Las noticias con La Mont, septiembre 18, 2023

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*In U.S. Visit, Zelensky to Make a Case for More Aid, and Say Thank You*

The Ukrainian leader’s second trip to America comes at a more delicate diplomatic moment, as he tries to navigate political currents while expressing gratitude for Western support.

A hero’s welcome awaited President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on his first trip to the United States after Russia’s full-scale invasion, which came on the heels of two back-to-back military advances that showcased Ukrainian momentum to the West. Mr. Zelensky spoke to a joint session of Congress last December, highlighting the successes and appealing for continued aid.

Mr. Zelensky’s second visit, beginning on Tuesday, is a more delicate political mission, coming in the face of skepticism over assistance to Ukraine from some Republican lawmakers and amid a slow-moving and so far inconclusive counteroffensive on which many hopes in the war had been pinned.

Mr. Zelensky will attend the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, where he is expected to continue an effort to win support among developing nations that have wavered or leaned toward Russia. Then he will travel to Washington to meet with congressional leaders and visit the White House.

The Ukrainian president is approaching his appearances with a more balanced message. He remains a tireless advocate for military assistance for the Ukrainian Army, but has infused his pleas with deep expressions of gratitude for what the West has already provided.

It’s a shift in tone and approach for Mr. Zelensky after criticism that he was scolding his allies and appearing ungrateful as he pressed them for weapons.

At a NATO summit in July, Ben Wallace, then Britain’s defense minister, said, “Like it or not, people want to see a bit more gratitude.” He said he was offering advice for Ukraine to win over those who have been skeptical of aid.

At the same summit, in Vilnius, Lithuania, Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, said that “the American people do deserve a degree of gratitude” for ammunition, air-defense systems, armored vehicles and mine-clearing equipment.

At the time, preparations were already underway for the military operation that began in southern Ukraine this June, after a monthslong wait for American and European weaponry, including tanks and armored vehicles. Mr. Zelensky has complained that the delay gave Russia time to dig in and lay vast minefields, thwarting any fast advance.

*Today’s Top News: A Rising Spy Battle Between the U.S. and China, and More*

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*U.N. to Meet Amid Growing Divisions, and Demands From the Global South*

With major world leaders skipping the annual event, discussions will focus on climate change, sovereign debt relief and development goals.

The United Nations General Assembly convenes on Tuesday in the shadow of the second year of war in Ukraine, amid a series of climate related catastrophes and at a time of increasing divisions in the world that will hamper efforts to address the litany of problems contributing to the strains.

Underscoring the tensions, only President Biden among the leaders of the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain — will attend the meeting. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will be there in person for the first time since Russia invaded his country, though Ukraine is not dominating the agenda as it did last year.

This year’s gathering was planned with an eye to growing demands from the nations of the “global south,” an informal group of developing and underdeveloped countries. They have been frustrated by the world’s attention on the conflict in Ukraine while their crises have received minimal attention and funding, diplomats said.

Responding to those demands, the U.N. has scheduled discussions during the General Assembly on climate change, sovereign debt relief and ways to help struggling countries reach the U.N.’s development goals on prosperity, health, development, education and gender equality.

“We will be gathering at a time when humanity faces huge challenges, from the worsening climate emergency to escalating conflicts, the global cost-of-living crisis, soaring inequalities and dramatic technological disruptions,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the U.N., said in a briefing for reporters last week. “People are looking to their leaders for a way out of this mess.”

Mr. Guterres acknowledged, however, that it was becoming increasingly difficult to bring U.N. member states together, given the depth of the divisions that were revealed by the absence of world leaders at the forum.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China will sit out the event for the second year in a row. But more surprising were the absences of President Emmanuel Macron of France, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.

*Iran Lets 5 Americans Leave as U.S. Unfreezes Billions in Oil Revenue for Tehran*

The terms of the deal have generated intense criticism from Republicans, who accused President Biden of helping to finance Iran’s terrorist activities.

Five Americans who had been imprisoned in Iran were allowed to leave the country on Monday, according to White House officials, after two years of high-stakes negotiations in which the United States agreed to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue and dismiss federal charges against five Iranians accused of violating U.S. sanctions.

The announcement that the Americans took off in a plane from Tehran just before 9 a.m. eastern, came as President Biden and Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s president, were to attend the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting of world leaders on Tuesday.

The five Americans, some of whom had been held for years in Evin Prison, one of the most notorious detention centers in Iran, were expected to fly to Doha, the capital of Qatar, for a Cold War-style exchange with two of the five Iranian nationals. Three others declined to return to Iran, according to U.S. officials.

The Americans will be given a brief medical checkup in Doha before boarding a U.S. government plane to be flown back to Washington, officials said.

At the same time, the United States informed Iran that it had completed the transfer of about $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue from South Korea to a Qatari bank account.

Top aides to Mr. Biden have said financial sanctions and strict monitoring will prevent Iran from spending the money on anything except food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. But they acknowledge that the deal might free up money that Iran is already spending on those items for other purposes.

The terms of the deal have generated intense criticism from Republicans, who accused Mr. Biden of helping to finance Iran’s terrorist activities around the world.

“Iran’s leaders will take the money and run,” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, wrote last week on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter. “What on earth did Joe Biden think would happen?”

Administration officials have said the agreement with Iran was the only way to win the release of the five Americans, who the United States said had been wrongfully detained by the Iranians in deplorable conditions.

The Americans — Siamak Namazi, Emad Sharghi and Morad Tahbaz, as well as two others who have not been named at their families’ request — had been jailed on unsubstantiated charges of spying. They had spent the last several weeks in Iran in home detention after Tehran agreed to release them from prison while the $6 billion transfer, a complicated process, was completed.

American officials said that Mr. Namazi’s mother and Mr. Tahbaz’s wife are also on the plane out of Iran. Both women are Americans and had been previously prevented from leaving Iran by the government there.

The deal comes as part of a larger effort by the Biden administration to de-escalate tensions with Iran, which had soared in the years since President Donald J. Trump abandoned the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which placed limits on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

The release took place two days after the first anniversary of the uprising in Iran that erupted after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the country’s morality police. Hundreds were killed in the ensuing government crackdown, including at least 44 minors, while around 20,000 Iranians were arrested, the United Nations calculated. In the past few weeks, the government has arrested dozens of dissidents and activists in an attempt to prevent a fresh round of protests.

Critics of Iran’s government say Iran most likely timed the release to distract the news media from the anniversary of the protests and to provide Mr. Raisi with a tangible foreign policy success as he meets world leaders and conducts rounds of interviews in New York.

“The international attention is now diverted from the ongoing horrific human rights situation in the country,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group. “To coincide with the anniversary of the uprising in Iran is seen as a slap in the face of Iranian people inside the country and has angered many.”

But officials at Iran’s mission to the United Nations dismissed the criticism, saying that the timing of the American detainees’ release was conditional on the $6 billion arriving in the Doha bank account and that Iran did not control that process.

In an interview last week in Tehran with Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor, Mr. Raisi said that the American detainees held in Iran were in “good health” and that Tehran had authority over how it used its released funds.

“This money belongs to the Iranian people, the Iranian government, so the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide what to do with this money,” Mr. Raisi said.

Only some of the Iranians involved in the deal were jailed in the United States, though all of them faced federal charges. Those charges will be dropped under the terms of the deal.

Several of them are permanent residents of the United States. American officials said that two of the jailed Iranians decided to return to Iran on Monday. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Naser Kanaani said that two would remain in the U.S. and one would return to a third country where he has family.

The Iranians were identified as Kaveh Afrasiabi, 65, who was charged with being an unregistered lobbyist; Reza Sarhangpour Kafrani, 48, a dual Iranian Canadian citizen charged with exporting lab equipment for Iran’s nuclear program; Mehrdad Ansari, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for obtaining military gear; Kambiz Attar Kashani, 45, a dual Iranian American businessman who pleaded guilty to conspiring to illegally export technologies; and Amin Hasanzadeh, who was charged with stealing sensitive technical plans.

Mr. Hasanzadeh has said he will return to Iran.

Negotiations to release the Americans accelerated in the spring, according to people familiar with the discussions, when Brett H. McGurk, the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House, met with officials in Oman in early May.

In August, after Iran released the Americans to house arrest, U.S. officials said they would not celebrate until the Americans were out of Iran and on friendly soil.

“Of course, we will not rest until they are all back home in the United States,” Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council at the White House, said at the time.

The Biden administration has made considerable efforts during the last three years to win the release of Americans held in other countries.

In March, the United States secured the release of Paul Rusesabagina, a human-rights activist detained in Rwanda. In December, Russia agreed to release Brittney Griner, an American basketball star, in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death.”

But other Americans remain in detention. In March, Russia accused the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich of espionage and detained him. Mr. Biden has said that his administration is working to secure Mr. Gershkovich’s release.

*This China Trade War Isn’t About Semiconductors*

Cosmetics sales in China are soaring, but a group of exporting nations led by France are pushing Beijing to lift restrictions they say are blocking them unfairly.

In the gloom of China’s economy, one area of business is booming: cosmetics.

After enduring nearly three years of mandatory masks and frequent lockdowns during the pandemic, many Chinese consumers, wary of big-ticket purchases like apartments, are now splurging on lipstick, perfume, moisturizers and other personal care products.

But cosmetics companies from France, Japan, South Korea and the United States, which have invested heavily in China, are missing out on a lot of the action.

As China’s cosmetics companies are booming, imports of cosmetics are wilting under regulations that the country imposed on foreign manufacturers during the pandemic.

While China’s trade conflicts with the West over semiconductors pivot on national security and technological innovation, the dispute over cosmetics is largely about money.

“I’m not talking about peanuts,” said Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister. “For many French companies,” he added, China “represents between 30 and 35 percent of their total revenues.”

During a visit to China last month, Gina M. Raimondo, the U.S. commerce secretary, said the United States wanted to expand its exports of personal care products. “No one can argue that health and beauty aids interfere in our national security,” Ms. Raimondo said.

Under rules that China introduced in 2021, companies must divulge every ingredient in their products and the precise quantities used. They must upload to a Chinese database the addresses of all ingredient suppliers as well as where the ingredients are assembled. Foreign companies fear that divulging those details could allow low-cost Chinese manufacturers to copy their products.

One of the most contested Chinese mandates is that many products, such as hair dyes or sun creams, must be tested on live animals before they can be sold to Chinese consumers — a practice that many global cosmetics companies have stopped.

“It’s not only the requirements that are onerous but the timelines under which things need to be done — they are unrealistically short,” said Gerald Renner, the director of technical regulatory affairs at Cosmetics Europe, an industry association.

Big companies like LVMH or L’Oréal have the resources to meet the regulatory demands. But some smaller players are pausing sales to China until there is a less time intensive and expensive way to meet the requirements.

Led by the French government, the European Union and 11 cosmetics-exporting nations, including the United States and Japan, are pushing China this year to repeal many of the requirements. President Emmanuel Macron of France raised the issue with China’s leaders during his visit to the country in April. Mr. Le Maire pressed it again when he visited Beijing in July, saying the concerns had been “at the core of discussions” with his Chinese counterparts.

Mr. Le Maire said he and Vice Premier He Lifeng of China had agreed to set up a working group to create common standards that would meet in Paris before the end of this year. But there is no guarantee that talks will resolve the dispute.

China is the second-largest beauty market in the world, trailing only the United States. Yet doing business there has long been difficult for foreign companies.

For decades, China mandated animal tests for most cosmetics, even for those that had been proven safe and sold by brands elsewhere. Brands either quietly tested their products on animals in China or gave up on their imports.

China dropped the animal test requirements a decade ago for many products made in China and, in 2021, for imported cosmetics that do not make health claims.

But China still requires animal testing for “special cosmetics,” which include products with sunscreen or antiperspirant as well as products like hair dye or skin lightener. According to Jason Baker, senior vice president for PETA Asia, these animal tests include forcing animals to swallow or inhale a test substance or applications to their skin or eyes. Rabbits, guinea pigs and mice are most commonly used.

Michelle Thew, the chief executive of Cruelty Free International, an advocacy group, added that China topped the list of countries using animals in testing and research for a variety of purposes — about 20 million animals annually — followed far behind by Japan and the United States.

The international beauty and personal care industry supports efforts to reduce animal testing for products sold in China, for both domestic and foreign manufacturers. Unilever, which makes Dove and Vaseline and owns the Dermalogica skin care brand, said it had been working with academics and the Chinese authorities to phase out the need for imported cosmetics to undergo animal testing.

*Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk to Meet, as Both Seek to Shrug Off Criticism*

Mr. Netanyahu, the Israeli leader, flew to California, where he plans to discuss artificial intelligence investments with Mr. Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter. The encounter gives each a stage to set a new narrative.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Elon Musk, the owner of X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, have both faced intense scrutiny and criticism for most of the year.

Mr. Netanyahu has been the target of a nine-month wave of mass protests against his deeply contentious effort to reduce the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. Mr. Musk, among other things, has been accused of tolerating and even encouraging a surge of antisemitic abuse on X.

On Monday morning, the two men were set to find a respite from those furors — in each other’s company. Mr. Netanyahu took a 15-hour overnight flight to meet Mr. Musk in California, where the Israeli prime minister has said they will discuss artificial intelligence and how to develop it in Israel.

For Mr. Netanyahu, an encounter with the world’s richest man — ostensibly to promote tech investment in Israel — provides a riposte to claims that his government’s judicial overhaul has put off investors and harmed Israel’s tech sector.

For Mr. Musk, the meeting with the leader of the world’s only Jewish state gives him a chance to deflect a barrage of criticism from American Jews who say he has allowed X to become a vessel for antisemitic hatred.

“Netanyahu is looking for any victories he can get, and if he is able to get Musk to promise high-tech investment in Israel and declare that Israel remains an A.I. leader, it will burnish his argument that he remains the best shepherd of Israel’s economy,” said Michael J. Koplow, an analyst at the Israeli Policy Forum, a research group in New York.

“As for Musk, he will point to a warm meeting with Netanyahu as a shield against accusations of antisemitism,” Mr. Koplow added.

The meeting was arranged at Mr. Musk’s suggestion and followed several calls in recent weeks between the two men, according to Mr. Netanyahu’s office.

Mr. Netanyahu was scheduled to leave again on Monday evening on another overnight flight, to New York, where he is set to meet President Biden and make a speech to the United Nations General Assembly later in the week.

The visit comes against a backdrop of rising unrest in Israel over Mr. Netanyahu’s effort to weaken the power of the judiciary. Mr. Netanyahu says his judicial program enhances democracy by giving elected lawmakers greater autonomy from unelected judges, but critics say it will make the government unaccountable, undermine the rule of law, and make Israel a riskier place to do business.

Economists, senior bankers and Israeli business leaders, including tech entrepreneurs who helped make Israel a cyber superpower, have said the overhaul, which has yet to be enacted in full, will harm Israel’s economy.

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*The High Stakes Behind the U.A.W.’s Strike*

The walkout by thousands of factory workers presents economic and political risks for the Big Three automakers, Midwestern states and President Biden.

Autoworkers put down their tools
Thousands of autoworkers walked off the job on Friday morning at three Midwest plants in an unprecedented strike, as the United Automobile Workers and Detroit’s three big carmakers remained miles apart on contract talks.

The move could be the most costly yet in a “summer of strikes.” Thousands of workers in many sectors have joined picket lines to demand higher wages, job security and clarity on how employers will deal with disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence. For President Biden, who is trying to revive his poll numbers by talking up his handling of the economy to help the working class, the strike presents a political challenge heading into the election next year.

The carmakers are already feeling some pain. Ford and General Motors were down in premarket trading. Shares in Stellantis, which makes Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram vehicles, fell at the open in Amsterdam, only to recover their losses.

A lengthy strike could dent the Big Three’s profits, analysts say, at a time when the companies are investing heavily in electric vehicles to catch up to Tesla and Chinese rivals. Mary Barra, G.M.’s chief, warned that meeting all or most of the union’s demands could hobble the company’s prospects. “Make no mistake: If we don’t continue to invest, we will lose ground, and it will happen fast,” she said. “Nobody wins in a strike.”

The unions are using new tactics. As The Times’s Neal Boudette reports, this is the first time the U.A.W. has called a strike at all three big carmakers simultaneously. (Typically it’s just one, as in 2019 against G.M.). Union leaders are also focusing on factories that make the most profitable models, including the Ford Bronco and the Chevrolet Colorado pickups.

They’ve also warned that they could expand the strike at any moment. “It’s going to keep them guessing on what might happen next,” Shawn Fain, the U.A.W.’s president, said. “And it’s going to turbocharge the power of our negotiators.”

The union’s demands include:

A 40 percent pay raise over four years, which would bring wages for many full-time workers to roughly $32 per hour.

Reinstate cost-of-living adjustments, which have become a central plank in contract negotiations amid high inflation.

A four-day workweek, a demand that’s grown in popularity since the pandemic scrambled workplace culture.

The political costs loom large. A 10-day strike could send Michigan into recession, according to a recent economic analysis. If the work stoppage were to last six weeks — the 2019 strike at G.M. lasted 40 — it could push the U.S. economy “close to the edge of a recession,” Mark Zandi, an economist for Moody’s, told The Times.

The strike is a big test for Biden. He often speaks of his pro-union roots, but doesn’t have a deep relationship with Fain, a relative newcomer in D.C. circles.

*How Biden’s View on Presidential War Powers Has Shifted*

The president says he can direct limited military operations without lawmakers’ approval. Most G.O.P. presidential candidates, including Donald J. Trump, did not answer a survey on executive power.

If he is elected to a second term, President Biden pledged that he will go to Congress to start any major war but said he believed he was empowered “to direct limited U.S. military operations abroad” without such approval when such strikes served critical American interests.

“As president, I have taken great care to ensure that military actions carried out under my command comply with this constitutional framework and that my administration consults with Congress to the greatest extent possible,” he wrote in response to a New York Times survey of presidential candidates about executive power.

“I will continue to rigorously apply this framework to any potential actions in the future,” he added.

The reply stood in contrast to his answer in 2007, when he was also running for president and, as a senator, adopted a narrower view: “The Constitution is clear: Except in response to an attack or the imminent threat of attack, only Congress may authorize war and the use of force.”

In the survey, The New York Times asked major presidential candidates to lay out their understanding of issues that can be critical to the outcome of policy fights but about which they are rarely asked: the scope and limits of a president’s power to act unilaterally or in defiance of statutes, particularly in war, secrecy and law enforcement.

*Casey v. Kevin on U.S. v. Google + Walter Isaacson on Two Years With Elon Musk*

It’s been a bumpy ride for the most important players in tech.

Is Google allowed to spend billions of dollars to make its search product the default browser? That is the question at the center of U.S. et al. v. Google — the most important tech trial of the modern internet era — and Kevin and Casey disagree on the answer.

Then, a conversation with the journalist who spent the last two years shadowing Elon Musk.

*Ireland’s Latest Fiscal Headache: What to Do With 10 Billion Euros*

The government in Dublin has a big budget surplus, thanks to a boom in tax revenue from multinational companies. Build more housing? Or a subway? Sock it away? Whatever the case, someone will be unhappy.

Fifteen years after a collapsed housing bubble forced Ireland to borrow tens of billions of dollars or risk going bust, the country is discovering that having too much money can also be a problem.

Swollen by rising corporate tax revenue, mainly from American tech and pharmaceutical corporations, the government is expecting to have a record budget surplus of 10 billion euros ($10.9 billion) this year. Next year, the windfall is projected to be even larger, reaching €16 billion.

For years, Ireland’s low corporate tax rate has lured multinational organizations to set up overseas subsidiaries here. Their tax payments have created a financial cushion for the government, while stirring the ire of other countries.

Although plans promoted by the United States and others to create a global corporate tax rate have slowly progressed — a change that could undermine Dublin’s position as a low-tax haven — the payments to Ireland have ballooned.

Which leaves Irish lawmakers in a quandary. As the government prepares its annual budget statement in October, it must settle the tricky question of what to do with this pot of money.

Chief among the options: save it for the future; pay off debts; invest in badly needed housing or some other infrastructure, like hospitals, schools and a subway system for Dublin; or give it away in tax cuts and support payments.

Yet for peculiarly Irish reasons, none of these apparent boons would be, in itself, an easy option.

“Whatever they do, it will leave some people feeling very grumpy,” said Cliff Taylor, a business columnist at The Irish Times. There is talk, he said, of putting the money aside in a sovereign wealth fund, to help support rising pension costs as the population ages.

*A Trip to Ukraine Clarified the Stakes. And They’re Huge.*

While visiting Kyiv last week, my first trip to Ukraine since Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, I tried to get my exercise every morning by walking the grounds of St. Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery. Its serenity, though, has been disrupted by a jarring exhibit of destroyed Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers. During my walks, I’d poke my head into these jagged, rocket-pierced hulks, wondering what a terrible death must have come to the Russian soldiers operating them.

But the shock of this tangled mass of rusting steel, sitting in the middle of this grand, whitish-stone piazza, evoked a different image in my mind’s eye: a meteor.

It looked as if a giant meteor had plummeted from space, disrupting life as we knew it — nearly eight decades without a “great power” war in Europe, a continent where centuries of invasions and conquest had given way to security and prosperity. Now we have this ugly pile sitting here in our midst, smoldering, and we, both Ukrainians and the world community, are struggling with how to deal with it.

Nearly every Ukrainian I spoke to in Kyiv was at once exhausted by the war and passionately determined to recover every inch of their Russian-occupied territory — but no one had clear answers about the road ahead, the painful trade-offs that await, only certainty that defeat would mean an end to Ukraine’s democratic dream and a smashing of the post-World War II era that had produced a Europe more whole and free than ever before in its history.

What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil. He has trumped up any number of shifting justifications — one day it was removing a Nazi regime in power in Kyiv, the next it was preventing NATO expansion, the next it was fending off a Western cultural invasion of Russia — for what ultimately was a personal flight of fancy that now requires his superpower army turning to North Korea for help. It’s like the biggest bank in town having to ask the local pawnshop for a loan. So much for Putin’s bare-chested virility.

What is so evil — beyond the death and pain and trauma and destruction he has inflicted on so many Ukrainians — is that at a time when climate change, famine, health crises and so much more are stressing Planet Earth, the last thing humanity needed was to divert so much attention, collaborative energy, money and lives to respond to Putin’s war to make Ukraine a Russian colony again.

Putin lately has stopped even bothering to justify the war — maybe because even he is too embarrassed to utter aloud the nihilism that his actions scream: If I can’t have Ukraine, I’ll make sure Ukrainians can’t have it, either.

“This is not a war in which the aggressor has some vision, some outline of the future. Rather, on the contrary, for them, everything is black, formless, and the only thing that matters is force,” Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, remarked on a panel we did together at a conference in Kyiv last weekend.

Being in the city has been clarifying for me in three regards. I understand even better just how sick and disruptive this Russian invasion is. I understand even better just how hard, maybe even impossible, it will be for Ukrainians to evict Putin’s army from every inch of their soil.

Perhaps most of all, I understand even better something that the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed almost 30 years ago: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”

Most Americans don’t know a lot about Ukraine, but I say this without any hyperbole: Ukraine is a game-changing country for the West, for better or for worse depending on the war’s outcome. Its integration into the European Union and NATO someday would constitute a power shift that could rival the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Ukraine is a country with impressive human capital, agricultural resources and natural resources — “hands, brains and grains,” as Western investors in Kyiv like to say. Its full-fledged integration into Europe’s democratic security and economic architecture would be felt in Moscow and Beijing.

Putin knows that. His war, in my view, has never been primarily about countering NATO expansion. It has always been much more about stopping a Slavic Ukraine from joining the European Union and becoming a successful counter example to Putin’s Slavic thieving autocracy. NATO expansion is Putin’s friend — it allows him to justify militarizing Russian society and to present himself as the indispensable guardian of Russia’s strength. E.U. expansion to Ukraine is a mortal threat — it exposes Putinism as the source of Russia’s weakness. And the Ukrainians I met, to a person, seemed to understand that they and Europe were bound up together in an epochal moment against Putinism — a moment, though, that cannot succeed without a steadfast United States. Which is why one of the most frequent — and worried — questions I got on my visit were variations of “Do you think Putin’s pal Trump can be president again?”

One need only look into the eyes of Ukrainian soldiers back from the front, or talk to parents in the streets of Kyiv, to be stripped of any illusions about the moral balance of this war. I was in the country for just three days — far shorter than my Times colleagues and other war journalists who have borne remarkable witness to this fighting and suffering. But my relatively brief interactions brought to life the photos we see of bomb-ravaged cities and villages in Eastern Ukraine, and the chilling findings we read from the United Nations documenting cases in which children have been “raped, tortured and unlawfully confined” by invading Russians.

This is as obvious a case of right versus wrong, good versus evil, as you find in international relations since World War II.

Yet the closer you come to this conflict and think about how to resolve it, that stark black-and-white moral balance sheet doesn’t offer an easy road map to a solution.

It is clear as day what defines a just outcome. It’s a Ukraine that is whole and free — with reparations paid by Russia. But it isn’t at all clear how much such justice is attainable, and at what price, or whether some dirty compromise will be the least-worst option, and if so, what kind of compromise, just how dirty, when and guaranteed by whom.

In other words, the minute you step out of the justice framework of this war — and into the realm of realpolitik diplomacy — the whole picture turns from black-and-white to different shades of gray. Because the bad guy is still powerful and still has friends and therefore a say. Ukraine, too, has lots of friends committed to helping it fight as long it wants to — until “as long as it wants to” becomes too long in Washington and other capitals of the West.

It is very hard to stop a leader who has no shame or conscience. On Tuesday Putin told an economic conference in Russia that the 91 felony counts filed against Donald Trump in four different U.S. jurisdictions represent the “persecution of one’s political rival for political motives” and show “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach democracy to others.” The hall erupted in applause for a leader renowned for using poison underwear, an exploding airplane and Siberian labor camps to “teach democracy” to his rivals.

The shamelessness is breathtaking. And while his beseeching of North Korea for military help is pathetic, the fact that he’s prepared to seek it underscores that he intends to continue this war until he can come away with some chunk of Ukraine that he can hold up as a face-saving success.

I went to Kyiv to participate in the annual meeting of the Yalta European Strategy, organized in partnership with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. (Pinchuk is a Ukrainian businessman.) The first speaker was Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who right from the top argued that if we abandon considerations of justice, and do a dirty deal with Putin, we will sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

“Human morality must win this war,” Zelensky said. “Everyone in the world who values freedom, who values human life, who believes that people must win. And our success, the specific success of Ukraine, depends not only on us, on Ukrainians, but also on the extent to which the entire vast moral space of the world wants to preserve itself.”

But securing justice in war almost always requires the total defeat and occupation of the aggressor. Russia has more than three times the population of Ukraine. And when you listen to Ukrainian soldiers speak, you hear a cocktail of Zelensky-like defiance, mixed with admissions of exhaustion.

The conference featured a panel of four male Ukrainian soldiers, one missing a forearm and one an eye, and a woman soldier. All had fought at the front. Here is how Dmytro Finashyn, an intelligence officer of the National Guard of Ukraine, whose left forearm was a black prosthetic, put it: “Our best people are dying, those who should shape the future of Ukraine. That is why it is necessary to reduce our losses. The world must help us, because we are fighting for global democracy.”

Alina Mykhailova, an officer who has been in the field for well over a year, started to cry during her presentation, mourning the loss of a beloved commander. “We are suffering huge casualties; there is no romanticizing battle and war. It is dirty, it is nasty and bad,” she said. “Every time you go to bed you should remind yourself how hard it is” for the soldiers at the front. “What we see at the front lines today, you would not learn from TV.” She added, “Each of us needs personal support, every soldier should have support: a family or a loved one, or any person who does not avert their eyes and understands what we are fighting for.”

Don’t get me wrong, this is a Ukrainian army ready to fight on — and any politician in this country, including Zelensky, who just hints at a territorial compromise will be run out of office. But the math is cruel. Everyone who volunteered, right after the invasion, has gone to the front, which means more and more Ukrainians will have to be drafted. While many show up, they often look to join drone units — not the trench warfare infantry — and more and more have been trying to bribe or flee their way out of the draft. That is why Zelensky recently had to fire the entire top leadership of his regional military recruitment centers.

It gets back to that meteor. No one in this modern European country was ready to have his or her life turned upside down by this kind of all-out war that, despite all the threats from Russia, always seemed a remote possibility. One mother remarked to me that her social life now is occasional dinners with friends, kids’ birthday parties “and funerals.” That was not the plan.

You know a country has been at war a long time when the fight starts spawning its own language. When the Ukrainian fund-raising platform United24 seeks donations to buy the army more drones, it now asks for a “dronation,” and everyone knows what it means.

*Dominican Republic Will Close Border With Haiti Amid Water Dispute*

The Dominican president said the military would enforce the measure on Friday morning. Experts warned the closure could deepen Haiti’s economic crisis.

The Dominican Republic said it would seal its border with Haiti on Friday morning amid a conflict over access to a river shared between the two historically contentious neighbors. The move would further isolate Haiti, a nation that has descended into gang violence and growing hunger.

Tensions have grown in recent days over construction in the Massacre River, which straddles both nations.

President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic, who claimed that the excavation of a canal on the river in Haiti would harm Dominican farmers, froze Haitian visas this week and threatened to close the more than 220 miles of border if the two sides did not reach a resolution.

A Haitian delegation met with the Dominicans in Santo Domingo, the capital, on Wednesday for 11th-hour negotiations, but there was no apparent resolution, and on Thursday, Mr. Abinader announced his decision to shut the boundary between the two Caribbean island nations starting at 6 a.m. local time Friday.

“The entire border of the Dominican Republic, both land, sea and air, will be closed,” Mr. Abinader told reporters as he stood in a military base in Santo Domingo among 20 armored vehicles that he said would soon be dispatched to the border. “The Army, the Navy and the Air Force will be prepared to comply with this decision.”

The Haitian government on Thursday evening released a statement saying it “can sovereignly decide on the exploitation of its natural resources.”

The government said it has “the full right” to access the Massacre River, according to the statement, and also called for calm in the wake of the potential border closure.

The decision is likely to deepen the economic turmoil in Haiti, where nearly half of the population is at risk of starvation, according to the United Nations. More than 25 percent of Haiti’s official imports come from the Dominican Republic, though another large share of goods, including food, enters unofficially along the porous border, according to a report from the International Monetary Fund.

Haiti is heavily reliant on trade with the Dominican Republic, as well as the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Haiti is the Dominican Republic’s third-largest trading partner.

“Haitians are already in a very difficult position in terms of food security and I’m anticipating this will exacerbate that problem,” said Daniel Foote, the Biden administration’s former special envoy to Haiti. “It’s going to have a particular negative impact on these desperate people who are barely surviving.”

Closing the border between the two countries could also hurt the Dominican Republic since so many of the country’s goods are destined for the Haitian market.

“This border closure generates an evident lose-lose situation,” said Antonio Ciriaco, an economist at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo. The Dominican Republic also relies on Haitian laborers who cross into the country every day to work in industries like agriculture and construction, he added.

The Dominican Republic last closed its border with Haiti after the assassination of the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, in July 2021.

Mr. Abinader has since occasionally closed parts of the border and begun constructing a wall between the two nations after violence escalated in Haiti. Dominican officials said they sought to stop the smuggling of weapons and illegal crossings into the Dominican Republic.

On Thursday morning, Dominican military forces were already gathering on the border.

The use of the Massacre River, named for a bloody battle between Spanish and French colonizers in the 1700s, has long been a source of tension between the two nations. The river was also the site of a massacre of thousands of Haitians by Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, in 1937.

In 2021, Haiti and the Dominican Republic issued a joint declaration acknowledging a 1929 agreement between the nations establishing that both countries had the right to use water from the river.

The excavation of the river, Mr. Abinader said, was not sanctioned by the Haitian government and was being carried out by former politicians and local businessmen. Dominican officials said the unauthorized construction was another example of the rising disorder in Haiti and the government’s lack of control over the country.

Some water experts said they believed the Dominican government was overreacting given that there are 11 existing canals on the Dominican side of the Massacre River.

“I think it is something that has been completely blown out of proportion, where the political is reigning more than the technical,” said Martín Meléndez, an engineering professor at the Santo Domingo Institute of Technology, adding that Haitians “have the right” to draw water from the river, too.

“This can be resolved taking turns as to who is going to take water, on what day, and how much,” Mr. Meléndez said.

The United States embassy in Santo Domingo issued a warning to American citizens in Haiti that the United States would not be able to help them reach the Dominican Republic in the event of a border closure.

Mr. Abinader said the border would stay shut “for as long as it takes for this provocative action to be eliminated,” and that the closure would be enforced by the military and the national police.

“The Haitian government itself has admitted to having problems controlling its territory,” he said. “And, if there are uncontrollables there, they will be uncontrollable for the Haitian government, but they will not be uncontrollable for the government of the Dominican Republic.”

But Jean Brévil Weston, the leader of a farmers’ group in Haiti that is working on the construction in the canal, said no one in the Haitian government had told any of his members to cease work. And they had no plans to stop doing so.

“We get water or death,” he said in an interview with Magik9, a Haitian radio station. “If we don’t find water for agriculture in the plain, we are already dead.”

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*Is Kim Jong-un’s ‘Most Beloved Daughter’ North Korea’s Next Leader?*

Her appearances in state media, most recently in undated photos released on New Year’s Day, have triggered growing speculation about succession plans in the country.

North Korean state media has not revealed much about the cherub-faced young girl who has made several appearances with Kim Jong-un, the country’s leader, in recent weeks.

On New Year’s Day, state media carried undated photos of her and Mr. Kim visiting a nuclear missile facility. Her age and name have not yet been reported; she has simply been referred to as Mr. Kim’s “most beloved daughter.”

That was enough to raise questions about the young girl’s place in the Kim family dynasty and whether she was being groomed as ​Mr. Kim’s successor.

North Korea is not a monarchy. Its top leader is supposedly elected through a ruling Workers’ Party congress. In reality, though, the Kims have run the country like a private family enterprise since its founding at the end of World War II​.

Both Mr. Kim’s grandfather and father ruled until they died. Mr. Kim, who turns 39 next Monday, has already been in power for 11 years and is unlikely to go anywhere any time soon.

Yet the question of who would inherit ​the regime — and its fast-growing nuclear arsenal — has remained the subject of endless fascination among officials and analysts, especially when doubts about Mr. Kim’s health have emerged.​

The speculation of North Korea’s succession plans unfolded as Seoul and Washington said this week that they were discussing how to better cope with North Korea’s growing nuclear threat, employing the full range of American defense capabilities.

The recent guessing game about succession first began after North Korea launched its Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile ​on Nov. 18 ​in one ​of ​the country’s most significant weapons tests.

*‘A Ticket to Disney’? Politicians Charge Millions to Send Migrants to U.S.*

The journey into the jungle begins, led by a guide from the New Light Darién Foundation.
The Biden administration vowed to “end the illicit movement” of people through the Darién jungle. But the number of migrants moving through the forest has never been greater — and the profits are too big to pass up.

Every step through the jungle, there is money to be made.

The boat ride to reach the rainforest: $40. A guide on the treacherous route once you start walking: $170. A porter to carry your backpack over the muddy mountains: $100. A plate of chicken and rice after arduous climbing: $10. Special, all-inclusive packages to make the perilous slog faster and more bearable, with tents, boots and other necessities: $500, or more.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are now pouring through a sliver of jungle known as the Darién Gap, the only land route to the United States from South America, in a record tide that the Biden administration and the Colombian government have vowed to stop.

But the windfall here at the edge of the continent is simply too big to pass up, and the entrepreneurs behind the migrant gold rush are not underground smugglers hiding from the authorities.

They are politicians, prominent businessmen and elected leaders, now sending thousands of migrants toward the United States in plain sight each day — and charging millions of dollars a month for the privilege.

“We have organized everything: the boatmen, the guides, the bag carriers,” said Darwin García, an elected community board member and former town councilman in Acandí, a Colombian municipality at the entrance to the jungle.

The crush of migrants willing to risk everything to make it to the United States is “the best thing that could have happened” to a poor town like his, he said.

Now, Mr. García’s younger brother, Luis Fernando Martínez, the head of a local tourism association, is a leading candidate for mayor of Acandí — defending the migration business as the only profitable industry in a place that “didn’t have a defined economy before.”

The Darién Gap has quickly morphed into one the Western Hemisphere’s most pressing political and humanitarian crises. A trickle only a few years ago has become a flood: More than 360,000 people have already crossed the jungle in 2023, according to the Panamanian government, surpassing last year’s almost unthinkable record of nearly 250,000.

In response, the United States, Colombia and Panama signed an agreement in April to “end the illicit movement of people” through the Darién Gap, a practice that “leads to death and exploitation of vulnerable people for significant profit.”

Today, that profit is greater than ever, with local leaders collecting tens of millions of dollars this year alone from migrants in an enormous people-moving operation — one that international experts say is more sophisticated than anything they have seen.

“This is a beautiful economy,” said Fredy Marín, a former town councilman in the neighboring municipality of Necoclí who manages a boat company that ferries migrants on their way to the United States. He says he transports thousands of people a month, charging them $40 a head.

Mr. Marín is now running for mayor of Necoclí, vowing to preserve the thriving migration industry.

“What was first a problem,” he said of the many migrants who began showing up in the last few years, “has become an opportunity.”

American diplomats have visited the towns next to the Darién Gap in recent months, strolling dusty streets and shaking hands with Mr. Marín, Mr. García and others running the migration business. White House officials say they believe that the Colombian government is following through on its commitment to crack down on illicit migration.

But on the ground, the opposite is happening. The New York Times has spent months here in the Darién Gap and surrounding towns, and the national government has, at best, a marginal presence.

When the national authorities can be seen at all, they are often waving migrants through, or in the case of the national police, fist-bumping the men selling expensive travel packages through the jungle.

The top police official in the region, Col. William Zubieta, said it wasn’t his job to halt the flow. Instead, he argued, the nation’s migration authorities should be exerting control.

“Unfortunately, they do not have it,” he said.

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, acknowledged in an interview that the national government had little control over the region, but added that it was not his goal to stop migration through the Darién anyway — despite the agreement his government signed with the United States.

He Was a Hillary Clinton Cheerleader. Now He Calls Democrats a Threat.*

Peter Daou, a former Democratic activist, is running Cornel West’s third-party campaign. He talked to The New York Times about how he came to view the two-party system as a bigger problem than Donald J. Trump.

On Monday, Cornel West, a left-wing scholar and third-party presidential candidate, announced that he had hired Peter Daou as his campaign manager. The choice adds a new twist to one of the most unusual career trajectories in political consulting.

A Lebanese American jazz keyboardist and dance music producer — one of his early club remixes was declared “smokin’” by Billboard in 1991 — Mr. Daou, 58, found his way into politics in the mid-2000s. He started as a liberal blogger and then became a digital adviser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

In 2016, he achieved prominence as the chief executive of Shareblue, a pro-Clinton megaphone that cultivated online outrage against Donald J. Trump, the political media and Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton’s primary rival. (Mr. Daou was not affiliated with the 2016 Clinton campaign, but he did get a shout out in Mrs. Clinton’s subsequent book, “What Happened.”) At the time, a Sanders strategist called Mr. Daou the “pond scum of American politics” — so it was a surprise when, four years later, Mr. Daou transformed from Clinton superfan to an equally loud supporter of Mr. Sanders, the Vermont socialist.

It was the first of a series of record-scratch shifts in Mr. Daou’s politics. He has since quit the Democratic Party, called on President Biden to resign over campaign-trail allegations of groping, and worked briefly for Marianne Williamson’s campaign before signing onto Dr. West’s Green Party candidacy.

*Walking Out of Morocco’s Rubble, Pregnant, Scared and Homeless*

Clambering away from an earthquake’s devastation and death, a family emerges treasuring a single new life.

Essaadia Boukdir stumbled through a valley of death in the throes of labor. Her husband, Brahim Bel Haj, held her up on one side. A cousin supported her on the other.

She worried her baby would die, as so many of her neighbors had only two days earlier, when an earthquake struck high up in a valley on the Atlas Mountains on Friday, cracking concrete, hurling giant boulders down the rocky slopes and burying people in their mud-brick and rock homes.

The earthquake, the most powerful to strike Morocco in more than a century, killed more than 2,900 people, most of them in the small villages scattered in mountains near the southwestern city of Marrakesh.

The valley where Ms. Boukdir lives, in the more distant province of Taroudant, is about 50 miles from the epicenter but reachable only by traveling hours up and down winding dirt roads. Residents say the earthquake killed 80 there, including three of Ms. Boukdir’s immediate neighbors. They are now buried in the local cemetery under stones and brambles.

“I was just hoping to stay alive,” Ms. Boukdir, 32, said softly. “I was so scared that the trauma we suffered would kill the baby.” Her family thought so, too.

Many in her family burst into tears in the terraced field where they had stopped, an area that normally serves as the village’s breadbasket, where residents grow corn and wheat along with almonds and walnuts. It has since become a homeless encampment, filling with makeshift shelters as each extended family has strung up tarps to protect them and the few meager belongings salvaged from the wreckage of their homes. This is where Ms. Boukdir had been sleeping, on a carpet stretched over dirt, since she and her family fled in search of safety.

“We knew if she stayed here, she would die,” said her brother-in-law Lahcen Bel Haj. “Nothing was certain.”

They shepherded her down the sand road, weaving around the boulders that had bounded down the jagged pink mountainside like giant balls bouncing down steep staircases, crushing everything in their path. One had crashed through a brick wall into a neighbor’s bathroom. From the road, it was visible where it had come to rest, hovering next to a small sink, its pointy top reflected in the pink-framed mirror.

*China Conducts Major Military Exercises in Western Pacific*

The drills, which appear to simulate a blockade of Taiwan, are believed to be in response to recent military drills between the United States and allies.

China launched large-scale military drills in the Western Pacific this week, deploying an aircraft carrier and dozens of naval ships and warplanes in a major show of force aimed at pushing back at U.S. pressure.

The joint exercises come after the United States conducted a series of military drills across the region in recent weeks with allies like Japan, Australia and the Philippines. On Saturday, the American and Canadian navies sailed ships through the Taiwan Strait.

What We Know
China’s Shandong aircraft carrier was one of at least 20 Chinese naval vessels spotted navigating waters around Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines starting on Tuesday, according to the Japanese and Taiwanese governments.

Other vessels identified by Japanese officials included missile destroyers, frigates and supply ships.

China also sent at least 68 warplanes near Taiwanese airspace on Thursday, up from 35 on Wednesday, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said. Some of those aircraft joined the naval exercises. Planes were spotted taking off and landing on the Shandong, according to Japan’s Ministry of Defense.

China has not announced any exercises involving the Shandong, its first domestically built aircraft carrier, one of two carriers China has in service.

What the Analysts Say
The drills appeared to be focusing on some of the People’s Liberation Army’s deficiencies: the ability to keep up operations far from its shores and coordinate between different forces on the water and in the air.

“It looks to me like they were practicing sustained air operations toward the West Pacific in conjunction with their carrier exercises, something we haven’t seen at this scale before,” said Ben Lewis, an independent defense analyst based in Washington, who tracks Chinese military activity around Taiwan.

Mr. Lewis said China’s military was likely practicing enforcing a blockade around Taiwan, the self-governed island that Beijing claims and has threatened to take by force. A blockade would complicate the United States’ ability to come to Taiwan’s aid if it were to be invaded by China.

“China wants to use this exercise to showcase that it has the ability to fly over the first island chain,” said Lin Ying-yu, an assistant professor at Tamkang University in Taipei, referring to the string of major archipelagos — Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines — nearest to China’s coast.

“By sending out big numbers of its jets and vessels, it wants to let the other players in the region know that it possesses the ability to launch joint attacks by sea and air forces,” he added.

*What to Know About the New R.S.V. Immunizations*

New vaccines for older adults and pregnant women, and an antibody therapy for infants, provide options for preventing severe infection.

hospitalizations and 6,000 to 10,000 deaths annually in Americans over the age of 65. (For comparison, flu caused about 171,000 hospitalizations and 16,000 deaths in older adults during the 2019-2020 flu season.)

Despite the harm caused by the disease, R.S.V. historically has not received as much attention as the flu or Covid-19. That’s starting to change, in part because the serious consequences of R.S.V. were on full display last winter with the so-called “tripledemic,” when the virus overwhelmed hospitals alongside the flu and Covid.

Coinciding with rising awareness about the risks of R.S.V., there are finally tools available to prevent severe infections in both infants and older adults. In May, the Food and Drug Administration approved two vaccines for adults 60 and up, in July it approved a monoclonal antibody therapy to protect infants and toddlers who are at high risk for severe disease, and in August it ruled that one of the vaccines could be given to pregnant mothers in order to protect their newborns.

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Here’s what to know about the different options, who should get them and when.

Vaccines for adults
The two adult vaccines, which were created by Pfizer and GSK, are very similar, both in terms of how well they protect against symptomatic R.S.V. infection and in their side effects. They also work the same way biologically — targeting a protein the virus uses to fuse to human cells — and were developed based on the same decade-old scientific discovery, which is why they’ve emerged at the same time.

In clinical trials, the Pfizer vaccine, called Abrysvo, was 89 percent effective at preventing lower respiratory symptoms (such as cough, shortness of breath or wheezing) in the first R.S.V. season after vaccination, while the GSK vaccine, called Arexvy, was 83 percent effective. There weren’t enough people in either trial to determine whether the vaccines also helped reduce hospitalizations and deaths, but experts anticipate that they will.

The vaccines were somewhat less effective at preventing disease in the second R.S.V. season after people received a shot. However, experts say that R.S.V. doesn’t mutate in the same way that influenza and SARS-CoV-2 do, so there shouldn’t be a need to update the vaccine or re-dose people every year.

“At least in terms of the more severe symptoms from the infection, it did not seem to diminish over the two-year period appreciably,” said Dr. Edward Walsh, a professor of medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, who led the Pfizer clinical trial. “This would suggest that right now, we’re probably looking at a vaccine that is not given any more frequently than every two years.”

Out of the roughly 38,000 people who received either vaccine, 20 experienced atrial fibrillation and six developed neurological complications, including encephalomyelitis and Guillain-Barré syndrome, in the weeks after vaccination. More common side effects were fatigue, fever and muscle pain at the site of the injection.

Rather than recommend the vaccines outright to everyone 60 and older, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that people talk to their doctors when deciding whether to get the shot. They included this extra step in part because of the potential for these severe, albeit very rare, side effects.

It’s about weighing the benefit versus the risk, said Dr. Tochi Iroku-Malize, the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. She and the A.A.F.P. support the federal recommendation that older adults get the vaccine after consulting with “their physician to make sure that this is the right thing for them.”

“Most adults who get infected with R.S.V. usually have mild or no symptoms,” she added. “But some adults may have more severe symptoms,” usually because they have an underlying condition such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease or a compromised immune system. People with these conditions may benefit more from receiving the vaccine.

The vaccines will be available at doctors’ offices and some pharmacies, including Walgreens and CVS, this fall. R.S.V. season typically begins in October, and people are encouraged to get the shot before it starts. The R.S.V. vaccine is safe to get at the same time as the flu shot, Dr. Walsh said, but there isn’t available data yet on receiving it and the Covid vaccine simultaneously.

Monoclonal antibodies for infants
While vaccines teach the immune system to produce antibodies against a specific disease, monoclonal antibodies provide an infusion of prefabricated antibodies — but their protection is more temporary. For babies whose immune systems are still developing, that temporary immunity could make a big difference.

A new monoclonal antibody therapy developed by AstraZeneca, called nirsevimab, was approved earlier this year to protect infants against severe R.S.V. In a clinical trial, the drug was about 77 percent effective against both hospitalizations and cases of R.S.V. requiring a doctor’s visit. Side effects were mild, with a rash at the injection site being the most common.

The C.D.C. recommended that all infants who are less than 8 months old at the start of R.S.V. season receive nirsevimab. Children between the ages of 8 months and 19 months are also recommended to get the shot if they have an increased risk for severe disease. That includes not only children who are immunocompromised or have pre-existing lung conditions, but also American Indian and Alaska Native populations. Babies should be able to receive the monoclonal antibody therapy at their pediatrician’s office, and some hospitals may offer the shot to newborns delivered during R.S.V. season.

*#La Polémica | El #Jefe del #Gabinete mexiquense*

La #Opinión de #Daniel Camargo en #Cuestión De Polémica

🔴 El ascenso de Delfina Gómez Álvarez 
🔴 Higinio Martínez, el impulsor de la izquierda
🔴 Legisladores se quedaron con licencia en mano
https://www.cuestiondepolemica.com/la-polemica-el-jefe-del-gabinete-mexiquense/

1. Política interna: Karine Jean Pierre, vocera de la Casa Blanca, consideró que “carece de fundamento” la investigación para someter a Joe Biden a un juicio político pues hasta la fecha no ha presentado evidencia creíble. Además, calificó como una “treta política” el anuncio del martes de Kevin McCarthy (R-California), presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, sobre la apertura de una investigación para un eventual juicio político en contra del mandatario. En sus primeros comentarios sobre el tema, en una reunión con donantes, Biden dijo anoche que los republicanos quieren abrir un juicio político en su contra porque desean también que haya una suspensión de actividades del gobierno federal, en referencia a las discusiones en el Congreso sobre asignaciones presupuestarias para el año fiscal 2024 (citado en Reuters, The Hill, NBC News y AP).
2. Política exterior: Antony Blinken ofreció una conferencia sobre “El poder y el propósito de la diplomacia de Estados Unidos” en The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies (SAIS) en la cual delineó su perspectiva de la política exterior estadounidense para el orden internacional actual. Entre otros puntos, resaltó la renovación y profundización de las alianzas de EUA bajo el liderazgo de Biden para cubrir temas tradicionales y nuevos con un mayor alcance geográfico. A su vez, se refirió a la formación de nuevas coaliciones para abordar retos globales. Finalmente, mencionó el trabajo con los aliados y las coaliciones para fortalecer y adecuar a los organismos internacionales para que respondan de mejor forma a los retos globales contemporáneos. Al respecto, nota del Departamento de Estado y comentario en The Daily Beast.
3. Congreso: la bancada republicana de la Cámara de Representantes no llegó a un acuerdo interno para avanzar con la discusión de su propuesta de asignación presupuestaria para el Departamento de Defensa que estaba prevista en el Pleno para ayer por la tarde. Varios miembros del ala extremista manifestaron su oposición, por lo que Kevin McCarthy (R-California) pospuso la consideración al no tener asegurada una mayoría. Esta decisión refleja las dificultades que habrá en el proceso legislativo para aprobar los fondos del gobierno federal para el año fiscal 2024 en las próximas dos semanas. Sobre el tema, notas de Washington Post, Politico, The Hill y Reuters.
4. Temas bilaterales: desde el lunes 11, la Casa Blanca anticipó que vetará la iniciativa republicana de presupuesto para el Departamento de Defensa en sus términos actuales a partir de varias consideraciones, entre ellas, la propuesta para reubicar a México del área de responsabilidad del Comando Norte (USNORTHCOM) al Comando Sur (USSOUTHCOM).

Y es lo más seguro; pero primero quitar votos a la oposición. Ayer vi en Cámara a diputados ebradoristas muy contento tos.

Por otro lado, el que Sheinbaum haya dado la vocería a Fernández Noroña no garantiza otra cosa que una campaña agresiva, violenta, sin miramientos.

No habrá argumentos, Fernández Noroña siempre imprimió el tono en las sesiones, Mier y aliados solamente lo soltaban y él con otras petistas y morenistas hacían el resto.

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*Russia Overcomes Sanctions to Expand Missile Production, Officials Say*

Moscow’s missile production now exceeds prewar levels, officials say, leaving Ukraine especially vulnerable this coming winter.

Russia has managed to overcome sanctions and export controls imposed by the West to expand its missile production beyond prewar levels, according to U.S., European and Ukrainian officials, leaving Ukraine especially vulnerable to intensified attacks in the coming months.

In addition to spending more than $40 billion providing weapons for Ukraine, the United States has made curbing Russia’s military supply a key part of its strategy to support Kyiv.

As a result of the sanctions, American officials estimate that Russia was forced to dramatically slow its production of missiles and other weaponry at the start of the war in February 2022 for at least six months. But by the end of 2022, Moscow’s military industrial manufacturing began to pick up speed again, American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose the sensitive assessment now concede.

Russia subverted American export controls using its intelligence services and ministry of defense to run illicit networks of people who smuggle key components by exporting them to other countries from which they can be shipped to Russia more easily. In less than a year since the war began, Russia rebuilt trade in critical components by routing them through countries like Armenia and Turkey. U.S. and European regulators have been trying to work together to curb the export of chips to Russia, but have struggled to stop the flow to pass through countries with ties to Moscow.

Russia’s re-energized military production is especially worrisome because Moscow has used artillery to pound Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines, and its missiles to attack the electric grid and other critical infrastructure, and to terrorize civilians in cities. Officials fear that increased missile stocks could mean an especially dark and cold winter for Ukrainian citizens.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is working to find ways to help Ukrainians better take down the missiles and drones fired by Russia at civilian targets in Kyiv and military targets around the country. The Pentagon has provided Patriot air defense systems and cajoled allies to provide S-300 air defense ammunition, both of which have proven effective. It has also provided other air defenses like the Avenger system and the Hawk air defense system.

But Ukraine does not have enough air defense systems to cover the entire country, and must pick the sites it defends. An increased barrage of missiles could overwhelm the country’s air defenses, Ukrainian officials said.

*Ukraine Strikes the Headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea*

The Russian Ministry of Defense said that it shot down seven of 10 cruise missiles that Ukraine fired at the facility in the city of Sevastopol. The area hosts naval operations key to Moscow’s war efforts in Ukraine.

A Ukrainian attack targeting the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea damaged two ships, and triggered a large blaze at a sprawling naval shipyard that plays a critical role in the Russian war effort, according to Russian and Ukrainian officials.

The pre-dawn attack on Wednesday appeared to be the largest on the Russian naval headquarters in the occupied port city of Sevastopol since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly 19 months ago.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement that Ukraine had fired 10 cruise missiles at the facility in the city of Sevastopol at the same time as it targeted a Russian warship on the Black Sea with three maritime drones. Air defense systems shot down seven cruise missiles, and the patrol ship Vasily Bykov destroyed the unmanned drones, the ministry said.

Moscow’s rare acknowledgment of a successful Ukrainian attack in Crimea came only after local residents posted images of explosions and raging fires in the shipyard on social media. Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-backed governor of Crimea, later shared a photo that appeared to show the port side of a large landing ship that sustained damage.

Mr. Razvozhaev said that at least 24 people were injured at the Sevmorzavod shipyard. The initial explosions, and sounds of air defenses, were first reported at about 2 a.m local time.

*Morocco’s Quake Zone Now Fears for Its Livelihood, Too*

The towns and villages of the Atlas Mountains were building a thriving tourist economy. The devastation of the earthquake puts that in doubt.

Before the tourists came to marvel at the valley cradled in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, with its arid red slopes splashed with lush green and its deep-blue lake, the only living to be made was in olive farming, and not much of a living at that.

Then came the modest little hiking lodge and the luxury resort, and the quasi-palace owned by Richard Branson and the inns set up by the people of the Ouirgane Valley, many of whom are members of the Amazigh ethnic group, more commonly known as Berbers.

As more and more tourists discovered over the last few decades that the area was only an hour’s drive from the city of Marrakesh, the residents of villages like Ouirgane got jobs as guides for mule riding and hiking, drivers, waiters, hoteliers, restaurateurs and more.

Many were able to move back home from Moroccan cities like Marrakesh and Essaouira, where they had taken jobs to support families in their villages.

It was a success story that Morocco replicated across the country. By 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic paralyzed the sector, tourism accounted for about 7 percent of the kingdom’s gross domestic product and an estimated half-million jobs, a vital source of growth in a largely agricultural country struggling with drought.

The industry was just starting to recover from the pandemic when the region around Ouirgane was hit by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake, killing more than 2,900 people. Entire villages and towns were destroyed, imperiling the businesses that supported them.

*The C.D.C. Director Explains Why You Should Get the Latest Covid Booster*

We have come a long way since the early days of 2020. Back then, I was the head of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services and working alongside Gov. Roy Cooper to navigate the uncertainty, the challenges and the fear around Covid-19. My extended family was in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. I didn’t realize then that it would be over a year until I saw them in person again. All I wanted was for them to be safe.

Now, as I lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we are in such a different place — no federal mandates, no travel restrictions. With vaccines, testing and treatment, we are once again enjoying fun-filled family vacations and celebrating milestones together.

While we would all love to leave Covid-19 in the rearview mirror for good, the virus is still here. And it will probably always be with us. The good news is that we have the tools to help people avoid serious illness, hospitalization, death and long Covid symptoms. We can minimize the virus’s damage to our lives by using one of our most effective tools in combating the virus: updated Covid-19 vaccines.

Covid-19 vaccines are the best way to give the body the ability to keep the virus from causing significant harm. Extensive studies and real-world experience have shown that they are safe and they work. And most Americans take them. Since the Covid-19 vaccines became widely available in 2021, more than 270 million Americans have received shots, preventing countless deaths and hospitalizations.

Some viruses, however, change over time. This coronavirus is one of them. It finds ways to evade our immune systems by constantly evolving. That’s why our vaccines need to be updated to match the changed virus. Even though many Americans have been exposed to previous versions of the virus because they’ve been infected, that protection decreases over time. This is partly why you can get Covid more than once and why you can still get very sick even if you had it before. That’s why the C.D.C. is recommending an updated Covid-19 vaccine, which is better matched to the currently circulating virus, for everyone age 6 months and older.

Covid-19 continues to pose a health threat, especially to older Americans. From January to July 2023, 88 percent of deaths from Covid-19 were among people who were age 65 years or older. Those with certain underlying health conditions — approximately 70 percent of American adults — and weakened immune systems also are at greater risk than younger, healthier Americans.

What’s more, anyone who gets infected with Covid can develop long Covid, and I don’t want any American to experience that if it can be avoided. People with long Covid can have many ongoing symptoms — like extreme tiredness, shortness of breath and headache — that diminish their quality of life. So far, studies have found that the people who may be more likely than others to get long Covid were unvaccinated against the virus, got severely ill from Covid (though even mild cases can also lead to longer-term symptoms) or had underlying health conditions.

These vaccines were put through extensive clinical trials before they were widely introduced in 2021, and since then, their safety has been intensely monitored, with more than 670 million doses administered in the United States over more than two years. Our understanding of them means that, like the annual flu vaccine, manufacturers can now focus on developing the best match for circulating strains.

*2024’s Field of Nightmares*

In the bottom of the 10th inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, with the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 5-3, Red Sox manager John McNamara sent Bill Buckner — a great hitter dealing with terrible leg problems that made him gimp his way around first base — back out to play the infield instead of putting in Dave Stapleton, Buckner’s defensive replacement. A half-dozen at-bats later, a Mookie Wilson ground ball went through Buckner’s wobbly legs, sending the World Series to Game 7 and a certain 6-year-old Red Sox fan to bed in desperate tears.

Those tears were my first acquaintance with the harsh truth of a baseball aphorism: The ball will always find you. Meaning that if you place a player where he shouldn’t be, or try to disguise a player’s incapacity by shifting him away from the likely action, or give a player you love a chance to stay on the field too long for sentimental reasons, the risk you take will eventually catch up to you, probably at the worst possible moment.

Obviously, this is a column about President Biden’s age. But not only about Biden, because America has been running a lot of Buckner experiments of late. Consider the dreadful-for-liberals denouement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career, where nobody could tell a lifetime-tenured Supreme Court justice who had survived cancer that it was time to step aside and Democrats were left to talk hopefully about her workout regimen as she tried to outlast Donald Trump. And she almost did — but in the end, her legacy was reshaped and even unmade by a decision to stay too long on the political field.

Or consider the Trump presidency itself, in which voters handed a manifestly unfit leader the powers of the presidency and for his entire term, various Republicans tried to manage him and position him and keep him out of trouble, while Dave Stapleton — I mean, Mike Pence — warmed the bench.

This managerial effort met with enough success that by the start of 2020, Trump seemed potentially headed for re-election. But like a series of line drives at an amateur third baseman, the final year of his presidency left him ruthlessly exposed — by the pandemic (whether you think he was too libertarian or too Faucian, he was obviously overmastered), by a progressive cultural revolution (which he opposed but was helpless to impede), by Biden’s presidential campaign and finally by his own vices, which yielded Jan. 6.

Naturally, Republicans are ready to put him on the field again.

These experiences set my expectations for what’s happening with Democrats and Biden now. The increasing anxiety over Biden’s lousy poll numbers, which I discussed in last weekend’s column, has yielded a defensive response from Biden partisans. Their argument is that the president’s decline is overstated, that his administration is going well and he deserves more credit than he’s getting and that, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser suggests, the press is repeating its mistake with Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and making the age issue seem awful when it’s merely, well, “suboptimal.”

*Kim expressed his support for Russia’s war in Ukraine during his meetings with Putin.*

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia welcomed the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, to a space facility in far eastern Russia on Wednesday for a summit that was being scrutinized for indications that Pyongyang will supply armaments the Kremlin needs for its war in Ukraine.

During the day of events, Mr. Kim expressed confidence in Russia’s ability to win the war, following the Kremlin’s lead in casting the conflict as a war against the collective West rather than against Ukraine. Giving a lunchtime toast, Mr. Kim said Russia would “win a great victory in the sacred struggle to punish the band of evil that aspires to hegemony and feeds on expansionist illusions,” according to Russian news agencies.

Mr. Kim also said he had reached a consensus with Mr. Putin “on further strengthening strategic and tactical cooperation, support and solidarity in the struggle to protect the sovereign right of security.” He didn’t go into detail about what that meant.

The two leaders met at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Amur region, first entering group discussions alongside their respective ministers and later moving into a tête-à-tête. The talks lasted roughly two hours in total before the delegations broke for lunch.

Heading into the talks, Russian officials emphasized that Moscow planned to expand its bilateral relationship with North Korea, despite United Nations Security Council sanctions on the nation over its nuclear weapons program and U.S. warnings against any arms transfers. But they did not directly address the possibility of receiving artillery shells from Pyongyang.

*Is Kim Jong-un’s ‘Most Beloved Daughter’ North Korea’s Next Leader?*

Her appearances in state media, most recently in undated photos released on New Year’s Day, have triggered growing speculation about succession plans in the country.

North Korean state media has not revealed much about the cherub-faced young girl who has made several appearances with Kim Jong-un, the country’s leader, in recent weeks.

On New Year’s Day, state media carried undated photos of her and Mr. Kim visiting a nuclear missile facility. Her age and name have not yet been reported; she has simply been referred to as Mr. Kim’s “most beloved daughter.”

That was enough to raise questions about the young girl’s place in the Kim family dynasty and whether she was being groomed as ​Mr. Kim’s successor.

North Korea is not a monarchy. Its top leader is supposedly elected through a ruling Workers’ Party congress. In reality, though, the Kims have run the country like a private family enterprise since its founding at the end of World War II​.

Both Mr. Kim’s grandfather and father ruled until they died. Mr. Kim, who turns 39 next Monday, has already been in power for 11 years and is unlikely to go anywhere any time soon.

Yet the question of who would inherit ​the regime — and its fast-growing nuclear arsenal — has remained the subject of endless fascination among officials and analysts, especially when doubts about Mr. Kim’s health have emerged.​

The speculation of North Korea’s succession plans unfolded as Seoul and Washington said this week that they were discussing how to better cope with North Korea’s growing nuclear threat, employing the full range of American defense capabilities.

The recent guessing game about succession first began after North Korea launched its Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile ​on Nov. 18 ​in one ​of ​the country’s most significant weapons tests.

Days later, ​​the National Intelligence Agency of South Korea identified the young girl as Kim Ju-ae, the baby that retired N.B.A. star Dennis Rodman ​​said he was allowed to hold when he met Mr. Kim in Pyongyang in 2013.

Ju-ae’s public appearance marked the first time ​Pyongyang confirmed that Mr. Kim had a child. Until her debut in state media, ordinary North Koreans had never seen any of Mr. Kim’s children.

South Korean intelligence officials have said that Mr. Kim has three children, with the eldest likely being a son. Ju-ae is his second child, believed to be 9 or 10​, they said.

Outside analysts quickly noted that she was described as “beloved” and had been chosen to represent the next generation of the Kim family. They were also intrigued by Mr. Kim’s decision to introduce her at a missile test site, highlighting the link between the Kim family and the North’s weapons program.

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*In Wake of Morocco Earthquake, Frustration Fuels Solidarity*

Anger is quietly growing against the government’s slow reaction and reluctance to accept foreign aid. But in a country where protest is a risk, perhaps the loudest response is action.

The line of eight vehicles made its way up the dirt road shuttling loaves of bread, folded sweaters, antibiotics and a warm sense of solidarity up to the broken mountain. An hour up the road into the Atlas Mountains from the provincial capital of Taroudant, the caravan came to stop in a darkened village that a group of volunteers had heard was in need of help.

The volunteers had been driving all day from their homes in distant cities. Pulling out flashlights and attaching headlamps, the motley group clambered over mounds of rubble, peaked at long cracks along walls and bent down to assess the spot where neighbors had dug out a 32-year-old man and his six children who had been eating dinner when the earthquake struck.

They had survived, but their home was destroyed, their wooden front door propped up against a jumbled pile of mud bricks and broken wood.

Much of the rescue efforts in these remote areas has been spearheaded by residents, with relief supplemented by volunteers in the days since an earthquake in Morocco — the strongest to hit the area in more than a century — killed at least 2,862 people and injured another 2,562, according to figures released by the Interior Ministry.

As the days roll forward, the initial shock has turned into a quiet anger against the government’s slow response to accept foreign aid and rescue teams. But in a country where criticism of the king can herald serious consequences, perhaps the loudest expression of protest is action, as people across Morocco come to help those in need.

The volunteers in the village of Douar Bousguine, Morocco, next came to a clearing where 15 women sat in a makeshift communal bedroom — woven plastic mats spread over the dirt, an overhead tarp held up by a long stick. Some wore fluffy bedtime robes over their gowns. “We lost everything,” said Khaddouj Boukrim, 46, who greeted the visitors with a warm handshake and a smile despite the crisis. “It’s very cold. We don’t have mattresses.”

A medical student in the group, dressed in navy scrubs, snapped on blue latex gloves and looked through the cardboard box brimming with medical supplies that he had brought. He treated a pregnant woman’s infected finger and a young mother’s swollen bruise. It was clear his team was offering more than medical help.

“We just wanted to help people,” explained Mehdi Ayassi, his friend, who was holding up his cellphone as a makeshift surgical light. Mr. Ayassi, 22, had quit his job at a Marrakesh hotel to aid in the rescue efforts with his friends. He said the earthquake, and the tragedy that has followed, made him realize that he wanted to do something else with his life.

Many regular citizens are filling their vans with supplies and heading deeper into remote places in the distant Taroudant Province, where professional help had yet to arrive.

“I went expecting misery,” said Yves Le Gall, a French owner of a hotel inside the fortifications of the provincial capital, who spent five hours carrying loaves of bread and bananas up to villages in the nearby Atlas Mountains where he normally sends his guests for hikes. “But I found Moroccan solidarity.”

A large group of volunteers from the coastal city of Safi formed over Facebook, and combined forces with Mr. Ayassi and his friends from Marrakesh after a chance encounter at a gas station en route. At 11 p.m., they handed out bags of flour, cheese, sugar, toilet paper and clothes to a crowd gathered on the dark road.

*Bulletproof, Slow and Full of Wine: Kim Jong-un’s Mystery Train*

Heading to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin, the North Korean leader chose to travel by rail, on a train with some unusual features.

When outside intelligence officials seek evidence of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, leaving on a trip abroad — like his journey to Russia this week to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin — they always look for the whereabouts of a train painted a drab green.

One such train was spotted on Monday heading north, near where the borders of North Korea, Russia and China meet. It was moving in the direction of Vladivostok, where Mr. Putin is attending an economic forum. On Tuesday, North Korean state media confirmed that Mr. Kim had indeed left Pyongyang, the North’s capital, for Russia by train. South Korean officials said soon afterward that he had crossed the border.

The green train that officials look for is the special bulletproof one that Mr. Kim — and his father and grandfather, who ruled North Korea before him — have used to visit China, Russia or the former Soviet Union. Family members were said to lack confidence that they could make a safe long-distance trip using one of their country’s decrepit fleet of old Soviet-era passenger jets.

While much about Mr. Kim’s latest journey remains a mystery, here is what we know about the train:

More powerful than a speeding bullet, but much slower
Much of what is known about the train comes from intelligence reports, recollections of officials permitted to travel on board in previous eras and rare state news media footage.

There are believed to be at least 90 high-security carriages at the leader’s disposal, according to a 2009 South Korea news report that relied on classified information. According to the report, written during the era of Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, three trains operate each time the leader travels: an advance security train, the leader’s train and a third carrying additional bodyguards and supplies.

Each of the carriages is bulletproof, making them thousands of pounds heavier than average. That additional weight translates to a slow ride. The trains are estimated to reach a maximum speed of just 37 miles per hour.

In Kim Jong-il’s time, according to the 2009 report, 100 security officers traveled in the advance train, searching stations for bombs and other threats and testing the safety of the track. Additionally, military helicopters and airplanes would fly overhead to provide more security.

Twenty train stations have been built across North Korea just for the leader’s personal use, according to the report.

All the comforts of home
North Korea’s state news media occasionally covered the leaders from inside the train, offering a rare glimpse at some of the many specialized cars.

When Kim Jong-un made his first state visit to China in 2018, he met a senior Chinese official who boarded his train in a carriage lined with thick pink sofas.

In 2015, Kim Jong-un was seen seated at a long white table in what appeared to be a conference room. In a similar video from 2011, his father, Kim Jong-il, is seen holding court in the same compartment. In the older video, a flat-screen television is clearly visible, and in the more recent one, a laptop computer can be seen.

In footage of the elder Mr. Kim’s trips, the leader is seen in an audience car with plush seats; leading a meeting in a dining car; and attending a banquet in a car paneled in dark wood. In that footage, Mr. Kim is seated at a table filled with food as entertainers perform in tuxedos and evening gowns.

The former leader’s office car, including a desk and computer, is preserved as a museum exhibit at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, Kim Jong-il’s mausoleum in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

Lobster, wine and ‘lady conductors’
Kim Jong-il was rumored to have had a fear of flying and preferred to travel on his train, which was outfitted with modern communications technology and a large staff that catered to his whims.

“It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine,” wrote Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian official who traveled with the former leader during a 2011 trip through Russia.

Mr. Kim insisted that live lobster and other fresh delicacies be delivered to the train as it crossed Siberia on trips to Russia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy wines were flown in from Paris, Mr. Pulikovsky recounted in his memoir of the trip, “Orient Express.”

*Who Has Qualified for the Second Republican Presidential Debate?*

At least six candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the second Republican presidential debate on Sept. 27. Former President Donald J. Trump, the clear front-runner in polling, did not attend the first debate. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will take part in the second, in part because he has not signed a pledge to support the eventual nominee.

Who appears to have qualified for the second debate so far
Qualified according to the campaign

Candidate
Qualified for second debate
Attended first debate
Donald J. Trump

Former president 
no

no

Ron DeSantis

Governor of Florida 
Vivek Ramaswamy

Entrepreneur 
Nikki Haley

Former governor of South Carolina 
Mike Pence

Former vice president 
Chris Christie

Former governor of New Jersey 
Tim Scott

Senator from South Carolina 
Doug Burgum

Governor of North Dakota 
no

Asa Hutchinson

Former governor of Arkansas 
no

Will Hurd

Former congressman from Texas 
no

no

Ryan Binkley

Businessman and pastor 
no

no

Larry Elder

Conservative talk radio host 
no

no

Perry Johnson

Businessman 
no

no

Francis Suarez

Mayor of Miami 
dropped out

no

Note: Candidates are sorted according to the FiveThirtyEight Republican primary polling average as of Sept. 11, with ties arranged alphabetically.
To participate, each candidate must first satisfy fund-raising and polling criteria set by the Republican National Committee. Financially, they each need at least 50,000 campaign donors, including at least 200 donors from 20 states or territories. And they need support from at least 3 percent of Republican voters in two national polls, or in one national poll and two polls from a short list of competitive early primary states.

These polls must meet R.N.C. standards, but the committee has generally refused to confirm which surveys count. This created some ambiguity in the weeks leading up to the first debate.

Candidates have until Sept. 25 to meet the requirements. If they do, they will also need to sign a pledge to follow several R.N.C. guidelines, including a promise to support the eventual Republican nominee. Many candidates signed this pledge before participating in the first debate.

Where candidates stand on each requirement for the second debate
Met goal according to a New York Times analysis

Met financial goal according to the campaign

Appears to have qualified

Candidate
Money goal met
Polling goal met
Signed pledge
Donald J. Trump

Former president 
no

Ron DeSantis

Governor of Florida 
Vivek Ramaswamy

Entrepreneur 
Nikki Haley

Former governor of South Carolina 
Mike Pence

Former vice president 
Chris Christie

Former governor of New Jersey 
Tim Scott

Senator from South Carolina 
Doug Burgum

Governor of North Dakota 
no

Asa Hutchinson

Former governor of Arkansas 
no

no

Will Hurd

Former congressman from Texas 
no

no

no

Ryan Binkley

Businessman and pastor 
no

no

Larry Elder

Conservative talk radio host 
no

no

Perry Johnson

Businessman 
no

no

Francis Suarez

Mayor of Miami 
dropped out

Note: Candidates are sorted according to the FiveThirtyEight Republican primary polling average as of Sept. 11, with ties arranged alphabetically.
To determine whether candidates had met the donor requirements for debate qualification, The New York Times reached out to campaigns directly, because the latest financial disclosures, filed in July, include data going up to only June 30. More recent financial reports will not be available for independent verification until after the debate.

Perry Johnson, a businessman who was disqualified from appearing on the primary ballot for the 2022 Michigan governor’s race, did not respond to requests for comment. He did, however, announce in August that more than 50,000 people had donated to his campaign. Mr. Trump is the only candidate whose filings from July show he has already surpassed the donor requirements to attend the second debate.

To determine whether candidates have met the polling thresholds, The Times analyzed Republican primary polls collected by FiveThirtyEight. The R.N.C. has not shared a full list of qualifying polls, so The Times included in its analysis surveys that appear to have met the R.N.C. criteria. Polling will ultimately be verified by the R.N.C., which is expected to announce the lineup within days of the second debate.

*What’s Next for Israel’s Judicial Overhaul?*

Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday began reviewing a contentious law that diminishes the court’s own role. A move to overturn the bill could set off a constitutional crisis.

Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday began start hearing an appeal over a contentious law passed in July that diminishes the court’s own role. If the judges eventually decide to overturn the legislation, the stage would be set for a constitutional crisis and even more social turmoil in a country that has been wracked by unrest for months.

Lawmakers in July approved the first step in a plan by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrict the influence of the Supreme Court, defying the opposition movements that had organized the months of protests.

Divisions over the government plan have led to what may be Israel’s gravest domestic political crisis since its founding 75 years ago.

The stakes could hardly be higher for Mr. Netanyahu, and for Israel. The government’s determination to press ahead with the judicial overhaul has disrupted Israel’s economy, strained Israel’s relations with the Biden administration, and led more than a thousand military reservists, a core part of Israel’s armed forces, to refuse to volunteer for duty.

Israel’s Judicial
Overhaul
What to Know
Supreme Court Weighs Law
What’s at Stake?
A Fractured Nation
What’s Next for Israel’s Judicial Overhaul?
Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday began reviewing a contentious law that diminishes the court’s own role. A move to overturn the bill could set off a constitutional crisis.

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Security forces in front of protesters with Israeli flags.
Security forces stood guard outside the Israeli Parliament in Jerusalem in July as protests escalated.Credit…Hazem Bader/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Isabel KershnerPatrick Kingsley
By Isabel Kershner and Patrick Kingsley
Reporting from Jerusalem

Sept. 12, 2023, 2:22 a.m. ET
Leer en español
Sign up for The Interpreter newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Original analysis on the week’s biggest global stories, from columnist Amanda Taub. Get it in your inbox.
Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday began start hearing an appeal over a contentious law passed in July that diminishes the court’s own role. If the judges eventually decide to overturn the legislation, the stage would be set for a constitutional crisis and even more social turmoil in a country that has been wracked by unrest for months.

Lawmakers in July approved the first step in a plan by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrict the influence of the Supreme Court, defying the opposition movements that had organized the months of protests.

Divisions over the government plan have led to what may be Israel’s gravest domestic political crisis since its founding 75 years ago.

The stakes could hardly be higher for Mr. Netanyahu, and for Israel. The government’s determination to press ahead with the judicial overhaul has disrupted Israel’s economy, strained Israel’s relations with the Biden administration, and led more than a thousand military reservists, a core part of Israel’s armed forces, to refuse to volunteer for duty.

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Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, has warned that the schism could lead to civil war. Mr. Netanyahu is caught between stabilizing his coalition, which includes far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties that have their own reasons for wanting to restrict the powers of the Supreme Court, and appeasing the fury of the more-liberal Israelis who oppose giving the government more control over the judiciary.

What’s at stake?
The dispute is part of a wider ideological and cultural standoff between Mr. Netanyahu’s government and its supporters, who want to make Israel into a more religious and nationalist state, and their opponents, who hold a more secular and pluralist vision of the country.

The governing coalition says the court has too much leeway to intervene in political decisions and that it undermines Israeli democracy by giving unelected judges too much power over elected lawmakers.

The coalition says the court has too often acted against right-wing interests — for instance by preventing some construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank or striking down certain privileges granted to ultra-Orthodox Jews, like exemption from military service.

Opponents fear that the measure will make the court much less able to prevent government overreach. They say that the government, unbound by independent courts, may find it easier to end the prosecution of Mr. Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges.

In particular, some warn that the government would have more freedom to replace the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, who oversees Mr. Netanyahu’s prosecution in an ongoing corruption case. Mr. Netanyahu has denied any plan to disrupt his trial.

Critics also fear that the changes might allow the government — the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israeli history — to restrict civil liberties or undermine secular aspects of Israeli society.

What will the Supreme Court be considering?
As part of its effort to to limit the Supreme Court’s influence, the government seeks to stop its judges from using the concept of “reasonableness” to countermand decisions by lawmakers and ministers.

The bill passed in July would strip the court of the right to use that standard when assessing decisions by government ministers, and the justices on Tuesday will start hearing an appeal filed by groups opposing the legislation.

Reasonableness is a legal standard used by many judicial systems, including Australia, Britain and Canada. A decision is deemed unreasonable if a court rules that it was made without considering all relevant factors or without giving relevant weight to each factor, or by giving irrelevant factors too much weight.

The government and its backers say that reasonableness is too vague a concept, that it was never codified in Israeli law, and that judges apply it in subjective ways. The Supreme Court angered the government this year when some of its judges used the tool to bar Aryeh Deri, a veteran ultra-Orthodox politician, from serving in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet. They said it was unreasonable to appoint Mr. Deri because he had recently been convicted of tax fraud.

The bill was an amendment to a Basic Law — one of the body of laws that have quasi-constitutional status in Israel — and Israeli analysts say that the Supreme Court has so far never intervened in, or struck down, a Basic Law. The high court has discussed such laws in the past but never ruled on them.

The judicial review process is expected to take months. The Supreme Court could also issue a stay on the law, pausing it from taking effect as it considers the case, but so far it has chosen not to do so.

How have the protests played out?
Powerful nonparliamentary groups — like military reservists, technology leaders, academicians, senior doctors and trade union leaders — have been trying to put pressure on the government to back down on its judicial overhaul plans. Hundreds of high-tech industry leaders said they are considering moving their businesses abroad or have already started the process.

Since the bill was passed, more than 1,000 reservists from prestigious units of the military have suspended their volunteer duty, according to reservist alliances, and doctors held a short strike.

Protesters are still gathering on Saturday nights for major demonstrations in Tel Aviv.

What’s next for the government’s plans?
Israel’s Parliament, called the Knesset, adjourned for its summer recess at the end of July and does not reconvene until October. But lawmakers from Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition have signaled that they intend to push forward with the next part of the process in the fall. They want to give the government greater control over the committee that selects new judges.

*Global Health’s Dirty Secret: Rich Countries Get Good Medicine, and the Poor Sometimes Get Poison*

In April, a pregnant woman died at a hospital in Kandy, Sri Lanka, of complications blamed on an anesthetic manufactured in India. A few months earlier, Indian-made cough syrups were linked to the deaths of children in Gambia and Uzbekistan. Substandard medicines also were found this year in the Marshall Islands and Micronesia before they could do any harm.

These incidents in far-flung corners of the world reveal the contours of a global crisis of unsafe drugs that inordinately affects poor countries. Over the past two decades, India emerged as the pharmacy of the developing world, the leading manufacturer of generic drugs and medicines, producing more than 20 percent of the world’s supply. This has helped to make a range of medicines available to poor patients around the world who previously had to do without.

Today, however, India stands accused of distributing death, as its regulators fail to prevent the manufacture and export of substandard medicines. But this isn’t entirely a made-in-India problem. There is a dirty secret in global health: Rich countries get quality medicines; the poor sometimes get poison.

The problem lies mainly in regulatory inequities between rich and poor nations. Developed countries have well-funded regulators keeping an eye on the safety and quality of drugs. India’s output, however, is overseen by its Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, an opaque agency that has long faced allegations of mismanagement and corruption. Many developing nations don’t have the resources to properly vet imported medicines.

The World Health Organization estimated in 2017 that one-tenth of medicines sold in low- and middle-income countries were thought to be substandard or falsified. Independent modeling studies based on those numbers indicate that this could result in as many as 285,000 children dying every year from malaria and pneumonia. The W.H.O. has not released more recent numbers, and there is limited data on exactly how much of this comes from India.

The global drug supply system is a vast and complex network. As of 2021, India manufactured 62 percent of the raw materials for drugs, known as active pharmaceutical ingredients. China manufactures 23 percent, and the United States and Europe make most of the remainder. These ingredients get shipped all over the world and are turned into drugs that have to be vetted by national regulators with varying levels of oversight and quality standards. The resulting medicines and vaccines enter intricate supply chains and end up being administered to pregnant women in Sri Lanka and coughing children in Gambia.

The recent deaths bring with them a strong sense of déjà vu. As H.I.V. spread in the 1990s, new antiretroviral treatments developed in the United States were locked in patent monopolies, which kept prices high and delayed the introduction of affordable generics. The monopolies prevented these lifesaving treatments from getting to patients in Africa — where the H.I.V. crisis was snowballing — for nearly a decade. In 2003 alone, an estimated three million people in sub-Saharan Africa were newly infected, and 2.2 million died of AIDS. By 2004, the region — then home to around 10 percent of the world’s population — had close to two-thirds of people living with H.I.V., some 25 million.

This tragedy led, however, to one of the greatest and least celebrated successes in global health.

By 2001, the Indian drugmaker Cipla had begun making an antiretroviral treatment that cost less than $1 a day. Patents on pharmaceutical products were not recognized under Indian law at the time, allowing India’s generic pharmaceutical industry to reverse-engineer H.I.V. drugs. It was a watershed moment. By 2002, the average annual cost of antiretrovirals plummeted from as much as $15,000 per patient in the 1990s to as little as $300 — and India was on its way to becoming the pharmacy of the world.

As Indian-made drugs began flowing across the globe, the W.H.O. in 2001 set up a groundbreaking program to monitor safety and quality, called the Prequalification of Medicines Program, or P.Q.P., which set global standards for H.I.V. medicines made by different nations. A year later, it was expanded to include medicines used to treat tuberculosis and malaria. With that, there was new hope in the fight against three of the biggest plagues of our time. The program is one of those unsung policies that keep the global health structure ticking.

The P.Q.P. effectively became a de facto drug approval authority for developing countries, and today it ensures the safety of over 1,700 medical products — including medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and a wide range of other medical and disease-control equipment. Yet it does not cover all essential medicines, a regularly updated W.H.O. list of hundreds of drugs ranging from antibiotics to opioids and anesthetics that are considered vital for any basic health care system.

The program should be expanded to cover all of these medicines. However, it relies largely on voluntary and potentially unsteady philanthropic funding from organizations like the Gates Foundation. Expanding it would surely require more funding, which should be borne by W.H.O. member states.

American and European regulators can and do conduct their own on-site inspections of foreign facilities churning out essential medicines. India has the most Food and Drug Administration-approved plants outside the United States. But many developing nations remain vulnerable.

The recent deaths have drawn new attention to drug safety. The African Union is setting up its own drug regulatory agency. Last month a Gambian government task force recommended suing the Indian government over deadly cough syrup. Yet the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India last month pushed a bill through Parliament that features lighter punishments for manufacturing substandard medicines, highlighting why individual nations cannot be relied on to address the problem.

India needs to clean up its act for its own good: Its growth into a powerhouse of generic drug production has polluted its rivers with antibiotic waste, spawned dangerous superbugs and made it a global hot spot for drug-resistant tuberculosis. For the rest of the world, the main benefit of India becoming the pharmacy of the poor was to break Big Pharma’s control of lifesaving medicines. More cases involving deadly Indian-made medicines could undo that positive achievement by causing irreparable harm to the global reputation of cheap generics.

Our response to the Covid pandemic was far from perfect, but it showed that the world can come together during an emergency, scaling up vaccine production and vaccination rates. W.H.O. member states are now discussing a new pandemic treaty, which would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

For much of the pandemic the United States, the European Union, Britain and other developed nations presented a unified stand to protect the patent monopolies of their Covid vaccine manufacturers. Similar urgency and solidarity must be shown toward the scourge of substandard medicines.

Equal access to quality health care — regardless of wealth, nationality or race — is a global civil rights issue. Until that right is ensured, millions will remain vulnerable to the next pandemic.

*As Covid-19 Cases Tick Higher, Conspiracy Theorists Stoke New Fears*

A late-summer rise in Covid-19 infections is bringing with it a wave of conspiracy theories.

As Covid-19 cases have climbed as part of a late-summer uptick, right-wing influencers and conspiracy theorists have responded by stoking fears about mass lockdowns and spreading unsubstantiated new ideas about Covid-19’s links to world events.

“Do they want Covid measures back to put us on war footing in preparation for the war with Russia?” Jack Posobiec, a right-wing personality, said to more than 150,000 followers on his Telegram channel.

There is little evidence that the current wave of Covid-19 cases will prompt the kinds of extreme countermeasures seen during the worst of the pandemic. The share of Covid-19 cases nationwide peaked at 14.1 percent in August — in line with most surges since the pandemic began — but hospitalizations were at near historic lows.

Officials have instead responded with targeted efforts, noting that the country was benefiting from wider immunity, better treatments for the sick and more accessible tests that can help prevent surges from becoming full-blown crises.

But to conspiracy theorists and right-wing influencers online, each uptick is an opportunity to sow fear and rile up their supporters, according to disinformation experts. The use of “plandemic” and “scamdemic” — two terms describing Covid-19 as a ruse — rose sharply in August on right-wing websites, according to data from Pyrra, a company that monitors threats and misinformation on alternative social networks.

“I would almost call it an obsession for the Covid denier, anti-vax community,” said Welton Chang, the co-founder and chief executive of Pyrra. “They just make mountains out of molehills for every little thing.”

Misinformation about Covid-19 is as old as the virus itself. Much of it is about vaccines: One-third of Americans said they believed that the Covid-19 vaccines caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people, according to a survey published in August by the KFF, a nonprofit research group. While there is no link between Covid-19 vaccines and sudden deaths, conspiracy theorists have often circulated the idea as celebrities and athletes fall ill from unrelated causes.

In many right-wing spaces online, users still claim without evidence that the virus is a planned bioweapon, that vaccines contain microchips or that unproven medicines offer simple cures for the virus’s symptoms.

As Covid-19 becomes recurring like the flu, disinformation experts warned that the false and misleading ideas swirling around the pandemic will continue evolving.

The latest misleading claims sprung after comments by the Biden administration in late August, when it issued warnings of a fall wave of Covid-19 infections. Health officials recommended Americans get vaccinated against new subvariants using forthcoming booster doses.

The reaction was swift.

“RED ALERT!” ran one headline this week on Infowars, the conspiratorial website run by Alex Jones, the right-wing fabulist. “White House Announces Plan to Reimplement Covid Tyranny.”

The rise in cases has also activated conservative politicians, who have found that criticizing lockdowns and mask mandates is a politically potent message for Republican voters.

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*After Prigozhin’s Death, a High-Stakes Scramble for His Empire*

A shadowy fight is playing out on three continents for control of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sprawling interests as head of the Wagner mercenary group. The biggest prize: his lucrative operations in Africa.

African leaders allied with Russia had grown used to dealing with Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the swaggering, profane mercenary leader who traveled the continent by private jet, offering to prop up shaky regimes with guns and propaganda in return for gold and diamonds.

But the Russian delegation that toured three African countries last week was led by a very different figure, the starchy deputy defense minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov. Dressed in a khaki uniform and a “telnyashka” — the horizontally-striped undergarment of Russian armed forces — he signaled conformity and restraint, giving assurances wrapped in polite language.

“We will do our best to help you,” he said at a news conference in Burkina Faso.

The contrast with the flamboyant Mr. Prigozhin could not have been sharper, and it aligned with the message the Kremlin was delivering: After Mr. Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash last month, Russia’s operations in Africa were coming under new management.

It was a glimpse of a shadowy battle now playing out on three continents: the fight for the lucrative paramilitary and propaganda empire that enriched Mr. Prigozhin and served Russia’s military and diplomatic ambitions — until the Wagner leader staged a failed mutiny against the Kremlin in June.

Interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials in Washington, Europe, Africa and Russia — as well as four Russians who worked for Mr. Prigozhin — portray a tug of war over his assets among major players in Russia’s power structure, including two different intelligence agencies. Many of those interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity, to discuss sensitive diplomatic and intelligence issues.

The fight is complicated, these people said, by the lingering allegiance to Mr. Prigozhin in his private army, where some are bridling at being subsumed within Russia’s defense ministry and instead backing a transfer of power to Mr. Prigozhin’s son.

“Wagner is not just about the money — it’s a kind of religion,” said Maksim Shugalei, a political consultant for Mr. Prigozhin, adding that he was proud to be part of the mercenary force. “It’s unlikely that this structure will totally disappear. For me, this is impossible.”

*Elon Musk Acknowledges Withholding Satellite Service to Thwart Ukrainian Attack*

The Starlink satellite internet service, which is operated by Mr. Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, has been a digital lifeline for soldiers and civilians in Ukraine.

Elon Musk has acknowledged that he denied satellite internet service in order to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet last year, prompting an angry response from a Ukrainian official.

The Starlink satellite internet service, which is operated by Mr. Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, has been a digital lifeline in Ukraine since the early days of the war for both civilians and soldiers in areas where digital infrastructure has been wiped out.

On Thursday, CNN reported that an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography, “Elon Musk” said the billionaire had ordered the deactivation of Starlink satellite service near the coast of Crimea last September to thwart the Ukrainian attack. The excerpt said that Mr. Musk had conversations with a Russian official that led him to worry that an attack on Crimea could spiral into a nuclear conflict.

Later on Thursday, Mr. Musk responded on his social media platform to say that he hadn’t disabled the service but had rather refused to comply with an emergency request from Ukrainian officials to enable Starlink connections to Sevastopol on the occupied Crimean peninsula. That was in effect an acknowledgment that he had made the decision to prevent a Ukrainian attack.

“The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

That drew an angry response from Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Musk’s “interference,” he said, had allowed Russia’s naval fleet to continue firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.

“As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego,” he wrote on X.

Within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Musk sent Starlink terminals to the country in response to public pleas from Ukrainian officials. Throughout the war, the connectivity provided by Starlink has been pivotal for Ukraine to coordinate drone strikes and gather intelligence.

The more than 42,000 Starlink terminals are also in use by hospitals, businesses and aid organizations across Ukraine.

*Today’s Top News: Biden’s Ambitions at the G20, and More*

Exclusively from New York Times Audio, our new app.

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.

*Hurricane Lee Is Now a Category 5 Storm, but Its Eventual Path Is Unclear*

The Atlantic hurricane will cause rip currents in the Caribbean and on the East Coast of the U.S. starting Friday. Experts, however, don’t know for sure where the storm is going.

Hurricane Lee has grabbed the attention of forecasters and social media this week as the rapidly intensifying storm moves west across the open waters of the Atlantic.

It is easy to look at a map showing a major hurricane with a forecast path pointed directly at the United States and think the East Coast is in for it. But as of Thursday night, that scenario was not the most probable outcome. Even if it was, Lee wouldn’t arrive until late next week, which is beyond the official forecast from the experts at the National Hurricane Center.

Here’s what we know about the hurricane:

What is Lee’s current location and path?
As of 5 a.m. Friday, Hurricane Lee was about 630 miles east of the northern Leeward Islands, which are in the northeastern Caribbean, and the storm was moving west-northwest at 14 miles per hour. Its maximum sustained winds of 165 m.p.h. make it a Category 5 storm, the first of this Atlantic hurricane season.

It currently does not threaten any land, and there are no coastal watches or warnings in effect, but dangerous surf conditions generated by the storm are expected to affect parts of the Caribbean on Friday and most of the U.S. East Coast starting Sunday, according to the Hurricane Center.

Meteorologists are fairly confident that Lee will stay north of the Caribbean. Several forecast models suggest the storm will veer north, but it remains unclear if and when that would happen — and whether it turns before threatening the United States. In a published forecast discussion, the Hurricane Center said, “It is way too soon to know what level of impacts, if any, Lee might have along the U.S. East Coast, Atlantic Canada, or Bermuda late next week, particularly since the hurricane is expected to slow down considerably over the southwestern Atlantic.”

How big is this storm going to get?
Lee intensified rapidly on Thursday, with its wind speeds doubling from 80 to 160 m.p.h. It is expected to remain a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher, with wind speeds of at least 111 m.p.h.) through early next week, according to the Hurricane Center.

What are the chances it will hit the U.S. East Coast?
There is some chance, but it is currently not the likely outcome. It might also hit Canada or stay farther east and move across Bermuda.

When will we know more?
Obviously, the closer we get to next week the better the forecasts will be. But by this weekend, forecasters should be getting a better idea of the forecast path for Lee.

Track Extreme Weather Risks
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Tell me what the models show. (Also, what’s a spaghetti model?)
One version of a model last weekend suggested that the East Coast could get hit, a possibility that has lingered in the minds of some forecasters and amateur weather watchers, in part because of widespread social media hype.

But when you look at all the versions of the model, there is not an overwhelming consensus on where the center of the hurricane will go after this weekend, with some outliers close to the East Coast.

*What $50 Million Can Buy: Inside the Sleek New White House Situation Room*

The ultrasecure facility, which was last upgraded in 2006, is returning to use after officials closed it for a year to modernize it in an era of high-tech sparring with China and Russia.

The White House Situation Room, the ultrasecure facility known to West Wing insiders simply as “the whizzer,” has undergone a $50 million renovation, with sophisticated communications equipment and technology to prevent American adversaries from listening in.

To walk into the heart of the refurbished Situation Room, which got its nickname from the acronym WHSR, feels a bit like entering the set of a Hollywood thriller. In the windowless basement, one floor down from the Oval Office, the president’s oversize swivel chair faces three huge screens that he can consult while overseeing covert operations around the world.

“This was enhanced to the highest standard,” said Marc Gustafson, the senior director for the White House Situation Room, who oversaw the renovation. “You constantly enhance to keep up with foreign adversaries.”

During a tour for several journalists on Thursday, a panel built into one wall glowed bright green, with the word “UNCLASSIFIED” and the phrase “MICS OFF,” indicating that the room was not being monitored at that moment. A world clock listed the current times for cities including Tehran and Kyiv. It also listed POTUS, so aides can always know the time wherever the president may be.

The walls, built from sustainably harvested wood, hide what officials say are the most sophisticated technologies in the American arsenal for keeping the room secure. Last upgraded in 2006, the room and the surrounding offices have been closed for a year while contractors gutted the old facility and carried out a complete overhaul.

It was the intelligence arms race that led the president to approve the upgrade. Computer monitors and servers that seemed modern in 2006 — the year before the iPhone was announced — had become old and creaky. The signal-blocking technology was in need of modernizing in the era of high-tech sparring with China and Russia. Even the furniture had become worn from seven-day-a-week use.

(When President Barack Obama wanted to monitor the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, Mr. Gustafson said, the main conference room did not have the technology to stream the Defense Department feed, forcing the president and his top aides to watch in a cramped room next door. That has been fixed, he said.)

Movies and spy novels describe the Situation Room as a single place where presidents meet with their aides to make top-secret decisions in a crisis. In fact, it is a warren of rooms that represents what White House officials describe as the most technologically secure spaces in the country.

What had become over the years a slightly grungy workplace now gleams — and smells a bit like a new car, with leather chairs in every room. The reception room feels like entering the lobby of a luxury hotel, with the White House seal etched into a marble slab sourced from a Virginia quarry. Down the hall from the staff entrance is the V.I.P. door, used only by the president and vice president.

“It’s a marriage of the traditional and the modern,” Mr. Gustafson said proudly.

The main conference room is known as the J.F.K. room, in honor of the former president. It was President John F. Kennedy’s staff who decided to build a secure facility under the West Wing after the Cuban missile crisis. Until then, the president did not have a central, secure location for reviewing and discussing classified information.

The small conference room where Mr. Obama watched the bin Laden raid has been torn down. The walls, furniture, lighting and other equipment were saved and will be sent to the Obama Presidential Center. In its place are two small, secure “breakout” rooms for people like the secretary of state, attorney general or secretary of defense to work privately when they come for meetings with the president.

Two other small conference rooms are outfitted much like the J.F.K. room, with similar screens, bug-busting technology and a panel showing those in attendance the classification level of whatever is being discussed. All the rooms have LEDs in the ceiling that can change colors; on Thursday, one of the small conference rooms was bathed in blue light.

Around the corner is a closet just for the official seals, which have magnets so they can be swapped out. There’s one for the president, another for the vice president, and several generic “Office of the President” seals for use when someone like the national security adviser presides in the room.

Down another hall is the nerve center of the Situation Room: the Watch Floor. The largest of rooms, it is outfitted with three rows of desks facing a massive wall of flat screens. During the tour, the screens on the wall and the monitors at the desks were all blank or only showing the seal of the Executive Office of the President.

In normal times, Mr. Gustafson said, the screens would be filled with data, classified and not — video streams, social media, maps of the world and intelligence reports from the C.I.A., the Defense Department and elsewhere in the government. Usually, one TV rotates between major news networks.

At the desks sit 17 officials from agencies around the government; every military branch and spy agency is represented, along with State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and a few others. Day shifts begin at 5 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., when the night crew rotates in.

Those are the people responsible for alerting the president and his top aides to any possible crisis. If North Korea fires a rocket in the middle of the night, it is the Watch Floor that wakes someone up — usually the president’s national security adviser. Mr. Gustafson, who also is wakened, said his sleep got interrupted frequently.

The Watch Floor is also the place that manages the secure calls that flow into and out of the White House. When the president wants to call a world leader, often with little notice, a crew of up to a dozen people from the Watch Floor springs into action, setting up the secure video connections and making sure that both sides of the conversation are in sync.

Mr. Gustafson and his deputy have two offices with glass walls at the back of the Watch Floor, overseeing the operation. In true Hollywood style, though, the glass turns opaque at the flip of a switch — the better to have a discussion without peeping eyes.

During the past year, Mr. Biden and his top aides have been forced into using other secure rooms in the West Wing and facilities in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Mr. Biden held his first meeting in the new space on Tuesday, two days before leaving for a foreign trip to India and Vietnam.

Much of the senior staff weighed in on the design of the facility, which retains the dark paneling of the previous one but with sleeker lines and high-tech lighting that make it feel more modern. It was a consensus design, Mr. Gustafson said, without confirming whether Mr. Biden was consulted directly.

In the future, Mr. Gustafson said, a complete, yearlong renovation should not be necessary. The new walls, ceilings and floors are modular and designed to be taken out to allow access to the technology underneath.

“We should not have to do another gut renovation,” he said.

*Antisemitic Comments by Palestinian Leader Cause Uproar*

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said in August that European Jews were persecuted for what he said were their predatory lending practices, not their religion.

Video has emerged of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, recently asserting that European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he said were their predatory lending practices, rather than their religion.

Mr. Abbas’s false claim drew swift condemnation from Israeli and European officials. It also fueled accusations that Mr. Abbas — an architect of interim peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s — is not genuinely committed to resolving the ongoing conflict.

In a speech late last month, Mr. Abbas said: “They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews.”

“No,” Mr. Abbas added. Jews were persecuted, he continued, because of “their social role, which had to do with usury, money, and so on.”

Mr. Abbas also repeated a widely discredited theory that European, or Ashkenazi, Jews have no ancient roots in the Middle East. Instead, Mr. Abbas claimed that European Jews were the descendants of a nomadic Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism during the medieval period, and therefore were not victims of antisemitism.

“When we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism — the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites,” Mr. Abbas said.

Mr. Abbas’s comments were broadcast live on Palestinian television two weeks ago, in a speech to members of his secular political party, Fatah,

The remarks were brought to a wider audience on Wednesday, when the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based monitoring group that mainly translates extremist comments by Arab and Iranian leaders, distributed a subtitled version of Mr. Abbas’s speech.

Mr. Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that has administered parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the 1990s, when the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships signed interim peace accords.

His comments illustrated why he has developed a checkered reputation among Israeli and Western partners. Mr. Abbas was one of the chief negotiators in the peace process, and often is credited with helping to reduce tensions following a wave of violence in the 2000s. At times, he has also described the Holocaust as a crime against humanity.

But Mr. Abbas also has a long history of antisemitic remarks. He made similar comments in 2018 about usury and Ashkenazi Jews, and last year he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

In 1984 he published a book in which he condemned the Holocaust but also cited historians who disputed the widely accepted death toll of as many as six million Jews.

“This is the true face of Palestinian ‘leadership,’” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, wrote on social media in response to Mr. Abbas’s latest speech.

“It is no wonder that mere hours ago a Palestinian teenage terrorist hacked innocent Israelis with a meat cleaver,” Mr. Erdan added, referring to an attack on Wednesday in the Old City of Jerusalem that wounded at least two people.

The European Union said in a statement that Mr. Abbas’s “historical distortions are inflammatory, deeply offensive, can only serve to exacerbate tensions in the region and serve no-one’s interests.”

The statement added: “They play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated for.”

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