Members phkrause Posted March 26 Author Members Share Posted March 26 March 26, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering breaking news of a bridge collapse in Baltimore overnight. More on that below. But first, we explain Trump’s legal troubles. Donald Trump in a New York courtroom in October. Dave Sanders for The New York Times Financial pressure By Maggie Haberman Senior Political Correspondent Donald Trump has 10 days to come up with a $175 million bond in his New York civil fraud case. After that, he may be on the hook for the full penalty in the case: almost half a billion dollars. Could this situation affect his presidential campaign? Yes, it could. I will explain how in today’s newsletter, by answering four questions from The Morning’s staff. What are the basic details of this case? The New York attorney general, Letitia James, sued Trump and the Trump Organization in 2022. She accused them of committing widespread fraud over a decade by inflating the values of properties, at times by as much as $2 billion a year. The net effect, James said, was essentially that Trump was able to get loans and insurance policies at more favorable rates than he was otherwise entitled to. A judge agreed, and ordered Trump to pay $454 million — equivalent to the total of his ill-gotten gains, plus the interest he would have paid. Trump has insisted that since his lenders weren’t stiffed, there were no victims, and that he considers the judgment corrupt. Yesterday, an appeals court said that the state would accept a far smaller bond — $175 million — while it considers whether to uphold the judge’s findings. Trump tried, but failed, to come up with the $454 million bond before the appeals court stepped in on Monday. Does it seem likely that he will be able to get the smaller bond? Trump told reporters on Monday in Manhattan that he would be able to post the bond. There’s no independent way to verify that he has enough cash, and if he decides to seek an outside company to provide the bond, he will still need to put up a large amount of cash and other investments as collateral to secure it, and in a short amount of time. In Manhattan. Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images However, the amount is less than half what it was previously, so it will almost certainly be easier now. And some legal experts see the appeals court’s decision as evidence that the court may reduce the $454 million judgment set by Justice Arthur F. Engoron. Trump’s legal problems are serious. So far, though, they don’t seem to have affected his 2024 campaign. He has become the presumptive nominee in a rout. Why might this case be different? This case goes to the heart of his identity and public image in a way the criminal cases simply do not. The risk of having his bank accounts frozen — or even one of his properties seized — affects him psychologically, and immediately. This is part of why he was so emphatic that the reduced bond requirement was a victory. Trump after a hearing in New York on Monday. Pool photo by Justin Lane Trump was in a different courtroom in New York yesterday, where a judge set an April 15 start date for Trump’s criminal trial on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money payments during the 2016 election. Even if he’s convicted in that case, though, it’s unlikely that he would be sent to prison before Election Day. What’s more, the question of how he ran his business, according to James’s telling, is likely to become a political cudgel for President Biden’s allies. For his part, Trump is painting it all as an overreach by his political opposition. What should people watch for now? The appeals court is probably going to take several months to consider the fraud ruling and Trump’s penalty, based on what they said Monday. If they uphold the decision, Trump would then have to hand over almost half a billion dollars. If not, he will describe it as a smack-down of an overzealous judge and attorney general. Trump’s social media company, which runs Truth Social, closed a deal last week to become a publicly traded company, and it’s an open question whether he will try to use his stake from that deal to acquire a bond from another company. For now, Trump’s reprieve in the civil fraud case is temporary. More on Trump The appeals court also halted other aspects of Justice Engoron’s judgment in Trump’s civil case, including ones that barred Trump and his sons from running companies in New York. Trump plans to adapt his presidential campaign schedule to his Manhattan trial. He is expected to visit nearby states and conduct interviews from Trump Tower. Trump’s social media company will begin publicly trading on the Nasdaq today under the stock symbol “DJT.” “It’s the first time someone’s ever heard, ‘Good news, you only owe $175 million’”: Late-night hosts discussed Trump’s discounted payment. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Baltimore Bridge Collapse The collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. Harford County Md Fire & E.M.S., via Reuters A major bridge in Baltimore collapsed after it was hit by a cargo ship. The Francis Scott Key Bridge carries Interstate 695. There are reports of cars in the water. The Coast Guard is searching for survivors. The water in Baltimore Harbor is currently about 48 degrees Fahrenheit. See video of the collapse from CNN. Israel-Hamas War At the United Nations. Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The U.S. abstained, allowing the measure to pass. After the vote, Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a plan to send delegates to Washington to discuss an invasion of Rafah. Israel’s defense minister is scheduled to continue meetings with Biden administration officials today. Trump urged Israel to “finish up your war” and “get on to peace.” He said the war in Gaza was hurting Israel’s international support. An Israeli paramedic told The Times that he had seen evidence that two teenagers were sexually assaulted during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. New video undercuts his account. Russia Concert Attack A Times investigation found evidence that the men detained by Russia are linked to the deadly Moscow attack. See analysis of the video evidence. Vladimir Putin acknowledged that “radical Islamists” had carried out the assault but continued to suggest that Ukraine had likely ordered it. Ukraine denies the allegation. Russian officials tortured the four men charged with terrorism. Their battered appearance in court was a warning to the public, analysts said. More International News Bassirou Diomaye Faye Seyllou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A 44-year-old political outsider won a surprise victory in Senegal’s presidential election, days after he was released from jail. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, spent two nights at the Hungarian Embassy in an apparent bid for asylum, security footage obtained by The Times showed. Bolsonaro is facing a number of criminal investigations. Politics Speaker Mike Johnson Kent Nishimura for The New York Times Speaker Mike Johnson has said privately he will ensure that the House approves more Ukraine aid, a step many in his party oppose. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to name Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer, as his running mate. Business Boeing’s C.E.O. will step down at the end of this year. The company’s leadership is changing after scrutiny of its planes’ safety. The E.U. opened investigations of Alphabet, Apple and Meta over potential violations of a new competition law. New York City A man was killed after being pushed onto subway tracks in an unprovoked attack, according to the police. Flaco, the owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo, had high levels of rat poison in his system and a severe pigeon virus when he died last month. Other Big Stories Outside the Los Angeles home tied to Sean Combs. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times Federal agents raided homes linked to the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, known as Diddy, who has been accused of sexual assault and sex trafficking in multiple civil lawsuits. The U.S. confirmed that a highly fatal form of bird flu had been found in cattle. It is the first time that cows infected with the virus have been identified. Opinions Dobbs did not settle the question of abortion in America; it only led to more cases — like the Supreme Court case over medication abortions, Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw write. Biden and the United States should make longer, healthier lives a national priority, Ashwin Vasan argues. Here is a column by Paul Krugman on Obamacare. For readers of The Morning, enjoy exceptional savings for a limited time. Take advantage of the complete Times experience with our sale. Save on your first year of unlimited access to news, Games, Cooking and more. Subscribe now. MORNING READS In Manhattan. Janice Chung for The New York Times Plastic: Restaurants are filled with fake flowers. Meet a man who is responsible. Aging: To live past 100, eat less, says an Italian expert who thinks faux fasting is the key to longevity. Bias: A Black couple who claimed that their home appraisal was biased because of their race won a settlement — and changes to a company policy. Health: Uncomfortably bloated after a flight? Here are some tips for relief. The Great Read: Bill Ackman is a hedge-fund manager who became famous on Twitter. Now he wields even more power. Lives Lived: Lisa Lane was a two-time U.S. women’s chess champion and the first chess player to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She protested gender inequality in the sport even as many focused more on her looks than on her ability. Lane died at 90. SPORTS College basketball: Caitlin Clark and Iowa escaped an upset against West Virginia to advance to the Sweet 16 with a 64-54 victory. M.L.B.: The Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani denied any knowledge of illegal gambling by his former interpreter. “I’m beyond shocked,” Ohtani said in a news conference. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Members of the Last Dinner Party. Ellie Smith for The New York Times Not viral: The Last Dinner Party is trying to become famous the old-fashioned way. The band has rapidly built a following by touring and staging meticulously planned theatrical live shows. They have ignored the temptation to chase fame online. The group has “become Britain’s buzziest new band,” Alex Marshall writes. They are playing a show in New York today. More on culture King Charles III hosted a fashion show. It used waste from his garden to promote his work on sustainability. Gisele Bündchen is releasing a cookbook — and speaking publicly after her divorce from Tom Brady. Read the interview. An American teenager won the men’s singles at the World Figure Skating Championships with a performance set to the “Succession” theme song. See it here. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Bake easy all-purpose biscuits. Use this dishwasher detergent. Reduce air moisture with a dehumidifier. Buy a toaster oven that doubles as an air fryer. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was blooming. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. P.S. The Times’s next class of Local Investigations Fellows will cover law enforcement in California, environmental policies in Utah and more. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted March 27 Author Members Share Posted March 27 March 27, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering a crisis of affordable housing in the U.S. — as well as the Baltimore bridge collapse, Israel and Elon Musk. In San Antonio. Josh Huskin for The New York Times Too few homes By Conor Dougherty Correspondent covering housing President Biden worries about high housing costs. So do Republicans in Congress. The consensus reflects a major problem: Tens of millions of families, across red and blue states, struggle with rent and home prices. The reason is a longstanding housing shortage. But action in Washington won’t make a huge difference. America’s affordable housing crisis is likely to be solved in cities and states. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how many are already doing so in bipartisan fashion. Local laboratories Home prices are up about 60 percent over the past decade, adjusted for inflation. About a quarter of renters — some 12 million households — spend more than half their income on housing, far in excess of the one-third level that is considered healthy. Homeless camps have expanded, and “super commuters” — who drive for 90 minutes or longer to work — have migrated well beyond the expensive coasts to smaller cities like Spokane, Wash., and fast-growing metropolitan areas like Dallas and Phoenix. Generally, Republican-led states have been more affordable than Democratic-led ones. They tend to have fewer construction and environmental rules, which allows the housing supply to expand faster. But as rent and home prices climb beyond middle-income budgets in more places, states are racing to add housing. The legislation in each state varies. But in general it removes permitting and design barriers so new construction can be approved faster. States are also trying to alter zoning rules to allow a greater diversity of units in more neighborhoods. In San Diego. Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times One way is to allow more backyard homes — known as granny flats. That way, homeowners can build a space for a renter or family member. Another is to shrink lot sizes so several smaller cottages can be built on parcels currently reserved for only one larger home. Cities and states are also altering zoning rules so duplexes and triplexes can be built in neighborhoods that are currently designated for single-family homes. All these methods aim to increase density within a city’s existing footprint. Already, Democrats and Republicans in Montana and Arizona have united for housing legislation. A similar coalition has taken shape in other states, including Texas, Minnesota and North Carolina. Even in California and Oregon, whose governments are both dominated by Democrats, Republican votes have helped pass housing bills. “Some issues become a horseshoe,” said Cody Vasut, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives who wants to drastically restrict abortion — but also liberalize land use laws. “We have different views of government, but sometimes we arrive at the same conclusion.” These coalitions are not always successful. Last week, for instance, the Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have allowed smaller homes and lot sizes. She called it “a step too far.” Most of these laws are too new for us to know their ultimate outcomes. But there’s ample evidence that building more housing reduces prices. In Austin, Texas, for instance, a surge in rent and home prices during the pandemic led to a boom in construction. Now prices are falling, and landlords offer months of free rent to fill empty units. New coalitions Why can political parties cooperate on this issue but so little else? Housing politics are hyperlocal and don’t hew to neat ideological lines. Neither party has a hard position that members feel beholden too. One thing most people agree on is that America has too few homes. According to Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giant, the nation is short about four million units. The deficit is particularly acute in both low-cost rentals and the entry-level starter homes favored by first-time buyers. Economists say much of the blame falls on local governments. City councils hold most of the power over where and what types of housing get built, but they are beholden to homeowners who often pack meetings to complain that new developments would destroy nature and snarl traffic. This is called NIMBYism, short for “Not in my backyard.” The remedy, in both red and blue states, has been to pass laws that strip cities’ power to say no. State legislatures are close enough to voters to share their concerns about rising housing costs — but far enough that they don’t have to answer for every new local development. They are the Goldilocks level of government for housing reform. Related: I want to hear from readers about their housing situations. You can submit stories here. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Baltimore Bridge Collapse In Baltimore. Erin Schaff/The New York Times The cargo ship that collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore lost power shortly before the crash, officials said. See how the bridge collapsed. After the ship put out a distress call, workers stopped cars from driving across the bridge. “These people are heroes,” Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, said. The Coast Guard is searching for the bodies of six of the eight construction workers who were on the bridge. Two were found alive; the others are presumed dead, an official said. Biden said that the collision appeared to have been an accident and that he wanted the federal government to rebuild the bridge. Several automakers said that they would reroute their shipments. Supreme Court Outside the Supreme Court. Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times Most of the Supreme Court justices sounded inclined to reject a bid to restrict nationwide access to an abortion pill, mifepristone, during arguments. Several justices seemed skeptical that the plaintiffs, doctors who don’t prescribe abortion pills, had a right to challenge the F.D.A.’s approval of the drug. Read more takeaways. The female justices had candid exchanges about women’s health, The Washington Post reports. 2024 Election The Biden campaign joined TikTok to try to reach younger voters. The videos have prompted jokes and criticism. Barack Obama regularly calls top Biden aides to strategize about Biden’s re-election campaign. More on Politics NBC News cut ties with Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican Party chairwoman, after hosts criticized the network for hiring her as a commentator. A Times review found that she had helped Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump’s social media company surged on its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, adding billions to his wealth. The judge overseeing Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial imposed a gag order prohibiting Trump from attacking witnesses or prosecutors. Trump posted a video urging his supporters to buy the “God Bless the USA Bible,” priced at around $60. Trump gets royalties from sales. A new law in Florida will prohibit children under 14 from having social media accounts, The A.P. reports. It is set to take effect next year. Israel-Hamas War Amit Soussana in Israel after she was released by Hamas. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times An Israeli hostage said she had been sexually assaulted and tortured in Gaza. Read her story. Hezbollah and Israel fired at each other across the border with Lebanon. At least one person died in Israel and seven were reported killed in Lebanon. Top Israeli and U.S. defense officials met to discuss Israel’s plan to invade Rafah. Israel is deploying facial recognition to conduct surveillance in Gaza, according to Israeli military and intelligence officials. The authorities in Gaza said 12 people drowned while trying to retrieve airdropped aid that had fallen into the Mediterranean. Other Big Stories Stella Assange, Julian Assange’s wife, speaking in London in February. Carl Court/Getty Images A British court ruled that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could not be extradited to the U.S. until the American authorities made more assurances about his treatment, including protection from the death penalty. Russia extended the detention of Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. China’s capable workers and cheap parts helped pull Tesla back from the brink of failure. This may give Beijing leverage over Elon Musk. Opinions The terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall shows ISIS is far from defeated, Bret Stephens writes. Colleges’ optional standardized tests hurt the students they are supposed to help, Emi Nietfeld writes. Here is a column by Ross Douthat on progressives’ new definition of sexual liberation. For readers of The Morning, enjoy exceptional savings for a limited time. Take advantage of the complete Times experience with our sale. Save on your first year of unlimited access to news, Games, Cooking and more. Subscribe now. MORNING READS In Uttar Pradesh, India. Adnan Abidi/Reuters Holi: The Indian festival is becoming more popular worldwide. Read about the tradition. Scams: A woman posed as a down-on-her-luck Irish heiress. The man she conned out of thousands started a podcast to track her down. The Great Read: A legal pot pioneer was busted in Idaho. He has a plan. Lives Lived: Lee Berry was one of the Panther 21, members of the Black Panther Party who were prosecuted in New York in 1970. His account of abuse in jail was a catalyst for Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue fund-raising party that Tom Wolfe satirized in a withering magazine takedown. Berry died at 78. SPORTS N.F.L.: League owners approved significant changes to kickoff rules, which will go into effect this season. College basketball: Iowa and West Virginia drew an average of 4.9 million viewers for their second-round women’s N.C.A.A. tournament game, a pre-Final Four record. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Aya Nakamura Charlotte Hadden for The New York Times French identity: Aya Nakamura, one of France’s most popular singers, might perform at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The choice has become a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. Nakamura was born in Mali and raised in a Parisian suburb, and her music mixes French lyrics with Arabic and West African dialects. “In a country often ill at ease with its changing population,” Roger Cohen and Aurelien Breeden write, “she stands on a fault line.” More on culture Matt Williams Beyoncé’s coming album, “Cowboy Carter,” is an extension of the artist’s exploration of how Black creativity fuels all corners of popular music. Read Jon Caramanica’s essay. Stephen King’s “Carrie” was published in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains its enduring appeal. “Trump is mashing together the Bible and the Constitution like it’s a Pizza Hut-Taco Bell”: The late-night hosts discussed Trump’s latest business venture. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times Stir together a one-pot crisp gnocchi with sausage and peas. Prepare kids for puberty with these items. Clean your oven. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was adjourn. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted March 28 Author Members Share Posted March 28 March 28, 2024 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering Biden and other world leaders’ unpopularity — plus the Baltimore bridge collapse, Boeing’s quality problems and Lizzo. President Biden with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Doug Mills/The New York Times The four I’s By many measures, President Biden is very unpopular. Since at least World War II, no president has had a worse disapproval rating at this point in his term. Relative to his international peers, however, Biden looks much better. Many leaders of developed democracies have disapproval ratings even higher than Biden’s, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows: Source: Morning Consult | Data was collected from Feb. 26 to March 6, 2024. | By The New York Times Many world leaders are also up for re-election. More than 60 countries — half of the world’s population — will vote or have voted this year. Most of the countries in the chart above will vote in national or European Union elections in the coming months. Why are people so upset with their leaders? Some explanations are local, but four global issues have driven much of the public’s anger. Call them the four I’s: inflation, immigration, inequality and incumbency. 1. Inflation The world has seen a sharp increase in prices over the past few years. As bad as inflation has been in the U.S., it has been worse in European countries more directly affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rising prices anger voters. Your hard-earned money is worth less. “When prices rise, it feels like something is taken away from you,” my colleague Jeanna Smialek, who covers the U.S. economy, has said. And people direct much of that anger toward their leaders. People also don’t like the solution to inflation. To slow price increases, central banks have raised interest rates. But higher interest rates also make loans, credit card payments and mortgages more expensive. This helps explain why people are so upset even as inflation has fallen. 2. Immigration The U.S. and Europe have dealt with multiple migration and refugee crises in the past decade. Those crises have fueled anger against the more mainstream political parties that tend to be in charge in developed countries. More immigration can have advantages, particularly for growing economies and reducing inflation. But for many people, other considerations win out. They worry that immigrants use government resources, take jobs, lower wages and change their country’s culture. Illegal immigration, in particular, upsets them by contributing to a broader sense of chaos and lawlessness. And they blame their leaders for it. Sometimes, they will support once-fringe, far-right candidates — as happened in the Netherlands and Italy in the last couple years. These politicians often want to shut down most, if not all, immigration. “There are a lot of people who are not right-wing themselves, but they really care about immigration,” said Sonnet Frisbie, deputy head of political intelligence at the polling firm Morning Consult. “They feel like centrist and center-left parties don’t represent their views.” 3. Inequality Across the world, the rich have captured a growing share of income. Big companies keep getting bigger. A few individuals have amassed more wealth than entire countries. Many people now believe that the wealthiest have pulled ahead while everyone else has lagged behind (although some economists disagree). The growing sentiment has contributed to greater distrust of elites, including national leaders. People feel that those in charge have taken advantage of their power to enrich themselves and their friends. That distrust now appears in approval ratings. 4. Incumbency Incumbents typically have an electoral advantage over challengers. But that advantage can diminish over time. Voters tend to tire of national leaders the longer they’re in power — what political scientists call “the cost of ruling.” Consider that two-term presidents in the U.S. are rarely succeeded by a president of the same party. The cost of ruling “is a remarkably consistent pattern across countries,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist at New America, a liberal think tank. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times Many current world leaders, or at least their political parties, have been in power for a while. Japan’s top party has led the country for most of the last seven decades. Leaders or parties in France, Canada and Britain have ruled for seven to 14 years. In the U.S., Democrats have held the White House for 11 of the last 15 years. The trend is not universal. India’s prime minister is popular after nearly a decade in office. Germany’s chancellor is unpopular despite coming to power a little more than two years ago. Still, the cost of ruling applies more often than not. The bottom line Over the past several years, the world has often felt chaotic and uncertain. Many people hoped that the end of the Covid pandemic would bring normalcy. Instead, inflation spiked. Longer-term problems, such as illegal immigration and inequality, persist. National leaders have struggled to address these issues, often despite many years in power. The result is widespread disapproval of the people running the world. And many of them are now at risk of losing their jobs this year. Related: These maps show where Biden faces protest voters. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Baltimore Bridge Collapse The Francis Scott Key Bridge. Jason Andrew for The New York Times Divers recovered the bodies of two workers from the wreckage; four others remain missing. Read more about the victims. Recordings show what happened in the moments after the ship lost power as the crew tried to avoid disaster. The bridge collapse has upset trade — and highlighted how the shipping industry is easily disrupted. These graphics show how ships have gotten bigger in the last few decades. That’s dangerous for bridges. Trump Media Shares of Donald Trump’s media company continues to surge. His stock is worth billions. If Trump wins the election, his social media site Truth Social could provide a route for foreign leaders or special interests to buy his favor. 2024 Election The Republican National Committee has asked job candidates whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen, a sign of Donald Trump’s grip on the party. Trump called Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent running for president, a “radical Left” candidate and said it would be “a great service to America” if Kennedy took votes from Biden. Trump has spent more than $100 million on legal bills since leaving the White House, almost all of it donated. Now, those accounts are running out. More on Politics Senator Joe Lieberman in 2010. Drew Angerer for The New York Times Joe Lieberman, a former U.S. senator from Connecticut who become Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 presidential election, died at 82. Russia has gotten better at hiding its online influence campaigns, and it’s using them to derail U.S. military funding for Ukraine, American officials said. After a legal setback, Disney dropped its fight against Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, over resort development. A Democrat who campaigned on abortion and I.V.F. access flipped an Alabama State House seat in a special election. The win highlighted the continued political power of reproductive rights. A Great Lakes pipeline has become a political fight in Michigan and Wisconsin, two battleground states. International The Garrick Club in London. Leon Neal/Getty Images, via Getty Images The Guardian, a British newspaper, leaked the membership list for an elite private members’ club in London. The club has received criticism for its men-only membership policy. Russia’s security services missed the attack on a concert hall in part because they were focused on Ukraine, experts say. Other Big Stories Quality issues have plagued Boeing, and many employees blame the company’s focus on increasing production. Read more about the problems. The M.T.A. approved a $15 toll on drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan. It faces lawsuits from officials in New Jersey and Staten Island. Rates of colorectal cancer are rising among young people. Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” died at 90. Though he never took an economics course, he pioneered the field of behavioral economics and won a Nobel. Opinions Democrats’ promises to help Puerto Ricans affected by hurricanes in the region are empty, Yarimar Bonilla writes. A.I. chatbots have become political, Zvi Mowshowitz writes. Take a quiz to see how chatbots’ views compare to your own. Here are columns by Pamela Paul on puritan progressives on Meta’s social media app Threads, and Thomas Edsall on Republicans’ campaign strategy for the Senate. For readers of The Morning, enjoy exceptional savings for a limited time. Take advantage of the complete Times experience with our sale. Save on your first year of unlimited access to news, Games, Cooking and more. Subscribe now. MORNING READS Rhonda and Scott Burnett at home in Kansas City. Dominick Williams for The New York Times Inflated fees: A recent change has upended real estate commissions in the U.S. Meet the homeowners who made it happen. The Royal Kardashians? The frenzy over Kate, Princess of Wales, reflects a shift in public sentiment: The Windsors are now like any other celebrity family. Spring curse: Climate change is making seasonal allergies worse. Here’s how to find relief. Radical honesty: An influencer couple were vulnerable about their relationship online. They were vulnerable about their breakup, too. Lives Lived: Richard Serra wanted to become a painter but instead became one of his era’s greatest sculptors. His “viewer centered” sculptures had a flowing, circling geometry that often had to be walked through. He died at 85. SPORTS M.L.B.: Baseball officially begins today. The Los Angeles Dodgers had an impressive offseason. N.B.A.: Golden State’s Draymond Green was ejected just four minutes into his team’s win over Orlando last night, his fourth expulsion this season. Women’s soccer: The San Diego Wave was recently sold for $120 million. It’s a sign of American teams’ skyrocketing values. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Devon Werkheiser Philip Cheung for The New York Times A second act: For years, Devon Werkheiser wanted to move past being seen as Ned, the character he played as a child on the Nickelodeon show “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide.” Now, at 33, he’s embracing his past on a podcast about the show with two of his former co-stars. The podcast is one of many hosted by former Disney and Nickelodeon child stars that capitalize on a nostalgic Gen Z and millennial fan base, and on the characters they have tried, with mixed success, to move beyond. More on culture Lizzo Yitty The singer Lizzo, a trailblazer of fat acceptance, spoke to The Times about her new swim line and her movement from “body positivity” to “body neutrality.” A judge ordered a former curator who is accused by the British Museum of stealing hundreds of artifacts to return any items that are in his possession. Stephen Colbert joked about the drama at NBC over the firing of the former Republican National Committee chairwoman. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Johnny Miller for The New York Times Bake chewy lemon cookies. Manage adult A.D.H.D. with expert-approved books. Add these items to your wedding registry. Live a less sedentary life. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was trackpad. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German P.S. Watch Jack Nicas, The Times’s Brazil bureau chief, discuss his story about Jair Bolsonaro hiding at the Hungarian embassy on Brazilian television. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted March 30 Author Members Share Posted March 30 March 29, 2024 SUPPORTED BY Good morning. We’re covering a crisis of school absenteeism — as well as Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, four presidents in New York City and Beyoncé’s new album. Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times Empty classrooms By Sarah Mervosh An education reporter A few years ago, a troubling phenomenon began to spread in U.S. education: Students were not showing up to school. This was not particularly surprising. Schools had shut down in the spring of 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and some did not fully reopen until fall 2021. Quarantines for Covid symptoms and exposures were still common. It would take time, many thought, to re-establish daily routines. What is surprising is how little the numbers have budged since, an issue my colleague Francesca Paris and I explore in depth in a new article published today. Before the pandemic, about 15 percent of U.S. students were chronically absent, which typically means missing 18 days of the school year, for any reason. By the 2021-22 school year, that number had skyrocketed to 28 percent of students. Last school year, the most recent for which national estimates are available, it held stubbornly at 26 percent. In interviews, many educators say the problem is continuing this school year. Perhaps most strikingly, absenteeism has increased across demographic groups, according to research by Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Students are missing more school in districts rich and poor, big and small. Source: Upshot analysis of data from Nat Malkus, AEI | By The New York Times Even the length of school closures during the pandemic was not a particularly useful predictor of absenteeism. On average, districts that were closed longest have experienced similar increases as those that opened sooner. What is going on here? I spoke with school leaders, counselors, researchers and parents. They offered many reasons for the absences: illness, mental health, transportation problems. But underlying it all is a fundamental shift in the value that families place on school, and in the culture of education during the pandemic. “Our relationship with school became optional,” said Katie Rosanbalm, a psychologist and associate research professor at Duke University. A cultural shift To some degree, this is a problem facing society at large since the pandemic. Anyone who works in an office with a flexible remote-work policy will be familiar with the feeling: You diligently show up, but your co-workers aren’t there. What’s the point? In Victoria, Texas. Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times Something similar may be going on in schools. Though school buildings are open, classes are in person and sports and other extracurricular activities are back in full, the stability of school seems to have shifted. For one thing, teachers are also missing more school, often because of professional burnout or child care challenges — or because, since the pandemic, more people are actually staying home when they’re sick. Some schools have kept their pandemic policies around online class work, giving the illusion that in-person attendance is not necessary. And widespread absenteeism means less stability about which friends and classmates will be there. This can beget more absenteeism. For example, research has found that when 10 percent of a student’s classmates are absent on a given day, that student is nearly 20 percent more likely to be absent the following day. “We are seeing disengagement spreading,” said Michael A. Gottfried, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied this issue. Sign of other problems This cultural shift is not simply a hit to perfect attendance records. The share of students missing many days of school helps explain why U.S. students, overall, are nowhere close to making up their learning losses from the pandemic. Students who are behind academically may resist going to school, but missing school also sets them further back. These effects are especially pernicious for low-income students, who lost more ground during the pandemic and who are more negatively affected by chronic absence. A high school in Anchorage. Ash Adams for The New York Times Absenteeism is also closely linked to other challenges schools have faced since the pandemic, including a rise in student anxiety and behavioral problems. “The pandemic increased stress in every way in our lives, but it really embedded ourselves in our stress response system — fight, flight or freeze,” Dr. Rosanbalm, the Duke psychologist, said. An increase in behavioral problems in schools is an example of the “fight” response, she said. On the other hand, she added, “flight is absenteeism.” For more: A tool in our article lets you see the absenteeism numbers for public school districts in most states. Continue reading the main story A MESSAGE FROM APPLE CARD Daily Cash back. Without limits. Earn up to 3% unlimited Daily Cash back on every Apple Card purchase. See how it adds up. Apply now THE LATEST NEWS Bankman-Fried Sentencing Sam Bankman-Fried in Manhattan last year. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul convicted of stealing billions from customers, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The sentence is among the longest imposed on a white-collar defendant in recent years. Bankman-Fried was also ordered to forfeit about $11 billion in assets. Politics Barack Obama, President Biden and Bill Clinton. Doug Mills/The New York Times Barack Obama and Bill Clinton joined President Biden for a fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Biden also gathered major donors privately. Donald Trump was also in New York City yesterday. He attended a wake for a police officer who was killed this week during a traffic stop. A Republican operative who accused Matt Schlapp, the head of a major conservative advocacy group, of groping him dropped his lawsuit after receiving a $480,000 settlement. Baltimore Bridge Collapse Workers began clearing debris and dismantling the wreckage in an attempt to reopen the port. A 1,000-ton crane, the largest on the Eastern Seaboard, will help. How hard did the container ship Dali strike the bridge? Calculations show it could have had the same force as a rocket launch. The disaster killed six men who were immigrants from Latin America. It has shaken Baltimore’s Hispanic community. War in Ukraine Evan Gershkovich’s parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich. Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been detained in Russia for a year. Read an interview with his parents. Vladimir Putin dismissed claims that Russia planned to invade other countries but warned nations against hosting warplanes meant for Ukraine. If the U.S. abandons Ukraine, that would embolden China to move against Taiwan, Taiwan’s foreign minister said. Climate The last two coal-fired power plants in New England are set to close. New England will be the second region in the U.S., after the Pacific Northwest, to stop burning coal. Garbage dumps release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, at higher rates than previously estimated, a study found. Other Big Stories In San Diego. Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times A judge is expected to rule on whether the U.S. government must provide shelter and food to migrant children as they wait in outdoor holding areas. In California, a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers, America’s highest, is about to take effect. Lawsuits accuse two county jails in Michigan of banning in-person family visits for inmates as a way to bolster revenue through phone calls and messages. An 8-year-old girl was the sole survivor of a bus crash in South Africa that killed 45. The bus fell off a bridge and burst into flames. Opinions The Supreme Court is “traditionalist,” meaning justices interpret the Constitution by enduring political and cultural norms, Marc De Girolami argues. Antiracism is commendable in art. At universities, it can distort curiosity, John McWhorter writes. Here are columns by David Brooks on the rise and fall of liberalism and David French on minors using social media. For readers of The Morning, enjoy exceptional savings for a limited time. Take advantage of the complete Times experience with our sale. Save on your first year of unlimited access to news, Games, Cooking and more. Subscribe now. MORNING READS Clockwise, from top left: Valentin Jeck; courtesy of Bukowskis; courtesy of Zanotta SpA - Italy; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh/Art Resource, NY © ARS, NY; Ellen McDermott © Smithsonian Institution; Herman Miller Archives; Vitra Accent chair: See the most influential pieces of furniture from the last 100 years. Hilarity and wonder: Meta’s glasses are becoming artificially intelligent. We tried them. Dogs: A German breeding bill could lead to bans for the beloved Dachshund. Modern Love: “How I learned to trust (some) men.” Lives Lived: Linda Bean was a granddaughter of L.L. Bean. She used her wealth to support right-wing causes and politicians, to amass paintings and properties associated with the Wyeth art family and to become an entrepreneur in her mid-60s. She died at 82. SPORTS March Madness: Alabama upset the No. 1 seed North Carolina to reach its first men’s Elite Eight in 20 years. M.L.B.: Commissioner Rob Manfred said he hoped the league’s investigation into the gambling allegations surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter would be “short.” N.H.L.: A Russian hockey player is expected to finally come to North America after being drafted nearly nine years ago. During the wait, he was arrested and forced into military service. U.S. Soccer: Korbin Albert, a rising star, apologized yesterday after Megan Rapinoe criticized anti-L.G.B.T.Q. content that Albert had reposted on social media. Caitlin Clark: The Iowa star was among the 14 players selected for Team USA’s training camp in Cleveland. Continue reading the main story A MESSAGE FROM APPLE CARD Daily Cash back. Without limits. Earn up to 3% unlimited Daily Cash back on every Apple Card purchase. See how it adds up. Apply now ARTS AND IDEAS Beyoncé James Devaney/GC Images, via Getty Images A new album: Beyoncé has gone country. Her just-released album, “Cowboy Carter,” has plucked banjos, lines about hoedowns and cameos from Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson. But “that’s only the half of it,” Ben Sisario writes. The 27-track album is a tour of popular music with a Beatles cover and features from Miley Cyrus and Post Malone. “The album’s range suggests a broad essay on contemporary pop music, and on the nature of genre itself,” Sisario adds. Read more about the album. More on culture Metro Boomin Theo Wargo/Getty Images for MTV The music producer Metro Boomin helped shape rap over the last decade. Next week, he is poised to claim his fourth No. 1 album. Here’s a guide to his music. Alessandro Michele, the designer who brought profits and plenty of buzz to Gucci, was named creative director of Valentino. Seth Meyers joked about Trump Media’s stock. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Julia Gartland for The New York Times Roast salmon with peas and radishes for a quick dinner. Jog with these strollers. Give a good gift to a frequent traveler. Make over your foyer. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was galumph. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted March 31 Author Members Share Posted March 31 March 30, 2024 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. If full-on spring cleaning feels intimidating, why not focus instead on tasks that are far less ambitious but no less satisfying? María Jesús Contreras Starting small Spring arrives, and with it, a semi-annoying, semi-invigorating mandate to spring clean — to clear out spaces both physical and psychological. Because I am constantly looking for reasons to get rid of old things, old ways of thinking and being that have outstayed their usefulness, I’m drawn to spring cleaning as an annual rite. But because I am also constantly reckoning with a pesky sense of dread regarding obligations of any size, I also find the concept of spring cleaning over-ambitious and intimidating. On days when routine chores like going to the post office or separating the laundry feel like punishments, the project of vacuum-sealing sweaters in mothproof storage bags seems unfeasible. A friend was telling me about readying for a twice-a-year neighborhood yard sale, how she had begun decluttering in anticipation of the event. I felt a mix of excitement (it’s that time of year again!) and panic (it’s that time of year and, once again, I have waited too long to call the accountant!). Then she mentioned how accomplished she felt after sewing a button on a shirt to ready it for the sale. I started thinking about those tiny things we put off, the little tasks that aren’t necessarily arduous, but for whatever reason — they’re not part of our regular routines, we don’t have to do them to function — we procrastinate getting done. When we actually do them, the sense of relief we experience is almost transcendent. Take sewing a button on a shirt. Yes, the shirt has been out of commission for four years, but it’s OK, you rationalized, you have other shirts and always more pressing things to do. But when you actually sit down and sew the stupid button, you feel an outsize sense of achievement that’s totally disproportionate to the effort and time expended. Look at your handiwork! And now you have another shirt! I started making a list of these tasks, the endlessly put-off, tiny things that occupy space at the bottom of the mind’s running to-do list. Shining shoes. Repotting plants. Sharpening knives. Getting the car washed. I made chicken stock recently from scraps that had been sitting in the freezer for months. I felt a sense of accomplishment that I can only compare to what someone might experience after lifting a car off a trapped child. It can be a sort of game, thinking of these little annoying tasks and then addressing them, seeing how much asymmetrical relief you can rack up from relatively minor exertion. You might find yourself so energized that you’re up to contemplate some version of spring cleaning. Maybe not a total closet overhaul, but, say, one quick “does this spark joy” pass over your winter wardrobe. Who knows what you’ll be capable of with the confidence accrued from checking off these items. You might even make an appointment with the tax accountant. (Or just gather your paperwork and throw it in a folder — take it slow, no need to do anything crazy.) For more The best way to approach spring cleaning? Slowly. Wirecutter’s guide to tackling intimidating cleaning projects. How to save yourself from task paralysis. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE WEEK IN CULTURE Music Rhiannon Giddens plays banjo and viola on Beyoncé’s new album. Her own work sheds light on the Black roots of folk music. Serena Brown for The New York Times Beyoncé released “Cowboy Carter.” The 27-track album features a cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and contributions from Miley Cyrus. Read about the guests and the behind-the-scenes figures on the album. Shakira performed a pop-up show in Times Square. The performance was quick, but it took months of planning. Eleanor Collins, regarded as Canada’s “first lady” of jazz, died at 104. In 1955, she became the first Black person to host a television program in the country. Film and TV Louis Gossett Jr., who was the first Black performer to win an Oscar for best supporting actor and who also won an Emmy for “Roots,” died at 87. Martin Scorsese has agreed to host a documentary series about Christian saints for Fox New Media’s streaming service, Fox Nation. ABC’s “The Bachelorette” cast the first Asian American lead in the show’s more than 20-year history. A prop door from the movie “Titanic,” on which the character Rose floated, sold at auction for over $700,000. Other Big Stories Paris’s Musée d’Orsay is celebrating the 150th anniversary of impressionism with an exhibition. Some South Korean activists want to replace a Japanese variety of cherry tree with a variety they say is native to South Korea. But the science is messy. The British Museum, facing a theft scandal and calls for the return of objects in its collection to their countries of origin, named the art historian Nicholas Cullinan as its new director. Kim Kardashian claimed that Donald Judd, the minimalist artist, designed her office furniture. Judd’s foundation says he didn’t and has sued her for making false claims. Where are men buying suits off the rack? More than 80 responses from Times readers offer a sense of what styles are currently popular. A British director is bringing a revival of “Cabaret” to Broadway. Read her interview with The Times. Governors Island announced Lauren Haynes as its new head curator. THE LATEST NEWS A Hight electric truck. Mark Abramson for The New York Times The Biden administration announced pollution rules meant to increase sales of electric or other zero-emission heavy vehicles, like school buses, ambulances and R.V.s. With inflation still running slightly above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target, Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said he was in no hurry to cut interest rates. Germany is Israel’s second-largest arms supplier and sees supporting it as a way to atone for the Holocaust. But as deaths mount in Gaza, German officials have begun to change their tone. A federal judge ordered New Jersey to redesign its primary election ballot. Andy Kim, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate, had challenged the old design, which gave preferential placement to local leaders’ preferred candidates. The F.D.A. warned that Impella heart pumps, which are used as temporary implants, have been linked to 49 deaths and dozens of injuries. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. CULTURE CALENDAR By Desiree Ibekwe 🎥 Monkey Man (Friday): For many, Dev Patel’s breakout role was as Jamal Malik in Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” I was first introduced to him — as many other British kids were — in “Skins,” a teen drama that was big on sex and drugs. (It was kind of a progenitor of HBO’s “Euphoria.”) Now, Patel has turned action star in “Monkey Man,” which he also wrote and directed. He plays Kid, a boxer who competes in an underworld street fighting club set in a fictional Indian city. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT RECIPE OF THE WEEK Jim Wilson/The New York Times By Melissa Clark Easter Egg Nest Cake Easter is on Sunday, and if you’re looking for a dessert to bolster the Easter Bunny’s sugary offerings, you can’t do better than Nigella Lawson’s playful Easter egg nest cake. This beloved recipe from the New York Times Cooking archives consists of a deeply fudgy, flourless cake with a top that puffs dramatically in the oven — only to sink as it cools. But that’s a good thing: The resulting crater makes a perfect nest to be filled with chocolate whipped cream and colorful candy Easter eggs. It’s easy to make, too, and keeps well if you want to bake it today to serve tomorrow. Just don’t top with the candy eggs until just before serving — or, you know, after the Easter Bunny drops them off. REAL ESTATE Matthew Schwartz, Alliana Semjen and Beacon. Katherine Marks for The New York Times The hunt: After seven years in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, a couple decided to move to the Upper West Side with a budget of $1.5 million. Which home did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $750,000: A converted schoolhouse in Phoenixville, Pa.; a one-bedroom condo in Portland, Maine; or a two-story house in New Orleans. LIVING Fewer Finer Diamond in the rough: “Divorce rings,” which signal a new beginning after a marriage ends, are having a moment. A bursting bubble? The future of luxury e-commerce looks uncertain after the implosions of Farfetch and MatchesFashion. Members club mania: Private clubs are proliferating in New York. Some city residents belong to more than one. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER The case for always checking a suitcase It’s a source of pride among some travelers to never check a bag. But a carry-on bag crammed with an entire trip’s worth of stuff can weigh us down as we meander around the terminal and make competitors of our fellow passengers for overhead space. As Wirecutter’s travel expert, allow me to suggest a better way: Check every bag, eagerly and with joy. I’ve floated through airports with nothing but a phone, headphones and a passport, and it feels, every time, transcendent. Start by investing in a great suitcase — like the sleek and durable one we recommend in our guide to the best luggage for checking. If you’re facing lost-bag anxiety, consider keeping tabs with a luggage tracker. Then: Be free. — Kit Dillon GAME OF THE WEEK Connecticut guard Stephon Castle. Steven Senne/Associated Press Connecticut vs. Illinois, N.C.A.A. tournament: The two best offenses in men’s basketball collide in the Elite Eight. UConn, last year’s champion, tore through the first three rounds of the tournament, beating opponents by almost 30 points a game. They have looked like the best team in the field. But they haven’t yet faced an offensive threat like Illinois’s Terrence Shannon Jr., a 6-foot-6 guard who has scored at least 25 points in his last seven games. 6 p.m. Eastern today on TBS More on sports In the women’s tournament, several top teams play in the Sweet 16 today: L.S.U. at 1 p.m., Iowa at 3:30 and UConn at 8. Thursday was Major League Baseball’s opening day. The Baltimore Orioles look really good, again. One of the strangest stories in Pittsburgh Penguins history came to a conclusion this week: 19,000 stolen Jaromir Jagr bobbleheads were found in a warehouse. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were evaluated, valuated and vaulted. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted March 31 Author Members Share Posted March 31 March 31, 2024 By Desiree Ibekwe Good morning. We’re covering a new show about life at Guantánamo Bay. At Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Marisa Schwartz Taylor/The New York Times Inside prison walls Around 780 people have been detained at the prison at Guantánamo Bay since it opened in January 2002. Thirty men remain there today, many of whom have not been charged. The podcast “Serial,” which debuted in 2014 with the story of a questionable murder conviction, has dedicated its new season to Guantánamo. Over nine episodes, it tells the story of the prison through a personal lens, by way of conversations with people who worked or were detained there. I spoke with the hosts, Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis, about the show. Desiree: There’s an interesting political story to be told about Guantánamo, but why did you decide to tell this story through the people who lived through it? Sarah: The government threw all of these normal people on Guantánamo, and they had to sort out how on earth are we supposed to behave in here, how are we supposed to make sense of this? So over the course of 20 years, you saw this thing, which was kind of like a terrible spasm in the national response to 9/11, harden into something that was trying to justify and sustain itself. I think that’s what we were interested in: Who were those people who are having to make decisions, who are having to survive a thing not of their own making, and what did that look like and what did that feel like? In the reporting of the podcast, did anything upend your preconceived notions or surprise you about Guantánamo? Dana: The people who work in Guantánamo for the military rotate in and out about every nine months, but the prisoners have been there, so very quickly the prisoners learned how the prison operated better than the guard force did. I heard a lot of stories about prisoners who would correct the guards and be like, “No, no, you need to give me 10 squares of toilet paper,” or “You’re not handcuffing me right. Let me show you how to do it.” And I think the thing that surprised me the most as I started digging into it was that we were told by the Bush administration that these are the worst of the worst, these are the people who did 9/11. As it turned out, they were not, and the people who worked in Guantánamo — and a lot of people in the Bush administration — knew that from within months of the first prisoners’ arriving. There wasn’t a tremendous amount of screening going on. It was really like an overflow room for the war in Afghanistan. And the prisoners who are there, and were there, have now been dipped in this toxic paint of this place forever. One thing that struck me was that while things at Guantánamo were scary and unsettling, it was also a really surreal place. Sarah: I think the thing that a lot of people either don’t know or forget is that it’s just a naval base. Like a normal naval base, it has sandwich shops and a coffee shop and a school and a chapel. It’s just when you first visit there, you’re not psychically ready to see that. But by the third time I went, I wasn’t even noticing that stuff. Once, I was there with these young people from various N.G.O.s who were there to observe the court, and one guy goes, “I got a coffee this morning, and then this woman told me to ‘have a nice day,’ and I was like, What are you talking about? How can I have a nice day?” And I was like, “Oh, you’re a newcomer. You’ll get over that.” How have you seen Guantánamo evolve? Sarah: When I was first reporting on it in the early 2000s, there were hundreds of prisoners there, and it felt very active and very violent and very scary and very shocking. And in 2015, I think there were 122 people. It wasn’t like the bad wasn’t still happening, but it had dug in for the long term. These people just live here now, and the court is chugging along. It felt very like an institution. To me it feels like it’s in its last throes, and it’s sort of falling apart. But it’s interesting — I spoke to an attorney who has been working there for more than a decade on the same case, and he was like, “Every time you come, you think this thing is about to fall apart, and I’m here to tell you: You have no idea whether it’s falling apart.” Listen to the first two episodes of the season here. For more Sarah and Dana spoke with Times Insider about the making of the show. Photography is largely forbidden at Guantánamo. Carol Rosenberg, who reports on the prison for The Times, explains what you can learn from a single image. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Middle East In Israel. Amit Elkayam for The New York Times Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet is divided about whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should be required to join the Israeli Army. Negotiations on a cease-fire in the war in Gaza are expected to resume today in Cairo, according to an Egyptian state-owned TV channel. Airdrops play a prominent role in efforts to deliver food and supplies to Gaza. A Times photographer observed one aboard a Jordanian Air Force plane. See the images. U.S.-led airstrikes against the Houthi militia and inflation have raised concerns about a new humanitarian crisis in Yemen. More International News At a recruitment center in Kyiv, Ukraine. Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times Ukrainian brigades are running their own marketing campaigns outside the official mobilization system to attract recruits. The death in Spain of a Russian defector has raised fears that Russia’s European spy networks continue to operate despite attempts to dismantle them. The police in Peru raided President Dina Boluarte’s home and the presidential palace in search of Rolex watches as part of an “unlawful enrichment” investigation. Protests by farmers in Europe have emboldened a far right that thrives on grievances. See images from Reuters of Christians around the world celebrating Holy Week. Other Big Stories A woman in Texas who was falsely charged with murder after using an abortion pill has filed a lawsuit against the local prosecutor’s office and its leaders. Thousands gathered on Long Island for the funeral of a New York City police officer who was shot to death in the line of duty. His killing has become a political flashpoint. Chance Perdomo, an actor known for his roles in the series “Gen V” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” died on Friday at 27. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Will the collapse of Francis Scott Key Bridge hurt the Port of Baltimore? Yes. The bridge’s destruction has cut off one of the busiest ports in the country. “The biggest generator of who knows how many millions of sticky dollars over the centuries, dollars that stuck right here, is at a standstill,” Will Englund writes for The Washington Post. No. The problems won’t be as severe as people think. “Given the hard lessons learned during the past decade, significant price shocks or product shortages are unlikely,” Tinglong Dai writes for The Baltimore Banner. FROM OPINION Vladimir Putin will use the attack on a concert hall near Moscow to escalate his campaign in Ukraine, Hanna Notte argues. Generative A.I. loves buzzwords. As the technology spreads, it will pollute our language, Erik Hoel writes. The science writer Ed Yong deepened his connection to animals through birding. Here are columns by Nicholas Kristof on the benefits of marriage and Ross Douthat on the future of American religion. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT MORNING READS Jane Goodall with two- and four-legged friends. Frans Lanting Jane Goodall: The activist celebrated her upcoming 90th birthday with 90 dogs. Doomscrolling? Try ringing a doorbell for fish instead. Mystery: Old newspaper stories helped researchers find a 19th-century shipwreck in Lake Michigan. Points: Credit card companies are changing the fees they charge merchants. That may affect travel rewards. Vows: He expresses himself through art, she through math. They have found ways to merge work with love. Lives Lived: Robert Moskowitz was a painter who was inspired by the New York City skyline. His work took on new meaning after 9/11. Moskowitz died at 88. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE José Andrés PEDEN + MUNK The chef José Andrés is famous for his food and for his humanitarian work. See behind the scenes at Zaytinya, where he still approves every dish on the menu. Screenland: Why does every Southern accent in a movie sound so bad? A writer recommends turning on a classic rock radio station in your car. TALK | FROM THE MAGAZINE Jerrod Carmichael Joyce Kim for The New York Times By David Marchese I’ll be part of a new Q. and A. franchise, The Interview, that’s launching in late April. Before then, I’m sharing some of my favorite past interviews. This one, from 2022, is with the stand-up comedian Jerrod Carmichael, who was then dealing with the familial fallout of having publicly come out as gay in his HBO special “Rothaniel.” You’re trying hard to tell the truth these days, but aside from what’s going on with your family, does committing to honesty present problems in your day-to-day life? It’s not easy to be fully honest with everyone. Oh, people get mad at you. I don’t like that but I know that’s a part of telling the truth — the reaction isn’t consistent. I used to lie to keep a consistent reaction, which was all about Like me, like me, like me. I told the truth about who I am and now there’s a rift with my mom. I was lying because it was more pleasant. For other people. For other people! And thus for me. I don’t like not talking to my mom. But it’s a byproduct of being honest. That’s the part of coming out, the relationship with my mom, that I don’t like. It was a truth I was afraid to say because of that one relationship. But it’s who I am. What did you feel inside when you delivered material that conveyed one thing about who you were when the truth was another? I don’t know, man. I don’t know because I wouldn’t have called myself gay. I could not accept that. That’s why it’s important for me to say it now. There are certain phrases that have no substitute. Like “I’m gay” or telling someone “I’m sorry.” But people can live in cognitive dissonance. I did. Read more of the interview here. BOOKS King of King’s: “Carrie,” Stephen King’s debut novel, was published 50 years ago next month. The Times Book Review’s editor, Gilbert Cruz, offers a guide to the author’s essential books. Borrowed titles: Many modern book names allude to other works of literature. A.O. Scott explores our habit of dressing up new writing in secondhand words. Our editors’ picks: “The Morningside,” a book about a version of New York in climate collapse, and seven other books. Times best sellers: Percival Everett’s book “Erasure” was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie “American Fiction.” His latest release, “James,” a reimagining of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is new on the hardcover fiction list. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Cool down with a good fan. Look good in the best cheap sunglasses. Spend 36 hours in Mumbai, India. Read “Where Rivers Part,” a memoir by Kao Kalia Yang. THE WEEK AHEAD What to Watch For Today is Easter. Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin hold primaries on Tuesday. Donald Trump has until Thursday to post a $175 million bond in his New York civil fraud case, after an appeals court lowered the amount and gave him more time. Meal Plan Matt Taylor-Gross for The New York Times In her Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein encourages you to make rice bowls for dinner. Try out Eric Kim’s extremely delicious and extremely simple bacon and egg don. Or whip up a salmon and rice bowl, which comes together in one pot. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was jackpot. Can you put eight historical events — including the chicken, the egg and the reign of Louis XIV — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 2 Author Members Share Posted April 2 April 1, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering ambitious projects that are trying to engineer the atmosphere — as well as protests in Israel, Donald Trump’s rallies and the peace sign. A carbon dioxide vacuum in Iceland. Francesca Jones for The New York Times Engineering change By David Gelles Lead author of the Climate Forward newsletter Infusing clouds with sulfur dioxide to block the sun. Vacuuming carbon dioxide out of thin air. Adding iron to the ocean to draw greenhouse gases down to the sea floor. As recently as a few years ago, technologies designed to change Earth’s atmosphere — what is broadly known as geoengineering — were considered too impractical, too expensive and too outlandish to be taken seriously. But, as I write in a new article, some of these technologies are being deployed. One is already in place. The effects of climate change are becoming worse. And nations aren’t meeting their collective goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions. The stakes are very real: Last year was the hottest in modern history. Oceans around the world are shockingly warm. Floods, fires and droughts are growing more intense. So investors and entrepreneurs are trying — sometimes unilaterally — to fix that. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain some of those efforts. Many scientists and environmentalists worry about the safety and efficacy of geoengineering. And some of the best-funded projects are bankrolled by the very oil and gas companies most responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions. Still, plans to intentionally tinker with the planet’s atmosphere are racing ahead. Underground bubbles On a warm winter day last month, I traveled to a massive construction site outside Odessa, Texas. There, Occidental Petroleum is building the world’s largest direct air-capture plant. The company plans to turn it on next year. The mechanics are relatively straightforward: Giant fans blow air across water that has been treated to absorb carbon dioxide. Occidental then uses chemicals to isolate that CO2, mixes the gas with water and pumps it underground. Extreme subterranean pressure keeps the gas locked away forever. In Texas. Ariana Gomez for The New York Times Occidental told me that most of the carbon dioxide it captures will be sequestered in bedrock, removed from the atmosphere for good. But at least some will be used to extract yet more oil from the ground, creating more of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet. Earlier this year, I toured a similar factory in Iceland. That one, built by a Swiss company called Climeworks, doesn’t sell any of its CO2 to oil companies. Other attempts to tweak the climate are still in their infancy. A California start-up claimed to have released sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in Mexico without permission, hoping to block solar radiation. (Afterward, Mexico imposed a ban on the process.) Researchers in Massachusetts are investigating whether they could generate blooms of phytoplankton that would absorb carbon dioxide and settle on the sea floor. Who has the power? Critics of the air-capture plants like those in Texas and Iceland remain skeptical. The projects are enormously expensive and very energy-intensive and snag only a sliver of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe they distract policymakers from the more urgent work of reducing fossil fuel emissions. Despite these concerns, the market for these ventures is set to boom — from less than $10 billion today to as much as $135 billion by 2040, according to Boston Consulting Group. Occidental is planning to build 100 plants in the coming years, funded in part by $1.2 billion in funding for the technology from the Biden administration. Climeworks wants to build in Kenya, Canada, Europe and Louisiana. It’s not unusual for a new technology to gain momentum before the major questions about its efficacy, safety and regulation are resolved. Who deserves the right to alter the planet, and what burdens of proof should they first meet? Right now, there are no international standards governing these new technologies, even though they could affect the whole planet. As one professor of environmental philosophy told me, “We don’t have a great track record of sustained global cooperation.” For more: Read David’s reporting in Iceland, where carbon capture is a small but growing business. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War In Jerusalem. Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press In Jerusalem, thousands of Israelis protested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for an early election. Israeli troops withdrew from Al-Shifa, a major Gaza hospital, after a two-week battle. More International News The mayor of Istanbul is expected to win re-election. It would be a rebuke of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party, which campaigned against him. India’s economy has grown in the decade since Narendra Modi was elected president. Many Indians are better off, but wealth gaps have widened. African migrants have filled worker shortages and created a new community in a remote mining town in Quebec. One part of Italy has bucked the nation’s falling birthrate: Bolzano, where parents enjoy discounted child care and groceries. Politics A Trump rally in Pennsylvania in July. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times Donald Trump ends many of his rallies with a churchlike ritual. Read more about how he infuses his movement with Christianity. Chinese accounts are pretending to be Trump supporters and spreading misinformation online ahead of November, according to researchers and government officials. Trump had varied responses to witnesses who testified at his trials: He criticized his former fixer Michael Cohen. He praised others for loyalty. New York City In Manhattan. Kena Betancur/Getty Images The Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival filled Fifth Avenue with color. See more outfits. Residents in Chinatown are angry about efforts to build what could be the world’s tallest jail there. A man accused of pushing a stranger in front of a subway train had been in a homeless shelter for people with serious mental illness. He found little help there. Other Big Stories To some, the Francis Scott Key Bridge symbolized Baltimore. Read reflections about its significance. A total eclipse crosses the U.S. on April 8. Small towns in its path are preparing to welcome visitors, The Washington Post reports. Opinions The U.S. should work with its adversaries on counterterrorism to prevent attacks like the one in Moscow, Christopher Costa and Colin Clarke write. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss nominees for their political April fools. Here are columns by David French on the rise of religious identity politics and Zeynep Tufekci on Boeing airplane safety. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS In Miami. David Cabrera for The New York Times Writings on the wall: Landlords used to scrub graffiti off their buildings. Now, they are willing to pay for it. Ask Vanessa: Can you wear sandals in the office? Hiking: The app AllTrails has become a beloved guide for both experts and newbies. Metropolitan Diary: Worst job interview ever? Lives Lived: Lorraine Graves was a ballerina who starred as a principal dancer for the groundbreaking Dance Theater of Harlem for nearly two decades. She died at 66. SPORTS Men’s Final Four: The lineup is set. Alabama will play UConn and Purdue will take on N.C. State. Elite Eight recap: Purdue beat Tennessee, 72-66, to advance to its first Final Four since 1980. And N.C. State beat Duke, 76-64, to tie a record as the lowest seed to reach the Final Four. Women’s college basketball: South Carolina is headed to its fourth consecutive Final Four after beating Oregon State, 70-58. More games are tonight, including Iowa v.s L.S.U. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Vassar College in 1970. William E. Sauro/The New York Times Meaning: The peace sign, which was designed in the 1950s, was once a powerful symbol for antiwar and countercultural movements. Now, for younger generations, the sign is little more than an anodyne lifestyle motif. “I take one look at the peace sign, and it feels really dated and meaningless,” a 22-year-old college junior told Michael Rock, a designer and academic. “It reminds me of being in elementary school, and this was on everybody’s water bottles or T-shirts.” Read more about how the sign’s resonance has changed. More on culture In Nashville. Liam Kennedy for The New York Times Beyoncé fans celebrated the release of “Cowboy Carter,” her latest album, in Nashville. “I’ve never seen so many people that look like me in cowboy hats in my life,” one fan said. “Oppenheimer,” a movie about the father of the atomic bomb, was released in Japan eight months after its U.S. premiere. Read Japanese viewers’ reactions. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Make an easy deli-style egg salad with any leftover hard-boiled eggs. Work with your hands. It’s good for your brain. Start composting. Break up with single-use plastics. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was lollygagged. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 2 Author Members Share Posted April 2 April 2, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering China’s efforts to bolster the Trump campaign — as well as Israel, Florida and Iowa’s big win. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meeting in 2017. Damir Sagolj/Reuters MAGA, Beijing edition America’s biggest adversaries evidently want Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election. Vladimir Putin’s preference for Trump has long been clear. And now China’s government is taking steps to help Trump’s presidential campaign. As my colleagues Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers report: Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking President Biden ahead of the election in November, according to researchers and government officials. The accounts signal a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with more of a willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Mr. Biden …. Some of the Chinese accounts impersonate fervent Trump fans, including one on X that purported to be “a father, husband and son” who was “MAGA all the way!!” The accounts mocked Mr. Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison jumpsuit, or claimed that Mr. Biden was a Satanist pedophile while promoting Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. This effort has been modest so far, and it remains unclear whether it will grow — or whether Beijing-linked accounts will later try to balance their approach with anti-Trump posts. For now, though, at least parts of the Chinese government appear to have picked a side in the 2024 election. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what China and Russia hope to gain from a second Trump term. Spheres of influence Putin’s reasons to prefer Trump seem obvious (even if Putin claims otherwise). Biden leads an international coalition opposing Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and U.S. support has enabled Ukraine’s much smaller military to stall Russia’s advance. Trump has suggested that he will end this support. A central part of Putin’s war strategy, intelligence experts believe, is to wait for Ukraine’s Western allies to tire of the war. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in 2019. Pool photo by Maxim Shipenkov China’s reasons to prefer Trump are less obvious. Trump, after all, took a more combative stance toward China than any U.S. president since Richard Nixon re-established ties with Beijing. The Associated Press and Washington Post have noted that Beijing seems unhappy with both Biden and Trump. But there appear to be at least two major ways in which China’s leaders could benefit from a second Trump term. The first involves America’s engagement with global politics. Biden believes that the world is in the midst of a struggle between autocracy and democracy, and he sees the U.S. as the leading democracy, much as past presidents from both parties did. In Biden’s view, the U.S. is “the indispensable nation” that must defend a democracy when an autocratic neighbor attacks, as Russia did in Ukraine and China may eventually do in Taiwan. Putin and Xi take a less idealistic view toward global affairs. They instead believe that strong nations should be able to control their own regions. Under Xi, China has become more aggressive not only toward Taiwan but also toward other neighbors. China has also expanded its influence in Africa and Latin America, effectively challenging the U.S.’s status as the world’s lone superpower. Trump has shown little interest in these issues. He is an isolationist who embraces the slogan “America First.” He prefers that the U.S. avoid international conflicts, and he is skeptical of treaties and alliances. He said at a recent campaign rally that Russia’s leaders should be able “to do whatever the hell they want” to some European countries. For Moscow and Beijing, the benefits of an American president who holds these beliefs are large. Potential chaos The second major advantage of a new Trump term for China and Russia is the domestic chaos that could result in the U.S. Trump governed as no previous American president did. His White House was often disorganized, and his positions could change quickly. A recent example involves China. As president, Trump favored forcing ByteDance, a Chinese company, to sell TikTok, and many congressional Republicans (as well as Democrats) continue to hold this view. But Trump recently reversed his position. One possible explanation is that a Republican donor whose firm owns a stake in ByteDance — and could lose money from a forced sale — lobbied Trump. In Dayton, Ohio. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times In a second term, the turmoil could increase. Trump has promised to use the government’s power to investigate and potentially jail his political opponents. He has encouraged his supporters to use violence to get their way. And he has so angered many Democrats that they became radicalized on several issues (including Covid lockdowns, immigration and policing) in ways that have divided the party. A politically chaotic U.S. could allow other countries to assert more global influence. I understand that Trump supporters will object to the idea that he could undermine the national interest. Many support him precisely because they believe he can protect the country in a way no other politician will. His central promise, of course, is to make America great again. What’s striking, however, is that the country’s biggest global rivals believe that a Trump victory will serve their interests instead. More on Trump Trump avoided financial disaster by getting a $175 million bond from an insurance company in California for his civil fraud case. Read more about the deal. The judge overseeing Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial banned him from criticizing the judge’s family members. Trump had criticized the judge’s daughter. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Florida The Florida Supreme Court allowed the state to ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, but voters will get to weigh in. A ballot measure in November would protect abortions until around 24 weeks if passed. Voters will also get to decide whether to legalize recreational marijuana in the state, Politico reports. More on Politics Speaker Mike Johnson Kent Nishimura for The New York Times Speaker Mike Johnson said that lawmakers would consider a bill to aid Ukraine when they return next week. He noted that it would include other policies meant to appeal to House Republicans, many of whom oppose more support. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign said he had enough signatures to appear as a third-party candidate in North Carolina, a swing state, The Hill reports. Oregon reimposed criminal penalties for hard drugs, three years after decriminalization. Read an interview with the mayor of Portland about why the state’s experiment “failed.” Biden, flanked by two people in giant bunny costumes, hosted the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. He also rejected Republican criticisms for commemorating Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. Middle East In Damascus, Syria. Youssef Dafawwi/EPA, via Shutterstock Israel struck part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, and killed at least seven Iranian officers, according to Tehran. Israel and Iran have been in a shadow war for years. A nonprofit run by the chef José Andrés paused operations in Gaza after seven of its workers were killed in an airstrike. The Israeli military said it was investigating the incident. Benjamin Netanyahu said that he would shut down Al Jazeera in Israel. Israel granted our Jerusalem bureau chief a rare visit to Gaza to see Al-Shifa, a major hospital, shortly before Israeli troops withdrew from it. See images of the damage. Trump’s call for Israel to “finish up” its war in Gaza has alarmed some Republicans and Israelis. More International News A munitions factory in Ukraine. Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press Ukraine has increased its weapons production, but its homegrown supply may not be growing fast enough. Manufacturing jobs have lifted millions in developing countries out of poverty. Automation threatens to undo those gains. Other Big Stories At least one person in Texas has been diagnosed with bird flu after having contact with dairy cows. The U.S. government said hospitals must obtain written consent from patients before they undergo pelvis and prostate exams, especially if patients will be under anesthesia. Washington State enacted a “Strippers’ Bill of Rights” to protect dancers from harassment and violence. Lou Conter, the last known survivor of the battleship Arizona from Pearl Harbor, died at 102. Opinions Money really does buy happiness for about 85 percent of us, according to the work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who died recently. Costa Rica wants to become the Silicon Valley of Latin America. It could give the U.S. a new source for microchips, Farah Stockman writes. The government should let people sell a kidney to save lives, Dylan Walsh argues. Here is a column by Paul Krugman on Trump loyalists’ approach to public infrastructure. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS Tatiana in New York. Randy Smith for The New York Times Where to eat: The Times critic Pete Wells revealed his annual ranking of the 100 best restaurants in New York City. See the list. Murder: The Chinese billionaire behind Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” was poisoned. Read about a case “as bizarre as a Hollywood blockbuster.” Walking and talking: In London, urban ramblers find friendship and fitness by strolling the city together. “The plane is fine”: Inside an airline course to help people overcome their fear of flying. Denmark: A writer returns to his grandparents’ former home — a castle. Ask Well: Should you eat your vegetables before your carbs for better blood sugar? Lives Lived: Esther Coopersmith was a long-reigning Washington hostess, a well-connected diplomat and a top fund-raiser. For decades, a place at her dinner table provided access to money, influence and power. She died at 94. SPORTS Caitlin Clark NCAA College basketball: Caitlin Clark scored 41 points, including nine three-pointers, as Iowa’s beat L.S.U. to advance to a second straight Final Four. The lineup: Connecticut will join Iowa in the Final Four after a 80-73 victory over No. 1 seed U.S.C. M.L.B.: Ronel Blanco of the Houston Astros threw the first no-hitter of the baseball season in a 10-0 win against the Toronto Blue Jays. N.B.A.: Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers is expected to return soon after an injury. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS In Northern Ireland. Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times Recovering history: In June 1922, an explosion destroyed an office in Dublin’s main court complex, causing the loss of sensitive documents and census returns dating to the Middle Ages. Seven years ago, a group of experts started a project to recover that history. The team has found a quarter of a million pages of duplicates in libraries and archives. Read about the team’s efforts. More on culture “Star Trek” collectibles. Connie Aramaki for The New York Times A lifelong “Star Trek” fan left behind a house filled with memorabilia. “I’ve never seen a collection that size,” one expert said. The retailer Brandy Melville sells many clothes in one size. That’s upset some people who think the store should be more inclusive, The Wall Street Journal reports. Jon Stewart discussed A.I. on “The Daily Show.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times Cobble together an earthy, creamy turmeric pasta with pantry staples. Watch these movies and TV shows coming to Netflix this month. Buy a gift for a frequent traveler. Get better sound from your TV. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was virology. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Looking for Strands? It’s not yet on the NYT Games app, but you can play it online here. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David P.S.: Four Spelling Bee enthusiasts explained why they wake up in the middle of the night to write hints for their fellow Bee lovers. Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter referred incorrectly to Narendra Modi. He is the prime minister of India, not the president. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 3 Author Members Share Posted April 3 Exclusive: NYT to soon offer most articles via automated voice The New York Times plans to make the vast majority of its articles available to users as narrations read via an automated voice, executives tell Axios. https://www.axios.com/2024/04/02/exclusive-nyt-to-soon-offer-most-articles-via-automated-voice? Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 3 Author Members Share Posted April 3 April 3, 2024 Good morning. Today, my colleague Jeanna Smialek explains how interest rates could impact the presidential election. We’re also covering the Middle East, an earthquake in Taiwan and the wrap dress. — David Leonhardt The New York Stock Exchange. Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters Political interest By Jeanna Smialek A reporter covering the Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve is in a tough spot. It expects to cut interest rates soon. But doing so before an election will yank the apolitical central bank directly into a partisan fight. Fed officials have lifted borrowing costs to 5.3 percent, the highest level in decades, to slow inflation. Now that price increases are fading, Fed officials think that they can dial back that response starting later this year. Investors expect the first move to come in June or July — just as the election kicks into high gear. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, says rate cuts this year would probably be an effort to help Democrats. Lower rates can lift markets and help the economy, so politicians tend to prefer cheap money when they are in office. Fed officials insist that rate changes would respond to economic conditions, not politics. Still, they can’t ignore the vitriol. If they ramp up during the campaign, Trump’s attacks could convince his supporters that the Fed is bending to partisan whims. And in the long run, a loss of popular support could expose the central bank, which answers to Congress, to lawmaker censure or even political tinkering. Prized independence The central bank sets policy without having to check its decisions through Congress or the White House. That doesn’t mean that Fed officials are free to do whatever they want. Congress has given the Fed its goals — full employment and low, stable inflation — and it holds regular oversight hearings. The White House influences the central bank by nominating the Fed’s chair, vice chair, and other Washington-based governors. Jerome Powell at a Senate hearing. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images But even if elected officials shape it, the Fed is insulated from immediate political backlash as it sets actual policy. That is because its big job — controlling inflation — can be very unpopular in Washington. Its efforts have been blamed for slowing the economy severely enough to harm or even doom both Jimmy Carter’s and George H.W. Bush’s re-election attempts. In fact, incumbent politicians used to frequently harangue Fed chairs for lower interest rates in public and in private. (Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly cornered his Fed chair against a wall at his Texas ranch.) Such critiques stopped in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration started a tradition of not commenting on Fed policy. Trump ended that tradition during his term in office, pushing loudly and constantly for lower interest rates to help goose the economy. He called Jerome Powell, his pick for Fed chair, an “enemy.” He looked into firing Powell, only to learn that doing so was nearly impossible. Now that Trump is back on the campaign trail, he’s much less welcoming to low rates, since presumably Biden would benefit from them. He says it would be political for the Fed to cut borrowing costs, and he has kept up his criticism of Powell, whom President Biden renominated. “He’s going to do something to probably help the Democrats, I think, if he lowers interest rates,” Trump said this year. Apolitical Fed There’s little reason to think that rate cuts by the Fed would be a ploy to bolster Democrats. “We’re working to serve all Americans, not any particular set of Americans or political parties or leaders,” Powell said during an event last week, one of several times he brought up or addressed the central bank’s independence. Fed officials have been clear that they are setting policy in response to inflation data. The Fed’s favored inflation gauge has dropped to 2.5 percent from a peak of around 7 percent. Officials are now simply waiting for further confirmation that inflation is under control to make a move. Not to mention, Fed policies take time to trickle through the economy, so it’s not clear how much a summertime rate cut would reshape the economy before November elections. Finally, Fed officials have limited reason to cave to political pressure: They serve long terms, are difficult if not impossible to remove and don’t all come from a single political party. Transcripts and inside accounts confirm that in recent years, politics rarely come up at Fed meetings. But even if the Fed sets policy without an eye toward politics, officials want to make sure America knows and believes that. The Fed relies on public belief to do its job. When people and companies think that the Fed is focused on fighting inflation, they expect inflation to hover at modest levels over the long run. That confidence helps to shape their behavior in ways that can help to keep inflation under control. Businesses don’t jack up prices as quickly, for instance. “The Fed is, to me, a very important American institution that serves all Americans on a nonpolitical basis,” Powell said last week. “Integrity is everything.” Related: An earlier Fed chair, Arthur Burns, is remembered as someone who bent to political pressure. Some say that’s not fair. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Middle East In central Gaza. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The Israeli military took responsibility for a strike in Gaza that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. The top commander said it was a mistake, and Benjamin Netanyahu called it tragic. Biden said he was outraged by the deaths, adding, “Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers.” The seven people killed “were the best of humanity,” José Andrés, the chef who founded World Central Kitchen, writes in Times Opinion. Read his essay. Iran’s leaders vowed to respond to Israeli airstrikes in Syria that killed three Iranian commanders on Monday. The Biden administration plans to sell F-15 fighter jets, worth billions, to Israel. More International News Taiwan felt its strongest earthquake in 25 years. At least nine people died and hundreds are injured. A fire at an Istanbul nightclub killed 29 people. The authorities said renovation work at the club may have been the cause. In Uganda, a court largely upheld an anti-gay law. It includes the death penalty for some cases. The U.S. warned Russia that Islamic State terrorists were planning a terrorist attack on a concert venue near Moscow, according to American officials. The police said a boy had shot and killed a 12-year-old and wounded two other students at a school in Finland. Senegal inaugurated Africa’s youngest elected president, the 44-year-old Bassirou Diomaye Faye. 2024 Election Trump said undocumented immigrants were “not humans” and described the U.S.-Mexico border as a “blood bath.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called Biden a bigger threat to democracy than Trump. After criticism, he backtracked. More on Politics Biden discussed Chinese aggression toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea in a call with Xi Jinping. The government is on track to admit 125,000 refugees this year, the most in three decades. A Trump win would likely reverse that trend. The Supreme Court did not reinstate a voting map in Washington State that a judge said discriminated against Hispanic voters. Biden has a complex relationship with big business: He wants to raise taxes on large companies, but his agenda relies on corporate tax breaks. Other Big Stories A machine designed for cloud brightening in California. Ian C. Bates for The New York Times As climate change gets worse, researchers tested a machine designed to reflect sunlight back into space. Six prisoners in New York sued the state for preventing inmates from viewing the eclipse. A man killed his wife and kidnapped his 15-year-old daughter in 2022. A newly released video shows how California deputies shot and killed the girl as she exited her father’s truck. Opinions Sex is a biological fact. Saying it is “assigned at birth” is misleading, Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven argue. There’s a surge of dengue in the Americas. Deborah Heaney writes about how travelers can avoid spreading the virus. Here are columns by Bret Stephens on the ugly elements of pro-Palestinian protests and Thomas Edsall on the network of people helping Trump’s campaign. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS In New York City. Yuvraj Khanna for The New York Times City streets: Orange steam funnels are all over New York City. But what are they actually for? Viral: People are reviewing sticks — yes, sticks — on the internet. Electric cars: Tesla had a bad quarter, while its rivals thrived. It could be losing its dominance. Sustainability: Sick of plastic wrap on your fresh fruit? Changes are coming. Brain activity: Exercise can improve your cognitive and mental health. Reap the benefits. Tourism: Rome could soon be more walkable. Officials are planning to create a huge, pedestrian-friendly area in the city’s center. A five-star stay: In China, some bird nests are turned into an expensive soup. In Borneo, people are giving the birds luxury houses to help them build the nests. Viewing party: Small cities have big plans for the eclipse. Lives Lived: Larry Lucchino was an executive with the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres who oversaw construction of modern stadiums. As president of the Boston Red Sox, he preserved Fenway Park for generations. He died at 78. SPORTS Elite Eight: Iowa’s win over L.S.U. set a record for the most-watched women’s college basketball game. N.B.A.: Joel Embiid returned for the Philadelphia 76ers after an injury. He helped his team defeat the Oklahoma City Thunder, 109-105. Jerseys: Adidas stopped the sale of German soccer shirts bearing the number “44” because the lettering closely resembled a Nazi symbol. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Michelle Obama and Kate, Princess of Wales. From left: Omar Torres/AFP — Getty Images; Chris Jackson/Getty Images Out of style: For decades, women loved the wrap dress, a design popularized by Diane von Furstenberg, because it was both flattering and office appropriate. The style boomed in the 1970s — and again in the 2000s and 2010s. “If you bought Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ when it came out in 2013, you probably owned a wrap dress,” Jessica Testa writes. In recent years, however, the dress has become unfashionable. One reason: Workplaces are more casual and workers have more flexibility to express themselves. More on culture At Shaw-naé’s House. Colin Clark for The New York Times The Times restaurant critic Pete Wells reviewed a six-table restaurant serving soul-food on Staten Island. (Talk to Pete about his latest 100 Best Restaurants in New York City list on Reddit at 1:30 p.m. Eastern.) A former employee sued Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, accusing the rapper of making antisemitic rants and of praising Hitler. Larry David spoofed Georgia’s voting laws on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Georgia’s secretary of state sent him a good-humored response. Stephen Colbert joked about Trump’s gag order. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times Cook a one-pot meal of skillet ginger chicken with apricots. Build a home theater system. Prune your garden. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were faintly, finality and infantility. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 5 Author Members Share Posted April 5 April 5, 2024 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering how sports betting became ubiquitous — as well as aid in Gaza, the sexual assault of migrants and dark energy. Next to the Washington Nationals’ stadium. Jason Andrew for The New York Times High stakes In the coming days, the country’s best men’s and women’s college basketball teams will clash in the N.C.A.A. tournament finals. For fans, these are some of the biggest events of the year — a chance to see the best young athletes in the highest-stakes games. They are also some of the most lucrative events for sports betting apps. Americans will legally wager nearly $3 billion this year during March Madness, the American Gaming Association estimates. Six years ago, sports betting was illegal under federal law. Today, it is everywhere. N.B.A. and N.H.L. viewers are exposed to three gambling ads a minute, a recent study found. Commercial sports betting revenue has increased 12-fold since 2019, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows: Source: American Gaming Association | By The New York Times What happened? In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban, concluding that it violated states’ rights. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia now allow gambling on games. The old laws were strange in many ways. Other countries had allowed betting. The U.S. allowed it for some competitions, like horse racing. And millions of Americans were already betting on sports, regardless of its legality. But the Supreme Court did not just let Americans place legal wagers. It also empowered a big industry to market sports betting apps and convince more people to gamble, through another set of rulings. Enabling big business Americans typically learn about free speech in the context of social and political issues. But starting in the 1970s, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to protect advertisements. Now, if something is legal, it can be advertised, and governments can’t stop companies from marketing it. (There are some limits: Ads can’t be deceptive or misleading, for instance.) A gambling billboard at Fenway Park. Charles Krupa/Associated Press Supporters of this legal paradigm say that advertising lets consumers make informed decisions. “The court has taken the view that the freedom of speech, generally speaking, should let individuals decide for themselves what to believe without the government trying to say that these are bad messages,” Eugene Volokh, a legal scholar at U.C.L.A., told me. In other words: If people want to spend their savings on legal sports wagers, they should be able to find out how to do so. What about tobacco? It’s true that cigarette companies are not allowed to advertise, even though their products are legal. But this is a special situation. Executives agreed not to market cigarettes as part of an unusual legal settlement with states in 1998. Otherwise, the Supreme Court has upheld tobacco companies’ right to advertise on First Amendment grounds. The rulings mean that the only reliable way to prevent the mass marketing of a product is to ban it. For lawmakers, “there is this strange incentive to try to get around the First Amendment by not legalizing things or by banning products,” Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health lawyer at New York University, said. She pointed to the federal government’s prohibition of marijuana, even as many states have legalized the drug. The consequences The American Gaming Association says that sports betting ads guide people from illegal to legal markets, which raises tax revenue for governments and helps consumers avoid fraud. But advertising also convinces more people to gamble. Recovering addicts complain that the deluge of ads presents a constant temptation when all they want to do is watch a game. Calls to gambling helplines have increased in states that legalized sports betting. Legal gambling has also affected the sports themselves. Consider prop betting, in which people try to predict how an athlete will perform in a given game. Fans have threatened players who don’t meet their predictions. And athletes can bet on themselves, then adjust their play in an effort to cash out, as N.B.A. player Jontay Porter has been accused of doing. Such self-dealing could damage the integrity of a competition. For these reasons, Louisiana this week passed a ban on prop betting for college athletes. Gambling can also bring other kinds of headaches for athletes. Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani is currently mired in a scandal after his former interpreter allegedly stole millions to pay for bets. (That misconduct involves illegal betting markets. The Athletic explained how they work.) These issues will become more common as sports betting grows. But the gambling industry has a vested interest in getting as many people to participate as possible, regardless of the consequences. And as a result of Supreme Court rulings, lawmakers are limited in what they can do. For more: Ohtani is performing, despite the gambling scandal. He hit his first home run as a Dodger with a 430-foot shot. See fun images of his fans. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War Israel agreed to open a crossing to increase humanitarian aid to northern Gaza after President Biden called Benjamin Netanyahu and threatened to make U.S. support conditional on civilian protections. Donald Trump again urged Israel to quickly end the war, saying, “I’m not sure that I’m loving the way that they’re doing it.” Benny Gantz, a political rival to Netanyahu, called for early elections in September. It’s a sign that the war is straining Israel’s unity government. More International News Armed men forced the 8-year-old girl, in pink, to strip naked, her parents said. Her mother, in white, was sexually assaulted. Federico Rios for The New York Times In a treacherous stretch of jungle known as the Darién Gap, migrant women and girls are being sexually assaulted at levels rarely seen outside of war. A routine editors’ note with Kate, Princess of Wales’s cancer announcement has fanned disinformation about her. Researchers say there is no evidence that the video is fake. In a difficult job market, young people in China are giving up on saving for retirement. Bologna, Italy, needed to prevent a leaning tower from falling. It looked to Pisa for help. 2024 Election The centrist group No Labels won’t run a third-party presidential ticket this year after it failed to recruit a candidate. A Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign email called the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters “activists” who had been “stripped of their Constitutional liberties.” The campaign later retracted the statement. National Republicans want to persuade their voters to cast ballots early, in part so they don’t forget on Election Day. Trump’s misinformation about mail voting has complicated the pitch. Trump Trials The judges who oversee Trump’s Georgia criminal case and his federal classified documents case rejected his efforts to dismiss them. New York’s attorney general said the company that helped Trump post a $175 million bond wasn’t qualified to do so. This could complicate a deal that let Trump avoid financial disaster. Climate Notes: Values reflect how much warmer or cooler sea surface temperatures were on April 2, 2024, compared with the average between 1971 and 2000. Data is preliminary. by Nadja Popovich/The New York Times Scientists expect an intense Atlantic hurricane season because the ocean is warmer than usual. The world is trying to save forests. But record wildfires in Canada and expanding agriculture elsewhere offset those protections, a report found. A Times climate reporter traveled across America on a train. She later found that flying would have been better for the environment because many Amtrak trains run on diesel. Other Big Stories A shipping channel to the Port of Baltimore will partially reopen by the end of April and full traffic is expected to be restored by late May, officials said. See who could pay for a rebuilt bridge in coming years. Stanford University named Jonathan Levin, a decorated economist, as its new president. “We should focus on encouraging students to listen to different perspectives and engage in dialogue,” he said. Student loan debt is keeping some young people from becoming Catholic priests and nuns. Opinions “When I first heard you speak, I thought you were a decent conservative, and then I found out you were pro-life.” David French writes about our broken politics, on both the right and left. Get over your insecurities about using “literally” figuratively, or “snuck” instead of “sneaked.” Breaking grammar rules is liberating, John McWhorter writes. Here are columns by David Brooks on his bad relationship with technology and Paul Krugman on billionaires who support Trump. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS An interactive flight through millions of galaxies. by Fiske Planetarium, University of Colorado Boulder and Desi Collaboration Astronomy: Scientists may have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy. That could be good news for the fate of the universe. Traveling light: See tips for how to pack your carry-on better. Recall: Dozens of eye drops and ointments have been pulled from shelves. These are safe. Scotland: A Willy Wonka event ended in disaster. From its ashes rose a budding star. 36 Hours: Fly kites on the lawn of a fortress and explore mural-lined streets in San Juan, P.R. Celestial event: Animals could act strangely during the solar eclipse. Lives Lived: Gaetano Pesce hated right angles. A rebel designer of furniture and art objects, his most celebrated work was an armchair shaped like a fertility goddess that represented the subjugation of women. Pesce died at 84. SPORTS Veasey Conway for The New York Times College basketball: The most anticipated women’s Final Four in history begins tonight, with Iowa and Caitlin Clark serving as headliners alongside undefeated South Carolina. North Carolina: The N.C. State women’s and men’s basketball teams are both in the Final Four. That’s a boon for Raleigh. Title game: Want to go to the women’s NCAA championship? It’ll cost you close to $1,000 — a bit more than the men’s. M.L.B.: The Oakland Athletics reached a deal to play in Sacramento for the next three seasons before the team’s planned move to Las Vegas in 2028. N.B.A.: Knicks forward Julius Randle will miss the rest of the season with a shoulder injury. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Angel Reese Myles Loftin/Vogue Fashion and sports: Days after L.S.U. lost to Iowa in the Elite Eight, the team’s star forward Angel Reese was still making headlines — this time in Vogue. She used the magazine to announce she would enter the W.N.B.A. draft and posed for a shoot with clothes from Valentino, Diesel, Wales Bonner and Christian Louboutin — the latest expression of a growing overlap between fashion and sports. The Paris Olympics this summer will be the ultimate mixing of these industries, Vanessa Friedman writes. More on culture Stephanie Gengotti for The New York Times Former owners of Michelangelo’s villa want to sell a sketch once on a kitchen wall. But scholars are divided over whether he actually drew it. Mel B, a former member of the Spice Girls, confirmed she was removed from the band’s group chat, The Cut reports. Stephen Colbert said Trump’s “April trials bring me smiles.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times Bake pearl couscous with chickpeas, roasted tomatoes and garlic for a one-pan vegetarian meal. Stream The Times’s new documentary about unregulated sperm donation on Hulu. Visit a New York City gallery. Tend to your garden with a watering can. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was midtown. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German P.S. The White House Correspondents’ Association gave awards to The Times’s Peter Baker for deadline reporting, and to Doug Mills for photojournalism. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 7 Author Members Share Posted April 7 April 7, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering the costly competition to attract TV and film shoots. In New York. Mimi d’Autremont for The New York Times On location By Matt Stevens A reporter covering arts and culture State governments use our tax dollars to build roads, fund schools and provide health care. In 38 states, they also ship money off to a high-gloss private industry: Hollywood. And it’s a lot of money. My colleague Christopher Kuo and I found that those states had given out more than $25 billion over the past two decades to subsidize the making of movies and television. The idea is to lure businesses to spend money, employ locals and stimulate the economy. The problem is, the programs are actually huge money losers for states. Studies show that these efforts typically return a quarter or even a dime on every dollar given to studios. Yet lawmakers are not slowing their spending. Quite the opposite. Hollywood is playing states off one another, and the competition has them sweetening their deals to lure productions, economists say. Under mounting pressure from New Jersey, New York recently expanded its film incentive program by 67 percent, to $700 million. Oklahoma went from $4 million to $30 million in just three years, in part to stay competitive with Texas. Then, Texas decided to spend nearly seven times that amount. “You could find almost an unlimited number of better uses for the same dollars,” said Michael Thom, a tax expert at the University of Southern California. “Who on earth would say, ‘Keep giving the money to Hollywood; my kid’s school doesn’t need new books’?” My colleagues and I wanted to understand why these programs persist. This morning, we published the third article in our series about the topic. Here’s a quick look at what we found. Parties and cameos States started supercharging their film incentive programs around the turn of the century. The idea is that when producers come to film in a state and spend money there, the government gives them back 20 to 30 percent of their costs as a thank-you for choosing that state. Lawmakers say the film and TV shoots employ electricians, hair stylists and many other crew members. That means jobs. Money trickles through local economies to hotels, diners and dry cleaners. In Georgia, for example, the film industry says the state gets $6 or $7 in economic value for every dollar invested Dennis Quaid in “The Tiger Rising.” The Avenue My colleague Jonathan Abrams went to a small town in Georgia and saw some of the effects there firsthand. A restaurant owner said that sales spiked every time a production came to town. A woman who owns a jewelry and leather goods store once sold the actress Anne Heche a $300 purse. But even when a community enjoys visits from famous people and an infusion of cash, the state is paying to subsidize those benefits. Of course, skeptical economic white papers can be no match for the allure of exclusive parties and the promise of a cameo in a blockbuster movie. Hollywood insiders lobby politicians with campaign donations and perks, which is another reason states keep expanding these programs. In Michigan, a big-name producer wined and dined lawmakers just as the state’s film incentives were set to expire. If you squint at the right scene from “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” you’ll spot a former Senate majority leader. And states need to offer a good deal, or else productions will simply film elsewhere. Experts say this arms race helps explain why more and more public funds flow to these programs. Remember the battle between Texas and Oklahoma? We document that in our latest piece. After Texas committed $200 million, Oklahoma began pushing to add many more millions to its own program. Dennis Quaid, a native Texan, has already plotted his home state’s next move: He wants it to approve $1 billion in the next budget. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War The Israeli military said it had recovered the body of a hostage who was abducted from a kibbutz on Oct. 7 and held in Gaza. A wild spinach-like plant has become a lifeline in Gaza at a time when most food is largely unavailable or expensive. Protests over the Biden administration’s handling of the war have complicated the Democratic Party’s ability to campaign in an election year. More International News At the Afghan border. Elise Blanchard for The New York Times For years, hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled to Pakistan to escape war. Now, many have returned home after the Pakistani government ordered them to leave. Russia recruited convicts to the army and pardoned them for their service in Ukraine. Some former inmates have committed new crimes. Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda, ethnic divisions persist under President Paul Kagame, who is accused of repression. The Ecuadorean police arrested a politician who had taken refuge in the Mexican Embassy there. Mexico called the arrest a violation of its sovereignty. New York Next to a highway in the Hamptons. Anna Watts for The New York Times Some laborers in the Hamptons who are unable to afford housing spend winter living in the woods. Read one man’s story. New York City agreed to pay more than $28 million to the family of a man who experienced brain damage after he tried to hang himself in a Rikers Island jail as correction officers stood by. Solar Eclipse In Mexico. Henry Romero/Reuters Would-be gazers are on the move across North America to witness the total solar eclipse tomorrow. Street parties are planned and some cities have canceled school. Enter your viewing destination here for a cloud forecast. Other Big Stories A little-known data firm has helped drive up patients’ bills and earn billions for insurers, a Times investigation found. A Times analysis has found that dozens of major U.S. bridges lack shields to block wayward ships. UConn will face Purdue in the men’s basketball national championship game after it defeated Alabama, 86-72. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Can President Biden change the U.S. position on the war in Gaza? No. Israel’s goals to remove Hamas from power align with Biden’s, and that means grievous harm to civilians. Despite his anger for Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden’s “regard for Israel runs deep in his emotional and political DNA,” Aaron David Miller writes for Times Opinion. Yes. After months of domestic and international outrage, Biden has threatened to put conditions on military aid to Israel. “That still seems too little too late to lots of people, even and especially in Biden’s own government,” Bloomberg’s Andreas Kluth writes. FROM OPINION Witness the total solar eclipse, Ryan Milligan writes. It’s not just something you see — it’s something you experience. (Kathleen Lenihan and Maureen Lenihan Rust plan to travel around 1,300 miles to ensure that their mother sees the eclipse.) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unqualified and unprepared to be president, Frank Bruni writes. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on happiness and the left and Lydia Polgreen on three Senate Democrats who are blocking the appointment of a Muslim judge. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT MORNING READS “One Afternoon” by Miki Hayakawa. Miki Hayakawa A traveling exhibit: See the work of women who made art in Japanese internment camps. Style: Are you a “spring” or a “winter”? Seasonal color analysis, big in the ’80s, is making a comeback. TikTok: The internet says “Oatzempic” — a blend of oatmeal, water and lime juice — is a weight-loss hack. Experts say there’s nothing magical about the mixture. Superstitious: The coach of UConn’s men’s basketball team wears the same socks and underwear to every game, so he travels with a washing machine. Vows: They kissed in the first 10 minutes. Lives Lived: Kate Coleman was a left-wing writer who documented Bay Area counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s. She made enemies with exposés that were critical of the Black Panthers and the environmental movement. Coleman died at 81. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE The al-Halabis in Dearborn, Mich. Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times Ahmad al-Halabi was an immigrant who did the most American thing possible: join the military. Then the U.S. government accused him of espionage. Letter of Recommendation: Make instant coffee. It isn’t that bad. TALK | FROM THE MAGAZINE Lynda Barry Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times By David Marchese I’ll be part of a new Q. and A. franchise, The Interview, that’s starting in a few weeks. Before then I’m sharing some of my favorite past interviews. This one is with the great cartoonist and creativity educator Lynda Barry. I know that you’ve done work on pairing Ph.D. students with kindergartners so that the children can help the graduate students with problem-solving. What does that look like in practice? When I started teaching at the university [University of Wisconsin-Madison], I couldn’t understand why all the grad students were so miserable. Then I thought, it is this laser focus on getting one particular thing done. But the kids could shift the students’ perspectives in really helpful ways. And my students had to be on the floor with them working together. It’s hard to explain, but it changes you. I’ll bet there’s a not insignificant number of people in the world — in my head, I picture some no-nonsense businessman — who think that playing around on the floor is not something for adults to be doing. Is there any way to persuade those people of the value of trying to access that childlike mind-set? Why try? Because those people run the world. The reason they run the world is because of the way they were built. But it’s not going to help that person. Those guys, they don’t have a need. So there’s not a lot we can do, and that’s the hardest thing to accept. You used the phrase “the way they were built.” When it comes to playfulness, can a person change how he or she is built? Whatever man we’re imagining, if you hand them their 8-month-old grandson, that man will dance, sing, tell stories. We still all can communicate that way. There’s amnesia about the deepness of that interchange and amnesia about how when you’re making a story or making a painting it’s that same sort of interchange, and having that is what you’re born to do. Read more of the interview here. BOOKS In Kansas City, Mo. Chase Castor for The New York Times The Rabbit Hole: See inside a new children’s literature museum, where the world of picture books comes to life. Audiobook: A high-profile adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984” for Audible, read by Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo and others, plays with the original text. Our editors’ picks: “The Hammer,” about the current landscape of the American labor movement, and six other books. Times best sellers: Stephen Breyer, the former Supreme Court justice, shares some of his philosophies in “Reading the Constitution,” which enters the hardcover nonfiction list. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Fall in love with the pianist and vocalist Shirley Horn. Make the perfect friendship bracelet. Move your home office outside. THE WEEK AHEAD What to Watch For A total eclipse crosses over North America tomorrow. Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, is expected to begin this week. The House of Representatives is expected to deliver impeachment articles against the homeland security secretary on Wednesday. The Senate could quickly dismiss them. South Korea will hold parliamentary elections on Wednesday. Biden is hosting a leaders’ summit on Thursday with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines. Coachella begins on Friday. Meal Plan Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini. A spring-cleaning of your kitchen might mean clearing out condiments and jars from your fridge. In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Genevieve Ko offers recipes to help you declutter. Add a spicy condiment to chicken or tahini to a spinach-and-cilantro soup. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was logophile. Can you put eight historical events — including the first airplane, the peace sign and “tulip mania” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 8 Author Members Share Posted April 8 April 8, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering a university that combines diversity and excellence — as well as Donald Trump, Ukraine and competitive quizzing. In New York City. José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times A reflection of New York City College of New York often serves as a nostalgic symbol of American higher education’s past. The college did not charge tuition for decades, and its students, many of them poor, went on to become Nobel laureates, chief executives, civil rights leaders and more. By contrast, higher education today can seem both less accessible and less rigorous. But it turns out that the school that occupies City College’s original 19th-century campus, on the East Side of Manhattan, has done a fine job of living up to its predecessor’s legacy. That school is Baruch College, and it is an upward-mobility machine. More than 60 percent of Baruch students receive Pell grants, which means they typically come from the bottom half of the income distribution. About 75 percent of undergraduates are people of color. The average annual cost of attending Baruch for low-income students is less than $2,000. And Baruch’s six-year graduation rate is 74 percent, well above the national average. When I asked S. David Wu, an engineering scholar who is Baruch’s president, about City College’s original vision of educating the masses, he told me, “In many ways, Baruch is realizing that vision, but in a 21st-century way.” In today’s newsletter, I’ll tell you about a new report that tracks how other colleges are doing. At Baruch College. José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times A worrisome decline After Michael Bloomberg finished being mayor of New York City in 2013, he turned his attention to philanthropy and decided that increasing economic diversity in higher education was a priority. “America needs to have as big a pool of talented, hard-working, well-educated people as it can possibly get,” Bloomberg told me. His main program is known as the American Talent Initiative, and its goal is to persuade colleges with high graduation rates to diversify. This morning, the group released its latest report, and it praises Baruch as a model college. “There are very few colleges in the country like Baruch,” said Josh Wyner of the Aspen Institute, which helps run the American Talent Initiative. Indeed, among all U.S. colleges with a graduation rate above 70 percent, Baruch may be the most economically diverse. It both holds down tuition costs and creates clear pathways for students to earn degrees, Wyner said. Other parts of the new report, however, are worrisome. Bloomberg’s group set a goal almost a decade ago: Lift the annual enrollment of low- and moderate-income students at colleges with high graduation rates by 50,000 — or roughly 10 percent. The group planned to do so partly by building a membership organization where colleges could share strategies. Initially, the progress was impressive. Enrollment jumped by more than 20,000 in the initiative’s first three years, putting it comfortably on pace to achieve the goal within a decade. But momentum stalled in 2019-20. The reasons weren’t completely clear, but I’ve noticed that economic diversity often declines when college administrators aren’t paying close attention. Other priorities — sports teams, fund-raising, U.S. News’s rankings — take over. Covid made the situation worse, by exacerbating K-12 inequality and preventing some lower-income students from making it to college. By fall 2021, all the early progress had been erased. Enrollment of lower-income students at colleges with high graduation rates was slightly below its 2015 level. In response, the initiative got tougher. To remain members, college now must commit to specific lower-income enrollment levels, rather than vaguely promising to make progress. A small number of colleges have since dropped out. Among them, according to public records, were Penn State and Virginia Tech, as well as several private schools, including Wake Forest, which is among the country’s least economically diverse colleges, and Denison, in Ohio. (This Times feature lets you look up economic diversity at nearly 300 colleges.) But 125 colleges remained, including the entire Ivy League and the flagship state universities in California, Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin. About 15 schools more have recently joined. Baruch is among them, as are Colorado College, Illinois State and Towson. At these member schools, lower-income enrollment has fully recovered from its recent decline. Updated data isn’t available for the roughly 200 other colleges with a graduation rate of at least 70 percent, but their trend is unlikely to be so positive: Source: American Talent Initiative | By The New York Times Successful strategies The new report cities several promising strategies for lifting diversity, such as: Reduce so-called merit aid, which tends to go to affluent students, and direct scholarships to students who demonstrate both academic excellence and financial need. Boston University has recently done so. Recruit more transfers from community colleges, where top students from modest backgrounds often start. Central Florida, Dayton, George Mason and the University of California all emphasize community-college transfers, and Princeton recently started a program. Help students navigate higher education. Its bureaucracy can be so maddening that it keeps students from graduating. In response, Baruch has created an office called BOSS — Baruch One Stop Shop — where students can get help enrolling in classes or filling out aid forms. The college has also created cohorts of first-year students who take classes together and can help one another. Baruch’s mission, Wu told me, is to educate a student body that resembles society at large — and increase upward mobility as a result. “Our diversity,” he said, “very much reflects the diversity of New York.” For more Some colleges will soon charge $100,000 a year. My colleague Ron Lieber explains how it happened. President Biden will announce student debt relief for millions of borrowers in a Wisconsin speech. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War In Khan Younis, southern Gaza. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The Israeli military has reduced the number of troops in Gaza. Only a fraction of the soldiers that it deployed to the enclave earlier in the war remain. Despite the drawdown of troops, the military has promised a future mission in Rafah, southern Gaza. The war reached the six-month mark with the conflict at an impasse. Nicaragua, a supporter of Palestine, is bringing a case against Germany at the International Court of Justice for supplying arms to Israel. War in Ukraine In eastern Ukraine. Emile Ducke for The New York Times Some Ukrainians, unable or unwilling to leave home, remain in villages on the front lines. See photos. Donald Trump has a secret, long-shot plan to end the war by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory, The Washington Post reports. Africa Victims’ clothing recovered from mass graves in Rwanda, in 2019. Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “I am still learning how to forgive”: Rwandans marked 30 years since a genocide there killed around 800,000 people. A British endurance athlete known as the Hardest Geezer ran the length of Africa in just under a year, The Guardian reports. Politics Trump has made many populist promises, but many corporate executives believe that his second-term agenda couldn’t really happen. They might be in denial. Trump said at a fund-raiser that he wants immigrants in the U.S. from “nice” countries “like Denmark.” An examination of Trump’s public statements revealed how he distorts his opponents’ record and exaggerates. Many of today’s seniors have voted Democratic at every stage of their lives. Nate Cohn explains why. A bipartisan group of former national security officials have asked lawmakers to impose limits on a president’s power to deploy troops on domestic soil. Other Big Stories The U.S. will experience its second total solar eclipse in seven years today. Read how to watch and see the cloud forecast where you are. In coastal cities, commuters — spurred by new routes and faster boats — are using ferries to get around. A Southwest Boeing 737-800 made an emergency landing after an engine cover fell off during takeoff. Maryland passed two privacy bills that limit how tech platforms can harvest and use personal data of consumers and young people. Economists sent similar résumés to job postings at about 100 of the largest U.S. companies — but changed the applicants’ names to suggest an ethnicity. Some companies discriminated against Black applicants much more than others. Opinions America was once the country begging richer allies for help. It can pay it back by supporting Ukraine, Stacy Schiff writes. If Gmail is making you miserable, stop using it, as Ezra Klein has. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss the election and tech regulation. Here are columns by David French on the parallels between Gaza and Iraq and Maureen Dowd on Trump’s “blood bath” comments. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS A watch party in New York. Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times Away games: Meet a group of New Yorkers who pooled money to buy a Danish minor league soccer team. Health tech: Patients can pay to have artificial intelligence read their mammograms. Experts are both excited and concerned. Metropolitan Diary: Best taxi ride in 50 years. Lives Lived: Albert Heath was a virtuoso jazz drummer who collaborated with John Coltrane and Nina Simone. He died at 88. SPORTS South Carolina celebrates. Ken Blaze/USA Today Sports Women’s college basketball: South Carolina beat Iowa, 87-75, to win their second national title in three years. Iowa’s defeat comes days before Caitlin Clark is expected to be the No. 1 pick in the W.N.B.A. Draft. A G.O.A.T.: Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s coach, thanked Clark for making women’s basketball more popular. “She carried a heavy load,” Staley said. Read about Clark’s collegiate career. Men’s college basketball: John Calipari is nearing a deal to coach at Arkansas. UConn: The Huskies face Zach Edey and Purdue with a chance to become the first repeat men’s college basketball national champions since Florida in 2006 and 2007. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Brandon Blackwell Elias Williams for The New York Times “University Challenge”: The New Yorker Brandon Blackwell knew that if he wanted to have a career in competitive quizzing, he had to move to its epicenter: London. Despite already having a degree, he applied to Imperial College London to get a visa. Then, he competed for the college on the Britain’s premier quiz show, “University Challenge.” Blackwell’s appearance on the show in 2020 turned him into a national figure and Imperial — which had not won the competition since 2001 — into a “University Challenge” powerhouse. More on culture The “3 Body Problem,” a Netflix show, has outraged people in China despite it being from the country. That highlights how censorship has shaped public opinion, Li Yuan writes. For nearly two decades, a gang stole items from small U.S. museums, including Yogi Berra’s championship rings. In the finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David essentially restaged the contentious “Seinfeld” ending, The Washington Post reports. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Finish any blend of cheese in your fridge with this quick stovetop mac and cheese. Trick your brain to love running with these three tips. Buy a gift for under $25. Keep your dog warm and dry on rainy days with a raincoat. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were curtain and taciturn. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 9 Author Members Share Posted April 9 April 9, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering the solar eclipse that captivated the U.S. — as well as Biden’s new student debt plan, the Vatican and book restrictions. The New York Times Awe-some By Elizabeth Dias She covers faith and spirituality. As the moon crossed over the sun yesterday, millions of people from Mazatlán to Maine stopped to gaze upward in a profound experience of awe. The solar eclipse tapped into a primal emotion. It evoked for many a mystical moment, as awareness of the celestial encompassed the earth. It revealed the close dance between spirituality and science. For a nation pulled apart by every manner of division, the eclipse also offered a moment of unity, however brief. It was a reminder to everyone, on the same day and at the same time, that life can be magical. That being alive is a collective experience. That there is something astonishing about being part of the greater story of things. That’s the subject of today’s newsletter. Below are photos and scenes from Times journalists across the country who witnessed this moment of awe and togetherness. Eagle Pass, Texas. Todd Heisler/The New York Times Eagle Pass, Texas: After the eclipse passed, Mireya Muñoz, 42, put her hands together and silently prayed. The return of the sun’s rays made her feel elated. “I wanted to thank God because we are alive and allowed us to see it,” she said. “I hope to be alive to see the next one, too.” Russellville, Ark. Alex Kent for The New York Times Russellville, Ark.: Around 100 couples gathered to be married under the eclipse. They exchanged celestial vows: “I promise to cherish you like this rarest of events, treasuring each moment as if it were a fleeting or shooting star. The galaxies of our dreams, hand in hand, heart to heart, until the end of time. For in my world, you are my sun, my moon and all my stars.” Murphysboro, Ill. Andrea Morales for The New York Times Carbondale, Ill.: The crowd at Saluki Stadium yelped and whistled and stamped the bleachers as the sky went dark and the sun’s corona beamed. People pointed to Venus and Jupiter, visible on either side of the eclipsed sun. The screams grew louder as the sun conquered the lunar surface and brightened the sky again. Niagara Falls, N.Y. Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times Niagara Falls, N.Y.: Darkness set in above heavy cloud cover. But for a few wonderful moments, the fully occluded sun poked through. The crowd went wild. “It’s incredible,” said Martine Raussin, from Saint-Georges-sur-Cher, in central France. Hugs and cheers also abounded on the Canadian side of the falls, though the American side was considerably louder. Washington Square Park. Amir Hamja/The New York Times Manhattan: The crowd at Sheep Meadow in Central Park whistled and screamed as the moon covered nearly 90 percent of the sun. Drummers played their instruments. Some people stood in awe in the bike and running paths, angering some cyclists and runners who felt no reason to change their exercise routines. Syracuse, N.Y. Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times Houlton, Maine: As the moon and the sun inched into perfect alignment in cloudless skies, turning day to night, the crowd quieted. Couples embraced. Small flocks of birds darted over the town square, and orange light glowed on the horizon. Time seemed to stop for three minutes. And then, too soon, sunlight flared. “I would pay a million dollars to see that again,” Sebastian Pelletier, 11, said. Mazatlán, Mexico. Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times Related: Read more about how the experience evoked awe. More on the eclipse See more photos of the eclipse from across North America. Follow what the phenomenon looked like from space using satellite images from NASA and NOAA. When daytime turned to darkness at the Indianapolis Zoo, the lions roared, the baboons ran and the macaws purred as if they were going to sleep. Children at a migrant shelter along the Mexico-U.S. border found magic in the eclipse. For Times Opinion, Pamela Paul wrote about the eclipse’s power to unite us. Fjords, pharaohs or koalas? This is where you should go to see your next eclipse. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Abortion Donald Trump said abortion restrictions should be decided by states. He attacked staunch anti-abortion conservatives, who he said were “making it impossible” for Republicans to win competitive races. Trump’s abortion stance favors campaign politics over conservative principles. More on Politics President Biden announced a plan to reduce student loan debt for 25 million borrowers. (See who would benefit.) An appeals court rejected Trump’s request to move his hush-money criminal case out of Manhattan. Trump plans to sue the New York judge in an attempt to delay its start. Some considered this case the least consequential of Trump’s indictments. Now it will be his first, and perhaps only, prosecution before the election. Israel-Hamas War In Khan Younis, southern Gaza. Fatima Shbair/Associated Press Israel withdrew from southern Gaza without eliminating Hamas, though officials say the war is not over. It leaves behind a dangerous power vacuum. Palestinians who returned to their homes in southern Gaza after the withdrawal found destruction. The Security Council agreed to consider a Palestinian bid for U.N. membership, which would amount to a recognition of statehood. Acceptance seems unlikely. Jon Stewart discussed U.S. lawmakers’ support for Israel on “The Daily Show.” More International News Pope Francis Andrew Medichini/Associated Press A Vatican document approved by the pope said that the Roman Catholic Church considered surrogacy and gender-transition surgery to be affronts to human dignity. A photograph of a mother and son killed in a drone attack in Odesa has become a symbol of the Ukraine war’s civilian toll. An overcrowded boat sank near Mozambique. Nearly 100 people drowned, the local authorities said. Religious authorities in Malaysia increased policing during Ramadan. Critics see it as part of a shift toward a more conservative form of Islam there, CNN reports. Business and Economy Investors expected the Fed to cut interest rates sharply this year. Months of stubborn inflation and strong economic growth call that into question. Banks made big climate promises. A new study doubts their impact. Other Big Stories In Brooklyn. Dave Sanders for The New York Times The timing of the school day can be tough for working parents. A Brooklyn school has tried a novel idea to help: staying open for 12 hours a day. Middle and high school students are faking explicit images of female classmates using A.I. A ticket bought in Oregon won the $1.3 billion Powerball drawing. Opinions The House speaker wants to seize Russian assets to support Ukraine. That sets a dangerous international precedent, Christopher Caldwell writes. There’s a crisis of anxiety on college campuses — not among the students, but among their parents, writes Mathilde Ross, a university psychiatrist. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the limits to Pope Francis’ liberalism and Michelle Goldberg on Trump’s abortion statement. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS In Maine. Joe Raedle/Getty Images Goodbye, moon: Someday, Earth will have a final total eclipse. (But not anytime soon.) Skin to skin: A large scientific review confirmed the benefits of touch. Library restrictions: See a list of the most challenged books of last year. “Brozempic”: Some health companies have turned to stereotypes to sell men weight-loss drugs. Where to eat: These are the 25 best restaurants in Chicago right now. Lives Lived: Col. Ralph Puckett Jr. commanded outnumbered Army Rangers in a battle during the Korean War, and was belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor in 2021. He died at 97. SPORTS Back-to-back champions. David J. Phillip/Associated Press Men’s college basketball: UConn defeated Purdue, 75-60, to become the first repeat men’s national champions since 2007. Ratings: The women’s college basketball national title game averaged 18.7 million viewers. The Morning bracket results: Congratulations to the winners of our Morning N.C.A.A. bracket pools: brewers6100 in the women’s tournament, and scfenton in the men’s. Soccer: Sign up for The Athletic FC, a daily newsletter with all the biggest stories. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS The cast and crew of “Suffs” with Hillary Clinton. Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times Play rights: The writer and composer Shaina Taub was doing research for a musical about the women’s suffrage movement when Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. She initially felt deflated — she had worked at a phone bank for Clinton — but was buoyed by her candidate’s concession speech, in which she implored girls to follow their dreams. Years later, Clinton is a producer on Taub’s musical, “Suffs,” which heads to Broadway next week. Read interviews from Clinton and other members of the cast and crew about what suffrage means to them. More on culture The actor Jonathan Majors, convicted of assaulting and harassing a girlfriend, was sentenced to 52 weeks in a domestic violence program. The country singer Morgan Wallen was arrested in Nashville, accused of throwing a chair from the roof of a bar. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Simmer chicken kofta in spiced tomato gravy for an easy Eid meal. Test your literary knowledge. Create a body skin care routine. Smear the best creamy peanut butter on your toast. Avoid significant water damage with a smart detector. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were parking and pranking. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. P.S. A handful of Times employees took in the eclipse from the roof of the Times’s building, high above Manhattan. They shared this photo: Marc Lacey/The New York Times Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 11 Author Members Share Posted April 11 April 10, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering abortion’s role in the 2024 election — as well as Rafah, the Japanese prime minister and Jane Goodall. In Amarillo, Texas. Meridith Kohut for The New York Times A new majority No American president has done as much to restrict abortion as Donald Trump. When he was running in 2016, he promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and his three nominees helped do precisely that in the 2022 Dobbs decision. Twenty-one states have since enacted tight restrictions. Yesterday, Arizona’s highest court reinstated an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions. These laws have proven to be unpopular. When abortion access has appeared on the ballot since 2022, it has consistently won, even in red states like Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. A Wall Street Journal poll last month found that abortion stood out from immigration, inflation and foreign wars as the only major issue on which most voters trusted President Biden more than Trump. All of this helps explains why Trump has tried to reduce his vulnerability on the issue — and why the Biden campaign is already running advertisements about abortion. “Donald Trump did this,” reads the onscreen text at the end of an ad released this week. It focuses on a Texas woman who nearly died during a miscarriage after a hospital refused to treat her. Trump released his own video this week, meant to serve as his defining statement on the issue. He said that states should be free to set their own laws, which is the post-Dobbs status quo. In so doing, he tried to distance himself from his past support for a federal ban. This back-and-forth will be a theme of the 2024 campaign. Democrats will try to focus voters on abortion, while many Republicans will try to shift attention elsewhere. Today’s newsletter offers four key points to help you make sense of the debate. The four points 1. The politics of abortion have changed. Before Dobbs, polls suggested that the issue didn’t offer a big political advantage to either party. Most voters favored both significant access to abortion and significant restrictions, which put them to the left of Republican politicians and to the right of Democratic politicians. But Dobbs — and the reality of statewide bans, as opposed to the mere prospect of them — altered public opinion. Gallup’s polls suggest that almost 10 percent of Americans on net switched from an anti-abortion position to a position favoring abortion access: Source: Gallup | By The New York Times 2. Democrats still have a challenge: salience. In the 2022 midterms, several high-profile Democratic candidates highlighted their Republican opponents’ role in restricting abortion access. Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Beto O’Rourke in Texas were among them. So was Nan Whaley, the Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio. “We think it is the issue,” Whaley said. It wasn’t. These candidates all lost by substantial margins. Nationwide, not a single Republican governor or senator has lost a re-election bid since the Dobbs decision. In House elections, the decision may have played a decisive role in a small number of races. How could this be? In today’s polarized atmosphere, most voters have already made up their minds. “There’s no one issue in this day and age that can be a silver bullet,” Danielle Deiseroth, executive director of Data for Progress, a left-leaning research firm, told me. If anything, Democrats may have a harder time focusing attention on abortion in a presidential election, when a larger portion of the electorate doesn’t follow politics closely and prioritizes pocketbook issues. Some of these voters are Black and Hispanic working-class Americans who tend to care less about abortion policy than white voters, Rachel Cohen of Vox has written. 3. Trump’s has his own problem: suburban swing voters. Democrats who tried to run on abortion in the 2022 midterms were trying to oust incumbent Republicans. Biden has an easier job this year: He’s trying to reassemble a winning coalition. His 2020 coalition included many college graduates — and women — in metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix, who allowed him to win swing states. Abortion access is popular with these voters, Deiseroth notes, especially when framed in terms of freedom and government overreach. A recent poll found that only about one in four independents blame Trump for recent abortion bans. Biden hopes to increase that share — and win back people who voted for him four years ago. 4. Trump hopes voters ignore the past. Trump’s latest position on the issue is a middle ground for Republicans, in favor of Dobbs but implicitly against a new federal law restricting abortion. This stance is meant to suggest that voting for him won’t lead to new laws forbidding abortion. That may be true (if he were to veto a Republican-passed federal ban, which he didn’t promise in his video). Yet it also ignores some important facts. As president again, Trump could appoint dozens more federal judges who would interpret existing laws to reduce access. And Trump is effectively asking voters to ignore his first-term record. He remains arguably the most important opponent of abortion access in American history. For more Biden condemned the Arizona abortion decision as “cruel” and “extreme.” “I’m pretty pro-life, but I think it should be the woman’s choice”: Read the mixed responses of Arizonans to the ruling. Trump’s abortion stance is designed to look moderate, Times Opinion’s Jamelle Bouie writes. Trump’s contempt for weakness is toxic to the pro-life movement, which promises protections to the most vulnerable, Times Opinion’s Ross Douthat writes. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Diplomacy At the White House. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times The Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, is on a state visit to Washington. The U.S. and Japan are expected to further integrate their militaries to counter China. David Cameron, the British foreign secretary and former prime minister, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Congress A bipartisan group of lawmakers plans to introduce a bill in Congress today that would limit troops’ exposure to blasts from weapons, which can cause brain injuries. Congress passed legislation to get food to children from low-income homes over the summer break. Nearly half of Republican-led states are yet to join the program. More on Politics An appeals court judge rejected another attempt by Trump to delay his criminal case in Manhattan. The trial is set to start Monday. A judge ordered Trump’s lawyers to redact the name of witnesses from a public filing in the classified documents case. The special counsel, Jack Smith, expressed concern for their safety. A Florida woman who stole the diary of Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, and helped sell it to a right-wing group was sentenced to a month in prison. The U.S. is now almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, a Pew report says. More voters have shifted toward the Republican Party. “A reality distortion bubble”: America isn’t as divided as many people think, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write for Axios. Israel-Hamas War Israeli border police officers in the West Bank. Mohamad Torokman/Reuters Iran is smuggling weapons to Palestinians in the West Bank to stoke unrest, according to Iranian, Israeli and U.S. officials. Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed that Israel would invade the crowded city of Rafah in southern Gaza. “No force in the world will stop us,” he said in a speech to military recruits. At the top U.N. court, Germany rejected an accusation from Nicaragua that it had aided genocide by shipping arms to Israel. It said most of the equipment was nonlethal. The U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, told a Senate committee that the Pentagon had no evidence that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Turkey said it would limit exports to Israel until there’s a cease-fire in Gaza. Israel threatened to retaliate. Europe England’s health service restricted medical gender transition for minors after a four-year review cast doubt on the treatment’s benefits. Several other European countries have similar rules. Europe’s top human rights court ruled that Switzerland violated its citizens’ rights by not doing enough to stop climate change. Ireland is now led by its youngest ever prime minister: the 37-year-old Simon Harris. Ukraine’s military has turned to drones from China after models sent by Silicon Valley start-ups failed in combat, The Wall Street Journal reports. Other Big Stories Jennifer and James Crumbley. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images The parents of a teenager who shot to death four fellow students at a Michigan high school each received 10 to 15 years in prison. The total solar eclipse delayed some Islamic communities’ declaration of Eid al-Fitr, the celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. The E.P.A. will require utilities to remove “forever chemicals” from tap water. The chemicals identified are linked to cancer. Opinions Benjamin Netanyahu must step down and leave Israel’s war in Gaza to someone who can win it, Bret Stephens writes. The U.S. economy has been far more successful at recovering from the Covid shock than from the 2008 financial crisis, Paul Krugman argues. Here are columns by Thomas Friedman on an exit strategy for Israel in Gaza and Thomas Edsall on Trump and the politics of intimidation. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS In Paris. Cedrine Scheidig for The New York Times Passion projects: A lab in France is famous for its medical discoveries. Some of its staff are also excelling in another field: music. Cure-all? People claim that apple cider vinegar can help you lose weight and clear acne. The science is more nuanced. Guns, machetes and food poisoning: Read about what one man encountered when he ran the length of Africa. Eclipse: Internet traffic dropped by 40 percent or more in the path of totality. Space: Rising temperatures make it harder for researchers to collect meteorites in Antarctica. Lives Lived: Peter Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle, sparking a half-century search that culminated with a Nobel Prize. The particle — the Higgs boson — was named after him. Higgs died at 94. SPORTS College basketball: The men’s national title game between UConn and Purdue averaged 14.8 million viewers, four million fewer than the women’s game. Stepping down: The Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer, who holds the record for most wins in college basketball, announced her retirement. M.L.B.: The Baltimore Orioles will promote Jackson Holliday, considered the best prospect in baseball, to the major leagues. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Jane Goodall Erinn Springer for The New York Times Dr. Jane’s Dream: Next year, sometime around World Chimpanzee Day — July 14 — “Dr. Jane’s Dream” will open its doors. The cultural complex, between Mount Kilimanjaro and Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, will celebrate the English primatologist Jane Goodall, who turned 90 last week. Read more about it, and about Goodall’s career. More on culture Donna Dennis Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times Donna Dennis is a trailblazer of installation art who has long been overlooked. Some of her work is being exhibited at O’Flaherty’s in Manhattan. Conan O’Brien returned to “The Tonight Show” for the first time in 14 years. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich. Bake budget-friendly cheesy chicken and mushroom pasta. Exercise even when you’re experiencing allergies. Buy a robot vacuum (they can work). Find a good raincoat for spring showers. Drink from an insulated tumbler. Download these apps before visiting a national park. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was hangable. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.— David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 11 Author Members Share Posted April 11 April 11, 2024 Good morning. Today my colleague Reid Epstein looks at how much Biden’s fund-raising advantage over Trump will matter. We’re also covering inflation, a state dinner and the warming ocean. — David Leonhardt Doug Mills/The New York Times Biden’s coffers By Reid J. Epstein He covers the Biden campaign. President Biden may be down in the polls, but he’s way up on Donald Trump when it comes to campaign funds. Each quarter since the president announced he was running again, Biden has lapped his predecessor in cash. The Biden campaign and its political committees held $192 million at the end of March, more than double the $93 million that Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts reported. Biden will also benefit from more than $1 billion pledged by independent groups that back his re-election. Trump allies have so far announced only a pittance of the outside money Biden has accrued. What can a campaign do with this sort of advantage? In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how a deluge of cash might matter — and why it might not. What campaigns do There are two main things a political campaign buys: advertising and efforts to get out the vote. TV and digital ads are by far the biggest expenditures for a national campaign, with staff-heavy field operations the next biggest. The Biden campaign plans to raise $2 billion by November. On screens and airwaves, it will hammer its anti-Trump message in battleground states. While that’s happening, it will send campaign workers to find voters in those states, figure out which ones need prodding to return their ballots or drag others to their local precinct. Campaigns spend their money on these things because they often work. “You win this election going out and talking to voters,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul who is a co-chair of the Biden campaign, told me. “That’s what our financial advantage allows us to do.” One example is abortion policy: The Biden campaign is spending millions to remind voters about Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s worth remembering that presidential campaign ads are not like commercials for insurance. They are aimed at people who don’t follow politics closely and may not have strong opinions about Biden and Trump. That’s a relatively small population, but it’s large enough to decide any of the eight battleground states. The less well-known the candidate, the larger the impact of political advertising. In 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign began defining Mitt Romney as out-of-touch while he was still fighting his primary contest — helping to doom him in the general election. On the organizing side, Team Biden — a network that includes the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties — has opened more than 100 offices in battleground states, employing some 300 people. Most of these offices existed as state party facilities and now operate as joint ventures with the campaign. Another 200 people work at the Biden campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Del. (The campaign declined to make any of its top officials available to comment on its spending for this story.) The Trump campaign has aired almost no paid advertising since February, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. It has not announced any new campaign offices. Supporters at a Biden campaign event in Philadelphia on Friday. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Is this cycle different? The question is what difference it makes to have a financial advantage in a presidential campaign. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had three times as many field offices as Trump did. I wrote a story from Ohio that September about how Trump campaign offices in the state sat vacant while Clinton’s were buzzing. Yet Trump won Ohio by eight percentage points. Presidential candidates are already so familiar to voters that advertising may mean less than in other races. That’s especially true here. Both Biden and Trump are universally known and not very well liked by the American public. Polling shows Trump’s supporters are loyal, while Biden’s biggest challenge is stitching back together the coalition of voters who backed him in 2020. Many of those constituencies — Black and Latino men, young people, some voters focused on the economy or Gaza — are reluctant to do so again. In response, the Biden campaign is using its money on ads to scare some of those people by arguing Trump would be far worse. But most people already have firm opinions about Trump. As Beth Myers, a senior aide to the Romney campaign, said, “Carpet-bombing with negative ads — what Obama did to us in spring 2012 when we were low on cash — probably won’t be as effective for Biden.” Biden has spent $15 million on ads since the beginning of March, according to AdImpact. His approval rating hasn’t moved. It’s possible that the advertising will be more effective in coming months, when more Americans will focus on the campaign. But Howard Wolfson, a former aide to Hillary Clinton and a longtime aide to Michael Bloomberg, is among those who worries that it is too late and that voters’ opinions are already fixed. The Biden campaign has seven months to show whether its money can buy, if not love, at least enough enmity for Trump to earn the president a second term in the White House. Related: Do Americans have a “collective amnesia” about Donald Trump? Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Economy Annual inflation rose to 3.5 percent, higher than economists expected. The increase complicates Biden’s campaign claims about the economy. Rising inflation could also prevent the Fed from cutting interest rates anytime soon. Japanese State Visit At the White House. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Biden and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, announced more military and economic collaboration to counter China. Kishida also promised to give Washington 250 cherry trees. They will replace 140 that are being uprooted to make way for taller sea walls around the Jefferson Memorial. Jill Biden wore an Oscar de la Renta gown to the state dinner. Its subtle symbolism was a preview of her role in the presidential campaign, Vanessa Friedman writes. The dinner guests included Hillary Clinton and Jeff Bezos. See the full list. More on Politics Trump’s former finance chief was sentenced to five months in Rikers for lying to the New York attorney general’s office. Right-wing House Republicans refused to extend a surveillance law after Trump publicly denounced it. Iowa made it a crime for a person to enter the state if they have ever been deported or denied entry into the U.S. Israel-Hamas War An Israeli airstrike killed three sons of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas. Israel said they were military operatives. Hamas said it did not have 40 living hostages in Gaza who met the criteria for the first step of an exchange deal. The claim raised concerns that more hostages are dead than previously thought. More International News Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president. Gianluigi Guercia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s ex-president who resigned in scandal, is running again after a court cleared him to appear on a ballot. Ukraine passed a mobilization law to replenish its forces. It had already lowered the draft age to 25, unsettling many young men and their families. A failed drug-sniffing dog in Taiwan — rejected for being too friendly — is now helping to locate earthquake victims. Spring floods forced more than 100,000 people to leave their homes in Russia and Kazakhstan. Other Big Stories The ocean has set heat records every day for the past year. Scientists are puzzled by the intensity, even considering climate change. Monday’s solar eclipse drew huge crowds — and traffic — to the path of totality. See where viewing was busiest. Rats breed faster than New York City can kill them. A council member wants to try spreading contraceptive pellets. Opinions Poverty kills: Patients struggle to keep wounds clean, or their medications get stolen. Permanent housing can help, Lindsay Ryan writes. A rematch election between an ex-president and an incumbent, framed as a do-or-die test of democracy: 2024, meet 1892, Jon Grinspan writes. There is a limit to Pope Francis’ progressivism. His condemnation of abortion and transgender identity shows that, Ross Douthat writes. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS Fragrances. Courtesy of the brands Blood, latex and floorboards: For some fragrance makers, it’s more important to smell surprising than good. Alien dinosaurs? She hunts for life in space by studying Earth. Robot bankers: A.I. can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level work. What will happen to the finance bros? Affairs: “What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity” is one of Modern Love’s most contentious essays. Hear Esther Perel read and discuss it. Reverse heist: A German museum fired an employee for hanging his own work in its modern art collection. Social Q’s: “Was it racist to take family photos at a wedding without me and my wife?” Lives Lived: Trina Robbins was a creator and historian of comics — a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field. She died at 84. SPORTS Taro Akebono in Japan in 1998. Kazuhiro Nogi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Sumo: Taro Akebono, a Hawaii-born wrestler who became sumo’s first foreign grand champion, died at 54. Golf: The Masters starts today, with Scottie Scheffler the favorite. Baseball: Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter is said to be negotiating a guilty plea in a gambling scandal. N.F.L.: The Packers and Eagles will meet in September in the league’s first game in Brazil, a Friday opener streamed exclusively on Peacock. Indiana Fever: The franchise set to pick Iowa’s Caitlin Clark in Monday’s W.N.B.A Draft will play 36 of its 40 games on national TV this year, more than any other team. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” — one of his most famous drawings — has been reproduced on cheap notebooks, coffee mugs, T-shirts, aprons and even puzzles. It’s become so lucrative that it’s the subject of a legal battle. The Italian government and a German puzzle maker are battling over a 1,000-piece puzzle, raising questions about who has the right to profit from old works. More on culture Enthusiastic collectors, including Barbra Streisand and Donna Karan, have contributed to a surging interest in the work of the Art Deco-era painter Tamara de Lempicka. Nickelodeon will reboot “Dora the Explorer,” this time with more Spanish — and a podcast. Late night hosts raged against Arizona’s abortion ruling. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Take this reader-favorite chickpea salad to work with you. Quiet your inner critic. Save on dry cleaning with this hand-washing detergent. Make coffee in a Nespresso machine. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was noblewomen. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 12 Author Members Share Posted April 12 April 12, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering the growing cooperation among China, Russia and other U.S. rivals — as well as O.J. Simpson’s death, three stranded sailors and Pompeii. Houthi recruits in Yemen. Yahya Arhab/EPA, via Shutterstock ‘More and more aligned’ The Houthis, the Iran-backed militia that controls much of Yemen, have disrupted the global economy by firing on commercial ships traveling through the Red Sea. But the Houthis have made some exceptions: Ships from China and Russia are allowed to pass without being attacked. This policy, formalized with a diplomatic agreement last month, is the latest sign that the world has entered a new period of great power politics. On one side is the largely democratic alliance — including the United States, Japan, South Korea and Western Europe — that has dominated global affairs since the demise of the Soviet Union. On the other side are China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as well as Iran-backed groups like the Houthis. These authoritarian powers “are more and more aligned,” Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, the Western alliance, told the BBC this week. “They support each other more and more, in very practical ways.” In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how the emerging alliance is shaping the world and why experts are anxious about the future. Money, weapons and propaganda Over the past decade, the emerging anti-democratic alliance has become bolder and more coordinated. Among the examples: In the Ukraine war, China, Iran and North Korea have supplied crucial help to Russia. Iran and North Korea have sent weapons. And China has allowed Russia’s economy to overcome tough sanctions, as my colleague Ana Swanson has detailed. This economic aid offers military benefits, too: China is helping Russia rebuild its military-industrial base after two years of war. China and Russia also act as military allies beyond Ukraine. “China and Russia are pursuing the joint development of helicopters, conventional attack submarines, missiles and missile-launch early warning systems,” Hal Brands of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies recently wrote in Foreign Affairs. Iran and North Korea resumed their collaboration on missile technology during the Trump administration, according to the U.N. North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and Iran seems to want them. During the war in Gaza, Chinese and Russian groups have filled social media with posts supporting Hamas (which, like the Houthis, relies on Iranian support). Many include antisemitic tropes, such as Jewish control of the U.S. “The reason why China chose this moment to take a decisively anti-Israel position is because China regards Israel as a close ally of the West,” Miles Yu of the Hudson Institute told Congress. The Houthis have praised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a global turning point. Ali al-Qahoum, a Houthi leader, said that the invasion had weakened “unipolarity” — a reference to American power — and promoted “multipolarity.” A ship crosses the Suez Canal toward the Red Sea. Mohamed Hossam/EPA, via Shutterstock Very different values Al-Qahoum’s line underscores the larger goal of the China-led alliance. Above all, it wants to reduce American influence and allow regional powers to assert their will. China might then be able to take over Taiwan. Russia could again dominate parts of Eastern Europe. Iran could contest Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, for sway over the Middle East. (These Times maps, by Alissa Rubin and Lazaro Gamio, explain Iran’s ambitions.) The countries in the anti-U.S. alliance, Brands wrote, aim “to reorder their regions and, thereby, reorder the world.” As Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, told Congress yesterday during a visit to Washington, “The international order that the U.S. worked for generations to build is facing new challenges, challenges from those with values and principles very different from ours.” These other countries obviously have their differences: Iran, for instance, is an Islamic theocracy, while China and Russia have oppressed their own Muslim populations. But the countries nonetheless have overlapping worldviews. All have authoritarian governments. All have patriarchal societies, with few women in senior roles. All restrict L.G.B.T. rights. None permit a free press. All imprison people, or worse, for criticizing the regime. The countries celebrate their hostility to liberal democracy and want to forge a world with less of it. What’s next? One possibility is that the world is entering a new cold war, with two broad alliances competing for power. Sometimes, this competition may lead to actual wars, in which the two alliances support opposite sides — but both take steps to avoid escalation. That describes the situation in Ukraine. Another possibility is even more alarming: a global war. Noah Smith, writing in his Substack newsletter this week, argued that the chances of such an outcome were higher than many Americans recognized. This war could start either with a major event, such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or almost accidentally. Imagine if the Houthis killed many Americans in a Red Sea attack or a Russian missile somehow did so in Europe. Experts are especially worried about China’s harassment of Philippine ships in the South China Sea. In a White House meeting yesterday, President Biden discussed the threat with the leaders of the Philippines and Japan. One problem, as Jim Sciutto of CNN pointed out in his new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” is that the guardrails that helped prevent a past world war seem weaker today. China and the U.S. don’t always communicate as well as Soviet and American officials once did, and proxy forces like the Houthis don’t always heed their sponsors. The past several decades have included many agonizing problems around the world. Overall, though, it has been a remarkably peaceful period. Global deaths from armed conflicts have fallen to near their lowest levels in six centuries, and global poverty has plummeted. The future looks more frightening. Related: The U.S. dispatched a top military commander to Israel, a reflection of concerns that Iran could soon retaliate for Israel’s killing of officials who worked with the Houthis and Hamas. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS O.J. Simpson O.J. Simpson in 1995. Pool photo by Myung J. Chun O.J. Simpson — the football star who was acquitted of murder in a trial that mesmerized the nation — died at 76. Read his Times obituary. Though extensive evidence pointed to his guilt, Simpson ended the trial as a free man. Los Angeles residents recalled yesterday how the verdict split the city. The trial made household names of its prosecutors, defense lawyers and witnesses — the beginning of fame for the Kardashians. Here is what’s happened to the major figures. Simpson was an earthquake, and we’re still living with his aftershocks: Read Wesley Morris’s essay about him. 2024 Election Speaker Mike Johnson will meet with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago today. His House position is under threat from Marjorie Taylor Greene. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said he would not vote for Trump. He plans to write in Dick Cheney’s name. A Times/Siena College poll asked voters to describe their feelings about the 2024 election in one word. “Anxious,” “Disappointed” and “Hopeful” topped the list. The Biden campaign’s message on abortion? “Trump did this.” More on Politics Senator Robert Menendez’s corruption trial will begin next month. His wife, Nadine, will face trial later. A liberal justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court will not seek re-election next year, threatening the majority that liberals won last year. Georgia’s lieutenant governor faces an investigation for serving as a fake Trump elector in 2020. Israel-Hamas War The site of the Tribe of Nova festival. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times When Hamas attacked a music festival on Oct. 7, many attendees were high on psychedelics. That has given Israeli researchers a chance to study how drugs affect trauma. International criticism of Israel has put a spotlight on nations that send it weapons. Read a list of the biggest suppliers. America’s pro-Palestinian movement has grown into a powerful, if disjointed, political force. Democrats feel the pressure. Asia South Korea’s opposition party gained seats in elections, putting new constraints on President Yoon Suk Yeol at home. Civil war in Myanmar has pushed half the population into poverty, CNN reports. A.I. Mistral, a French start-up considered a promising challenger to OpenAI and Google, is getting support from European leaders. Axios’s C.E.O. said A.I. would “eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media.” He’s changed the company’s strategy to increase live events. Other Big Stories In Micronesia. U.S. Coast Guard Three men stranded on a remote Pacific island for more than a week were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after spelling out “HELP” on a beach using palm leaves. Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter was charged with stealing $16 million from him to gamble. A Texas surgeon is accused of secretly denying patients liver transplants by tampering with a government database. Opinions J.D. Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, says that his party is not against helping Ukraine — but that Ukraine is asking for more help than the West can provide. Here are columns by David Brooks in praise of middle managers, Michelle Goldberg on the movie “Civil War” and Maureen Dowd on O.J. Simpson and jealousy. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS In Ocean Grove, N.J. Hannah Yoon for The New York Times Church and shore: Can a Christian community close the beach on Sunday mornings? Terrance: The joys and challenges of caring for a pet octopus. Costco: The store began stocking gold bars last fall. It now sells up to $200 million in gold and silver each month. Tracing history: In South Carolina, a community project is giving Black residents clues about their ancestry. Lives Lived: Thomas Gumbleton clashed with fellow Catholic bishops over his support for liberal causes. He died at 94. Half a world away, Nijole Sadunaite, a Lithuanian nun, clashed with the K.G.B. over her support for democracy and religious freedom. She died at 85. SPORTS College basketball: Kentucky is finalizing a deal to hire Mark Pope, a former Kentucky player, from B.Y.U. as its next head coach. Golf: Bryson DeChambeau leads the Masters after a first-round 65. N.F.L.: Tom Brady, now 46, says he is open to playing again. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Helen of Troy, Paris and a handmaiden. Parco Archeologico di Pompei Archaeologists at Pompeii have uncovered a formal dining room that offers a glimpse of how some of the lost town’s wealthier people lived, or at least the art they looked at as they ate. The walls were black to hide stains from candle smoke, experts said, and were divided into panels decorated with portraits of couples associated with the Trojan War. See images of the site and the paintings. More on culture Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, wrote a memoir before his death. Knopf will publish it in the U.S., under the title “Patriot.” Late night hosts joked about Trump’s criminal trial. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Make a pimento cheese sandwich in honor of the Masters. Visit Times readers’ favorite restaurants in New York City. Plan your Mother’s Day gift. Use better cleaning cloths. Play a video game set in postapocalyptic Australia. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was brickbat. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David P.S. Donald Dimmock, who died last month at 79, never appeared in pages of The Times. But he was an essential part of the paper for over three decades. His job: keeping the lights (and the giant printing presses) on. Read about his life. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 14 Author Members Share Posted April 14 April 13, 2024 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. Solving a crossword puzzle today is less a quiet test of mid-20th-century minutiae and more a spirited conversation with modern culture. María Jesús Contreras Clued in My 20-year-old niece, Emma, texted the other day to tell me she’s addicted to The Times’s game Connections; she and her friends play every day, along with the Mini and Strands. “The people who make the games need to make more fun games,” she declared. I don’t mind her treating me as her personal on-demand suggestion box for The New York Times; she’s my personal on-demand focus group for Gen Z. She’s used to my asking her about Snapchat etiquette, or which athleisure brands are cool, or if it’s true that her generation is grossed out by feet. I’d read about how younger people are getting into puzzles, but this was the first time my Gen Z rep had volunteered a report from the field. I was charmed; I’m a games nerd, but I’d never thought this was an activity that Emma and I would geek out over together. I, too, love Connections, but my deepest and most abiding puzzle romance is with The Times’s crossword. I average a couple of puzzles per day, a simultaneously mindful and mindless diversion, a way to keep half my brain busy while the other half unpacks experiences and emotions for which there is no language, or no language yet. I started doing crossword puzzles in my early 20s. From the puzzle, I learned the difference between ETNA and ELBA, ARAL and URAL, the names of golfers and pitchers and generals. I could give you dozens of clever ways to describe ASTA before I ever saw a Thin Man movie. The crossword filled gaps in my cultural and historical education, gave me an edge in bar trivia. Solving crosswords was like working out, something I got better at the more I did it, but while I acquired some niche familiarity with puzzle arcana, I never felt that I was getting smarter about the world that I lived in. In the past several years, as puzzles have evolved from slightly esoteric entertainment to work that’s more quirkily personal, the experience has changed, so that doing a crossword today is less a quiet test of mid-20-century minutiae and more a spirited conversation with modern culture. The reasons are manifold: The technology used to make crosswords has improved, the online spaces where people commune over puzzle making and solving have proliferated, and there has been an industrywide effort to increase constructor diversity. The result? “Constructors today are more inclined to express themselves in their work,” as a piece in today’s Times about crosswords in the age of Gen Z explains. Frankie Alduino for The New York Times Now, Times puzzles regularly include modern slang, internet speak, references to memes and films that weren’t shot on celluloid. Recent grid appearances include BITCOIN ATM and SELF-DRIVING CARS. “Arrive with great hype” was a recent clue for the answer COME IN HOT. Another clue called for a “Question of legitimacy”: IS THAT A THING. This has, for me, resulted in a puzzle that’s more exciting, but I’ve spent enough time on online crossword forums to know that every longtime puzzler’s reaction might not be so enthusiastic. I asked the editorial director of New York Times Games, Everdeen Mason, if she has heard from people who are unhappy with the way the crossword has evolved. The Times’s puzzle-solving community definitely feels ownership over the crossword, Everdeen told me. And she understands there’s “a sense of loss, maybe, when something that you thought was for you, you know, turns out to be for other people.” I’ve been thinking about that statement, how human it is to want to see yourself reflected in the things that you love. When I began doing puzzles, I didn’t question whether they were meant for me. It wasn’t until I started seeing clues and answers more relevant to my everyday that I understood how much of a tourist I was then. Of course, you don’t need to see yourself in a puzzle in order to enjoy it or complete it. “A well-constructed puzzle is solvable, even if there are niche entries,” Everdeen said. Those niche entries are what make the newer puzzles so much fun for me. I’m not just calling up esoteric vocabulary from my weird-puzzler’s lexicon. I’m participating in an activity that feels relevant to my everyday life. That doesn’t mean I’m not a little wistful for the days when I felt I’d established a sort of mastery of the crosswordese that comprised every puzzle, when solving a crossword was a bit dutiful, like reciting a memorized poem. I’m less sure-footed in solving these days, but I’m also more often delighted, which seems like a respectable trade-off. For more What constitutes “proper English” in a crossword puzzle? “Who and what we reference in a crossword signals which audience the crossword is for.” On the creation of the Expanded Crossword Name Database. Meet a new generation of crossword enthusiasts. Can crosswords be more inclusive? The constructor Natan Last investigated in The New Yorker. Meet some of the people who work on The Times’s games. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV A scene from “Civil War.” Murray Close “Civil War,” a new movie from Alex Garland, is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “If that sounds harrowing,” the critic Manohla Dargis writes, “you’re right.” Garland spoke with The Times about why he made the film — and why he chose to have Texas and California join forces. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” ended after 12 seasons. While the finale lacked any sense of surprise, Noel Murray writes, “it did feel right for the show.” Read the review Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist, who got engaged on the TV show “The Golden Bachelor,” are getting a divorce just three months after their wedding. Eleanor Coppola, a filmmaker and artist who made documentaries about her husband’s and her daughter’s cinematic triumphs and struggles, died at 87. Music The rapper J. Cole apologized for releasing a diss track about Kendrick Lamar. The two have worked together in the past. “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!”: The weight-loss drug has repurposed Pilot’s 1973 hit, “Magic,” making it an inescapable jingle. O.J. Simpson O.J. Simpson, who died this week at 76, was a central figure in 1990s culture. His trial for the murder of his ex-wife, televised live, made him one of the most-seen Americans in history. Nearly 100 million American TV viewers watched Simpson flee the police in his white Ford Bronco. The car ended up in a museum in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Before the trial made him infamous, Simpson had become a Hollywood fixture, playing roles as varied as an astronaut, a comic detective and a fake priest. He was also the first Black star of a national TV ad campaign. Theater Brody Grant, center, as Ponyboy Curtis in “The Outsiders.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times “The Outsiders” is notoriously tricky to adapt. But a new Broadway musical is “made with so much love and sincerity it survives with most of its heart intact,” our critic writes. Commercial Off Broadway, a small sector of New York’s theatrical economy, is having a banner season with plays like Eddie Izzard’s solo “Hamlet.” Other Big Stories Roberto Cavalli, the Italian fashion designer who celebrated glamour and excess, died at 83. See photos that show off his maximalist style. The International Booker Prize shortlist was announced. It includes books by Jenny Erpenbeck and Hwang Sok-yong. See a full list of the nominees. Jessica Alba will step down as the chief creative officer of The Honest Company, the baby product and personal care brand she founded in 2012. An HBO documentary claimed that the clothing store Brandy Melville, which sells single-size pieces, cashes in on young women’s insecurities and mistreats its employees. See our takeaways. THE LATEST NEWS A funeral procession in Tehran last week. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times President Biden said that he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner than later” in response to Israel’s killing of top Iranian generals. Six people were killed in a stabbing attack at a busy mall in Sydney, Australia. The attacker was killed by a police officer, officials said. Biden canceled another $7.4 billion in student loan debt for teachers, librarians and others. So far, he has forgiven $153 billion in loans. The House of Representatives voted to reauthorize a warrantless surveillance law. Speaker Mike Johnson scaled back the measure after Donald Trump urged Republicans to kill it. Haiti has a new governing council tasked with returning political stability to the country, which has been wracked by gang violence. Stocks slumped as tensions in the Middle East and concerns about inflation spurred caution among investors. The S&P 500 had its worst week of the year. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. CULTURE CALENDAR By Andrew LaVallee 🎼 “The Tortured Poets Department” (Friday): It may feel like you’re still digesting “Cowboy Carter,” but it’s time for another major album drop: “The Tortured Poets Department,” which Taylor Swift announced when she won a Grammy for “Midnights” earlier this year. Swifties, poets, even the grammar police have made their feelings known, and if you think the discourse will stop there, have you not learned anything from Beyoncé? Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT RECIPE OF THE WEEK David Malosh for The New York Times. By Melissa Clark Baked Lemon Pudding Do the words baked lemon pudding set your heart aflutter, as they do mine? Lucky for us, this recipe, which David Tanis adapted from JR Ryall’s cookbook, “Ballymaloe Desserts,” is a simple, speedy delight. A mere 10 minutes of prep time, plus 40 minutes’ baking, will yield a supremely citrusy dessert with two distinct layers: a puffed, spongy top that covers a soft and custardy center. Feather-light and brightly flavored, it’s just the thing to serve at the end of a big meal when you want something sweet but not filling. And for lemonheads who like things extra tart, substituting buttermilk for whole milk bumps up the tanginess in the best possible way. REAL ESTATE David Pickett, left, and Bert Fox. Michelle Litvin for The New York Times The hunt: A couple wanted to find a home on the north side of Chicago that struck the right balance between square footage and access to coffee shops. Which did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $420,000: A 1940 Colonial Revival house in Charles Town, W.Va.; an 1858 Greek Revival house in Holly Springs, Miss.; or a one-bedroom condominium in Washington. LIVING An Eid celebration in Washington Square Park. Amir Hamja/The New York Times Dressed to the nines: The comedians Hasan Minhaj and Ramy Youssef were among the hundreds of Muslims who gathered in New York to celebrate Eid al-Fitr. Fashion week: Nigerian fashion designers are ready for their industry to take center stage. Staples and well-kept secrets: Times readers shared their favorite New York City restaurants. See a list here. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Where to buy plants online Purchasing houseplants online can be useful if you don’t have a great brick-and-mortar store nearby. But not all plant purveyors are created equal. Wirecutter tested the most popular services, and landed on two we think offer the easiest shopping experience and deliver the healthiest plants. If you buy online, we recommend checking your new plant for pests, quarantining it from other plants for about a week, and repotting it in an ideal growing medium. Et voilà: fresh flora to celebrate the season — or perhaps a certain someone ahead of Mother’s Day? — Rose Lorre GAME OF THE WEEK Bryson DeChambeau on the 18th green yesterday. Doug Mills/The New York Times The Masters golf tournament: Scottie Scheffler is the best golfer in the world right now, “and it might not be close,” The Athletic’s Brody Miller writes. Scheffler has a peculiar swing — his feet slide as if on roller skates — that nevertheless seems to send the ball exactly where he wants it. He enters today six under par, tied for the lead with Bryson DeChambeau and Max Homa. 3 p.m. Eastern today and 2 p.m. tomorrow, CBS. More on the Masters Tiger Woods made the cut for the 24th consecutive year. His one over par puts him in 27th place. Augusta National is a special place: No other major championship is held at the same course every year. Here are five of its best holes. Did you know? The golfer who wins the Masters gets to choose the menu for the next year’s champions dinner. Here’s what last year’s winner, Jon Rahm, picked. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were agendum, undamaged and unmanaged. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 14 Author Members Share Posted April 14 April 14, 2024 By the staff of The Morning Good morning. We’re covering the intensifying conflict between Iran and Israel. Above Israel. Amir Cohen/Reuters Out of the shadows Iran’s missile attack on Israel has ended, for now, and virtually none of the missiles reached their targets. Iran last night launched more than 300 drones and missiles in retaliation for an apparent Israeli strike on an Iranian embassy two weeks ago. Iran’s attacks caused minor damage at one military base, and shrapnel seriously injured a 7-year-old girl from an Arab Bedouin community in southern Israel. But Israel intercepted most of the drones and missiles. The U.S. and Jordan also shot some down. The big question this morning is whether the conflict between the two countries will now return to its previous situation — a long-running shadow war — or enter a more dangerous new stage. Last night did represent something new: Experts believe it was the first time Iran attacked Israel from Iranian territory. But Iran telegraphed the attack days in advance, and it did not cause extensive casualties — which increases the likelihood that both countries will be willing to de-escalate. Today’s newsletter tells you what else we know. You can follow the developments all day on The Times’s website and app. What happened last night Air-raid sirens sounded across Israel around 2 a.m. Loud booms rang out in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Explosions illuminated the night sky as Israel, the U.S. and Jordan intercepted the missiles. (See video of the attack.) The weapons that Iran used were more sophisticated than those that Hamas (which Iran finances) and other groups have recently fired at Israel. Last night’s weapons “can travel much farther, and some of them can travel much faster,” our colleague Jin Yu Young explained. Some Iranians gathered in Tehran to celebrate the attack. Others stockpiled fuel. How leaders responded Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, wrote on social media: “We intercepted. We blocked. Together we will win.” Hamas expressed support for the attack. The attacks prompted emergency diplomacy. President Biden expressed “ironclad” support for Israel and planned a meeting with the Group of 7 leaders today. The United Nations Security Council is also expected to convene. Israel’s war cabinet is set to meet today. Israel’s defense minister said that the confrontation with Iran was “not over.” A top Iranian official wrote on social media: “The matter can be deemed concluded. However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe.” What the attacks mean Some analysts said that the attack was mostly performative. Michael Singh, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the U.S. National Security Council, told The Wall Street Journal, that it was “a slow-moving, thoroughly telegraphed, and ultimately unsuccessful retaliation.” Other experts called the attack more significant. Ahron Bregman, an expert at King’s College in London, called it an “historic event.” It brought Iran’s long shadow war against Israel into the open. The two rivals have no direct channels of communication, which can lead to dangerous military miscalculations. One reason to believe Israel may respond: “Any normalization of direct strikes by Iran is intolerable to the Israeli public and leadership,” The Economist magazine wrote. Dana Stroul, the former top Middle East policy official at the Pentagon, said, “Given how significant this attack was, it is difficult to see how Israel cannot respond.” Understand the shadow war: We recommend this article by Alissa Rubin and Lazaro Gamio. Iran largely fights through its proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran provides arms, training, and financial aid to more than 20 groups in the Middle East. Israel conducts much of its fighting through espionage and assassinations. Other Middle East news Hezbollah — an Iranian ally — fired rockets at an Israeli military site yesterday. In response, Israel said its fighter jets had struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. Clashes across the West Bank wounded dozens of Israelis and Palestinians after a missing Israeli teenage boy was found dead. Israel’s military said that he had been killed in a terrorist attack. Several nations including Belgium and Canada have halted arms deals with Israel. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election In the latest Times/Siena Poll, Biden’s popularity improved slightly. Donald Trump now holds only a slight advantage — 46 percent to 45 percent. Trump is considering which potential running mates might help him raise money. More on Politics In Phoenix. Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 law that bans almost all abortions. Patients at an Arizona clinic described their anxiety. Four Native American tribes in South Dakota barred Gov. Kristi Noem from their reservations after she said that Mexican drug cartels had a foothold there. International In Bogotá. Nathalia Angarita for The New York Times Cycling is an integral part of Colombia’s identity. This year, a number of robberies and assaults on cyclists have left many riders in Bogotá on edge. A decade ago, the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria. Read the story of one woman who was captured. Drones keep Russian and Ukrainian troops from moving on the battlefield, The Washington Post reports. Thousands of protesters in Niger called for the withdrawal of the U.S. forces there. Russia has been supporting the country. A stabbing attack that killed six in an upscale mall in Sydney, Australia, has shocked the country. Other Big Stories The Vessel, a 150-foot-tall sculpture in Manhattan, will reopen this year with new safety measures. It was closed in 2021 after a series of suicides. Pittsburgh reopened a bridge that it closed as a precaution after barges broke loose on the Ohio River. O.J. Simpson owed millions to the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson at the time of his death. THE SUNDAY DEBATE A senior NPR editor accused his outlet of having a liberal bias. Is he right? The claim: NPR’s coverage of multiple issues — Covid, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the war in Gaza — shows that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview,” Uri Berliner, the NPR editor, writes for The Free Press. “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR.” The defense: Edith Chapin, an NPR news executive, rejected Berliner’s claims. “We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. Here’s a longer NPR story. FROM OPINION Liberals should refuse tax breaks that help themselves but worsen the wealth gap, Matthew Desmond argues. Open letters demanding a cease-fire in Gaza and the return of hostages are performative and distract from meaningful action, Roxane Gay writes. Here are columns by Maureen Dowd on O.J. Simpson and Ross Douthat on Trump’s political cynicism. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT MORNING READS Photo illustration by Lauren Peters-Collaer Extinction: Should we change species to save them? Some scientists think so. Hello from the Masters: At the golf tournament, where cellphones are forbidden, fans make calls the old-fashioned way — using a landline. Nostalgia: Chain, a restaurant in Los Angeles, reminds diners of burgers and pizza from another era. Vows: A high school reunion reignited a 50-year crush. Lives Lived: Faith Ringgold was an artist whose quilts depicting the African American experience gave rise to a second distinguished career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. She died at 93. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Alistair Matthews for The New York Times Letter of recommendation: In defense of never learning how to cook. In Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play, “Sally & Tom,” she takes up the “relationship” between Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved woman who bore him seven children. TALK | FROM THE MAGAZINE Brian Eno Photo illustration by Bráulio Amado By David Marchese I’ll be part of a new Q. and A. franchise, The Interview, starting this month. Before then I’m sharing some of my favorite past conversations. This one is with the legendary musician and producer Brian Eno, whom I found inspiring. Almost all recorded music now is ambient music, in that it’s used as background while we do other stuff. But it doesn’t feel like musicians are responding to that reality in any interesting ways. Is there more that musicians could be doing? There’s certainly more to be done. What I’ve become interested in is listening clubs, where people get together and listen to a record. There are signs that people are resisting the atomization of everything. It’s suited capitalism to have us all as separate as possible because then we have to buy things individually. People are getting fed up with that and wanting to do things together. I’m curious about what you think of the idea of “disruption.” It depends how it’s used. For people like Steve Bannon, destruction is their main tool. They think, OK, if we can create chaos, we know how to benefit. This is why I talk about the climate movement, because that’s anti-chaos. That’s a knitting-together of people. Insofar as you have a public image, it’s as an extremely cerebral figure. But it’s clear that emotions drive a lot of what you do. So what’s an emotion driving you now? I recently found this gospel song on YouTube. Donald Vails is playing piano on it. Billy Preston is playing organ. They’re in a room with a mixed bunch of people. What’s fantastic is seeing these people singing to one another. We’ve been so atomized over the last 50, 100 years and told that the real human is the one who can stand alone. The real human, to me, seems like the one who can support his neighbors and work with them. Read more of the interview here. BOOKS Marine Buffard Fiction: In “The Garden,” by Clare Beams, nefarious things are afoot at a gothic maternity hospital. Get some rest: These audiobooks are perfect for falling asleep to — not because they’re boring, but because their romance and adventure feel cozy and charming. Poetry: Reading Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You” is like going on a perfect first date. Our critic explains what makes it so enticing. Our editors’ picks: “Victim,” a social satire about the fetishization of victimhood, and five other books. Times best sellers: “Table for Two,” a collection of short stories and a novella by Amor Towles, is new this week on the hardcover fiction list. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Use an excellent ice cream scoop. Improve the smell in your house with an oil diffuser. Unlock a two-factor authentication when you can’t get in. THE WEEK AHEAD What to Watch For Tax Day is tomorrow. Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan begins tomorrow. The Olympic flame lighting ceremony is on Tuesday in Greece. The flame will journey to Paris for the Summer Olympics. The Senate is scheduled to hold a hearing on Wednesday with a Boeing engineer about the company’s manufacturing practices. India’s general elections begin on Friday, and run until June. Meal Plan Christopher Testani for The New York Times In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Krysten Chambrot offers recipes that utilizes your freezer food. She suggests using frozen ground turkey in a spicy skillet dish, or shrimp for a one-pot coconut rice dish. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was pavilion. Can you put eight historical events — including Apollo 13, the first state dinner for a sovereign and a Scottish ban on golf — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 15 Author Members Share Posted April 15 April 15, 2024 Good morning. My colleague Ian Prasad Philbrick looks at the nostalgia that surrounds former presidents. We’re also covering the Middle East, Ukraine and Salman Rushdie. — David Leonhardt Donald Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times The nostalgia bump By Ian Prasad Philbrick He is a writer for The Morning. President Trump left office wildly unpopular. But in the past few years, some voters’ opinions about him have improved. Support for how Trump handled key issues as president — including the economy, and law and order — has risen by about six percentage points since 2020, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. A plurality of voters, 42 percent, now say the Trump years were “mostly good” for the country. Only a quarter say the same of President Biden’s tenure. Biden says he finds the nostalgia “amazing,” and at a time when Trump is a defendant in four criminal cases, it may seem surprising. But former presidents often enjoy more positive assessments from voters in retrospect. The difference this year is that, for the first time in decades, a former president is running to reclaim his old office. Today, I’ll explain why voter nostalgia seems to be helping Trump, and how that might change. A longstanding pattern Decades ago, the polling firm Gallup started asking Americans what they thought about past presidents. The results revealed a pattern: Almost everyone Gallup asked about, from John F. Kennedy to Trump, enjoyed higher approval ratings after leaving office than he did while holding it, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows. Source: Gallup | By The New York Times One explanation is political. As presidents leave office, partisan attacks recede. Some presidents, like Jimmy Carter, become well known for philanthropy or other good works. “You kind of move, as an ex-president, from being a political figure to someone who is above the fray,” Jeff Jones, a Gallup senior editor, told me. Another explanation is historical. As years pass, popular culture and collective memory come to shape Americans’ views of presidents — especially for those too young to remember the actual events. History textbooks, for instance, tend to focus more “on the good things they did than the bad things, the historical contributions that they made as president rather than scandals or poor decisions or poor policies,” Jones said. There are psychological explanations, too. Human memory is fallible. People often experience their current problems more acutely than they recall their past ones or think better of experiences in retrospect, which psychologists call recency bias. That can lead to a perpetual yearning for the supposed good old days. A political boon In Trump’s case, the result seems to be that voters are focused more on the inflation, record border crossings and overseas wars of the Biden years than on the administrative chaos, pandemic and insurrection of the Trump years. Voters “know about what they don’t like about Biden, and they have forgotten what they don’t like about Trump,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant, told The Times. Changes of three points or less are not considered statistically significant. | Based on New York Times/Siena College polls in the fall of 2020 and April 2024 Those more positive assessments may be one reason Trump has led Biden in most polls this year. In a Times/Siena survey from February, more than twice as many voters said that Trump’s policies had helped them personally as said that Biden’s had. Trump’s post-presidency bump may also suggest that voters have forgotten, or forgiven, the turmoil of his final weeks in office. Not all of Trump’s predecessors recovered in this way. Richard Nixon’s approval ratings plummeted before he resigned during Watergate, and they never bounced back. But in Gallup’s polling, voters’ assessment of Trump’s presidency has rebounded to where it was in October 2020, before Trump tried to overturn his re-election defeat and before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Will it last? Approval ratings can change. In particular, they can decline when a campaign begins. Hillary Clinton’s favorability spiked when she was first lady and secretary of state but fell when she ran for president. To flatten Trump’s nostalgia bump, the Biden campaign plans to run millions of dollars in ads reminding voters what they disliked about Trump’s presidency. One recent spot interspersed video of empty store shelves from 2020 with a clip of Trump wondering if Americans should inject disinfectant to treat Covid. Biden’s approach may already be working; the new Times/Siena poll shows that he has cut Trump’s national lead to just one point. Democrats have reasons to hope that higher approval ratings alone won’t win Trump a second term, even as Biden’s remain low. In Gallup’s poll, most Americans still disapproved of Trump and how he governed, even in hindsight. And as November nears, voters may focus more on what Trump plans to do if he regains the White House than on what he did last time. But in an election that’s likely to be very close, even a small afterglow could matter. More on the poll Biden has begun to win back some of the Black and Latino voters who supported him in 2020. Most voters remain pessimistic about the economy. See the full poll results. How can 1,000 people represent the country’s views? Read about how The Times and Siena College gets an accurate sample. More on 2024 Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan — about a hush-money payment — goes to trial today. The Jan. 6 riots are central to Trump’s campaign. He opens his rallies with a recording of defendants singing the national anthem from their jail cells. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Middle East Weapon fragments in Israel. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Israel is considering retaliation for Iran’s missile attack. World leaders are urging restraint. Benjamin Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation: He could look weak if he doesn’t respond, but he risks a broader war with retaliation. Iran’s strikes against Israel were a choreographed spectacle intended to cause maximum drama but minimal damage, experts say. The attack highlights how clashes in the Middle East are getting harder to contain, Alissa Rubin and Vivian Nereim write. “I’m afraid of war”: In Iran, some fear upheaval. Others have vowed to fight. More International News Workers in Nepal. Uma Bista for The New York Times Japan can no longer source the traditional paper it needs to produce its bank notes at home. Nepalese farmers have stepped in. A war between two military factions in Sudan has brought widespread hunger and driven about 8.6 million people from their homes. In western Ukraine, some men swim across a dangerous river toward Romania to avoid the draft. Alarm is rising in Germany about links between a far-right party and Russia. Business and Economy Inflation has made some Americans feel economically insecure — even when they’ve gotten big raises. Many Americans are reluctant to give up the low fixed-rate mortgages they secured during the pandemic, even if they want to move. Congress is targeting a Chinese company that makes cancer drugs over potential security breaches. The scrutiny has rattled the pharmaceutical industry. The Biden administration awarded $6 billion to Samsung for domestic semiconductor production. Other Big Stories Mary Moriarty Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times Minneapolis’s top prosecutor promised to overhaul criminal justice. She now faces criticism, including from fellow Democrats. Bonobos have a peaceful reputation, but a new study found they act aggressively more often than their chimpanzee cousins. Opinions Iran just made a big mistake in its attack. Israel shouldn’t retaliate, Thomas Friedman writes. Israel has every moral and legal right to retaliate against Iran. But it can get revenge without starting a broader war, Bret Stephens argues. China wants to negotiate a nuclear treaty with the United States. The Biden administration should take it seriously, W.J. Hennigan writes. Here is a column by David French on his relationship with masculinity. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS In New York. Todd Heisler/The New York Times Sumo: At Madison Square Garden, New Yorkers got to watch a sport that’s rarely seen stateside. Australia: Scientists are trying to save the koala in unusual ways, including with tree-planting drones. Roses are red, violets are blue: Read why one bouquet costs $72. Reverence: Lincoln’s murder is often re-enacted, but not at Ford’s Theater. Ask Vanessa: “Should I dress to cover up my scars or show them off?” Metropolitan Diary: A Greek epic on the Uptown local. Lives Lived: Don Wright was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who commented wryly on war and segregation. He died at 90. SPORTS Golf: Scottie Scheffler won the Masters by four strokes, securing his second green jacket in three years. N.B.A.: The regular season had its final weekend. Here’s what to know about the playoffs. Live from New York: Caitlin Clark appeared on “Saturday Night Live” where she received a 20-second ovation. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Jeffrey Gibson in his studio in Hudson, N.Y. Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times Later this week, the artist Jeffrey Gibson’s paintings and sculptures will fill the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His works will feature geometric patterns and political references to Indigenous struggles and American history. Gibson — who is Choctaw and Cherokee — is the first Native American artist to exhibit at the pavilion solo. Read more about the exhibition. More on culture Salman Rushdie Clément Pascal for The New York Times In “Knife,” Salman Rushdie addresses the 2022 attack that blinded him in one eye. He also details how his wife supported his recovery. “I wanted to write a book which was about both love and hatred — one overcoming the other,” he told The Times. Hundreds of survivors of the 2017 bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, have taken legal action against Britain’s intelligence services for not doing more to prevent the attack, The Guardian reports. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini. Roast lemony chicken with potatoes for an easy weeknight dinner. Stream a science fiction movie. Advocate for yourself at the dentist. Read this before filing your tax return. Download a free video game. Complete this checklist when adopting a cat. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were nighttime and theming. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — Ian Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 17 Author Members Share Posted April 17 April 16, 2024 Good morning. On the morning after the Boston Marathon, my colleague Ashley Wu looks at the growing popularity of distance running. We’re also covering Donald Trump, the Middle East and Coachella. — David Leonhardt Runners at the Boston Marathon. Mary Schwalm/Associated Press ‘The everyman’s Everest’ By Ashley Wu On a chilly day in April 1924 — the first year that the Boston Marathon was 26.2 miles, rather than the original 24.8 miles — around 140 men lined up in Hopkinton, Mass., to race. Yesterday, a century later in that same town, about 30,000 runners crossed the starting line. Distance running, once a niche sport, has exploded in popularity over the past few decades. Many of those who run marathons today are middle-aged or older, and some are less fit and less experienced. As a result, the average finish time in American marathons has slowed considerably, even as the top runners keep getting faster. It’s a sign of how popular marathons have become. Consider these charts: Sources: Boston Athletic Association; Boston Marathon Data Project | By The New York Times The Boston Marathon is a special race. It is the oldest annual marathon in the world. It was the first in which women competed. And it requires most runners to submit a qualifying time to apply for entry, making for an especially fast field. Even so, the trend of slower average finish times is apparent. The average finish time in Boston in 1924 was just under three hours. Yesterday, the average was nearly four hours. Around the turn of the 20th century, when the first marathons were held, the races were thought to be safe only for young, fit men. Many even believed, incorrectly, that running would make women infertile or overly masculine. But as distance running gained popularity as a way to stay healthy — thanks, in part, to an American victory in the 1972 Olympics — more people wanted to compete. The Boston Marathon expanded to meet the demand, and new marathons like New York City’s and Chicago’s were established. “It went from being something for fanatics to the everyman’s Everest,” said David Monti, a marathon specialist who runs a popular newsletter on distance running. It’s not just Boston Average times have risen at many of the biggest American marathons, most of which do not require runners to apply with a qualifying time like Boston does. Sources: New York Road Runners; Marine Corps Marathon; Chicago Marathon; Honolulu Marathon; Marathon Guide | By The New York Times Major marathon organizers want large field sizes. For one, marathons are costly to host: Cities need to shut down streets, provide security and set up infrastructure along the course. Runners’ registration fees help to cover that cost. The more runners and spectators, especially those from out of town, the more money goes to local restaurants and hotels. And then there is the prestige of hosting a large public event. “Those images of 50,000 people on the Verrazano Bridge — everybody wants that,” Monti said. “And you need a lot of people to do that.” Runners crossing the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York. Todd Heisler/The New York Times To recruit the crowds, many races are less strict about entrants’ credentials. That’s what drew Andy Sloan, 36, to register for his first marathon, in Honolulu last year. He was the final racer across the line, completing the course in 16 hours 59 minutes 39 seconds. When Sloan first started training, he thought running a marathon was going to be about hitting a goal time. But in Honolulu, he found more meaning in the people cheering him along. “To feel supported the whole way, even though I was the last person on the course, felt really, really good,” he told me. “Knowing that I took the time to set a goal, and worked really hard to achieve it, it did mean a lot to me.” Winners are still fast Averages may be slowing down, but marathon winners are not. Boston’s course records for both men and women have been set in the last 15 years. Sources: Boston Athletic Association | By The New York Times And world records are still being broken on American marathon courses. Last year, Kelvin Kiptum broke the world marathon record at the Chicago Marathon. His time was 2 hours 35 seconds. The last person to cross the finish line in Chicago that day had a time of 9 hours 41 minutes 14 seconds. Most people will never play soccer with Lionel Messi or tennis with Coco Gauff. But in a marathon, everyone runs the same course, on the same day. More on the Boston Marathon Sisay Lemma of Ethiopia won the men’s race with a time of 2:06:17. In the women’s race, Hellen Obiri of Kenya won for the second year straight, finishing in 2:22:37. Read about the day. For many runners, the blue-and-yellow finish line in Boston feels almost holy. Running clubs have become popular. They offer social benefits as well as physical ones. From 2018: Do some of Nike’s shoes make you faster? The data suggest that they do. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Trump on Trial Donald Trump in court. Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times Donald Trump went on criminal trial, a first for a former president. The case, in Manhattan, concerns a hush-money payment to a porn star. The first days of the trial are likely to focus on jury selection. Prospective jurors can be asked about where they get their news, but not their voting history or party registration. (Politico says opening arguments might not begin until May.) The judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, dismissed dozens of potential jurors who said they couldn’t be impartial. Trump looked irritated and exhausted in the courtroom, Maggie Haberman reported. He appeared to fall asleep before jolting awake. Read a guide to the figures in the trial, including the key witnesses. The courtroom was the big topic for the late night hosts: “Imagine committing so many crimes you get bored at your own trial.” Supreme Court The Supreme Court temporarily allowed Idaho to enforce a ban on gender-affirming medical treatment for transgender minors while an appeal moves forward. In arguments, the justices seemed likely to limit an anti-corruption law for state and local officials. Justice Clarence Thomas was absent from yesterday’s hearing. The court did not give a reason. More on Politics Speaker Mike Johnson said the House would vote this week on bills to send aid to Israel and Ukraine. Trump, who has relied on small donations, is asking big donors for help. Nikki Haley, who ended her presidential campaign last month, will join the conservative think tank the Hudson Institute, The Hill reports. President Biden and the first lady earned about $620,000 last year and paid about a quarter of that in taxes. Middle East In Tehran. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times Israel’s war cabinet met to discuss possible responses to Iran’s missile and drone attack. An official said several options were considered, including diplomacy and an imminent strike. The U.S. helped defend Israel against Iran’s attacks. If Israel retaliates, its allies will struggle to help, Peter Baker writes. Protesters demanding a cease-fire in Gaza blocked roads in cities across the U.S. More International News The old Stock Exchange in Copenhagen, Denmark. Emil Helms/EPA, via Shutterstock One of Copenhagen’s oldest buildings partly collapsed in a fire. “This is our Notre-Dame,” one man told the BBC. Ukraine is short on ammunition and soldiers. Its commanders are struggling to choose where to use limited resources. In Australia, an attacker stabbed a bishop and a priest at a livestreamed Mass in a Sydney suburb. A 15-year-old boy was arrested. China’s economy grew more than expected this year, fueled by exports. Other Big Stories Dead coral on the Great Barrier Reef. David Gray/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Rising sea temperatures around the planet are causing the most extensive coral-reef bleaching on record. Tesla will lay off more than 10 percent of its workers. It sold fewer electric vehicles in the first quarter of the year, while emerging competitors’ sales grew. Stock in Trump’s social media company fell yesterday. It’s down 60 percent since its first day of trading last month. Opinions As Trump faces his first criminal trial, his supporters are sure: He’s the victim of another witch hunt, and he’ll survive it yet again, Michelle Cottle writes. It’s time that international law protects power grids in war, Peter Fairley writes. Here’s a column by Jamelle Bouie on Republican abortion politics. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS A polycule. Anne Vetter for The New York Times Relationships: How a 20-person “polycule” navigates jealousy and fosters community. Unusual events: Sawfish are dying in the Florida Keys. Scientists don’t yet know why. Flying with your dog? See airlines’ pet policies. Beep! Most New York City drivers who honk their horns are breaking the law. Lives Lived: Ushio Amagatsu brought worldwide visibility to Butoh, a form of Japanese dance theater that arose after wartime devastation. He died at 74. SPORTS Caitlin Clark Sarah Stier/Getty Images W.N.B.A. Draft: The Indiana Fever took Caitlin Clark with the No. 1 pick. Cameron Brink of Stanford went second, to the Los Angeles Sparks. Chicago’s picks: The Sky drafted stars from the past two N.C.A.A. champions: Kamilla Cardoso of South Carolina and Angel Reese of L.S.U. A new era: Prada has never dressed any basketball player, male or female, for the draft. The label dressed Clark, GQ reports. New York Yankees: The radio announcer John Sterling announced his retirement after 35 years. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS The cast of “A Different World.” Schaun Champion for The New York Times The television show “A Different World,” which ran from 1987 to 1993, followed a group of young Black students at Hillman College, a fictional historically Black university. The show tackled growing pains as well as more serious issues like racism and domestic violence. It now streams on Amazon and Max, where it resonates with Gen Z. Three decades after the series finale, the principal cast members are on a tour of H.B.C.U.s across the country — including Spellman and Howard — to boost enrollment and launch a “Different World” scholarship fund. More on culture The rapper Ice Spice. Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images See the most memorable looks from the first weekend of Coachella. A vintage boutique in Los Angeles is a semi-secret spot for celebrities and costume designers. The armorer on the movie “Rust,” who loaded a live round into a revolver that killed a cinematographer in 2021, received an 18-month prison sentence. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Bake our classic five-star banana bread. Eat at the best restaurants in Boston. Turn your bike ride into a workout. Prevent melanoma. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was avalanche. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — Ashley Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 18 Author Members Share Posted April 18 April 17, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering the relationship between major C.E.O.s and Donald Trump — as well as Trump’s trial, Ukraine and feral cats. Donald Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times An ally of business If Donald Trump wins a second term, he has promised to govern as no modern president has, imposing steep tariffs, rounding up immigrants, freeing Jan. 6 rioters and possibly pulling out of NATO. Trump has signaled that he will accomplish all this by appointing loyalists, rather than the more moderate military leaders and corporate executives from his first term. Even so, many C.E.O.s are unconcerned, as my colleague Jonathan Mahler described them in a recent article. They don’t believe Trump will do what he has promised, in contrast to many scholars who have studied politicians like Trump and believe that he will follow through. To make sense of the situation, I asked for help from Jonathan and three Times reporters who have been covering Trump’s second-term plans: Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan. Our exchange follows. ‘They can work with him’ David Leonhardt: Do C.E.O.s just assume that Trump will fail to implement his agenda — or do they quietly support it? Jonathan Mahler: Most C.E.O.s are not wild about a second Trump term. They had a rocky ride the first time around — though they did get the tax cuts and deregulation they wanted — and they are pretty sure he will bring instability, which is generally bad for business. Having said that, many are also down on President Biden, who has been much more aggressive about regulating business. And I don’t have the impression that they have absorbed the messages that Trump and his allies have been sending about what a second term would look like. President Biden Al Drago for The New York Times It may be hard for C.E.O.s to imagine that they could have a lot less influence next time. But to me, that attitude seems to ignore both history and political currents around the world, including within America’s own conservative movement. Charlie Savage: The premise here is that C.E.O.s would be more motivated by larger issues of American democracy as a matter of enlightened self-interest than by their direct self-interest. I am not sure that premise holds. It is common to hear the term “populist” used as shorthand for Trumpism. But that isn’t the right label if the question is which candidate’s policies are more likely to allow corporations and the wealthy to amass more money in the near term. Biden would let Trump’s 2017 income tax cuts expire for affluent people, while Trump is promising a new corporate tax cut. And Trump disparages regulatory agencies — the means by which society imposes rules on powerful business interests, which can cut into their profits — as part of the “deep state” he has vowed to dismantle. Many radical aspects of Trump’s agenda are not incompatible with the wealthy getting wealthier. (Related: In a speech yesterday, Biden harshly criticized Trump as a protector of the wealthy. “He looks at the economy from Mar-a-Lago, where he and his rich friends embrace the failed trickle-down policies that have failed working families for more than 40 years,” Biden said.) Maggie Haberman: I think some C.E.O.s are telling themselves that there were similar warnings about Trump in 2016, and that they believe he’s so transactional that they can work with him. The problem with that take is that Trump’s interest in the C.E.O.s is entirely need based. Yes, he likes approval from the wealthy. But if he wins, he cannot legally run for president again, which would be unconstraining for him. I think the basic point that these executives are unhappy with economic policy under Biden is crucial. I have heard endless complaints about the climate initiatives, student debt relief and the federal deficit (despite a lack of complaining from the same executives when Trump increased the deficit). Most importantly, these executives tend to roll their eyes at coverage of Trump’s radical plans and tell themselves they can find ways to navigate it. ‘Averting their gazes' Jonathan Swan: Trump will have far fewer incentives in 2025 than he did in 2017 to appease corporate America. The donor class largely abandoned him after Jan. 6, even if some are slowly coming back now. American banks refuse to do business with the Trump Organization. And under Trump, the Republican base has changed dramatically. They are more blue collar, more likely to loathe corporate chieftains and Davos “thought leaders.” The relationship between corporate America and congressional Republicans has also chilled. I have heard something like this from several Trump-aligned Republicans about corporate America: “We protected you for years. And then you turned around and sided with the Democrats on every major cultural issue — the environment, immigration, diversity and inclusion and voting rights.” Most Republicans are still cozy with corporate interests, but some of the newer Trump-aligned members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are less dependent on corporate money because they raise a ton online from grass-roots donors. David Leonhardt: I’m left believing that many C.E.O.s genuinely support a lot of Trump’s agenda — but also oppose other parts. The executives seem to be betting they can get the parts they like without the ones they don’t. Maggie Haberman: No matter how genuinely they support or don’t support specific pieces, many are animated by greater antipathy toward Biden than attraction to Trump. And they’re averting their gazes from the parts they don’t like. For more: Read Jonathan’s article on the views of C.E.O.s and The Times’s series on Trump’s second-term agenda. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Trump on Trial At the courthouse. Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial, swore in the first seven of the jurors who will hear the case, including the foreman. Lawyers on both sides questioned prospective jurors, and Merchan dismissed several for social media posts critical of Trump. (See the 42 questions prospective jurors must answer.) After Trump muttered during jury selection, Merchan scolded his lawyer. “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom,” Merchan said. The selection is moving quickly and could be done this week. Read more takeaways from Day 2. When Melania Trump learned in 2018 that her husband had paid to cover up an affair, she was furious with him. Now, she shares his disdain for the case against him. Trump has relied on a handful of explanations to defend himself across his various indictments. Read a fact check. “Another Stormy day in New York”: The late night hosts had plenty to say about the trial. Congress Some House Republicans said they would fight Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to advance aid for Ukraine. Johnson will need Democrats’ help to pass the package. House Republicans delivered articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary, to the Senate. More on Politics The Supreme Court justices sounded wary of letting prosecutors use an obstruction law to charge participants in the Jan. 6 attack. It’s a case that could free convicted rioters from prison and eliminate some charges against Trump. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who worked entry-level jobs alongside his political roles in a populist strategy that helped make him a governor, senator and 2004 presidential candidate, died at 87. Middle East In southern Israel. Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press Israel’s war cabinet continued to debate retaliatory options after Iran’s attack. World leaders are pressing Israel and Iran to de-escalate the conflict. Separate Israeli strikes killed two Hezbollah commanders in southern Lebanon, the military said. Iran’s attack on Israel has shifted focus from the war in Gaza. Read about the status of Israel’s offensive there. International Response The U.S. plans to impose more sanctions on Iran for the attack. The University of Southern California, citing security concerns, canceled a planned speech by a valedictorian, who is Muslim. A Muslim group called the decision cowardly; pro-Israel groups said she had linked to antisemitic material online. Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, urged people to “take matters into your own hands” if pro-Palestinian protesters block roads. More International News In Ukraine. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Thousands of foreign fighters signed up to help Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. The Times spent four days alongside some of them. “Green Islam”: Clerics in Indonesia have issued fatwas to fight climate change. Other Big Stories American officials, to persuade the British government to extradite the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, promised that he would not face the death penalty. Assange is charged with violating the Espionage Act. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said the Fed would probably wait to cut interest rates, citing stubborn inflation. NPR suspended an editor who publicly accused the network of liberal bias. Hawaii bars government contractors from making political donations. Late night fund-raising parties have undermined the effort, a Times analysis found. Opinions Doug Sosnik explains Biden’s narrow path to victory with 11 maps. Israel should act like a democracy and allow outside journalists to enter Gaza, Jodie Ginsberg writes. Two former prosecutors discuss Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan with David French. Here are columns by Thomas Friedman on leadership change in the Middle East and Ross Douthat on the difference between polarization and civil war. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS A scientist and a bilby. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Animals: Feral cats threaten Australia’s native wildlife. Survival training for prey species could help. Nature school: This six-month program in Brooklyn helps New Yorkers bring neighborhood flora and fauna into focus. Social media: On TikTok, more women are making videos about abortions — some reflecting on their own experiences, others explaining how to obtain one. Ask Well: There are drugs to prevent Lyme disease in dogs. Why don’t humans have the same? Lives Lived: Whitey Herzog was a Hall of Fame manager who led the St. Louis Cardinals to a World Series victory. He died at 92. SPORTS N.B.A.: The Sacramento Kings defeated the Golden State Warriors, 118-94, in a Play-In game. The Warriors are eliminated from playoff contention. Los Angeles Lakers: The Kings will play the Pelicans for the Western Conference’s final playoff spot after the Lakers won in New Orleans to advance to the full playoffs. W.N.B.A.: Monday’s draft averaged 2.4 million viewers; the previous record was 601,000, in 2004. Cage-match politics: Dana White, the chief executive of the U.F.C., has risen to the peak of Trump-era political influence. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS At an improvisational movement class. Jim Wilson/The New York Times Medics in the U.S. have begun to explore an idea that was first popularized in Britain: “social prescription.” That means trying to address problems like isolation and stress by suggesting patients explore nonclinical activities — think glassblowing, walks in nature, or ballroom dancing. Some experts, however, are skeptical about how far the approach will go in a nation without socialized medicine: “I think all the biases built into the system favor medical care and more acute intensive care,” a health policy professor told The Times. More on culture At Hamburger America. Colin Clark for The New York Times Oklahoma-style onion burgers are popular in New York. Pete Wells visited a SoHo restaurant where they reach their drippy peak. “Civil War,” the new film from Alex Garland, ends in Washington. Read a behind-the-scenes look at how the sequence came together. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Serve Indian butter chickpeas over rice. Throw a perfect dinner party. Turn a bike ride into a workout. Focus better with a white noise machine. Stop mosquitoes from multiplying. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were complicit and impolitic. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David P.S. Jon Stewart interviewed The Times’s David Sanger, a national security correspondent, on “The Daily Show.” Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 19 Author Members Share Posted April 19 April 18, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering the uneasy alliance between Arab countries and Israel — as well as Congress, A.I. and a book hospital. In Tehran. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times The anti-Iran coalition To understand the current confrontation between Iran and Israel, it helps to think about three recent phases of Middle East geopolitics. Phase 1: Before Oct. 7 of last year, Iran was arguably the most isolated power in the region. The Biden administration was growing closer to Saudi Arabia, Iran’s biggest rival for power. Israel, Iran’s longtime enemy, had signed a diplomatic deal during the Trump administration with Bahrain, Morocco and the U.A.E. Iran, for its part, was financing a network of extremist groups such as Hamas and the Houthis. Together, these developments pointed to the emergence of a broad alliance — among Arab countries, Israel, the U.S. and Western Europe — to check Iranian influence and aggression. Phase 2: Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel scrambled the situation. Israel’s massive military response focused global attention on the plight of Palestinians — a subject that tends to isolate Israel. Arab leaders condemned Israel, while the U.S. and other countries pressured Israeli leaders to reduce suffering in Gaza and devise an end to the war. The anti-Iran coalition seemed to be fraying. Phase 3: The latest phase began last week, as Iran prepared to fire missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s April 1 assassination of Iranian military commanders who work with groups like Hamas. This retaliation would become Iran’s first direct attack on Israel. And the anti-Iran coalition reassembled to repel it. U.S. officials worked closely with Israel to intercept the missiles, as my colleague Peter Baker reported. British and French forces participated, too. Arab countries shared intelligence. Jordan went so far as to shoot down some drones itself. When President Biden commented on the attack’s failure, he did so while sitting next to the prime minister of Iraq, which is home to a missile battery the U.S. had used during the operation. Even though Iran fired more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel, the joint response enabled Israel to avoid a single civilian death. John Kirby, a Biden aide, summarized the result as being “a stronger Israel, a weaker Iran, a more unified alliance.” A new phase now? The question now is how Israel will respond to Iran. Israeli officials have said they must do so to exact a price that will deter future Iranian attacks. From Israel’s perspective, Iran is already the aggressor: Its official policy is to seek the destruction of Israel, and Iran-backed groups — like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — regularly attack Israelis. Israel has responded with covert assassinations of Iranian officials who lead this effort, such as the April 1 strike in Syria. After any future assassination, Israel does not want to face a new Iranian missile barrage. Some analysts believe that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, also has a political incentive to prolong the conflict with Iran. That fight, Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland told The Times, serves Netanyahu’s interests as both “a distraction from the horrors of Gaza and as a way of changing the subject to an issue where he is more likely to get sympathy in the U.S. and the West.” But a major response from Israel — one, say, that killed many Iranians — has the potential to destabilize the broad anti-Iran coalition, much as the war in Gaza has. “The point is to respond smartly, in a way that won’t undermine the opportunity for regional and international cooperation,” Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., told The Wall Street Journal. Among the options Israel is considering: a cyberattack, targeted assassinations or a strike on an Iranian military base in another country. The Biden administration hopes that any attack will contribute to Iran’s isolation rather than Israel’s. The threat to Arab leaders And why are Arab leaders willing to be part of a coalition with Israel? As surprising as it may sound, many see Iran as a bigger problem than Israel, even if they don’t say so publicly. The network of extremist groups that Iran funds and arms destabilizes the region. The Houthis have attacked Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. in recent years, for instance. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt’s government has long loathed. When Arab leaders worry about existential threats to their governments, Israel rarely makes the list. Iran and its network of outside groups do. “Many Arab leaders share the view that Hamas is a terrorist organization that should be destroyed,” said my colleague Michael Crowley, who covers diplomacy. This shared view helps explain why the anti-Iran coalition came together in the first place. But it is a fragile coalition. Arab countries and Israel do not make for easy allies. When Israel is at war — in Gaza or elsewhere in the region — the alliance can come undone. Related: This is the third recent newsletter on shifting global coalitions, which I think are crucial to understanding the news right now. You can also read about Iran’s “axis of resistance” and the emerging China-led alliance that includes Iran and Russia. For more Israel expected a small-scale response from Iran after the strike on the Iranian embassy complex in Syria, but it badly miscalculated, U.S. officials said. Tehran has evacuated personnel from sites in Syria in preparation for Israeli retaliatory strikes, Iranian officials told The Wall Street Journal. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Congress Alejandro Mayorkas Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times The Senate dismissed the impeachment case against Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary. House Republicans have accused him of failing to enforce immigration law. Speaker Mike Johnson said that the House would vote on aid to Israel and Ukraine on Saturday, defying objections from the right. Biden has endorsed the legislation. Johnson could bundle the foreign aid package with a bill that would require either the sale of TikTok by its Chinese owners or a ban on the app in the U.S. More on Politics Arizona Republicans again blocked a Democrat-led effort to repeal the state’s 1864 abortion ban. Some Republicans, including Donald Trump, supported a repeal. Biden plans to increase tariffs on steel and aluminum products from China. More than a dozen members of the Kennedy family will endorse Biden at a Philadelphia rally today in a pointed rejection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid. Columbia Hearing Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University. Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The New York Times The leaders of Columbia University, appearing at a congressional hearing, described campus antisemitism as a major problem and vowed to combat it. Their approach differed from that of the presidents of three other universities who appeared before Congress last year — two of whom later lost their jobs. Read takeaways. Israel-Hamas War A Hezbollah missile attack wounded 14 soldiers in northern Israel, a day after an Israeli airstrike killed two of the militia’s commanders in Lebanon. Gazans released from Israeli detention described being physically abused and deprived of food and water, according to a U.N. report. More International News In Zimbabwe. Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated Press Millions of people in southern Africa face hunger as a drought impacts crops and livestock. Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe have declared national emergencies. The men accused of carrying out the terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall are from Tajikistan. The nation is a key source of recruits to an ISIS affiliate. Political parties in India are using artificial intelligence in their campaigns. One effort involved an avatar of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that addressed voters by name. Torrential rains fell in the United Arab Emirates and in Oman, killing at least 20 people. See photos of the flooding. Business A Boeing whistle-blower told a Senate panel that the company knowingly put out defective planes. A company owned by a Republican megadonor played a bigger role in the origins of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, than previously known, according to court documents. After a judge voided a $47 billion pay package for Elon Musk, Tesla asked shareholders to approve it anyway. The board’s action could prompt more lawsuits. Other Big Stories Executioners botched the lethal injections of Black people more than twice as often as those of white prisoners, according to a report by an anti-death-penalty group. An 11-year-old fossil hunter and her father found a piece of bone on an English beach. Scientists believe it belonged to a dinosaur-era creature that would be the largest known marine reptile. Opinions U.S.C. canceled a valedictorian’s speech over fears of protest. In doing so, it signaled that students can silence one another by summoning a mob, David French writes. Here are columns by Pamela Paul on the benefit of college roommate assignments and Gail Collins on the difference between abortion and guns in politics. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS The Pons-Brooks, greenish in color. Irakli Gedenidze/Reuters Night sky: Earthlings have only a few more days to glimpse Pons-Brooks, a comet with a unique shape akin to the Millennium Falcon. It won’t be back for 71 years. Literary guide: Read your way through Accra, Ghana’s capital. Relationships: Can a sexless marriage be a happy one? Ancient abode: This lava tube in Saudi Arabia has been a human refuge for 7,000 years. Travel: There’s an emergency on an airplane. Here’s what flight attendants do next. Lives Lived: Anne Innis Dagg was often called “the Jane Goodall of giraffes.” Dagg traveled to Africa in 1956 and was believed to have been the first Western scientist to study African animals of any type in the wild. She died at 91. SPORTS N.B.A.: The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Miami Heat, 105-104, to advance to the playoffs, where they will play the New York Knicks. The Heat will face the Chicago Bulls tomorrow in a win-or-go-home matchup. Gambling: The N.B.A. issued a lifetime ban to Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors after an investigation found that he had wagered on the league and shared inside information with bettors. W.N.B.A.: No. 1 pick Caitlin Clark is nearing an eight-figure endorsement deal with Nike. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS At the Met’s book conservation lab. Nicholas Calcott for The New York Times The Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation is a hospital for ailing books inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, six conservationists work to repair books from every department in the museum. Some of the patients are rare and valuable, their pages worn down by time; others are ordinary, and have perhaps suffered a fall during regular use. “For people who love books, entering the lab is like getting hit with Cupid’s arrow,” the leader of the conservation team said. “People walk through this door with a dazed expression on their face, wanting to dedicate their entire lives to making sure the books are OK.” See photos of the restoration process. More on culture Rusty Foster’s newsletter, Today in Tabs, is an obsession of New York’s media class. He writes it from a tiny island in Maine. Trump critiqued Jimmy Kimmel’s turn as Oscars host on Truth Social. “This was five weeks ago,” Kimmel said on his show. “My parents don’t even care anymore!” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne. Bake a chocolate cake. Serve it plain or with espresso cinnamon mascarpone cream. Get comfortable with dirt. A little bit is good for you. Make pasta at home with these tools. Organize your small apartment. Lounge under a patio umbrella. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was meadowy. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted April 20 Author Members Share Posted April 20 April 19, 2024 Good morning. Today my colleague Sapna Maheshwari explains how TikTok has reshaped American life. We’re also covering Iran and Israel, Trump’s trial and the new Taylor Swift album. — David Leonhardt TikTok changed us By Sapna Maheshwari She covers media and technology. In the coming days, Congress may advance a bill to ban TikTok or force its sale to an American company. Politicians in both parties call the app a threat to national security. But its reach is felt most acutely in our culture. Since it first arrived in the United States in 2018 (after merging with another app), its 15-second gulps of entertainment have become a fixture in the lives of tens of millions of Americans — including those who’ve never opened the app. The engine that powers this juggernaut is TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, which figures out what users like and populates a customized feed of addictive videos. It’s called the For You Page, or FYP. It was not built to connect people with friends, the way Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat were. It was built to entertain. As the app fights the most serious threat yet to its autonomy, my colleagues and I explored the ways that its innovation has reshaped American lives. In today’s newsletter, I’ll spotlight a few of them. Hollywood. The film industry at first ignored and feared TikTok. But it eventually embraced the platform as a marketing tool for a new generation of moviegoers. The Sony romantic comedy “Anyone But You” drew a weak $8 million in ticket sales over Christmas weekend, my colleague Brooks Barnes, who covers Hollywood companies, writes. But “the movie turned into a full-fledged hit ($219 million) after TikTok users (at the urging of Sony) began making videos of themselves re-enacting the credit sequence.” The app is virtually a “ticket-selling machine,” he writes. Schools. A few schools have removed bathroom mirrors because so many students were leaving class to film TikTok videos there. These clips constitute “a TikTok genre, dating back at least five years, in which students use school bathrooms as film sets for dance routines, lip-syncing clips or critiques of unclean lavatories,” my colleague Natasha Singer, who covers tech use in schools, writes. School bathrooms have also become “arenas to stage, film and post videos of bullying, physical assaults on schoolmates and acts of vandalism.” News. For 14 percent of American adults, TikTok is a regular news source, up from 3 percent in 2020. People who don’t have traditional backgrounds in journalism, akin to bloggers for the TikTok era, aggregate and share information in snappy videos. Traditional news outlets are scrambling to catch up — and fretting about accuracy and context. Organizations including The New York Times are also making short-form videos in which reporters talk to the camera about their stories, the TikTok way. Cooking. Recipes got a makeover on TikTok, as creators depart from static images and step-by-step instructions. My colleague Becky Hughes, NYT Cooking’s social media editor, writes that traditional recipes have given way to looser concepts. That has helped create trends like eggs fried in a puddle of pesto, sandwich fillings chopped into a homogenous mixture and mini pancakes served like cereal, she says. “The most shareable recipes are the ones that you can watch once, then turn around and make — no measurements, bake times or reading needed,” she writes. “Just dump, stir, like, follow, repeat.” Our story also chronicles how TikTok has prompted self-diagnoses of ADHD and replaced window shopping at the mall. My colleagues looked at the app’s knack for spreading conspiracy theories, its fight with Taylor Swift’s record label and the secrecy around its algorithm. We hope you’ll spend some time on these articles, even if it’s only to check how many TikTok “microtrends,” such as glazed-donut skin and sleepy-girl mocktails, you’ve heard of. Influencing. Rita Harper for The New York Times More on TikTok What happens to a niche product when TikTok makes it viral? It lands at Walmart. Political debate is rife on the app. But few politicians have a substantial presence there. TikTok has turned to nuns, veterans and ranchers to argue that it’s a force for good. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE LATEST NEWS Iran and Israel In Tehran. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times Israel struck Iran early today, Israeli and Iranian officials said. It appears to be the Israeli military’s first retaliation for the Iranian attack on Israel this past week. Iranian and Israeli television played down the strike, as did some officials. A newsreader in Iran described the attack as “not a big deal.” Israeli officials said the limited response was intended to avoid escalation. Iranian officials said that small drones had hit a military base near the city of Isfahan, in central Iran. A separate group of drones was shot down about 500 miles further north, the officials said. The Israeli military has declined to comment. Isfahan, a tourist hub, is also a center of missile production and the site of four small nuclear facilities. Read what we know about the attack. Israel-Hamas War Hamas rejected Israel’s latest offer to pause the fighting in Gaza in exchange for the release of hostages, the C.I.A. director said. The U.S. vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have supported admitting Palestine as a full member state. Reaction to the War The police arrested more than 100 pro-Palestinian students at Columbia University for violating rules about when and where protests can take place. A disrupted honors ceremony, a shattered window, an injured security guard: Leaders of universities, worried about a breakdown in civility, are more tightly enforcing campus rules about demonstrations. More International News In Pakistan. Abdul Majeed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Heavy rains fell in Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing more than 130 people. The authorities have forecast more flooding and rainfall. Voting in India’s election begins today. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is expected to win a third term, has remained popular even as he has become more autocratic. Millions of girls in Africa will not receive promised doses of the HPV vaccine because of manufacturing issues at the drugmaker Merck. Trump on Trial Donald Trump Pool photo by Jabin Botsford All 12 jurors have been seated for Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan. The judge, Juan Merchan, said he hoped opening arguments would begin on Monday. Earlier in the day, Merchan excused two jurors who had previously been chosen, including one who worried about her identity becoming public. More on Politics In Ukraine. Nicole Tung for The New York Times A committee vote advanced a foreign aid bill for Ukraine and Israel. The move underscored Speaker Mike Johnson’s reliance on Democrats. A federal judge rejected Trump’s attempt to delay a group of civil lawsuits over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that were brought by police officers and members of Congress. The U.S. sent dozens of migrants back to Haiti as deportation flights restarted. The Biden administration blocked plans in Alaska to build an industrial road through a national park to reach a large copper deposit. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign qualified for the ballot in Michigan, a swing state. Democrats fear he’ll siphon votes from President Biden. Jimmy Kimmel weighed in on Johnson’s troubles with his conference. Other Big Stories Apple removed the Meta-owned apps WhatsApp and Threads from its app store in China on Beijing’s orders. Emergency room visits related to heat illness increased in the U.S. in 2023, the warmest year on Earth in a century and a half. Opinions Hilary Cass, the pediatrician who led a review of gender transition treatments in England, had the courage to follow the evidence, David Brooks writes. How would Americans react to the O.J. verdict today? The answer highlights our racial progress since the 1990s, John McWhorter writes. Here are columns by Michelle Goldberg and Pamela Paul on Columbia’s response to protests and Frank Bruni on the Trumps’ marriage. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. MORNING READS Party time, with a dachshund. Dafydd Jones Like it’s 1989: In the 1980s and ’90s, Dafydd Jones’s pictures captured the parties of Manhattan’s rich and powerful. Social Q’s: “Should I be loyal to my father or to my dying uncle?” In Manhattan: A Nigerian chess master is trying to break the record for the longest chess marathon. And he’s playing the games in Times Square. Processing: After a hard loss, an e-bike helped a writer embrace life again. Rebrand: Manischewitz, a staple in American Jewish households, is using a fresh look and new recipes to court a new generation. Lives Lived: The guitarist and singer Dickey Betts was a guiding force in the Allman Brothers Band for decades, helping to define Southern rock. He died at 80. SPORTS N.H.L.: The board of governors approved the Arizona Coyotes’ move to Salt Lake City. College football: Colorado coach Deion Sanders scoffed at the number of Buffaloes players entering the transfer portal, asking, “What are we losing?” Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Taylor Swift Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is out today, and fans who want to own a physical copy have no shortage of options. On Swift’s website, you can buy vinyl, CD, and even cassette versions. She offered autographed LPs, though those quickly sold out. One retailer is selling four separate CDs, each with a different bonus track. As streaming cuts into the sales of records, many artists are trying to lift revenues by marketing albums as collectibles. “The music industry is trying to figure out how to maximize superfans and give them more of what they want,” Dan Runcie, an industry analyst, said. More on Swift “She sounds confused, bitter, raging, vulnerable, yet more gloriously chaotic than we’ve ever heard her before”: Read Rolling Stone’s review of the album. Swift’s album arrived amid a promotional blitz. Sirius XM added a Swift radio station, Apple Music used her lyrics in a word game, and Spotify erected a Swift-branded “library installation” in L.A. Swift’s album has come out nearly a month after Beyoncé’s new release. Rather than competing over the charts, the two superstars are giving each other some space. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Top matzo, bread or bagels with Joan Nathan’s homemade whitefish salad. Listen to new songs from Olivia Rodrigo and others. Upgrade your backyard. Relax and let a robot vacuum do the work. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was inkblot. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phkrause Posted Sunday at 06:03 PM Author Members Share Posted Sunday at 06:03 PM April 20, 2024 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. Bedtime stories are typically for children, but audiobooks might offer a soothing analogue for grown-ups. María Jesús Contreras Pillow talk If I’m not working or around other people, more often than not, I want to be reading. The rise in availability of audiobooks has made this easier to achieve. One can read a physical book when stationary, then listen to an audiobook when driving, tidying up, walking or otherwise in motion. I like to get the same book in both formats for complete immersion: read the book over breakfast, switch to the audiobook on the stereo while getting ready for work, listen on headphones during my commute. My fall-asleep routine always, inviolably, involves reading either a physical or Kindle book. It’s so effective a soporific that most nights I struggle to read for more than 10 minutes, which is both satisfying and maddening. I’ve tried falling asleep to audiobooks, but there’s something about it that’s too passive. It’s almost as if I need to be actively engaged in the pursuit of staying awake in order to fall asleep. Reading a physical book in bed, my eyes and hands and even bent knees against which the book is resting are all enlisted in the reading process, a warrior pose against sleep. But sleep always wins. I came across this piece in The Times the other day, “Audiobooks to Lull You to Sleep.” I was intrigued, even though I’d already established that such a practice was not for me. That phrasing, that promise “to lull you to sleep,” shifted the idea of the presleep audiobook for me. As children, we were sung lullabies, read bedtime stories. Once children outgrow these parental ministrations, they’re on their own. That intimacy of being read to and sung to and having their sleep treated as a precious creative project is finished. (“And not a moment too soon!” I hear exhausted parents cry.) But do we ever outgrow the desire to be lulled, whether by soothing voice or chamomile tea or sleep gummy? I don’t think so. “Ever fallen asleep to an audiobook?” I asked in one of my group texts. “Duh, most nights,” my friend Natalie responded immediately. She’s partial to whodunits, nothing too complicated. My friend Chris said one of his most vivid reading experiences was of soothing himself to sleep with Stephen King’s “The Outsider” during a bout with Covid. “It was very trippy because I was only ever partially conscious,” he said. “It was like I was dreaming the book.” Another friend had a list of rules for falling asleep to audiobooks: Choose a book you’ve read before so you’re not overly concerned with following the plot. Use one earbud to listen if you’re worried about keeping a partner awake. Set a sleep timer so you’re not awakened by a particularly animated scene. And the narrator can’t be too dynamic: The experience of Thandiwe Newton reading “War and Peace” was too theatrical for her. Someone suggested that falling asleep to audiobooks might be hostile to the appreciation of literature. While in my ideal reading scenario I approach a book with intention and the full scope of my concentration, that setup is increasingly unrealistic. I asked Dion Graham, a narrator of audiobooks, including Colson Whitehead’s “Crook Manifesto” and David Grann’s “The Wager,” how he felt about the idea of people falling asleep to his voice. He sees it as a privilege of being an adult: “You get to have a bedtime story any time you want,” he said, adding, “You’re a grown-up, so nobody can tell you you have to go to bed. You can listen all night.” Elisabeth Egan, who wrote the Times piece on audiobooks for sleep, compared falling asleep to an audiobook to falling asleep to a comforting movie, like “When Harry Met Sally.” I like the idea of art having many applications, of there not being one “right” way to engage with a book or a movie. There’s so much to worry about already. For more Before there were audiobooks, there was reading aloud to each other. Here’s why adults should do it more. The pleasure of falling asleep with a book on your face. Want Jimmy Stewart to read you a bedtime story? Thanks to artificial intelligence, he can. Wirecutter’s favorite sleep headphones. You don’t have to listen to them to get the benefits: seven books for better sleep. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THE WEEK IN CULTURE Theater Nichelle Lewis, left, plays Dorothy in a new revival of “The Wiz.” Richard Termine for The New York Times “The Wiz” is back on Broadway, nearly 50 years after it debuted, with Wayne Brady in the role of the great and powerful Wiz. Read our review. Rachel Zegler, who played Maria in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” will star in a Broadway revival of “Romeo and Juliet,” Playbill reports. It will feature music by Jack Antonoff. In “Patriots,” now on Broadway, the creator of “The Crown” turns his attention to another period of modern history: the rise of Vladimir Putin. Dozens of theater, film and media stars turned out for the opening of “Suffs,” a new musical about women’s suffrage produced by Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai. Music Republic Records, via Associated Press Taylor Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department.” It is a return to her specialty, Lindsay Zoladz writes, “autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics. ” Madison Malone Kircher spoke with students in a Swift-focused English course at Harvard about their reaction to the new album. More than two decades after they first dated, Nelly and Ashanti rekindled their romance, became engaged and are having a baby. A complex web of rap beefs has emerged since Kendrick Lamar dissed Drake and J. Cole on a recent song. “Popcast,” a Times podcast, breaks down what’s going on. Film and TV “Dune: Part Two” is now available to rent online. For those who have seen it, the director Denis Villeneuve answers all the nerdy questions you might have. A retrospective of Ken Loach’s work at Film Forum in New York shows how his movies form a cinema of working-class superheroes, Jeannette Catsoulis writes. The activist entertainment company Participant, which produced socially conscious films like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” is shutting down after 20 years. Other Big Stories This week was the Salone del Mobile, Milan’s annual fair of furniture and interior design. T Magazine picked 10 standouts from the show. The singer FKA Twigs will perform with the Martha Graham Dance Company. “This is really important for my spirit,” she said. More books were removed from American public schools in the first half of this school year than in the entire previous one, according to PEN America. THE LATEST NEWS The U.S. Capitol on Friday. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times The House advanced legislation to aid Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies, setting it up to pass the chamber today. More Democrats than Republicans voted to advance it. Opening arguments are set for Monday in Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial after the judge seated six alternate jurors. Outside the courthouse, a man set himself on fire and died on Friday night. The Senate voted to extend a warrantless surveillance law that lets the government collect foreigners’ communications. The bill now heads to President Biden. Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted overwhelmingly to join the United Automobile Workers union, despite the South’s decades-long hostility to organized labor. Environmental activists who once worked with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged him to end his independent presidential campaign, warning that it would help re-elect Trump. The University of Southern California said it would have no outside speakers at graduation this year, after its decision to cancel its Muslim valedictorian’s speech stirred controversy. The Biden administration banned oil drilling on 13 million acres of Alaskan wilderness. A subscription to match the variety of your interests. News. Games. Recipes. Product reviews. Sports reporting. A New York Times All Access subscription covers all of it and more. Subscribe today. CULTURE CALENDAR By Desiree Ibekwe 🎥 “Challengers” (Friday): This latest movie from Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Call Me by Your Name,” depicts a love triangle that unfurls over more than decade. In 2006, two best friends and tennis players — Art and Patrick — fall for Tashi, another young player (Zendaya). Art and Patrick’s friendship breaks down, and their careers rise and fall. P.S. I would be remiss not to mention Zendaya’s red carpet outfits. The Times’s Jessica Testa writes that Zendaya has become a “defining star of the modern movie press tour” for her impressively thematic looks. (See some of them in Vanity Fair.) Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT RECIPE OF THE WEEK Jenny Huang for The New York Times. By Melissa Clark Flourless Chocolate Cake Whether you’re looking for a showstopping Passover dessert or just a rich, fudgy treat with coffee, Genevieve Ko’s classic flourless chocolate cake will fit the bill. Crackly on top and creamy in the center, this brownielike confection can be whisked together in one bowl, no electric mixer or egg-separating required. It calls for chocolate chips, which eliminates any chopping. But feel free to use whatever good dark chocolate you have on hand; a cocoa percentage of 70 to 78 percent gives it a nice bittersweet balance. REAL ESTATE Sherry and Dennis Weiss. Jim Wilson/The New York Times The hunt: After spending decades in Arizona, a couple relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they hoped to find a home with no stairs and enough space to host family. Which one did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $1.4 million: A four-bedroom ranch in Boise, Idaho; two acres in Kent, Conn.; and a Tudor Revival cottage in Biltmore Forest, N.C., built in 1927. LIVING Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times What is Highsnobiety? It’s a magazine — and a store, website, production agency and clothing line. Japan: The village of Yoshida is famous for its steel. To attract visitors, residents invite tourists to help them produce it. Beginners: The Times spoke with 150 artists, some planning retrospectives and others making their debuts, about the process of starting. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER How to be less sedentary If you’re anything like me and the millions of other people who have desk jobs, you do a lot of sitting around. But being less sedentary can do wonders for your well-being. Start by carving out small, intentional moments of movement throughout your day. While you don’t need anything new to do that, the right gear makes it much easier to build a habit. Wirecutter’s experts swear by tricks like buying a wobble board for your standing desk, keeping a Hula-Hoop (yes, a Hula-Hoop!) in your home office and using a fitness tracker to remind you to stand. No matter how you decide to get moving, take a lap — it’s good for you. — Annemarie Conte For expert advice, independent reviews and deals, sign up for Wirecutter’s daily newsletter, The Recommendation. GAME OF THE WEEK The Knicks’ Donte DiVincenzo in a game earlier this month. David Banks/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Philadelphia 76ers vs. New York Knicks, N.B.A. playoffs: The Knicks are a No. 2 seed in the East after their best regular season in over a decade. The team’s core — Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo — were college teammates and close friends at Villanova. Their style is tough, defensive, exhausting. Brunson, in particular, has emerged as a star: He scored 40 or more points in 11 games this season, good for second-most in the league. 6 p.m. Eastern today on ESPN NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were ironworking, nonworking and working. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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