaders.

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Why the False Narratives About Trump Are Likely to Spread

By Julia Angwin  16 Jul, 2024

It took minutes after the shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally on Saturday for misinformation to begin circulating on social media. Maybe the shooter was an Italian soccer commentator. Perhaps Mr. Trump was shot in the chest. The platform X, formerly known as Twitter, promoted conspiracy theories sporting hashtags like #falseflag and #staged (alleging that the shooting was staged to gain sympathy for Mr. Trump) among its trending topics.

We just experienced the first serious attempted assassination of a presidential candidate in the social media age. How widely are conspiracy theories being spread by our largest platforms? How many voters are being swayed by them? Are the platforms living up to their promises to stop misinformation from circulating? Believe it or not, the answer is that we don’t know — and have few ways to find out.

Thanks in part to a coordinated attack on the internet research community by right-wing groups — and also by the failure of Congress and the courts to install adequate guardrails on the behavior of Big Tech — we now have less information than ever before about the impact our underregulated social media platforms are having on our politics. As the Politico writer Mark Scott declared in a recent newsletter headline, “The U.S. Is Walking in Blind Into November.”

The 2016 presidential election was supposed to be a wake-up call about the role of social media in politics. Mr. Trump’s surprise victory was attributed partly to his campaign’s strategy of flooding social media — an effort supported by a covert Russian influence campaign and a trove of misused Facebook data.

By the 2020 elections, an entire monitoring ecosystem had arisen to ensure that the public wouldn’t be blindsided again. Disinformation research centers popped up at universities across the United States, where academics combed through Facebook posts and Twitter feeds using automated tools. Journalists used publicly available tools to report story after story about fake news spreading across the platforms.

Four years later, most of that transparency is in jeopardy or gone. Some of the research centers stopped work or were shut down entirely amid pressure from lawsuits and a Republican congressional inquiry that alleged that the disinformation research was part of a government censorship conspiracy.

“The study of misinformation has become the newest political target of the right,” the University of Washington researchers Ryan Calo and Kate Starbird wrote in a recent article, which describes the way that researchers have faced harassment, lawsuits and smears in partisan media.

Another culprit is Big Tech itself, which is shutting down or effectively blocking access to key tools used by researchers. X has even sued misinformation researchers. After all, what is their incentive to voluntarily offer tools that can then be used to critique their actions?

When Elon Musk bought X, he effectively halted researchers’ ability to gain access to data from the platform. Facebook is shutting down a tool that has helped researchers analyze its platform. The companies often say that they are trying to protect user privacy by restricting access, but the public needs information about public posts that are widely distributed, not private communications.

I hoped that some of this would be fixed when the European Union passed a package of laws that included new transparency requirements for big tech companies. The companies — such as Meta and TikTok — are required to report in detail the reasoning for removing content from their platforms and submit to regular audits. The E.U. law also called for researchers to get direct access to data from the largest tech platforms.

But it soon became clear that there were some big holes in the transparency requirements. The law does not do enough to ensure that journalists have access to platform data — and journalists have long been on the front lines of platform accountability.

And then the companies seem to be failing to comply with the law. In an ironic twist, Meta even cited the European Union’s rules to justify the shutdown of a tool that had been widely used by journalists and researchers to analyze misinformation on Facebook. To replace it, Meta built the Meta Content Library, but that lacks many key features and is available only to researchers who apply for access.

There’s a term for this type of apparent corporate subversion of the law: malicious compliance. Tech companies have been accused of subverting the European Union’s rules in all sorts of ways, ranging from Google changing how its maps work in the bloc to the changes Apple has made to the App Store. The union has started an investigation into Meta for potential violations of the Digital Services Act and has issued a preliminary finding that X violated the law.

While the European Union is investigating, the public is increasingly in the dark. Fact-checking organizations in the past few days have spotted and debunked a handful of shooting conspiracy theories. But without a window into the platforms, it’s next to impossible to tell how far and wide false claims have circulated and whether other fabrications are gaining traction.

The question remains: What will it take for us to mandate some public visibility for social media? Without transparency, we are heading into the election without a clear view of the false narratives that are shaping the national debate. If we want our information waterways to be clean, we need to use the best disinfectant available: sunlight.

Source images by Hand-robot, Anna Moneymaker and urfinguss/Getty Images.

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Why MAGA Nation Embraces Trump

17 Jul, 2024

To the Editor:

Re “The Deep Source of Trump’s Appeal,” by David Brooks (column, July 12):

I’ve always believed that the mass of Donald Trump supporters were fundamentally just working-class Americans who, as the country’s wealth increasingly skewed to the 1 percent ever since President Ronald Reagan, found themselves running faster and faster to stay in the same place, and finally (and justifiably) started to fume about it.

While Mr. Brooks doesn’t flat out say it, I take away from his article that, rather than viewing their plight as old-fashioned liberals used to — as plain and simple economic class exploitation — the white working class has been conned by demagogues like Mr. Trump into seeing it as existential, zero-sum identity politics.

If Mr. Brooks’s suggestion is that religious leaders guide Americans back to some form of enlightened democratic civility, they’re going to have to drop a bit more wealth redistribution into their message to the congregation.

Steven Doloff

New York

To the Editor:

It was only a matter of time before the voters who have become MAGA nation — having been dismissed as “deplorables,” sniffed at as people who “cling to guns or religion,” and generally considered less worthy — would decide to stand up for themselves and say, “We matter, too, and as much as you do.”

For all his many shortcomings, Donald Trump does have a keen eye for a marketing opportunity, and he was happy to swoop in and exploit the concerns of this group.

Democrats may prefer to fault President Biden’s frailty, but they have no one but themselves to blame for the burgeoning strength of the adversary they face.

Margaret McGirr

Greenwich, Conn.

To the Editor:

I was surprised that David Brooks fails to mention the highly significant role of social media in his ruminations on the fractiousness that besets our democracy today.

The tendency toward an “us versus them” mind-set in society has been greatly driven and amplified by social media’s algorithms.

These have been purposefully designed to drive us all deeper into our bunkers and undermine any sense of a societal collective.

The pervasiveness of social media dedicated to maximizing profit regardless of its malign impact on individuals and society is inimical to democracy and a major contributory factor to democracy being “on thin ice.”

Louis Brennan

Dublin

To the Editor:

David Brooks takes a good stab at understanding the tensions between Enlightenment values and religiously grounded social mores, but the one thing he doesn’t explain is how those who think we need a return to a more “religious” moral center are completely enthralled by the likes of Donald Trump, who, whatever else you can say about him, never expresses anything in word or deed that would suggest he has any moral grounding at all. I know of no religious tradition that features revenge as a central moral tenet.

Ken Blickenstaff

Danville, Ky.

To the Editor:

David Brooks’s column comes the closest I have seen to explaining the bizarre divisions in the country right now, and the incomprehensible appeal of Donald Trump. The identity politics of the day goes a long way to helping me understand why President Biden, who has experience, judgment and insight, is struggling to counter the fact-free and wildly unrealistic bombast of Mr. Trump.

Bruce Balfe

Stevensville, Mich.

To the Editor:

David Brooks states, “The task, then, is to build a new cultural consensus that is democratic but also morally coherent.” While I am not a religious person, there is wisdom to be had in some religious teachings.

So a place to start could be Matthew 7:12: “In everything, do unto others what you would have them do to you.” Most people want to be respected, listened to, acknowledged as worthwhile rather than to be reviled, called names and dismissed as unimportant.

If our political leaders from across the political spectrum could embrace the golden rule, if they could preach it before stating a position or starting an argument, if they could say I want to hear why you think as you do as much as I want to state what I think, perhaps we could start down the road to rebuilding a common culture as Mr. Brooks prescribes.

Richard D. Mamelok

Palo Alto, Calif.

Exit Menendez?

To the Editor:

Re “Menendez Guilty in Scheme to Sell Political Favors” (front page, July 17):

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, was found guilty on all 16 counts on Tuesday. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, called for his immediate resignation.

See how it works outside of a cult?

Vin Morabito

Scranton, Pa.

Joe, Keep Your Dignity

To the Editor:

After reading the July 10 columns by Thomas L. Friedman and Bret Stephens and the editorial, “The Democratic Party Must Speak the Plain Truth to the President,” I am very sad.

If President Biden had dropped out of the presidential race right after the debate, his legacy would have been exemplary. He would have gone down in history as a president who accomplished many worthwhile things for our people and our nation.

Little by little he is now being stripped of his dignity! Every time an Opinion writer or a member of his own party requests that he step aside, the request contains negative comments about his current physical and mental state.

Please, Joe, leave before all your positive accomplishments have been negated. Keep your dignity!

Ruth Menken

Mount Kisco, N.Y.

Spirituality in America

To the Editor:

Re “Are We in the Middle of a Spiritual Awakening?,” by Jessica Grose (Opinion, nytimes.com, July 3):

Despite the seemingly nebulous nature of many forms of spirituality, my research (with Prof. Evan Stewart of the University of Massachusetts Boston) suggests that spirituality is underrecognized for how important it continues to be in the United States. The spiritual are as civically and politically engaged as the religious.

Spirituality seems to be emerging for some as a substitute for religion, at a time when “religion” alienates a growing number of young people and political progressives, as well as some members of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, women and people of color.

These people are creating new forms of sacred togetherness, through dinner parties, Soul Cycle or diverse arts communities such as the Sanctuaries in Washington, D.C., and many other innovative, transcendent forms of gathering, as the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University and the Sacred Design Lab at Harvard Divinity School document.

One reason, perhaps, that emerging forms of spirituality and their connections to community are harder to identify is that they don’t have the obvious links to volunteer work and traditional civic religion.

Although spiritual practices, meanings and experiences may be important to many Americans, they may not always be accustomed to speaking about it with others in public.

Jaime L. Kucinskas

Clinton, N.Y.

The writer is an associate professor of sociology at Hamilton College and the author of “The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing From the Inside Out.”

International

- A Milan Airport Is Now Named for Berlusconi. Cue the ‘Bunga-Bunga’ Memes.

- Mayor of Paris Takes an Olympian Plunge in a Beautified Seine

- E.U. Court Rebukes Bloc’s Executive Arm Over Covid Vaccine Contract Secrecy

- In a Porridge Box, an Ancient Treasure Mysteriously Arrives in Dublin

- Judge Orders Boss Who Coughed at Employee During Pandemic to Pay Damages

- Promise of a Changed U.K. Comes Wrapped in Royal Tradition

- Ukraine’s Devastated Energy Grid Battles a New Foe: A Sizzling Heat Wave

- U.S. Accuses Former C.I.A. Analyst of Working for South Korea

- Hiker’s Death Prompts Move to Allow Wider Bear Cull in Romania

- Former Syrian Official in Charge of Notorious Prison Is Arrested in Los Angeles

- Trump Tells Taiwan to Expect a Higher Price Tag for U.S. Defense

- In a Bangkok Hotel Room, Six Bodies and Traces of Cyanide

- Moving in Childhood Contributes to Depression, Study Finds

A Milan Airport Is Now Named for Berlusconi. Cue the ‘Bunga-Bunga’ Memes.

The decision to name Italy’s second-largest passenger hub after the divisive media mogul and politician, who died in 2023, has prompted outrage and protests.

Terminal 1 at Milan’s Malpensa Airport, which is now named International Airport Milan Malpensa — Silvio Berlusconi.

By Elisabetta Povoledo  17 Jul, 2024

Millions of travelers pass through Italian airports every year, but most probably don’t know that Rome’s airport is named for Leonardo da Vinci, Pisa’s is named for Galileo Galilei, and Palermo’s is named for Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two prosecutors who were murdered in 1992 as payback for their anti-Mafia crusades.

But the decision this month to name Milan’s main international airport after Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul and former Italian prime minister who died last year at age 86, did not go unnoticed.

The renaming of Milan Malpensa Airport as International Airport Milan Malpensa — Silvio Berlusconi has unleashed a maelstrom of protests from left-leaning lawmakers, a barrage of memes and an online petition to block the designation, which as of Wednesday had more than 160,000 signatures.

It also has made global headlines.

“Why not Bunga-Bunga airport,” said one, in a German-language publication, referring to the sex-fueled bacchanals at Mr. Berlusconi’s villa that he described as merely “elegant dinners.”

The polemics began immediately after the transportation minister, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League party and a political ally of Mr. Berlusconi, announced on July 5 that the country’s Civil Aviation Authority had approved a request from regional leaders to name the airport after Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Salvini described him as “ a great businessman, great Milanese and great Italian.” The new name became official less than a week later, Mr. Salvini announced on social media.

Outrage followed.

“Airports are undoubtedly named after people who have brought prestige to Italy, and while Silvio Berlusconi was certainly a great entrepreneur and certainly a part of Italian politics, he was a divisive figure, loved by millions of Italians and opposed by as many millions of Italians who believed he used politics for personal gain,” said Silvia Roggiani, a national lawmaker with the center-left Democratic Party and the party’s regional secretary in Lombardy, where the airport is located, some 30 miles northwest of Milan.

Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, in 2021.

She added in a telephone interview that Mr. Berlusconi’s multiple legal travails, as well as his treatment of women — he promoted women as showgirls on his television channels and had dalliances that caused him legal headaches — did not make him an ideal candidate.

Ms. Roggiani said that her party’s youth wing had sponsored the petition to block the naming, and on Monday the party participated in a demonstration at the headquarters of the Lombardy region, which is run by the center-right. She said that the Democrats would also support legal actions being considered by nine small towns surrounding the airport, which were upset that they had not been involved in the decision to rename it.

Mr. Berlusconi was expelled from the Senate because of a tax fraud conviction and was barred from holding public office for several years, reason enough for to disqualify the honor, his critics said.

Calling the nomination a “purely political act,” Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, posted an appeal on Instagram last week to Mr. Berlusconi’s daughter, Marina. “You experienced firsthand how much your father was loved and hated. Wouldn’t it have been better to wait, to let tempers cool,” he wrote.

According to Italian law, a person has to be dead at least 10 years before a street, piazza or public building is named after him or her. Exceptions can be made, though.

Marina’s brother, Pier Silvio Berlusconi, said that the family had not been informed about the decision until the last minute.

Not everyone is against the naming. “It’s a recognition for someone who did something for Italy. He was more than just talk, like a lot of other politicians,” said Ugo Barelli, a mechanical designer from Milan who was in Malpensa Airport on Tuesday. Rosanna Filomeno, a retired office cleaner in Milan, said, “Why not,” adding, “I liked him, as a public figure.”

At Monday’s protest, feelings were less generous. Demonstrators held signs of other potential airport naming nominees, including the Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini and Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist politician who was killed by fascists in 1924. A trade union posted a petition nominating Carla Fracci, the principal dancer of Milan’s La Scala opera theater, who died in 2021.

Stefano Bellaria, the center-left mayor of Somma Lombardo, one of the towns that may sue over the decision, said the airport should have been named after someone who had connections with the area and its aeronautical history.

“They day they build a heliport in Arcore, it’s right that its dedicated to Berlusconi, because he used helicopters, but he has nothing to do with here,” Mr. Bellaria said, referring to the town where Mr. Berlusconi had a villa.

It would have made more sense, he said, to select someone like Gianni Caproni, an aviation pioneer who in 1910 flew the first plane in the area. Another option, Mr. Bellaria said, was Amalia Ercoli Finzi, 87, a local and the first Italian woman to graduate with a degree in aeronautical engineering who has served as a scientific adviser for NASA and the Italian and European space agencies.

“Why not fly high and find a name that will unite?” he asked.

Mayor of Paris Takes an Olympian Plunge in a Beautified Seine

Anne Hidalgo swam in the cleaned-up waters of the capital’s river, fulfilling a promise that has become a symbol of the Olympic Games that start this month.

[Embedded video available]

By Roger Cohen  17 Jul, 2024

After multiple delays caused by a combination of torrential rain and torrid domestic politics, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, took to the cleaned-up waters of the Seine on Wednesday, fulfilling a promise that has become a symbol of the Paris Olympics.

With the Games just nine days away, on the kind of perfect Paris morning that inspires wonder, Ms. Hidalgo, a socialist who has pursued the ecological transformation of the city, stepped down into the murky river that will be a focal point of the Olympics.

A vast engineering project, costing some $1.5 billion over the past several years, has stanched the flow of sewage and industrial waste into the Seine. The result is a river that is clean enough for several Olympic events — including the triathlon and two 10-kilometer swimming events — to be held in it and for the opening ceremony involving a flotilla of boats carrying thousands of athletes to take place on it.

As crowds looked on from the riverbanks and bridges, Ms. Hidalgo, 65, in goggles and a black wet suit, swam the crawl rapidly downstream, accompanied by Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris Olympics Committee and a three-time Olympic gold medalist as a slalom canoeist.

After much rain in the past two months, the river is still flowing at about three times its normal speed.

Ms. Hidalgo’s initial plan to swim on June 23 was postponed because of the level of the river and the bacteria in it. The swim was put back to June 30. But that idea was blown out of the water by President Emmanuel Macron’s surprise move to hold snap parliamentary elections that day — a decision Ms. Hidalgo deplored. “Why ruin this beautiful moment?” she said, alluding to how the vote would encroach on the Olympics.

Mr. Macron, who was invited and had indicated he might swim in the river at some point, was a notable absentee on Wednesday.

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, in the Seine on Wednesday. A vast engineering project, costing some $1.5 billion over the past several years, has stanched the flow of sewage and industrial waste into the river.

The aftershocks of the inconclusive election have not abated. After the government’s resignation on Tuesday, which he accepted, Mr. Macron asked it to stay on in a caretaker capacity. This means that a France in political limbo will host the first Olympics held in Paris since 1924.

Ms. Hidalgo and Mr. Estanguet, accompanied by Marc Guillaume, the top government official for the Paris region, were all smiles during their brief swim and after they came ashore.

“Perhaps this kind of madness is particularly French,” Mr. Estanguet said. “We like to move the boundaries.”

There is, it seems, a grandiose folly to the idea of making the Seine the center of a citywide stadium, with Olympic events being held at many of the city’s landmarks, including the Grand Palais, the Place de la Concorde and beside the Eiffel Tower. But behind the plan has lain a serious ambition: to make the Games as close to carbon neutral as possible by using the existing city rather than building a series of new stadiums that then stand empty.

Swimming was banned in the Seine in 1923. Ms. Hidalgo’s plan is for the river to be used not merely for a handful of Olympic events but also, from next year, for public swimming at a few locations.

Bleachers now line the Seine, and more are going up. Many bridges are closed. Roads and sidewalks are fenced off as security concerns run high for the opening ceremony. Some residents will soon need police-issued QR codes to reach their own apartments. Paris, for the moment, has emptied out as residents flee what some regard as a life-complicating takeover of their city.

In the current French climate, even a swim is political. The sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who is from Mr. Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, tried to one-up Ms. Hidalgo last weekend by plunging unexpectedly into the river.

As a stunt it went well, with images of the minister’s swim spreading quickly. But Ms. Hidalgo, who is well to the political left of Ms. Oudéa-Castéra, was pointedly silent. The two women are known to have a relationship of cordial mutual loathing, which has not improved over the past week.

E.U. Court Rebukes Bloc’s Executive Arm Over Covid Vaccine Contract Secrecy

The court ruled that the European Commission wrongly withheld information, casting a shadow on its leader, Ursula von der Leyen, before a crucial vote on her future.

A woman received a Covid-19 vaccine near Paris in 2021. The European Union’s initial vaccine campaign was marred by a slow start.

By Jenny Gross  17 Jul, 2024

The European Union’s second-highest court delivered an unusual reprimand to the European Commission on Wednesday, ruling that it did not give the public sufficient information about its agreements to purchase Covid-19 vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision by the General Court in Luxembourg gives new momentum to critics of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, who led the bloc’s response to the pandemic. It came just ahead of what is expected to be a tight vote on Thursday that will determine if she will serve another term as the European Union’s top official.

The European Union has refused to disclose the terms of the contracts it secured for Covid-19 vaccines, publishing redacted purchasing agreements. Green members of the European Parliament and private individuals had sued the commission, the bloc’s executive arm, seeking to gain access to the contracts and terms it negotiated with vaccine manufacturers.

On Wednesday, the court found that the European Commission was wrong to redact parts of the purchasing agreements that it published online, saying that it “did not demonstrate that wider access” to the details would undermine commercial interests. The court also said that the commission should have disclosed conflicts of interest by members of the team who negotiated the purchase of the vaccines.

The European Commission said in a statement that it would “carefully study” the court’s findings and their implications. It noted that the commission had needed to “strike a difficult balance” between giving the public and members of the European Parliament access to information, while satisfying the legal requirements of the vaccine contracts.

“In fact, in many cases in the past,” the statement said, an E.U. court has “recognized the need to protect the business interests of a contractual partner.” It added that the commission had provided the European Parliament “full information” on the vaccine contracts.

The European Union’s initial vaccine campaign was marred by a slow start compared with Britain and the United States, with the bloc taking a more conservative, budget-conscious approach. But the European Union later caught up and even surpassed other major countries after Ms. von der Leyen secured a contract with Pfizer-BioNTech, announced in May 2021, worth billions of euros.

At the time, the deal was backed by all E.U. member states, and Ms. von der Leyen was widely praised for securing access to the Pfizer vaccines. In 2021, when 70 percent of E.U. adults had been fully vaccinated, Ms. von der Leyen hailed the milestone and lauded the bloc’s coronavirus response.

But in the following years, concern has grown that the bloc, under Ms. von der Leyen’s direction, ordered too many vaccines, resulting in some going to waste.

In a separate case, The New York Times last year sued the European Commission as part of a freedom of information request that sought access to text messages between Ms. von der Leyen and the chief executive of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, as they negotiated a deal for Covid-19 vaccines. The case is pending in the European Court of Justice.

The New York Times welcomed the ruling on Wednesday.

“We are very pleased to see the court recognize and reinforce the importance of freedom of information in the European Union,” Maria Case, a spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Criticism of Ms. von der Leyen’s secrecy over the vaccine contracts is one of the more serious shadows she faces in terms of her record. In 2022, the European Commission said that it could not find the relevant text messages between Ms. von der Leyen and Dr. Bourla.

Concerns about the lack of transparency on the vaccine contracts, which come amid a recent surge in far-right politicians gaining seats in the European Parliament, have contributed to a sense of distrust among European voters about how officials have spent taxpayer money.

Because Thursday’s vote to determine whether Ms. von der Leyen can serve a second five-year term as president of the European Commission is secret and party discipline in the European Parliament is loose, she will need to rely on a broad coalition to secure the 361 votes needed to be confirmed by the 720-seat assembly.

In addition to members of her own party, Ms. von der Leyen will most likely need votes from center-left lawmakers including the Greens, who have been incensed by the way she handled the coronavirus crisis. Still, Ms. von der Leyen is expected to narrowly win.

In a Porridge Box, an Ancient Treasure Mysteriously Arrives in Dublin

The National Museum of Ireland received two copper Bronze Age ax heads in the mail. Now it needs to figure out who found them.

The ax heads arrived to the museum in a porridge box accompanied by an anonymous note about where they had been found.

By Ali Watkins  17 Jul, 2024

They arrived in a Flahavan’s porridge box, their gnarled edges tightly wedged into rudimentary, makeshift foam packaging, shaky pen marks still visible from where the sender had outlined their shape: two paddle-shaped copper ax heads, their hand-carved edges long since dulled by time — 4,000 years’ worth.

“It was addressed to me,” said Matt Seaver, an assistant keeper in the antiquities division of the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

So began a mystery that has befuddled the museum and its staff, which received the archaeological treasures in late June and subsequently confirmed their authenticity. The Bronze Age ax heads are a significant discovery, Mr. Seaver said. But it’s hard to say much else without the details.

“You’re talking about two early Bronze Age copper ax heads, possibly even older than 2300 B.C.,” Mr. Seaver said. “They’re intentionally placed in the ground. By archaeologically excavating the location of that find spot, you could reveal a lot more than just taking them out of the ground.”

The package was sent anonymously, accompanied by a letter that explained the finder hoped the artifacts could be preserved in the museum. It explained they had been found with a metal detector in County Westmeath, the geographic heart of the island and site of the kingdom of Meath. Within the county’s borders are some of Ireland’s most sacred sites, including the Hill of Uisneach, regarded as the island’s ancient center.

It’s a complicated circumstance in Ireland, where the earth is riddled with ancient treasures and rich history. Unlike some other parts of Europe and the United Kingdom, Ireland forbids the independent search or excavation of antiquities, especially via metal detector. Most countries allow the use of the machines recreationally on public land or with the permission of private owners, with preservation rules requiring finders to notify the authorities if they find something archaeologically significant.

In Ireland, though, it is forbidden to use a metal detector to search for archaeological objects anywhere in the country without a permit. Such strictures most likely explain why the finder opted for a more cloak-and-dagger strategy in turning over the artifacts. After all, using a metal detector to find relics in Ireland is punishable by a fine of more than 60,000 euros or even three months in jail.

These rules leave people in natural conundrums if they turn up something worthwhile; indeed, it is not the first time such strange, anonymous deliveries have arrived at the museum’s gates. In 2016, a similar package — this time in a plain brown envelope — arrived at the museum’s Kildare Street facility, located in the heart of Dublin. Inside were ax heads and Viking jewelry.

Though that package was not accompanied by a letter, museum officials still believed the objects were most likely found with a metal detector, and perhaps by a tourist or someone who was not Irish, and therefore potentially not familiar with the country’s prohibition on the machines until after the discovery.

The museum used the most recent delivery as a chance to issue a reminder on the prohibition on metal detecting — but still, it said, it hoped that the original anonymous sender might reveal themselves. In an effort to coax them forward, the museum said that information about the find would be used in confidence, and only to verify the objects’ historical significance.

“We obviously don’t want a cluster of objects coming to us anonymously, because it’s a poor precedent and the law is what it is,” Mr. Seaver said. “But in this situation, we’d face it as pragmatically as we can.”

Judge Orders Boss Who Coughed at Employee During Pandemic to Pay Damages

The ruling by a tribunal judge in Britain highlighted the challenges and missteps businesses encountered during the early days of the pandemic.

Barriers in central London in 2020, set up to allow more room for pedestrians because of Covid-19 social distancing measures.

By Lynsey Chutel  17 Jul, 2024

A judge in Wales has ordered a businessman to pay a former employee thousands of pounds in damages for deliberately coughing at her during the coronavirus pandemic.

Court papers shared publicly this week revealed that an employment tribunal judge in Wrexham found that the businessman, Kevin Davies, must pay his former employee 26,438 pounds, nearly $35,000, for his “inexcusable” conduct.

The ruling about the incident, in 2020, served as a reminder of the challenges businesses and their employees faced during the early days of the pandemic, as countries navigated social distancing and in some cases went into lockdown.

The former employee, who was not named by the tribunal, had worked for a property company owned by Mr. Davies in Newcastle Emlyn, a town in northwest Wales, since December 2017.

The court heard that she suffered from an autoimmune condition that made her particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. She had repeatedly asked colleagues to practice social distancing once the government announced safety measures in early 2020 to stop the spread of the virus — but her requests were dismissed, court records showed.

On March 17 of that year — days before Britain went into lockdown — Mr. Davies coughed “deliberately and loudly” in the woman’s direction then loudly commented that she was being ridiculous for requesting social distancing, the court records showed.

“His purpose was to ridicule and intimidate,” Judge Tobias Vincent Ryan said in his ruling.

Judge Ryan dismissed Mr. Davies’ denial of the incident — noting that other employees had heard and testified to it — and added that his conduct was “inexcusable and cannot be discounted as a joke or something light-hearted.”

The former employee’s autoimmune condition was documented before the pandemic. Diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, a chronic condition that creates a painful stiffness in the joints and affects the person’s skin, the woman had been given a chair with lumbar support by her employer, who had also adapted her sign-in procedure, the court heard.

But the coronavirus brought an added risk to office work. Studies showed that people with existing autoimmune conditions, like arthritis, had an increased risk of respiratory complications and were more likely to die from Covid-19.

After the coughing incident, the woman complained to human resources. When that complaint went nowhere, according to court records, she went to the police. By June of that year, she had resigned over what she described as an “untenable” workplace environment.

The woman, who remains anonymous, told a Welsh newspaper after the ruling that the March 2020 incident had left her “shaken.” Mr. Davies, the father of celebrated Welsh rugby player Gareth Davies, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Promise of a Changed U.K. Comes Wrapped in Royal Tradition

From plans to tackle climate change to ending the role of hereditary legislators, the ceremonial King’s Speech showcased the progressive priorities of Britain’s Labour government.

[Embedded video available]

By Mark Landler  17 Jul, 2024

At last, a “King’s Speech” that the king himself might have written, at least in its bridge-building, planet-saving passages.

On Wednesday, King Charles III formally opened Britain’s Parliament, presenting the priorities of Britain’s new Labour government, a center-left legislative agenda that chimes with some of his own cherished projects, from curbing climate change to cultivating close ties with the European Union.

It was a stark contrast to last year, when Charles presented the agenda of the Conservative government, which included plans to expand oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. Critics said that was at odds with Britain’s “net zero” emissions goals; the Labour government has promised to end new oil and gas exploration.

Nothing in the king’s demeanor suggested that he was any more enthusiastic speaking the words drafted for him by Prime Minister Keir Starmer than he was with last year’s speech, prepared by Mr. Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak.

His poker face spoke to a lifetime of studied political neutrality, a central tenet of Britain’s constitutional monarchy. That job requirement is rarely tested more than on the day the king opens Parliament, wearing the jewel-encrusted Imperial State Crown to deliver a speech jam-packed with politics.

“My government will govern in service to the country,” Charles intoned. “My government’s legislative program will be mission led and based upon the principles of security, fairness and opportunity for all.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, right, and Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister and leader of the opposition.

Among the marquee initiatives the speech presented was a plan to create two new public companies, Great British Energy, which would invest in clean-energy projects across the country, and Great British Railways, which would put Britain’s much-maligned private rail companies back into public ownership.

In one of its most avowedly political moves, the government confirmed it would no longer exempt private schools from paying value-added tax. It will use the revenue raised from that to hire 6,500 teachers for public schools.

Charles noted that Mr. Starmer will convene dozens of European leaders at a security summit at Blenheim Palace, near Oxford, on Thursday. That will give the government a stage to begin resetting its relationship with the European Union, even if the scope for an expanded trade relationship is rather limited.

For all the comfort the king may have felt in laying out new initiatives on climate change and Europe, he also found himself in the curious position — for a hereditary monarch — of presenting a plan to banish hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

The government billed this as the first step in a campaign to modernize the Lords, the ancient upper chamber of Parliament, whose aristocratic lineage makes it a natural target for any incoming Labour government.

A new law would go after roughly 90 peers whose seats were passed to them through their fathers. An explanatory document provided by the government noted that all these peers are men, with 42 seats reserved for peers affiliated with the Conservative Party, and two going to Labour aristocrats.

“In the 21st century,” the government said, “there should not be almost 100 places reserved for individuals who were born into certain families, nor should there be seats effectively reserved only for men.”

This was only the second state opening Charles presided over as king, though he had been deputized to read the speech on behalf of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, when she was ill near the end of her reign.

Britain’s last elected Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, set out to overhaul the House of Lords in 1999. But his efforts to remove all hereditary members bogged down, as the Lords showed a remarkable capacity for self-preservation. Mr. Blair ended up accepting a compromise that left a rump group of hereditary peers in place. Mr. Starmer has portrayed this as unfinished business.

Nonhereditary members of the Lords welcomed the change, though some noted it might be very gradual. The legislation could phase out the hereditary seats, one by one, as each member retires. Given that some of the peers are in their 50s, the culling process could take years.

“It will be a very slow burn,” said Rosalind Scott, a baroness who is a former president of the Liberal Democrats. Simon McDonald, a former head of the British diplomatic service who is a cross-bench, or nonpartisan, member, said, “Of course it will change the institution, but not radically.”

“In some ways, they are the most normal element of the membership, chosen by the lottery of birth,” Lord McDonald said. “The problem is that they all come from a narrow, privileged bit of society.”

It is easy to poke fun at the House of Lords. With 775 seats, it is the second-largest legislative body in the world, after the National People’s Congress of China — so large that not all the members can find seats in its gilded chamber at the same time. Conveniently, some of them rarely show up anyway.

Under Conservative prime ministers, the Lords became an ethically dubious club for party donors and other well-connected people. Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed Evgeny Lebedev, a friend and Russian-born media baron whose father was once a K.G.B. officer; as well as Charlotte Owen, a 31-year-old former aide.

But the House of Lords can also play a serious legislative role. In the last session of Parliament, several members delayed, and attempted to amend, a plan to put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda, citing human rights concerns.

The House of Commons ultimately overrode these objections. But the Labour government has since jettisoned the legislation, declaring it costly, inhumane and ineffective. That may also have pleased Charles: British newspapers reported that in 2022, he condemned the idea of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda as “appalling.”

The king passed by anti-monarchy protesters on his way to Parliament.

There is much in the government’s agenda that may interest the king. The government confirmed plans to rewrite Britain’s sclerotic planning rules to build thousands of additional houses. Charles has made housing one of his pet pursuits, overseeing a planned community, Poundbury, on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which he owned as Prince of Wales. He also has a record, sometimes successful, of opposing property developments on architectural grounds.

Although this was only the second state opening Charles presided over as king, he had been deputized to read the speech on behalf of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, when she was ill near the end of her reign.

Charles himself is being treated for cancer. But he spoke clearly on Wednesday, and noted that in October, he and Queen Camilla would travel to Australia and Samoa, where he would chair a meeting of the Commonwealth heads of government.

The sense of a new era in British politics, and a smooth transfer of power, was palpable. Mr. Starmer chatted amiably with Mr. Sunak, as the current and former prime ministers walked to the House of Lords, where the king, sitting on a throne and clad in an 18-foot velvet cape, was waiting for them.

Ukraine’s Devastated Energy Grid Battles a New Foe: A Sizzling Heat Wave

To prevent a collapse of the electricity system, crippled by months of Russian attacks, the authorities have imposed rolling blackouts. Experts say it’s a harbinger of what’s to come this winter.

Generators powering a row of shops in the Podil neighborhood of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on Tuesday.

By Constant Méheut  17 Jul, 2024

For months, Ukraine’s electricity grid has faced repeated Russian missile and drone attacks that have knocked out power plants and gutted substations. Now, it is contending with another, more unexpected threat: a sizzling heat wave.

Most of the country is experiencing unusually hot summer weather, with temperatures reaching 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius. It has strained an already hobbled grid, as residents turn on air-conditioners and food businesses use more electricity to cool products. Ukrenergo, the country’s national electricity operator, said Monday that current consumption largely exceeds Ukraine’s generating capacity.

To prevent a collapse of the grid, the authorities have imposed widespread rolling blackouts across the country. In Kyiv, the capital, most buildings are now without power for at least 10 hours a day, including during long periods in the daytime.

Patrons at an outdoor bar being served drinks by the light of a cellphone amid rolling blackouts in Kyiv.

On Tuesday, Valerii Kalinichenko, a waiter at Shibuya Sushi Kiosk, a Japanese restaurant in central Kyiv, said his managers had bought a 15-kilowatt gas generator to provide power and keep their food fresh. “Power outages — we are ready for them,” he said.

The roar of generators installed by cafes and restaurants has become a soundtrack of the Ukrainian capital since the heat wave began last week.

With power out in the city, residents walk their dogs at night using glow sticks as collars on streets plunged into darkness. During the day, they flock to the banks of the Dnipro River that snakes through Kyiv, hoping to cool themselves off.

Energy experts say the current blackouts are a harbinger of what’s to come this winter. Recent Russian attacks have destroyed about half of Ukraine’s generating capacity, officials say, and there isn’t enough time to repair or rebuild many power plants before the winter.

People walked under a mist sprayer on Wednesday at Taras Shevchenko Park in Kyiv.

Oleksandr Kharchenko, head of the Kyiv-based Energy Research Centre, estimated that power cuts in December and January will occur at more or less the same frequency and length as they are now, although other experts have warned of an even worse situation, with outages crippling sewage systems, for example.

Russia began attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the fall of 2022, targeting substations that distribute electricity. Ukraine managed to repair most of them, allowing it to get through last winter without significant disruption. At the start of this year, the country had about 18 gigawatts of generating capacity, enough to cover peak consumption in summer and winter.

But Russia’s latest campaign against the grid, which began in late March, has directly targeted power plants. Nearly all of Ukraine’s thermal power plants and a third of its hydroelectric power stations have been destroyed, President Volodymyr Zelensky said last month, bringing the country’s generating capacity down to nine gigawatts.

That is not enough to meet peak summer demand, which Mr. Kharchenko estimated at around 12 gigawatts. He added that the heat wave had increased consumption by 25 percent, leaving the government with little choice but to impose the blackouts.

Every day, Ukrainians consult online timetables of planned power cuts that mark outage hours with blue crossed-out lightning bolts and possible blackouts with gray bolts.

Ruslan Bakumov, an unemployed resident of Kyiv, said on Tuesday that power outages had become the new normal at his home, causing food in his fridge to rot. He now spends most days sunbathing at a beach beside the Dnipro River.

The Dnipro River on Tuesday. “You can’t turn on the air-conditioner and it’s very hot,” said Maria Cherevko, a 20-year-old student. “So you come here and you can cool off in the water — and get a tan at the same time.”

Around him, hundreds of people, young and old, were enjoying an afternoon on the beach in sweltering temperatures. It looked like an oasis of peace in a city that only last week was hit by one of the deadliest Russian air assaults of the war, killing more than 30 people.

The Ukrainian authorities have been exploring various solutions to try to restore as much generating capacity as possible before winter sets in. They are negotiating with the European Union to remove bottlenecks that limit Ukraine’s electricity import capacity to 1.7 gigawatts; and have pressed Western allies to provide spare parts from decommissioned power plants.

DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, published on Wednesday a list of all the equipment it urgently needs, such as transformers, worth a total of $176 million. But officials and experts acknowledge that the repaired power stations could be hit again by Russian missiles before winter, rendering the effort pointless.

A generator leading to a private apartment is chained to a pole in Kyiv.

Ukrainian officials have also floated the idea of installing hundreds of small gas turbines across the country, which would have the added benefit of dispersing the energy infrastructure, making it harder for Russia to target. Roman Vybranovskyy, the co-founder of the Ukraine Facility Platform, a think tank, said the “idea is great on paper, but hard in reality.”

Connecting gas turbines to communities requires equipment that is not easily available, he said, noting that some recently-installed turbines were not working. “Turbines are not a plug-and-play solution.”

The Ukrainian government has said that power cuts will ease next month, when nuclear power plants currently under repair will be back in operation.

On the riverside beach in Kyiv, several sunbathers were skeptical the situation would improve given Russia’s punishing pace of airstrikes on power plants. “Hope for the best, expect the worst,” said Oleksandr Kravchenko, 37. “Only God knows what will happen.”

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.

U.S. Accuses Former C.I.A. Analyst of Working for South Korea

Sue Mi Terry, a North Korea expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, was charged with acting as an agent for Seoul after leaving the intelligence agency.

Sue Mi Terry began operating as a foreign agent in June 2013, according to the indictment.

By Claire Fahy, Jesse McKinley and Benjamin Weiser  16 Jul, 2024

Sue Mi Terry, a prominent voice on American foreign policy, had a refined palate, a love for top-shelf sushi and a taste for designer labels. She liked coats by Christian Dior, handbags by Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton, and Michelin-starred restaurants.

And, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, she accepted such luxury goods and other gifts in exchange for serving the South Korean government in Seoul.

Ms. Terry, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and a senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is accused in a 31-page indictment released Tuesday of a yearslong effort to assist South Korean spies. The indictment says she even introduced the spies to congressional staff members, an action that she described as “bringing the wolf in.”

The charges, which were brought by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, were part of a concerted push by the Justice Department to combat foreign influence in American affairs, which has produced dozens of prosecutions in recent years. Such cases have been set off by illegal campaign contributions from overseas, covert influence operations and even the bribing of Senator Robert Menendez, for which he was convicted Tuesday.

In Ms. Terry’s case, prosecutors say she began operating as a foreign agent in 2013, five years after leaving the C.I.A. She was first contacted by an intelligence officer posing as a diplomat for the Korean mission to the United Nations in New York City, the indictment said, and in return for her work over the next decade, Ms. Terry received handbags, clothing and at least $37,000 in covert payments to the think tank where she was employed at the time.

“Despite engaging in extensive activities for and at the direction of” the South Korean government, Ms. Terry did not register as a foreign agent with American officials, as required by law, prosecutors said. She faces two counts, one for failing to register under the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the other for conspiring to violate it.

In a statement, Lee Wolosky, Ms. Terry’s lawyer, said that the allegations were unfounded and distorted “the work of a scholar and news analyst known for her independence and years of service to the United States.”

“Dr. Terry has not held a security clearance for over a decade, and her views on matters relating to the Korean Peninsula have been consistent over many years,” Mr. Wolosky said. “In fact, she was a harsh critic of the South Korean government during times this indictment alleges that she was acting on its behalf.”

He added, “Once the facts are made clear, it will be evident the government made a significant mistake.”

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, said in a statement that Ms. Terry had “sold out her positions and influence” for personal gain.

“The charges brought should send a clear message to those in public policy who may be tempted to sell their expertise to a foreign government to think twice and ensure you are in accordance with the law,” the statement read.

Considered an expert on North Korea and broader security issues in the region, Ms. Terry has worked not only at the C.I.A., but at the National Intelligence Council and the National Security Council, places where she produced “hundreds of intelligence assessments,” according to her biography on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

According to the indictment, federal agents had suspicions regarding Ms. Terry’s contact with Seoul as early as November 2014, when the F.B.I. called her in for a voluntary interview.

As she was questioned, Ms. Terry became “visibly nervous, changed her speech pattern and began to stutter and shift in her seat,” the indictment said. Over the ensuing years, agents would track Ms. Terry to numerous restaurants and luxury stores in Washington, D.C., providing photos of her dining with her handlers and standing next to them at cash registers as they bought her expensive goods. Several were included in court papers Tuesday.

In an interview with the F.B.I. in June 2023, Ms. Terry, who was born in Seoul but raised in the United States, admitted that she had resigned from the C.I.A. in 2008 rather than be fired because the agency had “problems” with her contacts with members of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the indictment said.

But her national-security work was only prelude to more wrongdoing after she left the government, according to prosecutors, including disclosing “nonpublic U.S. government information” to intelligence officers working for South Korea. The indictment says that Ms. Terry handed over handwritten notes of a private group meeting in 2022 regarding the U.S. government’s policy toward North Korea that she attended with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

During this period, the indictment said, Ms. Terry worked for several well-known think tanks in Washington.

Ms. Terry’s activity on behalf of South Korea started small and became more ambitious as she worked with three different handlers, the indictment said. At first, she mainly published opinion articles favorable to South Korea’s stance on North Korea, but soon she was facilitating meetings between incoming Trump administration officials and South Korean intelligence agents in 2016. By 2018, Ms. Terry was hosting meetings at a think tank at the request of her South Korean handlers, giving them access to U.S. national security officials, the indictment said.

Ms. Terry made media appearances and wrote articles in American and South Korean publications reflecting Seoul’s policy priorities, the indictment said, including an opinion piece for The New York Times in 2014. She also co-wrote a piece with her husband, Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist, about the improving relationship between South Korea and Japan.

On three occasions, Ms. Terry testified before Congress about North Korea, which required her to sign a form before each hearing declaring that she was not a registered foreign agent.

In April 2023, Ms. Terry hosted an event at a think tank where she invited congressional staff members and worked to study South Korea’s alliance with the United States at the request of the South Korean National Intelligence Service. Ms. Terry then invited the staff members to a happy hour where South Korean intelligence officers were present, allowing the officers to “spot and assess” potential recruits, according to the indictment.

As her work became more risky, her rewards were greater, prosecutors said. Her payment started with a $2,950 Bottega Veneta bag and ballooned to lump sums of $11,000 and then $25,000, paid to Ms. Terry’s gift account at the think tank where she worked, over which she had sole discretion, they said.

During lavish dinners at primarily Michelin-starred sushi restaurants, followed by drinks at rooftop bars, Ms. Terry’s handler would feed her lines she would then parrot in media appearances in the form of policy recommendations regarding U.S.-South Korea relations, the indictment said.

Iva Zorić, a spokeswoman for the Council on Foreign Relations, said the organization had learned of the indictment on Tuesday and placed Ms. Terry on unpaid administrative leave. She added that the council would cooperate with any investigation.

Hiker’s Death Prompts Move to Allow Wider Bear Cull in Romania

But some experts described the planned cull as excessive and said it would not keep people safe.

A bear on a street in Covasna, a town in central Romania, last fall.

By Amelia Nierenberg  17 Jul, 2024

When a wild bear attack led to the death of a 19-year-old hiker in Romania last week, the episode terrified people across the country and inspired a storm of horrified tabloid headlines.

So almost immediately, lawmakers in Romania — which is home to two-thirds of Europe’s wild brown bears and has long been a favored destination for hunters of big game — seized on the outcry to push for a broader cull.

Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu called lawmakers back from summer recess for a snap parliamentary session on bear attacks. And on Monday, they voted to more than double the number of brown bears that can be legally killed in Romania, raising the annual kill quota to 481, from 220.

Barna Tanczos, a senator who previously served as Romania’s environment minister and has long pushed for a broader cull, said of the move, “There is no other viable alternative besides issuing prevention and intervention quotas for brown bears.”

But some experts argue that the measure, if the country’s president signs it into law, will not get to the root of the problem, because it would not meaningfully reduce the amount of human-bear encounters.

“It will not prevent cases like this from happening again in the future,” Csaba Domokos, a bear biologist who works with the Milvus Group, a conservation organization in Romania, said in a telephone interview. Instead, he advised a change in behavior toward bears, noting that some people had even fed the animals by hand for selfies.

Brown bears are a protected species in Europe, and Romania tightly restricts hunting of the animals. From 2004 to 2021, there were 240 bear attacks on people in the country, according to environment ministry, and 22 people died.

Although lawmakers said they had no choice but to act to control what they described as overpopulation, there is even disagreement over how many brown bears there are in Romania, a country roughly the size of Michigan.

The environment ministry estimates that Romania had about 6,400 to 7,200 bears in 2019, an increase from the approximately 6,000 to 6,600 six years earlier. Yet some bear experts say that there has not been a recent reliable count, and that there is insufficient data to support any arguments that the country’s bear population is growing out of control.

“I don’t know if this is increasing — or if it has become really more visible,” Mr. Domokos said, citing images of a maimed body that were widely shared on social media after last week’s fatal attack.

Romania has long been a favored destination for hunters of big game.

Bear alerts and such widely shared videos have made people hypervigilant, said Barbara Promberger-Fuerpass, an executive director of the Carpathia Conservation Foundation, a philanthropic organization that seeks to protect the Carpathian Mountains, where many bears roam.

“It’s the perception that is out of control,” she said.

The hiker who died last week, a Romanian woman, was in the Bucegi Mountains, which are part of the Southern Carpathians, according to Sergiu Frusinoiu, a team leader at Salvamont Prahova, a mountain rescue organization.

The organization said in a Facebook message that she was with a friend “on a very popular trail, maybe the most popular in Romania” when she encountered the bear. The hiker suffered “serious wounds before she fell in a canyon,” Mr. Frusinoiu said.

The organization also said that bear encounters were not rare, with at least one call a day in the area. Fatal attacks used to be more common, it said, but these days most of the calls came from farmers.

Some conservationists say that the number of bears and the way that bears have learned to behave toward humans are different things.

Bears in the wild usually keep to themselves, experts say, whereas the bears that are likely to cause repeated issues for humans are “habituated” to people, and drawn to settlements by easy access to food, like garbage.

In the case of last week’s fatality, the bear that attacked the hiker was “regularly fed by other tourists — so it had completely lost its fear of people,” Mr. Domokos said.

It is the wild bears that are coveted by hunters, who want to track through the country’s thick, mysterious forests, conservationists say.

“Trophy hunting will not help anything in respect to the problem bears,” said Christoph Promberger, who is also an executive of the Carpathia Conservation Foundation. “There’s no hunter that wants to stay around the village and shoot a small or medium-sized bear that is trying to break into a stable.”

Other deterrents — like electric fences and sheep dogs for agricultural areas — have been found to be ineffective, said Ovidiu Ionescu, a professor of wildlife management at Transylvania University of Brasov. Aggressive male bears have driven female bears and their cubs toward agricultural land, he said, and that has caused millions of dollars in damage in the last decade.

A cull, Professor Ionescu said, might be the most humane “compromise.”

Lynsey Chutel contributed reporting.

Former Syrian Official in Charge of Notorious Prison Is Arrested in Los Angeles

Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, who was seeking U.S. citizenship, is accused of falsely describing whether he persecuted anyone for their political beliefs or had been involved in any killings.

Adra prison on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, in 2010. Former prisoners describe being starved, beaten, tortured and raped at the complex.

By Katie Benner and Adam Goldman  16 Jul, 2024

A former Syrian military official who ran one of the country’s most notorious prisons and is accused of torturing and killing political dissidents has been arrested in Los Angeles, according to a court filing.

Federal law enforcement agents detained the former official, Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, 72, just before he was scheduled to depart last Wednesday on a one-way flight to Beirut, Lebanon, which shares a border with Syria, according to court papers. Federal investigators requested that a judge approve an arrest warrant a day earlier.

Mr. al-Sheikh, a permanent resident of Los Angeles since 2020, is accused of attempted naturalization fraud in his effort to seek U.S. citizenship, according to a criminal complaint filed last week. According to the complaint, Mr. al-Sheikh, who ran Syria’s infamous Adra prison and was a police commander, intelligence officer and brigadier general, falsely described whether he persecuted anyone for their political beliefs or had been involved in any killings.

The case is continuing and investigators are considering additional charges, according to court papers.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Andrew Tabler, who served as the director for Syria on the National Security Council under President Donald J. Trump and later as a senior adviser to the U.S. special envoy for Syria, compared the arrest to the Nazis seeking haven abroad.

“Adra prison is one of the crown jewels of the Assad regime’s gulags,” Mr. Tabler said. “The fact that someone who was in charge of this torture chamber made it into the United States is on par with Nazi commanders living comfortably in Latin America after World War II.”

The charges against Mr. al-Sheikh reflect a long-running effort by American officials to hold the Syrian government accountable for its use of detainment and torture.

The Justice Department is investigating the 2016 death of an American aid worker, Layla Shweikani, as a war crime carried out by Syrian intelligence officials. Officials recently notified the family of an American therapist, Majd Kamalmaz, that he died in captivity. And the government is still investigating the disappearance of Austin Tice, a freelance journalist who was abducted outside Damascus in 2012 while covering the Syrian civil war.

Investigators believe that Mr. al-Sheikh has close ties to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose authoritarian government uses kidnappings and violence to quell dissent.

From 2005 to 2008, Mr. al-Sheikh ran Adra prison, a complex on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital, which holds political dissidents, protesters and other civilians accused of crimes.

Former prisoners describe being starved, beaten, tortured and raped at Adra, where many have awaited trial for years or died.

Five former detainees told U.S. investigators that Mr. al-Sheikh oversaw their mistreatment and torture, according to an affidavit filed by an investigator at the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. al-Sheikh walked the prison with his aides, approving executions and watching as inmates were hanged in a part of the facility known as “execution square,” the prisoners recounted.

One said that under Mr. al-Sheikh’s authority, guards broke his back and stomped on him, according to the affidavit. A former Syrian politician recalled how Mr. al-Sheikh ordered his fellow inmates at Adra to kill him so his death would fly under the radar. The former politician said that an inmate who helped him was beaten with electric cables in Mr. al-Sheikh’s office.

Another prisoner told investigators that guards stripped inmates naked, beating them to unconsciousness and dragging them down stairs.

After the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Mr. al-Assad appointed Mr. al-Sheikh governor of Deir Ez-Zour Province, where citizens staged some of the largest demonstrations against Mr. Assad, according to the affidavit.

Under Mr. al-Sheikh, the military conducted violent crackdowns in response.

“His appointment was not arbitrary,” Amjad Al Sary, a Syrian activist who documents war crimes, said in an interview. “He was willing to kill, maim and terrorize people, and Assad knew only he would be able to stop the protests.”

Zyad al-Kadhem, who worked in the province’s department of agriculture under Mr. al-Sheikh, recalled his brutality.

As governor, Mr. al-Sheikh “fired on protesters and disappeared countless thousands of civilians,” Mr. al-Kadhem told The New York Times.

Mr. al-Kadhem shared evidence with American investigators, including an order from Mr. al-Sheikh informing any government worker who appeared at a protest or missed days from work that they would be questioned by intelligence agents. He said that he was set to be executed, arrested and tortured until his family intervened.

“My family paid all of their life savings so that my fate would not be the same as countless other men, women and children who were arrested and killed by al-Sheikh’s orders,” Mr. al-Kadhem said.

Two years after the crackdowns began in Deir Ez-Zour, Mr. al-Sheikh’s wife became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 2017, she filed papers for her husband to join her in Los Angeles and he began the process of obtaining an immigrant visa.

Mr. al-Sheikh lied on his application, according to the affidavit, “falsely stating that he had not committed, ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in extrajudicial killings, political killings or other acts of violence.” The affidavit also said that Mr. al-Sheikh lied during his interview for an immigrant visa.

Mr. al-Sheikh flew to Los Angeles on a green card in March 2020, where he began applying to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Mr. al-Sheikh is accused of making seven materially false statements on the application, according to the affidavit. He said that he never persecuted anyone for their political beliefs, never was involved in any killings, never tried to hurt another person, never worked in a prison or jail, and never worked with any group that used weapons against others. The government also accused him of providing false documentation and information.

Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group, said his organization became aware a few years ago that Mr. al-Sheikh was hiding in plain sight in Los Angeles.

Mr. Moustafa notified law enforcement, providing documentation and potential witnesses that tied Mr. al-Sheikh to atrocities carried out by the Syrian government.

Trump Tells Taiwan to Expect a Higher Price Tag for U.S. Defense

Trump also accused Taiwan of sinking the U.S. semiconductor sector, signaling he wants a more transactional approach to shielding the island from China.

Former President Donald Trump backstage before entering the Convention Hall on the first day of the RNC Convention in Milwaukee on Monday.

By Chris Buckley  17 Jul, 2024

Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said that Taiwan should pay the United States for defending it from China, a remark highlighting the uncertainties — and high stakes — of how he might handle the smoldering Taiwan Strait dispute if he should win a second term.

Taiwan depends on political and military support from the United States to help resist pressure from Beijing, which claims the island as Chinese territory. Mr. Trump warned that Taiwan is perilously exposed to any attack from China and far away from U.S. protection, and signaled that he would take a more bluntly conditional approach to Taiwan.

“I think Taiwan should pay us for defense,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that published on Tuesday. “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.”

Just as Mr. Trump’s denigration of NATO has rattled America’s allies, his comments on Taiwan raised the question of how invested a second Trump presidency would be in the island’s defense. The United States is committed by law to help Taiwan defend itself, and leaves open the possibility of sending forces if Beijing ever attacks the island.

A military exercise in Taiwan in 2023.

Mr. Trump also took aim at Taiwan’s dominance in making advanced semiconductors, saying: “They did take about 100 percent of our chip business.”

The share price of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — the world’s biggest maker of advanced computer chips — fell by 2.4 percent on the island’s stock exchange on Wednesday, apparently in reaction to his comments.

Although Mr. Trump has made similar comments about Taiwan in recent years, his latest may land in Taiwan with a bigger impact, given his strong position in the race against President Biden.

“If I was in Taiwan, I would take this statement seriously because it is not an isolated remark — there is now a pattern,” said David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This statement, in particular, epitomizes Trumpism because it reflects his purely transactional view of foreign policy.”

A Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company building in Tainan. The chip maker's stock price fell after Mr. Trump’s remarks about Taiwan monopolizing the industry.

Taiwan already pays for nearly all of its weapons orders from U.S. manufacturers, though the Biden administration has moved to directly transfer some military equipment to Taiwan, drawing on U.S. stockpiles. Mr. Trump’s broader point seemed to be that Taiwan owed the United States more for its overall security.

Still, Mr. Trump’s comments should not be read as the final word on U.S. policies toward Beijing and Taiwan if he wins in November, Taiwanese experts said. A chorus of voices in Washington, including the Republican nominee for vice president, J.D. Vance, may influence his position, they said.

“During his presidency, he did not openly talk about abandonment of Taiwan,” said Alexander C. Huang, an international security expert who advises Taiwan’s opposition Nationalist Party, referring to Mr. Trump’s term, which ended in January 2021. “We also already understand that President Trump, if he returns to the White House, would ask Taiwan to bear more responsibility for our defense.”

Taiwan’s government has been increasing spending on its military, and in 2022 it began extending conscription from 4 months to 12 months. But many Taiwanese experts and officials say that their island will need to spend more to deter China’s much larger army.

The Trump and Biden administrations both expanded support for Taiwan while U.S. relations with President Xi Jinping in Beijing soured drastically over the past eight years. On Wednesday, China’s foreign ministry again denounced U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and said it would, in retaliation, suspend highly tentative nuclear arms control discussions with Washington.

Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Vance, and other Republicans have argued that China remains the most pressing global challenge to the United States, and some say that protecting Taiwan should be a higher priority for Washington than backing Ukraine against Russia.

“I think that we should make it as hard as possible for China to take Taiwan in the first place,” Mr. Vance told The New York Times in an interview published last month. “We’re not doing that because we’re sending all the damn weapons to Ukraine and not Taiwan.”

The Republican vice-presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance could one day influence Mr. Trump’s decisions on Taiwan should they win the November election.

Taiwanese officials have also vigorously courted bipartisan support in Congress. Taiwan’s supporters in the Republican Party could persuade Mr. Trump to be less skeptical of the island if he wins, said Raymond Chen-En Sung, the vice president of the Prospect Foundation, an institute affiliated with the Taiwanese government.

“The strategic competition between the U.S. and China is something for the whole national security circle around Mr. Trump,” he said. If Mr. Trump won a new term, Mr. Sung added, “I believe they will have the task of educating the president about the importance of Taiwan.”

Even so, Mr. Trump’s comments are likely to spur Taiwan to try to assure the United States — and Mr. Trump — that it is committed to completing semiconductor plants in Arizona and to spending more on its own military.

“We’re willing to shoulder more responsibility. This is us defending ourselves,” Taiwan’s premier, Cho Jung-tai, said in response to Mr. Trump’s remarks. “We’re very grateful” for U.S. support, he added.

Officials in Washington have long been concerned about the world’s reliance on Taiwan for advanced semiconductors, the tiny computer chips that power electronic devices from iPhones to fighter jets.

Over the past four years, TSMC has committed to building new factories in Japan, Germany and Arizona. In April, the Biden administration awarded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, a $6.6 billion grant to try to bring cutting-edge chip making to the United States.

Mr. Trump suggested that was a raw deal.

TSMC is building a factory in Phoenix.

“Now we’re giving them billions of dollars to build new chips in our country, and then they’re going to take that, too,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. He said that China’s leader, Mr. Xi, also coveted Taiwan’s semiconductor facilities. “That’s the apple of President Xi’s eye,” Mr. Trump said.

The notion that Taiwan had “taken” the United States semiconductor business was a misunderstanding, said Eric Huang, vice president at Digitimes, a tech industry market research firm based in Taiwan. Most of the world’s top semiconductor companies by market value are American firms like Nvidia and Qualcomm, Mr. Huang said.

“Taiwan plays a supporting role primarily by providing manufacturing services for these U.S. chip companies,” he said.

Meaghan Tobin and John Liu contributed reporting.

In a Bangkok Hotel Room, Six Bodies and Traces of Cyanide

A case that shocked Thailand, the police indicated on Wednesday, was one of murder-suicide.

A news conference Wednesday at a Bangkok police station about the six bodies found in a downtown hotel room.

By Sui-Lee Wee and Muktita Suhartono  17 Jul, 2024

The luxury hotel room, a suite, had been locked for nearly a day. The bowls of tom yum soup and plates of stir-fried vegetables and fried rice had been left untouched. But there was something far more ominous in the room: six bodies.

The episode, at a hotel in downtown Bangkok, prompted speculation of a mass poisoning. The prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, rushed to the scene and offered assurances that Thailand, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, remained safe for overseas visitors.

A day later, on Wednesday, the police said they had found traces of cyanide in the room and indicated the poison had been administered by one of the people found dead.

The dead — three women and three men, ranging in age from 37 to 56 — were all of Vietnamese descent. Two of them were citizens of the United States, and the rest of Vietnam. They had arrived in Thailand earlier in the month, some for their first visit to the country. The group stayed at a five-star hotel, the Grand Hyatt Erawan, which sits across a famous Hindu shrine in the heart of downtown Bangkok.

Late on Sunday night, they gathered in a room on the 5th floor before returning to their rooms, police officials said. The next morning, five of them checked out and headed to room 502. At around 11:45 a.m. they ordered food. A little later, they added another serving of fried rice. At 1:51 p.m., a server brought in that order, along with two thermos flasks of tea and six teacups. He was in the room for roughly six minutes and saw only one person, a woman. He offered to make the tea, but the woman declined, saying she would make it herself.

It’s unclear what happened after the server left, but it appears nobody left or entered the room, which was locked from inside. The staff of the hotel went to check the room on Tuesday because the occupant had not checked out as scheduled. The police were soon at the scene.

Entering the suite, they found one body by the door. Three more bodies, including one of a woman lying by the dining table with the untouched food, were in the living room. The remaining two victims were found in the bedroom.

A preliminary investigation found traces of cyanide on each of the flasks and teacups and also in the blood of one of the victims. The dead, the police added, had been poisoned by one of the people in the room, who also died.

The suspect “did this by using cyanide,” Maj. Gen. Noppasin Poonsawat, the deputy police chief in Bangkok, told reporters. He did not identify the person but officials said they did not suspect any gang activity and emphasized that Thailand was safe for foreign visitors.

The dead were identified as Sherine Chong and Dang Hung Van, both Vietnamese Americans, and Nguyen Thi Phuong Lan, Hong Pham Thanh, Tran Dinh Phu, and Nguyen Thi Phuong, all Vietnamese citizens.

The police said they had spoken with the relatives of the dead and gleaned some details about the group.

It appeared, General Noppasin said, that Ms. Lan was a broker in an investment plan and Ms. Chong had received 10 million baht, or nearly $280,000, from Ms. Phuong and her husband, Mr. Thanh. The couple wanted an update on their investment from Ms. Chong and Ms. Lan and had agreed to discuss the issue in Japan, but they met in Bangkok instead because of visa problems.

The police shared images of drinks left in the room where the bodies were found.

Mr. Phu was a well-known makeup artist who had worked with many Vietnamese celebrities. He had traveled to Thailand to help a bride get ready for her wedding about 10 days ago, according to a report in Nguoi Lao Dong, a Vietnamese newspaper, which cited Mr. Phu’s relatives. His family said they did not know whom he traveled with and that he was often on the road, according to the newspaper.

The Thai police said on Wednesday that they were coordinating with the embassies of Vietnam and the United States to solve the case. Officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrived in Thailand to assist, they added.

By Wednesday evening, the frenzy at the hotel had started to subside. The episode recalled why the Erawan Shrine was built nearby in the 1950s: It was meant to ward off the bad luck that had plagued the original hotel on the Grand Hyatt site.

Moving in Childhood Contributes to Depression, Study Finds

A study of more than a million Danes found that frequent moves in childhood had a bigger effect than poverty on adult mental health risk.

Researchers found that people who moved more than once within the ages of 10 and 15 were 61 percent more likely to suffer from depression in adulthood compared to counterparts who had not moved.

By Ellen Barry  17 Jul, 2024

In recent decades, mental health providers began screening for “adverse childhood experiences” — generally defined as abuse, neglect, violence, family dissolution and poverty — as risk factors for later disorders.

But what if other things are just as damaging?

Researchers who conducted a large study of adults in Denmark, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found something they had not expected: Adults who moved frequently in childhood have significantly more risk of suffering from depression than their counterparts who stayed put in a community.

In fact, the risk of moving frequently in childhood was significantly greater than the risk of living in a poor neighborhood, said Clive Sabel, a professor at the University of Plymouth and the paper’s lead author.

“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” said Dr. Sabel, a geographer who studies the effect of environment on disease.

“I’ll flip it around by saying, even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once, that your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods,” he added.

The study, a collaboration by Aarhus University, the University of Manchester and the University of Plymouth, included all Danes born between 1982 and 2003, more than a million people. Of those, 35,098, or around 2.3 percent, received diagnoses of depression from a psychiatric hospital.

As expected, adults who grew up in the poorer neighborhoods were more likely to suffer from depression, with increased risk of 2 percent for each drop in neighborhood income level.

More surprising was the increased risk for adults who moved more than once between the ages of 10 and 15: They were 61 percent more likely to suffer from depression in adulthood compared with counterparts who had not moved, even after controlling for a range of other individual-level factors, the researchers found.

The study did not try to find reasons for this association, but Dr. Sabel speculated that moving was disruptive to children’s social networks, requiring them to replace their friend groups, athletic teams and religious communities, all forms of what he calls “social capital.”

“It’s at a vulnerable age — at that really important age — it’s when children have to take a pause and recalibrate,” he said. “We think our data points to something around disruption in childhood that we really haven’t looked at enough and we don’t understand.”

Losing connection

Another surprise was that the negative impact of a move was not mitigated by moving to a more affluent area; adults who had moved from the poorest quintile of neighborhoods to the richest quintile had a 13 percent higher risk than counterparts who did not move. Those who moved from the richest to the poorest, by comparison, had an 18 percent higher risk than counterparts who did not move.

Dr. Sabel said this underlined the importance of social capital that develops within a settled community. Young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods are still “embedded in that community,” he said. Moving to a wealthier neighborhood, he said, “you have all the disadvantage” of a poorer upbringing, in addition to the stigma of not fitting in.

One clear policy application, Dr. Sabel said, is for the management of children in state care. The data suggests that, for this vulnerable group, frequent moves between foster homes or residential care should be avoided, he said. It was more difficult to advise parents, he said, but he advised that, when contemplating a move, parents should consider its impact on children.

“The literature does clearly point to having stability in childhood, especially early childhood, is really, really important,” he said.

It is unclear whether the Danish findings are applicable to Americans, who have high geographical mobility and tend to make longer-distance moves. The U.S. Census estimates that an average American can expect to move 11.7 times in their lifetime; lifetime mobility in most of Europe is a fraction of that.

Shigehiro Oishi, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and the author of a 2010 study on the long-term effects of frequent moves in childhood, said that the negative effect of moves within the United States might be greater than within Denmark, since the differences in curriculum and quality of instruction would most likely be greater.

He called the paper “a landmark study” and “very, very methodologically strong.” He said the authors could have looked more closely at the causal mechanisms, or at moderating factors that might explain why some children, but not others, were negatively affected by frequent moves.

Dr. Oishi’s own study, which followed 7,018 adults for 10 years, found that the impact of moving frequently in childhood was worse among introverts, who reported lower well-being and life satisfaction and had a greater risk of death during the course of the study.

Dr. Oishi said the parents of introverted children should be warned about the long-term risks of moving in childhood. While moving is generally counted among the 40 most stressful life experiences, he said, his research suggests it ranks higher for children, in the top five or 10.

He added that, because residential mobility is not a disease, the study of it received little in the way of research funding.

A 2018 research study was able to establish causality by following families in public housing who were divided into two groups, one that remained in public housing, and one that used rental subsidy vouchers to move into better-off neighborhoods.

The study, which followed 2,800 young people in five U.S. cities, found that mobility led to greater delinquency among boys between the ages of 13 and 16, though not for younger boys or for girls, suggesting that middle adolescence is a particularly sensitive period.

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Latino Republicans and Independents Back Trump’s Deportation Plan, to a Point

Hispanic voters disillusioned with Democrats want tougher immigration enforcement, but dozens of interviews showed many unfamiliar with details of Trump’s proposal.

Surveys and focus groups show more Latinos saying that they trust former President Donald J. Trump over President Biden to better handle migration at the Southern border.

By Jazmine Ulloa  16 Jul, 2024

Anthony Gavic recalls hearing his grandmother describe her migration to the United States from Mexico in the early part of the last century, and how she settled in Texas at a time when white Americans used the racist slur “wetback” to refer to Mexicans.

Mr. Gavic, 57, said he was not disturbed by former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign promise to carry out the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, one modeled on a 1950s initiative called “Operation Wetback.”

Rather, Mr. Gavic said he saw Mr. Trump as drawing practical parallels with that earlier operation. He dismissed concerns that the plan would target Latinos.

“I don’t think he is going to start rounding up Mexicans or Venezuelans,” said Mr. Gavic, a Republican who remodels homes in a Milwaukee suburb. “He is just going to put in an effective plan to round up or corral or target those people who really shouldn’t be here.”

Republicans gathered in Milwaukee this week for their national convention adopted an immigration platform in line with Mr. Trump’s agenda. In addition to a mass deportation plan, the platform includes pledges to finish the wall and to “stop the migrant invasion.” The messaging is even harsher in tone than when Mr. Trump first ran for president in 2016. But Republicans are betting it won’t turn off Latino voters this election cycle.

Surveys and focus groups show that Latino voters, like other Americans, have warmed to more punitive measures on illegal immigration, and that more Latinos are saying they trust Mr. Trump and Republicans over President Biden and Democrats to better handle migration at the Southern border. The trend lines are especially true for Latino Republicans and right-leaning independents, who are more likely to call the situation at the border a crisis, and to echo Mr. Trump’s depictions of undocumented immigrants as a threat to public safety, national security and the nation’s cultural identity.

Anthony Gavic, of Mexican descent, dismissed concerns that a new Trump administration would target Latinos.

Photographs show Gavic’s grandmother, who migrated to the United States from Mexico a century ago.

Still, Mr. Trump remains unpopular with Latino voters overall. Whether the appetite for tougher immigration measures translates into broader Hispanic support for him and his policies at the ballot box remains unclear. Although some surveys have found an increase in the share of voters who favor a national effort by law enforcement to deport undocumented immigrants, reliable data on Hispanic voters is limited.

Surveys from the Marquette Law School Poll, in Wisconsin and nationally, show that a small majority of Hispanic voters reject deporting those in the country illegally. That opposition is likely to be even higher if the dragnet is said to target undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for years and who have well-established jobs and families, said Charles Franklin, who directs the law school Poll.

“There is a general change in how punitive people are willing to be, but how you frame the question really matters,” Mr. Franklin said.

More than two dozen Latino voters, largely Republicans and independents, supported those findings in interviews in recent weeks but offered some nuanced views. Most said that they wanted the government to take a harder line on immigration enforcement, and that they believed Mr. Trump would do so more effectively. Roughly half said they would support some sort of far-reaching deportation effort.

But most of those in favor of a crackdown said it should focus solely on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes or are recent arrivals.

Many were unfamiliar with Mr. Trump’s platform, including his plans to round up undocumented people on a mass scale and to detain them in camps pending their deportation. Many Latino Republicans and independents who had heard of such campaign pledges did not believe that Mr. Trump would be able to fulfill his promises.

“Last time, he didn’t even finish the wall. What’s he going to do this time?” asked Edgar Armenta Soto, a 28-year-old Marine Corps veteran who migrated from Mexico as a child and was studying aviation at Southern Utah University. He said he nonetheless agreed with Mr. Trump’s economic policies and planned to vote for him.

In interviews, Mr. Trump has pointed to mass deportations during the Eisenhower administration as an example that his next administration could follow.

In Corpus Christi, Texas, Marissa Perez, 39, a Republican, said that her father crossed the border illegally from Mexico years ago. She did not support putting people in camps and abhorred the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border.

But she said that she did not believe the system under the Biden administration was working. “I am more in favor of Trump’s way of doing it than the current way it is right now,” Mrs. Perez, a former nurse, said.

Mr. Trump, who has built his political career on pledges to curb immigration, has not minced words in his promises to expand his first-term crackdown if he were to return to power. In interviews, he has pointed to mass deportations during the Eisenhower administration as an example that his own operation could follow.

That earlier initiative was designed to expel undocumented Mexicans. At least 1.3 million people — some of them U.S. citizens — were swept up in the campaign, which used military techniques and racial stereotypes to justify sometimes brutal practices.

During the June presidential debate, Mr. Trump dodged a question about whether his plans for mass removals would ensnare every undocumented immigrant, including those who have jobs, are married to citizens or have been here for decades. Asked for clarification on the policy later, an adviser to his campaign pointed to the party’s convention platform. The document is a stark contrast to the stance that the Republican National Committee laid out in a 2012 report, which outlined plans to improve Hispanic outreach by embracing “comprehensive immigration reform.”

“A majority of Americans, including Hispanics, want mass deportations for illegal immigrants, not Joe Biden’s mass amnesties and Border Bloodbath,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.

Traditionally, Hispanic Republicans have been less likely than other Republicans to say that increasing border security and deportations are important policy goals. They have been more likely instead to favor establishing legal means for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.

Linda Fornos, a Nicaraguan immigrant, spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday in support of Mr. Trump. She criticized Mr. Biden’s handling of the border.

But historians, pollsters and strategists say that Latinos’ views on the issue have shifted based on numerous factors. As the G.O.P. stepped up its anti-immigration language and policy, Democrats have seen their advantage erode in recent years, as more Hispanic voters perceive that the party has broken its promises to expand legal pathways to citizenship.

Anais Refunjol, 36, a Republican who works in human resources in Contra Costa, Calif., said that she obtained her citizenship after migrating from Venezuela in 2004 on a tourist visa and requesting asylum. She was shocked when she heard the details of the 1950s mass deportation plan, but she did not believe that Mr. Trump would take such extreme measures.

She said she was alarmed by more recent Venezuelan immigrants, pointing to local and national news reports of their involvement in grisly crimes, though studies have shown that illegal immigration does not increase violent crime.

“Putting them in a camp and deporting them?” Ms. Refunjol said in Spanish. “It sounds great to me.”

Biden Finally Got Border Numbers Down. Will He See the Political Benefits?

June had the lowest monthly total for illegal crossings since January 2021. But the downturn comes amid intense focus on President Biden’s candidacy and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

The U.S.-Mexico border near Ciudad Juárez last month.

By Hamed Aleaziz  16 Jul, 2024

The number of migrants crossing the southern border has dropped sharply since the Biden administration imposed severe restrictions on asylum last month.

In June, there were just over 83,000 illegal crossings, according to U.S. border officials, down from around 117,000 in May and the lowest monthly total since January 2021.

The downturn in crossings has continued into July. The daily average of encounters at the border in the past week was under 1,900 as of Monday, according to a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal statistics.

The steep decrease coincides with the implementation of a June policy that bans asylum at the southern border, along with ramped-up enforcement from Mexican officials starting this year.

But it comes at a time when the country’s attention is focused on the questions surrounding the continued candidacy of President Biden in this year’s election and the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump. The political benefits of a border crackdown may yet prove fleeting.

And as a harsher view of illegal immigration has taken hold among many Americans, surveys suggest that Mr. Trump’s harder line may resonate more with swing voters, including some Hispanic Americans.

Still, if the numbers remained stable, that would put July on track for about 60,000 crossings, around figures seen at the end of the Trump administration. The decrease in recent months has been especially stark compared with heights reached at the end of last year: In December alone, around 250,000 migrant apprehensions were reported.

“The Biden administration has been around for 41 full months; June 2024 will have been the month with the fewest migrant apprehensions,” said Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “By far — no other month comes close.”

“And of those 41 months,” he added, “the first six months of 2024 are all within the top quarter of months with the fewest migrants.”

The senior Customs and Border Protection official said that increased enforcement at the border had made a difference. The official also pointed to the ability for migrants to have options other than crossing the border illegally, like gaining entry through an application with a government app.

Matthew Hudak, former deputy chief at the U.S. Border Patrol, said the White House’s messaging in June when it instituted the asylum restrictions has had a major impact on migrants considering journeys across the border.

“There’s never been outright, direct, unambiguous messaging from the White House — that was the first time that’s happened,” he said.

Mr. Biden himself said last month that he needed to get the border under control.

“The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America,” Mr. Biden said in early June as he announced the asylum measure.

The Biden administration has long struggled to contain the flows of migrants crossing the border and has aimed to bring the numbers down to a manageable level. But the downturn has spurred new concerns, including that the figures could drop so low that the administration would be forced to pause the asylum crackdown.

The current rules allow for the ban on asylum to be lifted if the fewer than 1,500 migrants cross illegally per day over a period of about two weeks. Such a drop has seemed unlikely, given trends in recent years.

The shift on the ground at the border was notable, according to advocates and experts who recently visited.

In Arizona, Yael Schacher, the director of the Americas and Europe for Refugees International, said that a shelter she visited in Tucson had around 1,800 people in December. But in June, she said, the shelter’s highest day was around 300.

“There’s been a huge change,” she said.

Whether the downturn stays consistent remains to be seen.

In June last year, illegal crossings dropped to around 100,000 after the Biden administration instituted some restrictions on asylum at the border.

The drop did not last long, though the senior Customs and Border Protection official said that the number of migrants congregating near the border on the Mexico side has dropped compared with last year.

If illegal immigration recedes from the forefront of political conversation, that might still be to Mr. Biden’s benefit, whether or not voters give him credit.

“For the Biden administration, it means a few months in which the ‘border crisis’ won’t be as much of a campaign issue,” Mr. Isacson said.

Vance Honed Populist Views in the Senate, Auditioning for Trump

The Ohio Republican has used his brief tenure in the Senate to showcase his willingness to buck party orthodoxy and articulate the MAGA case.

Mr. Vance has moved on to the national stage after an extraordinarily short time of only 18 months in the Senate.

By Carl Hulse and Annie Karni  17 Jul, 2024

J.D. Vance, a newcomer to the Senate from Ohio, stood on the chamber floor in April and scolded his more experienced colleagues for their desire to continue backing Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.

“Have we learned nothing?” Mr. Vance railed as the Senate debated a stalled military aid package to Ukraine, referring to the debacles of the Iraq War. “Have we updated nothing about our mental thinking, about the standard that we apply for when we should get involved in military conflicts?”

Mr. Vance, a Republican elected in 2022 and a strident opponent of assisting Ukraine, lost later that day when the Senate gave overwhelming bipartisan approval to tens of millions of dollars of assistance for Ukraine.

But that defeat helped position him for a real victory this week, when former President Donald J. Trump chose Mr. Vance, 39, as his running mate. In many ways, Mr. Vance’s short time in the Senate was a high-stakes audition for that post, where he showcased his willingness to break with Republican orthodoxy and his lawyerly ability to mount a public case for MAGA policies both at abroad and at home.

Mr. Vance has moved on to the national stage after an extraordinarily short time in the Senate — 18 months — during which some senators historically may not have even given their maiden speech on the floor.

Mr. Vance faced his first significant Senate challenge weeks into his term in February 2023 when a freight train hauling hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio.

It once would have been an unthinkable leap. Dan Quayle, who had served in the House and been re-elected to a second term in the Senate, was considered an unknown and untested quantity in 1988 when he was picked by George H.W. Bush as the vice-presidential nominee. But Barack Obama changed the standard in 2008 when he was elected president after just four years in the Senate. Mr. Vance is now looking to change it even more.

During his short tenure in the Senate, Mr. Vance has not established much of a legislative record; he is viewed by many of his colleagues as someone who has simply used the office to mount a campaign for vice president. But he has distinguished himself as an outspoken proponent of populist policies, supporting antitrust enforcement at home, promoting an isolationist foreign policy and positioning himself as a first line of defense against a Justice Department that he claimed was persecuting Mr. Trump.

In a memo to his Senate colleagues last October in which he pressed them to consider aid to Israel and aid to Ukraine as separate bills, rather than a combined package, Mr. Vance wrote: “Israel has an achievable objective; Ukraine does not.” He argued that “the United States does not have a plan in Ukraine, but we do have a plan in Israel.”

He was more direct in an interview with Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser. “I’ve got to be honest with you,” Mr. Vance told him, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

Even Republicans who disagreed with him said there was no questioning his political talent.

“I told him, ‘You’re the intellectual conscience of the populist movement,’” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said on Tuesday, as he milled around Republican National Convention hall in Milwaukee. “Legislatively, he’s come up short; but he’s smart, he’s passionate but he’s not angry, he’s intellectual, his arguments aren’t just emotion.”

While Mr. Cramer supported sending aid to Ukraine, he made it clear he bore no ill will toward Mr. Vance, saying, “J.D. is always a joy to visit with.”

Publicly, that joy has been less visible. Early in his tenure, he threatened to block all nominations to the Justice Department until it stopped what he described as a “political prosecution” of Mr. Trump. He has baselessly accused President Biden of trying to “punish people who didn’t vote for him” by inundating the heartland with fentanyl.

Upon entering the Senate, Mr. Vance quickly aligned himself with a small but growing bloc of MAGA-leaning lawmakers like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Scott of Florida.

They regularly challenged Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, and other more mainline Senate Republicans not just over aid to Ukraine but a variety of issues, including overall spending and making deals with Democrats to keep the government open and suspend the federal debt ceiling to avoid a default.

“Legislatively, he’s come up short,” Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said of J.D. Vance. “But he’s smart, he’s passionate but he’s not angry, he’s intellectual, his arguments aren’t just emotion.”

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican who is seeking to succeed Mr. McConnell next year when he steps aside as leader, was careful in his language supporting Mr. Trump’s pick for a running mate, acknowledging that he has a different view of American power abroad.

“Trump picked someone who reinforces a lot of his views,” Mr. Thune, who vociferously backed aid to Ukraine, said in an interview in Milwaukee. “These are all debates we’re going to have if we’re successful in flipping the majority in the Senate. There will be some very interesting conversations in the future about economic policy and national security policy.”

When pressed on whether Mr. Vance’s selection was bad news for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Thune sighed and said he hoped it would not be.

“I come from a different school of Republican thought when it comes to that issue,” he said.

Other Senate Republicans without the same political ambitions to consider have been less charitable in the past about Mr. Vance.

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, told his biographer, McKay Coppins, when Mr. Vance was running for Senate and the former Republican presidential nominee watched him undergo a political transformation to cozy up to Mr. Trump and the MAGA base. He said it was hard for him to even sit in the same room with Mr. Vance during the weekly closed-door Republican Senate lunch.

“These are all debates we’re going to have, if we’re successful in flipping the majority in the Senate,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota. “There will be some very interesting conversations in the future about economic policy and national security policy.”

Mr. Vance faced his first significant Senate challenge just weeks into his term in February 2023 when a freight train hauling hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, threatening the health of some of his new constituents. He grabbed the spotlight and accompanied Mr. Trump to the community later that month as the former president assailed Mr. Biden’s response while the administration blamed Mr. Trump for loosening rail regulations.

The disaster also allowed Mr. Vance, a hard-right conservative, to demonstrate some willingness to work across the aisle. He crafted major rail safety legislation with Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat facing a difficult re-election race this year. But the bill has stalled over objections from more senior Republicans who see it as too heavy on new railroad regulation and too generous to labor unions.

“He beat Sherrod Brown to the accident and immediately started taking on the railroad,” Mr. Cramer said. “He established his credentials as a populist right away.”

Mr. Thune, who stood in the way of the bill, said that Mr. Vance “does have some strongly held views that maybe aren’t always what other Republicans think in terms of philosophy toward business.”

“Some of the things they were trying to fix weren’t things that needed to be fixed,” he added, referring to the rail safety bill. “They were things that the unions wanted to see happen.”

Mr. Vance’s short time in the Senate has not allowed him to leave much of a mark. His Republican colleagues view him as remarkably ambitious, even by the standards of an institution known for unbridled ambition, and they describe him as very quick on his feet in discussions and debate. In the hallways, Mr. Vance has positioned himself as one of the more accessible members willing to hold court with journalists.

But some of his colleagues — even Trump loyalists from his home state — have suggested that his outspoken stances have been less about policy than politics.

“He’s a one-issue senator, and it’s all about Ukraine,” Representative Max Miller of Ohio, a former top adviser in the Trump administration, said in an interview in April, after he broke with the majority of House Republicans and voted to send $60.8 billion in aid to Ukraine. “He thinks this is his winning issue and topic to be the vice president and to gain more political power. I think he’s doing a good job, but his rhetoric is very dangerous and it is scary.”

When pressed about whether he might regret those words if Mr. Trump selected Mr. Vance as his running mate, Mr. Miller insisted he would not.

“If he picks J.D. Vance and he’s out of the Senate, it’s even better for somebody like me, so I wouldn’t hate it,” Mr. Miller added.

In a statement on Wednesday, he said: “Senator Vance and I may have a different opinion on one issue — Ukraine — but when it comes down to it, there are a lot of issues more important to the American people. He and I have the same vision for America.” Mr. Miller said he was proud the party was unifying.

Democrats believe he is a vulnerable foil on a host of issues, particularly abortion rights and his ties to technology industry leaders.

“Trump’s V.P. pick is great news for the wealthiest Americans and lousy news for everyone else,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on a call arranged by Mr. Biden’s campaign after the selection of Mr. Vance was announced. “Billionaires on Wall Street and Silicon Valley are cheering, but there is no joy for working people.”

One thing Ms. Warren did not mention was that she had worked with Mr. Vance on a bipartisan measure that would claw back up to three years of compensation from bank executives in the event of a bank failure.

In an article in Politico, Ms. Warren remarked that Mr. Vance had been “terrific to work with.”

What It Would Take to Deport Millions of Immigrants

Donald Trump is calling for the biggest deportation program in American history. The costs and hurdles would be enormous.

Migrants waiting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in June.

By Miriam Jordan  17 Jul, 2024

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he vowed to build a wall to seal the border and keep criminals from entering the country. This campaign season, his immigration agenda has a new focus: a mass deportation program unlike anything the country has seen.

His party’s platform, ratified at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, promises the “largest deportation effort in American history,” and immigration was the theme of Tuesday’s gathering.

What would it take to deport millions of people? Is it even possible?

How many undocumented immigrants are in the country?

There were 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States in 2022, according to the latest government estimates, and more than eight out of 10 have been in the country for more than a decade. Mr. Trump said during the debate last month that there were 18 million, which is unsubstantiated.

Fleeing political and economic turmoil, migrants from countries like Venezuela have crossed the border in record numbers during the Biden administration.

Who would be targeted for deportation, and how easy would it be to remove them?

Mr. Trump and the Republican platform have made broad declarations but thus far offered scant details about their intended operation.

The former president has suggested that any undocumented immigrant is subject to removal.

The party platform states that “the most dangerous criminals” would be prioritized.

It also said: “The Republican Party is committed to sending illegal aliens back home and removing those who have violated our laws.”

The consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Mr. Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term.

“It’s enormously complicated and an expensive thing to decide to deport people who have been here years,” said Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

It would cost “billions of dollars. It would probably take 20 years. It would cause the economy to shrink,” she said.

It would require an enormous influx of resources throughout the enforcement system and billions in new appropriations.

“Even if he had a Congress willing to enact dramatic statutory reforms and appropriate the tens of billions required, there is no way such a system could be fully functional within a four-year period,” said John Sandweg, a homeland security official in the Obama administration.

What other obstacles would there be?

Undocumented immigrants who have lived in the country for years have legal protection and the right to due process.

Those who have entered the country unlawfully in recent years have been processed at the border and then released with orders to appear in court for deportation hearings. While their cases are winding through the immigration court, which typically takes several more years, they have the right to remain in the United States.

“Trump would need to triple the size of the immigration court to achieve anywhere near the numbers he is talking about,” said Mr. Sandweg. “Even then, he would need funding to build new courthouses, hire support staff and train judges.”

Migrants talk with Texas National Guard troops and Texas law enforcement officers on the U.S.-Mexico border in June. Mr. Trump has said he would enlist the National Guard and other resources in the military to execute his plan.

Decades of underfunding and vast number of asylum claims have exacerbated backlogs.

“An individual must be issued a deportation order; a president couldn’t just override that,” said Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary during the Obama administration. “You would need a change in the law, and Congress would have to be an active partner in this.”

In addition to the cost, a polarized Congress, even one controlled by Republicans, would still have to reach a consensus on the substance of the operation, a daunting prospect considering Congress has failed to overhaul the immigration system for more than two decades.

Are there enough personnel, facilities, planes and other transport for a deportation operation?

During the Trump administration, there were some 936,000 deportations, according to official data. As of February, about 340,000 people had been removed by the Biden administration.

To identify and arrest millions of people in the interior of the country would require tens of thousands more immigration agents, said Ms. Napolitano.

Mr. Trump has said he would enlist the National Guard and other resources in the military to execute his plan.

Local law enforcement could be deputized to identify undocumented people and turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has happened in the past in some localities.

But Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and Philadelphia are just a few cities that refuse to collaborate with ICE, out of concern such cooperation would promote racial profiling and land immigrants who have committed minor offenses, such as traffic violations, in deportation proceedings.

“You’ll have areas that don’t want to have anything to do with it,” said Michael Neifach, a border security expert who was principal legal adviser to Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the George W. Bush administration.

Currently, ICE agents focus on locating and deporting convicted criminals, such as child molesters and others suspected of being a threat to public or national security.

Some one million immigrants with final removal orders living in the country could be a targeted group.

“Let’s say you find these people. You then have to detain them,” said Mr. Neifach. “How are you going to expand detention in a way that won’t blow the bank?”

A woman in shackles is patted down before boarding a deportation flight in Texas in October while immigration agents with Enforcement and Removal Operations stand by.

Every potential deportee is held in a detention facility, and in the current fiscal year, Congress funded the detention of 41,500 immigrants daily at a cost of $3.4 billion, which would need to increase exponentially.

And many immigrants hail from countries that do not have diplomatic ties with the United States or that refuse to take back their nationals. They cannot be immediately flown out of the country, and the Supreme Court has ruled that people cannot remain detained for limitless periods awaiting removal.

The ICE budget for transportation and deportation in fiscal 2023 was $420 million, and the agency deported 142,580 people that year.

Where is there room for Trump to accelerate the pace of removals?

Another Trump administration could speed up deportations by terminating programs that the Biden administration has introduced.

For example, since 2022, some 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been allowed to fly to the United States and live and work for two years, provided they have a financial sponsor. Mr. Biden has also allowed nearly 700,000 migrants who make an appointment on a mobile app to cross the border through an official port of entry and receive work permits.

“Trump could flick the switch and revoke it,” said Mr. Neifach. But, he added, many of the migrants could make asylum claims and become part of the clogged courts.

Expedited removal at the border enables the swift deportation of migrants without a hearing, unless they convince an agent that they would face the threat of violence back home, and Mr. Biden in June issued an executive order currently being challenged in court to amplify use of this tool.

Mr. Trump could try to extend it to the interior, though he would likely face court challenges.

Would there be any exceptions among the deportees?

Mr. Trump has not addressed whether he would exercise any discretion, or make any exceptions.

More than one million Americans are married to an undocumented person, and a large share of undocumented immigrants have children who are U.S. citizens.

“When you are talking those kinds of numbers and law enforcement presence, you have to think at the end — what does that do to the atmosphere in the country?” said Ms. Napolitano, the former Homeland Security secretary.

In Milwaukee, a G.O.P. Transformation From Dysfunctional to Unified

On Tuesday, Republicans effectively took a victory lap in the middle of the presidential race, expressing a sense of invincibility at their convention.

Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump listened as speakers discussed crime and immigration on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention.

By Lisa Lerer and Rebecca Davis O’Brien  17 Jul, 2024

For eight chaotic years, Republicans battled in public and private, fighting over Donald J. Trump’s polarizing personality, his divisive policies and his history of electoral defeats through lawsuits and leadership battles, felony convictions and suburban defections.

Yet even before a single balloon has dropped at their national convention this week, Republicans have united — seemingly without reservation — behind the man and his message. Across downtown Milwaukee, delegates, officials and lawmakers appeared to be taking a victory lap in the middle of a race that many believe is breaking their way, galvanized by a would-be assassin’s bullet and the chaos gripping the rival party.

Even Mr. Trump’s most potent Republican primary foe, Nikki Haley, was greeted on Tuesday with a standing ovation as she testified to his fitness to return to the White House — an issue she had often questioned on the campaign trail.

“President Trump asked me to speak to this convention in the name of unity,” Ms. Haley said, adding: “I’m here tonight because we have a country to save. And a unified Republican Party is essential for saving her.”

It is a party-wide evolution that would have been difficult to envision eight years ago, when Mr. Trump first burst onto the Republican stage, or as recently as this spring, when the party was recovering from a bruising primary contest and the serial humiliations of a dysfunctional House majority that struggled to select its own leadership. Then, Mr. Trump was a liability and not the party’s great unifier.

Now, the shift in mood was striking: It has been decades since those at any Republican convention felt quite so confident — even optimistic — that they had the right candidate, the right causes and the right moment.

“You don’t have to agree with Donald Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him,” Nikki Haley said on Tuesday. “Take it from me.”

Mr. Trump’s former rivals have lined up to endorse him and offer praise at the convention.

“This is a party that is completely united right now, I think — frankly, united like we’ve not seen in generations,” said Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee, citing as evidence Ms. Haley’s presence at the convention, which came about after the shooting on Saturday.

From the careful choreography to the elaborate staging, political conventions are exercises in party pageantry — made-for-TV dramas designed to inspire the party faithful and drive a victorious narrative to the nation. But this year in Milwaukee, such typical manufactured fellowship has intensified.

Mr. Trump, not content to attend the convention only for the final days, as is customary, has taken part in the events from the outset — watching the tributes from the front row of an elevated platform, grinning broadly and at times appearing moved by the proceedings.

Speaker after speaker on Tuesday bent their knees, offering tribute to a man who had once insulted them, belittled them and, eventually, defeated them.

Senator Ted Cruz thanked “God almighty” for protecting the man who once insinuated that Mr. Cruz’s wife was ugly and his father had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota praised the political power of the man who had gleefully derided him as a “Globalist RINO” as the former president tanked his effort to become House speaker last year.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, for whom Mr. Trump coined the nickname Little Marco, said the former president had “inspired a movement” among working men and women. “These are the Americans,” he said, “who wear the red hats and wait for hours under the blazing sun to hear President Trump speak.”

And Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom Mr. Trump mocked mercilessly for the height of his boot heels, his polling numbers and his alleged pudding-eating techniques, praised Mr. Trump for “standing up” for America.

“Donald Trump has been demonized,” the governor said. “He’s been sued. He’s been prosecuted, and he nearly lost his life. We cannot let him down, and we cannot let America down.”

The parade of former opponents is expected to continue on Wednesday, when a man who privately fretted just eight years ago that Mr. Trump could become “America’s Hitler” stands side by side with him on the ticket. With his new position as Mr. Trump’s running mate, that man, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, vaults to the forefront of a party remade in the former president’s image.

Delegates danced on the convention floor between speakers on Tuesday.

Babydog, a bulldog owned by Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, made an appearance on the convention stage on Tuesday.

As Democrats debated whether President Biden should be their party’s nominee, Republicans were a party unfettered by doubt. They presented a united front, and many rounds of I-told-you-so’s. Republicans had been proven right, they claimed, about the border, about Covid pandemic lockdowns, about inflation, about Mr. Biden’s mental acuity, about antisemitism on college campuses.

“My friends, we are watching the principles of faith, family, freedom that once defined our nation now being trampled underfoot by the radical left,” Speaker Mike Johnson told the crowd. “As President Trump raised his fist and gave a rally cry on Saturday, now is our time to fight, and we will.”

On the floor of the convention Tuesday night, Mark Muller, an alternate from Kansas, described a mood of confidence that was not limited to the “die-hards” in Milwaukee. “It’s like a spiritual, historical battle, and we all feel it,” he said.

“This is our Waterloo,” Mr. Muller said. “We are all believers, but the people I know who have never been engaged in politics are getting engaged.”

As Democrats continue to struggle to unify around Mr. Biden, broad swaths of Republicans are rallying around the former president. Polling conducted by The New York Times and Siena College after the debate showed that 83 percent of likely Republican voters wanted Mr. Trump to remain their nominee, compared with just 48 percent of likely Democratic voters who said the same about Mr. Biden.

So far, there has been no public polling to give an indication of how the race might have shifted since the attack. Political history suggests Mr. Trump’s support would rise after the Republican National Convention, even without the assassination attempt.

Milwaukee has become a gathering of conservatives, foreign and domestic. Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of England who resigned in disgrace in 2022 and whose Conservative Party was flatly rejected by British voters this month, traveled to Milwaukee for the convention. When he appeared outside a hotel downtown on Tuesday, dozens of Republicans standing in a security line broke out in a cheer.

Gerald Malloy, a Republican delegate from Vermont, was thrilled by the sighting, but said that he thought American conservatives were on track for a very different fate in November.

“Yesterday was just fantastic,” Mr. Malloy said, recalling the experience of being on the convention floor when Trump appeared wearing an ear bandage. “Everyone there could feel the entire country starting to make the turn to go in the right direction.”

Chris Ager, New Hampshire’s G.O.P. chairman, said there was a feeling of extreme confidence among Republicans after the events of the past few weeks, starting with the debate and growing after Mr. Trump survived Saturday’s assassination attempt and his classified documents case was dismissed.

“Donald Trump has been demonized,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “He’s been sued. He’s been prosecuted, and he nearly lost his life. We cannot let him down, and we cannot let America down.”

Feelings of confidence were reflected on the convention floor as well as on the stage.

“I think it’s the perfect mix, or the stars aligning,” he said. “I was not as confident only two weeks ago.”

Of course, unity is in the eye of the beholder. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida was part of a rare tense exchange on the convention floor, telling the former House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster Mr. Gaetz orchestrated, “You would get booed off stage.” Another attendee told Mr. Gaetz, “Shut up, Gaetz.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — with Mr. Gaetz, an architect of the party’s congressional internecine conflicts — told a reporter outside that she did not rule out party unity.

Ms. Greene was not interested, however, in cooperating across the aisle.

“When Joe Biden and the Democrats produce actions of unity, that’ll be something that I’ll start to listen to,” she said. “But right now I haven’t seen any of that. Hell no, I’m not cuddling with Democrats.”

Neil Vigdor, Ken Bensinger, Jess Bidgood and Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.

Improvised Bombs Found in Gunman’s Car at Trump Rally Used a Radio-Control System

A report obtained by The Times detailed the bombs’ rudimentary construction, made with the kind of initiators used for fireworks shows.

An aerial view of the complex of buildings from which a gunman fired at former President Donald J. Trump in Butler, Pa., on Saturday.

By John Ismay  17 Jul, 2024

Following the killing of the gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday during a rally in Butler, Pa., investigators discovered two improvised explosive devices in the would-be assassin’s car that used a radio-controlled initiation system designed for commercial fireworks demonstrations.

Details on the improvised bombs were in a document released by a federal government task force on Monday to law enforcement departments across the country.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the document, called a “quick look” report, on Tuesday.

The two devices in the car owned by Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa., were almost identical in construction, according to the task force’s report. Each contained a cardboard tube filled with a gray powder that was described by a police bomb technician as having “an odor of nitromethane” and appeared to contain prills — essentially small pellets.

While the report does not contain a laboratory analysis of the gray powder, the description suggests the presence of a fertilizer, which is often packaged in prill form. According to the National Institute for Health, nitromethane is sometimes used as a fuel in racecars and has a “strong disagreeable odor.” It can be purchased online.

The combination of certain kinds of fertilizers and fuels is a common method for creating homemade explosives, such as the ammonium nitrate-based device Timothy J. McVeigh used to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Okla., in 1995, killing 168 people.

Whether or not Mr. Crooks attempted to detonate the devices is unclear, but the report described them in a manner that cast doubt on their viability as weapons.

Notably, the devices in Mr. Crooks’s car used a type of radio-control system for initiating fireworks displays, in which a single hand-held transmitter can broadcast a signal to multiple small receivers. These in turns send current to an electric match — a wire with a pyrotechnic compound on one end — that produces a small flame to ignite the firework.

The two devices in Mr. Crooks’s car were composed of ammunition cans — one metal, and one made of plastic — that each had a cardboard tube inside, filled with the gray powder recovered by police bomb technicians. Each cardboard tube had the head of an electric match inserted, and they were connected to a radio receiver unit.

The receivers shown in photos from the report appear to be identical to a model called Alpha Fire made by RFRemotech, a company based in Guangzhou, China.

The report shows that law enforcement officers recovered a set of 10 radio receivers from Mr. Crooks’s home along with electric matches. According to RFRemotech’s website, a set containing 12 Alpha Fire receivers and one transmitter can be ordered online for $192, while a set containing a second transmitter costs $216.

The product listing for the Alpha Fire says that it can reliably initiate fireworks from a distance of about 6,500 feet.

“We are sorry for the assassination attempt on your former president Donald J. Trump,” said Yukie He, an account manager for RFRemotech, in an email early Wednesday. “We checked all history sales, but not any records of a sale of our products to Thomas Matthew Crooks.”

Guns Are Woven Into the Life of Shooter’s Hometown

The gunman who opened fire at a Trump rally grew up in an area where hunting and target shooting have long been popular pastimes. Now, there’s new talk of gun regulation.

The Clairton Sportsmen’s Club in Clairton, Pa., where Thomas Crooks had been a member.

By Bianca Pallaro, Amy Julia Harris and Jack Healy  17 Jul, 2024

Thomas Crooks did not have to look far beyond his hometown in western Pennsylvania to find opportunities to arm himself, buy ammunition and practice shooting before he headed to a political rally last weekend and tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump.

Guns and hunting are deeply woven into the culture of smaller boroughs and rural areas of Pennsylvania where he grew up, just as they are across much of a country with an estimated 400 million firearms. The gunman’s high school, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, has had a rifle team since the 1950s, and it is not uncommon for students to skip a day of school during white-tailed deer season or come to class dressed in camouflage.

“Out in the suburbs, it’s a bit more common to practice these things,” said Keith Bartosch, a member of the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, where the gunman had also been a member. “From my house, I can hear at least four different sports clubs’ shooting, depending on which way the wind’s blowing.”

Now, Clairton and other private gun clubs, shooting ranges and gun dealers that speckle the rolling wooded countryside around Bethel Park are being scrutinized by federal investigators who are trying to unravel how the gunman armed himself and learn more about his history with weapons.

The shooting — which killed one rally attendee and critically wounded two others — has also reignited a debate over whether stricter gun laws could have stopped Mr. Crooks or kept the AR-15-style rifle he used out of his hands.

Advocates for tighter gun restrictions in Pennsylvania seized on the shooting to urge state lawmakers to pass bills already introduced into the state legislature that would expand background checks, temporarily remove guns from potentially dangerous people and raise the minimum age to purchase rifles similar to the one used in the attack to 21 from 18.

“There is a bipartisan interest in making sure we keep guns out of the hands of people like this gunman,” said Adam Garber, the executive director of CeaseFirePA, which supports stricter gun laws.

The gunman’s high school, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, has had a rifle team since the 1950s.

But such measures might not have prevented the gunman, who was 20, from getting his hands on a rifle. Law enforcement officials said that the AR-15-style gun used in the shooting had belonged to Mr. Crooks’s father, who legally purchased it in 2013. They said the gunman’s father owns more than a dozen firearms of different types.

“If someone is determined to assassinate a political leader, they’re going to find a way to do it,” said Val Finnell, the Pennsylvania state director of Gun Owners of America, a gun rights group that opposes the proposed new restrictions. “You’re not going to stop an assassin by making laws.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Crooks would have raised any red flags on background check systems. Federal investigators said he was not on their radar and did not appear to have a history of mental illness. He did not have a criminal record in Pennsylvania’s court databases.

Investigators have not said how the gunman obtained the rifle on the day of the shooting, or whether it had been locked up. Pennsylvania does not have laws requiring guns to be stored safely inside people’s homes.

The gunman also bought about 50 rounds of ammunition just before the shooting, law enforcement officials said.

One gun store that has been contacted by investigators is Allegheny Arms & Gun Works, which is tucked next to a tanning salon in a travel plaza in Bethel Park and displays more than 1,000 firearms in glass cases and tidy lines along the walls.

The store’s owners declined to confirm news reports that their store had sold ammunition to Mr. Crooks; they said only that they were cooperating with investigators and had not sold him any firearms.

But Bruce Piendl, one of the owners, defended the store as a “responsible member of our community” that was supporting a way of life by selling guns to hunters and sports shooters.

“We’re not evil people,” he said. “We understand. We live here, and our products are out in the community.”

While hunting for white-tailed deer, pheasant and grouse has long been popular in the area, he said, the number of gun ranges and shooting clubs around Pittsburgh has grown in recent years, reflecting an enthusiasm for target practice and marksmanship.

Josh Rowe, another owner of the store, said his lifelong fascination with guns began when a friend showed him a copy of the “Guns and Ammo” magazine when he was a teenager. When he was 16, his grandfather bought him his first shotgun, and he now owns more than 100 guns, he said.

When asked whether his opinions of guns had changed after the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump, which had hit so close to home, Mr. Rowe, 46, was adamant.

“Not a bit,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

At the Clairton club, a wooded facility that features a 200-yard rifle range, members and former members have spent the days since the shooting fielding calls from the news media and investigators about their contacts with Mr. Crooks.

In interviews, no members recalled seeing Mr. Crooks at the range, which is about a half-hour drive from the gunman’s home. But one former member said he could well have shot without drawing much notice. Former high school classmates who graduated with Mr. Crooks in 2022 described him as quiet and solitary, saying that he would go out of his way to avoid attention.

“There’s a real good possibility that he could have just gone down there during the day on time and shot by himself,” said Mark Mikolaj, a former board member. “Nobody would have ever known him.”

The presidents of three other clubs in the area said the gunman had not been a member and could not be found in their guest records.

At Clairton, current and former members described the club as a mostly volunteer-run nonprofit organization that is popular with service members, law enforcement officers and families. It draws people who want to learn how to shoot, hone their skills with shotguns and rifles, or practice shooting clay pigeons. The club has 2,100 associates, according to its latest tax return.

Although its members are largely conservative, political signs are not allowed at the club, and most members prefer to avoid political arguments while they are shooting, members said.

Mark Entress, a former attendee, disputed the idea that recreational shooters or hunters in the area were part of a “quote-unquote gun culture” and said that they were simply trying to work on their gun skills and enjoy a sport with a deep history and appeal in the region.

“It’s not like a militant thing,” he said. “Most of these places are set up as just exactly that — it’s a sporting affair where you work on skills and sportsmanship and conduct and that kind of stuff.”

He added: “It’s a little community. So it’s tragic to hear something like this.”

Glenn Thrush, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Julie Tate contributed reporting.

Megadonors Are Plotting to Change Biden’s Mind With Money. Will It Work?

They’re calling politicians. They’re dangling money to members of Congress. But major Democratic donors who want President Biden to step aside are also learning the limits of their powers.

President Biden has faced significant pressure from Democratic donors to drop out of the presidential race.

By Theodore Schleifer  17 Jul, 2024

For ultrarich Democrats, this is the golden age of political scheming.

The last three weeks since President Biden wilted during the first presidential debate have uncorked a nervous energy that has stirred almost every major Democratic donor and their advisers, turning billionaires ensconced on summer vacations into crafty political animals.

They’re calling every major politician they know, encouraging them to call for Mr. Biden’s removal. They’re dangling money to members of Congress who say the right things, and withholding money from those who do not. And even the most reclusive donors are talking to reporters, sometimes on the record, about the turmoil within the party establishment.

These are chaotic times. So many ideas are bouncing around the donor class that some card-carrying members say privately that they are having trouble keeping track of all the plots. Some of the wealthiest people in the world have been locked in a perpetual, almost academic examination of how much leverage they truly have to change Mr. Biden’s mind.

Would it be best to funnel money toward a super PAC, which has raised $2 million so far, that plans to back vulnerable Democratic members of Congress who are calling for Mr. Biden’s removal? Or maybe the savvier move would be to raise money loudly for Vice President Kamala Harris, his heir apparent, as an affirmative sign that the president need not worry about passing the reins? What about setting aside some money in an escrow account that would be spent only on a Democratic presidential campaign led by someone other than Mr. Biden?

Tom Strickler, a founder of the Hollywood talent agency WME, said he had recently met in Los Angeles with Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico.

“If you don’t publicly call for Biden to step aside,” Mr. Strickler said he told Mr. Heinrich’s team on Thursday morning, “you are not getting a dime from me.”

Mr. Strickler said that he had also been planning to give the maximum legal amount in August to each of the seven most vulnerable Democratic Senate candidates, but that as of now, he would not be supporting them because they have not broken with Mr. Biden.

“It’s a message that I’ve encouraged my friends to send as well,” he said. “If you back Biden, you will lose our support. Over and out.”

Or, perhaps, there is no leverage to be had at all.

The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010 threatened to unleash torrents of cash into American politics that critics worried would hand too much influence to a small group of partisan billionaires. But ever since Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2016, major business-friendly Republican donors have learned the limits of their powers — unable to dislodge him from the party’s nomination that year, nor able to do so eight years later.

Now, Democratic megadonors are learning some of the same lessons, especially during a time when Mr. Biden has shown some ability to raise significant money from small-dollar givers.

For all their riches and ambitions, many Democratic contributors and their big-money advisers have become resigned to the notion that their influence is fairly limited, and are trying not to be naïve. A sense of powerlessness pervades.

After all, Mr. Biden is not, as one major Democratic donor put it, subject to a vote by the wealthy. And he and his team have bristled against wealthy “elites” who are trying to force him out of a Democratic nomination that he won democratically, heightening concerns from major donors who are already nervous about their efforts backfiring if they are seen as bullies.

Voters’ confidence in Mr. Biden has dropped since his poor debate performance in June.

Mr. Biden is likely to be influenced first and foremost by his family, including Jill Biden, the first lady, and after that by a series of aides who have worked for him for decades. Major donors have debated among themselves about who precisely in his inner circle could be reached — and which donors have the best access to those people. But privately, few Democratic donors are bullish about their own powers, especially given Mr. Biden’s increasingly anti-elite language.

Joe Ravitch, a top Hollywood banker and a longtime Democratic fund-raiser, said that even before the debate, he had conditioned his giving on pushing for a change at the top of the ticket. But he sounded dour about whether his advocacy would accomplish much.

“I can’t figure out who — if anyone — has influence over this, but donors certainly don’t, regardless of what we do,” Mr. Ravitch said. “And to speak out publicly against the president only helps undermine him. It’s a Catch-22.”

Mr. Biden has had relatively few defenders among the country’s biggest donors. Democratic insiders say that most major donors want him to step aside.

But there are a few exceptions. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has been the most voluble supporter of staying the course. Alex Soros, the head of one of the Democratic Party’s most generous families, has urged the party not to abandon Mr. Biden. And Amy Goldman Fowler, a low-profile but major donor who gives millions of dollars a year to the Democratic Party, came out with a rare on-the-record statement praising the president.

Despite all of that agitation, plenty of Democratic donors are plainly nervous to cross Mr. Biden publicly, even now, with some worried about weakening him in the general election if he remains the nominee.

Some mega-contributors are staying as quiet as possible. Henry Laufer, one of the party’s biggest contributors, told The New York Times a week after the debate that “I have no comments.” A spokeswoman for another Democratic billionaire, Marilyn Simons, also one of the party’s top donors, shared that Ms. Simons had “no comments to offer.”

Haim Saban, the Hollywood magnate who has spent tens of millions of dollars for the Democratic Party since Citizens United, was asked for his view of the situation, and spoke for many of his peers.

“Silence is golden,” he replied simply.

Kate Kelly contributed reporting.

This Is Literally Your Brain on Drugs

A small new study shows reactions in the brain in people who were given psilocybin in a controlled setting.

By Andrew Jacobs  17 Jul, 2024

If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this.

[Embedded video available]

The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner.

The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.

The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders.

“Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.”

The study included seven healthy adults who were given either a single dose of psilocybin or a placebo in the form of methylphenidate, the generic version of the amphetamine Ritalin. Each participant underwent a total of 18 brain scans, taken before, during and after the initial dosing.

Four participants returned six months later for an additional psilocybin session.

Although the scans of those given methylphenidate showed acute changes in brain activity patterns, the neural disruption among those who took psilocybin was three times greater, the study found.

Much of that disruption occurred in parts of the brain involved in introspective thinking, like daydreaming and remembering. Those areas help individuals define their sense of self.

Perhaps more surprising were the scans taken days and weeks later. They showed that the brains of those who took psilocybin had largely returned to normal, but there remained a small and significant change suggesting that the drug’s effects remained long after psilocybin had left the individual’s body.

Dr. Jan Ramaekers, a professor of psychopharmacology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study, said the scans showing that the drug had lingering effects correlated with anecdotal evidence suggesting that the benefits of some psychedelic therapies were not permanent. “Treatments with psilocybin, even though they are effective, don’t last forever,” he said. “At some point, they need to be done again.”

Dr. Joshua Siegel, a neuroscientist and lead author of the study, said psilocybin appeared to disrupt the brain’s default mode network, an interconnected set of areas ordinarily active when the brain is not focused on anything in particular. By contrast, the default mode network remained stable in the participants who received the methylphenidate.

“The activity in these networks became much more disorganized, and boundaries between the networks essentially evaporated,” Dr. Siegel said.

He used the analogy of the synchronized stadium wave to explain the phenomenon. In normal day-to-day activity, millions of neurons work in synchrony but when a psychedelic like psilocybin washes over the brain, those neurons start firing off in a chaotic fusillade. “It’s like having thousands of stadium fans randomly raise their hands,” he said.

Ceyda Sayali, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the study, said she was struck by the images that showed a marked change when participants on psilocybin were asked to answer simple questions that forced them to focus on what was happening around them. The requests, known in the field as grounding, can briefly draw participants out of their psychedelic reverie.

In this case, the sudden jolt of reality was reflected in scans that showed a brief calming of brain activity. “This is something that has never been shown before,” she said.

Dr. Siegel said the scrambled brain activity was most likely a driver of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new ways of thinking and a hallmark of how psychedelic medicine can help patients break destructive thought patterns. “It almost makes you a different person, so to speak,” he said.

The study, he and others say, lends weight to the notion that the psychedelic experience — the intense visualizations, the distortions of time and space, and the detachment from self — is an essential part of the therapeutic process. While such a hypothesis might seem self-evident, it is not universally accepted among psychedelic researchers, some of whom are working to develop new compounds that provide the benefits of psychedelic drugs without the disorienting effects.

Dr. Siegel said he thought the results might also serve to counter a theory promoted by some researchers that places an outsize role on the placebo effect, given that a significant percentage of participants in psychedelic studies traditionally report improvements to their mental health despite the fact that they did not receive a psychoactive drug.

“Being able to show a neurobiological mechanism that says, hey, this is actually affecting the brain, gives more meat to the argument that this not just placebo effect,” he said. “It shows that these drugs are creating lasting change to the brain.”

Up to $1 Billion May Go to Waste After Hochul’s Congestion Pricing Halt

Transit leaders had already allocated hundreds of millions of dollars before Gov. Kathy Hochul’s last-minute reversal on the long-awaited tolling plan.

The program would have generated $1 billion annually for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which would have been used to upgrade the nation’s largest and busiest transit system.

By Ana Ley  16 Jul, 2024

By the time Gov. Kathy Hochul made the abrupt decision to cancel congestion pricing in New York City last month, transit leaders had already allocated more than a half a billion dollars to get the long-awaited tolling program off the ground.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority entered into a $556 million contract for cameras, software and other tools that would have been used to detect vehicles entering the planned tolling zone south of 60th Street in Manhattan.

The true amount spent by the M.T.A. to implement the program is almost certainly higher. The city’s Independent Budget Office said the resources devoted to the long-delayed endeavor over the course of decades were “unquantifiable.” But Rachael Fauss, the senior research analyst for Reinvent Albany, a watchdog group, said the amount is likely to be close to $1 billion, given the amount of staff time that was dedicated to planning.

With the program indefinitely suspended, that money is, at least for the moment, wasted.

Congestion pricing was designed to rein in traffic and pollution while improving travel speeds in some of the world’s most crowded streets. The money raised from the first-in-the-nation program would have generated $1 billion annually for the M.T.A., which would have used it to pay for critical upgrades and improvements to the city’s transit network.

The M.T.A. had planned to start charging the tolls on June 30, but Ms. Hochul announced less than a month before the program was set to begin that she had changed her mind, infuriating the plan’s supporters and shocking M.T.A. employees.

Ms. Hochul, who said that the planned tolls were too high — most drivers would have been charged $15 to enter the tolling zone during peak hours — has insisted that she is only temporarily pausing the program. She has not committed to a new start date.

In a statement, a spokesman for the governor noted that just last year, she helped to make the M.T.A.’s budget whole after years of financial uncertainty that were worsened by the pandemic. Ms. Hochul, he said, will find another way to fully fund the M.T.A.

“Governor Hochul saved the M.T.A. from the fiscal cliff last year, made critical investments in safety and service throughout the system and has made it incredibly clear that she is committed to funding the M.T.A. capital plan while congestion pricing is paused,” the spokesman, John Lindsay, said.

Responding to questions from reporters last week, Ms. Hochul referenced the cost of living said that she must “deal with how people are feeling about the conditions right now.” A Siena College survey in April found that most New York City residents were against congestion pricing, with 64 percent opposed and 33 percent in favor, and that suburban respondents disliked it even more.

M.T.A. officials declined to comment about the money that had already been spent on the program. Janno Lieber, the authority’s chief executive, has said that he is taking the governor at her word when she says that she will eventually let tolling move forward.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has insisted that she is only temporarily pausing congestion pricing, has not committed to a new start date for the program.

The M.T.A. had expected a significant return on the investments it made to begin the tolling program. The authority planned to use the expected revenue to secure $15 billion in bond financing to spend on capital improvements.

But the authority must now contend with an expensive loss that encompasses not only the cost of its contract with the company TransCore to build out the infrastructure, which includes cameras and tolling software, but also the money it spent to advertise the program and to consult with transportation experts.

The M.T.A.’s legal department has undoubtedly accumulated hefty fees to defend the program from eight lawsuits that have sought to delay or stop it.

Then there is staff time. During an M.T.A. board meeting last month, authority officials said that about 600 people had worked on the project since it was written into law in 2019. To push the plan past federal hurdles, some employees had spent four years working on an environmental assessment, which yielded an administrative record of more than 45,000 pages.

“There were so many opportunities, if the governor had cold feet, to say something,” Ms. Fauss said. “It’s so obvious that this was a last-minute decision because of all the resources that were spent.”

She added: “Not only are you not getting a program that was promised, but you’re also wasting resources. It’s really a double betrayal.”

The Wall Street Journal, which estimated the total losses at roughly $700 million, reported that the authority had spent $33 million on a customer-service center and that 100 employees had already been brought on.

Eric Goldwyn, a program director at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University, said it is not unusual for large infrastructure projects to fall apart as they reach the finish line.

Another notable cancellation occurred in 2010, when construction was halted on a commuter train tunnel that would have stretched under the Hudson River from North Bergen, N.J., to Manhattan, because Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said his state could not afford its share of the project’s rising cost.

But Mr. Goldwyn said the politics behind Ms. Hochul’s pause were remarkable. Right up until her change of heart, she had brushed off critics of congestion pricing while telling the M.T.A. — and the public — that she would greenlight the plan, which was critical to the authority’s fiscal solvency.

“Congestion pricing is unique — It doesn’t exist in the United States in the form that it was being proposed in New York,” Mr. Goldwyn said. “And so, if there were to be sort of a curveball, I think it makes sense that this is the project where you would have that issue.”

Without the funding generated directly by congestion pricing, as well as billions in federal spending that depended on the toll money coming in, the M.T.A. is facing an immediate and dire budget problem.

During its first meeting after Ms. Hochul’s decision to suspend the program, the authority’s board viewed presentations detailing sweeping cuts to projects, totaling $16.5 billion. The deferred projects included plans to make subway stations more accessible to riders with disabilities, repairs to some nearly century-old infrastructure and the expansion of the Second Avenue subway line.

Proponents of congestion pricing want Ms. Hochul to restore the plan before November’s presidential election. Former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has said he would halt the program entirely. Protesters have gathered across New York City to denounce the reversal, and some lawmakers who support the program have privately begun an informal campaign to persuade Ms. Hochul to move ahead with the tolls, but make them less expensive.

For now, the M.T.A. is still working to ensure that congestion pricing is ready to go into effect someday. Workers are using the cameras that have been installed to measure traffic, and they are testing the new toll collection system with fleet vehicles. Employees are also designing applications and information portals for people who might qualify for discounts and exemptions.

“The infrastructure is in place,” Ms. Fauss said. “It can still be turned on. It doesn’t have to be a waste.”

New York City Bill Would Mandate Air-Conditioning for Tenants

Landlords have to keep tenants warm in the winter, but can leave them sweating in the summer. A city councilman wants to change that.

Hundreds of New Yorkers die from heat-related illnesses each summer. Those who don’t have air conditioning at home are particularly at risk.

By Hilary Howard  17 Jul, 2024

As New York City endures its third heat wave of the year, a city councilman plans to introduce a bill this week that would require landlords to buy, install and maintain air-conditioning units or cooling systems for tenants during the summer, with fines of up to $1,250 per day for noncompliance.

The idea behind the legislation, proposed by Councilman Lincoln Restler from Brooklyn, is to update the existing housing code so that building owners are just as responsible for keeping people cool in the summer as they are for keeping them warm in the winter. The bill would apply to high-rises, walk-ups and multifamily buildings, including those owned by the city.

“This will save lives as we reckon with the challenges of the climate crisis,” Mr. Restler said.

Every summer, about 350 New Yorkers die from heat-related illnesses, according to the city’s health department. Black New Yorkers are twice as likely to die from heat as white residents, and a lack of home air-conditioning is a major driver of heat-stress deaths. According to city data, 91 percent of households had air-conditioning as of 2017.

Property owners, some of whom are already working to comply with Local Law 97, which curbs carbon emissions from large buildings, have several concerns, especially about cost. If the new law passes, buildings would have four years to ensure compliance.

“Any proposal in this space must carefully balance the needs of New Yorkers, the diversity of the building stock, the added cost burdens on tenants and owners, and the ability of the electrical grid and distribution system to meet the added demand,” a spokesman for the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade group, said.

Jay Martin, the executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord group, said, “Financial penalties are already exacerbating a high-operating-cost environment we have in New York.”

As the Northeast rapidly warms, primarily because of the burning of fossil fuels, it’s not just short-term extreme heat but more sustained periods of hot weather that can be deadly, said Caleb Smith, the resiliency coordinator for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit in Harlem that consulted on the bill.

“It’s really about a right to safe housing, a right to cooling,” Smith said. “We’ve already agreed as a society that no one should freeze in their homes. But there’s no reason we should accept sauna-like conditions.”

Last year was the Earth’s hottest on record, and this year — the beginning of which was the planet’s hottest start ever on record — seems to be on track to surpass that. Smith noted that the city’s most recent heat-related mortality report showed that people were also dying on “non-extreme heat days,” when the temperature was above 82 degrees but below the “extreme heat threshold” of 95 degrees.

Although most New Yorkers have air-conditioners, that does not mean that they can consistently cool their homes to 78 degrees when it’s 82 degrees outside, which is what the bill would require.

Those temperature caps are based on the approaches of other cities that are dealing with extreme heat, like Phoenix and Dallas, and the advice of health experts, Mr. Restler said.

According to a city report released earlier this year, neighborhoods with the least access to air-conditioning also have high rates of heat vulnerability (which means that residents have a higher risk of heat-related illness) because of other factors, like pollution and lack of green space. These areas include Central Brooklyn, Harlem, Southeast Queens and the Bronx.

Mayor Eric Adams, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, told reporters on Tuesday that “everyday New Yorkers don’t have air-conditioners” and that he had grown up without them. He joked that his mother would tell him to put his head in the refrigerator on hot days.

But times have changed, some experts say. “The increasing number of days with above-average temperatures means that the lack of air-conditioning can be a matter of life and death,” said Sheila Foster, a professor at the Columbia Climate School.

(Air-conditioners also contribute to global warming, accounting for about 7 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions, an amount that is expected to triple by 2050. The refrigerants most responsible for those emissions, hydrofluorocarbons, are being phased out, while more energy-efficient coolants, models and systems are under development.)

Should the bill become law, landlords would have two years to contact the Housing Preservation and Development Department about their cooling plans. They would also have the option to apply for a delay should they face financial hardships, like major capital improvements. After four years, all buildings would need to be in compliance.

But Mr. Martin, from the Community Housing Improvement Program, said property owners would need more time. There are a million rent-stabilized units in the city, about 90 percent of which were built before 1974, he said. These older properties would require expensive retrofits to allow for consistent cooling, as well as energy savings, he said. And although heat pumps — energy-saving contraptions that both heat and cool homes — show potential, the technology is not quite developed enough for them to work in older buildings, he said.

Additionally, Mr. Martin said that rent-stabilized buildings are regulated by the state, and questioned how a city law would affect them. Mr. Restler said the city has jurisdiction over regulations for cooling homes.

Amy Turner, the director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University, said the bill was consistent with state and city rules for landlords to provide “safe and habitable housing,” which should help protect it from legal challenges.

Tenants would be able to make complaints about cooling deficiencies to the Housing Preservation and Development Department, which would then conduct inspections. Initial fines for inadequate cooling would be similar to heating fines, ranging from $350 to $1,250 a day. Landlords who resolved the cooling problem within 24 hours of the first violation would pay $250.

The next hurdle, should the bill be approved, would be subsidizing the energy bills of low-income residents, Mr. Restler said. Both he and Smith aim to work with city, state and federal agencies to make this happen, they said.

California Becomes the First State to Ban Student Gender Notification Policies

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that prevents educators from having to notify parents if their child asks to switch names or pronouns.

The Chino Valley Unified School District is among the California districts that have emerged as culture war battlegrounds in recent years.

By Jill Cowan  16 Jul, 2024

A year after school boards in California emerged as unlikely culture war battlegrounds, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed the nation’s first law prohibiting policies that force educators to tell parents if their children ask to use a different name or pronouns.

The new law was applauded by L.G.B.T.Q. organizations who said it would protect the privacy and safety of transgender students, especially those who might fear their parents would not support their identity. But conservatives vowed to challenge the law in court, and Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive, called it the “final straw” in a post on X, vowing to move the headquarters of X and Space X to Texas as a result of the bill signing.

Over the past year, more than a dozen school boards in California — largely led by conservatives who were elected in the aftermath of pandemic disruptions — enacted policies that would have required school employees to notify parents if students asked to use a name or pronouns other than the ones listed on their school records.

Similar policies have been enacted in conservative states, such as Tennessee and North Carolina, as part of a sweeping “parental rights” movement backed by national conservative organizations. But liberal leaders in California saw the school board polices as an unwelcome incursion that would forcibly out transgender and nonbinary students.

Mr. Newsom and Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, had fought conservative-led school districts in court before the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature sent its bill to the governor last month.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill blocking schools from requiring that parents be notified of student pronoun changes.

The new law prohibits local school boards from forcing educators to tell parents if their child asks to use a different name or different pronouns. Parents would retain the right to access their child’s school records, and minors are still required to get permission from their parents or guardians before legally changing their name or gender.

“This law helps keep children safe while protecting the critical role of parents,” a spokesman for the governor, Brandon Richards, said in a statement. “It protects the child-parent relationship by preventing politicians and school staff from inappropriately intervening in family matters and attempting to control if, when and how families have deeply personal conversations.”

In fast-growing suburbs that were once more rural Republican outposts, such as Chino and Temecula in Southern California, outspoken conservatives have promised to rebuild trust between parents and educators by allowing parents to control much of their children’s education.

Sonja Shaw, who was elected in 2022 to lead the Chino Valley Unified School District, was among the first to take up what she has called a parental notification policy, which the state swiftly sued to block in a case that is ongoing.

On Tuesday, she condemned the new law and accused Mr. Newsom of being part of a “political cartel” intent on cutting parents out of the education of their children. She and her allies promised to fight the new law in court.

“It is morally corrupt and was enacted to prevent parents from exercising their rights,” she said. “This battle is far from over, and we will not rest until justice is served and parental rights are fully restored.”

Sonja Shaw, a conservative leader and a board member of the Chino Valley Unified School District, speaking in front of the California State Capitol in 2023.

Many opponents of the parental notification policies, including Mr. Bonta, described them as “forced outing” approaches that would harm transgender students whose parents reject their identities.

Some parents have organized to counter the so-called parental rights movement and push school boards to refocus on attracting high-quality teachers and funding extracurricular programs.

Kristi Hirst, a Chino Valley parent who helped start the nonprofit Our Schools USA, said that she has been encouraged in recent months by the ouster of several conservative school board members — most notably, the outspoken president of the Temecula Valley Unified School District, who at one point described Harvey Milk, the gay rights icon, as a “pedophile.”

She said on Tuesday that Mr. Newsom’s decision to sign the new legislation was “a strong showing of support.” (It was not a certainty that Mr. Newsom would sign the bill, given that he has in recent years rejected other bills supported by progressives.)

“It’s an excellent bill that will keep students safer in the state of California,” Ms. Hirst said of the new law.

She added that the law would ideally serve as protection if Republicans were to win control of the federal government and push for conservative educational priorities.

But legal experts say that court battles over parental notification policies in particular are far from over.

The law firm representing the Chino Valley Unified School District has argued that parents have a constitutional right to control their children’s upbringing, which includes their education. But legal scholars have said that children also have a constitutional right to privacy.

Conservatives in California have said they hope that the Chino Valley case or another one like it will ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.

Obituaries

- Robert Pearson, Hair Stylist Turned Acclaimed Barbecue Chef, Dies at 87

- Evan Wright, Award-Winning Reporter and Author of ‘Generation Kill,’ Dies at 59

- Herbert Hoelter, Prison Consultant to the Rich and Infamous, Dies at 73

- James B. Sikking, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 90

Robert Pearson, Hair Stylist Turned Acclaimed Barbecue Chef, Dies at 87

His Texas-style brisket, made with exacting precision, inspired a generation of New York City pit masters, who opened a wave of smoky joints in the 2000s.

Robert Pearson with a roasted pig during a barbecue contest fund-raiser in Manhattan in 1995. “There’s no such thing as a good old hairdresser,” he said in 1994, explaining why he had changed careers.

By Clay Risen  17 Jul, 2024

Robert Pearson, who never lost his cockney accent through a career that began with combat service in the Royal Air Force followed by nearly two decades as an acclaimed hair stylist in London and New York, and that then took an improbable turn into Texas-style barbecue, where he earned renown as the best pit master north of the Mason-Dixon Line, died on July 8 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

His niece Gale Gand, herself a well-known pastry chef, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Pearson opened his first restaurant, Stick to Your Ribs, in 1983, a time when most New Yorkers assumed it was enough to grill some meat and slather it with sauce to call something barbecue. Over the next 20 years, he showed them how wrong they were.

Though he lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he chose to start in a rough-edged corner of Stratford, Conn., halfway between Stamford and New Haven. The rent was cheap, he said, which gave him the flexibility to hone his craft with exacting precision.

He purchased a $13,000 custom-made pit from Texas. He bought mesquite wood at $800 a cord, which he blended with local green oak (at just $110 a cord); after much experimentation, he found that a one-to-four ratio created the right balance of smoke from the mesquite and moisture from the oak to fuel the six- to 18-hour fires he needed to cook his meats.

Mr. Pearson was a purist: He insisted on wood, and only wood, as fuel. He cooked low and very, very slow. He eschewed rubs and sauces, letting flavor emerge from the meat and smoke. He specialized in brisket, the lodestar of Texas barbecue, but also offered half chickens, pork shoulder and the occasional exotic fare, like alligator, elk loin and rattlesnake.

With his location just off Interstate 95, he had no trouble drawing a lunchtime crowd from the office parks along the Connecticut coast. As word of his wizardry got out, diners came from as far as New York and Boston. Eventually he bought a mobile pit, on a trailer, which he took with him to pop-up events around New England and the Mid-Atlantic.

Having perfected his technique, he moved Stick to Your Ribs to Long Island City, Queens, in 1992. Again, his reputation blossomed — the Zagat guide called it “the best Texas barbecue pit east of the Mississippi.”

Tucked on a side street near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the restaurant, which he later renamed Pearson’s, became a pilgrimage site for the food obsessed. Aspiring cooks made the trip to pepper him with questions, learning at the pit of the master before starting their own barbecue restaurants in an efflorescence of grilled meat that overtook New York in the 2000s.

Mr. Pearson and the veteran restaurateur Ken Aretsky, left, outside Pearson’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 2003. It closed after a few years.

“Pearson’s was a place of great import to the community,” said Matt Fisher, who worked the pit at renowned New York barbecue joints like Rub, Fletcher’s and Dinosaur. “It was elusive, remote, small, and all that added to its gravitas.”

Robert John Pearson was born on Nov. 5, 1936, in London, within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church, making him a true cockney, according to the unofficial rules of city folklore. His father, Robert, and his mother, Emily (Hartley) Pearson, were nurses.

He joined the Royal Air Force in 1953; based in Cyprus, he trained guard dogs and saw brief combat during the Suez Crisis in 1956. After returning to civilian life in London, he ran a candy shop.

But he soon grew bored of the shopkeeper’s life. He enrolled in the London School of Fashion to study hair styling and graduated in 1961. His first job was as a trainee with Vidal Sassoon.

Mr. Pearson’s timing was perfect: London was just beginning to emerge as a global center of 1960s hipness, and he was working in the storied salon whose bob and five-point cuts would help define the Swinging Sixties.

He cultivated a roster of wealthy clients, one of whom owned a salon in Bermuda and persuaded him to move to the island in 1964. There, he met Greta Anne Grossman, whom he married in 1966.

She survives him, as does his sister, Jean Sessa.

The Pearsons settled in New York. Mr. Pearson’s reputation was such that he snagged a coveted chair in the salon of Kenneth Battelle, whose client list of movie stars, first ladies and Manhattan grandes dames earned him a reputation as the first celebrity hairdresser.

Mr. Pearson later teamed up with an investor to operate a chain of salons inside Bloomingdale’s department stores. And in 1972 he joined with Paul Mitchell, another Sassoon alumnus, to open a Manhattan salon called Superhair.

By the end of the 1970s, Mr. Pearson was growing tired of the stylist’s life, in particular the long trips around the country to train stylists and speak at industry conventions. He did enjoy visits to one city, though: Lubbock, where he first encountered Texas-style barbecue.

Mr. Pearson had long enjoyed cooking, and he soon latched onto the idea of making it a new career.

Mr. Pearson and his wife, Greta, in about 1984. A year earlier, he opened his first barbecue restaurant, Stick to Your Ribs, in a rough-edged corner of Stratford, Conn.

“There’s no such thing as a good old hairdresser,” he told Newsday in 1994. “I wanted to get into the food industry. Ten years ago there was a great interest in regional food. I looked at pizza, which has been done and done very well. One that wasn’t done well was barbecue.”

After establishing himself in Queens, Mr. Pearson tried to open an outlet in Manhattan, which he supplied with food cooked in Queens. But he found that the cooked meat lost its zing during the drive across the East River, and in any case the space caught fire a few days after opening.

In the late 1990s, he stepped back from his restaurant, not long before it lost its lease under pressure from neighbors who, despite loving his food, were less enamored with its constant, thick smoke.

He returned in 2003 with an Upper East Side venture on 81st St., also called Pearson’s. Though it came with strong backing, including the veteran restaurateur Ken Aretsky, and a state-of-the-art smoke-scrubbing system, it closed after a few years.

While many young pit masters looked to Mr. Pearson as a mentor, few chose to follow his near-religious devotion to an austere interpretation of Texas barbecue, and in particular his aversion to sauce.

Conceding to consumer tastes, he did offer a quartet of sauces as an accompaniment: mild, medium, “madness” and “mean,” which he said, with some disdain, was a further concession to “macho” diners who insisted that real barbecue had to be wet and spicy. Mean, made with a pile of Szechuan peppercorns, gave them what they wanted, and more.

“When I’m making that sauce at the store, I’ve got to make sure it’s very quiet, and nobody else is around,” he told Newsday. “It’s very volatile. Mean is not really meant for human consumption.”

Evan Wright, Award-Winning Reporter and Author of ‘Generation Kill,’ Dies at 59

His best seller about Marines in Iraq, members of a “disposable generation,” was made into an HBO mini-series. He focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage.

Evan Wright during an interview promoting the HBO mini-series “Generation Kill,” which was based off his reporting, in 2008.

By Alexandra E. Petri  16 Jul, 2024

Evan Wright, an award-winning journalist whose reporting from the Iraq War formed the best-selling book “Generation Kill” and whose work illuminated the lives of those on the fringes of society, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59.

His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office and was confirmed in a statement released Monday night by his family.

Mr. Wright was known for immersive journalism that often focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage. He traveled with anarchists behind the Battle of Seattle in 1999, covered the 1996 Aryan Nations World Congress and rode with the Marines leading the United States’ invasion of Iraq.

His reporting on crime, war and American subcultures was published in Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor, as well as in Hustler, Vanity Fair and Time.

“I failed at everything else,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2011, discussing what led him to journalism. “I was optimistic. It was a refuge for rogues and miscreants.”

Mr. Wright moved from his native Ohio to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to pursue screenwriting. He landed his first paid journalism job in 1995 as an entertainment editor at Hustler, reviewing pornographic films and covering the adult film industry.

At Rolling Stone, Mr. Wright was introduced to combat and military culture — first on assignment in Afghanistan in 2002 embedding with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, and then in 2003 with the Marines’ First Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq. He secured a spot in the lead vehicle in the push from Kuwait to Baghdad, eventually filing a three-part series in Rolling Stone called “The Killer Elite,” which received the 2004 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.

He built off that series for his best-selling book “Generation Kill,” a nuanced look at young Marines in Iraq whom he called members of the “disposable generation” — coming from broken homes, raised on video games and the internet, and trained as killers. He was fascinated by what the men “thought of the world when they weren’t shooting their guns,” he told The New York Times in 2004, when the book was published.

“The young combat troops I reported on in the Middle East represented a new kind of subculture, one that was often as misunderstood by civilians at home as it was by military leaders,” Mr. Wright wrote in the introduction to his book “Hella Nation,” published in 2009.

Grounded in details about the Marines and the gallows humor of war, “Generation Kill” was later adapted into an HBO mini-series that Mr. Wright wrote with David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind “The Wire.”

In a 2004 best seller, Mr. Wright provided a close-up look at young Marines in combat during the Iraq war — men who came from broken homes, were raised on video games and were trained to kill.

Mr. Wright continued writing books and for television. “Hella Nation” was a collection of his articles that appeared in various publications examining the lives of “rejectionists” — people who, he said, had made the decision to opt out of the dominant culture.

“He had this endless empathy, and things that would horrify most people fascinated him,” said Will Dana, a former managing editor at Rolling Stone who worked closely with Mr. Wright.

His other books include “How to Get Away With Murder in America,” about a C.I.A. paramilitary officer and Blackwater executive alleged to have had early career ties to organized crime in Miami; and “American Desperado,” about the life and career of the cocaine smuggler Jon Roberts, a co-author of the book.

Mr. Wright was a showrunner on the 2016 mini-series “Harley and the Davidsons,” about the motorcycle company. His television credits also include “Homeland,” “Homecoming,” “The Bridge,” “The Man in the High Castle” and “Dirty John.”

In a post on social media last week, Mr. Wright said he began working on a book in 1982 about his childhood in a government-run youth rehabilitation center. He was featured in “Teen Torture Inc.,” a three-part docuseries on HBO Max about such institutions, released the day before his death.

Evan Wright was born on Dec. 12, 1964, in Cleveland. His father, Alan, was elected assistant prosecutor of Lake County, which is near Cleveland, and later became a corporate lawyer and lobbyist. His mother, Nina (Wonderlich) Wright, also a lawyer, was a parks commissioner of Lake County. He graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., with a degree in medieval and renaissance studies.

He is survived by his wife, Kelli Wright, and three young children, Carter, Evan and Kennedy, as well as a sister, Nora, and a brother, Walter.

Mr. Wright said his goal as a reporter was to see things as they are and inhabit the worlds of those in his stories.

“It’s a powerful experience to merge with somebody,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2009.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Herbert Hoelter, Prison Consultant to the Rich and Infamous, Dies at 73

He helped Martha Stewart, Leona Helmsley, Michael Milken and other white-collar criminals win lighter sentences, and prepared them for life in prison.

Herbert Hoelter in 2009. As a concierge to the federal prison system for white-collar criminals, he helped them secure alternative or shorter sentences and prepared them for prison.

By Michael S. Rosenwald  16 Jul, 2024

In the summer of 2003, as Martha Stewart’s trial on charges connected to securities fraud was nearing its conclusion, the CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper aired a segment speculating about how severe her punishment would be if she were convicted.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Cooper said, “it seems as though rich criminals seldom end up swapping smokes on Cell Block H. So if it’s not hard time in the joint, what kind of sentence could she get?”

His guest was Herbert Hoelter, a sentencing reform advocate who, to fund his nonprofit work at the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, had become a concierge to the federal prison system for white-collar criminals, helping them to secure alternative or shorter sentences and to navigate life as an inmate.

“Our philosophy isn’t that punishment should not occur,” Mr. Hoelter said, “it’s that it should occur in different ways.”

Mr. Hoelter died on May 2 in Baltimore, not far from his home in Catonsville, Md. He was 73. His daughter Katie Hoelter said the cause of death, in a hospital, was complications of congestive heart failure and DRESS syndrome, a rare hypersensitive reaction to certain medications.

Mr. Hoelter’s client list was a Who’s Who of corporate and financial scandal, including Leona Helmsley, the hotel baroness convicted of tax evasion; Bernard L. Madoff, the architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in financial history; Ivan F. Boesky, the financier convicted of insider trading; Michael R. Milken, the so-called junk bond king; and, after she was convicted, Ms. Stewart.

Mr. Hoelter’s main role in these cases was writing lengthy biographies of his clients — to help them appear sympathetic to judges, and to offer possibilities for alternative or lesser sentences.

“One of Herb’s best qualities was that he was able to humanize those who were about to be sentenced,” Richard J. Schaeffer, a New York lawyer who regularly consulted with Mr. Hoelter, said in an interview. “Many of these people felt they had given much more to society than others would have believed, and that they still had more to offer.”

When he worked for Ms. Stewart, Mr. Hoelter argued that her conviction, on charges that she lied about why she had sold shares of a biotechnology company, had already severely damaged her reputation. (The judge threw out a securities fraud charge during the trial.) Her legal team also presented an alternative to prison time: teaching disadvantaged women how to start their own businesses. The judge sent her to prison anyway, but for only five months, well short of what prosecutors wanted.

Mr. Hoelter also collected copious statistics on sentencing patterns to help sway judges.

After Mr. Milken was sentenced to 10 years in prison, his lawyers hired Mr. Hoelter, who produced data showing that the sentence was tougher than what others had received after being convicted of similar charges. His legal team argued that Mr. Milken had been a role model in prison, tutoring other inmates, and could continue that work near his home in Los Angeles. A judge reduced Mr. Milken’s sentence to two years, plus three years of community service.

Thousands of lesser-known white-collar criminals also benefited from Mr. Hoelter’s counsel.

“Our whole philosophy is that one should pay back the community, either in terms of financial restitution and/or social restitution,” he told Mr. Cooper on CNN. “I mean, we’ve had construction magnates build wings of hospitals for kids with spina bifida. We’ve had food executives create large amounts of food coming into food banks. There’s wonderful creative ideas that one can fashion that judges should look at, as well as the background of the different individuals that are there that come before them for sentencing.”

Herbert Joseph Hoelter Jr. was born on Sept. 20, 1950, in Yonkers, N.Y., and grew up in Niagara Falls. His father was a county official. His mother, Helen (Parker) Hoelter, managed the household.

Growing up, he worked part time in a doughnut shop and delivered newspapers. He was also a volunteer coach of a youth basketball team with a roster of players from troubled homes.

One weekend, only two of the 10 players showed up; the others had been arrested and taken to a juvenile detention center.

“So he goes to the place to see what he can do,” his daughter Katie said. “He was so distraught at the conditions they were in. It broke his heart and opened his eyes to the terrible things going on in the juvenile detention system.”

Mr. Hoelter in an undated photograph. His main role in cases was writing lengthy biographies of his clients in an effort to help them appear sympathetic to judges.

After graduating in 1972 from the State University of New York at Buffalo (now the University at Buffalo) with a bachelor’s degree in English, Mr. Hoelter earned a master’s degree in social work from Marywood University in Scranton, Pa., where he began counseling juvenile defenders.

In 1977, he founded the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Baltimore with Jerome G. Miller, a juvenile justice reformer who had almost single-handedly closed reformatories in Massachusetts in the early 1970s.

The next year, a doctor who had been convicted of federal tax charges called Mr. Hoelter and asked, “Could you do an alternative sentence for me?”

“So we put together an alternative sentence where he would help an AIDS clinic for free for 500 hours rather than go do laundry at a federal prison, and the judge liked it,” Mr. Hoelter said in a 2016 interview with a business publication in Baltimore. “That sprang into doing more cases like that.”

For decades, he poured the fees he generated from white-collar clients back into his organization.

“That money wasn’t going into his pocket,” Vincent N. Schiraldi, the secretary of juvenile services for the State of Maryland, said in an interview. “He was plowing that money into doing sentencing reports for poor people.”

Mr. Hoelter married Susan Marie O’Keefe in 1969. She died in 2000. He married Martha Jane Ginn in 2002.

In addition to his daughter Katie, his wife survives him, as do another daughter, Sarah Coble; a son, Jeffrey; his sisters, Joan Castellani, Melanie Hoelter and Moria Saviola; a brother, Peter Hoelter; and 10 grandchildren.

After Mr. Hoelter’s clients were sentenced, he counseled them about life in prison. He told them to make their time meaningful: teach adult education classes, exercise, read a lot. If he had another client in the same prison, he made sure they looked out for each other.

More than anything, he was a friendly, impartial sounding board.

Katie Hoelter remembers answering the phone early on Christmas morning in 1992, the year she turned 7.

Picking up the receiver, she assumed that a family member would be on the other end. Instead, it was a collect call from a prison inmate — Ms. Helmsley.

“Merry Christmas,” Katie said, after accepting the charges.

Ms. Helmsley, known as “the Queen of Mean” in the tabloids, wasn’t in a festive mood.

“I don’t care what day it is,” she said. “Let me talk to your father.”

James B. Sikking, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 90

His natural rectitude landed him roles on hundreds of TV dramas and comedies, including the beloved “Car Pool Lane” episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

James B. Sikking in his best-known role, as Lt. Howard Hunter on the long-running police series “Hill Street Blues.” His character was a disciplinarian who, when alone at home, might whisper lovingly to a puppy.

By Alex Traub  16 Jul, 2024

James B. Sikking, an actor who specialized in comically and threateningly stern men, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90.

The cause was complications of dementia, a spokeswoman, Cynthia Snyder, said in a statement.

Mr. Sikking combined a soldier’s leanness and square jaw with a gentleman’s horn-rimmed spectacles and neatly combed hair. As a Federal Bureau of Investigation director involved in high-level power players in the 1993 movie “The Pelican Brief,” he looked the part.

“I have that professional, intelligent look in my eye that hires me as doctors, lawyers, professional people,” he told The New York Times in 1988.

Among hundreds of roles on television, Mr. Sikking was best known for playing Lt. Howard Hunter on the police drama “Hill Street Blues” (1981-87). The show won 26 Emmys, a record for a drama until “The West Wing,” which ran from 1999 to 2006, reached the same total. The show “paved the way for today’s golden era of TV drama,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2014, a claim that many other commentators have made as well.

Mr. Sikking’s character, who appeared in every episode, was a pipe-smoking disciplinarian and weapons expert who, when alone at home, might whisper lovingly to a puppy.

He based the character’s persona and even dress on a drill instructor he had during a stint in the Army. “He was so ‘army’ that it was maddening,” Mr. Sikking told the entertainment and lifestyle publication Parade in 2014. “And he had just gotten his second lieutenant bars and he worked our butts off and he was totally unbending.”

Steven Bochco, who created the show with Michael Kozoll, also cast Mr. Sikking as a member of a police force on the short-lived “Brooklyn South” (1997-98) and as the father of the protagonist, Neil Patrick Harris, on “Doogie Howser, M.D.” (1989-93), in which Mr. Harris played a teenage doctor.

Mr. Sikking with Neil Patrick Harris in an episode of “Doogie Howser, M.D.” Mr. Harris played a teenage doctor, and Mr. Sikking played his father.

For younger TV watchers, Mr. Sikking’s most enduring performance was probably in “The Car Pool Lane,” a beloved 2004 episode of Larry David’s long-running HBO comedy, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Mr. Sikking played Jim Remington, one of two men who interview Mr. David and his wife (Cheryl Hines) at a country club dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans. Wearing a yellow polo shirt and a blue blazer, Mr. Sikking’s character asks, in a clipped manner, such questions as “You feel comfortable here?” and, referring to a schooner, “Do you sail it yourself or do you have a captain?”

Later, Mr. Sikking’s character runs into Larry at a baseball game with a prostitute, prompting Mr. Sikking, displaying his expertise in expressions of propriety, to look right down his patrician nose at both of them.

James Barrie Sikking was born on March 5, 1934, in Los Angeles. His father, Arthur, was a structural engineer, and his mother, Sue (Paxton) Sikking, was the founder and minister of Unity by the Sea Church in Santa Monica.

He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1959; his education was delayed by two periods of Army service at Fort Bragg in North Carolina (now called Fort Liberty). While in the Army, he proposed to Florine Caplan. They married in 1962.

Although Mr. Sikking was known mainly for his TV work, he also appeared, usually in small roles, in dozens of movies, including “Fever Pitch” (2005), starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon; “Ordinary People” (1980), directed by Robert Redford; and “Charro!” (1969), one of Elvis Presley’s last cinematic vehicles.

He is survived by his wife; a son, Andrew; a daughter, Emily Sikking; and four grandchildren.

“There’s a wonderfully childish quality about this business,” Mr. Sikking told The Times about being an actor in 1989. “We are players, and our basic job is to make you laugh or cry or scare you — to make you feel. If we make you think, that’s an extra bonus.”

Pages A2-A3 and Corrections

- Documenting a #MeToo Investigation Seven Years Later

- Quotation of the Day: Extreme Weather Causes Record Amtrak Delays

- Corrections: July 18, 2024

Documenting a #MeToo Investigation Seven Years Later

An article on claims of sexual misconduct against Louis C.K. led to backlash against the women who spoke out. “Sorry/Not Sorry,” a New York Times documentary, examined the aftermath.

Louis C.K. returned to the comedy stage nine months after a 2017 New York Times investigation detailed sexual misconduct claims against him.

By John Otis  18 Jul, 2024

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

In November 2017, the #MeToo movement had gained traction. A month earlier, a New York Times investigation that outlined sexual harassment claims against Harvey Weinstein inspired more and more women to come forward with their own stories.

So when three reporters, Cara Buckley, Jodi Kantor and Melena Ryzik, covered sexual misconduct allegations against the comedian Louis C.K., the reactions came swiftly.

A day after the article was published, Louis C.K. released a statement saying the claims were true: He had masturbated in front of several women. He also said that he would “step back.” He returned to stand-up less than a year later.

The women who had come forward about Louis C.K. were criticized and even mocked by his fans. And Dave Chappelle joked about one of the accusers in a 2017 Netflix special.

The fallout and Louis C.K.’s subsequent comeback are explored in a new documentary, “Sorry/Not Sorry.” Directed by Cara Mones and Caroline Suh and produced by The Times, the documentary features interviews with three of the women who spoke about Louis C.K. and with comics, critics and others who discussed whether more should have been done to address the open secret about his behavior. (Louis C.K. declined requests to appear in the documentary.)

The film presents the audience with a difficult question: Why were the women made a punchline, whereas Louis C.K. was able to return to the stage?

To mark the film’s release, Ms. Buckley, Ms. Kantor and Ms. Ryzik, all of whom were consulted on the film, looked back on their reporting. These are edited excerpts of their separate interviews in person and via phone and email.

The initial reporting

JODI KANTOR: In the wake of the Weinstein story, I got a tip about Louis C.K. Rumors about him had swirled around for years. It seemed like this was a window where we could tell the real story. What I remember about the Louis C.K. story was how fast it moved. The Weinstein investigation took about six months. This was really just a matter of a few weeks.

MELENA RYZIK: It was one of the first reporting projects we worked on in the immediate aftermath of the Weinstein investigation. Given the confidentiality and urgency, it was a very intense few weeks. When word got out that we were working on the story, and Louis canceled his appearances and a movie premiere of “I Love You, Daddy” without ever actually responding to our many requests for comment, that was a first for me. The story was trending on Twitter before ours was even published. I was still getting the final sources on the record and it was already a worldwide thing.

The backlash against the women

CARA BUCKLEY: Backlash against the women was definitely a concern. I didn’t think it would blow up the way that it did. I was really surprised by the pushback against the women. They’re talking about something that happened to them that was deeply upsetting, about an imbalance of power. So why are they getting roasted? It still makes no sense whatsoever.

KANTOR: They were really aware of the risks. But they were also trapped in a gray zone. Some of them had actually told the story for years and had never really been silent about it.

How this story was different

KANTOR: Usually the accused says, maybe under the advice of a lawyer, “Nothing like that happened” or “She totally misconstrued it.” What was striking about this story was that Louis copped to it, publicly, almost immediately. That makes it really different from other #MeToo stories because it meant there was no factual dispute.

BUCKLEY: Very few people spoke out in the comedy world because they really liked Louis. There was a marked generational difference in how people responded. Younger people who were fans of Louis were heartbroken. People older than us were like, “What’s the big deal?” It goes to show, historically, how much women put up with. There was a way lower tolerance for it among young people.

Why this topic remains relevant

RYZIK: The comic personas that Louis had pre- and post- these revelations are very different, as is some of his fan base. And we have still not sorted out, culturally, how to square all of that with what he did, and how he’s using it now. As the film makes clear, he has continued to flourish, while some of the women have had a much harder time. I’m glad the filmmakers asked men in the industry about all this, too.

KANTOR: To me, this is a lasting story. All these years later, the controversy about Louis C.K. is how can he be so successful when we all knew he did those things. That’s for other people to make up their minds about. But what matters to me is that these women came forward and told the truth. He acknowledged they were telling the truth. And because they had the bravery to do that, the comedy world is never going to be the same.

Before 2017, there was more of an attitude of, “This is accepted, this is inevitable, this is part of the culture. It may be unfortunate, but it’s the way life works.” That sense has changed. What Louis C.K. did and what the women did in response shouldn’t be forgotten.

Quotation of the Day: Extreme Weather Causes Record Amtrak Delays

18 Jul, 2024

“You get a sun kink when the train’s on it — you’re dead.”

LOUIS S. THOMPSON, former director of the Federal Railroad Administration, on how intense heat can affect rail traffic. Dated U.S. infrastructure is struggling to stay operational as climate change accelerates and intense heat waves, downpours and high winds become more frequent..

Corrections: July 18, 2024

Corrections that appeared in print on Thursday, July 18, 2024.

18 Jul, 2024

NATIONAL

A picture caption with a Critic’s Notebook article on Tuesday about images of the assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump misstated the site of the assassination of President James Garfield. He was shot in Washington and later died in Long Branch, N.J.; he was not assassinated in Long Branch.

An article on Wednesday about Donald J. Trump’s newly chosen running mate Senator J.D. Vance’s position on key issues misstated the position of Mr. Vance on a national abortion ban. Mr. Vance has said that he would support a 15-week national ban proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, not that the issue should be left entirely to the states.

ARTS

Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about an annual summer photography festival in France, described incorrectly the touring schedule for an exhibition by Mary Ellen Mark. It was in Berlin before it opened at Arles; it is not going to Berlin next.

Because of an editing error, a Critic’s Notebook article on Tuesday about the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt gave an incorrect date for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. It occurred in 2021, not 2001.

OBITUARIES

An obituary on Sunday about the sex therapist Ruth Westheimer referred incorrectly to her at one point. She was not a psychologist.

An obituary on Tuesday about the lawyer Abe Krash misstated the given name of a lawyer who worked with him on the landmark Gideon v. Wainwright case. He was Ralph Temple, not Paul.

Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.

To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email nytnews@nytimes.com. To share feedback, please visit nytimes.com/readerfeedback.

Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to letters@nytimes.com.

For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@nytimes.com.

Sports Thursday

- N.B.A. Board Backs TV Rights Deals, but Steps Remain

- Tadej Pogacar Closes In on a Tour de France Win

N.B.A. Board Backs TV Rights Deals, but Steps Remain

The agreements, set to begin after next season, could potentially pay the league about $76 billion over 11 years.

With the aim of attracting streaming companies, the N.B.A. sold three packages of games instead of two.

By Tania Ganguli and Kevin Draper  17 Jul, 2024

The National Basketball Association’s Board of Governors has approved a set of agreements for the rights to show the league’s games, Commissioner Adam Silver said on Tuesday, moving one step closer to completing deals that would reshape how the sport is watched over the next decade.

Mr. Silver declined to discuss any financial details or even the companies involved, though there have been reports for months that Disney, Comcast and Amazon were close to deals with the league. TNT, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, has shown N.B.A. games since the 1980s, but its prominent on-air personalities like Charles Barkley talked during the playoffs about how they worried that the network would lose the rights after next season, the last covered by the current nine-year TV deal.

The companies are expected to pay the N.B.A. a total of about $76 billion over 11 years. On average, ESPN would pay the N.B.A. about $2.6 billion annually, NBC around $2.5 billion and Amazon roughly $1.8 billion, according to three people familiar with the agreements, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the financial details.

The Board of Governors voted to approve the deals at its yearly meeting in Las Vegas. The N.B.A. must now present the deals to Warner Bros. Discovery, and once that happens, the company will have five days to match one of them to remain in the mix.

“We did approve this stage of those media proposals, but as you all know there are other rights that need to be worked through with existing partners,” Mr. Silver said.

Warner Bros. Discovery was expected to try to match Amazon’s offer, according to two people familiar with the company’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the negotiations.

Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment.

Games broadcast by Warner Bros. Discovery under its existing deal would be split between Comcast and Amazon. The rest would go to Disney, which currently shows league games on ESPN and ABC.

Whether Warner Bros. Discovery has the ability to match Amazon’s offer could be a tension point since Amazon would show games exclusively on its Prime streaming platform and Warner Bros. Discovery broadcasts most of its games on TNT, though it simulcasts those games on its streaming platform, Max.

When completed, the new deals, which start with the 2025-26 season, would be more than two and a half times the average annual value of the N.B.A.’s current rights agreements.

Streaming was a major reason the numbers rose so high. The N.B.A. historically sold two packages of games, but it created a third package this time to entice new bidders, particularly streaming companies. For years, sports leagues and streaming companies circled each other warily. The leagues did not want to alienate viewers or traditional broadcast partners by moving too many games to streaming services, while those services, committed to providing content to audiences whenever they wanted to watch, were slow to embrace the possibilities of live programming.

But in the past few years, the National Football League and Major League Baseball have grown more comfortable with streaming, and now the N.B.A. is diving in fully.

Warner Bros. Discovery had an exclusive window in which to negotiate with the league, but it balked at the N.B.A.’s insistence on reducing its package of games. That added to an already shaky back and forth between the league and the company, which was formed in 2022 after Discovery bought WarnerMedia, whose assets included TNT.

“We don’t have to have the N.B.A.,” David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, said at an investor conference in 2022. That raised questions within the league’s offices about the company’s commitment.

When the N.B.A. started planning for its rights negotiations years ago, such lucrative new agreements seemed unlikely. Media companies had already shelled out big money for N.F.L. rights, a few million households per year were dropping cable packages and Wall Street was demanding that streaming services stop focusing on endless growth and instead show profitability.

But even with many entertainment companies looking to cut costs and get spending under control, the opportunity to secure the long-term rights to televise N.B.A. games proved attractive.

Nicole Sperling contributed reporting.

Tadej Pogacar Closes In on a Tour de France Win

Stage after stage he has taken time from his rival Jonas Vingegaard. Two tough Alpine stages remain before the race ends on Sunday.

Tadej Pogacar wore the leader’s yellow jersey in the Tour de France on Wednesday and may hold that jersey until the finish.

By Victor Mather  17 Jul, 2024

They are the two best riders in the Tour de France. That has been true for several years and has been clear these last few weeks racing up and down the mountains of France. But it seems like Tadej Pogacar is just better than Jonas Vingegaard this year, and now he is closing in on his third Tour victory.

Pogacar held his grip on this year’s Tour on Wednesday by finishing ahead of Vingegaard in another mountain stage. He crossed the finish line two seconds ahead of his rival at the SuperDévoluy ski resort in the Alps and now holds a 3:11 lead overall.

After wrestling with crosswinds early and heat around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the riders approached the steep climbs at the end of the day. Pogacar had a 3:09 lead overall but seemed intent on increasing it.

He attacked Vingegaard on the biggest climb of the day, the Col du Noyer. Vingegaard chased immediately but could not keep up, though he did catch Pogacar on a brief, fast descent.

That left the final climb to SuperDévoluy. Pogacar attacked again near the finish there to grab a few seconds from Vingegaard. It wasn’t a lot, but given the overall margin, it is Vingegaard who needs to make up time; every stage he doesn’t leaves Pogacar closer to victory.

The race between the two was for 27th place in the stage, but the 26 riders ahead of them did not really matter. Richard Carapaz of Ecuador won the stage, but because he and the other stage leaders were well behind the big two in the overall standings, Pogacar and Vingegaard will barely have cared.

With an overall lead now of 3:11, it seems as if Pogacar of Slovenia, the 2020 and 2021 winner, has turned the tables on the two-time defending champion Vingegaard of Denmark.

Race leaders historically have chosen not to attack and instead made their opponents do the work. Not Pogacar. “Sometimes I don’t know the reason why I attack — even me, I don’t know anymore,” he said after the stage. “I guess I was just enjoying the climb, as it was steep and super nice, and I felt like attacking to test my legs into this third week and see if I could get a gap.”

Going into last weekend, Pogacar and Vingegaard looked even. But victories in tough mountain stages both Saturday and Sunday pushed Pogacar into a clear lead.

On the final climb of the day on Saturday, the imposing Pla d’Adet in the Pyrenees, Pogacar waited until there were about two and a half miles to go to attack a select pack of leaders. Everyone was expecting the move, but still Vingegaard could not keep up.

Tadej Pogacar, in the overall leader’s yellow jersey, and Jonas Vingegaard, right, on the final climb Saturday.

The gap between the two riders increased as they climbed the mountain, exciting fans who had been waiting all day hollering and waving flags.

Pogacar, in the leader’s yellow jersey, finished 39 seconds ahead of Vingegaard and increased his overall lead to 1:57. Vingegaard’s second place on the stage was good enough to pass Remco Evenepoel of Belgium for second overall.

On Sunday it was more of the same. This time Pogacar and Vingegaard broke from the pack together with six miles left in the climb up the Plateau de Beille. They matched each other pedal stroke for pedal stroke, making it almost look easy as they left 150 riders straggling on the brutal climb.

With three miles left, Pogacar left Vingegaard behind. He relentlessly pulled away to win by more than a minute. Pogacar had increased his overall lead again, to 3:09.

Now the Tour seems to be his to win or lose. His current lead of 3:11 is greater than the final margin of six of the last 10 Tours.

But there are still two brutal mountain stages to come. On Friday the riders will haul up two mountain climbs rated “hors catégorie,” without category, the most difficult classification, then finish at the ski resort Isola 2000, with riders perhaps wishing they were on a ski lift rather than a bicycle. Saturday brings a climb up the Col de la Couillole.

Vingegaard can still leave Pogacar far behind on these two stages. Or perhaps the days and days of climbing will affect Pogacar and he will blow up — the dreaded bad day in the mountains that has befallen Tour leaders before.

If that happens and the race is close by the final day on Sunday, there will be an exciting finish. The last stage is a 21-mile time trial with some climbing and a tricky descent into Nice.

The Arts

- Emmy Nominees 2024: The Complete List

- With New York’s Help, a Center of Art and Protest to Get a New Home

- ‘UnPrisoned’ Depicts the Burden of Incarceration With a Light Touch

- Jack Black Ends Tenacious D Tour After Bandmate Jokes About Trump Shooting

Emmy Nominees 2024: The Complete List

The 76th Emmy Awards ceremony is planned for Sept. 15. See all the nominees below.

“Shogun,” an FX drama, captured the most nominations, with 25.

Compiled by Shivani Gonzalez  17 Jul, 2024

Nominees for the 2024 Emmy Awards were announced by Tony Hale and Sheryl Lee Ralph, both Emmy winners, on Wednesday morning.

With 23 nominations, “The Bear” broke the record for most nods for a comedy series, beating out “30 Rock,” which had held the record for 15 years with 22 nominations. “Shogun” has 25 nominations, the most in this year’s drama category.

New shows including “Palm Royale” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” as well as the limited series “Baby Reindeer,” also earned their fair share.

The Emmys ceremony is planned for Sept. 15, and it will be the second of the year. Because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, the 2023 ceremony was held in January, delayed from its original date in September.

Here is the full list of nominees.

Best Drama

“Shogun” (FX)

Read our review

“The Crown” (Netflix)

Read our review

“The Morning Show” (Apple TV)

Read our review

“The Gilded Age” (HBO)

Read our review

“Slow Horses” (Apple TV)

Read our review

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (Amazon Prime Video)

Read our profile

“Fallout” (Amazon Prime Video)

Read our review

“3 Body Problem” (Netflix)

Read our review

Best Comedy

“Abbott Elementary” (ABC)

Read our profile

“The Bear” (Hulu)

Read our review

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” (HBO)

Read our review

“Hacks” (HBO)

Read our profile

“Only Murders in the Building” (Hulu)

Read our review

“Palm Royale” (Apple TV)

Read our profile

“Reservation Dogs” (FX)

Read our review

“What We Do in the Shadows” (FX)

Read our review

Best Limited Series

“Baby Reindeer” (Netflix)

Read our review

“Fargo” (FX)

Read our recaps

“Lessons in Chemistry” (Apple TV)

Read our feature

“Ripley”(Netflix)

Read our review

“True Detective: Night Country” (HBO)

Read our review

Best Actress, Drama

Anna Sawai, “Shogun”

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Jennifer Aniston, “The Morning Show”

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Reese Witherspoon, “The Morning Show”

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Imelda Staunton, “The Crown”

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Maya Erskine, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

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Carrie Coon, “The Gilded Age”

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Best Actor, Drama

Donald Glover, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

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Idris Elba, “Hijack”

Read our review

Walton Goggins, “Fallout”

Read our review

Gary Oldman, “Slow Horses”

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Hiroyuki Sanada, “Shogun”

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Dominic West, “The Crown”

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Best Actor, Comedy

Matt Berry, “What We Do in the Shadows”

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Steve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”

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Larry David, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”

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Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”

Read our review

Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear”

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D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, “Reservation Dogs”

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Best Actress, Comedy

Jean Smart, “Hacks”

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Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”

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Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”

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Kristen Wiig, “Palm Royale”

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Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building”

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Maya Rudolph, “Loot”

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Best Actress, Limited Series or TV Movie

Jodie Foster, “True Detective: Night Country”

Read our review

Brie Larson, “Lessons in Chemistry”

Read our feature

Juno Temple, “Fargo”

Read our recaps

Sofia Vergara, “Griselda”

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Naomi Watts, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”

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Best Actor, Limited Series or TV Movie

Matt Bomer, “Fellow Travelers”

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Jon Hamm, “Fargo”

Read our recaps

Richard Gadd, “Baby Reindeer”

Read our review

Tom Hollander, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”

Read our review

Andrew Scott, “Ripley”

Read our feature

Supporting Actress, Comedy

Sheryl Lee Ralph, “Abbott Elementary”

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Carol Burnett, “Palm Royale”

Liza Colon-Zayas, “The Bear”

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Hannah Einbinder, “Hacks”

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Janelle James, “Abbott Elementary”

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Meryl Streep, “Only Murders in the Buildings”

Read our review

Supporting Actor, Comedy

Lionel Boyce, “The Bear”

Paul W. Downs, “Hacks”

Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “The Bear”

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Paul Rudd, “Only Murders in the Building”

Bowen Yang, “Saturday Night Live”

Supporting Actress, Drama

Christine Baranski, “The Gilded Age”

Elizabeth Debicki, “The Crown”

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Nicole Beharie, “The Morning Show”

Greta Lee, “The Morning Show”

Lesley Manville, “The Crown”

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Karen Pittman, “The Morning Show”

Holland Taylor, “The Morning Show”

Supporting Actor, Drama

Tadanobu Asano, “Shogun”

Mark Duplass, “The Morning Show”

Billy Crudup, “The Morning Show”

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Jon Hamm, “The Morning Show”

Takehiro Hira, “Shogun”

Jack Lowden, “Slow Horses”

Jonathan Pryce, “The Crown”

Supporting Actress, Limited Series or Movie

Jessica Gunning, “Baby Reindeer”

Kali Reis, “True Detective: Night Country”

Read our profile

Aja Naomi King, “Lessons in Chemistry’

Diane Lane, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”

Lily Gladstone, “Under the Bridge”

Dakota Fanning, “Ripley”

Nava Mau, “Baby Reindeer”

Supporting Actor, Limited Series or Movie

Robert Downey Jr., “The Sympathizer”

Lewis Pullman, “Lessons in Chemistry”

Jonathan Bailey, “Fellow Travelers”

John Hawkes, “True Detective: Night Country”

Treat Williams, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”

Tom Goodman-Hill, “Baby Reindeer”

Lamorne Morris, “Fargo”

Comedy Guest Actress

Olivia Colman, “The Bear”

Kaitlin Olson, “Hacks”

Jamie Lee Curtis, “The Bear”

Maya Rudolph, “Saturday Night Live”

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, “Only Murders in the Building”

Kristen Wiig, “Saturday Night Live”

Comedy Guest Actor

Jon Bernthal, “The Bear”

Ryan Gosling, “Saturday Night Live”

Bob Odenkirk, “The Bear”

Will Poulter, “The Bear”

Matthew Broderick, “Only Murders in the Building”

Christopher Lloyd, “Hacks”

Drama Guest Actress

Claire Foy, “The Crown”

Sarah Paulson, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Michaela Coel, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Marcia Gay Harden, “The Morning Show”

Parker Posey, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Drama Guest Actor

Nestor Carbonell, “Shogun”

John Turturro, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Paul Dano, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Tracy Letts, “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”

Jonathan Pryce, “Slow Horses”

Variety Talk Series

“The Daily Show” (Comedy Central)

“Jimmy Kimmel Live” (ABC)

“Late Night with Seth Meyers” (NBC)

“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” (CBS)

Variety Scripted Series

“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (HBO)

“Saturday Night Live” (NBC)

Reality or Competition Program

“The Amazing Race” (CBS)

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” (MTV)

“The Traitors” (Peacock)

Read our feature

“Top Chef” (Bravo)

“The Voice” (NBC)

Host for a Reality/Competition Program

RuPaul Charles, “RuPaul’s Drag Race”

Alan Cumming, “The Traitors”

Kristen Kish, “Top Chef”

Jeff Probst, “Survivor”

Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner, Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Robert Herjavec and Daymond John, “Shark Tank”

Animated Program

“X-Men ’97” (Disney+)

“The Simpsons” (Fox)

“Blue Eye Samurai” (Netflix)

“Bob’s Burgers” (Fox)

“Scavengers Reign” (HBO)

TV Movie

“Mr. Monk’s Last Case” (Peacock)

“Quiz Lady” (Hulu)

Read our review

“Red, White and Royal Blue” (Amazon Prime Video)

Read our review

“Scoop” (Netflix)

Read our review

“Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story” (Netflix)

Read our review

Documentary or Nonfiction Special

“Jim Henson Idea Man” (Disney+)

“The Greatest Night in Pop” (Netflix)

“STEVE! (Martin) a documentary in 2 pieces” (Apple TV+)

“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” (HBO)

“Girls State” (Apple TV+)

Documentary or Nonfiction Series

“Beckham” (Netflix)

“The Jinx — Part Two” (Max)

“STAX: Soulsville U.S.A.” (HBO)

“Telemarketers” (HBO)

“Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of TV” (ID)

Directing for a Drama Series

Mimi Leder, “The Overview Effect,” “The Morning Show”

Stephen Daldry, “Sleep, Dearie Sleep,” “The Crown”

Hiro Murai, “First Date,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”

Frederick E.O. Toye, “Chapter Nine: Crimson Sky,” “Shо̄gun”

Saul Metzstein, “Strange Games,” “Slow Horses”

Salli Richardson-Whitfield, “Beat L.A.,” “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”

Directing for a Comedy Series

Randall Einhorn, “Party,” “Abbott Elementary”

Christopher Storer, “Fishes,” “The Bear”

Ramy Youssef, “Honeydew,” “The Bear”

Guy Ritchie, “Refined Aggression,” “The Gentlemen”

Lucia Aniello, “Bulletproof,” “Hacks”

Mary Lou Belli, “I’m the Pappy,” “The Ms. Pat Show”

Directing for a Limited Series/TV Movie

Weronika Tofilska, “Episode 4,” “Baby Reindeer”

Millicent Shelton, “Poirot,” “Lessons in Chemistry”

Noah Hawley, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” “Fargo”

Gus Van Sant, “Pilot,” “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”

Steven Zaillian, “Ripley”

Issa López, “True Detective: Night Country”

Writing for a Comedy Series

“Career Day” by Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”

“Fishes” by Joanna Calo and Christopher Storer, “The Bear”

“Bulletproof” by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, “Hacks”

“Orlando,” Meredith Scardino and Sam Means, “Girls5eva”

“Brooke Hosts a Night of Undeniable Good,” Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, “The Other Two”

“Pride Parade,” Jake Bender and Zach Dunn, “What We Do in the Shadows”

Writing for a Drama Series

“Ritz,” Peter Morgan and Meriel Sheibani-Clare, “The Crown”

“The End,” Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, “Fallout”

“Chapter One: Anjin” by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, “Shogun”

“Chapter Nine: Crimson Sky” by Rachel Kondo and Caillin Puente, “Shogun”

“First Date” by Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

“Negotiating With Tigers,” Will Smith, “Slow Horses”

Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or Drama Special

Series by Richard Gadd, “Baby Reindeer”

Series by Steven Zaillian, “Ripley”

“Joan Is Awful,” by Charlie Brooker, “Black Mirror”

“You’re Wonderful” by Ron Nyswaner, “Fellow Travelers”

“Part 6” by Issa López, “True Detective: Night Country”

“The Tragedy of the Commons” by Noah Hawley, “Fargo”

Writing for a Variety Special

Alex Edelman, “Just for Us”

Jacqueline Novak, “Get On Your Knees”

John Early, “Now More Than Ever”

Mike Birbiglia, “Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man and the Pool”

Writing for a Variety Series

“The Daily Show” (Comedy Central)

“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (Max)

“Saturday Night Live” (NBC)

With New York’s Help, a Center of Art and Protest to Get a New Home

ABC No Rio, a cultural center on the Lower East Side, broke ground on the new building, which will replace the tenement it operated out of for more than 40 years.

A digital rendering of the inside of the new ABC No Rio building.

By Colin Moynihan  16 Jul, 2024

Eight years after the rickety tenement that housed the Lower East Side cultural center ABC No Rio fell to the wrecking ball, a replacement is on the way.

A new four-story building will occupy the same lot on Rivington Street as the old center, which for decades symbolized the grit and defiance of the Lower East Side. No Rio cultivated political protest and the artistic avant-garde, with performances by Karen Finley and Beck, while also serving as a base for people to help prisoners and distribute free food.

The new structure will be built with the aid of the City of New York, which over the last several years has put $21 million toward the project, allocated through the Department of Cultural Affairs by the mayor’s office, the borough president’s office and City Council members.

That building will have a kitchen, a free computer lab and a zine library, just like its predecessor. It will also include environmentally conscious touches meant to insulate the building and conserve energy, including a roof garden and rows of plants along the facade.

The center’s relationship with the city, which for years was its landlord, has not always been smooth. In the 1990s, city officials tried to oust the group that ran the center. No Rio fought back, with protests and street theater.

But on Tuesday, at a ceremony as the construction project broke ground, the evolution in the relationship was clear.

“ABC No Rio embodies the DIY creative energy and legacy of the Lower East Side like few other places,” Laurie Cumbo, the cultural affairs commissioner, said in a statement, adding that the new building will “be rooted in the same mission and ethos that has made this a vital space for pioneering artists for more than 40 years.”

Cumbo and several No Rio members, including Steven Englander, the group’s longtime director, dug shovels into the ground during the ceremony. Excavation and actual construction are expected to begin within three weeks, said Englander, who described the groundbreaking as a “long awaited and very auspicious day.”

Becky Howland, who is among the artists credited with starting No Rio, said the survival of the center was “a testament to the power of communal action over time.”

The basement and ground floor of the new building will be completed within about 20 months, Englander said, and the three upper floors will be left partly finished, with walls, windows, ceilings and lighting, but little else. Additional work on those floors will take place during a second phase of construction that has yet to be scheduled, he said.

The original home of ABC No Rio on Rivington Street, which featured a wall mural on its facade. The new center is to be constructed at the same location.

No Rio traces its roots to 1979, when a group of artists took over an empty city-owned building on Delancey Street and held what they called “The Real Estate Show,” a commentary on gentrification replete with a manifesto that cited the importance of doing “something dramatic that is neither commercially oriented nor institutionally quarantined.”

The group soon moved with the city’s permission to Rivington Street. Its name came from the remnants of lettering on a nearby sign that had once read “Abogado y Notario Publico.”

In 1994, the city took steps to evict the group, starting a battle over whether the Rivington Street building would be given to a developer or retained by the artists and the activists they had allied with, including squatters who had fought the city over possession of empty buildings in the nearby East Village.

The artists and activists prevailed, at some cost. Those who had taken up residence inside No Rio had to move out. And the group had to prove it could afford repairs by raising $100,000, relying on fund-raisers and private donations. The center eventually raised just over $2 million, some of which came from the auction of donated artworks by people like Yoko Ono and Hans Haacke, That money is now going toward expenses like architecture, engineering and legal fees.

After buying the building for one dollar in 2006, No Rio members concluded that they could not simply shore it up. The center was razed in 2016 and as years passed a maddening cycle repeated: The group would solicit bids, prepare for construction, only to be blocked by ever-rising construction costs.

After the event on Tuesday, No Rio members marched north to celebrate at Umbrella House, a squat-turned-limited-equity co-op on Avenue C where Englander began living after moving out of the old Rivington Street building.

Along the way, Eric Goldhagen, a co-chair of the board of No Rio, said the new building would provide a chance for new people to get involved with the group.

“The history of No Rio has been one generation handing the project to the next,” he said. “We’ll call the rebuilding a success when a new generation of artists and activists have made the space their own.”

‘UnPrisoned’ Depicts the Burden of Incarceration With a Light Touch

Delroy Lindo and Kerry Washington discuss their series, which finds humor and struggle in a father and daughter repairing their relationship after a long prison term.

In “UnPrisoned,” Kerry Washington and Delroy Lindo (with Faly Rakotohavana, left) seek to tell a nuanced story about “the problems of families that have been decimated by the penal system,” Lindo said.

By Salamishah Tillet  16 Jul, 2024

“UnPrisoned” on Hulu is the rare show to focus on the aftermath of incarceration and its ongoing effects on families rather than on imprisonment itself.

Created by Tracy McMillan and loosely based on her 2011 memoir, “I Love You and I’m Leaving You Anyway,” the series stars Delroy Lindo and Kerry Washington as Edwin and Paige, a father and daughter trying to repair their relationship when Edwin comes back into Paige’s life after serving 17 years in prison.

The first season explored the emotional injury that Edwin’s long absence inflicted upon Paige, an avid Instagrammer, therapist and single mother who struggles with a string of unhealthy romantic partners. Season 2, premiering Wednesday, delves deeper into how the issues of abandonment, anxiety and mistrust have been passed down through three generations, and it depicts the hard work it takes for the family to break the trauma cycle and begin to heal.

Though the show spotlights a serious societal problem — mass incarceration — it does so with a light touch, finding humor as well as difficulty in the challenges of re-entry. Such nuance is what drew both Lindo and Washington to this story about, as Lindo put it, “the problems of families that have been decimated by the penal system and their trying to reconnect.”

“Shining light on that process and on one individual who has been imprisoned for as long as my character was, while also doing it somewhat comedically, was genuinely very, very interesting to me,” he said.

Washington helped develop “UnPrisoned” through her production company, Simpson Street. She said Lindo was her only choice for Edwin because she needed someone who could handle the comedy while also being able to convey the complexity and charisma of McMillan’s father, who inspired the character.

“I said in my pitches, ‘It’s Delroy or we don’t have a show,’” she said.

The second season brings a notable new character — the family’s eccentric therapist, played by John Stamos — and returning young actors like Jordyn McIntosh, who plays Paige’s inner girl; and Faly Rakotohavana, who plays Paige’s son, Finn. In separate video interviews, Washington and Lindo, spoke about the role of comedy in “UnPrisoned” and what they hope the series can contribute to discussions about criminal justice reform.

These are edited excerpts from the conversations.

How did “UnPrisoned” come about?

KERRY WASHINGTON During the pandemic, a mutual friend asked, “Do you know Tracy McMillan?” I was a fan of the show “Family or Fiancé” that she hosted on OWN, and thought she was really funny. So, when I eventually read the script for “UnPrisoned,” I loved it immediately. Also, anyone who’s read my memoir [“Thicker Than Water,” from 2023] knows that during the pandemic, I was navigating my own complicated relationship with my dad and my parents. So a lot of the stuff on this show resonated for me.

“Orange Is the New Black” included plenty of humor, but most shows about the criminal justice system and its impact are dramas, like “Oz,” “Prison Break” or “For Life.” How does comedy help illuminate this crisis differently?

DELROY LINDO It is a clever way to avoid proselytizing and perhaps be a little more engaging, if people have the outlet of laughter.

I approached it in the same way that I would approach anything else, which is just finding the truth of this person, of this person’s reality. I did meet Tracy’s father, but I was not trying to impersonate him. He gave me a lot of information and insights into his life. Then I met with formerly incarcerated men who work in an organization in Los Angeles. I spoke with them about their experiences and what led them to be incarcerated in the first place. I was gathering all of this data and then adding to that my process as an actor, which often involves identifying the areas of commonality between myself and whichever character I’m playing.

WASHINGTON A lot of the tone comes from Tracy, who is just a really funny person; her memoir is hilarious. Tracy is a miracle. She was in and out of dozens of foster homes and has had a really traumatic life because of her interactions with the system — the foster care system is like a pipeline to incarceration. And she not only survived but has become the woman that she is today. I think she navigates a lot of life through maintaining a perspective that allows for laughter and gives people, including herself, a lot of grace. Tracy’s dad was funny. My dad is funny. We’re trying to be really honest with this show, and the truth is that life is often ridiculous and funny. And you can survive some of the darkest moments when you can have that kind of perspective.

What was it like to work together?

WASHINGTON Delroy hates when I tell this story, but when I was in high school, I saw him playing West Indian Archie in [Spike Lee’s] movie “Malcolm X,” and it changed my understanding of what an actor could do. At the beginning of the movie, he is the powerful, sexy, dangerous, elegant badass. And then at the end, he’s the most vulnerable character. You believe that it’s the same man, even though you couldn’t imagine a more different incarnation of that person.

When Tracy talks about people meeting her dad, they’d say, “Oh, I would never think that he’s been in and out of prison your whole life: He’s so smart; he’s so elegant; he’s so well-spoken; he’s so charming.” So I thought Delroy could play my dad on the show, who is also so brilliant, so smart and so badass.

LINDO I was watching some episodes recently, and I was looking at Kerry playing my daughter, who is so neurotic. And what I admired was that Kerry gives herself over to that neuroticism. She’s vulnerable to it and expresses through it, and from it. It’s really admirable as an actor.

John Stamos joins the show in the new season, playing an eccentric family therapist.

Much of this show is about recovering from trauma. How did you approach showing this intergenerational story of healing?

WASHINGTON Therapy with that crazy man. John Stamos is so brilliant — he adds such a great layer of comedy but also the ridiculous. And Delroy and I were also blown away by Faly, who plays my son, Finn, in Season 1. So in Season 2 we wanted to give him more room to flex and continue to grow as an actor.

It’s also perfect for these characters, because they go into family therapy for him: They are willing to face stuff that they’ve never been able to before because they don’t want Finn one day to be complaining about Paige to his children. They’re like, we have to figure out how to stop this cycle so that this child can be free.

LINDO I think what audiences are seeing are human beings trying to connect. And when one thinks about Black people, African-descended people, the vast majority of our problems as a people have been caused by other folk not seeing our humanity.

What do you hope audiences take away from “UnPrisoned”?

LINDO That people are deserving of second chances and can be rehabilitated. That may seem like an extremely utopian, rose-colored-glasses type comment, but when we think about the warehousing of human beings in this country — which on many levels is what the federal prison system does — the vast, disproportionate number are Black and brown people. So what I’m hoping is that there is a re-investigation of the worth of human beings, and how human beings who are being incarcerated can be re-engaged and healed.

WASHINGTON A big part is wanting to get people beyond stereotypes and statistics and really humanize this issue because that was often the experience that people had when they met Tracy’s dad. So, how do you scale that? You scale that in storytelling and an experiment in empathy. This issue of mass incarceration is core to our culture as Americans because the system has destroyed so many families across so many races. I’m really proud that we’re telling the story through the lens of this very real Black family, but this is an American story.

Jack Black Ends Tenacious D Tour After Bandmate Jokes About Trump Shooting

At a concert in Australia, Kyle Gass made a comment suggesting that he wished the shooter had not missed former President Trump during an assassination attempt.

Kyle Gass, left, and Jack Black of Tenacious D in 2022. When asked to make a birthday wish at a recent concert in Australia, Gass said, “Don’t miss Trump next time.”

By Maya Salam  16 Jul, 2024

Tenacious D, the American comedy-rock duo that includes the movie star Jack Black, announced on Tuesday that the remainder of its tour would be canceled and that all future plans were on pause after the band’s other member, Kyle Gass, made an offhand comment onstage about the assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump.

A representative for the duo confirmed that Black had brought out a cake at the ICC Sydney Theater in Australia on Sunday to celebrate Gass’s 64th birthday. When Black asked Gass to “make a wish,” Gass responded, “Don’t miss Trump next time.” Videos of the moment were circulated widely online.

In a statement posted to social media on Tuesday, Black, known for “School of Rock” and “King Kong,” said he “was blindsided by what was said at the show,” adding, “I would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form.”

“After much reflection,” he continued, “I no longer feel it is appropriate to continue the Tenacious D tour, and all future creative plans are on hold. I am grateful to the fans for their support and understanding.” In June, Black, 54, attended a star-studded fund-raiser for President Biden, at which he gave a speech in American flag-themed overalls.

Gass posted an apology to social media on Tuesday morning, stating that “the line I improvised onstage Sunday night in Sydney was highly inappropriate, dangerous and a terrible mistake.”

“I don’t condone violence of any kind, in any form, against anyone,” he wrote. “What happened was a tragedy, and I’m incredibly sorry for my severe lack of judgment. I profoundly apologize to those I’ve let down and truly regret any pain I’ve caused.”

Michael Greene said on Tuesday that Greene Talent, Gass’s talent agency, had parted ways with him.

Shortly before the announcement that the entire tour was canceled, the band, which has been active since 1994, postponed its Tuesday date in Broadmeadow, Australia.

In the wake of Gass’s onstage remarks, Senator Ralph Babet of the center-right United Australia party called for the duo to be deported. In a lengthy statement posted online, he said, “Tenacious D should be immediately removed from the country after wishing for the assassination of Donald Trump at their Sydney concert.”

During a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, a man fired shots toward the stage while the former president was speaking. One spectator was killed, and Trump was rushed off, blood visible around his right ear. The shooter was killed by the Secret Service, and his motive remains unclear.

It is not the first time a celebrity has faced fallout from a joke about Trump. In May 2017, Kathy Griffin’s career was put on ice after she posed for a photograph holding a severed-head Halloween mask of Trump, who was then the president, doused in blood-like ketchup.

Thursday Styles

- Victoria Beckham Has Learned to Smile

- Who Is Gabbriette? Meet the Model ‘Brat.’

- They Went Viral Making Sunscreen From Scratch. Experts Have Concerns.

- Are You Screaming for This Whipped Cream Sunscreen?

- In New York, a Lunch With Extravagant Jewelry and Local Dim Sum

- An Easy, Beautiful Tomato Tart to Make All Summer Long

- The Irony of Dr. Ruth

- ASAP Rocky, Odell Beckham Jr. and John Cleese Are All Wearing It

- I Love This T-Shirt. Now, Would You Please Cut It?

- Is This the Craziest Sneaker You Have Ever Seen?

Victoria Beckham Has Learned to Smile

At 50, and after some promising years for her business, the designer and former Spice Girl has softened up (a little).

Victoria Beckham has entered a new chapter of her life marked by personal and professional milestones.

By Ruth La Ferla  15 Jul, 2024

On a balmy recent Sunday, Victoria Beckham sank into a banquette at the Fasano Fifth Avenue, a fancy hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, her pout a little puffier than it used to be, her slight frame sheathed in an inky silk suit of her own design. Tucked into a corner just within view was a pair of black crutches so streamlined and glossy they might have passed for an outsize accessory.

In fact, they were a testament to Ms. Beckham’s stubborn grit.

A fall at the gym this winter had hobbled her but not kept her from taking her bows on crutches at her namesake label’s runway show at Paris Fashion Week in March. Or from celebrating a milestone birthday, her 50th, at a lavish bash in London. Nor did it prevent her from hopping a flight to New York, where she had come to oversee and star in an ad campaign promoting the line of fragrances Ms. Beckham introduced last fall.

The perfumes were an expansion of the Victoria Beckham Beauty brand she started in 2019, which was itself an expansion of the Victoria Beckham fashion line she started in 2008 — when many still remembered her as Posh, the sophisticated Spice Girl who just happened to be married to the British soccer star David Beckham.

After her pivot from pop star to designer, some self-appointed critics were quick to dismiss Ms. Beckham, who grew up in Hertfordshire, England, as an unschooled Barbie from the hinterlands. Her career has given rise to plenty of speculation among fashion insiders: Is she for real? Is she selling a stake in the company to LVMH, the luxury giant? Will the business be profitable?

A fall this winter required Ms. Beckham to use crutches, but that did not stop her from taking a bow at her brand’s Paris Fashion Week show in March.

But Ms. Beckham is nothing if not tenacious. And 16 years after starting her brand with her husband and Simon Fuller, the creator of “American Idol,” she is more inclined than ever to dig in her towering heels.

“If I’m still being judged I really don’t care,” Ms. Beckham said in an accent that seems to have grown plummier over the years. “It’s been a real roller coaster of a ride for this brand. But I’m feeling grounded and proud of what I’ve achieved.”

With that she flashed a rare grin. “For so many years in pictures I didn’t smile,” she said. “That was definitely a sign of insecurity.”

Ms. Beckham has reason these days to be upbeat: At a time when some luxury fashion businesses are faltering, the Victoria Beckham brand appears to be finding its footing. The business, which had lost money nearly every year since its introduction, recently pulled out of the red after expanding into beauty and bags.

Marie Leblanc, who runs the brand’s fashion arm, said that 2022 was a turning point for the company. That year, it reported revenues of about $75 million, a roughly 44 percent increase compared with 2021, when its revenues were about $52 million. Between the same period, the company’s reported operating losses shrank to about $1.1 million, down from about $5 million.

“For the first time both fashion and beauty were profitable,” said Ms. Leblanc, who joined Ms. Beckham’s brand in 2019 after working at others including Isabel Marant and Celine.

David Belhassen, the founder of NEO Investment Partners, a private equity firm that invested about $40 million into Ms. Beckham’s brand in 2017, told WWD in May that the company’s operating cash flow, or EBITDA, grew in 2023.

Being a Spice Girl, Ms. Beckham said, boosted her confidence and commercial savvy.

Ms. Beckham has been chasing success since her earliest years. “At school I was never the brightest child,” she said. “I had to work really hard.” And, difficult as it is to conceive, the designer, whose recent birthday party drew A-listers including Salma Hayek and Tom Cruise, once thought of herself as a misfit. “I had terrible skin and was quite awkward.”

She credited pop stardom with giving her more confidence — and commercial savvy. “What better way to understand P.R. and marketing than to have been a Spice Girl in the ’90s,” she said.

Ed Burstell, a retail brand consultant in New York, described Ms. Beckham as “a shrewd businesswoman,” one who recognized that expanding into beauty could broaden her audience.

Mr. Burstell first met her in the early 2000s, when she was an aspiring designer and he a senior vice president at Bergdorf Goodman. By the time Ms. Beckham started her fashion line, he had become the managing director at Liberty, the luxury department store in London. Mr. Burstell considered carrying the collection there, but concluded it would not resonate with customers.

“The style, the cut of the clothes, they were good,” he recalled. “But the clothes were quiet at a time when fashion was less quiet. She didn’t get the credit she deserved for being on the forefront of quiet luxury.”

When she introduced her line, Ms. Beckham insisted on tackling the minutiae of her trade: pricing, turnover and how costs were managed. She learned the design process in part by draping dresses on herself. “I’m not claiming to be a master draper,” she told The New York Times in 2010. “The bottom line is: Would I wear this?”

Ms. Beckham described the experience of filming the recent Netflix series about her husband, the soccer star David Beckham, and family as trying — but also liberating.

Indeed, she has operated largely from instinct. And, said Mr. Beckham, her husband of 25 years, she has never been afraid to hitch up her sleeves. “I’ve always been in awe of her drive and work ethic,” he wrote in an email. “The business has faced many obstacles over the years but she stuck to her vision.”

Even now, Ms. Beckham acknowledged, “I’m a control freak.”

She had to tamp down her impulse to call the shots during the production of “Beckham,” the four-part documentary series about her husband and their family released by Netflix last year. “I found that you can’t control every picture, every scene,” she said, “and that took me out of my comfort zone.”

Ms. Beckham’s candor in her scenes all but stole the show. But the experience was trying. Most challenging were the moments in which she was asked to address her husband’s alleged affair with his personal assistant, Rebecca Loos, in 2003. While Mr. Beckham has consistently denied that it happened, there was friction in the marriage. “I was the most unhappy I have ever been in my entire life,” Ms. Beckham said in the documentary.

She seems to have since made her peace — and to have made some discoveries as well. During the filming, “I didn’t ask questions, I didn’t check the monitor, I didn’t check the lighting,” she said. “There is something quite liberating about that.”

Growing comfortable with letting go has not dampened her drive. “I’m still incredibly ambitious,” she said. “But I’m also more relaxed. And isn’t that the great thing about getting older?”

Who Is Gabbriette? Meet the Model ‘Brat.’

Having spent her career on the cool-girl fringes, the model rocketed to mainstream fame with a high-profile engagement and a mention from Charli XCX.

Gabbriette was already known as a model and musician, but being name-checked in a Charli XCX song and engaged to Matty Healy brought her to a much larger audience.

By Jessica Roy  15 Jul, 2024

“Call me Gabbriette, you’re so inspired,” sings Charli XCX on “360,” the intro track to her new album “Brat,” which has become such an instant hit that it has taken over an entire season. The line is a reference to Gabbriette Bechtel, a model and singer known as Gabbriette, whose goth-light aesthetic, defiant gaze and “brat” attitude have made her an “it” girl, particularly in the era of indie-sleaze revival.

Having spent much of her career in the cool-girl fringes, Gabbriette recently rocketed to mainstream popularity with an engagement, a booming modeling career and several famous friendships.

Here’s more about Gabbriette.

What’s her background?

Gabriella Leigh Bechtel, 26, was born in Orange County, Calif., to a Mexican mother and a German father. “The majority of students at my high school were beautiful, strictly white blond girls, and my sister and I were Hispanic,” she told British Vogue in 2023. “I was called some pretty awful things. But then I just learned to laugh at it.”

Initially intent on pursuing ballet, Gabbriette moved to Los Angeles after high school, where she started appearing in small modeling gigs and music videos. She is currently signed to IMG Models and has starred in campaigns for Marc Jacobs, Nike and Savage X Fenty.

But she also does music?

Yes. In 2018, Charli XCX tapped Gabbriette to be the lead singer in the all-female punk band Nasty Cherry. The band was the subject of a Netflix documentary, “I’m With the Band: Nasty Cherry,” which followed its inception and subsequent success. Nasty Cherry hasn’t released new music since its 2021 EP, “The Movie.”

Gabbriette still remains close with Charli XCX, as per the “360” reference. She also appeared in the “360” music video, alongside Julia Fox, Chloë Sevigny, Rachel Sennott, Chloe Cherry and Richie Shazam.

Who is her fiancé?

In June, Gabbriette announced that she was engaged to Matty Healy, the lead singer of The 1975. (Charli XCX is also engaged to a member of The 1975: the drummer George Daniel.) Much to his chagrin, Mr. Healy is probably best known across the internet as Taylor Swift’s ex. He and Gabbriette began dating publicly in September 2023, not long after the fervor over Mr. Healy and Ms. Swift’s short-lived situationship began to die down, and before it spun back up in the spring with the release of Ms. Swift’s album “The Tortured Poets Department.” Gabbriette announced her engagement on Instagram in June 2024 with a photo of her showing off a custom black-diamond engagement ring. Very brat.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8I5tyWJPea/

What’s next?

In addition to singing, modeling and being an artistic muse, Gabbriette also creates recipes and cooking videos for her social media accounts.

“Growing up, my family was always cooking,” she told British Vogue in 2023. “They were really experimental and would always have copies of Bon Appétit laid out.” She said her mother “would always be putting a twist on a recipe and my dad would be grilling something or making sauerkraut. Family meals were a big part of our life, we’d sit down together after school without our phones and talk about our day, and the cooking process was always a big part of that.”

Gabbriette hopes to parlay her talent in the kitchen into a future book deal. When Numéro Netherlands recently asked what was next for her, she replied enthusiastically, “A cookbook, 100 percent.”

And of course, she has her wedding to Mr. Healy to look forward to.

They Went Viral Making Sunscreen From Scratch. Experts Have Concerns.

Nara and Lucky Blue Smith make some of their own cosmetics, but the practice has risks.

Nara Smith and her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, using their homemade toothpaste. Experts say making your own at home could lead to damaged teeth.

By Katie Mogg  8 Jul, 2024

Last month, the model and influencer Nara Smith said she had recently run out of sunscreen. Instead of buying more, she asked her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, to make some from scratch.

Mr. Smith’s process, which Ms. Smith posted to TikTok last month, looked more like a cooking video than anything else. Wearing an unbuttoned shirt and holding a toothpick between his lips, he combined ingredients including coconut oil, shea butter, jojoba oil and zinc oxide powder in a clear bowl.

In a certain pocket of social media, Ms. Smith has become known for such do-it-yourself content. It began with her posting recipes to satisfy food cravings, but grew to include videos of her husband making personal care products such as sunscreen, toothpaste and moisturizer from scratch.

Some commenters admire the couple’s D.I.Y. cosmetics, while others wonder whether their content is satire. But cosmetic chemists, dentists and dermatologists agree that making beauty products from scratch isn’t always a good idea. Homemade moisturizer presents few risks, but homemade sunscreen is far less likely to offer protection, and D.I.Y. toothpaste may be bad for tooth enamel, experts said.

Ms. Smith, who did not respond to requests for comment, has at times nodded to the limitations of her experience. In the toothpaste video, for example, she acknowledged that she is not a professional dentist. But at other times, as in her sunscreen TikTok, she assured viewers that her husband “is a baker, so he makes sure that everything is very precise.”

Cosmetic chemistry is not the same as baking, said Marisa Plescia, the vice president-elect of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists. Experts make products according to precise formulas; attempting that process at home when you’re not a chemist can lead to D.I.Y. products that are ineffective, don’t last long or react poorly with your skin, she said.

“Baking? You could follow a recipe that you could find online or on the back of the box,” Ms. Plescia said. “Cosmetics? Yes, it is a recipe, but it is much more difficult to follow.”

[Embedded video available]

D.I.Y. Sunscreen

Ms. Smith’s sunscreen TikTok video has now been viewed more than 19 million times.

Cosmetic chemists in the United States must fulfill the requirements outlined by the Food and Drug Administration when determining which active ingredients in sunscreen are safe, and whether they can be combined, Ms. Plescia said.

Attempting to make sunscreen at home is challenging because the formulas are precise: Zinc oxide, for instance, is considered safe to use in sunscreen, but it shouldn’t make up more than 25 percent of a mixture.

Chemists also test sunscreen to ensure it provides the sun protection factor (or SPF) that you’ll see on the label, and make sure the ingredients will remain effective throughout the sunscreen’s shelf life.

Under most circumstances, homemade sunscreen offers weak and spotty protection, and it may lose its effectiveness quickly, experts said. Using ineffective homemade sunscreen exposes you to ultraviolet radiation, raising your risk of skin cancers and accelerating signs of aging, such as wrinkles and sun spots, said Dr. Brooke Jeffy, a board-certified dermatologist based in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“You are literally putting yourself in danger,” Ms. Plescia said.

TikTok Toothpaste

The Smiths’ toothpaste video now has more than 38 million views. In it, the couple makes toothpaste using bentonite clay (a gray powder made from montmorillonite and other minerals that has been used as a natural remedy), water, coconut oil, baking soda, stevia and peppermint essential oil.

Dr. Purnima Kumar, the department chair of periodontology and oral medicine at the University of Michigan, said she questioned the viability of D.I.Y. toothpaste because it’s hard to know whether the ingredients are too abrasive or contain harsh chemicals that can wear away enamel, the outermost layer of the tooth that protects from cavities.

Many ingredients used in homemade toothpaste, such as bentonite clay, haven’t been studied for their compatibility with enamel safety, Dr. Kumar added.

One ingredient in the Smiths’ D.I.Y. toothpaste is bentonite clay. Dentists say the clay is soft, but you still run the risk of damaging the enamel on your teeth if the clay includes abrasive impurities.

The Smiths’ homemade moisturizer is relatively harmless since it includes humectants and emollients, substances that hydrate and lock moisture into the skin.

Enamel cannot be replaced after it’s damaged, Dr. Kumar said, and when it’s worn down, your teeth are more likely to decay or feel sensitive.

So when it comes to using homemade toothpaste, “one must consider if this is a risk worth taking,” Dr. Kumar said.

Mixing Moisturizer

When Mr. Smith ran out of store-bought moisturizer, he made his own in a video that now has more than 28 million views. To do so, he used beeswax, squalene, jojoba oil, hyaluronic acid, glycerin, vitamin E oil and beef tallow.

“If you do want to stick to more at-home recipes, using plant-based oils is a great option,” Ms. Plescia said, adding that “there are people that do make their own moisturizers all the time.”

Jojoba oil and squalene are plant oils and emollients, which means they moisturize and soften skin by reinforcing its natural barrier and forming a layer that prevents moisture from escaping; beef tallow is considered an emollient, too. Hyaluronic acid and glycerin are humectants, which moisturize by attracting and holding onto the water molecules in your skin. Beeswax has both humectant and emollient properties, while vitamin E is an antioxidant regularly used in skin care products because it’s moisturizing and helps protect the skin from damage.

It’s difficult to know how long any D.I.Y. cosmetic will remain effective before turning rancid without proper testing, Ms. Plescia said, but the ingredients in the Smiths’ homemade moisturizer are relatively harmless. Some of them, she added, “have been used for thousands upon thousands of years for skin care.”

Are You Screaming for This Whipped Cream Sunscreen?

A few viral products aim to put fun in the sun(screen).

“Now, we have this product that isn’t just going to protect me from a sunburn, but it also looks cool and attracts attention,” said Jennifer Brady, a publicist who lives in Brooklyn.

By Alyson Krueger  28 Jun, 2024

Last week, on a family vacation at a resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., Alexa Johnson grabbed a canister containing a substance that looked like whipped cream, felt like whipped cream and made the same whooshing sound as whipped cream. But it wasn’t whipped cream at all. It was sunscreen.

Her children, 9 and 6, immediately extended their hands, then smeared generous helpings all over their arms and legs.

“It looked ridiculous,” said Ms. Johnson, a 37-year-old brand consultant who lives in Seattle. “We were all laughing.”

That is sort of the point. Marty Bell, a partner at Vacation, a sunscreen company based in Miami, which released Classic Whip sunscreen in August 2022, said the idea came out of a brainstorming session that wandered onto the topic of foods.

“We couldn’t stop laughing at the idea of a whipped cream sunscreen,” he said. “There’s something incredibly nostalgic and playful about whipped cream,” he said, adding that the team “became determined to find a way to replicate that whole experience with sunscreen.”

Applying sunscreen can be a laborious summertime chore, especially for parents trying to corral kids, a cohort notorious for their objections to sun protection. Brands like Supergoop, EVY Technology and Vacation have each produced a mousse product that aims to put fun in the sun(screen).

Every summer, such a product seems to have a moment on social media. Last August, Kim Kardashian anointed Classic Whip, which retails for $22 a bottle, “insane”; videos mentioning the product still rack up five million views a week on TikTok, according to Vacation. (In some of the more absurd videos, people can be seen trying to eat it — something you absolutely shouldn’t do, Mr. Bell said.)

Holly Thaggard, the founder of Supergoop, which began to sell a mousse sunscreen in 2017, said it’s essential to make applying sunscreen something people want to do.

“We need more people to find this fun, playful spirit in an activity that is saving the world from cancer,” she said.

“We need more people to find this fun, playful spirit in an activity that is saving the world from cancer,” said Holly Thaggard, the founder of Supergoop, which started selling a mousse sunscreen in 2017.

Indeed, the American Academy of Dermatology estimates that one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetime, a risk that can be reduced by wearing sunscreen.

“The mousse sunscreens are a novel formulation of the past three or four years, and they’ve kind of gone viral. The whipped one especially gets a lot of hype,” said Dr. Sheilagh Maguiness, a pediatric dermatologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “Anything that is novel that will make people use sunscreen and get excited about it is a win.”

She added that this is especially true with teenagers, who have been subjected to a great deal of misinformation about sunscreen and skin cancer.

“I think this is great for them,” Dr. Maguiness said.

With spray-on sunscreens, “you don’t know exactly how much is going on your skin,” Dr. Maguiness said. But many people rub mousse in fully. The downside, however, is that it can be tricky to know how much to use. “The mousse isn’t quite as thick as cream or lotion, so it can be hard to tell how much you need to get on to get that protection.” She said to consult the bottle for guidance.

Ms. Thaggard of Supergoop said she had gotten the idea for a whipped sunscreen after watching her children at a party. “I was sitting there watching these kids cover themselves in shaving cream, thinking it was the most fun activity ever,” she said. “I kept thinking, ‘If only this could be sunscreen, no one would ever get sunburned.’”

Many of the popular mousse sunscreens, including Vacation’s and Supergoop’s, are chemical sunscreens, not mineral sunscreens, the former of which can raise environmental red flags, Dr. Maguiness said. “Chemical sunscreens have their own baggage to carry these days because there are some of them that are not considered reef safe.”

Douglas Jessmer, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the most important thing an environmentally conscious consumer can do is check the ingredients in any chemical sunscreen to determine if any of them harm marine life; a list of those ingredients can be found on the National Ocean Service’s website.

Jennifer Brady, 36, a publicist who lives in Brooklyn, felt very popular on the beach of East Hampton, N.Y., last weekend when she tried her whipped cream sunscreen for the first time: “People came up to me and were like, ‘What is this? Can I try it?’”

She said the experience had made her reflect on how far sun protection has come.

“In the early 2000s, people were addicted to their tanning beds,” she said. “Now, we have this product that isn’t just going to protect me from a sunburn, but it also looks cool and attracts attention.”

In summary, Ms. Brady said, “it gives off a vibe.”

In New York, a Lunch With Extravagant Jewelry and Local Dim Sum

The designer Rolly Robínson gathered their close friends and collaborators to celebrate their new collection of jungle-themed pieces.

The designer Rolly Robínson, seated at top, hosted an intimate meal at a showroom in New York’s Chinatown.

By Coco Romack  9 Jul, 2024

When they were young, the jewelry and accessories designer Rolly Robínson moved with their family to the tree-dense outskirts of Sevierville, Tenn., a small city with a bronze statue of Dolly Parton at its center. There, they spent their summers outside, playing make-believe in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. “Living semi-off the grid among bugs and reptiles and wild animals,” Robínson said recently, “it unlocked this whole other part of my brain, this untapped place.” They held on to this love of fantasy and the outdoors when they undertook another transformative move, to New York City, in 2011.

Robínson setting the table for lunch at the showroom of the lighting design company Blue Green Works.

Robínson finished each place setting with a different piece of Isshī jewelry. This beaded and pearl-studded silk brooch doubles as a barrette.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early June, Robínson invited seven friends to a lunch celebrating both their 13th year living in the New York area and the launch of their 13th collection from their jewelry line, Isshī. “This is my 13 going on 13 event,” Robínson said with a laugh. The venue was the Chinatown showroom of the lighting design company Blue Green Works, co-founded by Robínson’s friend Peter B. Staples. Each place setting had a banana-leaf mat, and hanging over the table was a flared green glass pendant lamp that called to mind a palm tree; together, the details made the space feel like a jungle oasis. It was a fitting place to see Isshī’s resort 2025 collection, in whose press materials Robínson likened the experience of heartbreak to a plane crashing into the rainforest: Modular leather-cord necklaces, crystal-embellished bracelets and hand-felted lamb’s-wool corsages all resembled carnivorous plants.

Guests were invited to touch and try on the pieces, which were displayed on tables and plates throughout the space. Around 1:30 p.m., a delivery driver arrived carrying bags of dim sum, and while Staples doled out the food, Robínson offered their guests a brief toast: “Everyone here today has been a rock for me at some point,” they said, reflecting on the highs and lows of their life in the city, from becoming a regular presence in the Manhattan nightlife circuit to ending a nine-year relationship. After dessert, the group climbed one by one onto the building’s fire escape, balancing coffee mugs that sloshed with wine. And as they talked, the disco music emanating from the studio’s speakers melded with the frenetic honking of traffic down below.

An orchid-filled bouquet brightened the center of the table.

For dessert, guests were offered oranges in a plastic pitcher.

Lighting the space were flared-glass pendants and floor lamps from Blue Green Works’s Palm collection.

The attendees: Robínson, 36, invited friends and collaborators who’ve been important to the development of Isshī, including Staples, 39, and Robínson’s former partner and current housemate Jeauni Cassanova, 30, with whom they started the brand in 2019. Cassanova, a vintage clothing collector and TikTok creator, was the first guest to arrive, ambling up the stairs to the studio in a pair of eggshell-blue ostrich-leather pumps. The photographer Oscar Ouk, 35, arrived next, followed by the fashion designer Claire Sullivan, 30, and Sabrina Reales, 35, the founder of Sel Aer Studio, an agency that represents fashion and accessory lines including Isshī. Robínson greeted each new arrival with a “Hi, queen!” and a kiss on both cheeks.

The table setting included plastic tip trays and ceramic coffee mugs sourced from a neighborhood kitchen supply store.

Steamed dumplings from the restaurant Dim Sum Go Go. “I love dim sum. It’s easy,” Robínson said. “It’s very quintessential Chinatown, very New York.”

The table: To prepare for the event, Robínson and Staples picked up several sets of chopsticks, simple white plates and plastic tip trays from a nearby kitchen supply store and arranged them on a long wooden table. The centerpiece was a bouquet by the florist Audrey Hilfiger filled with white-edged purple orchids.

Some guests wore necklaces from Isshī’s resort 2025 collection as they ate.

The food: To keep the focus on their friends and the collection, Robínson opted to order in for lunch. From the restaurant Dim Sum Go Go — a neighborhood favorite where Robínson often holds meetings — they selected takeaway dishes of golden-brown fried rice, plump vegetable dumplings and string beans glistening with sambal sauce. As Staples lifted the lid of a bamboo steamer, the group shrieked with excitement at the sight of some bubble-gum pink dumplings; the wrappers had been dyed with beet juice and filled with a mixture of lotus root, cabbage and jicama, which gave them a subtle crunch. Later, Robínson brought out a stack of salty almond cookies purchased from M & W Bakery, located on the studio building’s ground floor, and a plastic pitcher overflowing with oranges.

Peter B. Staples, the creative director of Blue Green Works, served the food while Robínson entertained their guests.

A batch of vegetarian dumplings filled with cilantro and black mushrooms.

The drinks: Guests brought their own beverages to share with the table. A bottle of orange wine from the Spanish label Gulp/Hablo — an easy-drinking mixture of verdejo and sauvignon blanc varietals — was passed around and poured into ceramic diner-style coffee mugs.

The music: “Kind of summer island, beachy, tits out” is the atmosphere Robínson said they wanted to conjure with their playlist, which included the Canadian studio project Vera’s underground disco anthem “Take Me to the Bridge” and “Love in C Minor - Outro” by the French producer Cerrone. When the Italo-disco artist La Bellini’s gooey 1978 track “Satan in Love” came on, Robínson began to wiggle in their seat at the head of the table, moved by the sludgy bass line.

“It feels so full-circle and so appropriate to have my favorite New York City friends here with me celebrating,” Robinson said.

The conversation: Rather than assigning seating, Robínson placed a different trinket on each plate and asked their friends to sit by the one that most resonated with them, sharing their reasoning with the group. Everyone is a doll to Robínson, the hospitality manager Zach Ligas, 35, announced to the room, as the designer helped clasp necklaces and bracelets onto their guests, who wore their picks for the duration of the event.

After the meal, everyone climbed onto the fire escape, which overlooks East Broadway.

An entertaining tip: Robínson is careful to ensure that every detail of a party is aligned — especially their outfit. For this lunch, they paired a striped Christopher John Rogers dress with a plush chartreuse hat to which they affixed a dumpling-shaped pin, a playful nod to the meal they’d be serving. “My aunt told me years and years ago growing up that presentation is everything,” they said. “And I don’t miss a detail, ever.”

An Easy, Beautiful Tomato Tart to Make All Summer Long

The New York-based, French-born chef Yann Nury updated his childhood favorite with cherry tomatoes and an olive oil crust.

[Embedded video available]

By Lauren Joseph  10 Jul, 2024

The New York-based chef Yann Nury, 40, realizes that, these days, tomatoes are almost seasonless. “You could have them year-round now that they’re growing great ones in greenhouses,” he says. Still, he insists, there’s nothing that compares to the bright, tangy-sweet taste of the fruit at its peak. His favorite way to enjoy it: “Wait until July or August,” he says, “then make a tomato tart and have it eight times in two months.”

Nury’s version of the dish — cherry tomatoes nestled tightly in an olive-oil-based crust — was inspired, in part, by the one his mother made when he was growing up in the Ardèche region of southeast France. “It was a quick thing with store-bought puff pastry,” he says. “But it had mustard in it, which I really loved.” To mimic what he calls the “intensity and savoriness” of his childhood favorite, he adds a tablespoon of Dijon to a purée of roasted tomatoes, which he layers over the dough before topping it with fresh cherry tomatoes. This coulis can be cooked a day in advance, he says, and the recipe “will make enough for you to have a little bowl to serve alongside the tart.” (It’s also delicious spread on bread or mixed into pasta pomodoro.) For the crust, Nury uses olive oil — which makes for a supple dough with a vegetal richness — because he finds the traditional butter too sweet in combination with the almost sugary tomatoes. To get the abundant look of his tart, “really press the tomatoes into the pastry and into one another, so they fill the tart case even when they cook and shrink,” he says. The finished product is best served warm alongside “crisp lettuces dressed in a light vinaigrette, grilled meat and a chilled red wine or a really good rosé,” he advises. Eat outside if at all possible.

Nury, who records his recipes with sketches, recommends pressing as many tomatoes as possible into the crust.

Nury prefers the near-bursting cherry tomatoes of late summer for this tart, but any good ones will do.

Yann Nury’s Cherry Tomato Tart

Makes one 12-inch tart

Ingredients

- 3 pounds cherry tomatoes

- 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

- 1 red onion

- Dried oregano to taste

For the crust

- 150 grams all-purpose flour

- 150 grams whole wheat flour

- 100 grams warm water

- 100 grams olive oil

- 12 grams dry instant yeast (or 24 grams fresh yeast)

- 10 grams salt

1. Lightly brush a 12-inch round metal tart pan with olive oil.

2. Make the dough: Mix the warm water, olive oil and yeast in a small bowl until completely incorporated. Combine the salt and flour in a medium bowl. Add the liquid to the flour mixture, first mixing with a fork or wooden spoon and then kneading by hand until smooth.

3. Place the dough in the oiled pan and spread it evenly with your fingers to the edge of the pan. Cover with a towel and let sit for one hour.

4. Make the coulis: Slice the onion and toss it with a half pound of the cherry tomatoes and enough olive oil to coat. Sprinkle with a bit of dried oregano and roast on a sheet pan at 450 degrees until the tomatoes are lightly browned, about 15 minutes. Let cool slightly, then, using a blender, purée with 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard until smooth. Taste and adjust salt.

5. Slice the remaining tomatoes into halves. Spread a thin layer of the tomato mustard coulis onto the dough, adding an additional pinch of oregano to taste. Arrange the halved tomatoes atop the dough, packing them as tightly as possible. Drizzle with olive and sprinkle with sea salt.

6. Bake at 425 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes, until the crust is golden brown and the tomatoes are slightly charred. Serve warm, as is or finished with a bit of lemon zest, a few torn basil leaves, some shaved Parmesan and a sprinkle of capers or your favorite caviar.

The Irony of Dr. Ruth

People often laughed when she spoke, but Ruth Westheimer delivered a punch that challenged norms for older women.

A tiny woman with a grandmotherly demeanor, Dr. Ruth was the last person you’d expect to hear talking about orgasms.

By Rhonda Garelick  13 Jul, 2024

I will never forget the afternoon I spent, about 30 years ago, with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, interviewing her for a now-long-lost magazine article — my first ever. We met at the door of her New York City office in Washington Heights. In a gesture of mingled affection and authority, she thrust her top-handled pocketbook into my hands, while she fished for her keys. Once inside the cozy, cluttered space, I saw the many footstools she kept stowed beneath every chair. At 4-foot-7 Dr. Ruth used them to keep her feet from dangling when she sat down.

We were there to talk about a book she had written about sex and Jewish spirituality, but she turned it into a two-way conversation, quizzing me about my studies, my new job, my love life. Unsatisfied with what she had heard, she began trying to fix things. She mused about job interviews she might set up for me, and where I could find suitable young men (she recommended joining B’nai Jeshurun, the famous, progressive synagogue on the Upper West Side). She was personal, concerned, connected, and she encouraged me to connect more with others. Fostering connection was one of her special talents.

Dr. Ruth’s office testified to her own engaged and connected life. The many photographs lining the walls and crowding the tabletops showed her posing with family members as well as with numerous celebrities and dignitaries. Several photos showed her smiling through goggles on various international mountaintops. Dr. Ruth, it turned out, was an avid and accomplished skier, a fact that should not have surprised me but did. She just didn’t seem the type. And that was always the point.

Ruth Westheimer posed a perpetual contradiction: Her form never seemed to match her content. A tiny woman with an old-fashioned “beauty parlor” bouffant, high-pitched voice (with distinctive Old World accent) and grandmotherly demeanor, she was the last person you’d expect to hear talking about orgasms (or slaloming down an Alp). But “sexual literacy” was her field, and she dispensed learned, serious advice to the general public for over 40 years — in dozens of books, articles, her wildly popular radio and TV shows. She was even the subject of a one-woman Off Broadway show.

Being a sex educator, though, would never have sufficed to create all this fame. Dr. Ruth owed her celebrity precisely to the incongruity she embodied, which disarmed audiences, distracting them from the discomfort and embarrassment that sex talk can provoke — especially in America.

The slight amusement of hearing a middle-aged, then elderly lady cheerfully discuss “masturbation” (can’t you just hear her now, pronouncing that word?) provided the ideal deflection from the topic’s awkwardness, allowing listeners to relax and pay attention. Dr. Ruth understood this perfectly and cultivated that warmth and humor to great effect.

That trademark good cheer, though, was something of a miracle, given the trauma of Dr. Westheimer’s early life. Karola Ruth Siegel was 10 in 1939 when her mother put her on a train headed for an orphanage in Switzerland. Karola Ruth was part of the Kindertransport — the rescue effort that rescued some 10,000 children, mostly Jewish, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia before World War II. Although most of the children went to England, a few hundred were sent to Switzerland. Accompanying her, she told me, was her favorite doll, which she clutched, and her best friend at that time, a little girl named Matilda. Karola Ruth’s mother waved goodbye from the station platform, the last time the girl would see any member of her family.

That Dr. Ruth devoted her career to helping others sustain love, passion and connection can be read as a refusal to give in to the tragedy of her childhood, as a lifetime expression — a monument, really — of resistance to the violence, hatred and racism that marked her youth, of resistance to fascism.

But there’s more to learn from Dr. Ruth, beginning with her trademark incongruity. In retrospect, it’s worth asking: What exactly was so funny about an older woman talking about sex with precision and frankness? Dr. Ruth was already over 50 when she became an iconic radio and TV personality, well past the age of pop-culture sexual viability for a woman at the time.

True, she was witty, but listeners were also laughing out of incredulity: People do not associate eros with diminutive aging matrons. And while she dispensed technical advice, Dr. Ruth was always especially interested in pleasure — including pleasure in midlife and beyond, and women’s pleasure, specifically.

Her more than 40 books include titles such as “Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50” (which includes two long chapters on managing the physical changes of age in both women and men), “Sexually Speaking: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Sexual Health,” “The Art of Arousal” and “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Erotic and Sensuous Pleasures.”

Speaking up for women’s and older people’s sexual pleasure is a quietly radical stance. How often, really, do we encounter depictions of mature sexuality — especially in women — in television or film? With rare exceptions (“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" and a recent episode of “Hacks” come to mind), this topic is reserved for punchlines. Sex is still treated as the exclusive province of the young and hot.

Yes, people laughed when Dr. Ruth spoke, but, as she knew well, the laughter was Step 1 in pushing through to a better understanding of a universally important subject. Yes, she was tiny and adorable, but, as she also knew, her persona granted her stealth entry into her audience’s minds and hearts, where she could then set about dismantling some dangerously limiting clichés about womanhood and aging.

ASAP Rocky, Odell Beckham Jr. and John Cleese Are All Wearing It

Why are men into the women’s wear brand Miu Miu?

“One thing I love is you see the collections, and, yes, it’s traditionally a women’s brand, but you walk into the store and it’s like, anything goes,” said Jake Weber, a New York lawyer, who began wearing Miu Miu this year.

By Max Berlinger  14 Jul, 2024

A lot can be learned about a clothing brand by who wears it.

Take Miu Miu, the label overseen by Miuccia Prada, who is also the designer, with Raf Simons, at Prada. Many of those who clamor to wear Miu Miu today are not necessarily its intended audience. While Miu Miu officially trades in women’s clothes, its most recent surge in popularity is due, more specifically, to the men who are now seeking, buying and wearing it.

“I wear Prada, but Miu Miu feels a bit more fun,” said Corey Stokes, 33, a stylist and a senior vice president at Essence Ventures. Over the past few years, Mr. Stokes has accumulated around 15 items from the brand, including a bejeweled track jacket, a gray knit twin set, two pairs of jeans, a leather suit and boat shoes. “It felt a little more untapped, and I like being in something that no one is wearing,” he said.

The brand piqued Jake Weber’s interest after he watched a video of its spring 2024 catwalk presentation online. Mr. Weber, a New York lawyer, first bought a blue checked button-up shirt featured prominently in the collection, and then a pair of board shorts, pants with suede side detailing, polos, sweaters and T-shirts. He was invited to a trunk show to preview items from the fall collection and is mulling over some outerwear: fleeces, a peacoat and a faux fur jacket that the model Gigi Hadid wore on the runway. “There’s something really pure and light and fun about Miu Miu,” he said.

“One thing I love is you see the collections, and, yes, it’s traditionally a women’s brand, but you walk into the store and it’s like, anything goes,” Mr. Weber said. “It can be for anyone, any age, any gender. I mean, there’s price constraints, obviously.”

Clockwise from top left, Miu Miu enthusiasts Corey Stokes, ASAP Rocky, John Cleese and Odell Beckham Jr. Clockwise from top left, Vanni Bassetti/Penske Media, via Getty Images; BlayzenPhotos/Backgrid; MEGA/GC Images, via Getty Images; Baltimore Ravens

More “Miu Men” are popping up by the day: Odell Beckham Jr., the Miami Dolphins wide receiver; the musicians ASAP Rocky, Offset and Omar Apollo; the comedian John Cleese, who was spotted wearing a Miu Miu baseball cap; and Kim Jones, the British designer in charge of Fendi women’s wear and Dior men’s wear, who often wears its clothes, including during his runway bows. At its store in SoHo in New York, an associate said that once athletes and rappers wore it, more men began to drop by, some unaware that the brand didn’t officially make men’s wear.

In the last few years, Miu Miu has experienced something of a resurgence. Some say it’s due in part to the hiring of the stylist Lotta Volkova or to the fact that Mrs. Prada has been able to focus more energy on Miu Miu since bringing on Mr. Simons to help design for Prada.

Miu Miu was named brand of the year by the fashion search engine Lyst the last two years. In April, during its quarterly earnings report, the Prada Group, which owns the brand, reported a 16 percent year-over-year increase in sales, helped by Miu Miu’s staggering 89 percent sales growth. This is particularly surprising for a brand that was founded more than 30 years ago as a more youthful counterpart to Prada. (Miu Miu did have a stand-alone men’s line from 1999 to 2008.)

“I assumed they dropped a men’s line, but I realized the buttons were on the other side,” Luke Fracher said of a maroon polo he owns. Mr. Fracher acquired a few Miu Miu pieces through his luxury consignment shop in New York, Luke’s. “I’ve always been into the expensive, or nice, version of the thing you’d already have,” he added.

All this speaks to the way some men shop today, unconcerned with whom items are designed for. Miu Miu, too, is shrewdly playing into this gender ambivalence, using male models in its runway shows and campaigns. While Miu Miu executives and creatives declined to comment for this article, a representative said it considered its collections “gender-neutral.”

“We’re making progress, but women’s wear is usually more interesting,” said Drew Mac, a musician and producer. “They can call it whatever they want. If it fits me, it’s for me.”

Mr. Weber in Miu Miu.

“I wasn’t paying super close attention, because it was a women’s show,” said Lawrence Schlossman, a host of the fashion podcast “Throwing Fits.” Mr. Schlossman said he probably first noticed Miu Miu when ASAP Rocky wore the brand, introducing it to a wider male audience.

“These guys aren’t doing a gender-bending thing,” he said. “They’re wearing polos. A piece of clothing is just a piece of clothing.”

There’s also a certain amount of insider cachet to Miu Miu among men that gives it social capital, he said. “It is dope to be the guy that’s in the jacket that the average person is like, ‘Oh, that’s Carhartt,’ but you know that it’s the one big size from the store of the coolest women’s brand in the world,” he said.

We’ve come a long way from the days when Kanye West, now known as Ye, and Pharrell Williams made headlines by wearing items by Celine, when its former designer Phoebe Philo was making women’s apparel exclusively. Since then, some men have toyed with the gender binary in fashion. Mr. Williams has worn Chanel, which also doesn’t officially make men’s wear, as have Kendrick Lamar and the South Korean actor Park Seo-joon. Men like Oscar Isaac and David Harbour have worn skirts from Thom Browne. And younger consumers who are ambivalent about gendered clothing have inspired designers like Telfar, Helmut Lang and Eckhaus Latta to design unisex collections.

Drew Mac, 32, a musician and producer, has bought a few items, including a polo shirt, and is planning to look at Miu Miu’s fall collection when it arrives in stores. “We’re making progress, but women’s wear is usually more interesting,” he said. “They can call it whatever they want. If it fits me, it’s for me.”

I Love This T-Shirt. Now, Would You Please Cut It?

The return of the crop top means that some events are offering stations to help you create your own.

At the New York City Dyke March on June 29, organizers handed out T-shirts to the hundreds of volunteer marshals and set up a table with scissors so they could crop the shirts.

By Alyson Krueger  16 Jul, 2024

Madie Shaver set up shop at a table with tailor’s chalk, a ruler and a pair of sharp Singer scissors.

It took a few minutes to attract customers. “We had an example hanging up, and I was wearing one, but people were still confused,” she said. “But then one person did it, and everyone wanted them.” She estimated she cropped 15 shirts throughout the evening.

Ms. Shaver was running a cropping station for a live taping of “Celebrity Book Club With Steven & Lily,” a podcast that dissects celebrity memoirs, at the Bowery Ballroom in early June. She worked at the merchandise table, where fans could buy T-shirts promoting the podcast — and then immediately customize them.

Ms. Shaver, a friend of the hosts, works in marketing for the clothing brand Eckhaus Latta and has a degree in fiber with a concentration in experimental fashion from Maryland Institute College of Art.

“I would have them hold up the T-shirt and tell me where they wanted it to hit,” she said of the customers. “Then I would lay it down flat, use a ruler to make a superstraight line, and then just cut it.” The secret sauce was the tug she placed on the freshly cut part, making the item curl at the edges. “It looks a little nicer that way,” she added.

Madie Shaver at work with a “Celebrity Book Club” T-shirt at the Bowery Ballroom.

Ms. Shaver shows off the final product.

In fashion, what goes around comes around, and crop tops are no exception. Cropping stations have become a new event activity, offering participants a chance to customize merchandise they either received on the spot or brought from home.

We are in a big merch moment, said Chantal Fernandez, a fashion writer for The Cut. “Clothing as a souvenir or a way to remember a special experience is very trendy right now,” she added. “Having the cropping station makes people want to get that souvenir even more as a way to remember a party or event.”

Cropping stations vary in levels of sophistication.

Lauren Suiter, 31, was on the planning committee for the New York City Dyke March, an annual march that took place on June 29. Before the event, the organizers handed out T-shirts to the hundreds of volunteer marshals and set up a table with scissors so they could crop the shirts.

“A lot of people like to crop the shirts short or take the sleeves off, especially since it can be really hot,” she said. She added that because members of the lesbian community, “have such varying styles, it can be really important to feel confident in what they are wearing, especially on a day where you are supposed to feel empowered.”

“It can be really important to feel confident in what they are wearing, especially on a day where you are supposed to feel empowered,” said Lauren Suiter, who was on the planning committee for the New York City Dyke March.

Aaron Shannon, 31, a co-owner of New Gen Fitness in Regina, Saskatchewan, hosted a Pride party in June where, in addition to a D.J. and running games, he set up a cropping station for people to customize shirts they bought on the spot or brought from home.

“I have rotary cutters that you will see in any fabric store,” he said. “It’s like a pizza cutter. You just slice it down the line.” Although he said the cutters are easy to use, he asked a friend who is a seamstress to help supervise the station. “We want people to be in good hands.”

He believes crop tops are good for physical and mental health. “It can either be that someone can wear one to show off their hard work, or they can wear one to gain a sense of freedom,” he said. “In the recent past it was sort of a faux pas for someone of a larger size to wear something more revealing, but now it’s an opportunity to take that power back and say, ‘This style is for everyone.’”

Sandi Zager, an event planner based in Manhattan and Westchester, says customization stations that offer cropping have become high-end activities at bar and bat mitzvahs. “We have some parties where everyone is getting the same design, and we are just bringing in people who know how to cut fabric.” She said the vendor fee was about $2,500.

“But then sometimes we set up these full-blown stations with storefronts, multiple types of apparel from tees to tank tops, graphics the kids can choose from, and then cropping,” she added. “That can be $10,000 to $15,000.”

Sandi Zager, an event planner based in Manhattan and Westchester, says customization stations that offer cropping have become high-end activities at bar and bat mitzvahs.

“We did one at Capitale downtown this year that was super, super fun because every kid got to go home with their own piece,” she said. “I like it because these kids make their items themselves the way they want them, and that has a little bit more lasting value.”

Because these are teenagers, she instructs the employees doing the cropping not to cut anything too short. “We are cropping it at waist length,” she said.

But the trend is not just for teens: “The moms are knocking the kids over to get the cropped shirts,” Ms. Zager added. “They want them, too.”

How to crop your own shirt

This could be you.

Brittany Bonafede, marketing specialist at ShirtSpace, laid it out. (Tips are edited and condensed.)

1. Choose the right shirt for you. If you want a straight cut at the bottom with minimal hem roll, choose mid- to heavyweight cotton, cotton/poly blends or modal. If you don’t mind some roll, you can also consider lightweight cotton fabrics or jersey knits.

2. Mark the spot. If you are unsure of where to crop, try on the shirt and mark (with an erasable fabric pen or chalk) where you would like the bottom hem to land on your body. Lifting your arms up can help you determine whether the marked length will be comfortable for everyday wear.

3. Use a ruler to draw a straight line with chalk or an erasable fabric marker to cut along. Remember to leave an extra couple of inches if it’s a fabric that will roll.

4. Use pinking shears or high-quality fabric scissors to get the cleanest lines; avoid kitchen or craft scissors, which might give you rough or frayed edges (unless you like that look — no judgment).

5. Hold the shirt in place with clamps, tape or a helpful friend’s hands while you cut it.

6. Enjoy! (And remember that you can always get a more polished — though expensive — look by taking the shirt to a tailor.)

Is This the Craziest Sneaker You Have Ever Seen?

On and Hellen Obiri are taking the running-shoe game to a whole new level. Yes, spray-on shoes are happening.

Uppers for the one-piece Cloudboom Strike LS are created in a single step using an automated robotic arm at the On labs in Zurich.

By Vanessa Friedman  15 Jul, 2024

As soon as Hellen Obiri, the Kenyan distance runner and two-time Olympic silver medalist, takes her place on the starting line of the Olympic marathon in Paris next month, she will make history — though not for the reason you may assume.

For her shoes.

See, Ms. Obiri will be wearing the Cloudboom Strike LS, a new sneaker from On, the upstart Swiss brand started in 2010. But it doesn’t look like any sneaker anyone has ever seen.

“The first time I saw the shoes, I said, ‘No,’” Ms. Obiri said. “‘I can’t run with these.’” The shoes had no laces. They had no heel cap — a hard plate at the back kept the foot in place. They were made of a weird, stretchy, plastic-y material.

“In the changing room, even my colleagues were saying, ‘It’s a joke,’” Ms. Obiri said. “They were saying, “‘You can’t use these shoes for a marathon.’”

But then she tried them in practice. Then she agreed to wear them in the Boston Marathon in April. Then she won. And then, said Nils Altrogge, the director of innovation, technology and research for On, “She wouldn’t give them back.”

Hellen Obiri crossed the finish line to win the women’s race at the Boston Marathon in April. On her feet: the first On Cloudboom Strike LS sneaker prototypes.

The shoe was created from a single semi-translucent synthetic monofilament almost a mile long that was extruded by a robot arm, engineered to fit to Ms. Obiri’s feet to help her run in the most effective way and then heat-fused to a foam rubber and carbon-fiber sole. It is called the Cloudboom Strike LS — LS stands for LightSpray, the trademarked name of the technology — and it weighs a mere 170 grams, or about six ounces. It has 75 percent less impact on the environment than a traditional sneaker, according to On. And when it comes to style, it has more in common with an alien bedroom slipper than any running shoe.

Think of it as the Tesla of the sneaker world. On is hoping the Cloudboom Strike LS will have the same disruptive effect on the sneaker market that Elon Musk’s innovation had on the car world. If so, On will upend not just design conventions, but the whole sneaker business model.

Spray-On Shoes Get Their Glow-Up

Every once in a while, the sneaker market is reinvented, because of leaps in design or technology or both. It happened in 1979 with Nike Air Tech and in 1982 with the Air Force 1. It happened with the Adidas Yeezys in 2015. And it happened with the Nike Vaporfly and the introduction of carbon plates in 2017.

On began thinking it could change the market again in 2020, when one of its team members was at the Milan Design Fair and saw a student presentation that featured a shoe made with a hot-glue gun.

If this sounds like a scene from the children’s film “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” in which Flint Lockwood invents spray-on elastic biopolymer adhesive shoes (or even the spray-on Coperni dress worn by Bella Hadid at Paris Fashion Week in 2022), that is understandable. Unlike those inventions, though, the Cloudboom Strike LS can be easily removed and reworn.

“In the end, you need to believe that this look will be adopted,” said Marc Maurer, chief executive of On. “If it is, we believe it could change the industry.”

Fast-forward five years and that student, Johannes Voelchert, is a senior lead of innovation concept design at On, and the process he began has culminated in a paradigm shift.

Rather than the usual 150 to 200 components of a running shoe, the Cloudboom Strike LS has only seven. Rather than being touched by about 100 people on an assembly line, it is touched, on average, by one. Rather than being put together by patternmakers, it is created using parametric design principles, and computational engineering.

Rather than the fabric being dyed, color is added via inkjet. Rather than the production being outsourced to factories in Asia — in On’s case, in Indonesia and Vietnam — and then shipped around the world, the Cloudboom Strike LS will be made by new “production cells” in Zurich and in On’s other markets.

That means that the time between production and delivery is much shorter. (The Cloudboom Strike LS goes from midsole to finished product in three minutes.) It also means that there is no waste on the cutting-room floor — no leftover materials or toxic glue to be thrown away — and significantly fewer carbon emissions. There should also be less stock left at the end of every season because the shoe is made closer to demand. And because the filament is a thermoplastic, the upper can be melted down and reused at the end of a shoe’s life cycle.

“It’s really jumping into the future when it comes to manufacturing,” Marc Maurer, the co-chief executive of On, said. When asked about the implications for the supply chain and the people who will no longer be necessary, he said, essentially, that automation and repurposing are the story of industry.

Because the shoe is created by a robot that has been programmed to weave the filament more or less densely in different areas depending on the biomechanics of the foot and the need for support and breathability, the company has had to build the machines from scratch — an enormous financial and philosophical bet.

“Whenever you try to fundamentally redesign an industry, there’s obviously huge costs that come with that,” said Eric Hullegie, a senior lead of innovation concept design for On.

The challenge is to make it pay off. “We know the shoe is very fast,” Mr. Maurer said. “We know it’s superlight. What we don’t know is whether people will like it.”

The iPhone Effect

The Cloudboom Strike LS is not the lightest shoe on the market — the Saucony Sinister is a mere 149 grams (about five ounces), the Merrell Vapor Glove 6 is 5.5 ounces and the Nike ZoomX Streakfly is six ounces — but it is among them. Still, sneakers, more than any other piece of athletic equipment, have come to represent both cool and community signaling. The popular verdict is not simply performative, but emotional.

Among sneakerheads, weirdness and efficacy and first-past-the-post adoption are their own currency. A bizarre but signature look may work for them.

“We had a huge internal debate on the look,” Mr. Maurer said. “But you take an example like the iPhone and think about what phones looked like before and then what they looked like afterward.”

Close-up of the translucent filament used to create the Cloudboom Strike LS upper.

That sounds like hubris, but the iPhone is not a random comparison. The Cloudboom Strike LS isn’t intended just for elite athletes but for everyone. On intends to take it “from a pure performance product to something that you can sell in millions of pairs to an all-day consumer,” Mr. Mauer said, adding that his goal was to double the revenue from 2023, which was approximately 1.8 billion Swiss francs, in the next three years.

The Olympics will be the shoe’s global debut. Some shoes will be commercially available at that time, but the Cloudboom Strike LS won’t be on sale widely until the fall, around the time of the New York City Marathon. At $330, it is at the upper end of the sneaker market, more than Off-White x Nike Air Force 1s or Yeezys, though significantly less than fashion sneakers, which can cost about $1,100 for, say, Balenciaga kicks.

It is also a road shoe, not a track shoe. The plan is to expand the technology to sneakers specifically engineered for other sports, including tennis. Roger Federer is an investor in On and a contributing product designer.

Before that, however, all eyes will be on Paris — and Ms. Obiri. She is excited about her new gear. “When you trust the shoes, you have that mentality, like, ‘I’m going to run fast,’” she said.

Also, said Ilmarin Heitz, On’s senior director of innovation, “the psychological advantage of knowing ‘I have something no one else has’ is an amazing feeling at the starting line of very, very important races.” (At least five athletes in other track events will be wearing their own versions of the Cloudboom Strike LS, with spikes.)

If On’s dreams come true, it will not be Ms. Obiri’s advantage alone for very long.

Table of Contents

New York Times (Print): 18 Jul, 2024

The Front Page

How J.D. Vance Won Over Donald Trump

Biden Called ‘More Receptive’ to Hearing Pleas to Step Aside

‘Our Nation Is Not Well’: Voters Fear What Could Happen Next

A Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump

Promised Cures, Tainted Cells: How Cord Blood Banks Mislead Parents

Amtrak Passengers Face Record Delays From Extreme Weather

Biden Tests Positive for Covid

‘The Buck Stops With Me’: Secret Service Director Soldiers On

Families Say Shelters Without Air-Conditioning Are Like ‘Living in Hell’

Bird Flu Is Spreading. Why Aren’t More People Getting Tested?

‘Memory Saved Us’: How France Blocked the Far Right

‘Sinners’ and ‘Russian Talibans’: A Holy War Roils a Once Placid Village

A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It.

To Revitalize Britain’s Economy, a Plan for a Stronger Government Role

Why Donald Glover Is Saying Goodbye to Childish Gambino

Men Wear Short Shorts. And Long Shorts. And Everything in Between.

Business Day

Trump-Vance Administration Could Herald New Era for Dollar

How a Network of Tech Billionaires Helped J.D. Vance Leap Into Power

Amazon Workers Narrowly Reject Union Drive at British Warehouse

Chinese Billionaire and Bannon Ally Is Convicted of Fraud

Elon Musk Says He Will Move X and SpaceX Headquarters to Texas

Britain Approves Lab-Grown Meat for Pet Food

U.K. Inflation Steady as Economists Puzzle Over ‘Taylor Swift Effects’

J.D. Vance’s A.I. Agenda: Reduce Regulation

Editorials, Op-Ed and Letters

‘This Is the Pick of a Very Confident Presidential Nominee’: Four Columnists Size Up J.D. Vance

Republicans’ Depressingly Effective Minority Outreach Strategy

Can Democrats Find the Courage to Tell Biden the Truth?

Why the False Narratives About Trump Are Likely to Spread

Why MAGA Nation Embraces Trump

International

A Milan Airport Is Now Named for Berlusconi. Cue the ‘Bunga-Bunga’ Memes.

Mayor of Paris Takes an Olympian Plunge in a Beautified Seine

E.U. Court Rebukes Bloc’s Executive Arm Over Covid Vaccine Contract Secrecy

In a Porridge Box, an Ancient Treasure Mysteriously Arrives in Dublin

Judge Orders Boss Who Coughed at Employee During Pandemic to Pay Damages

Promise of a Changed U.K. Comes Wrapped in Royal Tradition

Ukraine’s Devastated Energy Grid Battles a New Foe: A Sizzling Heat Wave

U.S. Accuses Former C.I.A. Analyst of Working for South Korea

Hiker’s Death Prompts Move to Allow Wider Bear Cull in Romania

Former Syrian Official in Charge of Notorious Prison Is Arrested in Los Angeles

Trump Tells Taiwan to Expect a Higher Price Tag for U.S. Defense

In a Bangkok Hotel Room, Six Bodies and Traces of Cyanide

Moving in Childhood Contributes to Depression, Study Finds

National

Latino Republicans and Independents Back Trump’s Deportation Plan, to a Point

Biden Finally Got Border Numbers Down. Will He See the Political Benefits?

Vance Honed Populist Views in the Senate, Auditioning for Trump

What It Would Take to Deport Millions of Immigrants

In Milwaukee, a G.O.P. Transformation From Dysfunctional to Unified

Improvised Bombs Found in Gunman’s Car at Trump Rally Used a Radio-Control System

Guns Are Woven Into the Life of Shooter’s Hometown

Megadonors Are Plotting to Change Biden’s Mind With Money. Will It Work?

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New York City Bill Would Mandate Air-Conditioning for Tenants

California Becomes the First State to Ban Student Gender Notification Policies

Obituaries

Robert Pearson, Hair Stylist Turned Acclaimed Barbecue Chef, Dies at 87

Evan Wright, Award-Winning Reporter and Author of ‘Generation Kill,’ Dies at 59

Herbert Hoelter, Prison Consultant to the Rich and Infamous, Dies at 73

James B. Sikking, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 90

Pages A2-A3 and Corrections

Documenting a #MeToo Investigation Seven Years Later

Quotation of the Day: Extreme Weather Causes Record Amtrak Delays

Corrections: July 18, 2024

Sports Thursday

N.B.A. Board Backs TV Rights Deals, but Steps Remain

Tadej Pogacar Closes In on a Tour de France Win

The Arts

Emmy Nominees 2024: The Complete List

With New York’s Help, a Center of Art and Protest to Get a New Home

‘UnPrisoned’ Depicts the Burden of Incarceration With a Light Touch

Jack Black Ends Tenacious D Tour After Bandmate Jokes About Trump Shooting

Thursday Styles

Victoria Beckham Has Learned to Smile

Who Is Gabbriette? Meet the Model ‘Brat.’

They Went Viral Making Sunscreen From Scratch. Experts Have Concerns.

Are You Screaming for This Whipped Cream Sunscreen?

In New York, a Lunch With Extravagant Jewelry and Local Dim Sum

An Easy, Beautiful Tomato Tart to Make All Summer Long

The Irony of Dr. Ruth

ASAP Rocky, Odell Beckham Jr. and John Cleese Are All Wearing It

I Love This T-Shirt. Now, Would You Please Cut It?

Is This the Craziest Sneaker You Have Ever Seen?