Las noticias con La Mont, 15 de febrero de 2024

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*Israeli Forces Raid Hospital Complex in Southern Gaza*

Israel sent troops into Nasser Medical Complex on Thursday in what it described as a “limited” operation against Hamas, raising concerns about the fate of hundreds of patients and medical workers and the many displaced Palestinians who had sought shelter there from the war.

The raid came two days after Israel’s military ordered displaced people to evacuate the hospital, the largest in southern Gaza and one of the last ones functioning in the enclave, and after warnings by health officials that a military operation there could be catastrophic for civilians.

Ashraf al-Qudra, the Gazan health ministry’s spokesman, said that the Israeli military had demolished the southern wall of the complex and begun storming it, overrunning the ambulance center and an area where displaced people had been living in tents. He said that Israeli forces were attacking the hospital’s orthopedic department and had killed one patient and injured several others.

The Israeli military said that special forces soldiers were “conducting a precise and limited operation inside Nasser” against Hamas, which it accused of hiding in the hospital among wounded civilians. Israel, which has said that Hamas uses hospitals across Gaza as cover for military operations, said it had intelligence, including from released hostages, that Hamas had held captives at the hospital and that their bodies might be there.

Neither Israel’s claims nor those of the Gazan authorities could be independently verified.

GAZA

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Source: Satellite image from Planet Labs, Feb. 7By The New York Times
On Thursday, Israel said that it had detained “a number of suspects” at Nasser, and Dr. al-Qudra said that Israeli forces had bulldozed graves on the hospital grounds. In past raids on Gaza hospitals during the war, the Israeli military has arrested medical staff members and dug up graves, saying it was searching for hostages’ bodies.

Hamas and hospital administrators have denied that Hamas uses medical facilities for military operations. International law experts have said Israel is obligated to protect hospitals and other civilian infrastructure even if Hamas is embedded there.

The Israeli military has faced rising international condemnation for its actions against Gazan hospitals, mosques and schools, and on Thursday it said that it aimed to ensure that Nasser, in the city of Khan Younis, could continue treating patients despite the military operation. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said that at the hospital’s request, the military had arranged to allow international aid groups to deliver medical supplies and equipment to the hospital in recent days, including oxygen tanks and fuel.

The United Nations has said that the Israeli military allowed supplies to reach Nasser on Feb. 9 after seven previous attempts to bring aid there failed, as anesthesia, fuel, food and medical supplies ran dangerously low. U.N. officials have said that the Israeli military has impeded deliveries of aid across Gaza, an allegation Israel has denied.

Nasser has become a focus of Israel’s ground offensive against Hamas in southern Gaza, and in recent days doctors there described bombings and gunfire drawing near as Israeli forces edged toward the complex gates. After the Israeli military ordered displaced people sheltering there to evacuate, hundreds of Palestinians fled the hospital on Wednesday, although it was unclear where they would go in a territory pounded by airstrikes and riddled with fighting.

*Trump’s NATO Threat Reflects a Wider Shift on America’s Place in the World*

Alliances that were once seen as the bulwark of the Cold War are now viewed as an outdated albatross by a significant segment of the American public.

When former President Donald J. Trump told a campaign rally in South Carolina last weekend that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies who “didn’t pay,” there were gasps of shock in Washington, London, Paris, Tokyo and elsewhere around the world.

But not in South Carolina. At least not in the room that day. The crowd of Trump supporters decked out in “Make America Great Again” T-shirts and baseball caps reacted to the notion of siding with Moscow over longtime friends of the United States with boisterous cheers and whistles. “Delinquent” allies? Forget them. Not America’s problem.

The visceral rejection of the American-led security architecture constructed in the years after World War II serves as a reminder of how much the notion of U.S. leadership in the world has shifted in recent years. Alliances that were once seen as the bulwark of the Cold War are now viewed as an outdated albatross by a significant segment of the American public that Mr. Trump appeals to.

The old consensus that endured even in the initial years after the end of the Cold War has frayed under the weight of globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession of 2008-09 and Mr. Trump’s relentless assault on international institutions and agreements. While polls show most Americans still support NATO and other alliances, the increasingly vocal objections in some quarters hark back to a century ago when much of America just wanted to be left alone.

“The alliance structure was built to win the Cold War and it’s sort of atrophied,” said Michael Beckley, a scholar of great power competition at Tufts University. “Trump was obviously very jarring when he came to office, but it was part of a long-term trend.” Indeed, he added, “if you look at U.S. history, the last 80 years I really look at as an aberration. Through most of U.S. history, Americans thought they had a pretty good thing going here on the continent and they were largely independent economically of other countries, and that’s still largely true today.”

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Senator Lindsey Graham, wearing a dark suit and tie.
After speaking with Mr. Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham opposed the $95 billion security package for international allies.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
That historic tension between go-it-alone nationalism and broad-coalition internationalism has played out in stark form in the last week. Just days after his speech, Mr. Trump followed up by vowing to end all foreign aid “without the hope of a payback” if he wins his old job back, offering only loans to be reimbursed. And Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans refused to even consider a $95 billion security aid package for American friends in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Even some of the most outspoken Republican hawks in the Senate voted against the aid, most notably Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who opposed the package after speaking with Mr. Trump. Mr. Graham, who has long promoted muscular American leadership and portrayed himself as a ferocious backer of Ukraine and Israel, joined his Republican colleagues in demanding tougher action to secure the United States’ border with Mexico even at the cost of the allies.

The spurt of neo-isolationism over internationalism will surely be the main topic of discussion at the Munich Security Conference, which opens on Friday, as Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and other U.S. officials try to reassure rattled allies. In a sign of how much has changed, Mr. Graham abruptly withdrew as a leader of a congressional delegation to the conference, where he has been a faithful regular for years.

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National security adviser Jake Sullivan and NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, walking side by side.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, left, and Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general. “We know from history that when we don’t stand up to dictators, they keep going,” Mr. Sullivan said on Wednesday.Credit…Olivier Matthys/EPA, via Shutterstock
“Our allies are watching this closely,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters on Wednesday as he urged passage of the security aid. “Our adversaries are watching this closely.”

“There are those who say U.S. leadership and our alliances and partnerships with countries around the world don’t matter or should be torn up or walked away from,” he added. “We know from history that when we don’t stand up to dictators, they keep going. And the consequences of that would be severe for U.S. national security, for our NATO allies, for others around the world.”

*Putin Says He Prefers Biden Over Trump. Commentators Are Skeptical.*

The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, called President Biden experienced and predictable. But Moscow watchers said the comments most likely had an ulterior motive.

See more updates: Election 2024
14m ago
14m ago
Putin Says He Prefers Biden Over Trump. Commentators Are Skeptical.
The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, called President Biden experienced and predictable. But Moscow watchers said the comments most likely had an ulterior motive.

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Vladimir Putin stands at a lectern in front of a blue background.
President Vladimir V. Putin at a technology forum in Moscow on Wednesday, in a photo released by Russian state media.Credit…Pool photo by Alexei Maishev/Sputnik
Anton Troianovski
By Anton Troianovski
Feb. 15, 2024, 8:15 a.m. ET
President Vladimir V. Putin said on Wednesday that it was in Russia’s interest for President Biden to win a second term, calling his American counterpart experienced and predictable, and dismissing concerns about Mr. Biden’s age.

It was the first time that Mr. Putin had directly expressed a preference ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, and the comments ran counter to the widespread assumption that the Kremlin was rooting for former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner to be the Republican nominee. Mr. Putin made the comments in a brief interview with Russian state television released late Wednesday.

“Who is better for us: Biden or Trump?” the interviewer asked.

“Biden,” Mr. Putin responded. “He is a more experienced person, he is predictable, he is a politician of the old school.”

Mr. Putin added, with a smile, “But we will work with any U.S. leader whom the American people have confidence in.”

Some commentators quickly dismissed Mr. Putin’s comments as a provocation or perhaps as a roundabout attempt to weigh down Mr. Biden’s campaign by saddling him with the endorsement of one of America’s main adversaries.

It was also the latest in a series of comments by Mr. Putin that seemed aimed at keeping tensions with the United States in check, coming at a time when other developments — such as jitters about Russia’s possible plans to deploy a space-based nuclear weapon — threaten to exacerbate the strains in the countries’ relations.

Mr. Trump stunned policymakers this past week when he said that he would invite Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO member countries that had not met their commitments on military spending.

Referring to Mr. Trump’s comments, Mr. Putin said in the interview on Wednesday, “Let them figure it out themselves — that’s their problem.”

“I think there’s no point to NATO anymore, it makes no sense,” Mr. Putin added. “It has just one purpose — as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy.”

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Vladimir Putin and President Biden shake hands with the Russian and U.S. flags either side of them.
Mr. Putin with President Biden in Geneva in 2021. In an interview released on Wednesday, Mr. Putin, with a smile, said he would “work with any U.S. leader whom the American people have confidence in.”Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Asked later about Mr. Biden’s health, Mr. Putin defended his American counterpart — even though Russian state media often echoes Republicans in denigrating Mr. Biden as being too old for his job. When he met Mr. Biden in Switzerland in 2021, Mr. Putin said, “they were already saying that he was incompetent. I didn’t see anything like it.”

The commentary was Mr. Putin’s latest on American politics that seemed, superficially at least, to hold out an olive branch to the Biden administration. In his interview last week with Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host, Mr. Putin refrained from criticizing Mr. Biden directly and said little about Mr. Trump, while calling on Washington to negotiate over Ukraine — a suggestion quickly dismissed by the White House.

(In Wednesday’s comments, Mr. Putin also got in a dig at Mr. Carlson, describing his surprise that Mr. Carlson had patiently “listened to my long dialogues” and that he had not asked “tough questions.”)

Even some supporters of Mr. Putin, however, questioned whether the Russian leader was genuine in his praise for Mr. Biden. One post by a pro-Kremlin blogger called the interview a “fantastic session of midnight trolling” that may have been meant to benefit Mr. Trump, given that a Putin endorsement is not necessarily an advantageous one in American politics.

Indeed, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event on Wednesday that Mr. Putin had paid him a “compliment.”

“Of course he would say that,” Mr. Trump said. “He wants to have Biden because he’s going to be given everything.”

When he was president, Mr. Trump drew harsh criticism from Democrats for being overly solicitous of Russia and Mr. Putin. That was particularly true after a 2018 summit in Helsinki, where Mr. Trump chose to support Mr. Putin over America’s own intelligence agencies, before trying to backtrack.

Russia interfered ahead of the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded, while Mr. Putin publicly called Mr. Trump “a very bright and talented man.” But afterward, there was widespread disappointment in Moscow that Mr. Trump did not deliver on his campaign rhetoric about improving ties with Russia.

Asked about Mr. Trump in September, Mr. Putin said, “I think that there will be no fundamental changes in the Russia direction of U.S. foreign policy, no matter who is elected president.”

*Japan’s Economy Slips Into Recession and to No. 4 in Global Ranking*

A slowdown in consumer and business spending held Japan back at the end of last year, with the economy contracting for the second straight quarter.

The Japanese economy contracted at the end of last year, defying expectations for modest growth and pushing the country into a recession.

Japan’s unexpectedly weak economy in the fourth quarter was the result of a slowdown in spending by businesses and consumers who are grappling with inflation at four-decade highs, a weak yen and climbing food prices.

The end of the year also marked a moment that had been expected: Japan’s economy, now slightly smaller than Germany’s, fell one notch to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

On an annualized basis, gross domestic product fell 0.4 percent in October through December after a revised 3.3 percent decline in the previous three-month period. Economists had been forecasting fourth-quarter growth of around 1 percent.

The figures cloud the outlook for Japan’s economy. Corporate profits are at record highs, the stock market is surging and unemployment rates are low. But consumer spending and business investment — two key drivers for the economy — are lagging.

More on Japan
A Foreign-Born Beauty Queen: Karolina Shiino, a Ukraine-born model, won the Miss Japan title in January, a few months after she had been naturalized as a Japanese citizen. Then, her reign came to an unceremonious end over an affair with a married man.
A Talk Show Star: Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades. At 90, she’s still going strong.
Orphan Capsules: The Nakagin Capsule Tower was once hailed as a marvel of architecture. After its dismantlement, its legacy lives on through 23 pods from the original structure that are being repurposed as art spaces and museum pieces.
Plane Collision: The flight crew of a Japan Airlines plane evacuated all 367 passengers and 12 crew members safely after the jet collided with a Japan Coast Guard aircraft while landing at Haneda Airport. But five Coast Guard members were killed.
Shinichiro Kobayashi, principal economist at Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting, said the economy is “polarized” because of higher prices. When corporate profits jump, the prices of goods also go up, but wages have not kept up and consumers are reluctant to spend, he said.

A big question will be if Japanese workers can score a meaningful increase in wages this year.

“The ball is the corporate sector’s court,” said Mr. Kobayashi.

The two straight quarters of negative growth means that the economy is technically in recession, but the figures are preliminary. A large enough revision higher could nullify the recession label.

The soft economic data also complicates an upcoming decision from the Bank of Japan about whether to move ahead with the country’s first interest rate hike since 2007.

Japan’s central bank has stubbornly maintained policies meant to keep interest rates low and to spur spending — a remnant of its long-running battle to combat deflation. Many economists had speculated that the central bank may finally change course as early as April if the economy seemed to be on stronger footing.

Marcel Thieliant, head of Asia Pacific at Capital Economics, wrote in a research note that he “doubts” the disappointing fourth-quarter figures will prevent the Bank of Japan from ending negative interest rates in April even though economic growth will remain “sluggish” this year.

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A woman in Tokyo walking out of a store with window displays of sneakers and boots.
Consumer spending in Japan is lagging.Credit…Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
One sticky issue for the central bank remains the persistently weak Japanese yen. The currency’s decreased purchasing power means the cost of goods imported to Japan goes up, adding to the inflationary pressure that consumers feel. However, it tends to help the bottom line of many leading Japanese firms that sell goods abroad and bring those foreign earnings back to the country in yen.

By holding steadfast in the last couple of years even as the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve have raised rates, the Bank of Japan’s policies have added to the yen’s weakness. This has made it attractive for global investors to borrow yen at very low interest rates in Japan and then invest those funds in dollars or euros at much higher interest rates in the West.

Saisuke Sakai, senior economist at Mizuho Research & Technologies, said it seems likely that the domestic economy would contract again in the first three months of this year because of disruptions from the major earthquake in January that rocked western Japan — a region rich with manufacturing.

This could hurt consumer sentiment even more.

“If we have three straight quarters of negative growth, people would feel like ‘Is the Japanese economy really OK?’” Mr. Sakai said.

With the release of its year-end gross domestic product numbers, Japan also ceded its spot as the third-largest economy behind the United States and China, a position it has held since it was eclipsed by China in 2010. Germany now holds that distinction in terms of U.S. dollars, which are the principal currency used in global trade and finance.

In fact, the German economy is also sputtering. Its decision to stop buying cheap Russian natural gas and oil following the Russian invasion of Ukraine has driven energy costs up sharply, even as the country has shifted to suppliers in the Mideast, the United States and elsewhere.

Japan could in the coming years lose its hold on No. 4, as its shrinking population will struggle to keep up with the growth of India, the world’s most populous country.

*Putin’s Puppets Are Coming to Life*

President Vladimir Putin has always made expert use of puppets. These are regime-friendly politicians who, at the Kremlin’s behest or with its blessing, pose as opposition candidates but never stray into genuinely challenging territory. This system has existed for a long time — at least since Mr. Putin’s first re-election in 2004 — and has always worked perfectly: It maintains the facade of Russia’s imitation democracy. But in the run-up to the presidential election in March, the arrangement seems to have broken down. Mr. Putin’s puppets have begun to come to life.

A month ago, many Russian voters had never even heard of Boris Nadezhdin. Today, after a wildfire candidacy that caught the imagination of the nation, he is the country’s second-most-popular politician. Before his sudden rise to fame, the most noteworthy part of Mr. Nadezhdin’s biography was that he worked with Sergei Kiriyenko and was a member of his liberal parliamentary group. Mr. Kiriyenko, who was prime minister for less than a year in 1998, forswore liberal politics to become a key figure in Mr. Putin’s administration. As the president’s deputy chief of staff, he is now responsible for the country’s electoral campaigns. It is he who decides who will be allowed to participate in them.

In his role, Mr. Kiriyenko has often relied on political puppets. In 2018, for example, he offered Ksenia Sobchak, a popular journalist and daughter of a former mayor of St. Petersburg who had been Mr. Putin’s boss, the chance to run for president. Friends, including me, discouraged Ms. Sobchak from taking him up on the obviously suspect offer, but she agreed. She claimed that it was important to participate in debates and address taboo issues on state television. In the end, Ms. Sobchak won less than 2 percent of the vote. This was evidently Mr. Kiriyenko’s plan. The result was meant to humiliate the liberal, pro-Western middle class that Ms. Sobchak represented, showing that their votes don’t matter and that they could be disregarded.

This year, Mr. Nadezhdin, 60, appeared destined for a similar role. Like Ms. Sobchak, he is well known to television audiences. In recent years, he has regularly appeared on television chat shows, playing the role of a pro-Western liberal. In these contrived settings, he was one of the few people who would speak critically of Mr. Putin and contemporary Russia. But each time, of course, he was convincingly defeated by more numerous and more eloquent propagandists. However sincere his convictions, Mr. Nadezhdin took part in the charade.

Mr. Nadezhdin publicly stated that he had not discussed his candidacy with his old friend Mr. Kiriyenko. But it is hard to believe him. According to sources close to the Kremlin, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, Mr. Kiriyenko himself greenlit the whole thing. Mr. Nadezhdin was considered controlled, nonthreatening and likely to get that same paltry percentage of the vote — once again pointing out to Mr. Putin’s opponents their insignificance. It would be a win-win.

But the campaign did not go according to plan. After Mr. Nadezhdin declared himself the only antiwar candidate in the contest, calling Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a “fatal mistake,” tens of thousands of people lined up in Russian cities across the country to sign up in support. (A presidential candidate needs 100,000 signatures to be registered to run.) The lines for Mr. Nadezhdin were a sensation. In the draconian atmosphere of wartime Russia, they became the only way to legally protest against the war.

That enormous popularity clearly impressed Mr. Nadezhdin. He seems to have decided that he was much more than a puppet of the Kremlin; he could afford to be an independent politician. “Dictatorships don’t last forever. And neither do dictators,” Mr. Nadezhdin wrote on the day he took boxes of collected signatures to the central electoral commission. He had never dared to call Mr. Putin a dictator before. For the Kremlin, it was too much. Last week, citing alleged irregularities in his paperwork, the authorities barred him from the contest.

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Boris Nadezhdin standing in front of microphones, flanked by four advisers.
Boris Nadezhdin after he was barred from the presidential election last week.Credit…Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
Mr. Nadezhdin’s unexpected transformation from Kremlin plaything to people’s hero reminded many of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner group who died last year. He, too, seemed to be Mr. Putin’s puppet. At the beginning of the war, the president instructed him to criticize the army’s leaders to prevent them from becoming too powerful and popular. But Mr. Prigozhin, in video tirades that drew great attention, overdid it. He started to believe that he was the most popular man in the country and attempted a mutiny. It did not end well for him.

But the lesson for the Kremlin was cautionary. In such a fallow political field, where only Mr. Putin reigns, anyone who appears to offer a clear alternative immediately becomes a superstar. Despite the removal of Mr. Nadezhdin from the race, he is by no means the last candidate who may frighten the Kremlin in this campaign. The real leader of the Russian opposition, the imprisoned Aleksei Navalny, has called for voters to support any candidate other than Mr. Putin. Hypothetically, this means that any puppet who ends up on the ballot could pose a danger.

For now, there are three registered candidates who represent parliamentary parties — one each for the Communist Party, the far-right Liberal Democratic Party and the New People Party, a party that while fully controlled by the Kremlin is moderate and business oriented. That party is surely next in line to be backed by protesters. Its candidate, Vladislav Davankov, is 39 and relatively youthful. In January, Mr. Davankov even tried to position himself as a liberal by supporting Mr. Nadezhdin’s efforts to get on the ballot.

In theory, Mr. Davankov should pose no real threat. He is an associate of Yuri Kovalchuk, Mr. Putin’s closest friend, and an experienced puppet. He posed as a candidate for mayor of Moscow five months ago, running almost no campaign and gaining just 5 percent of the vote. But if all those opposed to Mr. Putin’s rule, including those living in exile, start campaigning for him, he could become the antiwar candidate even against his will. The Kremlin will then have to contend with yet another of its brainchildren gone awry.

Such a malfunction could have unexpected consequences. The bureaucrats surrounding Mr. Kiriyenko, according to a source close to the administration who asked not to be named to discuss confidential information, have already started mulling a change to the Constitution that would spare Mr. Putin the rigors of re-election. Russian propaganda has long sought to show that Western democracy is destructive and chaotic. Perhaps, the Kremlin might think, the time has come to abandon it altogether.

Like many Democrats, I’m stuck on a doomsday merry-go-round: Joe Biden shouldn’t be running for president. Joe Biden is running for president. Donald Trump shouldn’t be running for president. Donald Trump is running for president.

But this isn’t 2020. Biden cannot run the same campaign he did last time, when all he had to do was appear normal. Back then he still had some of the Obama sheen; today, he and his vice president are both unpopular. Little in his first term seems to be serving him well. Though he’s done a good job as president and the economy is thriving, few give him credit. And multiple polls show him running behind Donald Trump.

Most troubling, he’s too old and he looks tired. My brain wants to delete everything it’s heard from people who have spent time in his presence in the last year. (It’s not encouraging.) Only 23 percent of voters, according to a January NBC poll, say Biden is better than Trump on “having the necessary mental and physical health to be president,” a statistic that, no matter which way you bend it, doesn’t mean anything good.

If Biden is going to convince America that he has the drive to fight for their interests for the next four years, he has to show that he has four years of ideas and the wherewithal to carry them out left in him.

So how on earth can Biden energize an electorate that tunes out the moment he starts speaking?

What must Biden do to win?

He needs to go against his own political instincts — both in terms of how he’s run in the past and in how he governs. Forget nuance, forget reasonableness, forget complicated facts, forget humility and homilies and old-timey yarns. He should retire the unfortunate phrase “finish the job,” which sounds dispiritingly like tidying up loose ends before keeling over. Keeping it simple will not only help prevent him from mussing things up, it will also help voters absorb the stakes.

Instead, he should take a page from what’s worked for Republicans — going for the gut rather than the mind. Or, as Rachel Bitecofer, a political strategist and co-author of a new book, “Hit ’Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game,” put it when I spoke to her last week, instead of Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” the Biden campaign should think, “When they go low, we hit them where it hurts.”

“We should be focused on a counteroffensive rather than on explaining the facts, which is what Democrats like to do,” Bitecofer said.

That shouldn’t mean ad hominem attacks and childish insults; leave the gutter to Trump. But it should mean pushing hard on the issues in plain, here’s-what-we’ll-do language. It means telling voters exactly how and in what concrete ways a second Biden administration will help them. And it means relentlessly warning people precisely how a Trump administration will hurt them.

First, the issues that matter to voters. The border remains Biden’s biggest weak spot — then again, Trump didn’t fix the border, either. But rather than simply blame Republicans for the failed border deal or more of the same dithering and pandering to the progressive wing, Biden needs to take concrete measures, through executive orders, to address the crisis now. He needs to articulate a longer-term plan to put before Congress in his second term. He needs, at long last, to say: Here is what my administration will do to secure the border and prevent uncontrolled migration.

He has a much easier job on abortion. But still, Biden should hammer it home: He is the candidate who will fight to protect women’s rights.

Americans need to hear that he will continue to ensure the affordable medical care and prescription drugs that their lives and wallets depend on. Because not enough people are feeling the effects of a rebounded economy and slowed inflation, he needs to emphasize what he will do to make sure those benefits extend to working- and middle-class Americans.

And he needs to say that Trump will jeopardize all of that. Trump will push for a federal abortion ban. He will likely do little to push back as Republicans try to chip away at Social Security — no matter what he claims to the contrary. He will eliminate job protections and weaken unions further. He will make jobs less secure. He will amp up his policies of rewarding the rich and penalizing the poor.

There is already plenty of well-justified animus against Trump, but it won’t be enough. Polls consistently show that while Republicans hate Biden and Democrats hate Trump, Democrats do not love Biden nearly as much as Republicans love Trump. If this becomes a personality contest — as hideous and inconceivable as that may sound to steadfast Trump loathers — Biden may well lose.

Early polls are unreliable, and a lot can change in nine months. Once Trump quashes Nikki Haley and secures his party’s nomination, the reality of Trump will set in. With four criminal trials coming up, and as Trump’s increasingly batty assertions reach beyond the ears of his disciples, he will surely set off alarms among those voters who favor sanity.

But Biden can’t wait for that to happen. Trump is running like he’s already president. Biden needs to act with similar urgency. He needs to talk about the future. He needs to start making the threat of a second Trump term — in all its unbridled terror — real now. Lord help us, we’re relying on him to prevent that from happening.

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*Senate Passes Aid to Ukraine, but Fate Is Uncertain in a Hostile House*

Democrats and a group of Republicans teamed up to approve the $95 billion bill, which also includes aid to Israel and civilians in conflict zones, but the House speaker threatened to ignore it.

The Senate passed a long-awaited foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel early Tuesday morning, delivering a bipartisan endorsement of the legislation after months of negotiations, dire battlefield warnings and political mudslinging. But the measure faced a buzz saw of opposition in the House, where Republican resistance threatened to kill it.

The 70-to-29 vote reflected a critical mass of support in Congress for the $95 billion emergency aid legislation and for continuing to arm Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression. The measure would provide an additional $60.1 billion for Kyiv — which would bring the total U.S. investment in the war effort to more than $170 billion — as well as $14.1 billion for Israel’s war against Hamas and almost $10 billion for humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Palestinians in Gaza.

But it also splintered Republicans and foretold a bumpy road ahead in the G.O.P.-led House, where the speaker suggested late Monday that he would not act on it.

Twenty-two Senate Republicans voted with almost all Democrats for the bill — five more than had helped it over a final procedural hurdle on Monday night — while the rest of the party argued against continuing to fund a foreign nation’s battle to protect its sovereignty without first cracking down on an influx of migration into the United States across its border with Mexico.

The vote took place after an all-night Senate session in which a parade of Republican opponents made speeches denouncing various aspects of the bill.

Republican hostility to the measure has been egged on by former President Donald J. Trump, who encouraged G.O.P. senators to reject an earlier version that would have included a bipartisan border security deal, and Speaker Mike Johnson.

“House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement on Monday night, adding: “In the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters.”

His comments suggested that the foreign aid bill’s only path through the House may be for a bipartisan coalition like the one in the Senate — including more mainstream, national security-minded Republicans — to come together and use extraordinary measures to force action on it.

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Senator Rand Paul walking down white marble steps. A painting hangs on the wall.
“A literal invasion is coming across our border,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and an opponent of the bill who bemoaned the lack of immigration restrictions in it.Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
“If we want the world to remain a safe place for freedom, for democratic principles, for our future prosperity, then America must lead the way — and with this bill, the Senate declares that American leadership will not waver, will not falter, will not fail,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said after the vote.

Later, in a news conference at the Capitol, he laid out the stakes should the bill falter across the rotunda.

“Now it’s up to the House: Meet this moment, do the right thing and save democracy,” Mr. Schumer said. “If the hard right kills this bill, it would be an enormous gift to Vladimir Putin. It would be a betrayal of our partners and allies, and an abandonment of our service members.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader who has vocally championed aiding Ukraine, celebrated the vote as a triumph over the skeptics in his own party — though he refrained from directly challenging Mr. Johnson to put the bill on the House floor.

“The Senate understands the responsibilities of America’s national security and will not neglect them,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement after the vote. “History settles every account. And today, on the value of American leadership and strength, history will record that the Senate did not blink.”

Still, Mr. McConnell’s stance was a break with a majority of Republicans in Congress, who have repudiated the measure, reflecting a turn away from the party’s traditional hawkish posture and belief in projecting American power and democratic principles around the world.

Mr. Trump in particular has railed against the legislation from the campaign trail. In recent days, he has argued on social media that it was “stupid” for the United States to offer foreign aid instead of loans and encouraged Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that did not spend enough money on their own defense.

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Senator Chuck Schumer in a dark suit and orange tie.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, urged his fellow senators to pass the aid bill on Monday night.Credit…Valerie Plesch for The New York Times
The pressure did little to erode a coalition of Republicans that cast multiple votes to keep the aid bill moving forward; in fact, the bloc grew as the legislation made its way to passage.

That task will be more difficult in the Republican-led House, where Mr. Johnson controls the floor and right-wing lawmakers have shown a willingness to block legislation they oppose from even coming up for a vote. Still, if proponents can muster enough support from Democrats and mainstream and national security-minded Republicans willing to buck Mr. Trump and the far right, they could steer around the opposition through a maneuver known as a discharge petition. That allows lawmakers to force legislation to the floor if they can gather the signatures of a majority of the House — 218 members — calling for the action.

In the Senate, Republicans who supported the legislation argued that its passage was imperative to maintain the United States’ international standing as a guardian of Western-style democracy against threats posed by authoritarian regimes. They held up Ukraine’s war as a critical test of whether Washington is serious about standing up to aggressors like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“If it only stays this bad for the next couple of years, Putin is losing,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, said of Ukraine’s war effort. He argued that helping Kyiv could weaken Mr. Putin’s grip on power — “and that’s damn sure worth $60 billion, or $600 billion, to get rid of him.”

Mr. Tillis also dismissed the idea that skepticism of the bill by Republican voters was a reason to oppose it.

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Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio is displayed on a TV screen. Reporters are on couches in the foreground.
“The supplemental represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy,” said Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio.Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
“When people use the base as a reason for saying they have to oppose it, I say, I go home, show my base some respect, dispel the rumors, talk about the facts,” he said. “And then I don’t have a base problem.”

Many of the Republican opponents cited the lack of tough border restrictions for the United States. But they also led the charge last week to kill a version of the legislation that paired the aid with stiffer border enforcement measures, including stricter asylum laws, increased detention capacity and accelerated deportations.

“A literal invasion is coming across our border,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said on the floor on Monday. “And all they had time to do in the Senate was get the money, get the cash pallets, load the planes, get the champagne ready and fly to Kyiv.”

Other Republicans argued that it was folly to send Ukraine more tens of billions of dollars, questioning whether Kyiv could ever get the upper hand against Russia.

Mr. Putin is “an evil war criminal, but he will not lose,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, adding that “the continuation of this war is destroying Ukraine.”

And in a memo to colleagues, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, suggested that the entire bill was designed to compromise Mr. Trump’s ability to cut off aid to Kyiv in the future should he win the election.

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The Capitol at sunrise.
The vote took place after an all-night Senate session.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
“The supplemental represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy,” Mr. Vance wrote, adding that Democrats were trying to “provide grounds to impeach him and undermine his administration.”

A few Senate Democrats also opposed the legislation over the billions of dollars worth of offensive weapons included for Israel.

“I cannot vote to send more bombs and shells to Israel when they are using them in an indiscriminate manner against Palestinian civilians,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said in a statement Monday night. He joined Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who normally votes with Democrats but broke with the party because of his objections to Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza.

*Middle East Crisis Mediators in Cairo, Including C.I.A. Chief, Renew Push for Gaza Cease-Fire*

Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, fired missiles into northern Israel on Tuesday that injured at least two people, emergency officials said, amid a fresh diplomatic push to end months of clashes along the border.

Hezbollah said that it had launched two separate attacks into Israel — one aimed at Israeli soldiers and the other at a police building in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.

A 15-year-old boy and a 47-year-old woman were seriously wounded in Kiryat Shmona, according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s nonprofit emergency medical service. They had gotten out of the car they were traveling in when an anti-tank missile hit nearby, only to be injured when another landed, said Ofir Yehezkeli, Kiryat Shmona’s deputy mayor.

Israel and Hezbollah — an ally of Hamas in Gaza — have engaged in near-daily cross-border strikes since the deadly Hamas-led Oct. 7. attacks in Israel. The clashes have displaced more than 150,000 people from their homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.

The United States and others have engaged in diplomatic efforts to reduce the tensions. A Western diplomat said on Tuesday that France had presented a proposal to Israel, Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah. The French proposal was first reported by Reuters.

The proposal details a 10-day process of de-escalation and calls for Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters to a distance of 10 kilometers (six miles) from Lebanon’s border with Israel, according to the diplomat, who is involved in the talks and who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations. The diplomat said that France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, presented the proposal in writing to Lebanon’s government last week while on a visit to the country.

Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that the government had received the proposal. The French Foreign Ministry and Hezbollah did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In recent weeks, Israel has warned that unless a diplomatic solution is reached, it would have to use military force to stop Hezbollah’s attacks in order to allow for tens of thousands of Israelis to return to their homes.

Patrick Kingsley, Roger Cohen and Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.

— Euan Ward, Hwaida Saad and Adam Sella
Show less

Maps: Tracking the Attacks in Israel and Gaza
See where Israel has bulldozed vast areas of Gaza, as its invasion continues to advance south.

A bill with $14 billion for Israel’s war in Gaza passes the Senate, but may falter in the House.
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The U.S. Capitol dome appears behind the branches of a tree.
A vote on an aid bill came after an all-night Senate session in which Republican opponents made speeches denouncing various aspects of the bill.Credit…Valerie Plesch for The New York Times
A $95 billion foreign aid package passed by the Senate on Tuesday morning includes $14.1 billion for Israel’s war against Hamas, though the bill still faces uncertainty in the House.

The $95 billion legislation also sets aside almost $10 billion for humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones around the world, including Palestinians in Gaza.

A Tunnel Offers Clues to How Hamas Uses Gaza’s Hospitals
By Matthew Rosenberg, Ronen Bergman, Aric Toler and Helmuth Rosales Feb. 13, 2024
Gaza’s hospitals have emerged as a focal point in Israel’s war with Hamas, with each side citing how the other has pulled the facilities into the conflict as proof of the enemy’s disregard for the safety of civilians.

In four months of war, Israeli troops have entered several hospitals, including the Qatari Hospital, Kamal Adwan Hospital and Al-Rantisi Specialized Hospital for Children, to search for weapons and fighters. But Al-Shifa Hospital has taken on particular significance because it is Gaza’s largest medical facility, and because of Israel’s high-profile claims that Hamas leaders operated a command-and-control center beneath it. Hamas and the hospital’s staff, meanwhile, insisted it was only a medical center.

Al-Shifa’s value as a military target was not immediately clear in the days after the Nov. 15 raid, even after the Israeli military released the tunnel video that was used to create the 3-D model seen here.

But evidence examined by The New York Times suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.

Classified Israeli intelligence documents, obtained and reviewed by The Times, indicate that the tunnel is at least 700 feet long, twice as long as the military revealed publicly, and that it extends beyond the hospital and likely connects to Hamas’s larger underground network.

According to classified images reviewed by The Times, Israeli soldiers found underground bunkers, living quarters and a room that appeared to be wired for computers and communications equipment along a part of the tunnel beyond the hospital — chambers that were not visible in the video released by the Israeli military.

What the video showed under Al-Shifa
The • dot on the diagram follows the path of the video below that was released by Israel after the raid.

Stairs to surfaceDoorElectrical panelBathroomSinkBathroomRoomRoomDead endTunnel extends
from hereI.D.F.-forced entry point to tunnelSURGERY BUILDING ABOVE TUNNELSHACK ABOVE TUNNEL
By Malika Khurana and Helmuth Rosales; video from the Israel Defense Forces
The Israeli military, however, has struggled to prove that Hamas maintained a command-and-control center under the facility. Critics of the Israeli military say the evidence does not support its early claims, noting that it had distributed material before the raid showing five underground complexes and also had said the tunnel network could be reached from wards inside a hospital building. Israel has publicly revealed the existence of only one tunnel entrance on the grounds of the hospital, at the shack outside its main buildings.

The Israeli military says that it moved carefully because the tunnel was booby-trapped and ran out of time to investigate before it destroyed the tunnel and withdrew from the hospital. Israeli and Qatari officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel had to leave the hospital to comply with the terms of a temporary ceasefire in late November.

American officials have said their own intelligence backs up the Israeli case, including evidence that Hamas used Al-Shifa to hold at least a few hostages. American intelligence also indicates that Hamas fighters evacuated the complex days before Israeli forces moved into Al-Shifa, destroying documents and electronics as they left.

Hospitals are protected under international law, even if they provide medical care for combatants, but their use for other acts that are “harmful to the enemy” can make them legitimate targets for military action. But any action must weigh the expected military advantage against the expected harm to civilians.

Al-Shifa, Israeli officials have argued, is an example of Hamas’s willingness to use hospitals as cover and turn civilians into human shields. But critics say it is also an example of the toll on civilians when Israeli forces surround and raid hospitals to pursue Hamas fighters or rescue hostages, operations that can cut off doctors from fuel and supplies and residents from urgently needed medical care.

Five premature babies died at Al-Shifa before the raid “due to lack of electricity and fuel,” according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which helped organize the evacuation of 31 other infants.

“We all know that the health care system is or has collapsed,” Lynn Hastings, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, has told reporters.

Shack

Built early July 2021

Surgery

building

Tunnel

Al-Shifa Hospital

100 ft

The portion of the tunnel visible in the Israeli military video is at least 350 feet long. But confidential military documents reveal that the tunnel extends twice as far. Satellite Image by Planet Labs
Israel launched its war in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage. Since the start of the war, more than 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there.

In the face of international opprobrium over its raids on hospitals, Israel has publicized evidence that it says shows that Hamas hid fighters among the ill and injured, and held hostages in the facilities. The Israeli military said that before entering Al-Shifa, it warned the buildings’ occupants, opened evacuation routes and sent Arabic-speaking medical teams along with the soldiers.

Hamas and Gazan health officials say the hospitals have served only as medical facilities. But beyond accusing the Israeli military of planting evidence at hospitals, Hamas and Gazan officials have not directly refuted the evidence presented by Israel.

The Israeli military said it apprehended dozens of “terror operatives” at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December, and released videos, at the time, of men carrying weapons. A spokesman for the health ministry in Gaza said that Israeli forces had asked the hospital’s administrators to hand over the weapons of its security guards.

*Trump Is Losing It*

It is unclear whether Donald Trump has forgotten the precise nature of NATO or whether he ever fully grasped it in the first place.

What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue about what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish — the kind of outrageous nonsense that flows without interruption from an empty and unreflective mind.

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’” Trump said, recalling an implausible conversation with an unnamed, presumably European head of state. “‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump recounted responding. “‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

The former president’s message was clear: If NATO members do not pay up, then he will leave them to the mercy of a continental aggressor who has already plunged one European country into death, destruction and devastation.

Except NATO isn’t a mafia protection racket. NATO, in case anyone needs to be reminded, is a mutual defense organization, formed by treaty in 1949 as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union hardened into conflict. “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” states Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.

According to the terms of an agreement reached last year, member states will work to spend at least 2 percent of national G.D.P. on military investment.

But let’s set this bit of fact-checking aside for a moment and look at the big picture.

It is not just that Trump is ignorant on this and other vital questions; it is that he is incoherent.

Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.

Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.

Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”

There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.

“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said, repeating his false claim that Pelosi was responsible for the failure of Capitol security on Jan. 6.

If you would like, you can also try to make sense of the former president’s recent attempt to describe a missile defense system:

“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A.,” Trump said, before taking an unusual detour. “These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” he continued, gesturing to his arms and his head to emphasize, I guess, that the people responsible for building such systems are capable and intelligent.

“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom,” he added.

I assume Trump is describing the pressure of actually manning a missile defense system. Even so, one would think that a former president — currently vying to be the next president — would at least try to be a little more articulate.

But this gets to one of the oddest things about this election cycle so far. There is no shortage of coverage of President Biden’s age, even if there’s no evidence that his age has been an obstacle to his ability to perform his duties. Indeed, it is plainly true that Biden has been an unusually successful president in areas, like legislative negotiations, that require skill and mental acuity.

Coverage of Biden’s age, in other words, has more to do with the vibes of an “elderly” president — he isn’t as outwardly vigorous and robust as we would like — than it does with any particular issue with his performance.

In contrast to the obsessive coverage of Biden’s age, there is comparatively little coverage of Trump’s obvious deficiencies in that department. If we are going to use public comments as the measure of mental fitness, then the former president is clearly at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately for Biden, Trump benefits from something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because no one expected Trump, in the 2016 election, to speak and behave like a normal candidate, he was held to a lower effective standard than his rivals in both parties. Because no one expected him, during his presidency, to be orderly and responsible, his endless scandals were framed as business as usual. And because no one now expects him to be a responsible political figure with a coherent vision for the country, it’s as if no one blinks an eye when he rants and raves on the campaign trail.

It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue here is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may be unable to do the job at some point in the future; Trump, it seems to me, already is.

One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.

*Biden’s Age Is a Campaign Problem, Not a Governing One*

Last fall I found myself at a dinner party that included a former Biden administration official and a Democratic donor, and the conversation turned, naturally, to President Biden’s age and his prospects for re-election. The ex-official said that from inside the White House, where people experience the policymaking process firsthand, Biden was overwhelmingly seen as an effective leader who should run again. The donor, on the other hand, saw Biden mostly at the fund-raisers where watching the president’s meandering speeches left him terrified about the upcoming campaign. The gulf in their perceptions, I think, speaks to the fact that Biden’s age has impaired his ability to campaign much more than his ability to govern, which has created an impossible dilemma for the Democratic Party.

I have argued since 2022 that Biden shouldn’t run again because he’s too old, but there’s never been much sign that his advanced age affects his performance in office. I’m not aware of any leaks from the White House suggesting that Biden is confused, exhausted or forgetful when setting priorities or making decisions. It’s not just Democratic partisans who find Biden more impressive up close than his frail, halting image in the media would suggest. As Politico reported of the ousted House speaker Kevin McCarthy, “On a particularly sensitive matter, McCarthy mocked Biden’s age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.” There are obviously things Biden does that I disagree with; I wish he’d take a much harder line with Israel over civilian casualties in Gaza. But while his reluctance to publicly criticize Israel might stem from an anachronistic view of the country — Biden likes to talk about the Labor Zionist prime minister Golda Meir, who left office 50 years ago — his position is a mainstream one in the Democratic Party and can’t be attributed to senescence.

Because Biden has delivered on many Democratic priorities, there was never any real push within the party to get him to step aside, forfeiting the advantages of incumbency in favor of a potentially bruising primary contest. But it’s obvious to most people watching the president from afar that he looks fragile and diminished and that his well-known propensity for gaffes has gotten worse. Poll after poll shows that voters are very concerned about his age. That’s why the special counsel Robert Hur’s gratuitous swipes at Biden as someone who might seem to a jury like a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” have caused an epic freakout among Democrats. His words brought to the surface deep, terrifying doubts about Biden’s ability to do the one part of his job that matters above all others, which is beating Donald Trump.

That’s true even though the report by Hur, a former Trump appointee tapped by Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, looks like a partisan hit job. (Democratic attorneys general have a terrible habit of appointing Republican special counsels in an effort to display their own impartiality — a type of moral preening that Republican administrations rarely fall victim to.) Since Hur decided not to charge Biden with any crimes, his comments about Biden’s age, particularly his claim that Biden couldn’t remember the year his son Beau died, seemed designed to shiv him politically. If so, it worked.

Some Democrats are now comparing the media fixation on Biden’s age to the saturation coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails eight years ago, and there are similarities. Betty Friedan wrote that “housewifery expands to fill the time available,” and the same is true of bad political news. Trump’s scandals are so multifarious that each one tends to get short shrift, while his opponents’ weaknesses and missteps can be examined at length precisely because there are fewer of them. This asymmetry worked to Trump’s advantage in 2016, and it’s helping him now.

But there’s also a crucial difference between Clinton’s emails and Biden’s years. Clinton’s vulnerability was never really about her insufficient care with information security protocols. Instead, the emails became a symbol of a powerful but inchoate sense, magnified by disproportionate press attention, that she was devious and deceptive. Biden’s age is a much more straightforward issue; people think he’s too old because of how he looks and sounds. Pretending it’s not a problem isn’t going to make voters worry about it less; it’s just going to make them feel they’re being lied to.

Instead, Biden’s campaign should be candid about the challenges of aging — which, of course, the increasingly incoherent Trump shares — while doing its best to demonstrate that Biden’s judgment and grasp of complicated issues are still strong. That means doing a lot more interviews and events, especially those focused on policy questions, letting the American people see the version of Biden visible to those who work with him. He’ll almost certainly make plenty of verbal slips, but as they pile up, they might start to seem like old news, especially if he’s not defensive about them.

And if he’s not up for a major change in strategy? It might sound extreme, but in that case, he should find some medical pretext to step aside in time for a replacement to be chosen at the Democratic convention. Biden’s greatest contribution to this country was saving us from another Trump term. If his unwillingness to face his own limitations now clears the way for Trump’s restoration, it will be not just a mistake but a tragedy.

*A ‘Democracy Party’ Like No Other: One of the World’s Biggest Elections*

The celebration of the act of casting a vote has particular resonance in Indonesia, which until a few decades ago was a brutal dictatorship.

The young women and men moved from booth to booth, asking questions about the political hopefuls’ track records and visions for the country. A few steps away, first-time voters practiced casting their ballots in pretend voting booths. And onstage, talk show guests discussed how to make an informed choice in backing a candidate.

This gathering of more than a thousand people one recent Sunday in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, was a prelude to a celebration that is widely known here as “Pesta Demokrasi,” or Democracy Party.

Otherwise known as Election Day, it’s when tens of millions of people across this vast archipelago of thousands of islands head to polling stations that are sometimes decorated with balloons, garlands and flowers, and manned by officials dressed up as Spider-Man, Batman, Thor or other superheroes. After voting for presidential, parliamentary and local legislative candidates, people camp out near their polling places with food as they wait for early counts to trickle in. The next “party” is on Wednesday.

Free and fair elections in Indonesia were unthinkable as recently as the mid-1990s, when it was still under the brutal rule of Suharto. But after his fall in 1998, the country emerged as the world’s third-largest democracy. Partly because Election Day is a national holiday, voter turnout has consistently been among the highest in the world and reached a record 80 percent in 2019. With the minimum voting age set at 17, the biggest bloc this time is people under 40, who make up more than half of the 205 million voters in Indonesia.

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In a black and white photo, a man writes on a large board with papers while adults and children, sitting and standing, look on.
Counting votes during the presidential election in Jakarta in June 1999.Credit…Roger Lemoyne/Getty Images
The presidential election is a three-way race, and billboards with the faces of the three candidates — Anies Baswedan, Prabowo Subianto and Ganjar Pranowo — loom over major roads. Their debates are furiously discussed on Instagram, TikTok and X. Indonesians refer to the three men by their candidate numbers, so in homes, warungs and cafes here, the inevitable question is: “Are you voting for 1, 2 or 3?”

But even this vibrant electoral process has its limits.

“Indonesia is very new to democracy, and a lot of people are not used to choosing their candidates based on track records and ideas,” said Abigail Limuria, an organizer of the “Election Festival” gathering in Jakarta that aimed to educate voters about the candidates and issues. “Many of them just vote based on who their family is choosing.”

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People dressed in red, including some wearing traditional Indonesian theater costumes, wave flags as they ride motorcycles.
A campaign event for the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle in May 1999. Some of the rally-goers wore traditional costumes from Indonesian theater, an early example of how political campaigns in the country became festive occasions. Credit…Eddy Purnomo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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This campaign has also raised serious questions about the future of the hard-won democratic norms in Indonesia. President Joko Widodo, the popular incumbent who is barred from seeking a third five-year term, has alarmed critics with dynastic machinations that have allowed his son to run for vice president. Though not explicitly endorsing anyone, he has appeared to engineer an alliance with Mr. Prabowo, a former rival who has long been accused of human rights abuses and was once married to a daughter of Suharto, the dictator.

Yet there is still a belief that ultimately every vote matters.

“I am taking this as an opportunity to contribute to change Indonesia for the better,” said Shiela Mutia Larasati, 25, a fashion entrepreneur based in Jakarta. “Previously, I was still young and apathetic. But now, I have hope for Indonesia.”

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Three people in superhero costumes sit and stand behind a table piled high with paper ballots.
Election officials wearing costumes at a polling station in Surabaya in 2019.Credit…Zabur Karuru/Antara Foto, via Reuters
Recent elections in Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, have been marred by ugly identity politics — Mr. Joko was called a “Chinese Christian” (he is neither), and Mr. Prabowo, who has sought the presidency multiple times but never won, was dogged by questions about how many times he prayed in a day. Campaigning used to mean distributing food supplies to get votes. But this year, the political discussion appears to be more open about issues like democracy and defense, even if the presidential candidates all offer a vision akin to that of Mr. Joko: policy based on infrastructure and welfare projects.

“I think that’s a good sign of the improvement of democracy,” said Danis Syahroni, 24, a postgraduate student at Gadjah Mada University in the city of Yogyakarta. “We can debate and discuss candidates’ ideas.”

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A large stadium full of people, many waving various flags. Two large inflatable figures of men are visible above the crowd.
A campaign rally for Prabowo Subianto in Jakarta on Saturday.Credit…Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
About 1,200 young people turned up at a convention hall in Jakarta where the “Election Festival,” known locally as “Festival Pemilu,” was held. By midafternoon, the line was so long that organizers had to turn people away. One of the headliners was a group of young comedians known as “Trio Netizen.”

“If you get elected and you become someone important, don’t become crazy, yah?” said one of the comedians, Eky Priyagung, a reference to the 2019 election, when the opposite happened: Some candidates who lost were so devastated that they had to seek inpatient care for their mental health. The crowd burst out laughing. (This year, several hospitals have announced that they have prepared psychiatric wards for candidates.)

The event was an offshoot of a website called “Bijak Memilih,” or Choose Wisely, that caters to young voters. Ms. Abigail said she wanted to start the website because many young people have expressed confusion about whom to vote for in this election. Some are skeptical about the independence of the country’s media outlets, owned by tycoons who often hew to their political patron’s interests.

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People on a small boat loaded with white cardboard boxes, some flat and some assembled and inside clear plastic bags, distribute them to other boats and up onto land.
Workers distributing ballot boxes by boat to Bulang island on Wednesday.Credit…Antara Foto, via Reuters
To drive voters to polls, activists have relied on memes and stunts like putting out TikTok videos equating the candidates with various Taylor Swift songs. A Spotify Wrapped campaign playfully overlaps music with corruption statistics.

At least one candidate has also used social media to his advantage. With the aid of savvy digital tactics, Mr. Prabowo has had some success in rebranding himself from a feared general into a cuddly grandfather. Many young people simply do not know about his past. His apparent alliance with Mr. Joko has additionally helped his popularity.

In recent weeks, opposition to Mr. Prabowo has coalesced around images of people brandishing four fingers on one hand. The message: Voters should pick anyone except Mr. Prabowo and choose either No. 1 (Mr. Anies) or No. 3 (Mr. Ganjar).

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Women in head scarves look at merchandise, like small posters and pictures of T-shirts.
Supporters of Anies Baswedan buying campaign merchandise at a rally in Jakarta on Thursday.Credit…Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Anies, a former governor of Jakarta, has found support from an unlikely bloc: Indonesian K-pop fans. They have rented a food truck, crowd-funded digital billboards, and ordered light sticks for his last rally before the election. Many say they were taken by Mr. Anies after he emerged from a debate and did a TikTok livestream with his supporters, where, like a K-pop star, he answered questions about his love life and his favorite books.

If none of the three candidates win more than 50 percent of the vote, the race will head to a runoff in June. Recent surveys suggest Mr. Prabowo could pass the 50 percent mark, but that is far from certain. What remains certain is the high level of civic engagement.

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*5 Takeaways From the New Hampshire Primary*

Donald Trump made history with a second straight victory, as Nikki Haley and her supporters look increasingly adrift in his Republican Party.

The much-fabled power of New Hampshire’s fiercely independent voters wasn’t enough to break the spell Donald J. Trump has cast over the Republican Party.

Brushing aside Nikki Haley a little over a week after he steamrolled her and Ron DeSantis in Iowa, Mr. Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate who was not a White House incumbent to carry the nation’s first two contests. His winning margin of 11 percentage points in moderate New Hampshire demonstrated his ironclad control of the party’s hard-right base and set him on what could very well be a short march to the nomination.

For Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, it was a disappointing finish in a state she had poured considerable resources into carrying. Her efforts to cobble together a coalition of independents and anti-Trump Republicans, with support from the state’s popular governor, were no match for Mr. Trump’s legions of loyalists.

Even though Ms. Haley is vowing to fight on, the difficult terrain ahead in South Carolina means that this first-in-the-nation primary could turn out to be the last.

Here are five takeaways.

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Mr. Trump onstage during his watch party in Nashua, N.H.
Mr. Trump delivered angry remarks in Nashua, N.H., after his victory, repeatedly attacking Nikki Haley. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Trump demonstrated his command of the G.O.P. in a purple state.
In 2016, Mr. Trump’s win in New Hampshire put him on a path to the nomination and ultimately the presidency.

Eight years later, the state delivered again for him.

He performed well across nearly every demographic group, according to exit polls. He won every age group, among men and women.

In the final days, Mr. Trump sought to project an air of inevitability, hoping to avoid a protracted and costly fight as he resists efforts to convict him in a criminal trial before Election Day in November.

His success in New Hampshire was likely to lead to more pressure on Ms. Haley to drop out from his Republican allies, who include senators, House members and governors.

He won more than 50 percent of the vote, although his margin of victory decreased significantly from the primary in 2016, when he won New Hampshire by about 20 points over a crowded field. And he fell far short of his 30-point triumph in this month’s Iowa caucuses.

He seemed visibly aware of that fact when he took the stage on Tuesday night, and signaled an uglier next phase.

Using an expletive as he repeatedly attacked Ms. Haley, he said, “I don’t get too angry — I get even.”

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Supporters of Ms. Haley and President Biden standing together in Conway, N.H.
Supporters of Ms. Haley and President Biden in Conway, N.H. With the help of Democratic allies in the state, he won a write-in campaign in the party’s primary.Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Haley has an incredibly rocky road ahead.
The contest now moves to South Carolina, the next competitive primary and one where Ms. Haley faces a steep uphill battle. Mr. Trump has led polls in her conservative home state by more than 30 points for months.

For Mr. Trump, drawing the contest to a close in South Carolina would allow his campaign to avoid the costly expense of Super Tuesday on March 5, when 16 states hold primary contests. He’s expected to unleash a barrage of harsh attacks, a tactic similar to the brutal campaign of humiliation he waged against Mr. DeSantis, who quit the contest on Sunday.

Already, Mr. Trump has argued that Ms. Haley is hurting the party’s chances in the fall by forcing him into an extended nominating contest.

“If she doesn’t drop out, we have to waste money instead of spending it on Biden, which is our focus,” he told Fox News shortly after the race was called.

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Ms. Haley greeting supporters after her loss in the New Hampshire primary.
Ms. Haley has been embraced by Republican traditionalists, but they are outnumbered in today’s party. Credit…Sophie Park for The New York Times
The old guard of the G.O.P. is a dwindling faction.
Tuesday night’s results showed that the time is coming to sit shiva for the Republican Party of the Bushes, Cheneys and Romneys. And the donor class that once played an outsize role in shaping the party is now a desperate group of bystanders.

Ms. Haley ran on a traditional Republican platform, one that has faded during the Trump years. She campaigned on issues like reducing federal spending, enacting a staunchly interventionist foreign policy and overhauling programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Her candidacy was embraced by the pre-Trump G.O.P., as the gang got back together for one last shot at the interloper.

Traditional party donors from Wall Street, who loathe Mr. Trump, poured money into Ms. Haley’s super PAC. And in New Hampshire, she seemed to have a political environment more hospitable than in Iowa, with a voting base that is less religious and more educated.

But on Tuesday, New Hampshire Republicans rejected Ms. Haley and her attempt to revive the old guard.

She insists her campaign is alive and well, marching to South Carolina, but the wing of the party she represents will come out of New Hampshire on life support.

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A man and a woman walking in shadows in a conference center. The man is holding write-in Biden signs on a post, and a table has more signs.
Supporters of a write-in campaign for Mr. Biden gathered for a watch party on Tuesday night. His name was not on the ballot in the state after a clash over its diminished status on the nominating calendar. Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Biden, Democratic grumbling aside, is cruising to renomination.
President Biden did not submit his name for the New Hampshire ballot, after the state refused to comply with a new Democratic nominating calendar that made South Carolina the first primary contest. Yet a scrappy write-in campaign run by the president’s allies delivered a victory for him nonetheless.

His most significant challenger — Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota — was on track to capture little more than 20 percent of the vote. The self-help author Marianne Williamson, who mounted a second bid for the Democratic nomination, was far behind with just 5 percent.

Democrats have spent months pining for another option, raising worries about Mr. Biden’s age in polls, focus groups and even “Saturday Night Live” sketches. But these results underscore the reality of the Democratic nominating process: Mr. Biden faces no real opposition.

For years, many Democrats questioned whether Mr. Trump would complete his comeback and become the 2024 nominee. Now that he is ascendant, Mr. Biden and his party are turning their attention to the general election and preparing to transform the race into a debate over whether a polarizing and criminally indicted former president is fit to return to office.

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Donald Trump’s mug shot is illuminated on a mobile billboard, seen from in between snow-covered houses after dark.
Mr. Trump’s mug shot displayed on a mobile billboard in Rochester, N.H. He is facing 91 criminal charges in four cases.Credit…John Tully for The New York Times
Trump’s strength may not translate to the general election.
Despite his robust showing, the results offered warning signs for Mr. Trump ahead of November.

A significant slice of Ms. Haley’s support came from unaffiliated voters who wanted to send a message about stopping Mr. Trump — a reminder that he owns Republicans, but doesn’t own everybody else.

While Mr. Trump won the race, he failed to rack up the kind of numbers that would be expected of someone essentially running as an incumbent. He has been behaving as one as part of his strategy in battling the 91 criminal charges he is facing both in courts of law and courts of public opinion.

But only about half of those who voted in the New Hampshire primary said they would consider him fit for the presidency if he were convicted of a crime, according to CNN exit polling. Those who might not vote for him with a criminal conviction, assuming a trial takes place this year, remain a minority. But in a close fall campaign, such factors could matter.

On the flip side, the issues that exit polls suggested are driving a number of voters, including immigration, are ones that the Trump team expects to benefit him in a general election. And even with divisions within the Republican Party, the vast majority of its voters view someone wearing their partisan jersey as preferable to Mr. Biden.

*Trump’s Win Adds to Air of Inevitability as Haley Sharpens Edge*

The former president’s victories in Iowa last week and in New Hampshire on Tuesday leave his main Republican rival, Nikki Haley, with an uphill battle.

Donald J. Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday provided him the second of an opening pair of wins in the Republican nomination fight that accelerated his push for the party to coalesce behind him and deepened questions about the path forward for Nikki Haley, his lone remaining rival.

The defeat of Ms. Haley in New Hampshire came eight days after the former president trounced Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida so thoroughly in Iowa that it drove Mr. DeSantis from the race. Mr. Trump and his allies have turned his twin early wins into a milestone — declaring, after just the first two contests, that the party needs to unite behind him now to prepare for a rematch in November between Mr. Trump and President Biden.

No Republican candidate has ever won the first two states and then not ultimately secured the presidential nomination, a fact that Mr. Trump himself noted in his victory speech in Nashua, N.H.

“When you win Iowa and you win New Hampshire, they’ve never had a loss — there’s never been — so we’re not going to be the first, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.

Regardless of what comes next, the win on Tuesday sealed Mr. Trump’s status as the party’s standard-bearer in the history books: Before Mr. Trump, the only Republicans who have ever won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary have been sitting presidents.

The race was called on Tuesday night by The Associated Press the moment the last polls closed, sapping any drama from the outcome. Minutes later, Ms. Haley raced to speak first at her own election party in Concord, N.H., forcefully pressing her case that nominating Mr. Trump would be tantamount to conceding the general election to Democrats.

“You can’t fix the mess if you don’t win an election,” she said. “A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency.”

Ms. Haley pledged to press forward despite the loss on Tuesday. “New Hampshire is first in the nation — it is not the last in the nation,” she declared. “This race is far from over.”

Before Mr. Trump even took the stage on Tuesday night, the former president called Ms. Haley “delusional” in a social media post, one of several he wrote in all capital letters while she spoke.

It was a preview of a caustic and sometimes crude speech by the former president, in which he used the national platform of a victory address to bash his lone remaining rival, whose voters he would eventually need to win over in the fall.

“She didn’t win. She lost,” Mr. Trump said, calling her an “impostor” that he had beaten “so badly.” He mocked Ms. Haley for delivering an overconfident concession speech: “This is not your typical victory speech, but let’s not let somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night.”

Republicans began almost immediately to ratchet up pressure on Ms. Haley to quit.

“It’s time to drop out,” said Taylor Budowich, the chief executive of Mr. Trump’s super PAC. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who serves in the Republican leadership and had previously endorsed the former president, called Mr. Trump on social media the “presumptive” nominee. And Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has been critical of Mr. Trump, formally backed him, declaring, “Republicans need to unite around a single candidate.”

2024 Election: Live Updates
Updated
Jan. 24, 2024, 9:46 a.m. ET2 hours ago
2 hours ago
‘This thing is over’: Elected Republicans line up behind Trump.
‘The Daily’ discusses what New Hampshire means for the rest of the campaign.
Here’s the latest after Trump’s New Hampshire win.
Ms. Haley, Mr. Trump’s former United Nations ambassador, had sought for months to narrow the 2024 primary to a one-on-one race with him. She got what she wanted on Sunday with Mr. DeSantis’s exit, giving her only a single full day before voting began in New Hampshire to prosecute her case to independent voters and Republicans that she would be the strongest Republican candidate against Mr. Biden.

In New Hampshire, she did everything she could, from pouring beers to holding babies, as she blitzed across the state alongside its Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who had endorsed her.

But New Hampshire voters appeared to look past Ms. Haley’s warnings that Mr. Trump, who has been indicted four times in the last year and faces 91 felony criminal counts, would bring “chaos” to the campaign trail and be uniquely vulnerable to defeat in a general election.

The attacks between Mr. Trump, 77, and Ms. Haley, 52, had sharply escalated in recent days.

He returned to his nativist playbook to emphasize her birth name, and then purposefully mangled it in social media posts, and even indulged in birther conspiracy theories about her eligibility to serve because she is the daughter of Indian immigrants (she was born in America). Ms. Haley questioned Mr. Trump’s mental acuity after he confused her name with Nancy Pelosi’s, using the incident to press for generational change.

In her concession speech on Tuesday, she cited that verbal slip-up as someone shouted “Geriatric!”

Ms. Haley told the crowd, “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.”

Now, Ms. Haley must find traction beyond the first two states, where almost all the campaigning and advertising had occurred. Her super PAC has spent more than $71 million so far — and 99.9 percent of those funds were poured into Iowa or New Hampshire, according to federal records.

Ms. Haley faces what could be an excruciatingly long month. She opted not to compete in the Nevada caucuses with Mr. Trump on Feb. 8 after the state party made rules favorable to him.

“I’m pleased to announce we just won Nevada,” Mr. Trump declared on Tuesday. The formal Nevada caucuses may still be two weeks away, but because Mr. Trump is the lone remaining serious G.O.P. candidate in the running for delegates, he is expected to win all of them.

The next significant clash between Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley will be Feb. 24, in the primary in Ms. Haley’s home state of South Carolina, where she once served as governor.

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Donald Trump walking up a set of portable stairs and through a blue curtain, with a bright light peeking through the other side.
Mr. Trump entering the stage at a campaign rally in Manchester, N.H., on Saturday. Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley’s next significant clash will be in the primary in Ms. Haley’s home state of South Carolina.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
As the calendar slows, it is Mr. Trump with the political momentum.

In the last 10 days, four of Mr. Trump’s vanquished rivals have all lined up behind him: Mr. DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and South Carolina’s junior senator, Tim Scott, whom Ms. Haley first appointed to the Senate.

“You must really hate her,” Mr. Trump joked to Mr. Scott onstage on Tuesday.

Mr. Scott made his way to the microphone next to Mr. Trump and replied, “I just love you.”

On Monday, Mr. Trump was also endorsed by a Republican lawmaker from Ms. Haley’s home state, Representative Nancy Mace, whom Mr. Trump had tried to oust after she harshly criticized his conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Ms. Haley had campaigned with Ms. Mace in 2022.

“You’re seeing this unification moment happening, when in a normal primary you might see it happen in June or July,” Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, who campaigned this week for Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, said in a brief interview. “You’re seeing it in January, because the race is effectively over.”

Ms. Haley has pledged to push forward.

“There are dozens of states left to go,” Ms. Haley said on Tuesday night. “And the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina.”

The Haley campaign has already announced a $4 million ad campaign in South Carolina and has fund-raising trips to New York, Florida, California and Texas in the next two weeks to refill her coffers. Ms. Haley’s campaign and her allies have argued that Mr. Trump remains near the 50 percent mark in support in the first two states, a sign of potential vulnerability because as a former president he is universally known.

The strategists leading the Trump campaign, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, predicted in their own memo ahead of the vote on Tuesday that Ms. Haley would be — in all capital letters — “demolished and embarrassed” in South Carolina if she did not quit the race before then.

Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who had worked on a super PAC supporting former Vice President Mike Pence, said Ms. Haley had now ceded her best opportunity to score an outright early win.

“This is a black-and-white business — you either win or you lose,” Mr. Reed said, before invoking the famous rental-car commercial wars of the past. “It’s hard to go on being Avis — ‘We’re number two or number three!’ — behind Hertz.”

*Military Plane Crashes in Russia, Killing All Onboard, Moscow Says*

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the transport plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war and accused Ukraine of shooting it down. The claims could not be independently verified.

A large Russian military transport plane crashed on Wednesday in the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine killing everyone on board, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement, accusing Ukraine of shooting down the plane with missiles.

The Defense Ministry said that the plane had been carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were being transferred to the region from a military airport near Moscow to be exchanged for Russian service personnel. It accused Ukrainian forces of launching two missiles from the nearby Kharkiv region of Ukraine that struck the aircraft. The plane was also carrying six crew members and three other individuals, the ministry said.

The Russian claims could not be independently verified.

Officials in Kyiv did not comment directly on Moscow’s accusations that Ukraine shot down the plane but the military’s general staff headquarters issued a statement Wednesday afternoon asserting a right to target Russian military transport airplanes in the border region.

The statement, posted on the military command’s Facebook page, did not deny shooting down the plane. It said that repeated Russian missile strikes on the city of Kharkiv and the surrounding region had in the past week killed 16 people and wounded another 78 people and that Ukraine had responded by targeting missile launch sites and the logistics for missile deliveries.

“The armed forces of Ukraine will continue to take measures to destroy delivery vehicles and control the airspace to eliminate the terrorist threat,” the statement said.

The Belgorod region of Russia has a long border with Ukraine. Over the past few weeks, it has been the scene of frequent Ukrainian attacks, including a missile bombardment in December. It was also the staging ground for Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and for further Russian strikes against Ukrainian territory during the war.

The governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said in a statement on social media that the plane had crashed in a field near a settlement in the Korochansky district. He said that emergency services were at the site and were investigating.

A video posted to Telegram and verified by The Times showed a large plane crashing and exploding in Yablonovo, a town in the Korochansky district. Tass, a Russian state news agency, published a video of the scene of the crash showing debris littering a snowy field.

In its statement, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Ukraine’s leadership was “well aware that, in accordance with established practice, Ukrainian servicemen were to be transported by military transport aircraft to Belgorod airfield today for exchange.”

“According to an earlier agreement, the event was to take place in the afternoon” at a checkpoint on the Russia-Ukraine border, the statement added.

The Ukrainian General Staff did not address whether prisoners of war were on the plane. Earlier Wednesday, Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said in an interview with Radio Liberty that an exchange “planned for today is currently not taking place,” without elaborating.

The plane, an Il-76, was designed decades ago in the Soviet Union to perform military duties such as airlifting troops, cargo and weapons.

Former Ukrainian prisoners who were released in exchanges said that they had been transported on that model of airplane, said Olha Reshetylova, a coordinator for Media Initiative for Human Rights, a group that investigates potential Russian war crimes against prisoners of war. In an interview, she called for an investigation into the crash but said that those efforts would be “complicated by the fact that the crime took place on the territory” of Russia.

One former Ukrainian prisoner of war, Maksym Kolesnikov, confirmed in a social media post that prisoners were transported on military cargo planes but questioned the Russian assertion that only three guards escorted 65 prisoners. On his flight, he said, about 20 guards flew with 50 prisoners.

Andrei V. Kartapolov, a Russian lawmaker and retired general, said at a session of the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament, that the Il-76 had been shot down by three Ukrainian missiles. He did not provide any evidence for his claim, and it could not be independently verified.

Russia and Ukraine have been exchanging prisoners since the start of the war through deals brokered by a third-party, such as Turkey or the United Arab Emirates. Those deals have been very complicated, with the sides meticulously negotiating every detail.

In early January, after a long pause in exchanges — following the release in Turkey of five former commanders of Ukraine’s garrison in the Azovstal steel plant, which angered Moscow — Russia and Ukraine conducted the largest swap of prisoners since the start of the war.

Prisoner exchanges are politically sensitive in Ukraine and the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that it goes to great lengths to negotiate for releases. Families, some of whom have waited for months with little information about loved ones in captivity, have held street protests in Kyiv, the capital. The Ukrainian authorities typically do not release, even to families, the names of those to be released before exchanges.

The crash comes as the fighting along the front line in southeastern Ukraine has bogged down into a vicious but mostly stationary battle in trenches.

Military assistance for Ukraine has been cast in doubt as the U.S. Congress delays a vote on aid. Frontline commanders have said that artillery ammunition is running low, and the country is preparing for a mobilization that will most likely prove unpopular domestically.

With prospects for advances on the ground uncertain, Ukraine has turned to long-range strikes with drones and sabotage operations inside Russia that target military and fuel infrastructure. The tactics have included sabotage and commando raids near the border, including in the Belgorod region.

*A Nationwide Shutdown Tests Milei’s Tough Medicine for Argentina*

Liquor and wine advertised with printed signs to accommodate the frequent price changes this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Argentine unions are striking to protest President Javier Milei’s economic policies, which have accelerated inflation. He says they are needed to fix the country.

It has been six weeks since President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and since then, gas prices have doubled, inflation has soared and the value of the national currency has plummeted.

Such turmoil, he had warned, should be expected. Fixing decades of economic problems would first require more pain, he said.

Yet on Wednesday, many Argentines plan to take to the streets to show they have already had enough.

Argentina’s largest labor unions plan a nationwide strike — including workers in transportation, construction, health care, food services, energy and banking — to protest Mr. Milei’s planned overhauls, arguing they would weaken protections for workers and the poor. More than 100,000 people are expected to demonstrate across the country.

Pablo Moyano, a union leader, told reporters that Mr. Milei “is crapping on Congress and crapping on workers.” Mr. Milei has shot back that the protest shows “there are two Argentinas” — one stuck in the past and another that “puts us on the path to be a developed country.”

Still, more Argentines appear to agree with Mr. Milei. Despite the economic chaos, Mr. Milei’s approval rating has stayed high, or even risen along with prices. Recent surveys show 58 percent of Argentines support him, two percentage points higher than his share of the November presidential vote.

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A gas station attendant pumps gas into a vehicle.
Gas prices have doubled since President Javier Milei took office in Argentina about six weeks ago.
In response, Mr. Milei, a libertarian economist and television pundit who rode a brash political style to the presidency, has been trying to capitalize on his political honeymoon by quickly overhauling as much of Argentina as he can.

After cutting spending, laying off public workers and devaluing the currency, he has turned his focus to sweeping legislation that would have consequences for the economy, elections, labor, public safety, the environment, the arts, science, health and even how Argentines divorce. The omnibus bill would also consolidate more power in his hands.

That has sparked the blowback from labor. The unions already won a preliminary injunction this month against some of Mr. Milei’s efforts to amend labor laws via presidential decree, and now they aim to show their might with massive demonstrations on Wednesday.

Labor revolts have derailed government campaigns to make significant changes in Argentina before, but Mr. Milei is signaling that he will take a tougher stance against protests that turn disruptive. He has proposed docking the pay of government workers who partake in demonstrations, and increasing penalties against people who block roads so that they could face potential prison time.

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Prices are written in chalk at a produce shop in Buenos Aires.
Chalk boards are used by shops in Buenos Aires to allow for price changes. Argentina’s inflation rate rivals that of Lebanon for the highest in the world.
He has also moved fast. In his first days on the job, Mr. Milei made deep federal spending cuts, laid off thousands of government workers and halved the number of federal ministries to nine from 18. He also officially devalued the Argentine peso by more than 50 percent, bringing the government exchange rate much closer to the market’s measure of the currency — but also causing prices to soar.

From November to December, prices increased 25.5 percent, compared with 12.8 percent a month prior.

Argentina’s annual inflation rate is now at 211 percent, which puts the nation of 46 million roughly on par with Lebanon for the world’s highest inflation. Argentina’s prices are climbing faster than those in Venezuela, where years of economic collapse had led many Venezuelans to emigrate to Argentina. Now some are reconsidering.

“I’m seeing a lot of Venezuelans leave the country,” said Andreina Di Giovanni, 35, a Venezuelan immigrant in Buenos Aires who owns a shop that sells Venezuelan food. “Some are migrating elsewhere; some are going back to Venezuela.”

She said her business is struggling, with falling sales and rising costs, but she said it was too early to blame the new president.

Mr. Milei is hoping many Argentines are willing to give him a long leash to fix the country’s long-running economic woes, and for now, some are going along.

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Pedestrians walk a street lined with businesses.
Downtown Buenos Aires this week. Mr. Milei’s approval rating has stayed high, or even risen along with prices.
Stella Body, 70, said she was technically retired but continues to work full-time as a cosmetologist to afford the rising prices. To her, it was a worthy sacrifice for Mr. Milei’s plan. “We won’t see positive outcomes for at least a year,” she said. “Nothing can be fixed in a month.”

Mr. Milei is also attracting support from conservatives abroad. Last week, he gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he argued that unfettered capitalism is the only model to reduce poverty and that socialism, feminism and environmentalism threaten global progress by pushing government regulation.

“You are heroes,” he told the Davos crowd. “You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen.”

The speech went viral, promoted by various conservative and right-wing voices as a clear distillation of what was wrong with modern society.

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A man in a brown leather jacket waves from a balcony.
Mr. Milei campaigning in October.
“Good explanation of what makes countries more or less prosperous,” Elon Musk said when sharing a video of the speech. Later, the billionaire posted a doctored image of a man watching Mr. Milei’s speech while having sex, a post viewed 113 million times.

A Brazilian politician later posted that she played the speech for her unborn baby in the womb, and Donald J. Trump weighed in on his Truth Social platform, saying that Mr. Milei was “MAKING GREAT PROGRESS” in his effort to “MAKE ARGENTINA GREAT AGAIN!”

The International Monetary Fund, which is still owed the vast majority of a $44 billion loan program with Argentina, has also praised Mr. Milei, saying that he and his economic team have moved quickly to “rebuild reserves, correct relative price misalignments, strengthen the central bank’s balance sheet, and create a simpler, rules-based, and market-oriented economy.”

At the center of Mr. Milei’s efforts to tackle the country’s chronic financial troubles is the omnibus bill he is trying to push through Argentina’s Congress.

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Signs in support of Mr. Milei for president plaster a wall, with others calling for a general strike in Buenos Aires.
“There are two Argentinas,” Mr. Milei said in a radio interview this week. One side of the country is stuck in the past, he said, and the other “puts us on the path to be a developed country.”
With more than 500 provisions, the legislation would reduce regulations, weaken labor unions, privatize most state companies, eliminate election primaries, increase export taxes and remove some environmental protections. The bill would also give Mr. Milei emergency powers for at least one year to carry out his economic plans.

The sweeping measures are needed “to keep the current crisis from becoming a social catastrophe of biblical proportions,” Mr. Milei said in an address to the nation when announcing the legislation. Congress “will have to choose whether it wants to be a part of the solution or to continue being a part of the problem.”

Ricardo Gil Lavedra, a constitutional lawyer who has served as a congressman and Argentina’s justice minister, said that, without significant congressional support, Mr. Milei appears to be trying to move quickly while he has high approval ratings, knowing soaring prices could give him a short window of time to act.

But packing so many provisions into a single bill, and moving to consolidate more power in the presidency, is worrisome, he said.

“It’s impossible for people to have an idea of the enormous number of proposals Milei has sent,” he said. “They cover dozens and dozens and dozens of laws, often on deep topics, so I think the population generally doesn’t know what is being discussed.”

Still, pushback from unions and Congress is a sign of democracy working, Mr. Gil Lavedra said. “We must cooperate with a new government facing a very difficult situation, which has the support of a large number of Argentines,” he said. “But at the same time, we must keep Argentina within the framework of a constitutional democracy.”

*Turkey Backs Sweden’s NATO Bid*

The vote in the Turkish Parliament puts the Nordic nation closer to joining the military alliance, easing months of friction that have impeded efforts by the West to isolate Russia over its war in Ukraine.

Turkey’s Parliament voted on Tuesday to allow Sweden to join NATO, putting the Nordic country one step closer to entering the military alliance and easing a diplomatic stalemate that has clouded Turkey’s relations with the United States and hampered Western efforts to isolate Russia over its war in Ukraine.

The measure passed after a vote of 287 to 55, with four abstentions in the 600-member body. It will go into effect once it is published in the country’s official gazette, usually a swift formality. That would make Hungary the only NATO member that has not approved Sweden’s accession, depriving the alliance of the unanimity required to add a new member.

The bill’s passage is a big moment for NATO, paving the way for expanding its deterrence against Russia at a time when some of its members are struggling to provide Ukraine with enough arms to roll back Russia’s invasion.

NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said in a statement late Tuesday that he welcomed the news from Turkey, according to Reuters. But, he said, “I also count on Hungary to complete its national ratification as soon as possible.”

He continued: “Sweden has fulfilled its commitments. Sweden’s membership makes NATO stronger and all of us safer.”

Sweden’s accession would open a vast stretch of Nordic land to potential military operations by the alliance and extend to Sweden the other members’ automatic protection should it come under attack.

“Being a full-fledged ally means that if Sweden is under pressure or attack, there is no debate” over whether NATO would defend it, said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general. “As we see very clearly with Ukraine, you can be the closest NATO partner, but if you’re not an ally, the debate is different.”

Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, wrote on the platform X that Turkey’s approval of Sweden’s bid had been a priority for Mr. Biden. “Sweden is a strong, capable defense partner whose membership in NATO will make the U.S. and the Alliance safer and stronger,” Mr. Sullivan wrote.

Despite Tuesday’s vote, Sweden’s swift accession is not guaranteed. Turkey could delay filing its formal approval with the alliance, and it remains unclear when Hungary, whose Parliament is in recess until Feb. 15, might provide its assent.

Still, Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, praised the “positive” developments in Turkey, writing on the social media platform X, “Today we are one step closer to becoming a full member of NATO.”

On Tuesday before the vote, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary invited Sweden’s prime minister to Hungary to “negotiate” Sweden’s accession, suggesting that Hungary may seek concessions in exchange for its support.

“I am convinced that strong mutual trust must be the foundation of any political and security arrangements between Sweden and Hungary,” Mr. Orban wrote in a letter to the prime minister, which was initially reported by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet and confirmed by Swedish officials.

Mr. Orban said he believed that “a more intensive political dialogue can help strengthen the mutual trust between our countries.”

Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom of Sweden responded that he did not see “any reason to negotiate,” but that the two countries could “have a dialogue and continue to discuss questions,” according to the Swedish news agency, TT.

The vote in Turkey came nearly two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Sweden and Finland, which had been militarily nonaligned for years, formally applied to join the alliance. The process requires the unanimous support of the body’s members (now 31), and most quickly granted their approvals.

But Turkey and Hungary, whose leaders have both maintained cordial relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia throughout the war in Ukraine, held out. Hungarian officials have pushed back on Swedish criticisms of the state of Hungarian democracy, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey accused the two Nordic nations of neglecting his country’s security concerns by failing to crack down on dissidents whom Turkey considers terrorists.

Officials from other NATO countries quietly accused Mr. Erdogan of leveraging the alliance’s rules for domestic political gain while publicly lobbying Turkey to change its stance.

Sweden has taken extensive steps to assuage Turkey’s objections, including by amending its Constitution to allow for tougher antiterrorism laws.

In March, both Hungary and Turkey changed course on Finland, and their respective parliaments approved the country’s accession. It joined NATO soon after.

The president of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, wrote on social media Tuesday that he was “very happy that the Turkish Parliament has voted to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership.” He added: “Sweden’s membership will improve security in the Baltic Sea area and make the entire alliance stronger. When Sweden is a member, Finland’s membership is also complete.”

He was joined in his sentiment by leaders in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Even after Finland’s acceptance into NATO, Mr. Erdogan continued to resist Sweden’s bid, offering reasons that changed over time and prompting a diplomatic guessing game over what issue he would drag into the debate next.

Before a summit in July, Mr. Stoltenberg announced that Turkey had agreed to back Sweden’s accession bid. Days later, Mr. Erdogan told the Turkish news media that Sweden still needed to do more and that the issue rested with Parliament, not with him.

Also hampering talks over the issue were public burnings and desecrations of the Quran by protesters in Sweden, which prompted Turkey to accuse the Swedish authorities of not doing enough to combat Islamophobia.

Mr. Erdogan also linked the Sweden issue to Turkish demands from other NATO members. He suggested that simultaneously with Turkey backing Sweden, the United States approve the sale of a $20 billion package of American-made F-16 fighter jets and upgrade kits for jets that Turkey already has. The Biden administration has said it supports the deal, but it has faced resistance in Congress, with members citing the country’s human rights record and its stance on Sweden, frustrating the Turks.

Sweden’s approval appeared to be moving forward in December, when the Turkish Parliament’s foreign affairs committee passed the measure and sent it to the full assembly, in which Mr. Erdogan’s political party and its allies hold a majority. But it was not scheduled for a vote until this week.

Sinem Adar, an associate at the Berlin-based Center for Applied Turkey Studies, said that it remained unclear what Mr. Erdogan had gained by holding up Sweden’s bid and that the move had cost Turkey by making the country appear unpredictable and unreliable to its NATO allies.

“There is a very significant erosion of trust, which was already weakened, between Turkey and its allies in NATO because at a very important geopolitical moment, Turkey put its own interests ahead of the interests of the alliance,” she said.

Hungarian officials have said they would not block Sweden’s bid if Turkey approved it, but the timing of Hungary’s decision was not immediately clear, nor were the reasons for its foot-dragging.

Over the past year, Hungary has given a wide range of explanations for the delay. It initially cited technical reasons related to the Parliament’s schedule but later complained about a video shown in Swedish schools that cast Mr. Orban’s government in a bad light.

Mr. Grand, the former NATO assistant secretary general and now a defense expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that he assumed leaders in Budapest and Ankara were coordinating their moves and that he had become “more cautious” about predicting Sweden’s quick entry into the alliance.

But after nearly two years, he added, “I think we are now at the point where it becomes sort of ridiculous to further delay it.”

*Is It Bad to Wash Your Hair Every Day?*

The ideal lathering schedule varies from person to person, experts say. Here’s how to tell what may work for you.

Q: I’ve heard that washing your hair every day can strip it of its natural oils, making it dry and brittle and causing scalp irritation. Is that true? And what if I exercise regularly?

Whether you should lather up daily depends on a number of factors, said Dr. Murad Alam, vice chair of the department of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Among them, he said, are your hair’s texture, how oily it gets, how processed it is, your lifestyle habits and your age.

Shampoo cleanses your scalp and hair by removing environmental contaminants like dirt and pollen, as well as dandruff, sweat and hair-care products.

It also dissolves sebum, an oily, waxy substance produced by the sebaceous glands near your hair follicles. Sebum keeps your scalp from becoming too dry, said Dr. Rosemarie Ingleton, an assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and protects the skin from infection.

But if sebum builds up, she said, it can cause problems.

When to wash daily
Using shampoo every day, Dr. Alam said, can be the right choice for people with oilier scalps where sebum can accumulate, making the hair limp, greasy and possibly smelly.

Those with fine hair, Dr. Alam said, may also find that it becomes greasy more quickly, because there is less hair to absorb the oil. For them, a daily lather may be warranted.

Daily washing may also be needed, Dr. Alam added, if you frequently use products such as gels or hair sprays, which can build up on your scalp and cause irritation — or even hinder hair growth by clogging the hair follicles.

Image

Credit…Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times
When to avoid daily shampooing
Not all hair textures can tolerate a daily wash, Dr. Ingleton said, including curly or coily hair, which may dry out, become brittle or break if washed daily or even every couple of days. If you’re Black, the American Academy of Dermatology recommends washing your hair every week or every other week.

Dr. Shereene Idriss, a dermatologist and founder of Idriss Dermatology in New York City, has stricter recommendations for washing, regardless of how fine or oily hair is.

“When it comes to your scalp health, I do not regularly recommend washing your hair every day,” Dr. Idriss said, adding that it could lead “to irritation, inflammation and other scalp problems.”

Chemical treatments such as hair dyes and relaxers can make the hair shaft more prone to damage, Dr. Alam said. He recommended washing chemically treated hair two to three times a week.

Certain medications such as statins, antihistamines and diuretics, for example, may also increase skin and scalp dryness, Dr. Alam said. If you take them, he added, wash your hair with a gentle shampoo that contains moisturizers to prevent dryness and irritation.

It can also be helpful to use shampoo with warm instead of hot water, since lathering with hot water can remove too much oil from the scalp, Dr. Alam said.

“While it may seem that getting the scalp squeaky clean and without any oils is optimal, keep in mind that the scalp is a living part of your body, and not a dinner plate in your dishwasher,” Dr. Alam said.

Age can also dictate your shampooing schedule, Dr. Alam said. Sebum production is typically slow during early childhood, goes into overdrive during puberty, levels out during adulthood and slows down gradually after age 70. So if you are older, your scalp might be drier, and it may not require a daily scrub.

What to do if you exercise regularly
If you habitually work out and you’re an excessive sweater, Dr. Alam said, the salt from sweat can clog your pores and hair follicles. That may require a daily wash or rinse “to clean out the salt and secretions,” he said. “If you do not at least rinse your hair afterward, you can get inflammation of your hair follicles, which is called folliculitis, and pimples on your scalp.”

This becomes even more important if you have oily hair, Dr. Idriss said. You may need to wash it every day, she added, but you don’t always need to use shampoo.

“Alternating a shampoo wash with a water rinse every other day can help minimize stripping your scalp of oil,” Dr. Idriss said. And drenching your hair with plain water, she added, “can be enough to get you to the next day.”

If you just can’t skip the shampoo, Dr. Idriss said, opt for a mild formula that has “sulfate-free” or “gentle” claims on the label, and avoid hot water and excessive scrubbing, both of which can irritate the scalp.

As for drying, Dr. Alam recommended air drying whenever possible, “which is the least traumatic for your hair.”

If you wash your hair every day and your scalp is not irritated, your hair isn’t dry or brittle and you are not losing any hair, Dr. Alam said, “then keep doing what you are doing.”

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*Israel Says 24 Soldiers Are Killed as Pressure Grows on Netanyahu*

The Israeli military says 21 soldiers were killed in a single explosion.
The Israeli military suffered its deadliest day of the Gaza ground invasion on Monday, announcing that 24 soldiers had been killed, 21 of them in a single explosion inside the territory near the Israeli border.

Most of the soldiers were inside two two-story buildings that collapsed in a blast apparently involving explosives placed by Israel’s military to level the buildings, according to Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military, which announced the deaths on Tuesday.

He said that a missile had been fired at a nearby tank at the same time as the explosion, appearing to suggest the missile might have triggered the blast.

Admiral Hagari said the 21 soldiers, who were reservists, had been working to remove buildings and other infrastructure near the border between Israel and Gaza so that people could safely return to their homes in southern Israel.

The deaths come as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struggles with domestic divisions over how to proceed in the war with Hamas, on top of international pressure over the enormous number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza and concerns about a broader regional war.

As Israeli politicians from the right and left expressed heartbreak over the losses, leading members of the government declared that the war should continue until Hamas is defeated.

Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel had “experienced one of the most difficult days since the start of the war” and that the army was examining the incident.

“We need to learn the necessary lessons and do everything to preserve our soldiers’ lives,” he said in a statement on Tuesday, adding: “We will not stop fighting until complete victory.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s stated goals of the war are eliminating Hamas and securing the release of the hostages taken during a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, although some Israeli military leaders have said the two goals are incompatible in the short term. He faces mounting pressure to make a deal for the hostages’ release, even if that comes at the expense of eradicating the militant group.

President Isaac Herzog of Israel mourned the soldiers in a post on social media, saying news of the deaths had brought “an unbearably difficult morning.”

The military released the names early Tuesday of 10 soldiers, ranging in age from 22 to 37, who died in the explosion. Nine of them were from the same brigade. Earlier, it named three paratroopers who were also killed Monday in Gaza.

Soldiers’ deaths can carry even heavier weight in Israel, a small country where military service is largely mandatory and a rite of passage.

Internationally, Mr. Netanyahu faces criticism over the widespread destruction in Gaza, where health officials say the death toll has surpassed 25,000 — by far the largest loss of life in a regional war with Israel in the past 40 years. Almost the entire population of 2.2 million has been displaced but remains sealed in Gaza, and international aid groups say that disease is rampant and that widespread hunger is nearing starvation levels.

Since Oct. 7, when officials say 1,200 people were killed in Israel, previous days of high death tolls for the Israeli military have included Dec. 9, when nine soldiers were killed, and Dec. 13, when 10 died. From Oct. 31 to Nov. 1, 15 soldiers were killed in northern Gaza, according to the military.

*Israel Says Its Military Has Encircled Khan Younis in Gaza*

The fighting in the southern city has involved heavy exchanges of gunfire and a surge of tanks and troops into areas around hospitals.

Israel’s military said on Tuesday that it had encircled the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, part of a push that has resulted in intense fighting and bombardments in an area packed with civilians who have fled their homes in other parts of the territory.

The Israeli military described the area as a “significant stronghold” of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade and said that it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters over the previous 24 hours. The military’s claims could not be independently verified.

Israeli forces “targeted terrorist cells carrying R.P.G.s near the troops, those launching anti-tank missiles, and terror operatives who had rigged compounds with explosives,” the military said in a statement, referring to rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Ready-to-launch rockets, military compounds, shafts, and numerous weapons were located during the activity,” the military added.

The fighting has involved heavy exchanges of gunfire and a surge of Israeli tanks and troops into areas around the city’s hospitals. Displaced civilians in the area say they have no safe place to go.

Eman Jawad, who is sheltering in an industrial zone in Khan Younis, said that Israeli forces surrounded her shelter on Sunday night and heavy clashes broke out with Hamas fighters. She said the fighting was so close that several tents housing displaced people went up in flames.

“We are trapped,” Ms. Jawad said in a voice message on Monday. “There are snipers on the streets and we are not allowed to leave the industrial zone.”

Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
Jan. 23, 2024, 8:31 a.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago
More than half a million people in Gaza face ‘catastrophic hunger,’ the United Nations says.
Israeli forces have encircled the city of Khan Younis, the military says.
The Israeli military says 21 soldiers were killed in a single explosion.
Rasha Ahmad, 31, said she was not able to find a safe route to evacuate from Khan Younis to Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost district, on Monday because “Israeli tanks were everywhere.” But despite the risk, she and many others decided they had no choice but to make the nearly four-hour journey on foot because Khan Younis was no longer safe, Ms. Ahmad said.

“Five men were shot by a sniper in front of my eyes,” she said in one of a series of frazzled voice messages on Monday. “I’m sure they are dead — they were left to bleed on the ground.”

A spokeswoman for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Monday that Israeli forces had essentially besieged the entire Khan Younis district. The organization said that the presence of Israeli troops near Al-Amal Hospital, which it operates, meant that ambulances could not reach the injured in Khan Younis and that anyone moving in the area was being fired upon.

The Israeli military said on Monday that it was aware of sensitive sites in the Khan Younis area, including several hospitals, but that Hamas “exploits the civilian population” and has used medical facilities in its operations, including an attack launched last week from Nasser Hospital. It said areas occupied by civilians had been marked and the soldiers involved would use their experience to “mitigate harm to uninvolved individuals.”

The health authorities in Gaza have said in recent days that more than 25,000 people there have been killed since Israel began its campaign to defeat Hamas, adding that more than 63,000 others had been injured. The authorities do not distinguish between civilians and fighters.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel began the campaign after Hamas attacked the country on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,200 people and taking around 240 people hostage, according to the Israeli authorities. More than 100 of those hostages remain in captivity.

Israeli forces, using thousands of airstrikes and a ground invasion, largely secured military control of northern Gaza before pushing south. The United Nations said this month that more than 60 percent of homes in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed during the campaign, while almost all of the strip’s 2.2 million people have been displaced from their homes.

*China’s Travel Economy Is Slowly Coming Back. Here’s Where It Stands.*

Over a year after China opened its borders following the pandemic, international trips are still lagging, although domestic travel is more popular.

Since China reopened its borders in 2023 after three years of Covid isolation, domestic travel has thrived and high-speed rail has grown increasingly popular. But international trips in and out of the country are lagging, and flight capacity is still just a third of prepandemic levels.

The economic stakes are high. Before the pandemic, Chinese travelers were the world’s biggest spenders, accounting for 20 percent of global tourism spending, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

In the past year, the Chinese authorities have tried to spur more inbound travel. Among the changes: China has waived travel visas or agreed to extend the length of visa-free travel for visitors from eight countries, including Germany and France.

The main factor holding back international travel by Chinese will continue to be China’s economy. Growth has bounced back from the pandemic, but the weight of a severe real estate downturn has dampened consumer spending and confidence inside China. And global geopolitical tensions remain a wild card. China is engaged in trade disputes with the United States and Europe, home to many major multinational companies. As they think twice about their business in China, travel suffers.

Here’s what to know about the state of China’s travel economy.

Image
People gathered around a platform, with a river behind them and the Shanghai skyline in the distance.
Visitors walking along the Bund with a view of the financial district in Shanghai last week.Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times
Travel to China ground nearly to a halt in the pandemic. It won’t fully recover until 2025.
Throughout the pandemic, China enforced some of the strictest travel rules in the world. Overseas travelers who managed to enter the country sometimes had to quarantine at their own expense for as long as two months.

As of December, international flight capacity — essentially the number of available seats on flights coming from and going to China — was only 62 percent of what it was in December 2019, according to OAG, a flight data analytics firm. But domestic travel has picked up: Over the 3-day weekend at the end of last month, the number of those fliers exceeded prepandemic levels by nearly 10 percent.

At the start of last year, there were only about 500 international flights every week in China, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the aviation regulator. Now there are about 4,600, and that number is expected to increase to 6,000 by the end of the year — about 80 percent of prepandemic levels.

A big test will come next month during the spring festival around the Lunar New Year, typically a heavy travel period when millions of workers travel to their hometowns. Chinese airlines will schedule 2,500 additional international flights to accommodate spring festival visits, China’s aviation regulator said last week.

China’s transport officials said they expected 480 million rail trips to be made during a 40-day travel surge around the spring festival in the weeks before and after the Lunar New Year, a nearly 40 percent increase from last year.

High-speed rail has become a more popular way to travel within the country. China State Railway Group, the national rail operator, said rail trips exceeded 20 million at the start of the Golden Week holiday in October, a high, and the average daily number of passenger trips throughout the year exceeded 10 million.

Most analysts said they believed that the full recovery of international travel wouldn’t happen until 2025.

In a January research note, economists at Nomura, a Japanese bank, said the pace of the sector’s recovery would largely be determined by how much Chinese travelers were willing to spend. Pandemic-era problems like delays in issuing visas and passports that lasted through 2023 have been addressed.

“While supply-side constraints eased, the demand-side drag is now starting to kick in, and sizable headwinds remain for China’s outbound tourism recovery in 2024 and possibly 2025,” the Nomura economists wrote.

Image
Planes landing at an airport on the tarmac.
The first Boeing plane delivered to a Chinese airline since 2019 landed in Shanghai in December.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Applying for a visa and visiting China are a bit less complicated.
In December, China started allowing visitors from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Malaysia and the Netherlands to travel for 15 days without visas, a change it said would last through November 2024. China’s National Immigration Administration said 147,000 visas had been granted in the first six and a half weeks of the program. China also reached agreements to make visa-free travel more accessible for tourists from Thailand and Singapore.

For Americans, visa applicants will no longer need to submit documents such as hotel booking records, an itinerary or an invitation letter. The authorities have also cut all visa application fees by 25 percent until the end of the year.

It has also gotten easier for foreigners to pay for things when visiting China. Last July, the main payment platforms, WeChat Pay and AliPay, said they would support foreign credit cards and allow visitors to pay like locals. China has moved away from paper money and coins, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic.

Flights between China and the United States have been only slowly restored. Before the pandemic, there were more than 300 flights every week between the two countries. That number was 36 a week in September and has gradually increased. In November, the countries agreed to increase flights to 70 a week.

Image
A crowd of people waiting inside a train station.
In early October, passengers waited for trains at Shenyang North Railway Station on the last day of national holidays.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Geopolitical tensions and reluctant Chinese travelers could derail the sector’s recovery.
The fraught Chinese-U.S. relationship will continue to lurk in the background of international travel to China.

The U.S. State Department maintains a “Level 3” travel alert on China, warning Americans to “reconsider travel” to the country because of “the risk of wrongful detentions,” among other reasons.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has its own travel notice, warning that travelers to the United States have been “harassed and interrogated” at the border with “various excuses,” and that Chinese citizens have been arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted.

The changing tastes and expendable income of Chinese travelers could shape how the travel economy’s recovery plays out.

“As Chinese households become more price-sensitive and rational, domestic tourism is more preferred, given that it usually takes less time and money,” said Ying Zhang of the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research business.

*Things Fall Apart: How the Middle Ground on Immigration Collapsed*

Why have Republicans and Democrats moved so far apart on immigration? That’s the question that drives the Opinion video above.

We are publishing this as President Biden comes under extraordinary pressure to curb surging illegal immigration at the southwestern border. Republicans have held up further military aid to Ukraine, demanding more border security in exchange. And this month House Republicans opened impeachment hearings against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, accusing him of intentionally failing to enforce immigration laws.

A group of senators from both parties has been trying to negotiate a deal that would address the Republican demands for a border crackdown. But while the measures under discussion might go some way toward lowering illegal immigration — and even that is a matter of fierce debate — they don’t pretend to address all the wide-ranging, chronic problems with the country’s immigration system.

Bipartisan deals on immigration policy have been elusive for decades. The last big immigration reform bill passed in 1986, during the Reagan administration, and a smaller bill was signed into law four years later by George H.W. Bush.

Since then, Democrats and Republicans, on the subject of immigration, have seemed to sprint in opposite directions.

So what happened?

Hint: It’s not all Donald Trump’s fault.

*The Point Conversations and insights about the moment.*

It’s Primary Day! Let’s get out there and vote, New Hampshire!

I realize this Republican race hasn’t been high on suspense. And tooling around the Granite State the past couple of days, I’ve gotten the clear sense, even from many Nikki Haley fans, that most folks are resigned to watching Donald Trump cruise to victory today.

But New Hampshire being New Hampshire, there are still plenty of people dreaming of a voting-day shocker. They point me toward Bill Clinton’s second-place comeback in 1992. Or John McCain’s upset victory here in 2000.

At a Monday night rally in Salem, in a hotel ballroom packed to overflowing, die-hard Nikki supporters spun far-fetched scenarios for me about how she could still save the day.

“She needs to stay in there right up to the convention and force a floor vote,” said Lance, one of four youngish guys seated in the back row of the event. The men seemed undaunted by the recent polling showing Trump pulling further ahead of Haley. “It’s going to be much closer tomorrow,” predicted Andy.

Some people weren’t asking for an outright Haley win. They just want her to do well enough to keep going — to save America from another Biden-Trump face-off. “Otherwise, I don’t know what the country does,” sighed a worried-looking Gen X-er named Tonya.

(Interestingly, the people I spoke with at the event only felt comfortable giving their first names. “I don’t want to get doxxed,” said Lance.)

Going a shade darker, some voters believe Haley needs to stay in the game in case something unforeseen happens to Trump — and they seemed pretty pumped about the idea. “He could have a heart attack! Be convicted! Be sentenced to prison!” said a young mom named Lee.

Voting is fundamentally an act of hope. In this election, that hope is being forced into some pretty wild shapes.

*Here Is One Way to Steal the Presidential Election*

What happens when you stress-test America’s system for electing a president? How well does it hold up?

After the assault on the nation’s Capitol three years ago, we worked through every strategy we could imagine for subverting the popular will by manipulating the law. What we found surprised us. We determined that the most commonly discussed strategies — such as a state legislature picking a new slate of electors to the Electoral College — wouldn’t work because of impediments built into the Constitution. We also concluded that the most blatantly extreme strategies, such as a state canceling its election and selecting its electors directly, are politically unlikely.

The scenario we see as the most alarming was made possible by the Supreme Court itself. In a 2020 decision, the court held, in our reading, that state legislatures have the power to direct electors on how to cast their electoral votes. And this opens the door to what we think is the most dangerous strategy: that a legislature would pass a law that directs electors to vote for the candidate the legislature picks.

The question now is whether there is any way to close that loophole before a stolen election slides through.

The cases that led to the decision involved electors in 2016 who had voted contrary to their pledge. Recognizing that Hillary Clinton, the winner of the popular vote, would not be elected president, these electors worked to rally enough Republican and Democratic electors to vote for a Republican candidate other than Donald Trump, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives.

Three electors from the state of Washington cast their votes for Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, rather than for Mrs. Clinton, who won the popular vote there. Mrs. Clinton also won the popular vote in Colorado, where one elector attempted to vote for John Kasich, the former Ohio governor who had run for the Republican presidential nomination that year. Those electors were punished by their states with fines and removal as electors. They challenged that punishment in the Supreme Court. (One of us, Mr. Lessig, represented the Washington and Colorado electors.)

The court ruled in favor of the states. The electors, the Supreme Court decided, had no constitutional right to resist the laws in a state that directed how they must vote. The court held that the states could thus enforce those laws.

The danger now is that this decision has created an obvious strategy for a state legislature seeking to ensure the election of its preferred candidate, regardless of how the people voted. The state legislature would pass a law that requires electors to vote as the legislature directs. The default would be that electors vote as the people voted. But the law would reserve to the legislature the power to direct electors to vote differently if it so chooses.

Now imagine the election results in a state are close. Charges of fraud cloud a recount. Leaders in the state legislature challenge the presumptive result. In response to those challenges, the legislature votes to direct its electors to cast their ballots for the candidate who presumptively lost but whom the legislature prefers. Any elector voting contrary to the legislature’s rule would be removed and replaced with an elector who complied.

This is a critical innovation in the science of stealing a presidential election. There are plenty of mechanisms to ensure that the election selects the right slate of electors — recounts, contest proceedings and so on. But there are no protections against a state legislature simply ordering whichever electors are appointed to vote for the candidate that the legislature, and not the people of the state, choose.

The Supreme Court surely did not intend this result. Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion for the court ends with the promise that “here, we the people rule.” But the mechanism the court upheld means that it is actually the state legislatures that rule.

There’s little that can be done to eliminate this risk before the November election. Conceivably, a legislature could pass a law today openly asserting its power to direct how electors may vote, regardless of how the people vote. The justices then could act quickly to strike down that law, though the Supreme Court rarely acts to avoid such risks in advance. Absent that turn of events, in the rush between an election and the day when electors actually cast their votes, there may well be no time for the court to close the loophole that its opinion opened.

The more effective strategy to avoid this result would be for political leaders to reaffirm the principle that should guide every policy adopted by the states: that the electoral results in a state should track with the will of the people, not the partisans who command a majority in the legislature.

If partisans on both sides embrace that principle in good faith, we will have confidence in the results of the next election. But if they reject it, then this is just the most potent of a handful of strategies that might be deployed to flip the result.

Congress and legislatures should act now to intervene. Congress could amend the federal law governing electoral votes by declaring that any post-election change of the results by a state legislature would not count as votes “regularly given.” States could cement the requirement that electors are to follow the people’s will. Neither path is assured, but we are certain of this: It is a rocky road ahead.

*ATENTAMENTE*
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*Haley Gets a Trump Matchup, but Now Faces the Trump Machine*

As Nikki Haley celebrated Ron DeSantis’s departure from the Republican primary, Donald J. Trump turned his firepower toward his final rival.

With only about 48 hours left to campaign in the New Hampshire primary, Nikki Haley finally got the two-person race she wanted.

It might not live up to her expectations.

For months, it has been an article of faith among Ms. Haley’s supporters and a coalition of anti-Trump Republicans that the only way to defeat Donald J. Trump was to winnow the field to a one-on-one contest and consolidate support among his opponents.

That wishcasting became reality on Sunday afternoon, when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida ended his White House bid.

And yet, as the race reached the final day, there was little sign that Mr. DeSantis’s departure would transform Ms. Haley’s chances of winning.

Ms. Haley quickly learned that the role of last woman standing against Mr. Trump meant serving as the last target for a party racing to line up behind the former president.

Two former rivals in the race — Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Mr. DeSantis — both endorsed the former president. The head of the party’s Senate campaign arm proclaimed Mr. Trump to be the “presumptive nominee.” And Mr. Trump’s campaign strategists vowed that she would be “absolutely embarrassed and demolished” in her home state of South Carolina, the next big prize on the calendar.

Campaigning across New Hampshire on Sunday, Ms. Haley and her supporters celebrated the DeSantis campaign’s demise.

“Can you hear that sound?” she asked more than 1,000 gathered in a high school gymnasium in Exeter, N.H., her best-attended event in the state. “That’s the sound of a two-person race.”

Thirty-five miles north, in Rochester, N.H., Mr. Trump told his crowd to expect a victory so decisive it would effectively end the primary. “That should wrap it up,” he said.

Image
A view from a balcony in an opera house looking at Donald Trump standing and clapping on the stage. The stage has six American flags behind him.
Mr. Trump during a campaign rally at the Rochester Opera House on Sunday in New Hampshire.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Ms. Haley’s supporters in the state said they were feeling that pressure. Some worried aloud that she had pulled punches with Mr. Trump for so long that her aggressiveness in the primary’s final weekend would be inadequate to persuade flinty New Hampshire voters that she had enough fight in her to win against the brawling former president.

2024 Election: Live Updates
Updated
Jan. 22, 2024, 9:31 a.m. ET5 minutes ago
5 minutes ago
It’s New Hampshire primary eve. Here’s the latest.
G.O.P. voters said no to Tim Scott. His girlfriend said yes.
‘DeSanctimonious’ no more: Trump says he’ll drop his ex-rival’s nickname.
One Republican activist backing Ms. Haley said he kept his lawn sign in his garage because Mr. Trump’s victory felt inevitable. Another Haley backer, Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, described his support for the former governor as unenthusiastic. He said he could not bring himself to defend Ms. Haley on social media or lean on friends and family to vote for her.

“Too little, too late,” Mr. Cullen said about Ms. Haley’s prospects. “She had to inspire and engage unaffiliated voters, and I just haven’t seen her doing what she needs to do to reach that audience and turn them out in the numbers that she needs.”

Most polls during the past week showed Mr. Trump up by a dozen points or more. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 Boston daily tracking poll of New Hampshire voters showed Mr. Trump steadily adding to his lead over Ms. Haley, with a margin of 53 percent to 36 percent on Saturday.

Ms. Haley’s performance on Tuesday is likely to determine the future of her campaign — and possibly her political career. Anything short of a victory or narrow defeat would put pressure on her to drop out rather than face three weeks of punishing ads from the Trump campaign in her home state, where she is already behind.

Her best shot at survival is high turnout from New Hampshire’s independent voters, who make up 40 percent of the state’s electorate, while Republicans account for about 30 percent.

The New Hampshire secretary of state has been predicting record high turnout on Tuesday, a scenario that both campaigns were claiming would bolster their chances of success.

Ms. Haley’s team believes a turnout surge would mean more participation from independent and moderate voters who are more likely to support her. They looked to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign as a model. Mr. McCain won the state’s primary by dominating independent voters and battling to a draw among Republicans, according to exit polls.

Ms. Haley, however, appears to be trailing by a large margin among Republicans, according to public polls. In the tracking poll, Ms. Haley led independents, 49 percent to 41, but was nearly 20 points behind Mr. Trump overall largely owing to his wide margin from Republicans, 65 percent to 25 percent.

Image
Nikki Haley takes a selfie with a supporter amid a crowd of people, most of them women.
Ms. Haley on Sunday with supporters in Derry, N.H.Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Ms. Haley’s donors and allies argued Mr. DeSantis’s departure could reel in more donations and help her sharpen the contrast between herself and the former president. Both Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis struggled to find ways to criticize Mr. Trump without turning off Republicans who may be open to alternatives, but are still fond of him.

But some longtime political operatives in the state suggested there might not be enough anti-Trump Republicans and moderate independents to make the numbers work.

“Haley has consolidated the non-Trump vote, but overtaking him is the Rubik’s Cube no one has been able to figure out yet,” said Matt Mowers, a former Republican House candidate from New Hampshire who was endorsed by both Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley.

As she delivered her stump speech on Saturday with new urgency, Ms. Haley’s attacks on Mr. Trump were sometimes softened by including Mr. Biden in the critique.

“What are Joe Biden and Donald Trump both talking about?” Ms. Haley asked, at her rally in Exeter. “The investigations that they are in, the distractions they have, the people they’re mad at, their hurt feelings, and they have not shown us one ounce of vision for the future — not one.”

Jane Freeman, 55, a retired flight attendant and undeclared voter in Exeter, scrunched her forehead and let out a sigh when asked about Mr. DeSantis’s endorsement of Mr. Trump.

“Trump is a tricky thing,” said Ms. Freeman, who voted for the former president in 2016 and in 2020 but now supports Ms. Haley. “I really wish he would have waited,” she said of Mr. DeSantis. Still, she said Ms. Haley had the right momentum and was continuing to win voters. “I am nervous, but truly, truly hopeful,” she said.

*Last Exit Before Trump: New Hampshire*

Tuesday’s primary election will probably decide whether there will be a race at all.

Let’s be blunt about the stakes of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.

If Donald J. Trump wins decisively, as the polls suggest, he will be on track to win the Republican nomination without a serious contest. The race will be all but over.

The backdrop is simple: Mr. Trump holds a dominant, 50-plus-point lead in the polls with just seven weeks to go until the heart of the primary season, when the preponderance of delegates will be awarded. His position has only improved since Iowa, with national polls now routinely showing him with over 70 percent of the vote.

Even skeptical Republican officials are consolidating behind the party’s front-runner. Ron DeSantis’s decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Mr. Trump is only the latest example.

The polling by state isn’t much better for Nikki Haley, the only remaining opponent for Mr. Trump. He leads Ms. Haley by at least 30 points in all of the states after New Hampshire until Super Tuesday. So without a monumental shift in the race, he will secure the nomination in short order.

New Hampshire is the only state where we can entertain — however unlikely — the possibility that the race could be shaken up by enough to put additional states into play.

Why is New Hampshire the only real opportunity?

It’s the only state where the polls are even close. On average, Ms. Haley trails Mr. Trump by about 15 points in New Hampshire polls, 49 percent to 34 percent. That’s a comfortable lead for Mr. Trump, but there have occasionally been polls showing a single-digit race. It’s close enough to contemplate a Trump loss.

There is no other state where Mr. Trump leads the latest (often outdated) polls by less than 30 points. Not even Ms. Haley’s home state, South Carolina, appears competitive.

2024 Election: Live Updates
Updated
Jan. 22, 2024, 9:31 a.m. ET6 minutes ago
6 minutes ago
It’s New Hampshire primary eve. Here’s the latest.
G.O.P. voters said no to Tim Scott. His girlfriend said yes.
‘DeSanctimonious’ no more: Trump says he’ll drop his ex-rival’s nickname.

Trump’s polling lead over Haley

New Hampshire

15 pct. points

South Carolina

Wisconsin

Michigan

Ohio

North Carolina

Florida

California

Texas

Nevada

Tennessee

In states with three or more polls in the last three months.
Last Exit Before Trump: New Hampshire
New Hampshire is about as good as it gets for Haley. Her appeal is almost exclusively confined to moderate and college-educated voters, and New Hampshire is an excellent state for a moderate Republican. The state ranks eighth in four-year college attainment, and independent voters are allowed to participate in the primary. It has a moderate Republican governor who has endorsed Ms. Haley, not Mr. Trump. And in presidential primaries the state usually backs moderate candidates — think John McCain and Mitt Romney. While Mr. Trump won with 35 percent in 2016, the moderate-establishment candidates combined to amass 49 percent of the vote — more than in any other primary state in 2016 except for Vermont and Ohio, which was John Kasich’s home state.

If she can’t win in New Hampshire, there is no reason to think she can win elsewhere.

Support for moderate or establishment

candidates in 2016 Republican primaries

52%

Vermont

New Hampshire

Virginia

South Carolina

Massachusetts

Michigan

Oklahoma

Arkansas

Tennessee

Alabama

Texas

North Carolina

California*

*The 2016 California primary was held after Donald Trump was the presumptive nominee; moderate-establishment candidates include Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina. The states shown here are those with 2024 contests held on Super Tuesday or earlier.
It’s the only state that can create the perception of a newly competitive race. I’m not 100 percent sure whether New Hampshire is actually the No. 1 opportunity for a Haley victory. Maybe Vermont is a better one — though a recent poll says no — or the District of Columbia. What I’m sure about, however, is that none of those other chances could be treated as a “game changer” that could rekindle a tiny glimmer of hope for the potential opposition to Mr. Trump.

The first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary receives tremendous media coverage, and it would only be amplified if Ms. Haley posted an upset victory. It’s early enough in the primary season that the state scoreboard would read “Trump 1, Haley 1” at the end of the night. In March, a win in a state like Vermont will not receive anywhere near as much media coverage. By then, a Haley win would also be drowned out by other Trump victories, perhaps even on the same night — or, if not, just a few days later with another primary result. New Hampshire, in contrast, will set the conversation for a month. There isn’t another election with both Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump on the ballot until South Carolina, on Feb. 24.

Beyond New Hampshire
It’s important to emphasize that Mr. Trump would be an overwhelming favorite to win the nomination even if he lost New Hampshire. Ms. Haley is a classic factional candidate with narrow appeal to moderate and highly educated voters. It’s technically possible that New Hampshire will offer her an opportunity to broaden her appeal. But it’s not remotely likely that a conservative, populist, working-class party will swerve 50 points against a well-known former president toward the moderate, establishment candidate of highly educated voters over the next 45 days. Even if Ms. Haley won New Hampshire, she might still be the underdog in every other state.

And conversely, the race might remain contested in some sense, even if Mr. Trump wins New Hampshire decisively. Ms. Haley would presumably go on to South Carolina, where Mr. Trump leads by 30 points. But without New Hampshire to put the political wind at her back, there’s no reason to think she would be able to overcome this kind of staggering deficit. Instead, New Hampshire could put Mr. Trump on track for a 50-state sweep.

With a Trump win on Tuesday, the race would begin to have some of the characteristics of the Democratic primary. Yes, the front-runner faces a challenger. But no, it would not be realistic to believe the front-runner could be defeated by the usual means of campaigning on the trail and winning primary elections — with the obligatory caveat that Mr. Trump’s legal challenges might eventually offer a separate and novel way for him to lose down the line.

*Here Is One Way to Steal the Presidential Election*

What happens when you stress-test America’s system for electing a president? How well does it hold up?

The question now is whether there is any way to close that loophole before a stolen election slides through.

Three electors from the state of Washington cast their votes for Colin Powell, the former secretary of State, rather than for Mrs. Clinton, who won the popular vote there. Mrs. Clinton also won the popular vote in Colorado, where one elector attempted to vote for John Kasich, the former Ohio governor who had run for the Republican presidential nomination that year. Those electors were punished by their states with fines and removal as electors. They challenged that punishment in the Supreme Court. (One of us, Mr. Lessig, represented the Washington and Colorado electors.)

Now imagine the election results in a state are close. Charges of fraud cloud a recount. Leaders in the state legislature challenge the presumptive result. In response to those challenges, the legislature votes to direct their electors to cast their ballots for the candidate who presumptively lost but whom the legislature prefers. Any elector voting contrary to the legislature’s rule would be removed and replaced with an elector who complied.

The more effective strategy to avoid this result would be for political leaders to reaffirm the principle that should guide every policy adopted by the states: that the electoral results in a state should track the will of the people, not the partisans who command a majority in the legislature.

Rather than waiting until after the next election to fix this flaw, Congress and legislatures should act now to intervene. We are confident of only this: It is a rocky road ahead.

*The Point Conversations and insights about the moment.*

Every Monday morning on The Point, we’ll kick off the week with a tip sheet on the latest in the presidential campaign.

As New Hampshire gets ready to vote tomorrow for a Republican presidential nominee, there are two clear takeaways for me after months of campaigning, debates, strategy and polling: Donald Trump’s popularity in the Republican Party is deeper and broader than his critics wish it to be, and Nikki Haley ran the wrong kind of race in New Hampshire.

As a result, I think Trump wins by double digits over Haley in Tuesday’s primary, leaving her with a modest second-place finish (anything 10 points or more down is modest) and a big choice to make about whether to campaign for another four-and-a-half weeks until the primary in her home state of South Carolina.

Trump could reach 55 percent of the vote or more tomorrow, thanks in part to Ron DeSantis dropping out on Sunday. DeSantis was polling weakly here, but still, about 60 percent of his voters name Trump as their second choice in the University of New Hampshire’s final poll of the race. One reason for that is Trump’s inevitability. His presidency is appreciated by a very large number of Republicans who liked both his own-the-libs style and the state of the economy, the border, and broadly world affairs under him.

At Trump’s campaign event Sunday night in the heavily blue-collar city of Rochester, the crowd’s love affair with the former president was much in evidence. People were laughing, applauding or nodding along at a rate of every other sentence, with the biggest cheers coming from his “drill baby drill” stock line, his promises to terminate D.E.I. programs and secure the border, and his attacks on Haley, President Biden, Hunter Biden and “beautiful, beautiful Hillary” Clinton.

But the New Hampshire electorate is different than Iowa’s — candidates regularly win one state and lose the other by a lot — and Haley seemed positioned for months to do well here.

Many voters here like fighters, mavericks and disrupters who show a measure of heart or vulnerability and talk frankly about the country’s problems and their opponents. Haley depended a lot on endorsements from the establishment and on the idea that campaign dynamics would somehow work in her favor, including Chris Christie dropping out or New Hampshire becoming a two-person race.

But she didn’t cast herself as an underdog, as a gritty fighter against the kingpin Trump, and she never challenged him in the kind of blunt or surprising ways that might have generated momentum for her candidacy. She often came across as a familiar, scripted establishment figure in a state that wants more from its candidates. Where Haley goes from here is becoming the big question of the week.

David Firestone
Jan. 21, 2024, 4:41 p.m. ETJan. 21, 2024
Jan. 21, 2024
David FirestoneDeputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Why DeSantis Couldn’t Take on Trump
The people who actually know Gov. Ron DeSantis had no doubt that this day would come. His campaign never took flight, forcing the early withdrawal that DeSantis announced Sunday afternoon. And that’s because of who the guy is, or specifically, what he isn’t: appealing.

“I’d rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis,” Mac Stipanovich, a Republican lobbyist and strategist in Florida, told Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic in November 2022. As my colleague Nicholas Nehamas reported in June, “even supporters acknowledge that he is not a natural orator, and on the stump he sometimes calls himself an ‘energetic executive’ in a neutral monotone.”

You can occasionally get away with being boring or repellent as a governor, but it’s much harder to do in a presidential campaign. And that’s especially true this year, when DeSantis was running against a man who has bewitched an entire political party with smooth lies and impossible promises.

DeSantis ran an incompetent campaign, as NBC News documented today, but his big problem was that he thought he could run on a platform of substance, if you can call his anti-woke crusade that. For months he reminded voters that he had taken on Disney with his “don’t say gay” bill, kept books featuring L.G.B.T.Q. identity out of schools and fought against efforts to increase diversity in colleges and government. He falsely claimed his anti-vaccine efforts worked.

But polls repeatedly showed that almost no voters thought wokeness and transgender issues were high on the list of the nation’s top problems. As Lakshya Jain, who helps lead the website Split Ticket, told me in July, DeSantis misinterpreted what Florida voters were saying when they re-elected him in 2022 largely because of a good economy and a bad opponent.

Donald Trump is probably going to win the Republican nomination because he entertains his base with fantasies of strength and power, the essence of his cult of personality. To compete with him, it’s necessary to have a personality of your own. DeSantis doesn’t, and will soon disappear into the Florida swamps.

*Why Iran Doesn’t Want a War*

The war in Gaza has now gone where many feared it would, expanding into conflict in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Red Sea. With America’s repeated strikes against the Houthis in Yemen this month, fears of a larger regional conflagration are steadily growing.

Present in each of those arenas is Iran — and the question of whether Tehran and its powerful military will enter a wider war.

For years, Iran has provided funding, arms or training to Hamas and Hezbollah, which are fighting Israel, and to the Houthis, who have been attacking ships in the Red Sea. Iran has also launched its own strikes in recent days in retaliation for a deadly bombing earlier this month, claiming to target Israeli spy headquarters in Iraq and the Islamic State in Syria. It has also exchanged strikes with Pakistan across their shared border.

While Iran is clearly asserting its military strength amid the widening regional turmoil, that doesn’t mean its leaders want to be drawn into a wider war. They have said as much publicly, and perhaps more important, they have meticulously avoided taking direct military action against either Israel or the United States. The regime appears to be content for now to lean into its longtime strategy of proxy warfare: The groups they back are fighting Iran’s foes and so far, neither Israel nor the United States has signaled any interest in retaliating directly.

At the heart of Iran’s aversion to a major conflict are the domestic issues that have been preoccupying the regime. The elderly supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is seeking to secure his legacy — by overcoming political headwinds to install a like-minded successor, pursuing a nuclear weapon and ensuring the survival of the regime as an Islamist paladin dominating the Middle East — and that means not getting dragged into a wider war.

Mr. Khamenei’s government has been trying to keep his political opposition in check since 2022, when the Islamic Republic faced perhaps its most serious uprising since the revolution. The death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police tapped into widespread frustration with the country’s leaders and triggered a national movement explicitly intent on toppling the theocracy. Using brutal methods, the mullahs’ security forces regained the streets and schools, well aware that even unorganized protests can become a threat to the regime. Iran is also facing an economic crisis because of corruption, chronic fiscal mismanagement and sanctions imposed because of its nuclear infractions.

Even under less fraught circumstances, succession would be a delicate task in Iran. The only other time the Islamic Republic has had to choose a new supreme leader since its founding in 1979 was in 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution, died. At the time, Mr. Khamenei worried that unless the regime got the process right, its Western and domestic enemies would use the vacuum at the top to overthrow the young theocracy.

Today, Iran’s Assembly of Experts, a body of 88 elderly clerics, is constitutionally empowered to select the next supreme leader. Much about that process is veiled in secrecy, but recent reports in Iranian media indicate that a three-man commission that includes President Ebrahim Raisi and the Assembly members Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami and Ayatollah Rahim Tavakol is vetting candidates under Mr. Khamenei’s supervision. While the process may be intended to look like an open search in the fractured political environment, it is almost certainly just staging for the installation of another revolutionary conservative into the job.

To Mr. Khamenei, a fellow religious hard-liner would be the only candidate fit to continue Iran’s quest for regional dominance, or to lock in another key part of his legacy: the pursuit of a nuclear weapon. As the world has been focused on wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Tehran has been inching closer to the bomb — enriching uranium at higher levels, constructing more advanced centrifuges and improving the range and payload of ballistic missiles. At a time when the bomb seems tantalizingly close, Mr. Khamenei is unlikely to jeopardize that progress by conduct that might invite a strike on those facilities.

As he oversees the succession search and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Mr. Khamenei appears to be content, for now, to let the Arab militias across the Middle East do what Tehran has been paying and training them to do. Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance,” which includes Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, is at the core of the Islamic Republic’s grand strategy against Israel, the United States and Sunni Arab leaders, allowing the regime to strike out at its adversaries without using its own forces or endangering its territory. The various militias and terrorist groups that Tehran nurtures have allowed it to indirectly evict America from Iraq, sustain the Assad family in Syria and, on Oct. 7, help inflict a deeply traumatizing attack on the Jewish state.

As its proxy fighters inflame Israel’s northern front through sporadic Hezbollah missile strikes, instigate attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and impede maritime shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, Iran is likely hoping to pressure the international community to restrain Israel. And the imperative of not expanding the Israel-Gaza war, which has thus far guided American and Israeli policy, means that neither is likely to retaliate against the Islamic Republic — only against its proxies.

Of course, Hamas, which Israel has vowed to eliminate, is valuable to Iran. The regime has invested time and money into the group, and unlike most Islamic Republic proxies and allies, Hamas is Sunni, which helps the Shiite theocracy transcend sectarianism in the region. Liberating Palestinians, whom Iranian revolutionaries have been fond of since the Palestine Liberation Organization aided them against the Shah in 1979, is also at the core of the clerical regime’s anti-imperialist, Islamist mission.

But for Mr. Khamenei, the home front will always prevail over problems in the neighborhood. In the end, in the event Israel were to succeed in its goal of eliminating Hamas, the clerical state would most likely concede to the group’s demise, however grudgingly.

Of course, the more conflict Iran engages in — directly or indirectly — also increases the chance that a rogue or poorly judged strike could send the violence spinning out of control — in a direction Iran does not favor. History is riddled with miscalculations, and there is a real possibility that Iran could find itself pulled into the larger conflict that it has sought to avoid.

But Iran’s supreme leader is the longest-serving ruler in the Middle East precisely because of his uncanny ability to blend militancy with caution. He understands the weaknesses and strengths of his homeland when he seeks to advance the Islamic revolution beyond its borders.

In other words, Mr. Khamenei knows his limits — and he knows the legacy he needs to secure for the revolution to survive his passing.

*Only Voters Can Truly Disqualify Trump*

Intense debate has accompanied the decision by the Supreme Court to review the decision by Colorado’s highest court to bar Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballots based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — about the precise meaning of the word “insurrection,” the extent of Mr. Trump’s culpability for the events of Jan. 6 and other legal issues.

I’m not going to predict how the Supreme Court will rule, or whether its ruling will be persuasive to those with a different view of the law. But there’s a critical philosophical question that lies beneath the legal questions in this case. In a representative democracy, the people are sovereign, and they express their sovereignty through representatives of their choice. If the courts presume to pre-emptively reject the people’s choice, then who is truly sovereign?

The question of sovereignty was central to the purpose of the 14th Amendment in the first place. The Civil War — unquestionably an armed insurrection — was fought because of slavery. That was the reason for the war.

But its justification was a dispute over sovereignty, whether it resided primarily with the people of the individual states or with the people of the United States, who had established the Constitution.

The answer was settled on the battlefield, but it was ratified through the 14th Amendment, which defined who is a citizen of the United States and established that the “privileges or immunities” of same supersede any state laws that might abridge them. From now on, there would be no ambiguity: Under the Constitution, the people of the United States are sovereign, and this sovereignty supersedes the sovereignty of the people of the individual states whenever the privileges and immunities of the former are in conflict with the will of the latter.

Section 3 of that amendment was similarly enacted in order to secure federal supremacy. Rebel officers might well have retained strong popular support in the former Confederate states, but Section 3 prevented the rebellion from being continued by electoral means. The people of South Carolina might prefer to be represented by former rebels, but the people of the United States, whose sovereignty trumps South Carolina’s, forbid it.

Whose sovereignty, though, trumps the people as a whole?

Donald Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination for president and has a close to even-odds chance of winning the general election. That would seem to have no bearing on his eligibility to run. If a majority of the country wanted Barack Obama or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Selena Gomez to be president, it would be out of luck. The Constitution renders them ineligible: Mr. Obama has already been elected twice, Mr. Schwarzenegger was not born a U.S. citizen and Ms. Gomez is under 35 years old.

For that very reason, though, those individuals aren’t likely to run — and if they did try to run, their ineligibility would be manifest, recognized by everyone. Similarly, former Confederate officers and officials, by serving in the Confederacy, had explicitly declared themselves insurrectionists. Congress passed a broad amnesty in 1872 to lift the penalties associated with the involvement of most in insurrection, including that imposed by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment; some individuals not covered by the amnesty petitioned successfully for the restoration of their civil rights, and in other cases the prohibition was simply not enforced. But the essential fact of participation in the insurrection was not in dispute.

The situation with Mr. Trump could not be more different. An overwhelming majority of his party, and apparently about half of the country as a whole, considers him to be eligible to be president again. Moreover, these voters believe this even though, as President Biden said recently, “we saw with our own eyes” what happened on Jan. 6.

I count myself among those who consider Mr. Trump to be manifestly unfit to serve in any office ever again because of his actions on that day, even if he is not held criminally liable. But being unfit is not the same thing as being ineligible. What makes the Colorado Supreme Court — or any court — believe that it has a privileged understanding of those events that is beyond the capacity of the public to discern?

Perhaps the public is misinformed, or refuses to let itself be accurately informed, even at this late date, about what happened. The need for expertise and deliberation is why we have a representative democracy; the people do not act directly to make laws, but act through their representatives.

It’s notable in that regard, then, that impeachment — the remedy the Constitution provides for a president who violates his oath of office — does not involve the courts but the people, acting through their representatives. And the court of the people already had the opportunity to weigh in on Mr. Trump’s culpability for the events of Jan. 6. He was impeached an unprecedented second time by the House of Representatives for his actions on that day. But in the trial that followed in the Senate, Mr. Trump was acquitted.

That does not mean he is innocent. But it does mean that the Colorado Supreme Court has, in effect, declared that it outranks the Senate, and can overrule that body’s decision.

Some Republican senators, including the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, effectively asked the courts to do just that during the impeachment debate. Arguing that they had no authority to try a president whose term had ended, they refused to consider the facts of the case. But this was not a principled view. The Senate had already voted separately on the question of jurisdiction, and a majority determined that they did have the ability to try a president whose term had ended. Once that question was settled by the Senate itself, senators who thought Mr. Trump was guilty, including those who voted the other way on the jurisdictional question, could vote their consciences on the matter at trial.

Since the senators still voted to acquit, it must be because they did not think he was guilty, or did not deserve punishment for his guilt. Or, reflecting gross cowardice, perhaps they did not want the responsibility for convicting him, and preferred the courts to shoulder that responsibility instead.

That’s precisely what the Colorado Supreme Court has decided to do. But in so doing, it has usurped the proper prerogative of the people. It is saying, in so many words, that the people’s representatives got it wrong in the impeachment trial, and the people themselves are incapable of seeing what is in front of their eyes. Therefore the court must save the people from the possibility of making a catastrophically wrong decision.

El asalto al Tribunal y el pleito de los claudistas
Salvador García Soto
Salvador García Soto
Salvador García Soto
SALVADOR GARCÍA SOTO
| 22/01/2024 |
04:06 |
Actualizada
04:06
El asalto al Tribunal y el pleito de los claudistas
Salvador García Soto

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El asalto al Tribunal y el pleito de los claudistas

Gobierno ‘mala paga’ asfixia a contratistas y proveedores

Los nuevos videoescándalos de Carmona y la 4T

La guerra de egos en la campaña presidencial de Claudia Sheinbaum, en donde hay una feroz competencia por ver quién le garantiza a la exjefa de Gobierno la mejor asesoría jurídica y se coloca la estrellita de ser el operador que le saque a la candidata de Morena la declaratoria de validez de la elección y su declaración de “presidenta electa”, fue lo que realmente provocó la reciente explosión en el Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación y el cambio en la Presidencia de la máxima autoridad que calificará la próxima elección presidencial y declarará ganadora o ganador de la contienda.

El asalto de los claudistas al Tribunal Electoral comenzó a principios de diciembre pasado con la formación de un nuevo “bloque” mayoritario de tres ministros que tomaron el control de la Sala Superior y solicitaron la renuncia de Reyes Rodríguez Mondragón, argumentando “pérdida de confianza” por presuntas irregularidades administrativas y por el manejo discrecional del presupuesto del órgano judicial. Las inconformidades que sí existían entre los magistrados por las políticas “de austeridad” implementados por Reyes y las diferencias particulares entre el magistrado Felipe de la Mata y el exmagistrado presidente, fueron el caldo de cultivo para que tres colaboradores y cercanos a Claudia Sheinbaum diseñaran y planearan la toma de la máxima autoridad electoral en México.

Arturo Zaldívar, exministro de la Corte venido a porrista del oficialismo; Salvador Nava Gomar, exmagistrado del Trife y asesor jurídico de Sheinbaum, y la actual ministra de la Corte, Yasmín Esquivel Mossa, fueron los tres claudistas que agitaron las aguas del tribunal y azuzaron el golpe de la nueva mayoría que obligó a renunciar a Reyes Rodríguez. Para ello aprovecharon muy bien el debilitamiento del Tribunal Electoral provocado por la estrategia del presidente López Obrador de ordenarle al Senado que no nombrara al magistrado faltante, que debía ocupar el espacio que dejó vacante José Luis Vargas, quien concluyó su magistratura desde el 1 de noviembre de 2023.

Un Tribunal de 5 magistrados, en lugar de 7, le convenía mucho más a la 4T porque para formar una mayoría que controlara a la Sala Superior en materia electoral solo se necesitan 3 magistrados en lugar de 4 o 5. Por eso, con la misma estrategia perversa que le aplicaron al Inai, la mayoría de Morena en el Senado le dio largas al nombramiento de las dos magistraturas pendientes y con ello abrió la puerta para que se concretara el asalto al Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación, que solo necesitó de convencer a tres magistrados de que formaran la nueva mayoría y depusieran al anterior presidente Reyes Rodríguez, a quien no le tenían confianza por sus vínculos con el panismo, para colocar en el cargo a alguien más fácil de controlar para el oficialismo de Morena.

El ascenso de la magistrada Mónica Soto, como nueva presidenta del tribunal que calificará las elecciones fue la culminación de esa estrategia y detrás de ella también hubo una feroz competencia entre los tres claudistas mencionados, Zaldívar, Nava y Esquivel, quienes se disputan no sólo la influencia como juristas con la candidata morenista, sino también el mérito de ser quien le venda a Sheinbaum que gracias a sus buenos oficios y a su operación política dentro del Tribunal, se logre sacarle su declaración de presidenta electa, y por ende la banda presidencial.

Desde el cuartel de campaña Arturo Zaldívar operó con el magistrado Felipe Fuentes, con quien tiene una relación dentro del Poder Judicial. Fuentes conoce como pocos el manejo interno del Tribunal y ya había operado internamente en el desconocimiento y las renuncias de dos expresidentes del Tribunal: Janine Otálora en enero de 2019, y José Luis Vargas, en agosto de 2021. En ambas remociones, el magistrado jugó un papel principal, tanto en el de Janine, cuando fue nombrado presidente interino por casi 11 meses, como en el de José Luis Vargas, a quien también sustituyó en agosto de 2021 para dar paso luego a la presidencia de Reyes Rodríguez, de quien también fue parte del bloque que pidió su salida.

El otro operador claudista que tuvo injerencia en el cambio de presidenta del Tribunal fue Salvador Nava Gomar, quien tiene una relación cercana con Felipe de la Mata Pizaña, actual magistrado de ese órgano y quien trabajó con Nava en la época que este fue magistrado electoral de 2006 a 2016. De la Mata fue otro de los protagonistas en la formación del minibloque mayoritario que solicitó la renuncia de Reyes Rodríguez. Curiosamente Reyes y Felipe de la Mata fueron muy cercanos y pertenecieron al mismo bloque durante varios años, junto con Janine Otálora, pero en los últimos meses tuvieron varios choques y diferencias que los llevaron hasta el rompimiento, por una colaboradora cercana de De la Mata que lo acusó de “proposiciones indebidas” y dejó su oficina para irse a trabajar con Reyes Mondragón.

Y la tercera operadora que metió las manos al Tribunal Electoral, también en busca de quedar bien con Sheinbaum, fue la ministra Yasmín Esquivel. Su relación cercana con la magistrada Mónica Soto Fregoso data de hace décadas y tiene que ver con la carrera de ambas en tribunales judiciales y administrativos. Es tan cercana esa relación que actualmente hay familiares de la magistrada Soto que trabajan en la Suprema Corte y en concreto en la ponencia de la ministra Esquivel.

Entre Zaldívar y Salvador Nava hay fuertes diferencias. A partir de que el expresidente de la Corte dejó tiradas la toga y el birrete para mostrarse finalmente como el simpatizante que siempre fue de la 4T, creyó que sería el principal asesor de Sheinbaum en materia jurídica y de justicia. Pero cuando el ministro renegado llegó a la campaña, Nava Gomar ya tenía más de un año asesorando a la candidata y elaborando sus denuncias y litigios en materia electoral y judicial, lo que no le gustó a don Arturo y comenzó un choque de egos y una competencia por encabezar el equipo jurídico de la candidata.

A ese duelo de dos se sumó la ministra Yasmín Esquivel, quien también busca quedar bien con su amiga Claudia Sheinbaum y ganarse su confianza en materia judicial y jurídica. Hoy en manos de esos tres abogados claudistas (dos con el título y una bajo investigación por plagio) está el control del Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación. A cual más quiere agradar y complacer a la candidata y venderle en un futuro todavía hipotético, que fueron ellos dos o ella, los que le operaron el reconocimiento a su triunfo en el Tribunal y por ende los que le garantizaron, también eventualmente, que obtuviera la banda presidencial.

NOTAS INDISCRETAS… En medio de la guerra política que se vive en Tamaulipas, ayer el secretario del Ayuntamiento de Reynosa, Antonio Joaquín De León Villarreal, dio a conocer un documento en donde el Notario Púbico número 305 de esta ciudad, Francisco Garza Treviño, niega la validez del poder notarial presentado por el exgobernador Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca para tramitar una carta de residencia en ese municipio. Según acusa el funcionario municipal, el notario Garza Treviño aseguró que es falso el Poder General con el que compareció Claudia Margarita Rodríguez Martínez a solicitar la constancia de residencia en nombre y representación de Cabeza de Vaca y agregó que dicho poder “por ser de actos de dominio, para su validez, debe de estar inscrito en el Registro Nacional de Poderes (RENAP) y no lo está”. Y de acuerdo con documentos presentados, la firma que aparece en el poder notarial, que desconoce el Notario 305 de Reynosa, habría sido falsificada, porque según el notario Garza Treviño el exgobernador Cabeza de Vaca no estuvo en su notaría a las 13:00 horas del día 23 de septiembre del año 2022 para otorgar un poder en favor de un tercero como se asegura en el documento y además dijo desconocer “como puesta de mi puño y letra, la firma que obra en dicho poder, ni el sello que aparece en el documento”. El tema es delicado no sólo por las acusaciones de falsificación que hace el notario, sino porque esa constancia de residencia, que se tramitó con un poder notarial presuntamente falso, es un requisito legal para que Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca pueda ser postulado como candidato a diputado federal por el Partido Acción Nacional, ya sea por la vía de mayoría o incluso por la vía plurinominal. Y si no cumple con ese requisito, a Cabeza se le podría cerrar la puerta de cualquier candidatura ya sea a una diputación o de una senaduría por Acción Nacional en el actual proceso electoral en curso. Eso sin contar que el haber presentado un documento apócrifo podría traer problemas para el exgobernador, ya que el artículo 250 del Código Penal para el Estado de Tamaulipas, contempla el delito de Falsificación de Documentos Públicos o Privados y, el artículo 251, la forma en que se castigará dicho delito, mencionando que, si se trata de un documento privado, la sanción a imponer será de 6 meses a 5 años de prisión y multas de 100 a 200 veces el valor diario de la Unidad de Medida y Actualización. Habrá que esperar la respuesta de Cabeza de Vaca a las graves acusaciones de falsificación que le hace el notario, pero por lo pronto, queda claro que alguien no quiere el regreso del exgobernador a la política nacional. ¿Será por miedo o por pura precaución?… Hablando de miedos, el que de plano no tiene miedo de violar la ley electoral o de plano la viola conscientemente es el gobernador de San Luis Potosí, Ricardo Gallardo Carmona. Y es que ayer domingo, en pleno acto oficial con el presidente López Obrador en su estado, y siguiendo el ejemplo del mandatario que predica que “no me vengan con que la ley es la ley”, ayer el gobernador Verde, aliado de Morena, gritó a voz de cuello y en presencia del inquilino de Palacio: “Ahora, las y los potosinos le decimos, señor presidente, que estamos con usted, y con la consolidación de la Cuarta Transformación que encabezará Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo en este año 2024. Ya confirmamos en San Luis Potosí, la alianza entre el Partido Verde, Morena y el Partido del Trabajo, para arrasar en el próximo proceso electoral”, dijo con total descaro el mandatario potosino. A ese paso, y si no hay sanciones ejemplares del INE, que con la señora Guadalupe Taddei se ha vuelto lerdo y complaciente con las violaciones legales, la contienda presidencial y federal terminará siendo una disputa sin ley o bajo la ley de la selva en el que gana el más fuerte. Y hasta ahora ese es el partido gobernante. Cómo se están pareciendo los morenistas al más viejo y rancio PRI… Escalera Doble mandan los dados para iniciar la semana. Muy buena señal.

*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*

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*How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again*

Blue-collar white voters make up Donald Trump’s base. But his political resurgence has been fueled largely by Republicans from the other end of the socioeconomic scale.

Working-class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump. College-educated conservatives may ensure that he keeps it.

Often overlooked in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with a college degree remain at the heart of the lingering Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy and cultural issues.

These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Mr. Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.

Even as Mr. Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, it was only a year ago that he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination.

Then came Mr. Trump’s resurgence, in which he rallied every corner of the party, including the white working class. But few cross-sections of Republicans rebounded as much as college-educated conservatives, a review of state and national polls during the past 14 months shows.

This phenomenon cuts against years of wariness toward Mr. Trump by college-educated Republicans, unnerved by his 2020 election lies and his seemingly endless craving for controversy.

Their surge toward the former president appears to stem largely from a reaction to the current political climate rather than a sudden clamoring to join the red-capped citizenry of MAGA nation, according to interviews with nearly two dozen college-educated Republican voters.

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A supporter holding his hand over his heart — where his shirt has a picture of Donald Trump’s mug shot — during the singing of the national anthem at a Trump event in Clinton, Iowa.
In interviews, many college-educated Republicans expressed anger at the criminal cases against Mr. Trump, calling them unfair. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Many were incredulous over what they described as excessive and unfair legal investigations targeting the former president. Others said they were underwhelmed by Mr. DeSantis and viewed Mr. Trump as more likely to win than former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Several saw Mr. Trump as a more palatable option because they wanted to prioritize domestic problems over foreign relations and were frustrated with high interest rates.

“These are Fox News viewers who are coming back around to him,” said David Kochel, a Republican operative in Iowa with three decades of experience in campaign politics. “These voters are smart enough to see the writing on the wall that Trump is going to win, and essentially want to get this over with and send him off to battle Biden.”

As the presidential nominating season commences, college-educated Republicans face a profound decision. Whether they stick with Mr. Trump, swing back to Mr. DeSantis or align behind Ms. Haley will help set the party’s course heading into November and for years to come.

‘Now I prefer Trump’
Mr. Trump is the odds-on favorite to become his party’s nominee, which would make him the first Republican to win three consecutive presidential nominations. But there was little sense of inevitability a year ago.

He had failed to help deliver the red wave of victories he promised supporters in the 2022 midterm elections. In the weeks that followed, he suggested terminating the Constitution and faced sharp criticism for hosting a dinner with Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier, and the rapper Kanye West, who had been widely denounced for making antisemitic comments.

The backlash from Republican voters was immediate.

In a Suffolk University/USA Today poll at the time, 61 percent of the party’s voters said they still supported Mr. Trump’s policies but wanted “a different Republican nominee for president.” A stunning 76 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed.

This month, the same pollster showed Mr. Trump with support from 62 percent of Republican voters, including 60 percent of those with a college degree.

Other surveys have revealed similar trends.

Mr. Trump’s backing from white, college-educated Republicans doubled to 60 percent over the course of last year, according to Fox News polling.

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Supporters of Mr. Trump clapping at a rally in November in Edinburg, Texas, near the southern border, where Gov. Greg Abbott endorsed the former president.
Supporters of Mr. Trump gathered at a rally in November in Edinburg, Texas, near the southern border, where Gov. Greg Abbott endorsed the former president. Mr. Trump consolidated Republican support throughout the year. Credit…Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Mr. Trump’s ability to maintain support from both sides of the party’s educational gap could be crucial to his political future beyond the Republican primary race.

Iowa Caucuses: Live Updates
Updated
Jan. 15, 2024, 11:47 a.m. ET55 minutes ago
55 minutes ago
When will we know who won Iowa? It depends.
Will Trump claim fraud if he doesn’t like the caucus results?
Fear and anxiety are on the ballot in Iowa.
In the 2020 presidential election, he bled support from 9 percent of Republicans who voted for a different candidate, according to an AP VoteCast survey of more than 110,000 voters. Some campaign advisers have said those defections cost him a second term, particularly given that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost just 4 percent of Democrats.

College-educated voters accounted for 56 percent of Mr. Trump’s defections, according to a New York Times analysis of the data.

Ruth Ann Cherny, 65, a retired nurse from Urbandale, Iowa, said she was turning back to Mr. Trump after considering whether the party had “a younger, dynamic guy.”

She considered Mr. DeSantis, but decided she couldn’t support him because “dang, his campaign is such a mess.” She wanted to support Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and political newcomer, but concluded he was too inexperienced and could not win.

“Trump has been in the White House once, and maybe he has a better lay of the land this time and will know who’s who and what’s what,” Ms. Cherny said.

Yolanda Gutierrez, 94, a retired real estate agent from Lakewood, Calif., whose state votes in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 5, expressed similar views.

“I know Trump’s got a lot of baggage,” she said. “But so much of it is make-believe.”

Ms. Gutierrez, who studied education in college, said she had voted twice for Mr. Trump but had been leaning toward Mr. DeSantis because she liked his record as governor of Florida and thought the party needed a younger leader.

“But now I prefer Trump because Democrats are trying to find any way they can to jail him,” she said.

‘Like a teenager who’s rebelling’
The shift in Republican support for Mr. Trump can be pinpointed almost to the moment last year when, on March 30, 2023, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, making him the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.

At the time, Mr. Trump’s primary bid had support from less than half of voters in most polls, an ominous position where he had been hovering for months.

But just four days after the Manhattan indictment, Mr. Trump eclipsed the 50 percent mark, and he has trended upward ever since, according to a national average of polls maintained by FiveThirtyEight. As of Saturday, Mr. Trump had support from about 60 percent of the party.

Lisa Keathly, 54, who owns two flooring businesses near Dallas, said she still wanted to support Mr. DeSantis, whom she views as more polished and less rude. But she added that she was increasingly likely to back Mr. Trump in her state’s Super Tuesday primary.

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Ron DeSantis smiling and speaking into a microphone at a rally in Grimes, Iowa.
At the start of the primary campaign, Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the Republican Party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times
She pointed to a ruling last month from Colorado’s top court to block the former president from the primary ballot, which the U.S. Supreme Court is now considering, as a moment that may have sealed her support for Mr. Trump.

“It’s a little bit like a teenager who’s rebelling — a part of me is like, Maybe I should go for Trump because everyone is telling me not to,” Ms. Keathly said. “Part of my thing is: Why are they so scared?”

She added, “Because they can’t control him.”

Worries about ‘a wasted vote’
Some college-educated Republicans said they had circled back to Mr. Trump as they grew increasingly anxious about foreign conflicts.

Unlike Ms. Haley, who now appears to be Mr. Trump’s toughest challenger, they were opposed to sending more aid to help Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. And they liked Mr. Trump’s tough talk on China.

“I like Nikki Haley, and I’d probably vote for her if I thought she could beat him,” said Linda Farrar, a 72-year-old Republican from Missouri, which holds its presidential caucuses on March 2. “But right now, national security is the most important thing.”

Ms. Farrar said she wanted to send a message to the world by nominating a presidential candidate who would project strength abroad.

“I’m just afraid of China and what’s happening at the border and who’s coming in,” she said. “It scares me a great deal. China is really taking over — they’re infiltrating from the inside.”

Others cited increasing concern about the economy, and a longing for the kinds of market gains that colored Mr. Trump’s first three years in office.

Many, like Chip Shaw, a 46-year-old information technology specialist in Rome, Ga., said they had been underwhelmed by Mr. DeSantis’s campaign, and viewed support for any candidate other than Mr. Trump as “a wasted vote.”

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Mr. Trump’s back is visible as he walks offstage after an event in Clinton, Iowa.
Some college-educated Republicans said they had circled back to Mr. Trump as they grew increasingly anxious about foreign conflicts.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
“If we’re going off the way polls are right now, that’s the way I feel. My vote would be going into thin air,” Mr. Shaw said. “The country was really running smooth under him. I think that the economy was a crap ton better — we weren’t paying $6 a carton for eggs.”

Still, support for Mr. Trump has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The urgency among Republicans to unseat Mr. Biden has been a key factor in determining which candidate to support, a finding that Trump aides said had revealed itself in their internal research of primary voters.

The Trump campaign has focused much of its ad budget on attacking Mr. Biden, which appears to be an early pivot to the likely matchup in the general election — and addresses one of Republican voters’ top concerns.

“Trump is good,” said Hari Goyal, 73, a physician in Sacramento, who supported Mr. DeSantis last year but has since changed his mind. “Look at Biden and what he has done to this country. Trump can beat him, and he can fix this country.”

*Election 2024 In Final Push, Trump, Haley and DeSantis Battle for Votes in Iowa*

Donald J. Trump is hoping for a record margin of victory. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are battling to finish a stronger-than-expected second. Caucusing begins at 7 p.m. Central time.

It’s Caucus Day in Iowa. Here’s the latest.
Against a backdrop of blisteringly cold weather and polls suggesting a race short on drama, Republicans will gather on Monday night in caucuses across Iowa to inaugurate their party’s process of choosing a presidential nominee for 2024.

The three leading candidates — Donald J. Trump and then, far behind him in the polls, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis — battled high winds and snow over the weekend as they implored supporters to turn out, making the case one final time for their candidacies and against those of their opponents. They were also looking ahead to the next two states with nominating contests as they began to shut down their Iowa operations and move to New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The Iowa caucuses have historically been a suspenseful early test for candidates, who spend nearly a year campaigning in intimate settings, taking questions from voters. Suspense-wise, that may be less true this year.

Mr. Trump, the former president, is dominating the field, according to nearly every poll and reports from Republicans across the state. The lingering question is whether Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, or Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, will come in second.

In one sign of confidence, Mr. Trump held his final in-person campaign rally on Sunday night, in Indianola, and plans to spend the day calling caucus captains before visiting a caucus site in Des Moines.

Ms. Haley plans to attend several events in and around Des Moines on Monday, as well as host a virtual town hall and visit a caucus site. In the evening, she is expected to deliver remarks at a caucus watch party in West Des Moines.

Mr. DeSantis — who could very well be forced out of the contest if he comes in third — was setting off on one final blitz of campaigning across the state, including stops in three of Iowa’s major media markets and nearly a dozen appearances on national and local media outlets.

In other news:
Republicans once had high hopes for a possible record turnout in these caucuses. But the brutal weather and Mr. Trump’s dominance have cooled predictions. When caucusgoers cast the first votes tonight, the temperature will feel like minus 40 degrees in northwestern Iowa, minus 30 degrees near Des Moines and minus 15 degrees in the southeastern part of the state, said Jonathan Porter, the chief meteorologist for AccuWeather.

After Monday, the quadrennial post-caucus exodus begins, potentially before the final outcome in Iowa is known. In the coming days, Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis all plan to make their way to New Hampshire, where there is a Republican primary next week, though Mr. DeSantis will stop along the way in South Carolina, which has its primary after New Hampshire’s. (Polls suggest that Mr. DeSantis should not bank on a strong showing in New Hampshire.) No weather respite there: Forecasters are predicting cold temperatures and up to three inches of snow.

Mr. Trump finished up a light month of campaigning by attacking Ms. Haley, as good an indication as any poll of how he sees the race in the days ahead. He told supporters that Ms. Haley was “not right to be president.” (A key poll released on Saturday night showed her in second place, with 20 percent, behind Mr. Trump, with 48 percent. Mr. DeSantis was at 16 percent.)

President Biden’s campaign, seeking to grab some attention, said that together with two allied committees it was entering 2024 with more than $117 million in cash.

For her part, Ms. Haley used her closing arguments on Sunday to tell voters in Ames that the country was at a turning point — “The world is on fire,” she said — as she presented herself as a candidate of change. “The only way we’re going to win the majority of Americans is if we have a new generational leader that leaves the negativity and the baggage behind and focuses on the solutions of the future,” she said.

*A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.*

Cheryl Sharp, a 47-year-old sales associate who was among the many Iowans turned away from a filled-to-capacity Trump rally last month, sounded pretty confident she knew why Donald Trump was so appealing to many voters. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along.

“You want someone strong, globally, so that it creates mutual respect with other countries, and maybe a little bit of fear,” she told me. “Yes, it’s true, not everyone likes him. It’s good not to be liked. Being strong is better.” Sharp readily conceded that not everything Trump said was great, but she saw that as part of the right personality to be president. “You gotta be a little crazy, maybe, to make sure other countries respect and fear us,” she said. “And he can run the country like a business, and they will leave him alone.”

Three days later, inside a Trump rally in New Hampshire, Scott Bobbitt and his wife, Heather, also brought up Trump’s strength. “He commands respect and fear around the world,” Scott Bobbitt told me. “Many people may be driven by fear of him because he’ll do what he says he’s going to do, and he’s not afraid to talk about it. And I think that that’s very powerful. That does protect our country, and he’ll stand up instead of rolling over.”

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A photograph of a flag with a portrait of Donald Trump that reads “miss me yet?”
I first began attending Trump rallies eight years ago, to try to better understand a candidate who was then being described as a joke — someone with little to no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency — and came away struck by his mix of charisma and powerful command of audiences.

Rather than the bumbling celebrity I expected, I encountered a politician laying the groundwork for a powerful political realignment around subjects too readily brushed aside by the bipartisan establishment in Washington, such as the loss of manufacturing in the United States; those left behind by globalization and trade, especially trade with China; the legacy of the Iraq war and U.S. involvement in foreign wars in general; and, of course, immigration.

I recently started going to Trump rallies and following his supporters’ online political conversations once again, to try to better understand something else: his base, and specifically the question of authoritarianism and the American voter.

The authoritarian label has been attached to Trump by critics for years, especially after he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. I have studied and written about authoritarianism for years, and I think it’s important to pay attention to the views and motivations of voters who support authoritarian politicians, even when these politicians are seen by many as threats to the democratic order.

My curiosity isn’t merely intellectual. Around the world, these politicians are not just getting elected democratically; they are often retaining enough popular support after a term — or two or three — to get re-elected. Polls strongly suggest that Trump has a reasonable chance of winning another term in November. And he has clearly retained his hold on the Republican Party base: His Republican challengers either seem to be angling to be his vice president or are struggling to climb in the polls.

What I wanted to understand was, why? Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?

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A photograph of a woman in a stars-and-stripes T-shirt, holding a red trump hat over her heart.
Barb Rice stands for the pledge of allegiance in Waterloo, Iowa.
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A photograph of a man holding up a sign at a Trump rally.
A Trump supporter at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa.
In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.

*What Makes Nikki Haley Tougher Than the Rest*

Politics is a tough business, so you’d think most politicians would be tough people. In fact, in my experience they’re often not. A lot of people go into politics because they want to be universally liked, and from Abraham Lincoln on down, many of them have detested personal confrontation. Several years ago it occurred to me that in every administration I had covered to that point — from Reagan through Obama — the White House staff seemed to fear the first lady more than they feared the commander in chief.

This has obviously changed in recent times. Donald Trump was tough, mean and self-pitying (a nifty combination). President Biden is tougher than he looks. And the woman who is now Trump’s chief challenger, Nikki Haley, is one of the toughest politicians in America — by which I mean confrontational, willing to hammer her foes.

When you read accounts of her days in South Carolina, her bellicosity fairly ripples off the pages. In a fantastic 2021 profile in Politico Magazine, Tim Alberta quotes a former South Carolina Republican Party chair: “Listen, man. She will cut you to pieces. Nikki Haley has a memory. She has a memory. She will remember who was with her and who was against her. And she won’t give a second chance to anyone who she thinks did her wrong.”

But the most telling quotation is the one Haley gave to Alberta herself: “I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust.”

She grew up in the only Indian American family in a small working-class South Carolina town. The stories she tells about her girlhood are often about exclusion: being disqualified from a beauty pageant because it was set up to allow for only one Black and one white winner (though some locals dispute this); a fruit-stand vendor calling the cops because her father was a brown-skinned man wearing a turban. She once described her childhood as “survival mode.”

Today, many people think of Haley as part of the older Republican establishment, a political descendant of the Bushes and Mitt Romney who suddenly finds herself trying to thrive in a party dominated by Trumpian populists. This is not quite right. Haley entered politics as a Tea Party maverick. As Hanna Rosin noted in The Atlantic in 2011, the Tea Party was female-led, and most of its supporters were right-wing women who, among other things, wanted to take on the Republican old boys network. Women like Haley and Sarah Palin presented themselves as whistle-blowers, taking down corruption.

Haley ran her first campaign, for state legislature, against a 30-year Republican incumbent. What ensued was classic South Carolina politics. A mailer went out attacking her and referring to her by her birth name, Nimrata Randhawa. A whisper campaign suggested she was Buddhist or Hindu. (In fact, she is a Christian who attends a Methodist church). When she got to the legislature, she didn’t fit in with the old guard. “I’m telling you, nobody liked her. Nobody wanted to work with her. They hated her,” another state representative, who became a close friend, told Alberta.

Alberta captured this period of her career this way: “She came to be loathed by many of her fellow Republicans for not being a team player, for going rogue on certain votes and procedures that made them look slimy or stupid to her benefit.”

In 2010, she was given little shot at winning the governor’s race until Palin visited the state to enthusiastically endorse her. Once again the rough rules of South Carolina politics prevailed. Two men surfaced at the height of the campaign, including a lobbyist who had worked for one of her rivals, claiming to have had affairs with her, while lacking evidence. A fellow lawmaker called her a “raghead.”

After his own political career imploded, Gov. Mark Sanford gave Haley a $400,000 donation at a crucial moment in the campaign. “And then she cut me off,” Sanford recalled to Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki: She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”

As governor it was more of the same. She frequently went to war with lawmakers to get her agenda passed. “I have called out legislators from Year 1,” she once declared. “I go to their districts and call them out. I mean, it’s what I’m known for. I put their votes up on Facebook.” One of her great successes as governor was relentlessly lobbying corporations to build their plants in South Carolina. When she left office, the state had 400,000 more jobs than when she entered.

She brought the same pummeling manner to her job as U.N. ambassador. All U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations defend Israel, but Haley made it the centerpiece of her job. She waded into a famously anti-Israel institution with fists raised. She was one of the people who made the Trump administration so supportive of the Jewish state. When close allies like Britain and France voted for a resolution condemning the U.S. decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she did not invite their representatives to a U.S. Mission reception, which is practically war in U.N. terms.

Seen through one lens, she is a ruthlessly ambitious person who is happy to bruise people to succeed. Seen from another perspective, she is a brave renegade who fights the old guard to get things done. Seen through a third lens, she is a needlessly competitive personality who makes enemies in profusion. All three viewpoints seem to contain a piece of the truth.

A few things need to be said to complicate this picture. First, though she knows how to play hardball, her heart has not been callused over. When nine parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston were gunned down by a white supremacist in 2015, she was vulnerable and grieving in public and private. She went to all of the funerals. Her friends worried she was losing a dangerous amount of weight. Mobilized by sadness and anger, she helped persuade more than two-thirds of both houses of the legislature to remove the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds, which was an astounding act of political craftsmanship and moral fortitude that even her detractors admire.

Second, if she’s often tough as nails, she has generally been tough as tulips about Donald Trump. As The Times’ Sharon LaFraniere has reported, she was not one of the Trump officials who would stand up to try to prevent him from carrying out his more crackpot ideas. “Every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later,” Trump told Vanity Fair in 2021, which is pretty accurate.

I wonder if Haley would be seen as tougher if she were a man. I also wonder if her toughness was forged by being a woman in a conservative, male-dominated state. Maya Angelou offered some wisdom on female toughness in her 1993 book, “Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now.” She wrote, “The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough. She must have convinced herself, or be in the unending process of convincing herself, that she, her values and her choices are important. In a time and world where males hold sway and control, the pressure upon women to yield their rights of way is tremendous. And it is under those very circumstances that the woman’s toughness must be in evidence.”

By this measure, Haley has succeeded amazingly well. But then Angelou added a wrinkle: A woman “will need to prize her tenderness and be able to display it at appropriate times in order to prevent toughness from gaining total authority and to avoid becoming a mirror image of those men who value power above life, and control over love.”

There’s often been a wariness around Haley, people worrying she’s mostly about herself. Donald Trump, who really is all about himself, has somehow made himself into the much-beloved tribune of the working class in a way his opponents just haven’t.

The Republican Party has come a long way in the last few decades. The party is no longer in the mood for compassionate conservatism or even Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. Republicans feel besieged and want a bruiser type who will defend them. In their different ways, Trump and Haley are both products of and architects of the current G.O.P. vibe. Neither Trump nor Haley sits around reading Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Neither Trump nor Haley has what you would call fully developed philosophies. Neither is conventionally partisan; both made their bones attacking the G.O.P. establishment, not working their way up within it.

Mike Pence was too boring to match the party’s current mood. Tim Scott was too nice. Trump and the woman who is now his leading challenger are different versions of a bare-knuckled ethos, and if you look at their records, it’s pretty clear that Haley is actually more effectively tough than Trump. She’s confrontational in pursuit of policy, whereas he is confrontational in pursuit of ratings. She’s a doer; his attention span isn’t long enough to make him an effective executive. If Republicans want someone who will execute their agenda, they should go with her.

Unfortunately, Haley’s support in the G.O.P. seems to have a low ceiling. This campaign is about toughness and finding someone who can defend a party that feels under siege, but it’s also about identity and class. Haley is surging, but she is surging mostly among college-educated voters. In general, Haley does better among more educated voters than less, slightly better among men than women, and she does poorly among evangelicals, which these days is as much a nationalist identity category as a religious one.

Trump also has an advantage that Haley can’t match. He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unpack. But it’s a bond no amount of Nikki Haley toughness can break.

*Guatemala’s New President Is Sworn In, Despite Efforts to Stop Him*

For hours, it was unclear whether Bernardo Arévalo, an anticorruption crusader, would take office at all, as lawmakers delayed the transfer of power.

Despite staunch resistance from his opponents in the government, the anticorruption crusader Bernardo Arévalo was inaugurated early Monday morning as Guatemala’s president, a turning point in a country where tensions have been simmering over widespread graft and impunity.

His inauguration had been scheduled for Sunday, but members of Congress delayed it, and concerns persisted about whether it would happen at all. But after an international outcry and pressure from protesters, Mr. Arévalo was sworn in shortly after midnight, becoming Guatemala’s most progressive head of state since democracy was re-established in the 1980s.

His rise to power — six months after his victory at the polls delivered a stunning rebuke to Guatemala’s conservative political establishment — amounts to a sea change in Central America’s most populous country. His landslide election reflected broad support for his proposals to curb graft and revive a teetering democracy.

But as Mr. Arévalo prepares to govern, he must assert control while facing off against an alliance of conservative prosecutors, members of Congress and other political figures who have gutted Guatemala’s governing institutions in recent years.

“Arévalo has the most thankless job in Guatemala today because he arrives with exceptionally high expectations,” said Edgar Ortíz Romero, an expert on Guatemalan constitutional law. “He’s been given a budget for a Toyota when people want a Ferrari.”

Mr. Arévalo’s opponents in Congress moved to rein him in late last year, approving a budget that would severely limit his ability to spend on health care and education, two of his top priorities.

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A person with a white and blue paint on his face takes a photo of a person holding a flag and others look on.
Protesters outside Guatemala’s Congress on Sunday.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
But finding resources to spend is just one of the difficulties confronting Mr. Arévalo. More urgently, as his opponents in Congress showed again on Sunday, he faces multiple challenges from Guatemala’s entrenched establishment, aimed at quickly crippling his ability to govern.

The power struggle playing out in Guatemala, a nation of 18 million, is being closely followed throughout Central America, a region on edge over the expanding sway of drug cartels, the exodus of migrants and the use of authoritarian tactics in neighboring countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua.

“This is a unique event in the country’s history,” said Javier García, a 31-year-old engineer, who was among the thousands who turned out to celebrate the inauguration in the capital, Guatemala City. “Now I hope those who lost the election understand this once and for all.”

The transition of power was anything but orderly. After he burst onto Guatemala’s political scene last year, Mr. Arévalo faced an assassination plot, his party’s suspension and a barrage of legal attacks aimed at preventing him from taking office. His opponent in the presidential race, a former first lady, refused to recognize his victory.

In the capital, speculation swirled in recent days that prosecutors would seek the arrest of Mr. Arévalo’s running mate, Karin Herrera, potentially derailing the inauguration because both the president-elect and vice president-elect need to be present for the transfer of power to be legitimate.

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A man in a suit is surrounded by throngs of people holding flags as part of a street march.
Mr. Arévalo, a sociologist and former diplomat, won broad support for his proposals to curb corruption and revive Guatemala’s teetering democracy.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Guatemala’s highest court issued an order last week shielding Ms. Herrera from arrest, giving her and Mr. Arévalo a reprieve. But the same court sowed confusion on Sunday when it allowed his conservative opponents to remain in the running to retain control of Congress.

Members of Congress opposed to Mr. Arévalo then spent hours trying to consolidate their hold on the chamber, effectively delaying the transfer of power as much of the country remained on tenterhooks. But in a twist on Sunday night, Mr. Arévalo’s party managed to win leadership of Congress, clearing the way for the swearing-in.

Prosecutors and judges opposed to Mr. Arévalo had already gone on a judicial onslaught soon after the national election. Seeking to cast doubt on Mr. Arévalo’s victory at the polls, where he won by more than 20 percentage points, prosecutors obtained arrest warrants for four magistrates who served on Guatemala’s top electoral authority, alleging corruption in the acquisition of election software. The four magistrates were all outside the country when the warrants were issued.

On Thursday, the attorney general’s office arrested Napoleón Barrientos, a former interior minister, on the grounds that he had refused to use force to maintain order in October against protesters demanding the attorney general’s resignation.

Such moves have grown common in Guatemala since 2019, when conservative political figures shut down a pioneering United Nations-backed anticorruption mission. Dozens of prosecutors and judges who had been trying to take on graft fled into exile.

Pushing back, the United States, the European Union and multiple leaders in Latin America threw their support behind Mr. Arévalo, a sociologist and former diplomat. That support was visible on Sunday as the delays seemed to put the transfer of power in doubt.

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People linger and chat inside the congressional chamber.
Members of Congress delayed the inauguration on Sunday.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
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“There is no question that Bernardo Arévalo is the president of Guatemala,” said Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, who led a U.S. delegation to the inauguration. She added, “The world is watching.”

The Biden administration maneuvered for months in support of Mr. Arévalo after he shocked many in Guatemala, including members of his party, by squeaking into a runoff election that he went on to resoundingly win.

Washington’s support for reform stands in contrast to the role it played in Guatemala decades ago. The United States backed the Guatemalan military during a long, brutal civil war; one military dictator during the 1980s was later convicted of genocide for trying to exterminate the Ixil, a Mayan Indian people. In 1954, the C.I.A. engineered a coup that toppled a popular, democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz.

After that coup, Mr. Arévalo’s father, Juan José Arévalo, a former president who is still admired in Guatemala for allowing freedom of speech and creating the social security system, spent years in exile around Latin America.

The younger Mr. Arévalo, a soft-spoken sociologist and diplomat, was born in Uruguay during that time and was raised in Venezuela, Mexico and Chile before the family could return to Guatemala.

As efforts intensified last month to prevent Mr. Arévalo from taking office, the United States imposed sanctions on Miguel Martínez, one of the closest allies of the departing president, Alejandro Giammattei, over widespread bribery schemes.

And in a pivotal move, the American authorities in December imposed visa restrictions on nearly 300 Guatemalans, including more than 100 members of Congress, accusing them of undermining democracy and the rule of law as they tried to weaken Mr. Arévalo and keep him from being inaugurated.

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Men and women sit in a waiting room centered by a large, flat-screen television.
Journalists waiting for the inauguration.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
“The pressure from the United States has prevented a coup d’état; without that, we wouldn’t be here,” said Manfredo Marroquín, the head of Citizen Action, an anticorruption policy group. “The Americans are like insurance: there in times of crisis.”

Still, the U.S. support of Mr. Arévalo has revealed fissures in Guatemala. In his last weeks in office, Mr. Giammattei, who was barred by law from seeking re-election, grew increasingly vocal in his criticism of the American sanctions and the international support for Mr. Arévalo.

Dealing another blow to Mr. Arévalo, Mr. Giammattei withdrew Guatemala from an antidrug task force created in 2020 with the United States. That move could weaken Guatemala’s ability to combat drug trafficking groups, which have been expanding their sway around the country.

At the same time, Mr. Arévalo’s efforts to forge alliances have revealed how challenging it will be for him to govern. This month, he announced the first Guatemalan cabinet in which women would account for half of all ministerial posts, but the celebration of that milestone was short-lived.

A member of a major business association was named to the new cabinet, prompting calls that Mr. Arévalo, who has hewed to centrist policies, was drifting to the right. Another cabinet nominee withdrew after old comments surfaced in which she criticized a prominent Indigenous activist.

Indignation also arose because only one minister in his cabinet was Indigenous, despite the crucial role that Indigenous groups played in protesting against the efforts to keep Mr. Arévalo from taking office. Nearly half of Guatemala’s population is Indigenous.

“There is an expectation that this new government will be different,” said Sandra Xinico, an anthropologist and Indigenous activist. “But we’ve seen once again how Indigenous peoples are excluded from the political process.”

*Taiwan Loses Ally to China After Electing President Loathed by Beijing*

The tiny Pacific island of Nauru severed relations with Taiwan, a move that boosts China’s regional sway and was seemingly timed to Taiwan’s contentious recent election.

Just two days after Taiwan elected as its next leader Lai Ching-te, whom Beijing sees as a staunch separatist, it lost a diplomatic ally in its rivalry with China. Nauru, a tiny freckle of land in the Pacific Ocean, announced that it would be severing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, effective immediately.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it welcomed the decision by Nauru and is ready to establish relations with it. Taiwan’s foreign ministry indicated that it had no doubt that Beijing had orchestrated the Pacific island’s shift, stating that “China has been actively courting Nauru’s political leaders for a long time, and using economic inducements to bring about a change of direction in the country’s diplomacy.”

A Taiwanese deputy foreign minister, Tien Chung-kwang, told a briefing in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, that China had orchestrated Nauru’s severing of relations to happen in the immediate wake of Taiwan’s election on the weekend.

“The intent is to strike a blow against the democracy and freedom of which the Taiwanese people are so proud,” Mr. Tien said. He said Taiwan had pre-emptively severed relations with Nauru after learning of its impending shift in loyalties.

Such moves from Beijing have been widely expected in Taiwan in the wake of the victory for Mr. Lai, whose Democratic Progressive Party has campaigned on policies to distance the self-governing island democracy from China. Beijing claims Taiwan is its territory, and Chinese officials harbor a particular dislike for Mr. Lai, whom they call a pro-independence threat. Mr. Lai has said he wants to protect Taiwan’s current status as a de facto independent democracy.

Nauru is the latest small nations to abruptly break relations with Taiwan, joining such countries as Honduras and Nicaragua in switching diplomatic allegiance to China. And it is one of a growing number of Pacific island nations that China has aggressively courted in its bid to dominate the region.

In a statement accompanied by a national address that was broadcast on radio and television, President David Adeang of Nauru announced that the country would no longer recognize Taiwan as a nation in its own right, “but rather as an inalienable part of China’s territory, and will sever ‘diplomatic relations’ with Taiwan as of this day.”

He added: “This change is in no way intended to affect our existing warm relationships with other countries.”

The move leaves Taiwan, a de facto independent democracy, with just 12 diplomatic relationships, mostly with smaller nations such as Eswatini, Guatemala, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Paraguay. At the start of 2017, it had ties with 21 states.

Voters in Taiwan on Saturday once again handed the presidency to the Democratic Progressive Party. Mr. Lai, its candidate and the country’s current vice president, pledged his commitment to defending Taiwan’s identity — including from Beijing’s ever-louder saber rattling. The Chinese Communist Party had repeatedly stressed that a vote for the Democratic Progressive Party was a vote for war.

“Between democracy and authoritarianism, we choose to stand on the side of democracy,” Mr. Lai said at the time. “This is what this election campaign means to the world.”

Rumors of Nauru shifting diplomatic ties had been swirling for some time, said Anna Powles, a senior lecturer in security studies at Massey University in New Zealand.

“The timing is not a coincidence,” she said. “The announcement was orchestrated in such a way as to undermine Taiwan and to demonstrate that China has been successful in dismantling Taiwan’s network of allies in the Pacific.”

As a nation with around 13,000 citizens and a gross domestic product of just $133.2 million a year, Nauru is nonetheless valuable to Beijing for its location, its support of deep sea mining and its vote at the United Nations.

“China is increasingly seeking to shape the international narrative, with respect to its activities in Xinjiang, in Hong Kong and in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits,” Dr. Powles said. “So this is where Nauru would be an effective ally.”

China’s move to lure away one of Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic partners exposed a weakness in the island’s political system, said Kuo Yu-jen, a political science professor at National Sun Yat-sen University in southern Taiwan. Mr. Lai will not assume the presidency until May, giving China plenty of time to pressure the incoming administration.

“China can exploit this transition period between Taiwanese administrations to deliver vigorous blows against Taiwan — diplomatically, militarily and economically,” Professor Kuo said.

JOSE UREÑA. 24 HORAS

No puede pasar desapercibida la concentración de diez mil personas en Álvaro Obregón por Javier López Casarín, aspirante a alcalde.

Reunió a tirios y troyanos morenistas, desde Claudia Sheinbaum hasta Omar García Harfuch, quien fue abandonado por el dedazo presidencial pese a liderar encuestas para la capital.

_*”VIDA,VERDAD Y LIBERTAD”*_

Este es el discurso completo de Xóchitl Gálvez en el cierre de su precampaña en la Arena CDMX.

Los que estuvimos ahí podemos confirmar que fue algo MUY emocionante.

Aquí nomás, haciendo historia.

Por favor, date el tiempo de verlo con atención. Es el eje de su propuesta y nuestro estandarte de lucha, porque es una lucha:

Dictadura o democracia.

Elijamos una propuesta que busca proteger la vida, la verdad y la libertad.

¿Luchar o claudicar? Verdad que no hay opción…

*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*

Sent from my iPod

Las noticias con La Mont, 9 de enero de 2024

Premio Internacional Periodismo Y Periodismo Migrante*📃

La Información Directa a tu Celular 📲 de HOY *Martes 9 de Enero 2024* *En El Plano Nacional e Internacional*:

*Ahora también ya estamos en la redes y síguenos a través de nuestros siguientes medios:*

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*Colaboración Especial En:* http://MexicoTodayUSA.com

*2020 Election Case Appeals Court Hears Arguments on Trump’s Claim of Immunity*

Judges are considering a question that has paralyzed the 2020 elections case: whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution because the charges are tied to actions he took while president.

Here’s the latest on the arguments.
Three federal appeals court judges on Tuesday peppered a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump with tough questions about Mr. Trump’s central defense to an indictment accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election: that he is entirely immune to the charges because they arose from actions he took while in the White House.

All three members of the three-judge panel — composed of two Democratic appointees and one Republican appointee — appeared to express skepticism about several arguments Mr. Trump’s raised to support their immunity claims.

Judge Karen L. Henderson, the sole Republican appointee on the panel, also pressed D. John Sauer, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, pushing back on his argument that for more than 200 years, American courts have never sat in judgment over a president’s official actions. Judge Henderson pointed out that until Mr. Trump was indicted — not just once, but four times — courts have never been in a situation where they had to consider the criminal liability of a president or former president.

Judge Henderson also seemed less than persuaded by Mr. Sauer’s argument that Mr. Trump was acting in his role as president and upholding his official duty to preserve the integrity of the election when he sought to challenge his loss to President Biden.

“I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ allows him to violate criminal law,” Judge Henderson said.

The hearing in front of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit could help decide when — or even whether — Mr. Trump will go to trial in the election interference case, which is unfolding in Federal District Court in Washington. It could also go a long way in determining the timing of the three other criminal trials that Mr. Trump is facing in the months ahead.

Here’s what to know:

The former president arrived at the courthouse before the hearing even though he is not required to be there — and appellate judges often prefer to hear cases as intellectual exercises without the presence of defendants. Mr. Trump has placed fighting his criminal prosecutions at the heart of his political strategy heading into the Republican primary campaign.

As Mr. Trump’s lawyers argue to the court, they are playing a long shot, hoping to persuade the judges that the Constitution affords him total immunity from prosecution for any actions he undertook as president. Read more about the lawyers in the court.

Another argument Mr. Trump’s lawyer made is that a president must be impeached and convicted before he could face criminal prosecution. It’s a legal long-shot and may come as a surprise to some of those who opted not to remove Mr. Trump from office after the Jan. 6 riot. For example, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, voted for acquittal then gave a fiery speech on the Senate floor saying that the legal system could still hold Mr. Trump to account.

Prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, who filed the case against Mr. Trump, argued that nothing in the Constitution or American history supports the idea that former presidents are above being subject to federal criminal law.

Winning the appeal is only one of Mr. Trump’s goals. He is also hoping that the litigation can eat up enough time to postpone the election trial — now set to start in early March — until after Election Day. If he retakes the White House, he could seek to order the charges against him to be dropped or try to pardon himself.

Because no former president has ever been prosecuted before, there are few definitive precedents to guide the appellate judges in deciding the question of immunity. While the Justice Department has long maintained a policy that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, Mr. Trump’s bid to claim total immunity from prosecution is a remarkable attempt to claim the protections of the presidency even though he is no longer in office.

Show less
Charlie Savage
Jan. 9, 2024, 10:39 a.m. ET1 minute ago
1 minute ago
Charlie SavageReporting from the courthouse

Pearce is now done. Sauer is coming back.

Charlie Savage
Jan. 9, 2024, 10:36 a.m. ET4 minutes ago
4 minutes ago
Charlie SavageReporting from the courthouse

Pearce agrees with Judge Pan’s analysis that Trump’s gambit lives or dies based on whether the court decides that conviction in an impeachment proceeding is necessary before any criminal prosecution. Pearce also argues that Trump’s legal team is wrong about that.

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Charlie Savage
Jan. 9, 2024, 10:35 a.m. ET5 minutes ago
5 minutes ago
Charlie SavageReporting from the courthouse

A lawyer for the special counsel, Pearce, says Sauer’s arguments put forth an extraordinarily frightening vision. Pearce cites the possibility that a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a rival and then either resign before he can be impeached or otherwise evade conviction in his Senate impeachment trial, and it would not be treated as a crime.

Charlie Savage
Jan. 9, 2024, 10:28 a.m. ET12 minutes ago
12 minutes ago
Charlie SavageReporting from the courthouse

In response to Judge Childs, Pearce argues that the court could rule in a way that allows this case to go forward while leaving open the possibility that in some other case in the future with different circumstances, a president could successfully raise a narrower immunity claim.

Jan. 9, 2024, 10:27 a.m. ET13 minutes ago
13 minutes ago
Alan Feuer

Pearce rejects Sauer’s argument that denying immunity to Trump would open a Pandora’s box of “tit-for-tat” partisan-driven prosecutions of presidents moving forward. He essentially argues that Trump is a unique case and holding him criminally liable won’t lead to an onslaught of charges against future presidents.

Charlie Savage
Jan. 9, 2024, 10:27 a.m. ET13 minutes ago
13 minutes ago
Charlie SavageReporting from the courthouse

Judge Henderson asks how the courts could write an opinion that would not unleash a floodgate of prosecutions of former presidents. Pearce, a lawyer for the special counsel, says it’s been understood since Nixon’s resignation during the Watergate scandal — and his acceptance of a pardon for having used the C.I.A. to obstruct an F.B.I. investigation — that presidents can be prosecuted for their acts in the White House. This would not be a sea change, he says, and the fact it hasn’t come up until now underscores how aberrational and serious Trump’s conduct was.

*The New Space Race Is Causing New Pollution Problems*

Earth’s stratosphere has never seen the amounts of emissions and waste from rockets and satellites that a booming space economy will leave behind.

The high-altitude chase started over Cape Canaveral on Feb. 17, 2023, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched. Thomas Parent, a NASA research pilot, was flying a WB-57 jet when the rocket ascended past the right wing — leaving him mesmerized before he hit the throttle to accelerate.

For roughly an hour, Mr. Parent dove in and out of the plume in the rocket’s wake while Tony Casey, the sensor equipment operator aboard the jet, monitored its 17 scientific instruments. Researchers hoped to use the data to prove they could catch a rocket’s plume and eventually characterize the environmental effects of a space launch.

In the past few years, the number of rocket launches has spiked as commercial companies — especially SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk — and government agencies have lofted thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit. And it is only the beginning. Satellites could eventually total one million, requiring an even greater number of space launches that could yield escalating levels of emissions.

SpaceX declined to comment about pollution from rockets and satellites. Representatives for Amazon and Eutelsat OneWeb, two other companies working toward satellite mega-constellations, said they are committed to sustainable operations. But scientists worry that more launches will scatter more pollutants in pristine layers of Earth’s atmosphere. And regulators across the globe, who assess some risks of space launches, do not set rules related to pollution.

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A single circular-shaped plume from a rocket flying into the blackness of space.
The exhaust plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 2018,Credit…Matt Hartman/Associated Press
Experts say they do not want to limit the booming space economy. But they fear that the steady march of science will move slower than the new space race — meaning we may understand the consequences of pollution from rockets and spacecraft only when it is too late. Already, studies show that the higher reaches of the atmosphere are laced with metals from spacecraft that disintegrate as they fall back to Earth.

“We are changing the system faster than we can understand those changes,” said Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute. “We never really appreciate our ability to affect the environment. And we do this time and time again.”

We Have Liftoff
When a rocket like the Falcon 9 lifts off, it typically takes about 90 seconds to punch through the lower atmosphere, or troposphere, before reaching the middle atmosphere. It was at the top of the troposphere that Mr. Parent began his pursuit, ultimately flying as high as the middle atmosphere, where the air’s density is so low that he and Mr. Casey had to wear pressure suits and heavyweight gloves, as well as helmets that provided them with oxygen.

The middle atmosphere has seldom seen so much excitement. Commercial airliners seldom fly at these heights. Nor is there much terrestrial weather or pollution from the ground. It is thus calm, unspoiled and empty — except for the occasional rocket, which will pass through it for three to four minutes on its way to space. By the time a rocket curves into orbit, it will have dumped in the middle and upper layers of the atmosphere as much as two-thirds of its exhaust, which scientists predict will rain down and collect in the lower layer of the middle atmosphere, the stratosphere.

The stratosphere is home to the ozone layer, which shields us from the sun’s harmful radiation. But it is extremely sensitive: Even the smallest of changes can have enormous effects on it — and the world below.

Image
A silhouette of a space shuttle as it points toward the Earth with a sharp line of the Earth’s atmosphere, or limb, viewed from the International Space Station.
The space shuttle Endeavour on its way to docking with the International Space Station in 2010, with the Earth’s troposphere layer, in orange, clearly visible.Credit…NASA
When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it belched enough sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere to trigger a multiyear cooling spell on Earth. That gas created sulfate aerosols, which warmed the stratosphere while blocking heat from hitting Earth’s surface. Some scientists worry that cumulative exhaust from more rockets may affect the climate in a similar manner.

Today, rocket exhaust pales in comparison to the exhaust emitted by aviation. But scientists are concerned that even small additions to the stratosphere will have a much bigger effect. Martin Ross, a scientist from The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research organization in Los Angeles, compared Earth’s atmosphere to a barrel of muddy water that has settled — with muck at the bottom and a relatively clear top. If you add more dirt to the mucky bottom, it may go unnoticed. But if you add that dirt to the clear top, he said, it is likely to become cloudy or even mucky.

Just how rockets will affect that relatively clear top, the stratosphere, remains uncertain. But scientists are concerned that black carbon, or soot, that is released from current rockets will act like a continuous volcanic eruption, a change that could deplete the ozone layer and affect the Earth below.

Skyrocketing Numbers
In the 1990s, when NASA’s space shuttle and other rockets consistently launched from U.S. soil, several studies predicted that the spacecraft would cause local ozone damage. One study even forecast a loss as high as 100 percent — essentially creating a small ozone hole above Cape Canaveral that would allow more of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation to reach the ground, raising the risk of skin cancer, cataracts and immune disorders.

The studies relied on models and predictions alone, with no observational data. So Dr. Ross and his colleagues gathered data from high-altitude research flights, which did find local ozone holes in the shuttle’s wake. But they healed quickly and were not large enough to affect Cape Canaveral — at least not at the frequency of launches then, roughly 25 per year.

Image
A distant view of a space shuttle launching into layers of clouds on a bright day.
The space shuttle Discovery launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1988.Credit…NASA
The same may not be true going forward. In 2023, SpaceX launched nearly 100 rockets on its own, with most flights building its Starlink satellite constellation. It will soon be joined by Amazon, which is planning frequent launches for its Project Kuiper constellation, and other companies seeking substantial presences in orbit. These satellites offer a range of benefits, including broadband internet almost anywhere on Earth.

But once these companies complete their constellations of up to thousands of orbiters, the launches won’t end. Many satellites have a lifetime of five to 15 years, requiring satellite companies to loft replacements.

It is the beginning of a new era.

“I think we are at a stage in the space industry that we were at many decades ago in a number of our terrestrial environments,” said Tim Maclay, the chief strategy officer for ClearSpace, a Swiss company seeking to build sustainable space operations. “We see the prospect of development and we tend to race into it without a tremendous amount of forethought on the environmental consequences.”

A Race Against the Space Race
As space companies set records for launches and satellites deployed, scientists are starting to quantify the potential effects.

In a paper published in 2022, soot from rockets was shown to be nearly 500 times as efficient at heating the atmosphere as soot released from sources like airplanes closer to the surface. It’s the muddy-barrel effect.

“That means that as we start to grow the space industry and launch more rockets, we’re going to start to see that effect magnify very quickly,” said Eloise Marais, an associate professor in physical geography at University College London and an author of the study.

A separate study also published in 2022 found that if the rate of rocket launches increased by a factor of 10, their emissions could cause temperatures in parts of the stratosphere to rise as much as 2 degrees Celsius. This could begin to degrade the ozone over most of North America, all of Europe and a chunk of Asia.

As a result, “people at higher latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere may be exposed to more harmful ultraviolet radiation,” said the study’s lead author, Christopher Maloney of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Image
A long plume of exhaust shooting out of a launching Starship spacecraft.
A Starship rocket launching from Texas in November. Its fuel creates less soot, using a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants.Credit…Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
That said, Dr. Maloney’s team did not quantify how much more radiation exposure could occur.

The exact amounts of soot emitted by different rocket engines used around the globe are also poorly understood. Most launched rockets currently use kerosene fuel, which some experts call “dirty” because it emits carbon dioxide, water vapor and soot directly into the atmosphere. But it might not be the predominant fuel of the future. SpaceX’s future rocket Starship, for example, uses a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants.

Still, any hydrocarbon fuel produces some amount of soot. And even “green rockets,” propelled by liquid hydrogen, produce water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas at these dry high altitudes.

“You can’t take what’s green in the troposphere and necessarily think of it being green in the upper atmosphere,” Dr. Boley said. “There is no such thing as a totally neutral propellant. They all have different impacts.”

Smithereens of Satellites
What goes up must come down. Once satellites in low-Earth orbit reach the end of their operational lifetimes, they plunge through the atmosphere and disintegrate, leaving a stream of pollutants in their wake. Although scientists do not yet know how this will influence Earth’s environment, Dr. Ross thinks that it will be the most significant impact from spaceflight.

A study published in October found that the stratosphere is already littered with metals from re-entering spacecraft. It used the same NASA WB-57 jet that chased the SpaceX rocket plume last year, studying the stratosphere over Alaska and much of the continental U.S.

Image
A close-up portrait of pilot Tom Parent, in a WB-57 pressure suit, which somewhat resembles a spacesuit.
Tom Parent, in a WB-57 pressure suit in preparation for a high altitude research flight.Credit…Robert Markowitz/NASA
When the researchers began analyzing the data, they saw particles that didn’t belong. Niobium and hafnium, for example, do not occur naturally but are used in rocket boosters. Yet these metals, along with other distinct elements from spacecraft, were embedded within roughly 10 percent of the most common particles in the stratosphere.

The findings validate earlier theoretical work, and Dr. Boley, who was not involved in the study, argues that the percentage will only increase given that humanity is at the beginning of the new satellite race.

Of course, researchers cannot yet say how these metals will affect the stratosphere.

“That’s a big question that we have to answer moving forward, but we can’t presume that it won’t matter,” Dr. Boley said.

An Exception to the Rule
While scientists are raising the alarm, they don’t see themselves in opposition to rocket companies or satellite operators.

“We don’t want to stop the space industry,” said Karen Rosenlof, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory, who says that satellites provide incredible services to people on the ground. But she and others are asking for a set of regulations that will consider the environmental implications.

Dr. Rosenlof argues that there are ways to reduce the impacts of the space industry without shutting it down. For example, if scientists find a threshold beyond which the space industry will start to harm the environment, it would make sense to simply limit the numbers of launches and satellites. Alternatively, the materials or fuels used by the space industry could be tweaked.

Dr. Boley agrees. “There are a lot of possibilities that could help us protect the environment while still giving access to space,” he said. “We just need to look at the big picture.”

But to do that, scientists argue, satellite operators and rocket companies need regulations. Few are currently in place.

“Space launch falls into a gray area,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been involved in a working group on this research. “It falls between the cracks of all the regulatory authorities.”

Image
A bright plume from a rocket out of frame launching at nighttime.
A Falcon 9 launching from Cape Canaveral last year.Credit…Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The Montreal Protocol, for instance, is a treaty that successfully set limits on chemicals known to harm the ozone layer. But it does not address rocket emissions or satellites.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is not responsible for analyzing rocket launches. The Federal Communications Commission licenses large constellations of satellites but does not consider their potential harm to the environment. (The Government Accountability Office called for changes to that F.C.C. policy in 2022, but they have yet to occur.) And the Federal Aviation Administration assesses environmental impacts of rocket launches on the ground, but not in the atmosphere or space.

That could put the stratosphere’s future in the hands of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other private space company executives — which is particularly worrying to Dr. Boley, who says the space industry does not want to slow down.

“Unless it immediately affects their bottom line, they’re simply not interested,” he said. “The environmental impact is an inconvenience.”

A spokesperson for the telecommunications company OneWeb, which has launched more than 600 satellites, said it is committed to sustainability in satellite design, constellation plans and launch efforts.

“We work closely with public and private partners to minimize the environmental impact of our fleet of satellites,” said Katie Dowd, a senior director there.

Still, OneWeb plans to expand its constellation to roughly 7,000 satellites.

“It remains to be seen how well we’re going to do this,” Dr. Maclay said. “We don’t tend to be very good as a species at proactively taking responsible steps toward environmental stewardship. It often comes as an afterthought.”

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*This Venezuelan Family Won Asylum. Days Later, They Lost It.*

Millions of asylum seekers have overwhelmed the immigration system. A confusing mix-up is keeping one family in limbo.

Dyluis Rojas and his wife and children fled first from Venezuela and later from Colombia and Chile, crossing deserts, jungles and rivers with one goal: to make it to the United States and stay there.

The family arrived in June 2022. Less than a year and a half later, they were elated when they received news that their asylum application had been approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, one of the federal agencies that processes immigration matters. Mr. Rojas and his wife could soon begin to work. They would eventually be able to apply for green cards.

Then, a few days later, another letter arrived, with the same date and signed by the same official. It said that Mr. Rojas’s asylum claim had been deemed “not credible” and that he had not been granted asylum. The family faced the possibility of deportation.

“We were at zero all over again,” Mr. Rojas said.

It is unclear why two opposing notices were issued and which one will stand. Immigration lawyers said that Mr. Rojas’s situation seemed highly unusual, but that miscommunication by and within government agencies was not uncommon. Now, the family is waiting again, uncertain about their fate.

The contradictory letters shine a spotlight on a system that is badly overwhelmed as an influx of migrants crossing into the United States continues.

Thousands of people are arriving by the day, their hopes pinned on a teetering immigration bureaucracy that has received record numbers of asylum applications in the last two years. There is now a backlog of two million asylum cases, according to data from U.S.C.I.S. and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

Asylum applicants must submit their claims within one year of arriving in the United States, but most migrants lack the know-how and resources to do so. Applications are filed to two separate federal entities: U.S.C.I.S., under the Homeland Security Department, and immigration court, which is part of the Justice Department.

Image
Ms. Oropeza sits at a restaurant table and feeds a spoonful of yellow rice to a toddler sitting in a stroller.
Ms. Oropeza with her youngest daughter. She and her husband, Mr. Rojas, are confused about whether they will win asylum or be deported.Credit…José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times
Asylum seekers can wait years to receive a decision, with wait times and approval rates varying by U.S. region and applicants’ nationalities, among other factors. In courts across the country, the estimated average wait for an asylum hearing is now 1,429 days, according to TRAC.

At U.S.C.I.S., the processing time is approaching a decade.

A U.S.C.I.S. official said the agency does not comment on individual immigration cases. The official said U.S.C.I.S. evaluates each case fairly and humanely and that it was putting resources toward reducing backlogs.

Understaffed government agencies are playing a perpetual game of catch-up and sometimes crossing wires, leaving the lives of migrants like Mr. Rojas hanging in the balance.

The situation only stands to get worse. Crossings at the southern border have risen to record highs under President Biden. The Border Patrol has apprehended as many as 10,000 people in a single day in recent weeks. More than 160,000 migrants, many of them Venezuelan, have come to New York City since the spring of 2022, and some 70,000 remain in the city’s care.

The crisis has been a difficult test for Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who has implored federal officials to ease the burden on big cities by providing more funding but also by expediting work permits and helping more people apply for asylum, one of the few routes to being able to work legally.

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Four children of different ages pose in a parking lot with slight smiles on their faces. They all wear warm coats.
The family lived in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, but were moved to a Queens hotel recently, which is an hour away from the children’s school.Credit…José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times
The city opened an asylum help center in June. As of last week, the city had helped migrants file over 25,000 applications, including for temporary protected status, work authorizations and asylum; of those, more than 8,100 were asylum cases. It is unclear if any of those people have been granted asylum.

Anecdotally, immigration lawyers say that some migrants who arrived in New York in the last two years have received decisions on their asylum cases, but that the vast majority of those cases are still pending.

The lengthy timeline was one reason Mr. Rojas and his wife, Grisy Oropeza, were surprised and overjoyed to receive a notice of approval only four months after they applied.

“Words did not come,” Mr. Rojas recalled recently of the day he received the news. “We were in shock.”

A TV news crew recorded as someone from a community group explained the letter’s meaning. Mr. Rojas and Ms. Oropeza wiped away tears.

“The dream begins today,” Ana Maldonado-Alfonzo, the paralegal who helped them apply, said then.

Mr. Rojas’s asylum claim said that officials under Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, had sought to extort money from the small store he and his wife ran out of their home. In his application, Mr. Rojas said he had been beaten and imprisoned when he refused to pay, and that he continued to receive death threats after he was released.

Eventually, after trying to make a living in Colombia and Chile, where they said they faced xenophobia, the family, including a 5-month-old baby, began a monthslong journey to the United States. They didn’t have an exact destination in mind, but they had heard a lot about New York and knew someone there. Officials bused them from the border to Washington, Mr. Rojas said, and from there they made their way north.

Desperate to work, they applied for asylum in June 2023.

“To arrive here, get a job, be established with the kids, have a better life for them — that was the hope,” Ms. Oropeza said.

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Ms. Oropeza and Mr. Rojas stand next to each other on a New York City street and look with mouths set toward the camera.
Mr. Rojas must appear in immigration court to find out what will happen to them next.Credit…José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times
Once in a family shelter in Brooklyn, they began to create some stability. The older children started school, where bilingual teachers and Spanish-speaking friends helped them acclimate. With donated clothes they weathered their first winter.

In October, they received the notice of asylum approval. Then came the rejection letter. In November, without being given a reason, the family was moved to a shelter in a Queens hotel, more than an hour’s commute to the children’s school in Brooklyn.

The family is scheduled to appear in immigration court this week, a step that ManoLasya Perepa, government relations policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called “a huge waste of time.”

“Whoever made the initial findings that they are approved for asylum felt that the family, by law, met their burden of proof,” she said.

Ms. Perepa said that “inefficiencies and mismanagement and redundancies” like those that appear to have occurred in this case are what cause the immigration system “to be so sluggish and unfair.”

Jose Perez, an immigration lawyer who is representing Mr. Rojas and his family for free, said the best outcome would be for their court case to be dismissed and for U.S.C.I.S. to issue a final decision on the original asylum claim. Otherwise, the family could remain in limbo for years.

Ms. Oropeza said she felt she’d had a dream taken away in an instant. “One goes through so much to get here,” she said. “To get here and not know your destiny, to be still on that journey — it’s depressing.”

*South Korea Bans Dog Meat, a Now-Unpopular Food*

Breeding, killing and selling dogs for their meat will be banned in a country where it has fallen out of favor. Hundreds of thousands of the animal were still being bred for human consumption.

South Korea’s lawmakers on Tuesday outlawed the breeding, slaughter and sale of dogs for human consumption, a centuries-old practice that is unpopular and rare today.

Dog meat was once more common, and remained so in the decades after the Korean War when the country was destitute and meat was scarce. It is used in a well-known dish that Koreans call “bosintang,” or “soup good for your body.” But the practice became increasingly shunned as incomes, pet ownership and concern for animal welfare rose steadily in the late 20th century.

Today, many South Koreans, especially younger people, see eating dog meat as appalling. About 93 percent of South Korean adults said they had no intention of consuming dog meat in the future, and 82 percent said they supported a ban, according to a survey conducted last year by Aware, an animal welfare organization in Seoul.

“This is history in the making I never thought I would see in my lifetime,” Chae Jung-ah, the director of Humane Society International Korea, said in a statement by the group. She added, “We reached a tipping point where most Korean citizens reject eating dogs.”

With the ban’s passage, South Korea joined a list of other places that have prohibited the trading of dog meat, including Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, the group said. Millions of dogs are still killed each year for their meat in places like Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam, according to Four Paws, an animal welfare organization in Austria.

President Yoon Suk Yeol’s cabinet is expected to officially put the ban into effect. Mr. Yoon and Kim Keon Hee, the first lady, who own numerous pet dogs and cats, have campaigned for the ban. The president managed to succeed after previous governments had failed to gather enough support to end the practice.

Under the law, which has passed the National Assembly with broad support, a person who butchers dogs for human consumption could face three years in prison or a fine of 30 million South Korean won, or about $23,000, after a three-year grace period. The breeding and selling of the animals would be punishable by two years in prison or a fine of 20 million won.

The law will also offer financial incentives for dog farmers and owners of restaurants that serve dog meat to switch jobs, requiring each to submit a phaseout plan to a local government.

In 2022, about 520,000 dogs were being raised for human consumption at 1,150 farms, and about 1,600 restaurants were selling dog meat nationwide, according to lawmakers — considerably lower than in years past.

An association of dog farmers protested the bill in the months before it passed, arguing that eating dog meat was a matter of individual choice, and demanding more compensation for farmers who would lose their businesses as a result of a ban.

The law’s passage marked a milestone for animal protection activists who have campaigned for the ban for years. Since 2015, they have helped 18 dog farmers close their operations or transition into vegetable farms. The farmers gave up their animals to be adopted as pets.

*See How 2023 Broke Records to Become the Hottest Year*

Month after month global temperatures didn’t just break records, they smashed them. This year could be even warmer.

The numbers are in, and scientists can now confirm what month after month of extraordinary heat worldwide began signaling long ago. Last year was Earth’s warmest by far in a century and a half.

Global temperatures started blowing past records midyear and didn’t stop. First, June was the planet’s warmest June on record. Then, July was the warmest July. And so on, all the way through December.

Averaged across last year, temperatures worldwide were 1.48 degrees Celsius, or 2.66 Fahrenheit, higher than they were in the second half of the 19th century, the European Union climate monitor announced on Tuesday. That is warmer by a sizable margin than 2016, the previous hottest year.

To climate scientists, it comes as no surprise that unabated emissions of greenhouse gases caused global warming to reach new highs. What researchers are still trying to understand is whether 2023 foretells many more years in which heat records are not merely broken, but smashed. In other words, they are asking whether the numbers are a sign that the planet’s warming is accelerating.

When scientists combine their satellite readings with geological evidence on the climate’s more distant past, 2023 also appears to be among the warmest years in at least 100,000, said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, at a news briefing. “There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet the last time the temperature was so high,” he said.

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A year of record heat. 2023’s global temperatures did not just beat prior records — they left them in the dust. Scientists are now sifting through evidence to see whether this year might reveal something new about the climate and what we are doing to it. One troubling hypothesis? That the planet’s warming is accelerating and its effects are barreling our way more quickly than before.

An Arctic report card. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its 18th annual assessment of the Arctic region. According to the report, 2023 overall was the sixth-warmest year the Arctic has experienced since reliable records began in 1900, and this summer was the region’s warmest on record.

The view from above. With their ability to store planet-warming carbon, protected areas like the forests of Borneo and the Amazon can be a crucial buffer against climate change. Now, high in orbit, a new NASA program is helping researchers more accurately calculate how much carbon these reserves are keeping out of the atmosphere.

Air-conditioning use. Sixty nations in Dubai for U.N. climate talks committed to improve the efficiency of new air-conditioners by 50% and reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to those cooling machines by almost 70%, the latest in a flurry of global promises that aim to tackle climate change.

Rising emissions. The greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet are on the rise, despite years of commitments by countries to reduce them. Carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels is expected to grow by 1.1% in 2023 compared with 2022, researchers from the Global Carbon Project found.

Every 10th of a degree of global warming represents extra thermodynamic fuel that intensifies heat waves and storms, adds to rising seas and hastens the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.

A record lowSea ice formation around Antarctica was one of the metrics that broke records in 2023
Where’s All the Antarctic Sea Ice? Annual Peak Is the Lowest Ever Recorded.
Those effects were on display last year. Hot weather baked Iran and China, Greece and Spain, Texas and the American South. Canada had its most destructive wildfire season on record by far, with more than 45 million acres burned. Less sea ice formed around the coasts of Antarctica, in both summer and winter, than ever measured.

Where 2023 was hotter or colder compared with 1991-2020 baseline

COLDER

AVERAGE

HOTTER

–3°C

–2°

–1°

–0.5°

–0.2°

+0.2°

+0.5°

+1°

+2°

+3°

Northern Canada was exceptionally warm.

Cooler-than-average areas were rare.

El Niño brought warmer temperatures to the East Pacific.

Source: Copernicus/ECMWF
NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the research group Berkeley Earth are scheduled to release their own estimates of 2023 temperatures later this week. Each organization’s data sources and analytical methods are somewhat different, though their results rarely diverge by much.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations agreed to limit long-term global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and, if possible, 1.5 degrees. At present rates of greenhouse gas emissions, it will only be a few years before the 1.5-degree goal is a lost cause, researchers say.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the main driver of global warming. But last year several other natural and human-linked factors also helped boost temperatures.

Explore more charts and maps documenting 2023’s record temperatures

Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm?
Dec. 26, 2023

What This Year’s ‘Astonishing’ Ocean Heat Means for the Planet

It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter.
The 2022 eruption of an underwater volcano off the Pacific island nation of Tonga spewed vast amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere, helping trap more heat near Earth’s surface. Recent limits on sulfur pollution from ships brought down levels of aerosols, or tiny airborne particles that reflect solar radiation and help cool the planet.

Another factor was El Niño, the recurrent shift in tropical Pacific weather patterns that began last year and is often linked with record-setting heat worldwide. And that contains a warning of potentially worse to come this year.

The reason: In recent decades, very warm years have typically been ones that started in an El Niño state. But last year, the El Niño didn’t start until midyear — which suggests that El Niño wasn’t the main driver of the abnormal warmth at that point, said Emily J. Becker, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.

It is also a strong sign that this year could be hotter than last. “It’s very, very likely to be top three, if not the record,” Dr. Becker said, referring to 2024.

Scientists caution that a single year, even one as exceptional as 2023, can tell us only so much about how the planet’s long-term warming might be changing. But other signs suggest the world is heating up more quickly than before.

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About 90 percent of the energy trapped by greenhouse gases accumulates in the oceans, and scientists have found that the oceans’ uptake of heat has accelerated significantly since the 1990s. “If you look at that curve, it’s clearly not linear,” said Sarah Purkey, an oceanographer with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

A group of researchers in France recently found that the Earth’s total heating — across oceans, land, air and ice — had been speeding up for even longer, since 1960. This broadly matches up with increases in carbon emissions and reductions in aerosols over the past few decades.

But scientists will need to continue studying the data to understand whether other factors might be at work, too, said one of the researchers, Karina von Schuckmann, an oceanographer at Mercator Ocean International in Toulouse, France. “Something unusual is happening that we don’t understand,” Dr. von Schuckmann said.

Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times. More about Raymond Zhong

Keith Collins is a reporter and graphics editor. He specializes in visual storytelling and covers a range of topics, with a focus on politics and technology. He has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. More about Keith Collins

Learn More About Climate Change
Have questions about climate change? Our F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions, big and small.

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*No, That’s Not Taylor Swift Peddling Le Creuset Cookware*

The singer did not promote a giveaway of the popular cookware, but an artificially generated version of her voice suggested otherwise.

Taylor Swift’s affinity for Le Creuset is real: Her collection of the cookware has been featured on a Tumblr account dedicated to the pop star’s home décor, in a thorough analysis of her kitchen published by Variety and in a Netflix documentary that was highlighted by Le Creuset’s Facebook page.

What is not real: Ms. Swift’s endorsement of the company’s products, which have appeared in recent weeks in ads on Facebook and elsewhere featuring her face and voice.

The ads are among the many celebrity-focused scams made far more convincing by artificial intelligence. Within a single week in October, the actor Tom Hanks, the journalist Gayle King and the YouTube personality MrBeast all said that A.I. versions of themselves had been used, without permission, for deceptive dental plan promotions, iPhone giveaway offers and other ads.

In Ms. Swift’s case, experts said, artificial intelligence technology helped create a synthetic version of the singer’s voice, which was cobbled together with footage of her alongside clips showing Le Creuset Dutch ovens. In several ads, Ms. Swift’s cloned voice addressed “Swifties” — her fans — and said she was “thrilled” to be handing out free cookware sets. All people had to do was click on a button and answer a few questions before the end of the day.

Le Creuset said it was not involved with the singer for any consumer giveaway. The company urged shoppers to check its official online accounts before clicking on suspicious ads. Representatives of Ms. Swift, who was named Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2023, did not respond to requests for comment.

Image
An A.I.-generated ad that shows Taylor Swift wearing a black top and sitting near a piano. The words overlaid on the ad read: “Hey y’all, it’s Taylor Swift here!”
In recent ads posted on Meta, artificial intelligence technology helped create a synthetic version of Taylor Swift’s voice, which was paired with footage of her and clips of Le Creuset Dutch ovens.
Famous people have lent their celebrity to advertisers for as long as advertising has existed. Sometimes, it has been unwillingly. More than three decades ago, Tom Waits sued Frito-Lay — and won nearly $2.5 million — after the corn chip company imitated the singer in a radio ad without his permission. The Le Creuset scam campaign also featured fabricated versions of Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey, who in 2022 posted an exasperated video about the prevalence of fake social media ads, emails and websites falsely claiming that she endorsed weight loss gummies.

Over the past year, major advances in artificial intelligence have made it far easier to produce an unauthorized digital replica of a real person. Audio spoofs have been especially easy to produce and difficult to identify, said Siwei Lyu, a computer science professor who runs the Media Forensic Lab at the University at Buffalo.

The Le Creuset scam campaign was probably created using a text-to-speech service, Dr. Lyu said. Such tools usually translate a script into an A.I.-generated voice, which can then be incorporated into existing video footage using lip-syncing programs.

“These tools are becoming very accessible these days,” said Dr. Lyu, who added that it was possible to make a “decent-quality video” in less than 45 minutes. “It’s becoming very easy, and that’s why we’re seeing more.”

Dozens of separate but similar Le Creuset scam ads featuring Ms. Swift — many of them posted this month — were visible as of late last week on Meta’s public Ad Library. (The company owns Facebook and Instagram.) The campaign also ran on TikTok.

The ads sent viewers to websites that mimicked legitimate outlets like the Food Network, which showcased fake news coverage of the Le Creuset offer alongside testimonials from fabricated customers. Participants were asked to pay a “small shipping fee of $9.96” for the cookware. Those who complied faced hidden monthly charges without ever receiving the promised cookware.

Some of the fake Le Creuset ads, such as one mimicking the interior designer Joanna Gaines, had a deceptive sheen of legitimacy on social media thanks to labels identifying them as sponsored posts or as originating from verified accounts.

In April, the Better Business Bureau warned consumers that fake celebrity scams made with A.I. were “more convincing than ever.” Victims were often left with higher-than-expected charges and no sign of the product they had ordered. Bankers have also reported attempts by swindlers to use voice deepfakes, or synthetic replicas of real people’s voices, to commit financial fraud.

In the past year, several well-known people have publicly distanced themselves from ads featuring their A.I.-manipulated likeness or voice.

This summer, fake ads spread online that purported to show the country singer Luke Combs promoting weight loss gummies recommended to him by the fellow country musician Lainey Wilson. Ms. Wilson posted an Instagram video denouncing the ads, saying that “people will do whatever to make a dollar, even if it is lies.” Mr. Combs’s manager, Chris Kappy, also posted an Instagram video denying involvement in the gummy campaign and accusing foreign companies of using artificial intelligence to replicate Mr. Combs’s likeness.

“To other managers out there, A.I. is a scary thing and they’re using it against us,” he wrote.

A TikTok spokesperson said the app’s ads policy requires advertisers to obtain consent for “any synthetic media which contains a public figure,” adding that TikTok’s community standards require creators to disclose “synthetic or manipulated media showing realistic scenes.”

Meta said it took action on the ads that violated its policies, which prohibit content that uses public figures in a deceptive way to try to cheat users out of money. The company said it had taken legal steps against some perpetrators of such schemes, but added that malicious ads were often able to evade Meta’s review systems by cloaking their content.

With no federal laws in place to address A.I. scams, lawmakers have proposed legislation that would aim to limit their damage. Two bills introduced in Congress last year — the Deepfakes Accountability Act in the House and the No Fakes Act in the Senate — would require guardrails such as content labels or permission to use someone’s voice or image.

At least nine states, including California, Virginia, Florida and Hawaii, have laws regulating A.I.-generated content.

For now, Ms. Swift will probably continue to be a popular subject of A.I. experimentation. Synthetic versions of her voice pop up regularly on TikTok, performing songs she never sang, colorfully sounding off on critics and serving as phone ringtones. An English-language interview she gave in 2021 on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” was dubbed with an artificial rendering of her voice speaking Mandarin. One website charges up to $20 for personalized voice messages from “the A.I. clone of Taylor Swift,” promising “that the voice you hear is indistinguishable from the real thing.”

*France Gets Its Youngest and First Openly Gay Prime Minister*

Gabriel Attal, 34, replaces Élisabeth Borne in a cabinet shuffle that President Emmanuel Macron hopes can reinvigorate a term marked by drift and division.

PARIS — In a typically bold bid to revitalize his second term, President Emmanuel Macron named Gabriel Attal, 34, as his new prime minister, replacing Élisabeth Borne, 62, who made no secret of the fact that she was unhappy to be forced out.

Mr. Attal, who was previously education minister and has occupied several government positions since Mr. Macron was elected in 2017, becomes France’s youngest and first openly gay prime minister. A recent Ipsos-Le Point opinion poll suggested he is France’s most popular politician, albeit with an approval rating of just 40 percent.

Mr. Macron, whose second term has been marked by protracted conflict over a pensions bill raising the legal retirement age to 64 from 62 and by a restrictive immigration bill that pleased the right, made clear that he saw in Mr. Attal a leader in his own disruptive image.

“I know that I can count on your energy and your commitment to push through the project of civic rearmament and regeneration that I have announced,” Mr. Macron said in a message addressed to Mr. Attal on X, formerly Twitter. “In loyalty to the spirit of 2017: transcendence and boldness.”

Mr. Macron was 39 when he sundered the French political system that year to become the youngest president in French history. Mr. Attal, a loyal ally of the president since he joined Mr. Macron’s campaign in 2016, will be 38 by the time of the next presidential election in April, 2027, and would likely become a presidential candidate if his tenure in office is successful.

This prospect holds no attraction for an ambitious older French political guard, including Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, and Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, whose presidential ambitions are no secret. But for Mr. Macron, who is term-limited, it would place a protégé in the succession mix.

More on France
A Painful Episode: Family groups are calling for the excavation of land in southwestern France that is believed to hold the bodies of tens of Algerian children whose parents fought for France during Algeria’s war of independence and who died after being placed in internment camps at the end of the conflict.
Immigration: President Emmanuel Macron is standing behind a tough immigration law that Parliament passed with unwanted support from the extreme right, causing fissures in his governing coalition.
Luring FIFA: A plan promoted by the government of Macron would encourage international sports bodies, including world soccer’s governing body, to move to the country by promising them tax breaks not available to French citizens and companies.
A Higher Price: The Louvre Museum said that it would raise its basic ticket price to 22 euros beginning in January, in the latest sign that visitors may face higher costs ahead of next year’s Summer Olympics in Paris.
“My aim will be to keep control of our destiny and unleash our French potential,” Mr. Attal said after his appointment.

Standing in the bitter cold at a ceremony alongside Ms. Borne, in the courtyard of the Prime Minister’s residence, Mr. Attal said that his youth — and Mr. Macron’s — symbolized “boldness and movement.” But he also acknowledged that many in France were skeptical of their representatives.

Alain Duhamel, a prominent French author and political commentator, described Mr. Attal as “a true instinctive political talent and the most popular figure in an unpopular government.” But, he said, an enormous challenge would test Mr. Attal because “Macron’s second term has lacked clarity and been a time of drift, apart from two unpopular reforms.”

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President Emmanuel Macron walking in front of a line of troops.
President Emmanuel Macron reviewing troops in Paris last week. A reshuffle, he hopes, will invigorate his government.Credit…Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
If France is by no means in crisis — its economy has proved relatively resilient despite inflationary pressures and foreign investment is pouring in — it has appeared at times to be in a not uncharacteristic funk, paralyzed politically, sharply divided and governable with an intermittent recourse to a constitutional tool that enables the passing of bills in the lower house without a vote.

Mr. Macron, not known for his patience, had grown weary of this sense of deadlock. He decided to force Ms. Borne out after 19 months although she had labored with great diligence in the trenches of his pension and immigration reforms. Reproach of her dogged performance was rare but she had none of the razzmatazz to which the president is susceptible.

“You have informed me of your desire to change prime minister,” Ms. Borne wrote in her letter of resignation, before noting how passionate she had been about her mission. Her unhappiness was clear.

In a word, Mr. Macron had fired Ms. Borne, as is the prerogative of any president of the Fifth Republic, and had done so on social media in a way that, as Sophie Coignard wrote in the weekly magazine Le Point, “singularly lacked elegance.”

But with elections to the European Parliament and the Paris Olympics looming this summer, Mr. Macron, whose own approval rating has sunk to 27 percent, wanted a change of governmental image.

“It’s a generational jolt and a clever communications coup,” said Philippe Labro, an author and political observer.

Mr. Attal has shown the kind of forcefulness and top-down authority Mr. Macron likes during his six months as education minister. He started last summer by declaring that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.”

His order, which applies to public middle and high schools, banished the loosefitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim students and ignited another storm over French identity. In line with the French commitment to “laïcité,” or roughly secularism, “You should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them,” Mr. Attal said.

The measure provoked protests among France’s large Muslim minority, who generally see no reason that young Muslim women should be told how to dress. But the French center-right and extreme right approved, and so did Mr. Macron.

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Élisabeth Borne with Mr. Attal in a formal setting, surrounded by guards.
Éisabeth Borne, the departing prime minister, delivering a speech during the handover ceremony in Paris on Tuesday.Credit…Pool photo by Emmanuel Dunand
In a measure that will go into effect in 2025, Mr. Attal also imposed more severe academic conditions on entry into high schools as a sign of his determination to reinstate discipline.

For these and other reasons, Mr. Attal is disliked on the left. Mathilde Panot, the leader of the parliamentary group of extreme left representatives from the France Unbowed party and part of the largest opposition group in the National Assembly, reacted to his appointment by describing Mr. Attal as “Mr. Macron Junior, a man who has specialized in arrogance and disdain.”

The comment amounted to a portent of the difficulties Mr. Attal is likely to face in the 577-seat Assembly, where Mr. Macron’s Renaissance Party and its allies do not hold an absolute majority. The change of prime minister has altered little or nothing for Mr. Macron in the difficult arithmetic of governing. His centrist coalition holds 250 seats.

Still, Mr. Attal may be a more appealing figure than Ms. Borne to the center-right, on which Mr. Macron depended to pass the immigration bill. Like Mr. Macron, the new prime minister comes from the ranks of the Socialist Party, but has journeyed rightward since. Mr. Attal is also a very adaptable politician, in the image of the president.

The specter that keeps Mr. Macron awake at night is that his presidency will end with the election of Marine Le Pen, the far right leader whose popularity has steadily risen. She dismissed the appointment of Mr. Attal as “a puerile ballet of ambition and egos.” Still, the new prime minister’s performance in giving France a sense of direction and purpose will weigh on her chances of election.

Mr. Macron wants a more competitive, dynamic French state, but any new package of reforms that further cuts back the country’s elaborate state-funded social protection in order to curtail the budget deficit is likely to face overwhelming opposition. This will be just one of the many dilemmas facing the president’s chosen wunderkind.

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*December Jobs Report U.S. Job Growth Remains Strong*

The labor market showed continued resiliency in December, with employers adding 216,000 jobs last month, a sign that economic growth remains vigorous.

The labor market ended the year with a bang.

Employers added 216,000 jobs in December on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, surpassing the expectations of economists. It was the 36th consecutive month of gains.

Altogether, the U.S. economy added roughly 2.7 million jobs over the past year. That’s a smaller gain than in 2021 or 2022, during the economy’s initial resurgence from the pandemic lockdowns. Yet the gains of 2023 would still be impressive by the standards of the previous decade.

The numbers are buoying expectations of what has been called a soft landing — in which the economy is able to avoid significant job loss while shifting into a calmer, more sustainable gear, after the years of disorienting volatility that began with the arrival of Covid-19 roughly four years ago.

Many experts caution that data for December is notoriously hard to calculate in any year because of the hiring churn caused by the holiday season.

The unemployment rate, based on a survey of households, was unchanged at 3.7 percent.

Average hourly earnings for workers — a common measure of wage gains — rose 0.4 percent from the previous month and were up 4.1 percent from December 2022.

Layoffs remain near record lows, beneath prepandemic levels.

A mixture of economic data in the past couple of months that appears neither too hot nor too cold has given a lift to both investors and policymakers at the Federal Reserve, who have been pleasantly surprised at the continuing balance between falling inflation and sustainable growth.

*What Investors and the Fed Will Look For in the Jobs Report*

All eyes will be on the latest nonfarm payrolls data scheduled for release on Friday. Here’s what to look out for.

Jobs report: the numbers to watch
Wall Street, the White House and the Fed will all be watching Friday’s jobs report for signs of how the labor market is holding up. The numbers may also deliver clues on the central bank’s next move on interest rates.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is set to release the nonfarm payrolls number at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Here are the data points to watch:

160,000. Economists polled by FactSet expect the report to show that employers added roughly 160,000 jobs last month, a drop from the 199,000 positions created in November. They also forecast that the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.8 percent in December, from 3.7 percent the previous month.

2.7 million. If those predictions are correct, it would bring total hiring in 2023 to about 2.7 million, a strong showing in a year marked by strikes and layoffs by large firms across multiple sectors. Heading into an election year, it’s a data point that President Biden is expected to trumpet to voters still unconvinced about his handling of the economy.

3.9 percent. The big number investors will be watching is wage growth. The consensus estimate is that average hourly wages grew by 3.9 percent on an annualized basis last month, roughly in line with figures from November.

A hot number here could spook markets. Wall Street is divided over how the Fed’s interest rate policy will unfold this year. The central bank has signaled that a trio of cuts could be coming, but officials have since warned that a resurgence in inflation could stall such a dovish pivot — and even reopen the door for rate increases.

1.7 percent. The past two jobs reports have been good ones for investors, with the S&P 500 climbing after the data was released. Market watchers will be hoping for a similar performance. The benchmark index is on a four-day losing streak, and has lost 1.7 percent in 2024.

Inflation F.A.Q.
Card 1 of 5
What is inflation? Inflation is a general increase in prices, which will cause a loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys.

What causes inflation? It can be the result of rising consumer demand. But inflation can also rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions, such as limited oil production and supply chain problems.

Is inflation bad? It depends on the circumstances. Fast price increases spell trouble, but moderate price gains can lead to higher wages and job growth.

How does inflation affect the poor? Inflation can be especially hard to shoulder for poor households because they spend a bigger chunk of their budgets on necessities like food, housing and gas.

Can inflation affect the stock market? Rapid inflation typically spells trouble for stocks. Financial assets in general have historically fared badly during inflation booms, while tangible assets like houses have held their value better.

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HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Foreign governments paid millions to Donald Trump’s companies during his presidency. A report by House Democrats found that Trump businesses received at least $7.8 million — most of it from China. Democrats argued that the findings, drawn from court documents, show that the former president engaged in the kind of activity that Republicans accuse the Biden family of; G.O.P. lawmakers and Trump’s son Eric dismissed the report.

Eurozone inflation rises. Prices in the 20-country region rose 2.9 percent in December, ending months of declines. The rise spurred new questions about when the European Central Bank would begin cutting interest rates. Relatedly, the big French retailer Carrefour stopped carrying PepsiCo products over “unacceptably” high prices.

Bill Ackman’s wife is accused of plagiarism by Business Insider. The publication said that Neri Oxman, a prominent academic and architect who formerly taught at M.I.T., had failed to use quotation marks around several passages in her 2010 doctoral dissertation that were taken from other papers, though she cited her sources. Oxman posted on X that she was checking the accusations, apologized and would request any necessary corrections; Ackman, who was a leading advocate for ousting Claudine Gay as Harvard’s president over plagiarism accusations, posted in support of his wife.

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Hedge fund winners (and losers) of 2023
Last year presented challenges for hedge fund moguls, given volatility in the bond markets, economic uncertainty and the U.S.’s regional banking crisis. But some of the industry’s top players were still able to mint money.

2023 proved to be a good, but not stellar, year for big hedge funds. Take Citadel, one of the industry’s best performers, which fell far short of the 38 percent gain it reported for 2022. (That said, it’s returning $7 billion to investors.)

The picture was murkier for the broader industry. Hedge funds on average returned 4.5 percent, according to the data provider HFR. And they were vastly outperformed by the S&P 500, which gained 24 percent.

Here’s how some hedge-fund titans fared in 2023, according to news reports:

Cliff Asness, AQR Capital Management: Its AQR Absolute Return fund rose 18.5 percent.

Ken Griffin, Citadel: Its flagship Wellington fund gained 15.3 percent.

Steve Cohen, Point72 Asset Management: It rose 10.6 percent.

Izzy Englander, Millennium Management: The firm gained 10 percent.

Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates: Its Pure Alpha II fund lost 7.6 percent last year.

Trying not to kill The Messenger
The Messenger was started last year by the veteran media mogul Jimmy Finkelstein with $50 million in funding to become the next big name in digital news publishing.

But the start-up is now under severe financial pressure and looking to raise more money, The Times’s Ben Mullin reports, as its business model soured and it ran into editorial difficulties.

Among The Messenger’s problems:

The site generated about $3 million in revenue last year, and lost $38 million as costs mounted, including $8 million for leases on offices in New York, Washington and West Palm Beach, Fla.

It has told potential investors that it had only $1.8 million in cash on hand at the end of December.

It is laying off two dozen employees, including reporters covering national politics, science and technology.

A spokeswoman for The Messenger said the company wasn’t in “dire” straits, saying that it booked as much revenue in January as it did for all of 2023. She added that the company had already raised more than $10 million in a new funding round.

The State of Jobs in the United States
Too Few Workers: Employers in Vermont are battling a labor shortage as the local population grows older. The state’s struggles offer an early look at where the rest of the country could be headed.
Seasonal Hiring: After scrambling to fill out work forces the last few holiday seasons, many retailers are reporting more modest goals for temporary employment this year.
Truck Drivers: The trucking industry has complained for years about a dire shortage of drivers. But some women say many companies have made it effectively impossible for them to get those jobs.
A Surge in Start-ups: The Covid-19 pandemic hurt the U.S. economy in a lot of ways. But it might have also broken America out of a decades-long entrepreneurial slump.
What went wrong: The Messenger bet on digital advertising even though that market remains troubled. It also wagered that it could draw big traffic numbers by optimizing for search, which hasn’t paid off nearly as well as the company had hoped. (It is gaining some traction, having drawn 24 million visitors in December, up 24 percent month on month.)

A highly regarded politics editor quit last year after clashing with a senior colleague, while some reporters have chafed at demands to write articles based on competitors’ stories.

The Messenger is now in talks with conservative investors to sell a majority stake, according to Axios. They include Omeed Malik, a financier who has backed Tucker Carlson’s new media venture, and George Farmer, the former C.E.O. of the right-wing social media site Parler.

The investors recently met with Finkelstein at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to discuss a deal for $30 million for 51 percent of the company that valued The Messenger at $60 million.

“I think I wasn’t actually torturing some poor A.I. artist who could suffer. But it’s not a good sign for our civilization that we don’t seem to have any way of knowing for sure.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence researcher who pushed ChatGPT to produce more “normal” images after it created absurd pictures and resisted some of his requests.

Meet the “C.E.O.” of Hamas
As the Israel-Hamas war grinds on, more attention has fallen on how the Islamist group finances its military operations, including the Oct. 7 attacks.

That’s in part because of Zaher Jabarin, who over several years built a financial network across the Middle East to secure funding for Hamas. (A former Israeli security officer called him the “C.E.O.” of Hamas.) The Wall Street Journal takes a close look at Jabarin, who operates from an office building in Istanbul and says he isn’t part of Hamas’s militant wing or involved in raising money for the group:

Jabarin, working closely with other Hamas officials, developed a real-estate portfolio in the country, which made up the bulk of its $500 million worth of assets globally, the U.S. said a few years later. It included stakes in companies based in Algeria and the U.A.E., which didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The highest-profile asset was real-estate developer Trend GYO. Listed on the Turkish stock exchange, it was owned 75% by front men for Hamas, according to the U.S., which sanctioned the firm in May 2022.

The Turkish government granted one of Trend’s founders citizenship and a new name, according to U.S. officials. Hamas officials based in Turkey have opened Turkish bank accounts to move cash and transfer it to operatives in the West Bank, they said.

In a statement, Trend said it didn’t know Hamas or people associated with the group.

In other Middle East news: Secretary of State Antony Blinken will begin another diplomatic tour of the region. Here’s why the oil industry has largely shrugged off the threats against shipping traffic in the Red Sea. And the McDonald’s C.E.O., Chris Kempczinski, said that the war “and associated misinformation” was having a “meaningful business impact” on several of its markets.

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THE SPEED READ
Deals

A group including Jeff Bezos and Nvidia has invested $74 million in Perplexity AI at a $520 million valuation, betting that the search start-up can steal market share from Google. (WSJ)

Deutsche Bank has hired Alison Harding-Jones, Citigroup’s former M.&A. chief for Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as its global head of M.&A. (FT)

Amer Sports, the Chinese-backed group that makes Wilson tennis rackets and Salomon hiking boots, filed to go public in the U.S., reportedly eyeing a $10 billion valuation. (Bloomberg)

Policy

Names being floated for a potential Nikki Haley administration include Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president, as Treasury secretary and Dina Powell, a former top Goldman executive, as chief of staff. (The Messenger)

Donald Trump met with the Teamsters’ chief, Sean O’Brien, as the former president and President Biden compete for union support. (NYT)

SpaceX sued the National Labor Relations Board a day after the agency accused it of illegally firing employees, arguing that the regulator operates unconstitutionally. (Politico)

Best of the rest

A trial will begin next week over a Russian oligarch’s claim that the auction house Sotheby’s abetted a scheme to defraud him of millions via overinflated art sales. (NYT)

Social media influencers are worried that A.I. might cost them valuable brand partnerships, but there’s reason to believe that those fears are overstated. (FT, Business Insider)

BlackRock has hired Leigh Farris, the former head of communications at the Carlyle Group, as global communications chief; Carlyle named Meg Starr, who recently led its E.S.G. efforts, as global head of corporate affairs. (PR Week, Axios)

*America Must Face Up to Israel’s Extremism*

Two far-right members of Israel’s cabinet, the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, caused an international uproar this week with their calls to depopulate Gaza. “If in Gaza there will be 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs and not two million the entire conversation on ‘the day after’ will look different,” said Smotrich, who called for most Gazan civilians to be resettled in other countries. The war, said Ben-Gvir, presents an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,” facilitating Israeli settlement in the region.

The Biden administration has joined countries all over the world in condemning these naked endorsements of ethnic cleansing. But in doing so, it acted as if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s provocations are fundamentally at odds with the worldview of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to whom America continues to give unconditional backing. In a statement denouncing the ministers’ words as “inflammatory and irresponsible,” the State Department said, “We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the government of Israel, including by the prime minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government.” Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat who has called for a cease-fire, thanked the State Department in a social media post, saying, “It must be clear that America will not write a blank check for mass displacement.”

But it’s not clear, because we’re writing a blank check to a government whose leader is only a bit more coy than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich about his intentions for Gaza. As Israeli news outlets have reported, Netanyahu said this week that the government is considering a “scenario of surrender and deportation” of residents of the Gaza Strip. According to a Times of Israel article, “The ‘voluntary’ resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza is slowly becoming a key official policy of the government, with a senior official saying that Israel has held talks with several countries for their potential absorption.”

Some in Israel’s government have denied this, mostly on grounds of impracticality. “It’s a baseless illusion, in my opinion: No country will absorb two million people, or one million, or 100,000, or 5,000,” one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Israeli journalists. And on Thursday, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, released a plan for the day after the war that said that, contrary to the dreams of the ultranationalists, there would be no Israeli settlement in Gaza.

But with its widespread destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including roughly 70 percent of its housing, Israel is making most of Gaza uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Disease is rampant in Gaza, hunger almost universal, and the United Nations reports that much of the enclave is at risk of famine. Amid all this horror, members of Netanyahu’s Likud party — such as Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and Gila Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister — are pushing emigration as a humanitarian solution.

“Instead of funneling money to rebuild Gaza or to the failed UNRWA,” the United Nations agency that works with Palestinian refugees, “the international community can assist in the costs of resettlement, helping the people of Gaza build new lives in their new host countries,” wrote Gamliel in The Jerusalem Post. Right now, this is a grotesque fantasy. But as Gaza’s suffering ratchets up, some sort of evacuation might come to appear like a necessary last resort. At least, that’s what some prominent Israeli officials seem to be counting on.

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A group of Palestinians ride in the back of a crowded truck.
Palestinians heading south to Rafah, on the Egyptian border.Credit…Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
After Hamas’s sadistic attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israel was justified in retaliating; any country would have. But there is a difference between the war Israel’s liberal supporters want to pretend that the country is fighting in Gaza, and the war Israel is actually waging.

Pro-Israel Democrats want to back a war to remove Hamas from Gaza. But increasingly, it looks as if America is underwriting a war to remove Gazans from Gaza. Experts in international law can debate whether the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza can be classified as genocidal, as South Africa is claiming at the International Court of Justice, or as some lesser type of war crime. But whatever you want to call attempts to “thin out” Gaza’s population — as the Hebrew newspaper Israel Hayom described an alleged Netanyahu proposal — the United States is implicated in them.

By acting as if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich can be hived off from the government in which they serve, U.S. policymakers are fostering denial about the character of Netanyahu’s rule. Joe Biden often speaks of his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, then the prime minister, and like many American Zionists, his view of Israel sometimes seems stuck in that era.

If you grew up in a liberal Zionist household, as I did, you’ve probably heard this (possibly apocryphal) Meir quote: “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” There’s much to criticize in this sentiment — its self-regard, the way it positions Israel as the victim even when it’s doing the killing; still, it at least suggests a tortured ambivalence about meting out violence. But this attitude, which Israelis sometimes call “shooting and crying,” is now as obsolete as Meir’s Zionist socialism, at least among Israel’s leaders.

Among both American and European politicians, said my friend Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians who now heads the U.S./Middle East Project, there’s a “willful refusal to take seriously just how extreme this government is — whether before Oct. 7 or subsequently.” I’m tempted to say that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich said the quiet part out loud, but in truth they just said the loud part louder.

*Should Trump Be on the Ballot? And Other 2024 Sticky Wickets*

New year, new problems. The hosts try to make sense of it.

Is Donald Trump an insurrectionist who should be barred from the ballot? On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss who should get to decide if the former president can try to return to the White House. Plus, the hosts lay out what other stories are on their 2024 political bingo cards.

*Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Politically Obtuse Plutocrats*

All Wall Street wants is a good hypocrite — someone who can convince the Republican base that he or she shares its extremism, but whose real priority is to enrich the 1 percent. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, yes.

If you’re not a politics groupie, you may find the drama surrounding Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, puzzling. Until recently, few would have considered her a significant contender for the Republican presidential nomination — indeed, she arguably still isn’t. But toward the end of last year, she suddenly attracted a lot of support from the big money. Among those endorsing her were Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, a new business-oriented super PAC called Independents Moving the Needle and the Koch political network.

If this scramble sounds desperate, that’s because it is. And it looks even more desperate after Haley’s recent Civil War misadventures — first failing to name slavery as a reason the war happened, then clumsily trying to walk back her omission.

But there is a logic behind this drama. What we’re witnessing are the death throes of a political strategy that served America’s plutocrats well for several decades but stopped working during the Obama years.

That political strategy was famously described by Thomas Frank in his diatribe “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” which drew criticism from some political scientists but nonetheless seemed to capture a key political dynamic: Wealthy political donors wanted policies, especially low taxes on high incomes, that were generally unpopular; but they could get these policies enacted by supporting politicians who won over working-class white voters by appealing to their social conservatism, then devoted their actual energy to right-wing economics.

Thus in 2004, Republicans mobilized socially conservative voters in part by organizing referendums banning gay marriage; then, having won re-election on social issues and the perception that he was strong on national security, President George W. Bush proceeded as if he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. (He didn’t.)

This strategy didn’t always succeed, but it worked pretty well for a long time — until the G.O.P. establishment lost control of the base, which wanted genuine extremists, not business-friendly politicians who just played extremists on TV.

If I had to identify the moment it all went wrong, I’d point to a largely forgotten event: Eric Cantor’s shocking June 2014 primary defeat by an obscure Tea Party challenger. Cantor, the House majority leader, was so deeply embedded in conservative economic ideology that he once marked Labor Day by celebrating … business owners. By booting him, Republican primary voters in effect signaled that they no longer trusted that kind of figure.

And then, of course, the 1 percent-friendly establishment was unable to block the rise of Donald Trump who, whatever else you may say about him, is the real thing when it comes to extremism. But Trump was more a consequence than a cause of the Republican unraveling.

At the beginning of 2023, however, the big money thought it had found a way to resurrect the old strategy. Wall Street, in particular, believed that it had found its next George W. Bush in the form of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was supposed to offer a Trump-like appeal to the Republican base while in reality being mainly a defender of elite privilege. The campaign contributions data reveal just how all-in Wall Street went for DeSantis. Even though his campaign is now in free fall, the financial industry has given far more to DeSantis in this election cycle than to anyone else, including President Biden.

But it was all wasted money. Part of the problem is that DeSantis turns out to be a terrible politician. At the start of 2023, betting markets considered him the Republican front-runner; now he’s a punchline.

Beyond that, DeSantis wasn’t playacting at being a cultural and social extremist. Who gets into a gratuitous fight with Disney or has his handpicked surgeon general crusade against Covid vaccines?

Hence the last-minute pivot to Haley. But the slavery contretemps reveals why this pivot has very little chance of succeeding.

Haley went off the rails basically because she was trying to avoid antagonizing the G.O.P. base, which hates anything that hints at social liberalism. A politician who admits that slavery caused the Civil War, or that climate change is a real threat, or that Covid vaccines are safe, just might be a little bit, you know, woke. Yet the big money doesn’t want politicians who are genuine extremists. Haley failed to walk that tightrope; probably nobody could.

What’s so striking to me is the political obtuseness of big money. Any moderately well-informed observer could have told big bankers that a MAGAfied Republican Party isn’t going to nominate anyone who might make them comfortable. Someday, perhaps, reasonable people will once again have a role to play within the G.O.P. But that day is at least several election cycles away.

For now, rationality has a well-known Democratic bias. And throwing money at Nikki Haley won’t change that.

*Should Trump Be Removed From the Ballot?*

To the Editor:

Re “Seeing Threat to Democracy, With Trump on Ballot or Not” (front page, Dec. 31):

The argument by Republicans like J.D. Vance and Chris Christie and Democrats like Gavin Newsom that removing Donald Trump from the ballot would be anti-democratic and would deprive voters of the right to choose their president is flawed in two respects.

First, the 14th Amendment — like the rest of the Constitution — was adopted through a democratic process. It is no more anti-democratic to deny Mr. Trump a place on the ballot because he engaged in insurrection than it is to disqualify a 34-year-old from running for president because of the age requirement.

Second, if the Supreme Court chooses not to enforce the 14th Amendment on the premise that voters should be able to make an unfettered decision, it must give voters an opportunity to assess all of the facts for themselves. If the court were to reverse the Colorado decision to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot, a necessary corollary must be an expedited criminal trial on the Jan. 6-related indictment so that voters can be fully informed before deciding whether to vote for Mr. Trump.

The polls suggest that the results of this trial could change the votes of a significant number of Mr. Trump’s supporters and could determine the outcome of the election.

Randy Speck
Washington

To the Editor:

“Seeing Threat to Democracy, With Trump on Ballot or Not” leaves out a crucial problem: the glacial pace of the criminal justice system. Whether former President Donald Trump is guilty of insurrection should have already been decided in court. But our justice system is too slow, and too vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s favorite legal strategy, to delay, delay, delay.

Since March 2023, Mr. Trump has been charged with 91 felonies in four cases: falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, and attempting to overturn the 2020 election through an insurrection and by trying to strong-arm Georgia officials. But we haven’t seen Mr. Trump cleared or convicted of these charges, charges filed only years after the fact.

With courtroom justice delayed, and mountains of compelling evidence publicly available, it’s no surprise that challenges have been filed in 32 states to consider whether Mr. Trump is guilty of insurrection and thus ineligible to run for president.

Deciding Mr. Trump’s guilt or innocence before the next election is still possible. But it will require judicial officials to act faster than may be comfortable or usual. American democracy is at stake, making it imperative that justice not be denied through delay.

Tom Levy
Oakland, Calif.

To the Editor:

Re “How Justices May Weigh Trump Case,” by Adam Liptak (news analysis, front page, Dec. 30):

In 2000, I wrote a statement eventually signed by 673 law professors (and run as a full-page ad in The Times) denouncing the Bush v. Gore justices for acting as “political partisans, not judges of a court of law.” Will they do so again?

The Republican-appointed justices can escape partisanship by rejecting the feeble arguments against removing Donald Trump from the ballot.

First, the 14th Amendment plainly applies to the presidency. Who can take seriously the notion that the amendment’s authors wanted to prevent insurrectionists from running for dogcatcher but not the most powerful office in the land?

Second, Jan. 6 was obviously an insurrection — a violent attempt to overturn an election and prevent a lawfully elected president from taking office.

Finally, those who argue “let the voters decide” ignore that it was precisely the point of the constitutional provision to prevent voters from deciding to put insurrectionists back into power.

Anti-democratic? In a way. Those who wrote Section 3 of the 14th Amendment recognized that American democracy remained at risk from those who had once tried to overthrow our government. When it came to insurrection, their view was: “One strike, you’re out.”

We face the very same risks today. An insurrectionist wants another shot at dictatorship. The Constitution says no way.

Mitchell Zimmerman
Palo Alto, Calif.

To the Editor:

Re “In Trump Case, Voters’ Will vs. Rule of Law,” by Charlie Savage (news analysis, Dec. 23):

Mr. Savage considers the argument that removing Donald Trump’s name from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment would deprive voters of the right to pick their leaders, and he sees a clash between voters’ rights and the principle that no one is above the law.

But there is no such conflict here. We must of course respect voters’ rights, if our democracy is to endure. Which is all the more reason to enforce the 14th Amendment and keep Mr. Trump off the ballot.

He was already rejected by the voters in 2020, and he refused to accept their decision. He refused to honor his constitutional duty to enable the peaceful transfer of power. He attempted to deprive millions of voters of their right to have their votes counted. One purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is to prevent such people from repeating such a travesty.

Let us also dispense with the argument that we should keep Mr. Trump on the ballot to avoid social unrest. The coming election — assuming a rematch between President Biden and Mr. Trump — will be fraught with problems, no matter the outcome.

If Mr. Trump wins, he will keep his promises to destroy many of our democratic institutions; if he loses, he will not accept his defeat, and we will see a replay of 2020, and possibly of Jan. 6, 2021.

The consequences of enforcing the law might be dire, but the consequences of not enforcing it might be worse.

Larry Hohm
Seattle

Reflections After Claudine Gay’s Resignation at Harvard
Image
A gate at Harvard.
Credit…Adam Glanzman for The New York Times
To the Editor:

Re “What Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” by Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 4):

I applaud Dr. Gay’s guest essay. She emphasizes how her position as a Black woman in a position of power partly explains the venom with which she has been attacked. The press, including The New York Times, should be drawing greater attention to the rampant misogyny unleashed in these attacks on leading women in academia.

Susan Laird Mody
Plattsburgh, N.Y.
The writer is emerita associate professor of education and gender and women’s studies at SUNY Plattsburgh.

To the Editor:

Claudine Gay wraps herself in Harvard’s toga of integrity. It simply won’t work, not for herself nor for Harvard. Plagiarism allegations are serious, especially for an academic researcher — or for a president of a leading academic institution. The best she can do now is to leave gracefully, without excuses or explanations.

Mark Castelino
Newark
The writer is an associate professor of finance at Rutgers Business School.

To the Editor:

As a Harvard alumnus, I for one am sorry to see Claudine Gay go. Not because she was a perfect president. But because she demonstrated several qualities often lacking in public figures today: kindness, humility and a commitment to growth.

I also don’t understand people who say she wasn’t “qualified” because she didn’t have a voluminous research record. The presidency of Harvard is not a Nobel Prize. It’s an administrative role, and Dr. Gay was an accomplished university administrator. We should consider the agendas of those who suggest otherwise.

*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*

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*U.S. and Ukraine Search for a New Strategy After Failed Counteroffensive*

President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Washington at a critical moment, both on the battlefield and on Capitol Hill.

American and Ukrainian military leaders are searching for a new strategy that they can begin executing early next year to revive Kyiv’s fortunes and flagging support for the country’s war against Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

The push for a fresh approach comes after Ukraine’s monthslong counteroffensive failed in its goal of retaking territory lost to the invading Russian army and after weeks of often tense encounters between top American officials and their Ukrainian counterparts.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine arrived in Washington on Monday for hastily arranged meetings this week with President Biden and Congress to discuss the way forward. The two presidents will attempt to demonstrate solidarity and bolster support for Ukraine at a critical moment, both on the battlefield and on Capitol Hill.

Ukraine’s setbacks have come as Republican support for continuing American financial assistance for Kyiv has eroded. Even some senior U.S. officials have expressed worries that if the war falls into a long stalemate next year, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will gain the advantage.

“We can’t let Putin win,” Mr. Biden said last week as he pressed Congress for a new round of funding for Ukraine. “It’s in our overwhelming national interest and international interest of all our friends. Any disruption in our ability to supply Ukraine clearly strengthens Putin’s position.”

The Russian military, after its own failed drive to Kyiv in 2022, has begun to reverse its fortunes and is rebuilding its might. Moscow now has more troops, ammunition and missiles, and has increased its firepower advantage with a fleet of battlefield drones, many of them supplied by Iran, according to American officials.

The United States is stepping up the face-to-face military advice it provides to Ukraine, dispatching a three-star general to Kyiv to spend considerable time on the ground. U.S. and Ukrainian military officers say they hope to work out the details of a new strategy next month in a series of war games scheduled to be held in Wiesbaden, Germany.

The Americans are pushing for a conservative strategy that focuses on holding the territory Ukraine has, digging in and building up supplies and forces over the course of the year. The Ukrainians want to go on the attack, either on the ground or with long-range strikes, with the hopes of seizing the world’s attention.

The stakes are huge. Without both a new strategy and additional funding, American officials say Ukraine could lose the war. Administration officials argue that Mr. Putin is betting on diminished American support, pointing to his recent statements that if Ukraine runs out of NATO-provided ammunition, Russia would prevail in days.

The United States has given vast military and economic support to Ukraine, more than $111 billion over the past two years. But a significant number of Republicans now say they oppose further spending, and others are demanding to see a new strategy before they vote for any additional funds.

Many Ukrainian leaders do not realize how precarious continued U.S. funding for the war is, American officials said. These Ukrainian generals and senior civilian officials have unrealistic expectations about what the United States will supply, they said. They are asking for millions of rounds of artillery, for example, from Western stockpiles that do not exist.

*Gaza After Nine Weeks of War*

After Israel’s invasion and thousands of strikes, many neighborhoods lie in ruins.

Nine weeks ago, the Gaza Strip was a bustling home to more than two million people. Today, neighborhoods have been flattened by Israeli airstrikes and farming communities have been bulldozed by invading Israeli tanks.

Video and satellite imagery captured in late November and early December reveals a devastating transformation in much of northern Gaza.

The Port of Gaza used to be a lifeline for the Gazan fishing industry, with a fish market next to the shore.

Satellite imagery shows that the fighting has resulted in heavy damage to almost every corner of Gaza City, far beyond the port area. A U.N. assessment in early November found that at least 6,000 buildings had been damaged with about a third of them destroyed.

Israeli officials vowed to destroy Hamas in the wake of the group’s surprise Oct. 7 attack and have since subjected Gaza to one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century.

Before the war, Omar Mukhtar Street was the main road through Gaza City, with restaurants, banks and shops on either side of Aljondy Almajhool Park.

Now the road is filled with rubble from destroyed buildings. Those still standing are heavily damaged.

Destruction along the coast
Gaza’s seashore was once an escape for Palestinian families during hot summers with frequent blackouts.

The beaches are now deserted, apart from Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Many of the high-rise hotels that once offered tourists sea-view rooms are scorched, their windows blown out.

The damage to Gaza’s coastline stretches all the way to the northern border, where Israeli forces invaded on Oct. 27.

The next phase
These images capture only a fraction of the destruction across the Gaza Strip. Recent assessments indicate that more than half of the buildings in northern Gaza show signs of damage.

Frequent aerial bombardments have hit the south, too, since the war began on Oct. 7, including at Al Amin Mohamed mosque, shown here.

*WHAT IS THE PATH TO PEACE IN GAZA?*

After Hamas’s depraved attack and the unfathomable destruction of Palestinian life, infrastructure and society in Gaza by the Israeli military offensive, any hope for the territory feels far away. But once the guns fall silent and Gazans are allowed to contemplate the reconstruction of their shattered home, the time will come when Israelis, Palestinians and the rest of the world must wrestle with the future of Gaza and its people.
Times Opinion reached out to thinkers, political leaders and experts for their vision of what might meet the moment. Because in the end, two neighboring groups of millions of people must find a way to live their lives. Here are 10 ideas for a path forward.

Today, most Jewish Israelis support the invasion of Gaza. They think it is crucial to restoring their country’s reputation for military competence and strength. But while Israel can depose Hamas, its leaders have not explained how it can rule Gaza — either directly or by proxy — without inviting a future insurgency. That insurgency will be powered by Palestinians seeking revenge, since, as Israeli experts have noted, Hamas recruits fighters from the families of people Israel kills. As that quagmire deepens, Israel would look about as strong and competent as the United States did when it could not quash insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Militarily, Israel should instead conduct the kind of narrowly targeted response the United States eschewed after Sept. 11. It should pursue the people who masterminded the Oct. 7 slaughter to the ends of the earth and the end of their days. But it should halt its invasion of Gaza and negotiate a long-term cease-fire that leads to freedom for all the remaining Israeli hostages. At the same time, Israel should allow Palestinians to create a legitimate political leadership — which can take charge in the West Bank and Gaza — and empower Palestinians who pursue their freedom in ethical ways.

To negotiate seriously with Israel, Palestinians need legitimate leaders — not the discredited Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who hasn’t stood for election since 2005. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has advised in the past, Israel should release the imprisoned Palestinian nationalist Marwan Barghouti, who is more popular than the leaders of Hamas. Mr. Barghouti was convicted of murder and membership in a terrorist organization during a trial at which he declined to offer a defense and refused to recognize the Israeli court’s jurisdiction. But despite defending Palestinians’ right to violently resist Israeli oppression, he has also lauded Nelson Mandela’s willingness to “defy hatred and to choose justice over vengeance.”

Israel should then empower Mr. Barghouti and other credible, non-Hamas Palestinian leaders by showing that they can improve Palestinian lives and give Palestinians hope that they will gain their freedom. It should begin dismantling the West Bank settlements whose inhabitants terrorize their Palestinian neighbors and help Palestinians forced from their villages by settler violence to return. It should prevent Jewish ultranationalists from undermining the status quo on the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, and promise not to establish diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia until Palestinians are free.

According to Israeli media, influential Palestinians have proposed allowing Hamas to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group that includes different Palestinian parties, if it disarms. Mr. Barghouti could oversee such a process, which would pave the way for a revived, internally democratic P.L.O., which could set a new political direction for the Palestinian people.

Will Benjamin Netanyahu’s government do any of this? Not a chance. But polls suggest that his Likud party may suffer a historic collapse when Israelis next vote. The Biden administration should make it clear that America’s relationship with Israel will depend on its next government pursuing a different path. Israel’s current one will succeed only in devastating Gaza. It won’t give Palestinians hope, and it won’t keep Israelis safe.

ISRAEL’S MILITARY CAMPAIGN will continue until Hamas’s military capabilities are eliminated and it is removed from power. It’s hard to guess how long it will take, but if we are to be honest, it will take longer than Western societies are prepared to accept and longer than what their leaders — above all, President Joe Biden, a close friend of Israel — are willing to tolerate.

It is imperative for this reason that Israel provide the world with a clear picture of what it intends to do next, after the army has completed its work. The current Israeli government has no answer. It hasn’t had time to prepare a long-term strategy. But even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners are unwilling and unable to propose the necessary next steps, the rest of Israel — and anyone who cares about its stability and security — can no longer avoid the question.

Here’s what I think should be part of that plan:

After the military campaign to remove Hamas from power and destroy its ability to fight, Israeli forces must withdraw all the way to the border of Gaza.

As that campaign now continues, Israel, the United States and other allies in parallel must agree on the deployment of an international force drawn from NATO countries, with their deployment agreed on by Israel and the United States and operating under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council.

The international force would take the place of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. Arab nations will probably not be willing to send in troops. While Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia desire nothing more than the destruction of Hamas, which is a destabilizing force for their own governments, none will want to be seen as lending a hand to Israel’s military campaign.

The international force would help create a different governmental administration and would start to rebuild the civilian authorities and governing systems in the Gaza Strip for approximately 18 months.

Israel must announce that with the cessation of its military campaign, talks will immediately begin with the Palestinian Authority based on a two-state solution — which is the only political horizon that can offer stability and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians and diplomatic, military and economic cooperation between Israel and the moderate Arab states.

There is no doubt that the Netanyahu government is unwilling, unable and unprepared to make such moves. Before any of these steps may be taken, therefore, there is no choice but to get rid of this government. Once it is gone and as soon as the military campaign in Gaza is over, the first steps toward what comes next may be taken.

*As Frogs Disappear Worldwide, ‘There Is No Way to Stop That Killer’*

Mysterious deaths have occurred all over
the planet and followed a similar pattern.
Why have so many species vanished?
And what does it all have to do with us?

We met the ecologist Karen Lips in Washington, D.C. One morning, she picked us up from a Metro station and took us to Shenandoah National Park, keen to show us a species of salamander.

Ms. Lips describes herself as an amphibian forensic scientist. For decades, she has been researching the disappearance of amphibian species, and what she told us that day was shocking.

As filmmakers, we’ve covered the extinction of species and other ecological issues in our work for years. Mammals, reptiles, insects, fish — much of the planet’s wild fauna is threatened with extinction. But no other vertebrate class is as threatened as amphibians. Herpetologists like Ms. Lips don’t just fear for individual species; they fear for the class Amphibia as a whole.

No one else we had met and interviewed on this subject seemed to be as affected by it as Ms. Lips. To put it simply: Frogs, salamanders and all amphibians are her life. For her, their increasing disappearance from our planet is a personal drama.

We finally found a few of the salamanders toward the end of our day up in the mountains. We were delighted at seeing them but also disheartened. Ms. Lips had no doubt that they, too, could soon vanish. That night, full of emotion, we interviewed Ms. Lips, who is the voice of this documentary.

This is about much more than frogs and salamanders. It is about all life on our planet.

*Biden’s New Friendship With Modi Is Already Under Threat*

The indictment unsealed in New York on Nov. 29 accusing an unnamed Indian government official of plotting the assassination of a Sikh separatist in America raises many grave questions. Chief among them: Is the partnership between the United States and India in peril?

On the face of things, it would appear not. Washington has so far adopted a measured tone, urging cooperation and forgoing any outright condemnation of the Indian government for its potential role in the foiled plot. India, which in September angrily rejected what Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, called “credible allegations” linking Indian agents to the killing of a Sikh secessionist in British Columbia, has responded temperately this time; it asserted that extraterritorial killings are “contrary to government policy” and set up a panel to investigate the charges.

Nevertheless, these allegations, and they way they are playing out in India, expose the brittle underpinnings of what the Biden White House views as one of America’s “most important relationships.”

The two Sikh men the United States and Canada say were targeted by agents of the Indian government were drum beaters for an independent state of Khalistan. For most Indians, the memory of the Khalistan movement, a bloody ethno-religious agitation to establish a Sikh state in the Punjab region, is harrowing. Its campaign of terror, peaking in the 1980s, claimed thousands of lives. It took years for its traumas — from the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards to the killings of thousands of Sikhs in riots that followed — to heal. In 2005, Manmohan Singh, India’s first Sikh prime minister, made a public apology to the Sikh community.

Yet for all the violence, including the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight from Canada by Khalistani militants that killed more than 300 people on board, the idea of Khalistan was fated to fail for a simple reason: Most Indian Sikhs rejected it. Khalistan was and is a cause pursued, financed and overseen by a vocal minority in the diaspora that aimed to incinerate Punjab’s historic pluralism.

North America, home to the largest Sikh population outside India, has emerged as the headquarters for Khalistan’s champions, while some of its fiercest foes, including the military officers who led operations against militant separatists, have been Sikhs in India. According to a Pew Research Center report on India from 2021, 95 percent of Sikhs surveyed said they were “very proud” to be Indian; 70 percent believed that those who disrespect India cannot be considered Sikh; more than half said they had a lot in common with Hindus; and most did not see evidence of widespread discrimination against their community.

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the dual American and Canadian citizen whom Washington says was targeted by an Indian official, was designated a terrorist by India in 2020. Last month, Mr. Pannun posted a vitriolic video in which he made a veiled threat against Air India and warned Sikhs to avoid flying the airline (he later specified he was calling for a boycott of the carrier), and pledged to rename the airport in Punjab after the killers of Indira Gandhi. He has recently warned Hindus to leave Canada and declared that his group, Sikhs for Justice, was going to “Balkanize” India.

Mr. Pannun and his fellow travelers, though unsavory, do not constitute an existential threat to India. For all their ranting and raving, they simply are no match for the might of the Indian state. This doesn’t, however, mean that Mr. Modi doesn’t stand to benefit from the fallout of the allegations, regardless of whether his government had any involvement in either incident. To Mr. Modi, all enemies of the Indian state are a political gift.

*The Magical Solutions Floating Out of Dubai Won’t Fix the Climate Crisis*

I live at the base of Basalt Mountain, an ancient volcano that tops out at nearly 11,000 feet in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado. An eruption 10 million years ago contributed to the contours of the landscape. In the mornings I drink strong coffee from a U.S. Forest Service mug, and I look out the window at the light on the peaks, at the wild turkeys pecking in the yard, at the deer so tame that I could touch them.

I have spent my career working on climate change — not theoretically but in the trenches, crawling under trailers to insulate them under a federal government program to help low-income families conserve energy, building solar farms, capturing methane from coal mines, bolstering the climate movement through various nonprofit boards and crafting policy at the state and municipal levels. I served as a state regulator and an elected town councilman.

I have also spent 25 years in the field of corporate sustainability, trying to figure out how business might become a meaningful part of the climate solution. Over time, I came to understand that the ethic being applied — the idea that free markets can solve societal problems and that even a monstrosity like climate change can be fixed without regulation — was a ruse that I had bought into, realizing that fraud only late in the game.

This year, Earth’s average temperature bumped, briefly but ominously, to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average. Climate scientists have been telling us that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is the threshold we should not exceed, but at this point, more and more experts are saying it is all but inevitable.

As the global climate summit in Dubai has unspooled, I’ve read inexplicably cheerful social media posts from colleagues and friends, climate leaders I admire and total unknowns at COP28, the Conference of the Parties — which I’ve come to call the party at the end of the world. These “Look, Ma!” posts strike me as forced, naïve at best, trending toward willful blindness and delusion.

One “breakthrough” being lauded includes a purely voluntary commitment by fossil fuel companies to better capture methane, a potent greenhouse gas we absolutely must contain.

I know this issue intimately. The one man in America who fully understood the obscure problem of methane leaking from coal mines — Tom Vessels, a former oil and gas executive — partnered with me and others a decade ago to capture the gas to generate electricity. The project was a first in the nation, and while it was worthy of and received praise, it was also the only such project — because no federal policy existed to ensure the capture or mitigation of this super-warming agent.

For fossil fuel companies, committing to containing methane leaking from their pipelines and wellheads is a way for those businesses to appear beneficent while continuing to traffic in oil and gas. It is that very trafficking that causes the leakage that must be regulated, even as scientists tell us the essential action required to control warming is to stop burning coal, oil and gas.

A few years ago, I visited Tom in Denver as he was dying from mesothelioma, the result of home remodels done in his youth, when no regulations existed around asbestos. He was rail thin and ghost white. We sat on the couch drinking cans of seltzer. I told him: “You lived a good life. You did a good thing, and you were ahead of your time.” He died a few weeks later. Future generations won’t suffer his fate, thanks to strict asbestos laws. On methane, so far, future generations are mostly unprotected from its pernicious warming power.

In the missives I’ve seen from COP28, there are bad ideas pitched as magical solutions, such as the Rube Goldberg-like plan that John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, doubled down on. According to the investigative outlet The Lever, which reported on a leaked memo outlining discussion issues for the conference, the U.S. plan was to build “on existing voluntary carbon market standards for the international carbon market, as opposed to establishing a new robust framework with stringent standards.” This approach is undermining the United Nations’ effort to solidify an internationally regulated carbon market.

If we’re going to use these markets to reduce emissions, governments must administer and enforce them to make sure the reductions for which one polluter is paying another in the carbon market — the so-called offsets — are real.

At the same time, there were glimmers of hope. As the climate conference began, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced comprehensive new rules to regulate methane in the United States, at least. There are also plans to create a fund to help vulnerable nations hit by climate disasters, and to set a goal of tripling the amount of renewable power worldwide by 2030 (if high interest rates don’t derail that objective). There were also calls for a full fossil fuel phaseout.

But that proposed phaseout rattled the conference hosts in Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading oil producers. It is ramping up oil production. The idea was quickly scuttled. The head of the OPEC cartel called on its members to reject any plan that would threaten the production and sale of oil, gas and coal. And it was no idle threat: All 198 participating nations must consent to any agreement. So much for what the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said would be a major benchmark of success for the summit.

Let’s be real, though. The summit’s proposals for voluntary commitments — on methane, on renewables, on phasing out fossil fuels — were theater. Imagine if in the 1960s Americans had responded to the civil rights movement not with legislation but with calls to please treat one another nicely.

That is one of the reasons that when I read optimistically pithy social media posts from colleagues visiting a petrostate hosting a climate conference led by an oil executive, I begin to feel the creeping tendrils of despair. The climate problem is complex and enormous, and the progress to rein it in has been slow. Meanwhile, carbon emissions continue to rise in what is expected to be the hottest year in recorded history.

And still, I make my coffee, holding it in my hands as I look out into my yard, thinking how good I have it. I am reminded of the biologist E.O. Wilson’s defining idea, “biophilia,” our innate love of life and nature.

I see even in Dubai, as the conference comes to a close, the outlines of a human inclination to protect, to hold on and to persevere.

These are mostly good people, after all, who convened to reduce carbon emissions worldwide, with the focus on this issue alone, for two weeks. Many are driven by the idea that we can’t let this unique and beautiful existence, on a spinning globe in the big empty, go down in literal flames. Sure, the event has been co-opted. At least 1,300 oil, gas and coal lobbyists were granted access to the conference. But there are also powerful forces pushing for success.

Thomas Keating, a Catholic priest who helped start St. Benedict’s, a now-closed monastic community near my house, lived among turkeys and deer like the ones I see from my windows. “Whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup,” he wrote, “divine life is pouring into the world.”

*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*

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