TIDBITS from ELDERUPDATES.COM, NUMBER 81, FEBRUARY 19, 2024

TIDBITS from ELDERUPDATES.COM

NO. 81, FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Just some of the news that's fit to print

"A Republic, if you can keep it."

TRUMP TRIAL STARTS ON 3-25-24, TRUMP TRIES TO BLAME BIDEN FOR “LOSING UKRAINE”; CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSING TORNADOES?; TRUMP ENCOURAGES RUSSIA TO INVADE NATO MEMBERS NOT PAYING THEIR “BILLS”; GEORGIA DISTRICT ATTORNEY WILLIS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE; POLISH LEADER CHASTISES CONGRESS; RUSSIA TRYING TO PUT NUCLEAR WEAPON IN SPACE; OLDER VOTERS NOT CONCERNED ABOUT CANDIDATES’ AGE; BIDEN PRESSURING ISRAEL TO MINIMIZE CIVILIAN CASUALTIES; NEW POLISH LEADER SEEKS TO END ABORTION RESTRICTIONS; MORE...

Introductory apology: Your blogger apologizes for gaps, formatting problems and sometimes even duplication of articles, but hopes readers will forgive him this trespass and enjoy the blog.

BLOGGER’S NOTES AND COMMENTS

TRUMP trial in hush-money case set for March 25, 2024 after New York judge rejects Trump’s bid to throw out criminal charges against him stemming from a hush-money deal with porn star Stormy Daniels. (NYT)

UKRAINE withdraws troops (due to failure of U.S. to provide aid) and also launches missile strike against Russian city of Belgorod, killing 5.

TELEVISION news reported Chief Justice Roberts saying in the hearing regarding Colorado’s removal of Trump from the ballot – as best your blogger can remember – “what will prevent blue states from removing Republicans and red states from removing Democrats – that will leave just a small number of states to decide the election”. Roberts did not seem to realize that with the Electoral College today a small number of voters in a small number of states decide the election. Nevertheless, your blogger believes it is fruitless to seek termination of the Electoral College for the simple reason the smaller states will oppose losing their disproportionate clout.

HOUSE Republicans refuse to consider aid to Ukraine, the buffer between Russia and NATO member Poland, because it doesn’t contain border reforms. Senate negotiates border reforms and Trump states – without seeing it first – the reforms are a bad deal. Senate Republicans (Trumpublicans), refuse to even vote for the bill. House Speaker then calls bill “dead on arrival” as it does not contain border reforms. Senate then passes bill without border reforms. House Speaker declines to even bring it to the floor for a vote. (And thus, we see how the mighty U.S. has fallen.)

POLISH Prime Minister Donald Tusk slammed U.S. Republicans for blocking a bill containing billions in military assistance for Ukraine. “Dear Republican Senators of America. Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today,” Tusk wrote Thursday morning on X. “Shame on you.” (Politico)

FINLAND’S former prime minister, Alexander Stubb, completed a surprise political comeback on Sunday by winning a closely fought runoff to become the Nordic state’s president after seven years in the political wilderness. The result will have been closely watched in European capitals and beyond given Finland’s strategically important location along the EU and NATO’s eastern border with an increasingly aggressive Russia. The country’s president leads its foreign policy alongside the government, and serves as Finland’s commander-in-chief. (Politico)

ZELENSKYY’S new top commander has a reputation as a ‘butcher’ who [unnecessarily] puts his men in danger to reach his military goals...highlighted by Syrskyi overseeing last year's dogged nine-month defense of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian troops suffered high casualties against relentless "meat waves" of Russian attackers before having to abandon the eastern city. That earned him the gruesome nickname of "Butcher."... [One] Ukrainian soldier tweeted a message in a group chat of veterans of the Bakhmut fight: "We're all fucked." Another “His relentless pursuit of tactical gains constantly depletes our valuable human resources, resulting in tactical advances such as capturing tree lines or small villages, with no operational goals in mind.” (Politico)

ELON Musk's satellite internet service Starlink is in use by the Russian army, Ukrainian military intelligence said on Sunday. (Politico)

WHILE unable to pass the border reform bill Trumpublicans have voted to impeach Homeland Security chief Mayorkas.

FORMER Congressman Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) associate Joel Greenberg is cooperating with the House Ethics Committee probe into whether the member had sex with an underage girl while serving as an elected official. (TheHill.com)

AFTER your blogger received an apparently legitimate text last month from Citibank, he did as requested and called the number -- 877-255-7938 to bring his account current and, as he usually does, paying off the balance WRONG! That this was just another sophisticated scam only appeared to your blogger when 2 months later he received an identical text message. This time, your blogger called Citibank which verified the account had not been paid since 12-28. Then, at the suggestion of the bank employee, your blogger googled the phone number only to find as early as 2017 it had been reported as a scam -- more than 6 years ago.

ALTHOUGH it may be true that sometimes the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, 850 law enforcement officers in Kansas City were unable to stop 3 shooters from injuring at least 20 people at a Super Bowl winner’s celebration parade.

NOT meaning to be glib, but what is the standard to be applied when homeless people make streets dangerous and interfere with public safety? Or make going to a particular business undesirable at no fault of the business owner?

RECENT L.A. Times article quoted in this blog reports a school closing because homeless placed in apartments/rooms in the same building through the Inside Safe program made schooling at the now noisy, smelly (urine and feces) and generally uncomfortable for students and staff.

Is there a point at which society must answer the question "are we being scammed by those homeless -- limited though the number may be -- who abuse our goodwill and efforts to improve their lives?" "What is to be done when the solution creates only creates different problems?" Somehow, the answer that City Hall is "monitoring" the problem sites is of scant comfort to your blogger, and even less so to those bearing the burden of having their businesses and schools near an Inside Safe facility? Safe for who?

One need not be a social troglodyte to say "enough is enough". If people can't live with a modicum of concern for the concerns of others, perhaps jail is the only place to house them. Or will we still be fighting the same battles over the rights of the homeless over the rights of others in 20 or 30 years?

Even if "housing is a right" "rights come with responsibilities".

SOME believe Chief Justice Roberts may be attempting a “grand bargain” under which Trump would be put on ballot in Colorado but also lose his immunity case before the Supreme Court.

SECRETARY of Defense Lloyd Austin hospitalized again, but this time lets everyone know and temporarily appoints his assistant to act. (WP)

TOM Suozzi’s victory in yesterday’s special House election on Long Island brings Democrats one seat closer to recapturing the majority they lost two years ago. But in the run-up to Election Day, party leaders were leery about making too much of the closely watched contest—win or lose.

This was as national as a contest for a single House seat gets. Democrats poured millions of dollars into the compressed campaign brought about by the expulsion in December of Representative George Santos...The election became a test case for the political salience of the GOP’s attacks on President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration and the influx of migrants over the southern border. Suozzi’s opponent, Mazi Pilip, used nearly all her campaign ads to tie him to Biden’s border policies. Suozzi, meanwhile, took a firmer stance on the border than many Democrats and assailed Mazi for opposing the bipartisan deal that Senate Republicans killed last week. (RealClearPolitics)

SPECIAL counsel Jack Smith quickly voiced opposition to former President Trump’s request for the Supreme Court to delay his federal election subversion trial by freezing a ruling that rejected Trump’s immunity claims...Earlier this week, Trump filed an emergency motion with the high court asking it to keep his trial proceedings on hold as Trump continues appealing.

In a 40-page response filed days before his deadline, Smith’s team [wrote] “Delay in the resolution of these charges threatens to frustrate the public interest in a speedy and fair verdict — a compelling interest in every criminal case and one that has unique national importance here, as it involves federal criminal charges against a former President for alleged criminal efforts to overturn the results of the Presidential election, including through the use of official power,” prosecutors wrote. (TheHill.com)

BIDEN administration is putting $60 million into three geothermal energy pilot projects, it announced Tuesday. Geothermal energy is energy from the heat of the earth that is trapped underground in hot water reservoirs. This type of energy is carbon-free and does not emit greenhouse gases. It can be used to generate electricity and also to heat buildings.

The funds, from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will fund three projects [in California, Utah and Oregon] that aim to demonstrate that geothermal energy that comes from man-made reservoirs is effective and able to be used on a large scale. (TheHill.com)

STORM-soaked California is still in the clutches of a wet El Niño winter, but in an unexpected plot twist, La Niña could be hot on its heels... The El Niño-La Niña Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that can influence weather worldwide and across the Golden State... [El Nino] has intensified in recent months, becoming what is now believed to be the fifth-strongest El Niño on record, according to an advisory the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued this week... California has been pummeled by intense atmospheric rivers, including three storms that dropped record-breaking rainfall in Oxnard, San Diego and Los Angeles. The latest storm killed at least nine people and triggered landslides, debris flows and two tornadoes.

But California’s wild weather ride may not be over yet, as there is now a 55% chance La Niña could develop sometime between June and August, the advisory says. There is a 77% chance it could develop between September and November. (LAT)

TWO tornadoes touched down Wednesday along San Luis Obispo County’s coast, hitting Grover Beach and Los Osos with 95-mph winds that uprooted trees, snapped power lines and took part of a roof off at least one building, according to the National Weather Service. (LAT)

CALIFORNIA’S high-speed rail... fast becoming a reality for residents of the Central Valley. This heavily farmed region —... — is first in line to benefit from an infrastructure project being built with tens of billions of dollars in state and federal funding.

The 171-mile stretch of rail running between Merced and Bakersfield could be operational as early as 2030...the project has created more than 12,000 construction jobs, with 70% of those workers coming from the Central Valley. (LAT)

Against their will, Californians are proving they are still capable of big things.

IT’S back to regular IRS deadlines for California taxpayers this year, but with a new tool for many low- and moderate-income households: a service that will prepare and file their tax returns online for free. Starting later this year, taxpayers in California, Arizona, Nevada and nine other states will have access to a new program from the IRS called Direct File... [under which taxpayers] can send sensitive financial information directly to the IRS — no middleman required. (LAT)

PAKISTAN’S Imran Khan... a populist (and popular) candidate, has [apparently won the election]...Tensions had been mounting for months, after Mr. Khan...was arrested in August. Just days before the polls opened, he was slapped with two additional prison sentences. Yet his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI, is leading with about 93 seats out of 266. The imprisoned Khan, or at least a semblance of him, even gave an AI-generated victory speech. (WP)

ITALIAN farmers and more than 1,000 tractors were massed at the gates of Rome on Friday, preparing to march on the Italian capital, [literally, crossing the Rubicon] as a wave of demonstrations by agricultural producers spreads across Europe. While protests have eased in France and Germany, they have been gaining intensity in Italy, even as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's farmer-friendly government scrambles to appease their demands.

As well as the threat from novel foods that they say threaten their livelihoods, farmers are protesting rising taxes, the high cost of diesel, cheap imports, low supermarket prices and restrictions imposed by EU climate change targets. (Politico)

EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski came under pressure on Friday to resign as farmers blocked roads in his native Poland and border crossings with Ukraine at the start of a new month-long strike against EU policies...Farmers in Poland blockaded roads and major border crossings with Ukraine on Friday at the start of a month-long series of countrywide protests. The farmers demand a stop to imports of agricultural products from Ukraine and a halt to implementing EU green policies — echoing demands made at protests around Europe. They've also asked for more money for livestock farming. (Politico)

L.A. City Council seats up for sale... With the election less than a month away, L.A.’s council contests are awash in “independent expenditures” — unlimited spending, frequently by unions, businesses and advocacy groups seeking to shape decision-making at City Hall.

Although donors are barred under city law from giving more than $900 to the campaign of each council candidate, independent expenditure committees can raise and spend as much as they want to promote their favored candidates — as long as they do not coordinate their activities with those same candidates. (LAT)

Frankly, if this city council is the best money can buy, your blogger wants his money back.

IN DVD lecture series "The Great Presidents" from The Great Courses, Professor Allan J. Lichtman notes Thomas Jefferson was a supporter of a small government that emphasized individual liberties, and "agrarian rights", as contrasted with Hamilton's view of a strong federal government capable of large projects such as the National Bank to foster industrial growth, or more modern projects like the interstate highway system or Biden's IRA Act to foster environmentally sustainable technologies (your blogger notes there would be no need for "environmental sustainability" had we taken Jefferson's approach, as we would still be burning wood for warmth while wearing scratchy wool clothes and toiling with hoes and scythes to raise our potatoes, corn and vegetables).

Your blogger notes Jefferson might be analogized to Mahatma Ghandi and his weaving, rather than today's U.S. with its industrial might, modern economy and technical expertise (internet) that could never have occurred in Jefferson's small government agrarian economic model. Perhaps under Jefferson someone would have invented a better way of making cloth, while as a result of Hamilton's approach we have the internet. Ironically, Jefferson placed embargo on imports, forcing manufacturing to develop in U.S. (Your blogger notes Jefferson was a scholar and a great writer who lived a life of privilege and died in debt, owning 200 slaves and having fathered children with Sally Hemmings, who was one of his slaves.) Possibly, not all The Great Presidents were all that great.

UK’s 40-year-old fusion reactor achieved a world record for energy output in its final runs before being shut down for good, scientists have announced...The Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire began operating in 1983...The reactor’s previous record was a reaction lasting for 5 seconds in 2021, producing 59 megajoules of heat energy. But in its final tests in late 2023, it surpassed this by sustaining a reaction for 5.2 seconds while also reaching 69 megajoules of output, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. (New Scientist)

Your blogger supports use of nuclear fission plants as a better alternative to burning fossil fuels, and especially supports research into fusion reactors.

U.S. sanctions on Russia’s latest LNG project, Arctic LNG 2 of the largest Russian LNG exporter, Novatek, have upended the company’s plans for production start-up and export timelines. In November, the U.S. Department of State designated limited liability company ARCTIC LNG 2, the operator of the Arctic LNG 2 Project, as part of additional sanctions against Russia “to further target individuals and entities associated with Russia’s war effort and other malign activities.” (OilPrice.com)

HACKERS from the Prana Network were able to gain access to the mail servers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which contained information on the production and cost of Shahed-136 attack drones used by Russia...Russia has used Iranian-made Shahed drones to indiscriminately attack Ukraine since the start of its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The IRGC operates a shell company known as Sahara Thunder which promotes illegal arms sales between Iran and Russia... hackers from Prana were able to publish internal documents revealing the cost of production of an individual drone as well as the profits Iran made from Shahed-136 sales to Russia. Documents revealed that one drone costs $375,000 to produce. During negotiations, an agreement was reached establishing that each drone would cost only $193,000 when Russia ordered 6,000 units or $290,000 when ordering 2,000 units.

In total, the Iranian government earned $1.8 billion from the sale of Shahed drones to Russia. At least part of the payments, the documents report, were provided in gold. (Kyiv Post)

SINGLE mother who teaches financial literacy has 2 Master’s degrees and $307,000 student loan bill; something wrong with this picture.

NOTE: READERS WILL GET A BREAK AS YOUR BLOGGER TAKES A VACATION FROM LATE FEBRUARY TO EARLY MARCH.

ARTICLES

Zelensky Removes His Top General, in Major Shake-Up of Ukraine Military

Gen. Valery Zaluzhny led the effort that thwarted ’s initial assault on Kyiv. But his troops have struggled to make progress recently, and tensions have mounted with the civilian leadership.

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A general in a cap and camouflage stands with other military figures.

A photograph released by Ukrainian Presidential press service last July showing Gen. Valery Zaluzhny during a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of Ukrainian independence.Credit...Ukrainian Presidential Press Service, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Andrew E. KramerMarc Santora

By Andrew E. Kramer and Marc Santora

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Feb. 8, 2024

Want the latest stories related to Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for the newsletter Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send them to your inbox.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday removed his top general as part of a sweeping overhaul of his military command, the most significant shake-up in Ukrainian leadership since Russia invaded almost two years ago.

The dismissal ended weeks of speculation about the fate of the commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, whose relationship with Mr. Zelensky had deteriorated as Ukraine failed to make a breakthrough in its counteroffensive last summer and fall. Mr. Zelensky was prepared to fire the general 10 days ago before temporarily backing off, Ukrainian officials have said.

The upheaval comes at a difficult moment for Ukraine in the war, amid intensified Russian attacks, partisan wrangling in the United States over providing aid to the government in Kyiv and the tensions between Ukraine’s civilian and military leadership.

General Zaluzhny will be replaced by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of Ukraine’s ground forces, the president said.

While praising General Zaluzhny, who has led the nation’s military since Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago, Mr. Zelensky said “urgent changes” were needed to ensure victory.

“Starting today, a new management team will take over the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in an evening address to the nation, adding that he had met with General Zaluzhny and thanked him for his service.

The decision to remove the senior military leadership in the midst of an enemy offensive poses risks, including a disruption to operational planning, and Ukraine does not have a deep bench of senior commanders to draw on for general staff posts. In announcing the shake-up, Mr. Zelensky named five generals and two colonels he intends to promote.

Mr. Zelensky said a new command team must begin by laying out “a detailed action plan for the year ahead.”

However, any plan will need to account for the uncertainty around the pace and quantity of Western weapons and the challenges in recruiting news soldiers to the fight.

Image

Men looking at maps.

President Volodymyr Zelensky with Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, right, during a visit to the frontline city of Kupiansk last year.Credit...Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

While there is a new mobilization plan being debated in the Parliament, critics of Mr. Zelensky say he has not effectively communicated to the public why more soldiers are desperately needed and has shied away from making difficult and possibly politically unpopular decisions regarding recruitment. (NYT)

Your blogger notes a similarity between Zelensky and Lincoln and a very substantial difference at the same time. Lincoln removed McClellan and other generals because he felt they would not fight, until he found Grant. Zelensky here removes his general for a similar reason, that he is not being aggressive enough.

The difference is that Lincoln had industrial abilities the South did not and a much greater number of potential soldiers, while Zelensky has neither a larger population nor industrial superiority.

After Fighting Ukraine Aid, Trump Says Biden Will ‘Give’ Ukraine to Putin

Donald Trump suggested he would do more to protect the country from Russia, seeking to flip the script on the president, who has been calling for more military aid for months.

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Donald Trump speaks at a lectern with an American flag behind him.

Donald J. Trump often positively invokes Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as an authoritarian strongman. He acknowledged in a speech on Wednesday that they got along.Credit...Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

Michael Gold

By Michael Gold

Reporting from North Charleston, S.C.

Feb. 14, 2024

For many months, President Biden has been rallying global leaders to provide more military aid to Ukraine and pressing Congress to pass a multibillion-dollar aid package to help the country beat back Russian aggression. Former President Donald J. Trump has been undermining that effort, pressing Republicans to thwart it.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Trump tried to flip the script, suggesting that he would do more to protect Ukraine than Mr. Biden, who he said would effectively cede Ukraine as a gift to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Speaking at a campaign event in North Charleston, S.C., Mr. Trump said that, under a Biden presidency, Mr. Putin is “going to be given everything he wants, including Ukraine. That’s a gift. He’s got a gift.”

Then Mr. Trump — who often positively invokes Mr. Putin as an authoritarian strongman, and who acknowledged in his speech that they got along — doubled down, saying that Mr. Biden “is going to give” Ukraine to Mr. Putin.

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Mr. Biden has repeatedly vowed to help Ukraine defend itself for “as long as it takes,” pledging that “our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken.” Mr. Trump, by contrast, has previously said that he would consider letting Russia “take over” parts of Ukraine in a negotiated deal to end the war.

A day earlier, the Senate, in a bipartisan vote, approved an additional $60.1 billion in assistance to Kyiv to help it fight Russia’s invasion, part of a long-debated foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel.

After the Senate vote, Mr. Biden accused Mr. Trump of bowing down to Russia. Mr. Biden has previously argued that aid for Ukraine is necessary to keep Mr. Putin from gaining ground in the war, and that a failure to provide assistance could ultimately encourage Mr. Putin to attack NATO allies, which could draw the United States into direct conflict with Russia.

But that effort faces significant resistance from Republicans in the House, many of whom have been encouraged by Mr. Trump’s “America First” views on foreign policy and his criticisms of the legislation on the campaign trail.

Earlier this week on social media, Mr. Trump said it was “stupid” for the United States to offer foreign aid to countries instead of loans. And he has repeatedly been critical of the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine, arguing that Europeans who are worried about Russian aggression should be spending more to fight it.

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Mr. Trump often posits that the mere fact of his presidency, had he won in 2020, would have been enough to keep Russia at bay. In his stump speech, he routinely promises that he will settle the war quickly if he is elected, and he has often said that he could resolve the conflict “within 24 hours.”

But European leaders and security experts have expressed concerns that a second Trump presidency could embolden Russia, particularly given Mr. Trump’s frequent threats to withdraw the United States from NATO.

Further feeding their fears, Mr. Trump on Saturday raised the possibility that he might “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” against NATO members that were not spending enough money on their own defense. His comments spurred a firestorm of criticism from Mr. Biden and Nikki Haley, his lone major rival in the Republican primary.

After days of headlines, Mr. Trump did not restate that claim on Wednesday. But he returned to his more frequent contention that he had told NATO members that the United States would not defend them if he deemed their spending insufficient.

NATO has a nonbinding goal that its member countries spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their militaries. As of last year, just 11 of 31 NATO members had reached that level. Mr. Trump on Wednesday said he thought the goal should be doubled to 4 percent. (NYT)

Front-line Ukrainian infantry units report acute shortage of soldiers

By Isabelle Khurshudyan and Anastacia Galouchka

Updated February 8, 2024 at 3:17 p.m. EST|Published February 8, 2024 at 1:00 a.m. EST

Military trucks are parked by a road in Donbas, Ukraine, on Saturday. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

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KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian military is facing a critical shortage of infantry, leading to exhaustion and diminished morale on the front line, military personnel in the field said this week — a perilous new dynamic for Kyiv nearly two years into the grinding, bloody war with Russia.

In interviews across the front line in recent days, nearly a dozen soldiers and commanders told The Washington Post that personnel deficits were their most critical problem now, as Russia has regained the offensive initiative on the battlefield and is stepping up its attacks.

One battalion commander in a mechanized brigade fighting in eastern Ukraine said that his unit currently has fewer than 40 infantry troops — the soldiers deployed in front-line trenches who hold off Russian assaults. A fully equipped battalion would have more than 200, the commander said.

Another commander in an infantry battalion of a different brigade said his unit is similarly depleted.

The soldiers interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and could face retribution for their comments.

A deputy battalion commander checks the position of his soldiers in Donbas. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

A deputy battalion commander speaks on his phone in a house in Donbas that serves as a temporary base. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

The reports of acute troop shortages come as President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday replaced his military chief, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. While their relationship had long been tense, in recent weeks one chief disagreement has been over how many new soldiers Ukraine needs to mobilize. Zelensky elevated Oleksandr Syrsky, the 58-year-old commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, to replace Zaluzhny.

Zelensky move to fire general leaves Ukraine guessing who will command war

The Ukrainian presidential office declined to comment, referring questions to the Defense Ministry, which in turn referred questions to the Ukrainian military’s General Staff. The General Staff did not respond to a request for comment.

Zaluzhny told Zelensky that Ukraine needs nearly 500,000 new troops, according to two people familiar with the matter, but the president has pushed back on that figure privately and publicly. Zelensky has said he wants more justification from Ukraine’s military leadership about why so many conscripts are needed and has also expressed concern about how Kyiv would pay them.

Financial assistance from Western partners cannot be used to pay soldier salaries, and Ukraine’s budget is already under strain, with a $60 billion aid package proposed by President Biden stalled in Congress. The European Union last week approved roughly $54 billion in aid after it was delayed for weeks by opposition from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The debate in Kyiv about mobilization — and to what degree the country should ramp it up — has angered soldiers on the front line.

Oleksandr, a battalion commander, said the companies in his unit on average are staffed at about 35 percent of what they should be. A second battalion commander from an assault brigade said that is typical for units that carry out combat tasks.

Light catches a cross on the side of the road during a snowstorm in Donbas on Saturday. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

Asked how many new soldiers he has received — not including those who have returned after injuries — Oleksandr said his battalion was sent five people over the past five months. He and other commanders said the new recruits tend to be poorly trained, creating a dilemma about whether to send someone immediately onto the battlefield because reinforcements are needed so badly, even though they are likely to get injured or killed because they lack the know-how.

“The basis of everything is the lack of people,” Oleksandr said.

“Where are we going? I don’t know,” he added. “There’s no positive outlook. Absolutely none. It’s going to end in a lot of death, a global failure. And most likely, I think, the front will collapse somewhere like it did for the enemy in 2022, in the Kharkiv region.”

In fall 2022, the Ukrainians took advantage of a weak spot in the Russian front line, where Moscow’s forces were undermanned, and managed to liberate most of the northeast region in a swift one-week September offensive. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the embarrassing defeat by announcing a mobilization in his country.

Zelensky’s shake-up of military command, meant as a refresh, risks backlash

The Ukrainian parliament is in the process of revising a draft law on mobilization that will lower the minimum conscription age to 25 from 27. But lawmakers working on the bill and soldiers alike have acknowledged that Kyiv has done a poor job explaining to the public why sending more people to the front is necessary.

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Instead, the messaging has been confused, with Zelensky and Zaluzhny contradicting each other publicly and creating an appearance of infighting.

New recruits train in Donbas on Monday. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

Recruits warm up by a fire during training in Donbas. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

Training exercises for new troops in Donbas. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

In August, Zelensky fired the heads of all of Ukraine’s regional military recruitment offices, citing concerns about corruption. But with some of those positions left vacant, mobilization came to a halt, a high-ranking military official said. Commanders in the field confirmed that they have had few new people arrive since the fall.

“We have direct trouble with personnel,” said Mykyta, a deputy infantry battalion commander. “Because this is war, and it’s infantry in defense that’s dying.”

“I’m talking with my friends, also officers in other units, and those in infantry; it’s almost the same situation everywhere,” Mykyta added.

A year along the vital river that flows through Ukraine’s heart

Shortages of ammunition and weapons are also an issue. A commander whose unit was recently moved to a new part of the front in eastern Ukraine said he received 10 shells for two howitzers. Zelensky has acknowledged that artillery ammunition deliveries have slowed as Europe struggles to manufacture enough shells to meet Ukraine’s needs and as the aid package remains stalled in Washington.

The personnel shortages can have a domino effect, Ukrainian troops in the field said.

Damaged houses in the Donbas region, seen on Saturday. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

Especially in winter, when the weather conditions are hard, infantry should be rotated out after about three days. But because units lack troops, deployments get extended — or personnel intended for the rear get pressed into front-line duty despite being ill-prepared for it. Troops who are mentally and physically exhausted because of overwork sometimes can’t defend their posts, allowing Russia — with more manpower and ammunition — to advance.

“They need to be replaced by someone,” said Oleksandr, the battalion commander. “There is no one to replace them, so they sit there more, their morale drops, they get sick or suffer frostbite. They are running out. There is no one to replace them. The front is cracking. The front is crumbling. Why can’t we replace them? Because we don’t have people; nobody comes to the army. Why doesn’t anyone come to the army? Because the country didn’t tell people that they should go to the army. The state failed to explain to people that they should go to the army. Those who knew that they should go, they have already all run out.”

Serhiy, 41, a platoon commander fighting in Avdiivka, the site of Russia’s most intense assaults, said he and his men are rarely rotated out after just three days. More often five days go by — or even 10.

Serhiy, 41, a platoon commander fighting in Avdiivka. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)

Dmytro, another deputy battalion commander in a different brigade, said his infantry typically get two days of rest after five to 10 days holding the line, and because most of his soldiers are over the age of 40, their lack of physical fitness compounds the problems.

“You can feel it; people are exhausted both morally and physically,” Serhiy said. “It’s very hard, the weather conditions, the constant shelling. They have a great impact on the human psyche.”

The lack of rotations is a problem across the Ukrainian military — not just for infantry on the line. Soldiers might get a few days off to go home and see their families, but rarely more. They say they are still motivated to fight the Russian invaders, but also that they need rest and more men beside them.

Zelensky has also asked the military and parliament to prepare a law to demobilize those who have been fighting for nearly two years. Members of parliament working on the bill have said they are discussing a plan to discharge, or “demobilize,” soldiers who have been on the front for 36 months. But that would require sending people in to replace them.

“Every soldier thinks about that guy that walks around in Dnipro or Lviv or Kyiv,” Mykyta said. “They think about them and they want to have a rest, too. Of course, in their heads appears the thought: Some guys are just strolling around there, but we’re here.” (WP)

Russia Stands to Lose Billions as Ukraine Drones Target Key Oil Hubs

Published Jan 23, 2024 at 4:56 AM EST

Updated Jan 23, 2024 at 9:40 AM EST

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Russia Stands To Lose Billions As Ukraine Drones Target Key Oil Hubs

By Isabel van Brugen

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Russia could lose billions in oil exports, should Ukraine successfully attack the country's major fuel terminals in the Baltic Sea.

On January 18, Ukraine launched a drone attack on a St. Petersburg oil terminal, about 620 miles from the Ukrainian border. It marked the first time a drone had targeted Russian President Vladimir Putin's home region, Leningrad, since the full-scale war in Ukraine began in February 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with heads of municipalities in the constituent entities of Russia in the Moscow region on January 16, 2024. Russia could lose billions in oil exports should Ukraine successfully attack the... More

SERGEI SAVOSTYANOV/POOL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Another Ukrainian drone attack near the city of St. Petersburg overnight on Sunday struck a major gas export terminal—a Novatek PJSC gas-condensate plant in the port Ust-Luga—causing a huge fire, and halting fuel supplies. Ust-Luga is Russia's largest Baltic port, and Ukraine's Security Service claimed responsibility for that attack, the Kyiv Post newspaper reported.

Should Ukraine successfully strike Russia's two major oil terminals in the Baltic Sea, Ust-Luga and Primorsk, it could halt the export of 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. This could cause the country to lose billions, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Newsweek contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment by email on Tuesday.

The amount of oil shipped by the two oil terminals daily accounted for more than 40 percent of Moscow's total seaborne crude exports on average from January to November 2023, Bloomberg reported, citing industry data.

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Russia depends on its oil exports and energy industry, which make up some 30 percent of the country's budget revenues, and are crucial for the funding of Moscow's ongoing war in neighboring Ukraine. In 2023, Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia and became China's largest oil supplier.

Russian oil and gas analyst Mikhail Krutikhin told the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in September 2023 that oil companies, due to Western sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine, have found it more profitable to sell everything abroad.

"That is, to export as much as possible and get at least some money there," said Krutikhin. "Moreover, this is happening throughout the country; even in the Far East, fuel shortages have begun to be felt. They export everything that is possible."

A source in Ukraine's Security Service told the Kyiv Post that the successful assault on the oil terminal in Ust-Luga "not only inflicts substantial economic harm on the enemy, disrupting their revenue streams for the war in Ukraine, but also disrupts the logistical chain of fuel essential to the Russian military.

"This move strategically hampers the occupiers' ability to sustain their forces, marking a significant setback in their ongoing aggression," the source added.

A Russian Telegram channel, meanwhile, said the reason why Ukrainian attacks have managed to reach deep inside Russian territory is that the country's air defenses in the city of St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad region are stretched thin. Putin has pulled the majority of his resources to defend his prized residence at Lake Valdai.

The VChK-OGPU outlet, which purports to have inside information from Russian security forces, said on Sunday that, according to its source, recent drone attacks on St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region are due to an "acute shortage of technical means for detecting small air targets and mobile air defense missile systems capable of shooting them down."

Russia's Pantsir-S1 air-defense systems "were deployed to protect a 'particularly important' facility in Valdai," the Telegram channel said. Newsweek is still working to verify the VChK-OGPU report. (NEWS)

Biden Cautions Netanyahu on Ground Offensive in Southern Gaza

The president told the Israeli leader on Sunday that protection was needed for Palestinians seeking shelter and called for “urgent and specific” steps on humanitarian aid.

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President Biden walking down the steps from the Marine One helicopter.

As the White House faces rising pressures, President Biden’s criticism of the Israeli war effort has grown increasingly blunt.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Reporting from Washington

Feb. 11, 2024

President Biden warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Sunday that a ground offensive in southern Gaza should not proceed without a plan to protect the more than 1.4 million Palestinians clustered there, the latest sign of frustration by the White House over rising civilian deaths from Israel’s military assault.

During the call on Sunday, according to a description from the White House, the two leaders also discussed ongoing negotiations with Hamas to release Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for a cease-fire and the release of Palestinians being held in Israeli jails.

Last week, Mr. Netanyahu bluntly rejected as “ludicrous” a response from Hamas in the negotiations that called for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and the freeing of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of more than 100 Israeli hostages in Gaza.

But both American and Israeli officials have said subsequently that there is still room for compromise in the negotiations. A senior administration official who spoke about Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu’s call on the condition of anonymity expressed optimism about the state of the talks, adding that they would continue over the next week to address “significant gaps” between the two sides.

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“The president emphasized the need to capitalize on progress made in the negotiations to secure the release of all hostages as soon as possible,” according to the White House statement. “He also called for urgent and specific steps to increase the throughput and consistency of humanitarian assistance to innocent Palestinian civilians.”

Mr. Biden has strongly supported Israel’s decision to retaliate for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas that killed an estimated 1,200 people. But as the White House faces rising pressure from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party over the administration’s support of Israel’s military, Mr. Biden’s criticism has grown increasingly blunt. On Thursday, he said Israel’s military operations in Gaza were “over the top.”

The comments were another indication of increasing frustration in the White House with Mr. Netanyahu over the soaring number of civilian deaths in Gaza, where more than 27,000 people have been killed, according to health authorities in the strip run by Hamas. Mr. Netanyahu, who is focused on appealing to the far-right flank of his coalition to maintain his hold on power, has also rejected the Biden administration’s call for a two-state solution after the war.

The White House has said on multiple occasions in recent days that it does not support Mr. Netanyahu’s likely invasion of Rafah, which sits on the border with Egypt. More than half of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are now sheltering in the city, many of them displaced after the Israeli military told them to flee south to avoid the war in the north.

Mr. Biden on Sunday “reaffirmed his view that a military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there,” according to the White House.

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In an interview with ABC News that aired on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said, without giving specifics, that Israel was “working out a detailed plan” to move Gazans north of Rafah. Egypt has already said it will not accept Palestinians who try to cross the border.

Mr. Biden is expected to discuss the war again on Monday when he hosts King Abdullah II of Jordan at the White House. (NYT)

Readers will remember that when the Israeli response was still pending Biden warned Israel not to be consumed with revenge.

Al-Shifa Hospital has been at the center of a debate over whether Hamas is using medical facilities as cover.

A satellite image of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, a multi-building complex.

Israel said that a tunnel found beneath Al-Shifa, running from the surgery building to a shack, was proof that Hamas operates from hospitals.

The satellite image transitions into a 3-D model of the hospital, with a shack and a surgery building highlighted.

The Times created a 3-D model of the portion of the tunnel that was visible in a video released by the Israeli military.

Note: The diagram is schematic.

The 3-D model highlights the tunnel and flips to show it underground.

A Tunnel Offers Clues to How Hamas Uses Gaza’s Hospitals

By Matthew Rosenberg, Ronen Bergman, Aric Toler and Helmuth Rosales Feb. 13, 2024

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Gaza’s hospitals have emerged as a focal point in Israel’s war with Hamas, with each side citing how the other has pulled the facilities into the conflict as proof of the enemy’s disregard for the safety of civilians.

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

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

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

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

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

What the video showed under Al-Shifa

The • dot on the diagram follows the path of the video below that was released by Israel after the raid.

Stairs to surfaceDoorElectrical panelBathroomSinkBathroomRoomRoomDead endTunnel extends

from hereI.D.F.-forced entry point to tunnelSURGERY BUILDING ABOVE TUNNELSHACK ABOVE TUNNEL

By Malika Khurana and Helmuth Rosales; video from the Israel Defense Forces

The Israeli military, however, has struggled to prove that Hamas maintained a command-and-control center under the facility. Critics of the Israeli military say the evidence does not support its early claims, noting that it had distributed material before the raid showing five underground complexes and also had said the tunnel network could be reached from wards inside a hospital building. Israel has publicly revealed the existence of only one tunnel entrance on the grounds of the hospital, at the shack outside its main buildings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shack

Built early July 2021

Surgery

building

Tunnel

Al-Shifa Hospital

100 ft

The portion of the tunnel visible in the Israeli military video is at least 350 feet long. But confidential military documents reveal that the tunnel extends twice as far. Satellite Image by Planet Labs

Israel launched its war in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage. Since the start of the war, more than 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there.

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

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

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

After the raid on the Qatari Hospital, the commonly used name for the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics, the Israeli military showed a video on Nov. 5 of what it said was the entrance to “a tunnel that was being used for terror infrastructures” on the hospital’s grounds.

But the video appears to show something else: a water storage area built in 2016, when the hospital was constructed, according to engineering plans and images from the hospital’s construction reviewed by The Times.

The Israeli military declined to provide additional imagery to support its assertion that this was a tunnel entryway or part of a tunnel complex.

Just before the Al-Shifa raid, Israeli forces entered Al-Rantisi hospital, on Nov. 13, soon after its remaining patients and staff had left. Within days, the military released two videos that showed weapons and explosives it said it found there, and a room where it said hostages had been kept. The health ministry in Gaza disputed the assertions made in the videos and said the weapons were planted.

One of the videos released by Israel showed troops rushing into the hospital and appearing to find explosives, weapons and the hostage room. In the other, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, chief spokesman for the Israeli military, showed off guns, explosives and other weapons that he said were found in the basement of the hospital.

The video included footage of a piece of paper taped to a wall in the hospital’s basement. Admiral Hagari said the paper — a grid with Arabic words and numbers within each square — could be a schedule for guarding hostages “where every terrorist writes his name.”

The Gazan health ministry said it was nothing more than a work schedule. But the calendar begins on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and an Arabic title written at the top uses the militants’ name for the assault: “Al Aqsa Flood Battle, 7/10/2023.”

Given its size and history, taking control of Al-Shifa was always a more important goal for the Israeli military than the other smaller facilities.

Screenshot from the video showing the inside of the tunnel.

Concrete sections of the Al-Shifa tunnel are visible in this still image from the video released by the Israeli military. Israel Defense Forces

There is substantial independent evidence that Hamas constructed a vast tunnel network across Gaza. Senior Israeli defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, estimate the network is between 350 and 450 miles — extraordinary figures for a territory that at its longest point is only 25 miles. The officials estimate there are thousands of entrances to the network.

There is also established documentation that Hamas used Al-Shifa before the war to mask some of its activities. During Israel’s three-week war with Hamas in 2008, armed Hamas fighters in civilian clothing were seen roaming Al-Shifa’s corridors and killing an Israeli collaborator, according to a Times correspondent reporting in Gaza at the time. Six years later, during the next round of fighting, the militants routinely held news conferences at the hospital and used it as a safe meeting place for Hamas officials to speak with journalists.

After that war, Amnesty International reported that Hamas had used abandoned areas of Al-Shifa, “including the outpatients’ clinic area, to detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects, even as other parts of the hospital continued to function as a medical center.”

Israel’s critics, though, countered with statements made at the time by two Norwegian doctors, who described themselves as pro-Palestinian activists and had worked in Gaza during the 2014 war. They insisted that they saw no Hamas presence at Al-Shifa.

Israel has also released video footage, taken by the hospital’s own security cameras, which it says shows two hostages being brought to Al-Shifa shortly after being abducted in the Oct. 7 attack.

The Al-Shifa tunnel was discovered by following ducts that ran underground from air-conditioning units that were powered by the hospital’s electricity supply and mounted on one of its buildings, officials said. Israeli soldiers also found evidence that the hospital’s water supply was being fed to the tunnel.

The Israeli military has also displayed weapons and other equipment it said were found inside Al-Shifa, including grenades placed near an MRI machine. Among the cache presented to journalists were belongings that Israeli officials said had been taken from hostages, including a bag emblazoned with the name Be’eri, a kibbutz attacked by Hamas.

The military also said it found weapons in Al-Shifa’s parking lot, and a Toyota vehicle identical to those used in the Oct. 7 attack and loaded with the same equipment that militants carried during the raid, including guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Israeli officials speculated that it was a spare vehicle not used in the attack.

Screenshot of a room.

Screenshot of a sink.

Screenshot of a bathroom.

Screenshot of electrical wires.

Images from the video released by the I.D.F. Clockwise from top left: A room, a sink, electrical wires and a bathroom. Israel Defense Forces

Some of what the Israeli military has shown so far does not wholly match the description of a terrorist headquarters that it offered ahead of its ground invasion of Gaza on Oct. 27.

Underneath Al-Shifa, the Israeli military wrote in a lengthy post on its website, “lies a labyrinth of tunnels and underground compounds used by Hamas’s leaders to direct terrorist activities and rocket fire and to manufacture and store a variety of weapons and ammunition.”

There may no longer be a way to directly assess that claim. Israeli forces remained at Al-Shifa for a little more than a week.

Hours before Israeli forces left the hospital on Nov. 24, soldiers lined the tunnel with explosives and destroyed it in a blast that sent plumes of smoke high into the air and rocked buildings on the ground above. (NYT)

Rage in Gaza isn’t directed only at Israel. Some are angry with Hamas too

Protesters in Gaza demanding an end to the war with Israel

Protesters in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, gather on Jan. 24, 2024, to demand an end to the Israel-Hamas war.(Adel Hana / Associated Press)

BY NABIH BULOS AND A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

JAN. 31, 2024 2:30 AM PT

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KHAN YUNIS, Gaza Strip — By the 100-day mark of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Abu Ahmad Al-Gharabli and his 13 family members had been displaced four times before settling in Rafah, at the besieged enclave’s southern end.

Forced to sell cigarettes on the street to get by, the 56-year-old blacksmith is angry. At his inability to provide food and shelter for his family. At the scant humanitarian aid he’s received.

And, most of all, at Hamas.

“Before they launched Oct. 7, they should have secured food, drink and money so that we wouldn’t suffer like this,” Al-Gharabli said of the militant group’s assault on Israel that triggered the war.

Medics treating wounded girl in Gaza

Medics treat a girl wounded in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. (Ramez Habboub / Associated Press)

“It seems Hamas didn’t consider the consequences,” added Al-Gharabli’s wife, Umm Ahmad, who, like most people interviewed for this story, gave only her nickname for safety reasons. “They believe they planned for everything, but when it came to us, they didn’t. The poverty, the displacement — all this Hamas didn’t think about.”

More than three months into the most devastating assault Gaza has ever experienced, many residents — 85% of whom are displaced and almost all of whom are at risk of starvation — are growing exasperated with Hamas amid a war that has left no one in the enclave unaffected.

Palestinians carry a wounded girl after being rescued from under the rubble of buildings that were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. In just 25 days of war, more than 3,600 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, according to Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry. The advocacy group Save The Children says more children were killed in Gaza in October 2023 than in all conflict zones around the world combined in 2022. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled)

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Although the majority of the 2.3-million population hold Israel principally responsible for their suffering, and Hamas retains the support of a significant portion of society, many Gazans feel caught between fealty to the resistance against Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and a war strategy by their militant rulers that seemed to overlook them.

“Any organization or state that plans for a military attack should have a feasibility study, if you will,” said Abu Tawfiq, 35, speaking with the clear diction of the voiceover artist he was before the war. “We’ve started to ask, ‘You go on a military adventure — did you fortify the home front? Did you prepare the simplest means of life for citizens in Gaza?’”

On Oct. 7 — when Hamas commandos killed at least 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240 others, Israeli authorities say — most Gazans celebrated, Abu Tawfiq said, seeing it as a moment of fighting back against Israel and its long siege of the coastal strip.

People searching for survivors in a destroyed mosque in Rafah, Gaza

People look for survivors in the rubble of a mosque destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. (Hatem Ali / Associated Press)

But since then, “it’s been a nightmare from which we can’t wake up,” Abu Tawfiq said. “We’re angry. And Hamas neglecting citizens is compounding that anger.”

Examples of that neglect abound, he said. With Israel restricting the number of aid trucks going into the Gaza Strip, price gouging was to be expected, which is why, in past confrontations with Israel, Hamas officials or police would be out in marketplaces penalizing offending merchants. This time, with Israeli drones and armor a constant threat, Hamas authorities barely have a presence in the streets — and an ineffectual one at that.

Sugar, at almost $3 a pound, costs seven times more than it did before the war; onions, 13 times; canned goods, six times. Diapers for Al-Gharabli’s two grandsons surged to a staggering $38 a pack — and he has to walk two miles to find them.

A Palestinian child walks past factories destroyed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in Deir al Balah on Saturday, Jan. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

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“There’s no supervision. You just don’t get a sense there’s a government,” said Abu Amir Tafesh, 42, who was searching for bottled water for his family.

Problems also riddle the distribution of what few supplies make it into Gaza, some say. During other wars, aid organizations linked to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, another militant group, would give out packages or cash not just to members but also supporters. That’s not happening this time.

“Even if you’re sitting inside the mosque, you get nothing,” Abu Tawfiq said.

The sense of abandonment by Hamas is exacerbated, many say, by the fact that the only gain from the Oct. 7 operation has accrued to the occupied West Bank, where hundreds of imprisoned Palestinians were freed from Israeli prisons in November during a weeklong truce in Gaza.

BNEI BRAK, ISRAEL -- NOVEMBER 14, 2023: From left, Uri Yaffe, Itzik Shapira, Uriel Ringel, work together alongside other students from Orthodox Jewish communities to learn how to code and program at JBH, a school that trains Haredi men to become programmers and software developers at firms like Citibank and Mobileye, in Bnei Brak, Israel, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023. This push to encourage them to join IsraelOs vibrant technology industry D beyond the bounds of tradition comes when ultra-Orthodox Jews are resented by a larger secular society for religious school subsidies and other benefits, including exemption from compulsory military service for Torah students. Those tensions led to mass street protests last year as far-right nationalist and religious parties became prominent voices in Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuOs coalition government. Many Israelis regard the power that religious parties wield as a threat to the countryOs democratic identity. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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“All the martyrs, the houses destroyed, the fear ... we’re paying the price,” Tafesh said.

He’s happy that the Palestinian detainees were released. But with more than 26,000 people reported killed by the Israeli bombardment, entire families wiped out and much of the enclave destroyed, Gaza as he knew it is gone.

“People want a way to live in dignity. That’s it,” Tafesh said. “They’re silent now because they’re too aggrieved. Even if they want to shout at the government, what use would it be?”

Israeli soldiers in vehicles near the border with Gaza

Israeli forces move near the border with the Gaza Strip on Jan. 25, 2024. (Ohad Zwigenberg / Associated Press)

With little sense of Hamas’ endgame, many Palestinians are torn over what has happened since Oct. 7. A December poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research — which involved 1,231 respondents, including 480 in Gaza — showed 37% of Gazans labeling Hamas’ decision to attack as “incorrect,” given the consequences so far.

A majority of Palestinians also say the killing of civilians is not permissible, but they do not believe the Israeli government’s allegations or evidence of atrocities by Hamas.

“If the 7th of October didn’t happen, we would have stayed humiliated, under the mercy of the occupation all our lives,” said 57-year-old Umm Mahmoud Zreik. “For us, the exchange of hostages is not much of an achievement. We need them to do more, like break the siege.”

RAS AL A'MUD, ISRAEL -- NOVEMBER 28, 2023: Ayham Salaymah holds up up microphones as his father Nawaf speaks to reporters after the his brother Ahmad Salaymah, 14, release from prison, in their home in Ras Al A'Mud, Israel, Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023. When Israel agreed with Hamas to a prisoner swap, it published a list of 300 Palestinians it considered for released, the majority of them children. It's a reflection of an incarceration system, Palestinians and rights groups say, that targets children as enemy combatants, elevating offenses like rock throwing into security-related violations that carry a years-long sentence. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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Perhaps in response to such sentiments, Hamas on Sunday issued its first public report about its multipronged cross-border assault, a 16-page document titled “Our Narrative,” in which it cited a list of reasons for its attack, including the Israeli government’s right-wing policies, the expansion of illegal settlements, the increase in Palestinian detainees and the failure of negotiations over a Palestinian state.

The report also insists that, although “maybe some faults happened” during the “rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system” during the assault and the “chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza,” Hamas fighters did not intentionally target civilians.

About 60% of the Israelis killed Oct. 7 were civilians. Israel accuses Hamas of wanton slaughter and says it has compiled abundant visual evidence and witness testimony that the militants engaged in torture and sexual violence against civilian victims. Hamas blames Israel, pointing to reports in Israeli media that the army was responsible for killing a number of civilians during the engagement with the group’s fighters.

Wounded Palestinian awaiting treatment at a hospital in Rafah, Gaza

Palestinians wounded in Israel’s continued offensive in Gaza await treatment at a hospital in Rafah. (Fatima Shbair / Associated Press)

Although there are growing signs in Gaza of disillusionment with Hamas, which has ruled the strip since 2007, it can still count on a loyal base. The December poll found that support for the group rose slightly, to 42% from 38% in Gaza; in the West Bank, it almost quadrupled to 44%.

Inside Gaza, researcher Abdalhadi Alijla sees two trends at work: skepticism of Hamas amid minimal improvements to life after 17 years of its rule and no moves to ease the enclave’s isolation, yet also the increasingly dominant belief among Palestinians that armed struggle is the only way to end Israeli occupation.

“The consensus in Gaza is that the resistance is a red line — that it will remain, with or without Hamas,” Alijla said, adding that Hamas has never resolved whether it is a governing authority able to provide order, stability and jobs or a liberation movement.

MITZPE YAIR, OCCUPIED WEST BANK -- NOVEMBER 9, 2023: Reservist soldiers, settlement residents, local and some volunteers from Israel and the United States take part in a close quarter combat weapons training in an empty building that is still under construction, in Mitzpe Yair, an Israeli settlement that sits close to the town of Susya, Occupied West Bank, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023. As IsraelOs war against Hamas in Gaza unfolds amid the bombed buildings and deaths of more than 11,000 Palestinians, the increasing violence in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since its 1967 war with Arab nations, is threatening to open another front in the conflict. Armed settlers man checkpoints and at times descend on Palestinian lands destroying hundreds of olive trees and blocking villages in deadly provocations that have led to retaliatory knifings and ambush shootings by Palestinians. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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“The popularity of Hamas is greater in the West Bank than in Gaza because those in Gaza tried their rule. They know it,” Alijla said.

Hamas maintains that the chief aim of its Oct. 7 incursion was to kidnap Israeli soldiers in order to force a prisoner exchange. But its report makes clear that another goal was to refocus world attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The report repeatedly castigates Israel’s allies and the United Nations for ignoring Palestinians’ plight.

As the war grinds on and the question of who will govern Gaza becomes more urgent, anger among some Gazans at Hamas has not translated into greater support for the rival Palestinian Authority, the much-reviled administration that exercises limited control over the West Bank and was violently ousted from the Gaza Strip by Hamas in 2007.

“The authority doesn’t have the trust of the people. Even its own officials don’t trust it,” Alijla said.

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Whatever arises as an alternative, said Umm Ahmad, the wife of blacksmith Al-Gharabli, the priority should be providing stability for civilians.

“This living on the streets, this famine, our kids getting sick or injured with nowhere to be treated — for me, I won’t accept it,” she said. “I need a government that takes care of its people.” (LAT)

Your blogger finds that even as he begins to feel the pain of the Palestinians a little he is reminded many Palestinians are more than happy to see Jews killed, so long as preparations are made to take care of Palestinians first. And just when you think you’ve heard it all, the article below appears:

First Thing: Palestinian groups accuse UN advisor of failing to warn about potential genocide

Letter sent to UN raises concerns about Alice Wairimu Nderitu’s ability to act with ‘effectiveness and impartiality’. Plus, have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture?

A woman holds a child as she hangs laundry on barbed wire.

Displaced Palestinians who fled their houses due to Israeli strikes, take shelter in a tent camp near the border with Egypt in Rafah. Photograph: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

Nicola Slawson

Good morning.

Leading Palestinian human rights groups have accused the UN special advisor on the prevention of genocide of failing to fulfil her mandate after she issued only one statement on the war in Gaza – largely supportive of Israel – that has claimed 26,000 Palestinian lives.

In a statement issued in October, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, a Kenyan, omitted any criticism of Israel.

In a letter sent to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, on Wednesday, 16 Palestinian groups, including the umbrella body the Palestinian human rights council, said there had been a “glaring absence of any action in response to the sustained mass atrocities endured by Palestinians in Gaza”, and that this raised “significant concerns about the special advisor’s capability to execute her mandate with due effectiveness and impartiality”.

More broadly, the groups accused Nderitu of a dereliction of duty in failing to warn of a potential genocide, and said there had been a deafening failure by her to speak out about what had happened in Gaza.

What’s happening with the diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire? A Hamas delegation is expected in Cairo for more ceasefire talks, a day after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected the group’s demands made as part of their response to a proposed ceasefire deal. (GRDN)

Widening Mideast Crisis

Biden Imposes Sanctions on Israeli Settlers Over West Bank Violence

Published Feb. 1, 2024

Updated Feb. 2, 2024

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ImagePresident Biden speaking behind a lectern while standing on a stage.

President Biden during the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Follow live news updates on the Israel-Hamas war.

Here’s what we know:

President Biden’s executive order appeared to be aimed in part at Arab American voters who are furious with his administration’s backing of Israel in the war in Gaza.

U.S. officials fear a surge in settler attacks against Palestinians could set off wider violence.

Who are the four Israelis placed under U.S. sanctions?

Some far-right Israelis denounce the U.S. sanctions, while some Arabs say they’re not enough.

Austin says Iran trains and funds militias targeting U.S. troops.

Iran has slowed down production of enriched uranium, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog says.

Israel releases over 100 detainees back to Gaza, with many showing signs of abuse, a Palestinian official says.

Differences among hostages’ families complicate Netanyahu’s calculus.

U.S. officials fear a surge in settler attacks against Palestinians could set off wider violence.

Image

President Biden speaking into a microphone while standing in a room with seated people.

President Biden speaking in Warren, Mich., to members of the United Auto Workers Union, which recently endorsed him. Michigan is vital to Mr. Biden’s campaign for a second term.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

President Biden on Thursday ordered broad financial and travel sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, a forceful gesture aimed in part at Arab American voters in the United States who have expressed fury about the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mr. Biden authorized the sanctions with an executive order that goes further than a directive issued in December by the State Department, which imposed visa bans on dozens of Israeli settlers who have committed acts of violence in the West Bank. The sanctions will initially be imposed on four Israelis, who will be cut off from the U.S. financial system and from accessing any American assets or property. They also will be prevented from traveling to the United States or engaging in any commerce with people in the United States.

For Mr. Biden, the order served a dual purpose: It was a sharp diplomatic notice to Israel’s government at a time when the United States is pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for restraint. But it also sent a message to Arab Americans, a key part of the political coalition he needs to be re-elected, that he is serious about using the power of the United States on behalf of the Palestinians.

The White House announced the sanctions just hours before Mr. Biden held a campaign event in Michigan, a critical battleground state that has a large Arab American population and has been the site of numerous protests over the war in Gaza.

The executive order comes after years of American frustration with Israeli settlers, whom they view as a source of violence and instability and a threat to a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. And it comes as Mr. Biden faces growing criticism over U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza, including from members of his own party. American officials fear a recent surge in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank could set off even wider violence, making an already combustible situation worse.

“This violence poses a grave threat to peace, security, and stability in the West Bank, Israel and the Middle East region, and threatens the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States,” said Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser.

Israel’s war against Hamas is taking place in the 141-square-mile Gaza Strip, home to about two million Palestinians. But there are also deep tensions in the West Bank, a much larger area that Israel has occupied since 1967. It is home to more than 2.5 million Palestinians and has long been at the heart of the territorial dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.

Palestinians and many analysts say that Israel’s government has allowed the often heavily armed settlers to act with impunity inside the West Bank. A United Nations report said that eight Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank by Israeli settlers since Hamas fighters from Gaza invaded Israel on Oct. 7 and killed 1,200 people.

The office of Mr. Netanyahu responded to the sanctions by saying the “vast majority” of Israeli West Bank settlers were “law-abiding citizens.” Israel “acts against lawbreakers everywhere, so there is no need for exceptional steps in this matter,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Before leaving for Michigan, Mr. Biden spoke about what he called “the trauma, the death and destruction in Israel and Gaza.” Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, he pledged to work for the release of hostages held by Hamas and the lives of Palestinians.

“Not only do we pray for peace, we are actively working for peace, security, dignity for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” he told the group of lawmakers and religious leaders at the event.

Michigan is vital to Mr. Biden’s campaign for a second term. In 2020, he won the state over former President Donald J. Trump by 154,188 votes out of almost 5.5 million cast that year. On Thursday, the president stopped by a Black-owned restaurant outside Detroit and met with about 100 members of the United Auto Workers, the union that had recently endorsed him.

Against a backdrop with posters like “UAW 4 JOE” and “Unions heart Joe,” the president credited the labor movement for having the “strongest economy in the whole damn world,” and dismissed skeptics who had predicted that “China’s going to eat our lunch. Well guess what, man? We don’t taste that good.”

Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the campaign, said Mr. Biden was eager to thank Shawn Fain, the union’s president, who was at the event, and to draw a contrast with former President Donald J. Trump in a state where union workers could decide who wins the presidential election this year.

“He’ll continue fighting against Donald Trump’s historically anti-worker agenda,” she said, promising that Mr. Biden would “make many trips to Michigan” in the next several months.

Michigan is home to several hundred thousand Arab Americans, most of whom live in the Detroit area. Those areas voted by big margins for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Image

A crowd of demonstrators in the Capitol Rotunda hold signs reading “Protect Immigrants + Asylees” and “Stop Arming Israel,” and a banner that says: “The people chose life. Ceasefire now!”

Demonstrators inside the Capitol in December. Since the attacks by Hamas and Israel’s response in Gaza, polls show the president losing support among Arab Americans.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

But since the attacks by Hamas and Israel’s response in Gaza, polls show the president losing support among Arab Americans. One poll late last year showed Mr. Biden’s support in that population plummeting from 59 percent to 17 percent, a more than 40 percentage point decrease since the last election.

Mr. Biden has been dogged by people protesting his support for Israel at almost every campaign event in recent weeks. At a third stop on Thursday, at the Simple Palate restaurant, he was met by a number of protesters waving Palestinian flags and using a megaphone to chant, “Genocide Joe” and “How many kids have you killed today?”

Osama A. Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab American News, said on Thursday that Mr. Biden’s standing among Arab voters was as low as it had ever been, and that the sanctions would do nothing to change that.

“We have given up on him doing anything,” Mr. Siblani said, adding that he had been struck by the lack of specificity from the White House about the president’s schedule in Michigan, which he said seemed like an attempt to avoid possible protests.

Before Mr. Biden’s travel on Thursday, the White House and the president’s re-election campaign had provided only scant information about where he was going.

“If the community is not going to be able to protest his visit,” Mr. Siblani said, “we’re going to give him the answer on Feb. 27,” a reference to the date of the Michigan Democratic presidential primary.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden’s campaign disputed the idea that the campaign was being secretive, noting that Mr. Biden often appears at small events that are not announced in advance.

The protesters believe that Mr. Biden has not done enough to prevent the killing of thousands of Palestinians by Israel. Authorities in Gaza say at least 26,000 people have been killed during Israel’s military campaign against Hamas.

Officials said the sanctions would not be levied against American citizens living in Israel. State Department officials identified the four Israelis who were named in the sanctions on Thursday as David Chai Chasdai, Einan Tanjil, Shalom Zicherman and Yinon Levi.

In a news release on Thursday, officials said Mr. Chasdai had “initiated and led a riot” resulting in the death of a Palestinian civilian and assaulted other Palestinians. They said Mr. Tanjil had been “involved in assaulting Palestinian farmers and Israeli activists by attacking them with stones and clubs.”

Mr. Zicherman “assaulted Israeli activists and their vehicles in the West Bank,” officials said, citing video evidence. They said Mr. Levi had threatened “violence if they did not leave their homes, burned their fields, and destroyed their property" in the West Bank.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in a statement that the sanctions are designed in part to pressure Israel’s government to prevent the kind of violence by its citizens against Palestinians living in the West Bank.

“The United States has consistently opposed actions that undermine stability in the West Bank and the prospects of peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” Mr. Blinken said. “Israel must do more to stop violence against civilians in the West Bank and hold accountable those responsible for it.”

Mitch Smith contributed reporting from Harrison Township, Mich., and Zach Montague from Washington.

— Michael D. Shear Reporting from Clinton Township, Mich.

Who are the four Israelis placed under U.S. sanctions?

Image

Men work among damaged cars parked next to a burned building.

Working to repair cars damaged, like the building alongside them, in a settler rampage in the West Bank village of Huwara last February.Credit...Samar Hazboun for The New York Times

President Biden imposed financial sanctions on Thursday against four Israelis accused of escalating violence against civilians, intimidating civilians or destroying property in the West Bank.

In a statement, the State Department said, “The United States has consistently opposed actions that undermine stability in the West Bank and the prospects of peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Here’s what we know about the four men, who range in age from 21 to 32.

David Chai Chasdai, 29

Mr. Chasdai led a riot on the Palestinian town of Huwara, the State Department said, which resulted in the death of a Palestinian civilian. The New York Times reported on a rampage in Huwara and neighboring villages on Feb. 26, 2023, that started after two settlers were shot and killed. Israeli settlers burned and vandalized homes, businesses and vehicles, and one Palestinian was killed.

Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Chasdai’s mother, Dafna Chasdai, dismissed the impact of the sanctions, saying that the family does not have relatives in the United States and that the “whole thing is a joke.”

After the Huwara violence, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, signed an administrative detention warrant — a policy of indefinite imprisonment without trial that Israel almost exclusively uses against Palestinians — for Mr. Chasdai, according to the Israeli news media. A few days later, a court shortened his detention by a month.

He was sentenced to six months in jail in 2016 for planning to carry out an attack, when he and another person were found outside Beit Iksa, a Palestinian village, with fuel bottles and a club.

In 2013, Mr. Chasdai was detained for assaulting a taxi driver, according to an Israeli legal database. He was represented in court by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a lawyer and politician who now serves as Israel’s minister of national security. The court decided not to extend Mr. Chasdai’s detention, as requested by the police, citing a lack of evidence.

Yinon Levi, 31

The State Department said that Mr. Levi was from Meitarim Farm, an illegal Israeli settlement in the southern West Bank, and that he had led settler groups “that assaulted Palestinian and Bedouin civilians, threatened them with additional violence if they did not leave their homes, burned their fields and destroyed their property.”

The Israeli Supreme Court is hearing a case brought by Palestinians living near Hebron that alleges that on Oct. 16, Mr. Levi, accompanied by Israeli soldiers, entered the Palestinian village of Susiya on a tractor and participated in the destruction of olive trees, crops and water wells, prompting residents to flee the village.

The petitioners say the demolitions were unauthorized, and they filed the suit asking for immediate steps to halt evictions of Palestinians. The Supreme Court has ordered Israel’s military and police to respond by Monday with information on the investigative actions it has taken to stop such evictions and to provide details on steps taken against suspects, including Mr. Levi.

Mr. Levi’s wife, Sapir Levi, declined to comment on Friday.

Einan Tanjil, 21

Mr. Tanjil was described by the State Department as being involved with “assaulting Palestinian farmers and Israeli activists by attacking them with stones and clubs, resulting in injuries that required medical treatment.” He could not immediately be reached for comment.

He was charged in 2021 with assaulting an Israeli activist, Neta Ben Porat, a high-tech sector worker and mother of three, according to a Facebook post by Mehazkim, an Israeli center-left political page.

The post said that Mr. Tanjil had been charged with hitting her in the head and legs with a club when she and other Israeli activists were helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives near Surif, a Palestinian town in the West Bank.

Shalom Zicherman, 32

Mr. Zicherman assaulted Israeli activists and their vehicles in the West Bank, the State Department said, citing video evidence. He cornered at least two of the activists and injured them both, the statement added.

Mr. Zicherman threw stones at the vehicle of Israeli left-wing activists outside the Palestinian area of Masfar Yata, wounding one of them and breaking the car’s window, according to a video filmed by an activist.

A lawyer for Mr. Zicherman said he would not comment on the sanctions.

Seeing such reports makes your blogger, and likely countless others, think “a pox on both their houses”, but recognizes the settlors are only representative of a slice of Israelis, as Trump supporters who would abandon NATO are just a slice of Americans. Still, your blogger finds the Isreali government’s toleration of settlers less than conducive to peace, or even an uneasy truce.

We could soon find out if the Georgia case against Trump keeps going

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (Dennis Byron/Hip Hop Enquirer/AP)

On Thursday, the Georgia prosecutor who has charged Trump with election interference will have to defend her decision to have a relationship with a deputy lawyer on the case.

The prosecutor, Fani Willis, acknowledged having a relationship with a lawyer she hired to prosecute Trump. She denies Trump allies’ claims that the relationship somehow shaped the case against him — and she especially denies the claim that she financially benefited from it all.

A Georgia judge will hear the allegations Thursday, and it’s up to the judge to decide whether she can stay on.

At the very least, this side drama has delayed the case by weeks. And it’s called into question Willis’s judgment — which could taint a jury, said Robert James, a former district attorney in Georgia.

There are also other avenues for her to be removed, says Amy Gardner, a Washington Post political reporter covering the case who answered reader questions about this: “The state Senate has launched an investigation, and the state ethics commission has received a complaint. Both could theoretically lead to her removal.” (WP)

IN California, an attorney must avoid even the “appearance of impropriety”. Although not knowing the standard in Georgia, Willis has failed this test, even if everything was aboveboard.

Trump’s lead over Biden may be smaller than it looks

Consider only the highest-quality national polls, and the Republican’s advantage melts away

image: the economist/getty images

Feb 4th 2024|washington, dc

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If america were to hold its presidential election tomorrow, Donald Trump would be picking out curtains for the Oval Office. The Economist’s polling average puts him up by 2.3 points over Joe Biden nationwide (see top chart). And across the six swing states expected to decide the election—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—he leads by an average of 3.8 points. Betting markets list Mr Trump as a clear favourite. Never in his past two campaigns were his general-election polls this strong. Is it time for the world to brace itself for a second Trump presidency?

The election is still nine months away. Historically, polls taken before the summer of an election year have been poor predictors of results. But no former president has sought to return to office since the advent of modern polling. Opinions about the omnipresent Mr Trump are much firmer than they are about typical challenger candidates, who at this stage of the race are usually still fighting to secure their party’s nomination. As a result, even though Mr Trump is not yet the presumptive Republican nominee, current head-to-head polls between him and Mr Biden may be unusually informative.

Stay up to date with our new daily update, The us in brief, and our presidential poll tracker.

Read more of our coverage of the us elections of 2024.

Nationwide surveys over the past month have varied widely, ranging from an eight-point lead for Mr Trump to a six-point edge for Mr Biden. Polling averages, which blunt the effect of such outliers, suggest that Mr Trump holds a clear lead. But the polls that comprise such averages differ in their methods and degree of rigour. Democrats hunting for a silver lining can take solace in one clear pattern: pollsters with the best records of accuracy show better results for Mr Biden. Lower-quality pollsters are kinder to Mr Trump.

Public trust in polling has weakened following the industry’s high-profile underestimates of Mr Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020 (although polling before the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections was accurate). Reliably estimating pollsters’ accuracy—measured by the size of their historical errors and whether they consistently exaggerate support for a particular party—requires a large sample of surveys across many elections. FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, recently updated its ratings of American pollsters. It assesses them on a combination of their records and their methodological transparency.

image: the economist

Some pollsters are consistently more accurate than the field. But there are many ways to judge quality. The Economist’s general-election polling average weights polls solely by sample size and recency, so larger and newer polls contribute a greater share to the overall score. On this basis, Mr Trump leads Mr Biden in national polls by 2.3 points. That compares with a 0.2-point lead for Mr Biden in an unweighted average that gives polls from six months ago the same weight as those from this past week.

The size of Mr Trump’s lead varies widely by the quality of pollster, as assessed by FiveThirtyEight (see bottom chart). This early in the election cycle, the pollsters in its highest tier have run polls only sporadically. (An exception is a weekly survey by YouGov, an online pollster, for The Economist.) However, in total, 13 polls have been conducted in 2024 by firms in this group. On average, they show a virtual tie between Mr Trump and Mr Biden.

By contrast, most polls released in January 2024 have come from firms with good but not exceptional records. Polls in these (“good” and “decent”) tiers show Mr Trump with a 2.4-point and 1.7-point lead respectively. Meanwhile, pollsters with a poor record or no previous published results show Mr Trump with an average lead of around six percentage points.

National polls reflect the general mood, and correspond to the popular vote. But thanks to the electoral-college system, winning the popular vote is no guarantee of electoral victory. In 2000 and 2016, for example, Republican nominees won the presidency despite losing the popular vote. In recent decades the electoral college has benefited Republican candidates. If Mr Trump were to win the popular vote by a six-point margin, he would almost certainly win at least 358 electoral-college votes, giving him the largest Republican victory since George H.W. Bush‘s in 1988. This would bring into play even states that Mr Biden won comfortably in 2020, such as Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia.

To those who think that all polls are created equal, Mr Trump has opened a modest but growing lead nationwide. But to those who insist that pollsters’ historical accuracy predicts future accuracy, the candidates are in a dead heat. (ECON)

House Republicans are helping Vladimir Putin

Their cynicism over Ukraine weakens America and makes the world less safe

An illustration of a red elephant crushing a tank and barbed wires.

image: alberto miranda

Feb 7th 2024

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Politicians often put winning the next election above solving problems. Yet this week Republicans in the House of Representatives went a step further and sabotaged their own policy priorities to hurt President Joe Biden. Their cynicism makes America weaker, and gives comfort to its enemies.

For the past couple of years Republicans have made much of the chaos at the southern border, with good reason. There were 302,000 attempts by irregular migrants to cross in December alone. Knowing that Democrats wanted to pass a bill to supply Ukraine with fresh military aid, the House leadership paired the two issues, thinking that by doing so they could drive a harder bargain on immigration. A bipartisan group of senators went away and worked on a border compromise, the results of which are broadly in line with what Republicans had sought. The proposals would have helped reduce the flow of people coming across the southern border, which is a priority for voters.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

Rather than take this win, the House leadership then turned around and rejected the very thing they had been asking for. It is no mystery why they did this: Donald Trump wants to win votes by playing up the border chaos. He urged Republicans to kill the deal the Senate had come up with because he would rather keep the border as a livid campaign issue than see the problems there alleviated. After Mr Trump’s intervention, Republican senators abandoned it too, burying this latest Senate compromise in the crowded graveyard of failed immigration reforms, and leaving Republicans still complaining about the border and still refusing to do anything about it.

That is bad enough, but the damage Republicans have done goes far beyond America’s own shores. By killing the border bill, they have also set back the cause of Ukraine, which urgently needs more cash and kit to defend itself against invading Russians. Ukrainian soldiers cannot wait while some alternative funding idea percolates through a congressional committee. They need ammunition now. If they do not get it, they may not be able to repel the Russian spring offensive, and they could lose more of their country.

Without new legislation on Ukraine or the border, Mr Biden may tap some other Pentagon budget for a little bit of money—though nothing like enough. He can also tweak immigration enforcement through executive actions. But this will be tinkering to offset the harm caused by a massive political failure in Congress. Domestically, the consequence will be more border chaos, with tens of thousands of people crossing each month to claim asylum, and then disappearing into an overburdened immigration system. For the world, the fallout could be much worse.

The slowdown of American support is already hurting Ukraine on the battlefield, as can be seen from the dispute between the country’s president and the head of its armed forces. America’s friends are watching nervously; its enemies with gleeful anticipation.

If Uncle Sam fails to stand behind a democratic ally defending itself against an unprovoked invasion by a tyrant who is also the West’s most belligerent geopolitical foe, what good are American security guarantees in the Baltics or Taiwan or the Middle East? Ukraine has doggedly resisted Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions without endangering a single American soldier. To cut it loose would embolden aggressors everywhere and make the world less safe for everyone. House Republicans are no doubt congratulating themselves for making life harder for Mr Biden. If they had set out to harm America and help Mr Putin they could hardly have done a better job. (ECON)

Here Are the Republicans Who Broke With Their Party to Back Ukraine Aid

Party leaders, national security institutionalists and centrists made up the core of the 22 Republicans who joined Democrats in pushing through the military aid, defying former President Donald J. Trump.

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A silhouette of a person behind an American flag.

The defectors have cleared the way for approval within days of $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and allies in the Pacific region.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Carl Hulse

By Carl Hulse

Reporting from Capitol Hill

Published Feb. 12, 2024

Updated Feb. 13, 2024, 8:17 a.m. ET

Twenty-two Senate Republicans bucked a majority of their party and former President Donald J. Trump in joining Democrats to approve military assistance, highlighting a widening foreign policy divide in the contemporary Republican Party.

The 22 senators, mainly national security hawks who include several military veterans, provided the votes needed to overcome multiple filibusters backed by a majority of their colleagues, clearing the way for Senate approval early Tuesday morning of $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and allies in the Pacific region.

“The thread that binds that group together is national security,” said Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, who is one of the 22. “America’s national security, the belief that what happens in Ukraine matters to the United States, the belief that what happens in Israel matters and the belief that what happens in the South Pacific matters.”

Backing the funding has drawn condemnation from Mr. Trump and his allies, a major factor in the breadth of G.O.P. opposition to it.

Five Republicans who had balked at the bill ultimately voted for it on final passage after trying to use their opposition to win the chance to change it, an effort that proved unsuccessful. Still, less than half of the 49 Republicans voted for it.

“Although this legislation is not what we would have drafted, it is a strong bill that makes Idaho and America safer — our first responsibility,” Senators Jim Risch and Michael D. Crapo, both Idaho Republicans, said on Tuesday in a statement explaining their backing for the legislation after earlier votes to block it. Mr. Risch is the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Here’s a closer look at the defectors.

Senator Mitch McConnell.Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

All but two of the Senate’s Republican leaders

The group included the two top Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Thune of South Dakota, as well as two others on the leadership team: Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

Two other leaders, Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and Steve Daines of Montana, both of whom have endorsed Mr. Trump, voted no.

The sharp split on the funding inside the top echelons of the Senate Republican Conference mirrors a sharp division inside the party, which for much of the post-World War II era has been a strong proponent of exerting American power overseas and standing by U.S. allies. But there is a growing and strong sentiment among Republicans — encouraged by Mr. Trump — of withdrawing from foreign involvement.

Mr. McConnell has been among the most vocal proponents of sending aid to Ukraine. He has called Kyiv’s war against Russian aggression an existential issue and argued with increasing fervor in recent days that the United States must not abandon its democratic ally standing up against President Vladimir V. Putin.

Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has been leading an effort to slow-walk the military assistance measure, on Monday called the idea that bolstering Ukraine was essential to America’s national security “ludicrous.”

“I think sending money to Ukraine actually makes our national security more endangered,” Mr. Paul said. “The leadership has come together, but it is the wrong kind of compromise. It is a compromise to loot the Treasury. They are shoveling out borrowed cash.”

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Others who voted for the funding include Senators John Cornyn of Texas, a former top Republican who is interested in rejoining leadership, and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the longest-serving Senate Republican.

Senator Roger Wicker.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

National security leaders and veterans

Several members of the Armed Services Committee backed the bill, including Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the senior Republican on the panel, Senators Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, and Ms. Ernst.

Ms. Ernst served overseas as an Iowa National Guard officer, and Mr. Sullivan retired this month as a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. A third Republican veteran who has been a strong backer of the aid, Senator Todd Young of Indiana, is a former Marine officer.

Democrats have praised the Republicans who have joined them in the Ukraine effort.

“I think they understand the necessity of supporting Ukraine, particularly since this is a contest between a rules-based international order and Russian autocracy,” said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “They also understand that it could involve our service members soon.”

Senator Susan Collins.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Mainstream Republicans and appropriators

Members of the Appropriations Committee, including two more-centrist senators — Susan Collins of Maine, the senior Republican on the spending panel, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — were also instrumental in pushing the aid. Other appropriators behind the bill included Mr. Moran, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, John Boozman of Arkansas, John Hoeven of North Dakota and Ms. Capito.

The measure had the backing of a handful of others who have been known to break with their party and support bipartisan compromises, including Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee; Bill Cassidy of Louisiana; and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

“I think there is a common understanding that if we fail on this vote, if we don’t support Ukraine — this is not bluster, this is not hyperbole — bad things are going to happen,” Mr. Tillis said on Monday.

Republican backers of the legislation said they could not worry about Mr. Trump or the potential electoral consequences given the urgency behind the push to restrain Russia and avoid a wider war in Europe or Asia.

“The stakes are high, and we must meet the moment,” Ms. Collins said.

As for a potential backlash, Mr. Tillis said he was not worried.

“I slept like a baby last night,” he said, referring to his vote on Sunday to overcome the filibuster by a majority of his Republican colleagues.

The following is an alphabetical list of the 22 Republicans who joined Democrats in voting for the bill early Tuesday:

Senator John Boozman of Arkansas

Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana

Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota

Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho

Senator Susan Collins of Maine

Senator John Cornyn of Texas

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa

Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky

Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska

Senator Jim Risch of Idaho

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah

Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota

Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska

Senator John Thune of South Dakota

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi

Senator Todd Young of Indiana (NYT)

Russia is losing the battle for the Black Sea

Ukraine wants to keep trade flowing and destroy Russia’s fleet

Shipping to and from Ukrainian Black Sea ports along the temporary corridor

image: getty images

Jan 28th 2024|odessa

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On september 19th Ukrainian military and civilian shipping officers huddled in a secret control room to watch the Resilient Africa as it left Odessa’s Chornomorsk port. As this was the first vessel to leave using Ukraine’s new emergency shipping corridor, established after the collapse of a un-brokered grain deal, tensions were high. Russia had warned that it could open fire on ships using the corridor. Emergency services were on standby. “We readied ourselves for any scenario,” says one of those present in the room. “We were really quite nervous.” In the event, the ship sailed without incident, hugging 150km of Ukrainian coastline before entering first Romanian, then Bulgarian territorial waters, and continuing on through the Bosporus to its destination, the Israeli port of Haifa.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

The declaration of a shipping corridor in defiance of Russian bombardment was always going to be risky. But for Ukraine, it was a strategic necessity. Before the war, 60% of its trade went through its deep-sea ports, travelling to markets in Africa and the Middle East, as it had done for centuries. Russia’s decision to reimpose a blockade was an act of economic war.

So Ukraine began secretly devising its own alternative route. It chose the shallowest waters, safe from Russian submarines, and close enough to the coast to be covered by onshore artillery. “We believed it would work, but it was about convincing others,” says Yury Vaskov, Ukraine’s deputy infrastructure minister. The first ships sailed at a loss, but confidence has seen the cost of insuring ships that take the route fall by three-quarters, and profits return. Nearly 500 vessels have followed the Resilient Africa in and out of Odessa.

Back to the beginning

With 6.3m tonnes of goods exported in December, the Odessa region’s three ports—Odessa itself, Chornomorsk and Pivdenny—are now almost back to pre-war volumes. On an unusually sunny day in late January, the port of Odessa clinked to the rhythm of metal on metal. Fourteen ships stood loading in dock. Another 11 hung on the horizon, waiting their turn to be inspected by border officials, who shuttled in and out on speedboats. The border service is not only inspecting goods on board these days, but also checking for Russian saboteur groups, which remain a threat. Another wartime change is to subordinate all traffic in the region to a single maritime command. “We connect traders with the emergency services, ecological services, weather reports, missile attacks and air raid alerts,” says Yuriy Lytvyn, head of Ukraine’s Sea Port Authority. “It’s a unique Lego puzzle, a crazy amount of work.”

image: the economist

On dry land the work is much the same as ever: delicate, demanding, dangerous. Dockers down their tools only during air-raid alerts, which can last several hours at a time. The raids add about 30% to loading times, says Denys Paviglianiti-Karpov, head of the Odessa port authority. But the constant threat of missiles and drones means no one is in the mood to cut corners. “Crimea is just 160km away and the missiles sometimes land even before the sirens start,” he says. Inside the port, you don’t have to look hard to grasp the mortal dangers. The wreckage of the passenger terminal, mangled by an Onyx anti-ship missile on September 25th, is Russia’s most prominent calling card. But it is rare to see an intact roof or undamaged window here; corrugated plastic sheeting often replaces glass. The roads are pockmarked. A smell of burning lingers. In all, Russia has attacked nearly 200 port facilities since it withdrew from the grain deal in July.

Ukraine had to work hard to establish its own corridor, overturning Russia’s dominance of the Black Sea without a single working warship. The first success came soon after the Russian invasion, when Ukraine prevented an amphibious landing. It was a close-run thing, but the key moment was halting the Russian westward encirclement of Odessa 100 km away at Voznesensk in March 2022. Two months later, Ukraine was able to impose a 100-nautical-mile buffer in the north-western part of the Black Sea after destroying Russia’s Moskva flagship and regaining control of the strategic Snake Island. The third phase, completed over 2023, saw Ukraine push Russian warships entirely from the north-western, central and even south-western parts of the Black Sea.

This final part of the jigsaw was predicated on Ukraine’s maritime forces developing an arsenal of missiles and drones to hunt and sink Russian warships. Ukraine says it has destroyed at least 22 of the 80 working combat vessels of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and damaged another 13. Now not even the eastern coast of Crimea is considered safe for Russia’s ships; its best ones shelter in Novorossiysk, 600km away, on the other side of the Black Sea. “It’s a matter of time before we destroy the Black Sea Fleet in its entirety,” says Dmytro Pletenchuk, the Ukrainian navy’s spokesman.

A world-beating wager

Ukraine’s new deterrence capability has allowed it to bet that Russia will not attack a foreign merchant ship. Not only would an attack invoke international opprobrium, but the threat of escalation now means it would increase insurance premiums right across the Black Sea, including for Russia-bound shipping. So far Ukraine has won the bet, except over a Liberian-flagged ship that was struck, probably by accident, while docked in Pivdenny last November (the danger may be greatest when a ship is in dock). Russia can and does throw glide bombs from the air in the general direction of the emergency corridor. Mines from the second world war are also an occasional problem. Both are a nuisance, but not enough to deter large cargo ships.

The return to action of Odessa’s deep-sea ports is a timely boost to Ukraine’s battered economy. Oleksiy Sobolev, Ukraine’s deputy economy minister, says the unblocking of the sea is forecast to add at least $3.3bn to exports this year, adding 1.2 percentage points to gdp growth.

Yet those involved are too cautious to declare victory. One trader, responsible for one of Odessa’s largest private terminals, asked not to be named because he feared Russia would target his business. Mr Vaskov admits that the new corridor does not yet have enough air defences, international monitoring and, ideally, international military escorts to make it fully secure. But its functioning at the worst of times has proved a point: shipping can continue even during Russia bombardment. (ECON)

As this edition of the blog is drafted, DW News reports Ukraine has sunk another Russian ship in the Black Sea, a landing transport ship.

Vladimir Putin extends his crackdown in Russia

Even troublesome war supporters are targeted

Igor Girkin (Strelkov) sits inside a glass defendants' cage at the Moscow City Court

Marksman markedimage: afp

Feb 8th 2024

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On january 25th a Russian court sentenced Igor Girkin, a former officer of the fsb, Russia’s main security service, to four years in a penal colony for the crime of “public incitement of extremist activity”. His arrest last July, days after he had criticised Vladimir Putin’s wartime decisions and called the Russian president a “cowardly mediocrity” on social media, has sent shockwaves through Russia’s active community of pro-war nationalists, many of whom deem him a hero.

Mr Girkin’s reputation rests on his paramilitary career; under the codename Strelkov (“Marksman”), he proved a key figure in both the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the initial organisation of rebel groups in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. He remains a strong supporter of both the war and Russia’s resurgent national project, notwithstanding running afoul of the Kremlin. The case has heralded a shift in Kremlin prison policy, which now not merely punishes critics of the war but also seeks to rein in the excesses of troublesome supporters.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

Politically motivated cases in Russia have long resulted in draconian prison sentences, but the motivations for such prosecution have shifted with time. In the 2000s cases were brought against prominent business figures like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch, and Sergei Magnitsky, a tax adviser who later died violently while in custody. In the 2010s political prisoners tended to be involved in protest movements, as was the case with the band Pussy Riot and with the house arrest in 2014 of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, however, the policy shifted again and Russia’s many prisons started to be used as an instrument for punishing opponents of the war. Mr Navalny, who has been held in custody since 2021, has received two additional sentences since the invasion began: first for nine years and then for another 19.

Punishment even against grassroots activists has veered into the absurd. One example is the seven-year sentence imposed in mid-November on Sasha Skochilenko, an artist who replaced grocery-store price tags with criticisms of the Russian army and the war effort. Last summer Olga Smirnova, an activist, was sentenced to six years in jail in connection with seven war-related posts she had made on Vkontakte, a Russian social-media platform.

Cases such as these are launched selectively, and to set an example, says Sergey Troshin, a St Petersburg municipal councillor who has expressed public support for both Ms Smirnova and Ms Skochilenko. “The task the state set for itself was to take a few people and publicly hand them large sentences,” he said. “You can think of this as ‘precision repression’, and it makes people scared enough to halt their activism.”

According to ovd-Info, a human-rights monitor, approximately 160 Russians have been imprisoned and over 850 have been prosecuted for anti-war activities since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The prison system has also been used as a reward for loyalty as much as a punishment for defiance. Prisoners, many of whom had been convicted for multiple, violent crimes, have walked free with full pardons after serving in the Russian army in Ukraine for as little as six months. This has been framed in state-run media outlets and friendly social media as a reward for loyalty to a new national project centred on resistance to the West, the promotion of a multipolar world and Russia’s continuing influence in the “near abroad”.

However, a recent investigation conducted by bbc Russia uncovered a shift in policy. In an effort to curb local resentment, and probably to distance the president from what has proved to be a controversial policy during the runup to the presidential elections next month, ex-convict veterans are now required to serve until the war’s end in return for probation rather than a pardon. Exoneration may only be received in cases when soldiers reach the military’s age limit, earn a special commendation or are maimed in combat, described as “health loss”. (ECON)

Russia’s Advances on Space-Based Nuclear Weapon Draw U.S. Concerns

A congressman’s cryptic statement about new intelligence set Washington abuzz and infuriated White House officials.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia standing at a lectern wearing a dark suit.

The war in Ukraine has pitted the United States and its allies against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Credit...Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik, via Reuters

Julian E. BarnesKaroun DemirjianEric SchmittDavid E. Sanger

By Julian E. Barnes, Karoun Demirjian, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger

Julian E. Barnes, Karoun Demirjian and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and David E. Sanger from Berlin.

Feb. 14, 2024

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The United States has informed Congress and its allies in Europe about Russian advances on a new, space-based nuclear weapon designed to threaten America’s extensive satellite network, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.

Such a satellite-killing weapon, if deployed, could destroy civilian communications, surveillance from space and military command-and control operations by the United States and its allies. At the moment, the United States does not have the ability to counter such a weapon and defend its satellites, a former official said.

Officials said that the new intelligence, which they did not describe in detail, raised serious questions about whether Russia was preparing to abandon the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans all orbital nuclear weapons. But since Russia does not appear close to deploying the weapon, they said, it is not considered an urgent threat.

The intelligence was made public, in part, in a cryptic announcement on Wednesday by Representative Michael R. Turner, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He called on the Biden administration to declassify the information without saying specifically what it was.

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ABC News reported earlier that the intelligence had to do with Russian space-based antisatellite nuclear weaponry. Current and former officials said that the launch of the antisatellite did not appear imminent, but that there was a limited window of time, which they did not define, to prevent its deployment.

Concerns about placing nuclear weapons in space go back 50 years; it was even a sub-theme of “Star Trek” episodes in the late 1960s, just as the treaty was coming into effect. The United States experimented with versions of the technology but never deployed them. Russia has been developing its space-based capabilities for decades.

U.S. military officials have warned that both Russia and China are moving toward greater militarization of space, as all three superpowers work on ways to blind the others.

A report released last year, highlighted Russia’s development of weapons to blind other satellites but noted that Russia had refrained from using the full range of antisatellite capabilities it had developed.

Deploying a nuclear weapon in space would be a significant advancement in Russian technology and a potentially dramatic escalation. The Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear weapons in space, but Russia has been exiting many Cold War arms control treaties, seeing them as a restraint on its most important source of military power.

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Mr. Turner’s statement, and his decision to share the information with others in Congress, set Washington abuzz on Wednesday about what the intelligence was.

But the statement infuriated White House officials, who feared the loss of important sources of information on Russia. While Mr. Turner has been an ally to the White House on Ukraine aid, his remarks on Wednesday became the latest flashpoint in strained relations between the Biden administration and congressional Republicans.

The intelligence was developed in recent days, and while it is important, officials said it was not a break-the-glass kind of warning of any imminent threat. But Mr. Turner urged its release.

“I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the administration and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat,” Mr. Turner said.

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Representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio, right, speaking to a staff member at the Capitol.

Representative Michael R. Turner, Republican of Ohio, right, issued a cryptic statement calling on the Biden administration to declassify the material.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

His committee took the unorthodox move of voting on Monday to make the information available to all members of Congress — a step that alarmed some officials because it is not clear in what context, if any, the intelligence in the panel’s possession was presented. In a note to lawmakers, the House Intelligence Committee said the intelligence was about a “destabilizing foreign military capability.”

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Capitol Hill is mired in a bitter political standoff over whether the United States should be mobilizing resources to counter Russian threats to Ukraine, a cause that most Democrats and some Republicans — including Mr. Turner — have maintained is essential to protecting U.S. national security interests. But a majority of Republican members of the House, including Speaker Mike Johnson, reject calls to put the Senate-passed foreign aid package with $60.1 billion for Ukraine to a vote on the House floor.

Former President Donald J. Trump has egged on Republican opposition, saying over the weekend that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that had not spent enough money on its own defense.

Other officials said Mr. Turner was making more of the new intelligence than would ordinarily have been expected, perhaps to create pressure to prod the House to take up the supplemental funding request for Ukraine that the Senate passed this week.

That measure, providing military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, faces an uncertain prospect in the House. While many Republicans oppose additional funding, Mr. Turner is an outspoken advocate of more assistance to Ukraine and recently visited Kyiv, the capital.

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Shortly after Mr. Turner’s announcement, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, entered the White House press room to discuss the importance of continued funding for Ukraine’s military.

But Mr. Sullivan declined to address a reporter’s question about the substance of Mr. Turner’s announcement, saying only that he was set to meet with the chairman on Thursday.

“We scheduled a briefing for the House members of the Gang of Eight tomorrow,” Mr. Sullivan said, referring to a group of congressional leaders from both parties. “That’s been on the books. So I am a bit surprised that Congressman Turner came out publicly today in advance of a meeting on the books for me to go sit with him alongside our intelligence and defense professionals tomorrow.”

Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the issue was “serious” and that Mr. Turner was right to focus on it. But he added that the threat was “not going to ruin your Thursday.”

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said in a joint statement that the Senate Intelligence Committee had been tracking the issue from the start and had been discussing a response with the Biden administration. But the lawmakers said that releasing information about the intelligence could expose the methods of collection.

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Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, speaking to reporters at the White House.

Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, declined to address a reporter’s question about the substance of Mr. Turner’s announcement.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

At the White House, when Mr. Sullivan was asked whether he could tell Americans that there was nothing to worry about, he replied that it was “impossible to answer with a straight ‘yes.’”

“Americans understand that there are a range of threats and challenges in the world that we’re dealing with every single day, and those threats and challenges range from terrorism to state actors,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And we have to contend with them, and we have to contend with them in a way where we ensure the ultimate security of the American people. I am confident that President Biden, in the decisions that he is taking, is going to ensure the security of the American people going forward.”

Mr. Turner declined to respond to questions on Wednesday. Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, said the new intelligence was one of several “volatile threats” facing the United States.

“This is something that requires our attention,” Mr. Crow said. “There’s no doubt. It’s not an immediate crisis, but certainly something that we have to be very serious about.”

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Mr. Johnson, apparently trying to spread calm after Mr. Turner’s announcement, said there was “no need for public alarm.”

“We are going to work together to address this matter,” he said.

The Outer Space Treaty was one of the first major arms control treaties negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union, and one of the last remaining in place.

If Russia exited the space treaty, and let the New START treaty limiting strategic nuclear weapons expire in February 2026 — as seems likely — it could touch off a new arms race, of the kind not seen since the depths of the Cold War.

“Ending the Space Treaty could open the floodgates for other countries to put nuclear weapons in space as well,” said Steven Andreasen, a nuclear expert at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in Minneapolis. “Once you have orbital nuclear weapons, you can use them for more than taking out satellites.” (NYT)

Biden and Jordanian king warn about planned Israeli invasion of Rafah

The president appeared alongside an Arab leader at the White House for the first time since the Israel-Gaza war began

By Yasmeen Abutaleb and Matt Viser

Updated February 12, 2024 at 8:18 p.m. EST|Published February 12, 2024 at 5:22 p.m. EST

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden welcome King Abdullah II, Queen Rania Al Abdullah, and their son Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah, all of Jordan, at the White House on Monday. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

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President Biden and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, speaking jointly at the White House on Monday, warned against an indiscriminate Israeli invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, resulting in an event that had not occurred since the Israel-Hamas war began — the president standing alongside an Arab leader to voice reservations about the Israeli onslaught in the Palestinian enclave.

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“The major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan to ensure the safety and support of more than 1 million people sheltering there,” Biden said, referring to Israel’s publicly announced plans to invade the city. “Many people there have been displaced — displaced multiple times, fleeing the violence to the north. And now they’re packed into Rafah, exposed and vulnerable. They need to be protected.”

Abdullah was more direct. “We cannot afford an Israeli attack on Rafah. It is certain to create another humanitarian catastrophe,” the king said. Referring to the war more broadly, he added: “We cannot stand by and let this continue. We need a lasting ceasefire now. This war must end."

Panic mounts in Rafah

Biden himself has not publicly called for a ceasefire, saying Israel must be allowed to defend itself by rooting out and destroying Hamas’s base of operations in Gaza. But his willingness to stand alongside an Arab leader who did issue such a call was notable.

U.S. officials privately have told members of Congress that Israel is not close to eliminating Hamas, the stated goal of its military campaign, more than 100 days into the war, according to officials familiar with the briefing, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private exchange.

Biden: ‘Key elements' in Israel-Hamas negotiation on table

1:10

On Feb. 12, President Biden said that the United States continues its work on a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, though “gaps remain.” (Video: The Washington Post)

The joint comments by the president and the king Monday came after Biden met privately with Abdullah at the White House, the first face-to-face discussion the president has held with an Arab leader since the Israel-Gaza war began in October. The meeting came as U.S. officials have expressed deep concern about Israel’s plans to target the tiny town of Rafah, which borders Egypt and where about 1.3 million Palestinians are living in decrepit conditions after fleeing there under Israeli orders.

Despite Biden’s growing willingness to publicly challenge Israel’s conduct of the war, he and his top aides have not publicly supported restricting aid to Israel or imposing conditions on it, as many of the president’s liberal critics demand. And while National Security Council spokesman John Kirby last week said an Israeli operation in Rafah “would be a disaster for those people, and we would not support it,” the White House has not threatened specific consequences if Israel proceeds with its plans.

An Israeli operation overnight Sunday in Rafah succeeded in rescuing two hostages, but it also killed at least 67 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, raising fears among Arab leaders that a sustained Israeli operation there could kill and injure thousands more. The planned Rafah operation has also escalated fears of a forced displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians, as Arab leaders fear they will be pushed into Egypt — a goal that far-right cabinet members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have openly embraced.

Israeli operation rescues two hostages

Biden reiterated Monday that he and his top aides are working urgently to negotiate a six-week pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas in exchange for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, saying that could lay the groundwork for a permanent end to the war.

At a time when Biden has faced increasing criticism from Arab-American and Muslim voters angry over his staunch support for Israel and what they describe as a lack of empathy for Palestinians, Biden found a welcome ally in Abdullah. The president took the opportunity to highlight the suffering of the Palestinians, saying they are facing “unimaginable pain” and adding, “It’s heartbreaking. Every innocent life [lost] in Gaza is a tragedy, just as every innocent life lost in Israel is a tragedy as well.”

Jordan, whose population includes a large proportion of ethnic Palestinians, will almost certainly be key to any long-term American vision for the Middle East. Biden has said the war in Gaza must be followed by planning for a Palestinian state — a notion forcefully rejected by Netanyahu — and the United States believes that will require a thorough reform of the Palestinian Authority, which governs part of the West Bank. Jordan, which borders both Israel and the West Bank, would be central to any such effort.

In recent days, Biden has shown more willingness to take aim at the Israeli military operation in Gaza, last week calling it “over the top,” his strongest rebuke to date. But for months, Arab leaders in the United States and the Middle East have felt Biden’s public comments allowed little room for criticism of the hard-hitting military campaign.

Biden: Israel's attacks in Gaza 'over the top'

The conflict began on Oct. 7 of last year, when Hamas militants surged across Gaza border into Israel and killed about 1,200 people, largely civilians, who lived in nearby towns and kibbutzim. They also took some 250 hostages.

Israel since then has mounted a fierce retaliatory campaign in Gaza, killing more than 28,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In addition, more than 80 percent of the territory’s residents have been displaced, and an Israeli siege has put hundreds of thousands of residents at risk of famine and disease.

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Meanwhile, Israeli officials have resisted repeated U.S. calls to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave. Adding to the challenges are Israeli protesters who have blocked aid trucks from getting in to Gaza through the country’s Kerem Shalom crossing into the enclave.

Abdullah, whose wife, Queen Rania, is Palestinian, is one of few people who can speak to Biden in detail about the suffering in Gaza, said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has worked on Middle East issues in multiple U.S. administrations.

Biden and Abdullah have known each other for more than 20 years and have deep affection for each other, according to aides to both men. As vice president, Biden oversaw the Iraq portfolio for the Obama administration and made more than a dozen trips to the country. On each of those trips – either on the way over or the way back home – Biden stopped in Amman to visit Abdullah, Riedel said.

In the first months of his presidency, Biden demonstrated support for the Jordanian king after his half-brother threatened to destabilize the monarchy. Biden called the king immediately after the incident and voiced his full backing, a move that earned the deep gratitude of the monarch, experts said.

That longstanding relationship gives Abdullah the rare ability to speak in detail to Biden about the immense suffering in Gaza and appeal to his compassionate side, Riedel said.

“Abdullah can talk about all these issues in a level of candor that few other Arab leaders can because he knows Biden – they’ve been around together for a long time,” Riedel said. “I think he can be much more direct and candid. Part of the king’s objective here is to appeal to the empathetic part of Joe Biden and get him to show some empathy with the Palestinian people, which Biden needs to do for his own domestic political reasons.”

The conflagration in the Middle East, which has already spread to engage several Iran-backed militias in the region, carries the risk of significant political consequences for Biden. Arab Americans in Michigan and elsewhere are organizing to defeat him, and polls suggest that younger voters and people of color are deeply unhappy with his handling of the war.

Michigan's Muslims and Arab Americans work to defeat Biden

Abdullah’s visit to Washington comes at a precarious time in the conflict, when Biden is closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over the high civilian toll, disagreements over humanitarian aid, and Netanyahu’s rejection of a Palestinian state. More immediately, U.S. officials are highly concerned about Netanyahu’s announcement of the upcoming military operation in Rafah.

Biden, as he stood outside the White House awaiting Abduallah’s arrival, was asked if Netanyahu is listening to his advice.

He smiled broadly and said, “Everybody does.”

Abdullah’s trip to Washington is part of a tour to visit the United States, Canada, France and Germany, part of his effort to mobilize international support for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as well as the protection of civilians and for more humanitarian aid. Abdullah is also expected on Tuesday to meet senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as members of Congress.

Abdullah spoke to Biden about rising violence in the West Bank, as U.S. and Arab leaders fear another front in the war could open up as tension boils in that territory. More than 370 Palestinians — including about 100 children — have been killed in violent clashes in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The great majority have been killed by Israeli military forces, but some have been killed by violent settlers. Biden issued an executive order earlier this month that imposed sanctions on four West Bank settlers for violence against Palestinians.

The meeting on Monday was also the first visit since three U.S. military members were killed last month in an attack on an outpost in northeastern Jordan. Biden blamed Iranian-backed militias for the killings, which launched a round of retaliatory strikes.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Abdullah reiterated the position that the violence in the Middle East will not end without a two-state solution, calling for “an independent, sovereign and vital Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital ... living side-by-side with Israel.” (WP)

Opinion What do ‘Latino voters’ want? The GOP seems to know.

By Marie Arana

February 13, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

(Edel Rodriguez for The Washington Post)

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Marie Arana, a former editor of Book World and inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress, is the author of numerous books, most recently “Latinoland: America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” from which this essay is adapted. Simon & Schuster will publish the book later this month.

Is there such a thing as “the Latino voter”?

My father, a Peruvian, was something of a Republican, even when he wasn’t yet a citizen of the United States. For the first 15 years of my parents’ marriage, in Peru, he was mostly concerned with the careening allegiances of his own countrymen: the gaping divide between the elites and the poor; the wild, destabilizing vacillation between right wing and left wing in Latin America; the perpetual pendulum swing between oppression and revolution.

When my parents immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, looking for better opportunities for their children, they arrived as a sea change was afoot. The country had drifted from the rose-colored complacency of the 1950s; it was no longer the sparkling Arcadia my American mother had promised. The United States we encountered had embarked on a Cold War, committed civil rights atrocities that made a mockery of the American Dream, endured a slew of grisly assassinations, and experienced a radical change in the color of its immigrants.

The gaping divide between the two political philosophies in the gringo mind-set now became a regular theme at our Summit, N.J., dinner table.

“What exactly is the difference between a Republican and a Democrat?” my father asked. For him, a man who had lived through the vicissitudes of Peruvian politics, the separation between liberals and conservatives in his own mind was stark — more like the difference between a communist revolutionary and a hidebound military dictator.

“Well,” answered my mother, a descendant of generations who firmly believed in American exceptionalism, “a Republican believes in family, education, hard work, opportunity, individuality, the freedom to succeed on one’s own, the freedom from government interference and the conviction that a sturdy belief in God makes the rest possible.”

That was all it took.

Marie Arana's family outside their home in Paramonga, Peru, in 1956. From left: her brother, George; her sister, Victoria; her parents, Marie Elverine Clapp Campbell and Jorge Enrique Arana Cisneros; and Marie. (Family photo)

Jorge Arana Cisneros may have been a conservative by way of Latin American Catholicism and values, but he was by no means a ready-made Republican. He had always been a lover of scientific progress and its allies: individual curiosity, group commitment, chance. He had come from a culture that believed in education, hard work and faith in a supreme being; the conviction that talent could supersede any social barrier; the notion that intelligence, skill and drive — no matter a person’s rank — might be a person’s salvation.

When my mother described a Republican’s sense of individualism and self-reliance, he was convinced the description fit him completely.

It took many more years before he became a citizen, but once he did, he voted a Republican slate for the rest of his life. My mother broke ranks to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, by which time my father had decamped this mortal coil. I, on the other hand, had left the ranks of Republicans as a child, in that heartbreak year of 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. A few years later, repelled altogether by the rigid binary of two parties, two racial categories, and the with-us-or-against-us polemic of Vietnam War defenders, I became a registered independent — a not unusual choice for Hispanics like me, impatient with the system’s lack of nuance.

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For all the conjecture among so-called experts about Latinos’ party leanings and the assumption that we are natural-born Democrats or deep-down Republicans, there is little predictable about our politics, just as there is little predictable about our race, class or beliefs. Gallup Polls indicate that we are weak Democrats and shaky Republicans at best, with more than half of us claiming to be independents at heart.

Increasingly, we are an unclassifiable, protean agglomeration of Americans — a web of contradictions — adrift in a purple sea.

This is where Democrats, who have assumed a lock on the “Latino vote” for almost a century, so often go wrong. And it is where Republicans, playing the long game, are placing huge bets on winning.

It is far too early to know how the 2024 election will shake out. And polling, as history tells us, can be spectacularly unreliable. But it is nonetheless notable that in at least two recent surveys, former president Donald Trump was polling ahead of President Biden among Hispanic voters.

A sign marking the entrance to a voting precinct in Phoenix in 2022. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

Cristina Beltrán, a political theorist who thinks well beyond the confines of any partisan strategy, has characterized the Latino population as nearly impossible to view as a single entity, either socially or politically. According to her, we have long been portrayed as a community on the cusp of political power, a power we never quite seem to reach. As a result, we are seen as a stubborn breed: politically passive, difficult to mobilize.

We are, to put a finer point on it, a sleeping Leviathan that, from time to time, stirs ever so slightly and squints out into the world only to fall back into hapless obscurity. And yet the very image of a giant waiting to flex its electoral muscle and redefine the social and political landscape of this country presumes a collective consciousness, a uniform identity.

There are a few realities we share. It is true that all Latinos can trace their roots to somewhere near or south of the Rio Grande. It is also true that most of us claim the mantle of Latinidad and say so on the census, whether we call ourselves Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latine or Latinx. Sometimes we even speak alike. Often we celebrate “our heritage,” “our culture,” “our music.” Which might lead some to believe that we think alike. But, as Beltrán points out, we do nothing of the kind.

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There is no Latino mind-set. Indeed, there are often stark differences of opinion among the major groups of origin, depending on age, religion and dominant language (Spanish or English). Mexican Americans and Cubans are often less approving of affirmative action quotas than Puerto Ricans, for instance. The majority of Mexican Americans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans say abortion should be legal, whereas Central Americans are more likely to oppose it. Defying widely held stereotypes, Mexican Americans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, as dynamically different as they are, do not necessarily support “traditional” roles for women; all three are more likely than Anglos to agree that a woman is better off if she has a career.

Latinos may not want exactly the same things from our government — making us fair game for both parties — but, from the surveys, at least, our priorities are fairly clear.

According to 2022 data from Pew Research Center, the cardinal concern of Latinos who lean toward the Democratic Party is affordable health care; their other top priorities are, in descending order: economic security (jobs), education, gun safety and the need to address climate change. On the other hand, the hot topic for Latinos who lean Republican is economic security; and, in descending order, violent crime, education, immigration and the nation’s voting policies.

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These priorities, for the most part, agree along party lines. But they are also the basic, everyday issues we all care about as Americans. As Rep. Ritchie Torres, an Afro-Latino Democrat from New York’s poorest district, suggests, Hispanics in the South Bronx want the same thing as Hispanics in Arizona: We are, he says, like most populations, struggling to clamber onto the next rung, “practical rather than ideological. The concerns are bread and butter, health and housing, schools and jobs.”

Latinos want, in other words, what every other American wants. And Republicans seem to understand this better than Democrats.

Although Latinos have been largely faithful to the Democratic ticket, there is no question that the party has been taking them for granted. The assumption has been that if they are immigrants and poor, they are surely in need of social services, and so they must be hardcore Democrats.

Some years ago, Harry M. Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, summed up this attitude when he blurted to a crowd of Hispanics in Las Vegas: “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay. Do I need to say more?” The editorial page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal snapped back: “They all think alike, right Sen. Reid?” The paper also said, “Indeed, how could the concepts of limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty ... have any relevance to Hispanics?”

The senator’s remark had been ham-handed, even clueless. But it was also revealing: Democrats have felt entitled to the Latino vote for some time — and not without reason. Most Latinos do believe liberals care more about them than conservatives do. Yet Republicans are eagerly taking advantage of a growing segment of Latinos who are disenchanted with that presumption.

Women organized by Mi Familia Vota, a national civic-engagement nonprofit, decorated their cars with a "get out the vote" theme in preparation for a parade en route to an early voting location in Las Vegas on Oct. 24, 2020. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

For the past half-century, it is true that Latinos as a whole have tended to vote Democratic. But analysts have observed, too, that we are more apt to have lower voter turnout than any other bloc, which means any projections about the Hispanic population as a whole are inherently flawed. Half a populace does not represent a unified voice, a robust political engine or even — as some pundits imagine — a reliable swing vote.

For instance, in some counties in Texas where Hispanic populations are sizable, voter turnout has been as paltry as 17 percent. Even as recently as the 2020 presidential election, only half of all eligible Hispanic Americans went to the polls, well below the overall 71 percent of White voters and far less than the number of African and Asian Americans.

Why do Latinos stay away? For many, a lack of interest in the voting process is simply a byproduct of disillusionment or distrust. Those who fail to participate may have emigrated from a country in which voter suppression is common. Or they are afraid to vote, reveal their addresses and call attention to the immigration status of someone in their household. Or they may feel that neither the red team nor the blue team represents them exactly — that a two-party system with no room for nuance doesn’t serve their slice of the American pie.

That said, Latinos account for half the increase in the growth of eligible U.S. voters since the 2020 election, according to Pew, and are projected to make up 14.7 percent of all eligible voters this November. As ever, it is hard to pin down precisely what will drive them to cast a ballot — if they turn out.

They could, for instance, be moved by the Supreme Court’s historic decision to dismantle Roe v. Wade. (One 2022 survey found that 82 percent of Latino voters support reproductive freedom, whether or not they would choose abortion.) Or, they might be counted among the steady stream of Latinos who join evangelical churches every day and are encouraged to take their faith to the polling place. “Don’t just pray,” the Pentecostalist Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, founder and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, tells a congregation of millions. “Register all the people in your church to vote life, liberty and biblical justice” — be a political force, in other words, a catalyst of change.

What we do know: Despite Donald Trump’s outrageous remarks about Mexicans at the launch of his 2016 campaign for president (accusing them of being “criminals, drug dealers, rapists”), and despite his austere anti-immigrant policies (separating migrant children from their families), he racked up almost 30 percent of the Latino vote in 2016 and expanded that count in his failed 2020 run for reelection. (WP)

Inside the race to grasp the fate of the Colorado River

For decades, officials have tried to predict the river’s future flows. Now they’re hoping innovative, web-based tools will help salvage the lifeline it provides.

By Joshua Partlow

February 11, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

In this photo from March 2023, the discolored area beneath the shoreline shows where Lake Mead once resided along the Nevada-Arizona boarder, near Boulder City, Nev. (John Locher/AP)

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BOULDER, Colo. — To ensure that the Colorado River can remain a lifeline for 40 million people, the federal government is looking for answers in the extremes of the distant past and the warnings of a hotter future.

In a low-slung building at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a group of engineers and scientists have developed a cutting-edge approach to help negotiators fashion the next major deal to divvy up the dwindling river for decades to come.

Despite significant rainfall in recent months, Lake Mead could return to near-historic lows by 2025. As the Bureau of Reclamation looks to reach a deal by the end of the year — before a potential change in administration — the agency is, for the first time, putting climate change at the center of how it’s planning the future.

Those who rely on the river are now testing water-sharing strategies with the agency’s new web-based tool that harnesses more than 8,000 possible futures of the river to see how policies stand up against the wild swings and uncertainties brought on by the warming climate.

“We ultimately get a very wide range of conditions that could happen under climate change,” Rebecca Smith, a Reclamation official, said during a November seminar. “And scientists don’t expect that to be narrowing anytime soon.”

The force driving this innovation is a chilling one: Policymakers’ recognition that the way they’ve forecast the river’s future no longer works.

A mother and daughter check out a previously submerged boat on Lake Mead in June 2022 in Boulder City, Nev. (Roger Kisby for The Washington Post)

By relying on records of the river’s flow over the last century, the federal government and western states repeatedly underestimated the drought and failed to keep major reservoirs from nearing dangerous levels that could threaten the water supply for millions of people. Over the years, Reclamation has looked to climate science to solve the real world problem of a shrinking Colorado River, according to river experts and people involved in the effort. Even so, the deals struck with states over the past two decades to cope with the drought did not incorporate climate change models into the simulations of the river used to set long-term policy.

This is changing now. Reclamation’s new approach will test policies against a future informed by climate models that project warming to continue, as well as tree ring records of ancient droughts far worse than anything in the recent past — incorporating a much wider range of possible river flows than available in the recent historical record.

“We’re teetering right on the edge here of being able to say, yep, climate change models are a part of our decision-making,” said Terry Fulp, who spent three decades with Reclamation, including eight years as the Lower Colorado River Basin regional director until retiring in 2020. “It’s been a long time coming.”

To do this, a wonky band of government officials and academics are diving into a new world of unpredictability.

Their approach is called “decision-making under deep uncertainty” and it throws out the notion that anyone can predict what the future flow of the river might be — a strategy that led to Reclamation being in a “crisis management mode,” said one official not authorized to speak publicly.

The most recent crisis eased about a year ago. The nation’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell, nearly dropped to the point where its hydroelectric dam could no longer produce power. It was saved by an unusually wet winter — and a short-term deal with states to conserve water in exchange for billions in federal money. But scientists warn that renewed drought could quickly threaten the region again.

“Last year was maybe the anomaly,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

Rethinking past assumptions

When Fulp joined Reclamation in 1989, the future of the Colorado River was planned on a single computer in a suburban Denver office building.

The lumbering mainframe at the Lakewood office took up an entire room and slowly churned out rows of numbers on perforated paper — a simulation of how the most important river in the West would be distributed among its dozen major reservoirs for years into the future.

The only people who could use this model — known as the Colorado River Simulation System, or CRSS, were federal government water managers such as Fulp. And to make tweaks required rewriting its code in the now-archaic computer language called Fortran. It was, Fulp recalled, “really cumbersome.”

In the early 1990s, Fulp teamed up with academics at UC Boulder’s Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems to develop software known as RiverWare and a version of the CRSS model that could be used by others reliant on the river, from states and cities to farmers and tribes.

In the Colorado River basin, the states were competing more for water; new federal environmental laws required comparing alternatives before making resource decisions; and many distrusted the federal government.

“They all hated Reclamation,” recalled Edith Zagona, a former Reclamation official who directs the UC Boulder Center. “We had to prove to them that this newfangled software could work. They didn’t want anyone pulling a fast one on them.”

Joseph Kasprzyk and Edith Zagona, of the Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems, pose in front of their research in Boulder, Colo. “We had to prove to them that this newfangled software could work,” said Zagona, the CADSWES director. (Matthew Staver for The Washington Post)

Over the years, the software and the models running on it became a fundamental tool for settling disputes, avoiding litigation among rival parties and reaching agreements on how the water could be stored and distributed. It’s used on several major rivers in the United States, including the Columbia River and the Rio Grande.

The CRSS model simulates the flow of water through canals, pipelines and reservoirs as the Colorado traverses 1,450 miles, seven states and two countries — from the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez. Programmed into it are the rules that govern who gets priority access to that water — the complex web of regulations, statutes, treaties and court cases that date back more than a century, known as the Law of the River.

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It can reveal how changes in water supply, demand or the policy environment will impact issues including reservoir levels, hydropower production, flood control or protecting the endangered fish that swim through the Grand Canyon.

To run it, water managers must estimate the streamflow entering the river system. Since the model was first developed, they’ve based this on what had been observed on the Colorado River dating back to 1906.

Scientists knew this period included very wet years in the 1920s, when the western water sharing deal was forged, and in the 1980s, when Lake Powell almost overflowed the Glen Canyon Dam. But the 20th century record was seen as the best way to understand what the river was capable of doing.

“It was almost universal in water planning: the assumption that the future would look like the past,” said Jeff Lukas, a climatologist and Colorado River researcher.

But after the drought started in 1999 — and Lake Mead and Lake Powell commenced their long decline — there were growing doubts about the usefulness of the 20th century record. One major warning came in the form of tree rings.

The rings inside logs, stumps and standing dead trees told a much older story of how much water was available in the Colorado River basin. Researchers in 2007 created a record that dated back to 762 A.D. that revealed punishing Medieval droughts, including a 62-year dry stretch in the 1100s that produced streamflows lower than anything in the 20th century.

With levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropping from nearly full, in 2000, to about half full five years later, Reclamation and the states negotiated an agreement over how to operate the reservoirs as they declined — and how shortages would be divvied up.

In 2007, the modeling predicted a zero percent chance that Lake Powell’s elevation would fall to the point that it couldn’t help produce power by 2026. Last year, states struck an emergency deal to make unprecedented cuts in water use to avoid that very fate.

The Glen Canyon Dam is located on the Colorado River in Page, Ariz. In the 1980s, Lake Powell almost overflowed the dam. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Charting the river’s future

In 2012, after a decade of drought, Reclamation published a major study assessing the health of the Colorado River and what the warming climate would mean for its future.

It wasn’t a simple answer. The leading global climate models needed to be adapted to the Colorado River region — where topography in the Rocky Mountains varied widely — then combined with other models to estimate stream flows. While the results consistently projected higher temperatures for the region, with less snowpack in the Rockies and more frequent droughts, it was — and remains — less clear how much rain and snow would fall each year.

“The precipitation part of climate model output is not good,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. “It still continues to have problems, especially on a regional basis, getting things right.”

A Rand Corp. scientist named David Groves, who had been hired to help on the 2012 study, saw this uncertainty as an opportunity to rethink how river modeling was done. Instead of trying to make possibly incorrect predictions about what the Colorado River would look like in the future, he and his colleagues advocated to test different river management strategies against thousands of possible futures of the river derived from a wide range of sources — the tree ring record, climate models, the historical record — to see how well they held up.

At the time, such intensive computer modeling was slow. In November 2014, Groves convened a group of Colorado River stakeholders at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to show how the lab’s supercomputers could accelerate the process. He tested policies against 12,000 river scenarios — something that would normally take six weeks.

“While we fed them lunch, we ran the supercomputer and it did the whole analysis in an hour,” Groves said.

Back then, he said, there were plenty of ominous possible outcomes in his analysis, including that Lake Mead would disappear if consumption patterns continued.

“People saw it and it worried them,” Groves recalled. “But even if someone says this is what could happen, you can still say, ‘Well, that’s far off.’”

By the fall of 2022, Lake Mead and Lake Powell were just a quarter full. And Reclamation was predicting a more than 50 percent chance these lakes would drop below critical thresholds without further action, although forecasts are now less dire.

Trying to avoid disaster

The new web tool, built by Virga Labs, a water consulting firm, in partnership with Zagona’s center and Reclamation, is the culmination of years of work on the science of “decision-making under deep uncertainty.” It uses cloud-computing to run the CRSS model in thousands of variations in ways that haven’t been possible in the past, said Virga Labs chief executive Season Martin.

But the tool also represents a more fundamental change in how Reclamation looks at the problem of a dwindling Colorado River. Instead of trying to assign probabilities about future risk, the agency aims to test different ways to manage the river against the widest possible range of river scenarios — and see what works best to avoid disaster.

“We want to know that things are going to be okay even in really challenging conditions,” Smith, the Reclamation official, said in November.

Buschatzke, Arizona’s top water official, called the new modeling tool a “very positive step forward,” because it allows people or entities without the technical expertise to explore changes in river management. But he expects his agency to continue to run numbers and test strategies the old way, as well.

“We’ve spent enough time and effort learning how to do it,” he said.

Reclamation said it will also use other analytical methods it has relied on in the past as it assesses the proposals that states are expected to present in March on how to share a river stressed by climate change.

Not everyone is confident this new approach will deliver better results — or keep reservoirs from running dry in the future.

Udall, the Colorado State University scientist, said sophisticated new tools may give the illusion of being able to find a safe path forward for a river whose natural flow is down 20 percent in the past two decades. Simply cutting the amount of water states can take by a big amount may be wiser, he said.

“I think we get too clever by half with all this technology,” he said. “I think you can make this process a whole lot simpler. Which is we need to plan for a lot lower flows, and let’s not hide behind or obscure some of these tough details with really complicated models.” (WP)

Supreme Court Poised To Deliver Massive Blow To Deep State

Posted on Wednesday, February 14, 2024

by AMAC Newsline

56 Comments

AMAC Exclusive – By Katie Sullivan

The United States Supreme Court

The Supreme Court looks set to finally rein in the power of unelected federal bureaucrats and restore the Constitution’s separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Two cases the Court will rule on this term, Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo could overturn the precedent set in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) – a ruling that many legal scholars view as the origin point for the unchecked growth of federal agencies.

In order to understand the significance of the Relentless and Loper cases, it is necessary to first understand the history behind Chevron.

In that case, the Chevron Corporation challenged the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) interpretation of the Clean Air Act. The EPA had issued regulations allowing states to adopt less stringent emission controls for certain industrial facilities if they met specific criteria. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) argued that the EPA’s interpretation was incorrect and that the Clean Air Act required more stringent controls.

In essence, the question at the heart of Chevron was about the leeway that federal agencies should have when enforcing laws passed by Congress.

To answer that question, the Supreme Court, in a landmark decision authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, articulated a two-step framework for reviewing agency interpretations of statutes.

First, a court must determine if the statutory language (or the text of the law) in question is ambiguous. If the statute is not ambiguous, the court is to apply the plain meaning of the statute when determining if a federal agency acted within its constitutional authority.

If a court determines the statutory language in question is ambiguous using all interpretive means available, they must move on to step two, which requires the court to defer to the involved agency’s reasonable interpretation of the statute. This means the court does not decide what the statute means or apply its own definitions when an agency is involved. Instead, the court must uphold the bureaucratic agencies’ determination of the meaning of statutes enacted by Congress.

The ruling established the term “Chevron Deference,” which has had a profound impact on administrative law. Since being decided in 1984, the case has been cited in approximately 15,000 judicial decisions, making it one of the most cited Supreme Court decisions of all time.

Ironically, when Chevron was decided, many conservatives touted it as a win, claiming it prevented unelected federal judges from making decisions about the meaning of statutory language and instead left interpretation up to those with expertise in the applicable field – ostensibly federal bureaucrats.

But it soon became clear that Chevron Deference would become a powerful weapon for the administrative state to expand its own power – primarily because determining whether a statute is “ambiguous” is a subjective exercise. Throughout oral arguments in the Relentless and Loper cases, for instance, lawyers for the fisheries have provided example after example showing some circuit court judges finding ambiguity in statutory language with alarming frequency, while other judges have found the same language to be unambiguous.

As long as federal agencies can ensure their case is heard in a friendly court, Chevron Deference practically ensures that their interpretation of federal law – no matter how divorced it was from the actual language of the law – would win out. According to a Michigan Law Review article from 2016 which reviewed more than 1,500 cases, “the circuit courts overall upheld 71% of [agency] interpretations and applied Chevron deference 77% of the time.”

The specific issue in Relentless and Loper is whether the Magnuson-Stevens Act passed in 1976, authorizes the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to promulgate a rule that would require fishing companies to pay the salaries of federal government “observers” on their boats. Lawyers for Relentless have argued that if all the justices did not agree with the fisheries’ interpretation of the statute, under Chevron, they would still have to defer to the agency’s interpretation, as long as the interpretation was reasonable. The administrative state therefore has more power than the judiciary – a clear violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Although the Court could rule in favor of the fisheries without overturning Chevron, many conservatives are anticipating a sweeping ruling that reverses the 1984 decision. As Washington University Law Professor Sanne Knudsen has noted, the Court’s 6-3 majority includes justices who have openly criticized Chevron while serving on lower courts.

Should the Court decide to overrule Chevron, which it seems inclined to do after oral arguments in early February, it would be a major win in reigning in the currently unchecked power given to federal agencies, which have become overtly politicized and weaponized against conservatives.

Chevron upset the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, tipping the scales wildly in favor of the executive branch and paving the way for the growth of dangerously powerful federal agencies. Now, the Court has a chance to correct that error. (Association for Mature American Citizens, AMAC)

Famed climate scientist wins million-dollar verdict against right-wing bloggers

The verdict comes amid heightened attacks on scientists working on climate change, vaccines and other issues

By Dino Grandoni

February 8, 2024 at 5:38 p.m. EST

Michael Mann outside the H. Carl Moultrie Courthouse in D.C. on Monday. (Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post)

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Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist, won his long-standing legal battle against two right-wing bloggers who claimed that he manipulated data in his research and compared him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky, a major victory for the outspoken researcher.

A jury in a civil trial in Washington on Thursday found that the two writers, Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn, defamed and injured the researcher in a pair of blog posts published in 2012, and awarded him more than $1 million.

“I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech,” Mann said in a statement

Mann’s victory comes amid heightened attacks on scientists working not just on climate change but also on vaccines and other issues. But the case was one that some critics worried could have a stifling effect on free speech and open debate in science.

“Inflammatory does not equal defamatory,” Victoria Weatherford, an attorney for Simberg, repeatedly told the jury during the trial.

The verdict is a dozen years in the making for the climatologist, who for decades has been a target of right-wing critics over his famous “hockey stick” graph.

“We normally let scientists fight it out amongst themselves to discover what the truth is,” said Lyrissa Lidsky, a defamation expert at the University of Florida. “In these science cases, there’s a lot of leeway for opinion. It doesn’t mean there’s carte blanche to lie about another scientist.”

Early in his career, Mann used data from tree rings, ice cores and coral reefs to show global temperatures were relatively stable until the Industrial Revolution. But after humans started burning fossil fuels in large quantities, Mann and his colleagues found, temperatures spiked over the past century.

Today, Mann is one of the most famous climate scientists in the country, having written half a dozen books, appearing on numerous TV shows and amassing more than 200,000 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter). As a public figure, he faced a high bar during the nearly month-long trial to prove his defamation claim.

In a 2012 column titled “The Other Scandal in Unhappy Valley,” published on a website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Simberg wrote that Mann had “molested and tortured data” of global warming and compared Mann to Sandusky, who was a Pennsylvania State University football coach who had been arrested for molesting young boys. At the time, Mann was a professor at Penn State.

In the National Review, Steyn quoted the article and added: “Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point.”

“Calling Michael Mann’s work fraudulent is just patently false,” said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a group that helped defend scientists facing legal attack in 34 cases last year as of October. Mann, she added, has been “exonerated” of wrongdoing by multiple investigations into his work.

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“Climate scientists are still regularly targeted by climate deniers, even though the science is quite clear at this point,” she added.

The jury awarded Mann $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn in punitive damages, meant to punish wrongdoing. And it granted Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each writer for Mann’s actual losses.

Simberg was found liable for statements that compared Mann to Sandusky but was cleared on other statements criticizing Mann’s scientific work.

“I am pleased that the jury found in my favor on half of the statements at issue in this case, including finding my statement that Dr. Mann engaged in data manipulation was not defamation,” Simberg said in a statement. “In over a decade of litigation, the sanctions levied against Dr. Mann dwarf the judgment against me.”

During closing arguments, Steyn, a radio and TV personality who spoke for himself during much of the trial, said he still “stand[s] on the truth of every word I wrote about Michael Mann, his fraudulent hockey stick and the corrupt investigative process at Penn State.”

In a statement after the verdict, Steyn’s manager, Melissa Howes, suggested he would appeal the $1 million in punitive damages.

“We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue. And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages,” Howes said in a statement. “The punitive damage award of one million dollars will have to face due process scrutiny under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.”

For many, the trial was about more than just Mann, who said he suffered emotional distress and lost out on opportunities for funding and participating in studies.

The two sides spent days arguing about not just the blog posts but also the veracity of Mann’s “hockey stick” and the field of climate science itself, as well as over how far the First Amendment extends protections to critics.

“There is a bit more First Amendment leeway for hyperbolic statements,” Kurtz said. But she added that comparing Mann to a child molester is “false” and “grotesque.” (WP)

Senate passes $95 billion Ukraine, Israel aid package amid GOP divide

The measure, opposed by Trump and his Senate allies, faces uncertain prospects in the House as Ukraine struggles to repel Russia’s invasion

By Liz Goodwin

Updated February 13, 2024 at 12:05 p.m. EST|Published February 12, 2024 at 9:21 p.m. EST

Senate passes $95 billion Ukraine, Israel aid package

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The Senate passed a $95 billion national security package to aid Israel, Ukraine and other U.S. allies early Feb. 13 after a monthslong debate. (Video: The Washington Post)

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The Senate passed a $95 billion national security package to aid Israel, Ukraine and other U.S. allies early Tuesday after a months-long debate that has deeply divided congressional Republicans.

The bill passed 70-29, after 22 Republicans joined Democrats in approving the aid.

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But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) preemptively rejected the legislation on Monday night, saying in a statement that the package’s failure to address U.S. border security makes it a nonstarter in the House.

“In the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters,” Johnson said in a statement. “America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.”

Johnson and other House leaders helped torpedo an earlier version of the legislation, which includes sweeping border security measures and other reforms.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) holds a news conference on Capitol Hill last week. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)

The aid package has been long awaited by the White House, which requested the funds in October, shortly after Israel came under attack by Hamas. Republicans, including Johnson, demanded that a border security piece be attached to it in exchange for their votes. But they abandoned the proposal amid opposition from former president Donald Trump, who has made the border crisis a core campaign issue and has complained that the border reforms would help President Biden and Democrats.

“These past few months have been a great test for the U.S. Senate to see if we could escape the centrifugal pull of partisanship and summon the will to defend Western democracy when it mattered most,” Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said after the bill passed in the Senate. “Today, the Senate has resoundingly passed the test.”

Schumer told The Washington Post that the “onus” is now on Johnson to put the bill on the floor where he predicted it would get a “robust” bipartisan vote.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement after the vote: “History settles every account. And today, on the value of American leadership and strength, history will record that the Senate did not blink.”

Biden also urged the House to pass the bill. “If we do not stand against tyrants who seek to conquer or carve up their neighbors’ territory, the consequences for America’s national security will be significant,” the president said in a statement.

Ukraine funding has become unpopular among GOP base voters, and Trump said at a recent rally that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO nations that he views are not spending enough money on defense. (NATO nations aim to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, a standard that 11 countries met in 2023.) Trump also explicitly opposed the foreign aid package, saying in a recent social media post that he believes aid should be given as a loan.

There are efforts underway to go around Johnson and pass the bill through a Democratic-led discharge petition. Democrats need to gather at least four signatures from Republicans supportive of Ukraine funding to be able to introduce the petition, which probably wouldn’t happen until the end of the month given the congressional calendar.

Its path would still be tricky in the House, given that some Democrats have objected to the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza, where most homes have been destroyed or damaged, more than 12,300 Palestinian children have been killed and a quarter of the population is starving, according to the United Nations. Enough Republicans would need to support the bill to make up for those Democrats who would not vote for the bill over the aid to Israel.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) leaves a luncheon before a vote last week. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Bringing the legislation to the floor through a discharge petition — which requires 218 members to support it — would avoid Johnson having his fingerprints on the proposal amid calls by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and others to remove him as speaker if he puts a Ukraine funding bill on the House floor for a vote.

In addition to the $60 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel, the national security legislation also includes more than $9 billion in humanitarian assistance to Gaza, Ukraine and other nations; spends nearly $5 billion on Indo-Pacific allies, including Taiwan; and prohibits U.S. funding from the law from going to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency that operates in Gaza and the West Bank, following allegations that some of its employees were involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) were the only members of the Democratic caucus to vote against the legislation, citing the staggering civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza.

The Pentagon has said Ukraine urgently needs this aid and risks running out of ammunition as it continues to fend off a Russian invasion that began in 2022.

“For us in Ukraine, continued US assistance helps to save human lives from Russian terror,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a social media post thanking the Senate for passing the aid. “It means that life will continue in our cities and will triumph over war.”

Trump’s presence has loomed over the aid package in Congress, as some Republicans echoed his rhetoric opposing sending Ukraine aid and then later tanked the border deal they demanded, after Trump said he didn’t like it.

GOP senators have been fighting with each other for weeks over the package, with some critics arguing that McConnell led them into a political box in which Democrats have claimed the edge on border security after the GOP defected from the border deal that the generally pro-Republican Border Patrol union endorsed.

“Why did Republicans stab their voters in their back?” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) asked Monday on the Senate floor, referring to the decision to vote for the package without securing the southern border. (Vance, along with almost every Republican, voted against the border security component last week.)

A vocal faction of McConnell critics has grown louder over the past several days, with a handful even calling for his ouster, as Senate Republicans gathered in meeting after meeting arguing about the uncomfortable political situation in which they find themselves. “Clearly there is more objection to foreign involvement in the Senate now than there used to be,” McConnell told The Post in an interview last week. But he said he was “willing to take the heat” to force the politically divisive issue.

Democrats have raised alarms about the lack of unity on the Republican side to aid U.S. allies, as well as about Trump’s rhetoric.

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, called Trump’s comments “frankly frightening” and said they would encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin as he wages war on Ukraine. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Trump was “signaling” to Putin that he would “hand” him Ukraine if he becomes president.

But on the final vote, several Republicans who had been opposing the bill joined their 17 colleagues who had been voting for the measure earlier. (NYT)

Precision equipment for Russian arms makers came from U.S.-allied Taiwan

Moscow-based importer also sought to supply a secretive Kremlin effort to mass-produce attack drones, a Post examination found

By Dalton Bennett, Mary Ilyushina, Lily Kuo and Pei-Lin Wu

February 1, 2024 at 8:05 a.m. EST

(Illustration by Natalie Vineberg/The Washington Post; Wojciech Grzedzinski/For The Washington Post; Felipe Dana/AP; Obtained by The Post; iStock)

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It had been a busy year for the employees gathered in June for I Machine Technology’s corporate retreat at a resort on Russia’s Black Sea coast. With war raging in Ukraine, the Russian defense industry was hungry for the advanced manufacturing equipment the Moscow-based supplier specialized in importing.

Dressed in summer linens, chief executive Aleksey Bredikhin welcomed the crowd seated among plates of local delicacies and flutes of prosecco. He paused to recognize several guests who had traveled thousands of miles to join the festivities in Sochi.

“I especially want to welcome our friends from faraway Taiwan,” he said, video footage of the event posted online shows. “For almost a year now, we have been working very hard.”

Since January 2023, I Machine Technology has imported over $20 million of sophisticated equipment called CNC machine tools made in Taiwan, a U.S. strategic partner, according to trade records and Russian tax documents obtained by The Washington Post. The computer-controlled machines are used for the complex and precise manufacturing that is critical in many industries, including weapons production.

The Taiwan-made machines accounted for virtually all of the Russian company’s imports in the first seven months of last year, according to the records, and the company’s sales during that period were overwhelmingly to the Russian defense industry. Bredikhin also sought to make the machines available for a secretive Russian effort to mass-produce the attack drones that have unleashed horrors on the U.S.-backed Ukrainian army, according to an invitation sent to one of the project managers overseeing engine construction for the drone program.

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What’s at stake?

Taiwan is a U.S. strategic partner. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan has placed restrictions on exports to Russia.

Post reporting finds that a Russian company, a supplier to arms makers, continued to import high-tech manufacturing equipment from Taiwan.

The company sought to supply the machines to a secretive Russian effort to mass-produce attack drones, documents show.

End of carousel

Kevin Wolf, a former senior Commerce Department official who once headed the agency that implements U.S. export controls, said shipments identified by The Post probably violated prohibitions Taiwan and the West imposed last January on the sale of technology to Russia, in response to the Ukraine war. He said the shipments should “absolutely” be an enforcement priority for authorities in Taiwan.

“This is why export controls against Russia were imposed,” he said. “You’ve got tools that are very important for making military items. You’ve got a lot of connection to military end uses and users. You have connections to drones. You’ve got a large dollar amount. This is a classic enforcement priority issue.”

The shipments highlight how, despite a U.S.-led regime of global restrictions that is one of the most expansive in history, Russia’s defense industry has remained robust partly because of regulatory loopholes and lax enforcement. Critical goods have continued to flow directly to Russia, as well as through China and other countries that are not participating in the restrictions — including, in this case, goods that originated on a self-governed island that is allied with the United States.

“On the one hand, we appreciate the efforts taken by our partners so far to disrupt Russian supply chains,” said Vladyslav Vlasiuk, a sanctions expert and adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “At the same time, it is clearly not enough.”

The machines were sent in 63 separate shipments, according to Russian trade data obtained by The Post and export records provided by the Center for Advance Defense Studies, or C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on global security. The first batches, worth $4.47 million, were sent directly to Bredikhin’s firm from a similarly named Taiwanese trading company, I Machine Tools. Yu Ming Je, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a sales director for the company, was among those Bredikhin paused to recognize at the retreat in Sochi. Yu was previously a co-owner of the Moscow-based firm, according to Russian business records.

Bredikhin praises Taiwanese business partner

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A video from June 2023 shows Taiwanese businessman Yu Ming Je at a corporate retreat hosted by the Russian CNC machine tool importer I Machine Technology. (Video: @i_machine_technology/Instagram)

By the end of May, the direct shipments of CNC machine tools to Russia ceased. The remaining equipment, worth $17.8 million, traveled a circuitous route. Though Bredikhin imported those shipments from Turkey or China, trade records show that the machines were manufactured by several other Taiwanese companies.

Bredikhin acknowledged in a phone interview with The Post that he had for years imported CNC machine tools from I Machine Tools, but he denied doing so after the restrictions were put in place last January. He said the shipments after that point were for spare parts and so did not violate export controls.

“I’m not buying anything from them except for parts,” he said.

He did not respond after being given copies of trade records showing that in nearly every case his firm was importing complete CNC machine tools, some listed by model and trade code, and not merely parts.

After The Post contacted Bredikhin, dozens of posts were deleted from I Machine Technology’s Instagram account. Among them were images and videos of the Sochi retreat, of Yu with other Taiwanese executives and of Bredikhin visiting Taiwan.

In an interview, Yu initially said that his company stopped all shipments to Bredikhin’s firm once Taiwan imposed export restrictions. After being told of the records gathered for this report, he acknowledged the shipments last year but said they involved parts that were not subject to export controls.

“You still have to do this kind of service, because when the sanctions are lifted in the future, we can still cooperate, instead of just cutting it off,” he said.

I Machine Tools-branded goods made up more than 40 of the shipments to I Machine Technology last year, including some that came via Turkey and China, according to Russian import records. Only several were for parts, the records indicate.

A screenshot from a since deleted Instagram story shared to I Machine Technology’s account shows Taiwanese businessman Yu Ming Je. The Russian text refers to him as “Joseph” and “Our Taiwanese Partner.”

After those records were sent to him, Yu said that since export controls were imposed, “our company has no longer transacted with this dealer.”

He also suggested that the records might not be authentic and said his firm has not been a supplier for the Chinese and Turkish companies that sent shipments to I Machine Technology.

He said he was not aware of I Machine Technology’s ties to the Russian military. “Distributors basically have many users,” he said.

Security alignment

Taiwan has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, in April 2022, imposed controls on exports of technology to Russia. In January 2023, it expanded those measures to include certain CNC machine tools, making the controls “substantially equal to those of the E.U. and U.S., as well as in line with those of democratic allies,” Taiwan’s International Trade Administration said at the time.

The alignment occurred as Taiwan looks to the United States for security amid fears the island could be invaded by China. The response to Russian aggression in Ukraine is widely seen as one indicator of how the West might respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, giving Taipei added incentive to support Ukraine’s defense.

“The current government in Taiwan does feel a strong motivation to signal clear support for a U.S.-led policy of restricting technology imports by Russia,” said John Dotson, deputy director of the Global Taiwan Institute. “They want to stake out that position to show their affinity with the United States to further shore up their own security relationship.”

Taiwan’s International Trade Administration, in the Ministry of Economic Affairs, declined to comment on whether the Taiwanese companies identified in this report violated export controls. The Taiwanese government is planning to bar Taiwanese companies from selling their goods to I Machine Technology out of concern they could be used for weapons production, the agency said in a statement.

A post on the Instagram account of I Machine Technology shows the company’s chief executive, Aleksey Bredikhin, sitting at a desk with the flags of Russia and Taiwan. The Russian text outlines the firm’s history.

At the request of The Post, researchers at the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security reviewed the trade data, financial records and technical documentation gathered for this report.

The team — led by former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright and researchers Sarah Burkhard and Spencer Faragasso — found that several of the models of CNC tools described in the records were probably subject to export controls, but said a definitive assessment would require input from the Taiwanese government.

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“If Taiwan has aligned its export controls with the United States, its stated policy, then many of I Machine Tool’s exports would be illegal under Taiwanese law and/or regulation,” they wrote in their assessment. “But a complicating factor is that Taiwan sometimes lags in new situations to writing expanded control or sanctions legislation and enhanced export controls and then enforcing the new laws.”

“If any of the machine tools went to entities involved in WMD [weapons of mass destruction] or the means to deliver them, such as by missile, Taiwan’s law would control such exports,” they wrote, noting that “Taiwan should have done a better job ensuring its exports did not contribute to Russia’s war effort.”

The arrangement between the two similarly named companies puts them in a category by themselves, according to the researchers. The Taiwanese firm effectively has a “Russian domestic sales” branch that provides access to a wide range of companies in Moscow’s military industrial complex, they wrote.

In early November, 10 members of Congress urged the Biden administration to prioritize the curbing of exports of CNC machine tools to Russia. The letter noted a “troubling trend” of machine tools produced by U.S. allies, including Taiwan, making their way to Russia’s defense industry.

That same day, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Bredikhin’s firm, citing its connections to the Russian defense industry.

A reliance on imports

Russia for years has been heavily reliant on imports to obtain CNC (computer numerical control) machine tools. The machines, typically weighing thousands of pounds, are used to mass-produce goods that require an extreme and consistent level of precision. They follow computerized instructions to shape metal or other materials, using drills, lathes, mills or other components.

“CNC machine tools are the quintessential dual-use goods,” said Allen Maggard, an analyst with C4ADS. “Depending on the instructions you put into the machine, you can make the firing pin of a rifle or a metal water bottle from a block of metal. They remove human error and increase productivity. ”

An estimated 70 percent of Russia’s CNC machine tools have been foreign-sourced in recent years, according to the nonprofit Economic Security Council of Ukraine (ESCU). After the West imposed export restrictions, Russia increasingly turned to Asian-based suppliers, including Taiwan, for equipment needed by its defense industry.

From January to July of last year, I Machine Technology was paid more than $80 million for unspecified goods and services provided to over 40 weapons manufacturers and Russian military contractors, according to tax records provided by the Kyiv-based ESCU, which tracks goods used by Russia’s defense industry and investigates sanctions evasion. Several of those companies are under sanction by the U.S. Treasury Department for assisting the Kremlin’s war effort.

The records show that Bredikhin’s largest customer last year was Moscow Machine Building Plant Avangard, a key supplier of missiles used in Russia’s S-400 air defense system. Another customer operates a factory that produces command posts for Russia’s nuclear-capable Yars intercontinental ballistic missile system. The newly developed missile, capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads, was demonstrated during an October military exercise that simulated a retaliatory nuclear strike.

Bredikhin acknowledged in the interview that his firm received millions of dollars in payments last year from the Russian defense industry. Without elaborating, he added, “To my great regret I am not supplying them anything anymore.”

Under Taiwan’s rules, controlled CNC machine tools cannot be shipped to Russia even if they are routed through third countries, experts said. Companies must disclose who the end user is to get export permits for such items, they said.

“If the end user is Russian, that would not be approved,” said Chou Hui-hsin, a Taipei-based trade lawyer.

In March of last year, thousands of people traveled to Taiwan for the Taipei International Machine Tool Show. Among the attendees were Bredikhin and a handful of employees of I Machine Technology, photos of the event show.

An employee of one of Taiwan’s largest CNC machine tool manufacturers, Arthur Deng, said in an interview that he was approached by a Russian attendee — not from I Machine Technology — who hoped to bypass Taiwan’s export restrictions and ship products via a third country.

“They know very well that many Taiwanese manufacturers do business in China, Turkey or some Eastern European countries,” said Deng, a regional director for Tongtai Machine and Tool, who said his company had stopped all exports to Russia by last January.

‘Russian partners come to Taiwan’

Photos posted to social media show Yu in years past visiting the facilities of Taiwanese CNC makers whose goods were imported by I Machine Technology in 2023; in some shots, he’s seen posing with company executives. Photos also show Bredikhin and Yu at some of the other companies’ facilities late in 2022.

A post on Facebook to Yu Ming Je’s account in December 2022 shows images of Bredikhin visiting Taiwanese CNC manufacturers. The text, written in Mandarin, reads in part: “Thanks to all manufacturers for their support over the years, we will continue to work hard!!”

In since-removed company webpages, Bredikhin described his firm as a “Russian branch” of I Machine Tools. The description is one of several indicators that the companies are related.

The companies’ logos are similar — each combines the letters “i’ and “m” — and the trademarks for both logos are registered to the same Taiwanese firm, ROST Group and Technology. That firm, owned by a Russian national, Alexander Braslavskiy, specializes in exporting machine tools.

Braslavskiy’s son, Artem, a manager at the company, told The Post in a brief interview that I Machine Tools and I Machine Technology are “the same company.”

Yu said he was unfamiliar with Braslavskiy’s firm.

Russian corporate records show that in 2011 Yu was listed as a founder of I Machine Technology, owning a one-third stake in the Moscow-based company. His stake in the company was reported last week by the Insider and the Reporter, media outlets from Russia and Taiwan, respectively, in a joint investigation of machine tool shipments.

Yu has traveled to Russia frequently over the past decade on business, his social media posts show. One image from a trip to Moscow in 2012 shows Yu and Bredikhin, along with a former co-owner of Bredikhin’s firm.

That summer, Bredikhin and several business associates traveled to Taiwan, where they joined Yu for steak dinners, cigars and a fishing trip, according to social media posts. One post from the trip was captioned: “Russian partners come to Taiwan.”

It marked the beginning of a lucrative relationship for I Machine Technology.

By 2013, the company began publicly touting its connections to Russia’s defense industry, advertising that its “metalworking equipment” was used by helicopter factories, air defense systems manufacturers and ammunition cartridge producers, according to archived versions of its webpages. Other clients have included the producers of the Ka-52 attack helicopter and the manufacturer of the Buk missile system, according to government procurement records.

That year, I Machine Technology was awarded a contract for more than $100,000 to provide a CNC machine tool to Unit 45185 of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, procurement records show. The unit is home to a technical and scientific research center, according to the London-based Dossier Center, sponsored by exiled Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime.

In 2014, the firm was awarded a contract for 4,378,000 rubles — or $115,000 at the time — to provide a CNC machine tool of Taiwanese origin to the FSB’s Unit 43753, which plays a role in Russia’s communication security and cryptology.

After the invasion, an opportunity

I Machine Technology’s long-standing connections to Taiwan proved beneficial as the Kremlin began to suffer massive losses of military equipment after invading Ukraine in February 2022.

In April of that year, the company assured customers that its deliveries of machine tools would remain uninterrupted. “Despite all the sanctions restrictions and difficulties, the logistics chain of our company operates as usual and all equipment is consistently delivered to the territory of Russia on time,” it said on Instagram.

That November, Bredikhin’s firm invited a project manager at a drone factory then being built in the Tatarstan region, 500 miles east of Moscow, to visit machine tool production lines in Taiwan. The project manager was involved in building engines for the drones, according to personnel documents leaked to The Post from inside the program, a secretive collaboration with Iran that was previously exposed by U.S. authorities.

“During the trip you will see the largest enterprises producing lathes and grinding machines,” read the invitation, which has Bredikhin’s name on the signature line. The invitation described Taiwan-based I Machine Tools as “our company.”

A slide from a presentation on production plans at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone drone factory in Tatarstan shows two I Machine Technology-branded CNC machine tools incorporated into the making of the drone’s engine.

Russian engineers at the drone factory hoped to use equipment from I Machine Technology to make some of the most challenging parts of the drone engines, according to a slide presentation detailing production plans at their facility.

The documents reviewed for this report do not indicate whether the official involved in the drone program went on the December trip to Taiwan. Nor do they say if the drone factory ultimately acquired the Taiwanese equipment.

During the trip, Bredikhin visited four of the Taiwanese machine tool manufacturers whose equipment he later imported, as well as one other, according to since-removed images and posts shared to Facebook and Instagram. At three of the facilities, he and Yu are pictured giving a thumbs up.

Bredikhin told The Post his firm “offered Chinese machinery for drone production” but said that he didn’t know the specifics and that his firm does not “currently” have any active contracts with the drone factory. He did not respond to follow-up questions about whether his firm supplied equipment to the factory at any point.

Bredikhin denied sending the invitation. He did not respond after being told the document appears to bear his signature.

For the Sochi retreat in June, Yu was accompanied by three other people from Taiwan, one an executive with another of the companies whose equipment was imported by Bredikhin, according to travel booking data obtained by a Ukrainian hacking group and reviewed by The Post. Images show the four individuals at the party.

Bredikhin said in the interview that the Taiwanese attendees were his “old friends.” He said that he invited them “to drink vodka” and that no business was discussed during the trip.

Yu said he was in Turkey for business and traveled to Sochi because “even though there’s no business, we are still friends.”

At the retreat, speaking to Yu in Mandarin, Bredikhin reflected on their business relationship.

“I think us meeting and getting to know each other was truly fortuitous,” Bredikhin said on video.

After he spoke, the men embraced. (WP)

G.O.P. Officials, Once Critical, Stand by Trump After NATO Comments

Defending Donald Trump or deflecting his statements, some top G.O.P. officials reflected the trajectory of a party that the former president has largely bent to his will.

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Donald Trump on a stage and clapping his hands outstretched in front of him.

Donald J. Trump’s comments from the rally stage were not part of his teleprompter remarks, a person close to him said.Credit...Sean Rayford for The New York Times

Maggie HabermanJonathan Swan

By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Feb. 12, 2024

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After Donald J. Trump suggested he had threatened to encourage Russia to attack “delinquent” NATO allies, the response among many Republican officials has struck three themes — expressions of support, gaze aversion or even cheerful indifference.

Republican Party elites have become so practiced at deflecting even Mr. Trump’s most outrageous statements that they quickly batted this one away. Mr. Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, had claimed at a Saturday rally in South Carolina that he once threatened a NATO government to meet its financial commitments — or else he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to that country.

In a phone interview on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina seemed surprised to even be asked about Mr. Trump’s remark.

“Give me a break — I mean, it’s Trump,” Mr. Graham said. “All I can say is while Trump was president nobody invaded anybody. I think the point here is to, in his way, to get people to pay.”

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Marco Rubio during a Senate hearing. He has his hands clasped in front of him.

Senator Marco Rubio said, “I know exactly what he has done and will do with the NATO alliance.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican Party’s top-ranking official on the Senate Intelligence Committee, struck a matter-of-fact tone as he explained on CNN on Sunday why he was not bothered in the least.

“He told the story about how he used leverage to get people to step up to the plate and become more active in NATO,” Mr. Rubio said on “State of the Union,” rationalizing and sanitizing Mr. Trump’s comments as just a more colorful version of what other U.S. presidents have done in urging NATO members to spend more on their own defense. “I have zero concern, because he’s been president before. I know exactly what he has done and will do with the NATO alliance. But there has to be an alliance. It’s not America’s defense with a bunch of small junior partners.”

Mr. Trump’s comments from the rally stage were not part of his teleprompter remarks, according to a person close to him who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. But the remark — a new version of a story he has been telling for years — quickly inflamed in Europe what were already severe doubts about Mr. Trump’s commitment to NATO’s collective-defense provision. That provision, known as Article 5, states that an armed attack on any member “shall be considered an attack against them all.”

Mr. Trump has been using his power over the G.O.P. to try to kill recent bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill to send Ukraine more weapons and vital resources for its fight against Russia. Ukraine is not a NATO member, but helping Ukraine preserve its independence has become the alliance’s defining mission since President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia began his military invasion in February 2022. And where Mr. Trump might land on a commitment to Ukraine has, for the international community and foreign-policy experts, become something of a stand-in for how he will approach NATO, America’s most important military alliance, in any potential second term.

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Officials from smaller and more vulnerable NATO countries are especially worried because Mr. Trump has already suggested that it’s not in America’s national interest to get in a war with Russia to defend a tiny nation like, say, Montenegro.

What Older Americans Say About Age and Leadership

Card 1 of 7

We asked readers whether they thought the ages of President Biden, 81, and former President Donald Trump, 77, affected their ability to be president.

“The world is changing too rapidly (in dangerous ways). It is time to put egos aside and let a new generation of leaders move us forward.” — Christopher Hardwick, 66, Edgewater, Md., independent

“It is perfectly normal to forget names and words at this age, but I do not believe that this renders one incapable of governing or disrupts one’s thinking rationally.” — Kathleen Young, 80, Longmont, Colo., registered Democrat

“I worked a 45-year career in nuclear power plant operation, which is a highly critical, mentally challenging occupation. In my opinion, they are both too old. There should be an age limit on U.S. presidents.” — Kevin Robinson, 65, Lincolnton, N.C., registered Republican

“I’ll make it to 70 this year. I’m not concerned about their ages. I’m concerned about their ability to think through complex situations and apply judgment in the best interest of the people of the United States.” — Ken Lawler, 69, Alpharetta, Ga., nonpartisan

“I’ll be 70 on my next birthday. I think people need to stop being presidents at the age of 70.” — Kathi Sweetman, 69, Rochester, N.Y., unaffiliated

“I am 76 years old and I believe that age doesn’t matter if a person keeps themselves in good mental and physical condition. I think age is a positive if a person has learned from their past experiences.” — Greg White, 76, Cobden, Ill., registered Democrat

The international reaction to Mr. Trump’s Saturday remarks included a rare public rebuke from Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general. Mr. Stoltenberg said that “any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”

The defense of Mr. Trump by several Republican officials such as Mr. Graham reflected the trajectory of a party that the former president has largely bent to his will.

Eight years ago, when Mr. Trump was in the thick of his first campaign for president, Mr. Graham would have given a very different response. In that campaign, Mr. Graham — initially one of Mr. Trump’s competitors in the primary, whom Mr. Trump quickly vanquished — saw himself as a defender of the Republican Party’s internationalist values against what he perceived as the acute threat of Mr. Trump’s isolationism.

As a wingman of the late Republican hawk and war hero Senator John McCain of Arizona, Mr. Graham traveled the country warning anyone who would listen about the dangers of Mr. Trump. But after Mr. Trump won the presidency, Mr. Graham set about becoming a friend and close adviser and was welcomed into Mr. Trump’s inner circle. Many others followed a similar path.

In 2016, Mr. Rubio, another foreign policy hawk who competed against Mr. Trump for the party’s nomination, called Mr. Trump a “con man” and warned how dangerous he would be if entrusted with the nation’s nuclear codes. But after Mr. Trump won, he put those feelings aside, became friendly with Mr. Trump and is now among a handful of Republicans in contention to be his running mate.

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Senator Tom Cotton sitting during a hearing. His name plate is in front of him, saying Mr. Cotton.

“President Trump is simply ringing the warning bell,” Senator Tom Cotton said.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, among the most hawkish Republicans on national defense, suggested European nations in the alliance needed to do more to sustain their own defenses against Russian incursions.

“NATO countries that don’t spend enough on defense, like Germany, are already encouraging Russian aggression and President Trump is simply ringing the warning bell,” Mr. Cotton said in an interview. “Strength, not weakness, deters aggression. Russia invaded Ukraine twice under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but not under Donald Trump.”

Several former national security and foreign policy officials in the Trump administration declined to speak about the anecdote that Mr. Trump told about threatening a NATO member nation’s head of state with encouraging Russian aggression. But they said they recalled no such meeting actually taking place.

Mr. Trump is fond of outright falsehoods in relaying stories to make himself look like a tough negotiator. His former national security adviser John Bolton, who has warned that Mr. Trump would withdraw the U.S. from NATO in a second term, said he had never heard Mr. Trump threaten another country’s leader that he would encourage a Russian invasion.

Another former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid inflaming Mr. Trump, delicately described the tale as “hyperbole.” Still another former official — H.R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser and a retired Army lieutenant general — gave a one-word assessment of Mr. Trump’s comments: “Irresponsible.”

Mr. Trump often praises Mr. Putin — he has described the invasion of Ukraine as the work of a “genius” — and has long admired him as a “strong” leader.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called on Russia to “find” emails that Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic nominee for president and a target of Mr. Putin, had deleted from her private email server. He has suggested Mr. Putin is no different, morally, from American leaders. When Bill O’Reilly, a former Fox News host, pressed Mr. Trump shortly after he took office on his admiration for Mr. Putin, saying that the Russian leader “is a killer,” Mr. Trump replied, “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

But as president, Mr. Trump’s policies toward Russia were sometimes tougher than his predecessor’s — a point that Mr. Trump’s allies highlight when they dismiss statements such as Saturday’s as rhetorical flourishes. Mr. Trump’s allies, who claim he would not undermine NATO in a second term, point out that in his first term he approved sending antitank weapons to Ukraine, which President Obama had not done after Russia seized Crimea in 2014.

As he runs to take back the White House — and as polls suggest he has a good chance of doing so — Mr. Trump has been coy about his intentions for NATO. His campaign website contains a single cryptic sentence: “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”

When pressed on what that means, Mr. Trump and his team have refused to elaborate.

Mr. Trump has been focused in private conversations about treating foreign aid as loans, something he has posted about on social media, as Senate Republicans tried again on Sunday to pass an aid package, after Mr. Trump helped tank their earlier efforts. But the Russia comment appeared to catch most on his team by surprise.

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Jason Miller standing aboard a plane with his hands crossed in front of him. He’s smiling, as is a woman standing behind him.

“President Trump got our allies to increase their NATO spending,” said Jason Miller, a senior campaign adviser.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, when asked to explain the former president’s statements — including whether it was an invitation for new aggression from Russia — did not directly address the question.

“Democrat and media pearl-clutchers seem to have forgotten that we had four years of peace and prosperity under President Trump, but Europe saw death and destruction under Obama-Biden and now more death and destruction under Biden,” Mr. Miller said. “President Trump got our allies to increase their NATO spending by demanding they pay up, but Joe Biden went back to letting them take advantage of the American taxpayer. When you don’t pay your defense spending, you can’t be surprised that you get more war.”

NATO countries’ spending on their own defense grew during the Trump administration, but it has expanded by an even larger amount during the Biden administration, after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who worked in the Trump administration, has remained close to Mr. Trump and who has also been outspoken on the need to defend Ukraine, spoke at the request of the Trump campaign, saying that he did not believe Mr. Trump was opening the door to fresh aggression.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Kellogg said, has a “track record of deterrence.”

He added, “I really do think he’s onto something,” saying that he believes Mr. Trump’s goal is to get NATO members to focus on Article 3 of NATO’s founding treaty, which calls on nations to build their individual and collective abilities to stave off an armed attack.

“I don’t think it’s encouragement at all,” Mr. Kellogg said, because “we know what he means when he says it.” (NYT)

Journal Retracts Studies Cited in Federal Court Ruling Against Abortion Pill

The journal found that the studies, which had suggested that medication abortion is unsafe, included incorrect factual assumptions and misleading presentation of the data.

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An orange box of Mifeprex (Mifepristone) sits on a table with papers nearby.

Two studies suggesting that the abortion pill mifepristone is dangerous contradict widespread evidence that it is safe and were retracted by a journal.Credit...Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Pam Belluck

By Pam Belluck

Feb. 9, 2024

An academic journal publisher this week retracted two studies that were cited by a federal judge in Texas last year when he ruled that the abortion pill mifepristone should be taken off the market.

Most of the authors of the studies are doctors and researchers affiliated with anti-abortion groups, and their reports suggested that medication abortion causes dangerous complications, contradicting the widespread evidence that abortion pills are safe.

The lawsuit in which the studies were cited will be heard by the Supreme Court in March. The high court’s ruling could have major implications for access to medication abortion, which is now the most common method of pregnancy termination.

The publisher, Sage Journals, said it had asked two independent experts to evaluate the studies, published in 2021 and 2022 in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, after a reader raised concerns.

Sage said both experts had “identified fundamental problems with the study design and methodology, unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions, material errors in the authors’ analysis of the data, and misleading presentations of the data that, in their opinions, demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part.”

The publisher also retracted a third study by many of the same authors that was published in 2019 in the same journal, which did not figure in the mifepristone lawsuit.

Sage said that when it had begun examining the 2021 study, it confirmed that most of the authors had listed affiliations with “pro-life advocacy organizations” but had “declared they had no conflicts of interest when they submitted the article for publication or in the article itself.”

Sage said it had also learned that one of the reviewers who evaluated the article for publication was affiliated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

The institute denied that the studies were flawed, as did the lead author, James Studnicki, who is vice president and director of data analytics at the institute.

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“Sage is targeting us,” Dr. Studnicki, who has a doctor of science degree and a master’s degree in public health, said in a video defending the team’s work.

Noting that the studies had been used in legal actions, he said: “We have become visible, people are quoting us, and for that reason we are dangerous, and for that reason they want to cancel our work. What happened to us has little or nothing to do with real science and has everything to do with political assassination.”

In a statement, Dr. Studnicki said, “The authors will be taking appropriate legal action,” but he did not specify what that would be.

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A man in a blue suit sits at a table in front of a microphone.

Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Federal District Court judge, ruled last year that mifepristone should be taken off the market. An appeals court struck part of his ruling, and the case will soon be heard by the Supreme Court.Credit...Reuters

The lawsuit seeking to bar mifepristone — the first pill in the two-drug medication abortion regimen — was filed against the Food and Drug Administration by a consortium of groups and doctors who oppose abortion. In fighting the lawsuit, the federal government has defended its approval and regulation of mifepristone, provided years of evidence that the pill is safe and effective and argued that the plaintiffs have no legal standing to sue because they are not abortion providers and have not been harmed by mifepristone’s availability.

In his opinion last April, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk cited the 2021 study to support his conclusion that the plaintiffs had legal standing to sue. That study reported a higher rate of emergency room visits after medication abortions than after procedural abortions. Citing it, Judge Kacsmaryk wrote that the plaintiffs “have standing because they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place ‘enormous pressure and stress’ on doctors during emergencies and complications.”

In another section of his ruling, Judge Kacsmaryk cited the 2022 study, writing that “plaintiffs allege ‘many intense side effects’ and ‘significant complications requiring medical attention’ resulting from Defendants’ actions.”

Judge Kacsmaryk’s opinion was criticized by many legal experts, and an appeals court struck parts of it but said significant restrictions should be placed on mifepristone that would prevent it from being mailed or prescribed by telemedicine.

Legal experts said it was unclear if Sage’s action would affect the Supreme Court’s decision. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, said the retractions might simply “reinforce a position they were already ready to take.”

For example, she said, there were already strong arguments that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing, so if a justice was “willing to overlook all that other stuff, you may be willing to overlook the retractions too,” she said. For justices already “bothered by various other problems with standing, you probably were potentially going to say the plaintiffs didn’t have standing as it was.”

Similarly, she said, some justices would already have concluded that the vast majority of studies show mifepristone is safe, so if a justice was “prepared to say that, notwithstanding the weight of the evidence, mifepristone is really dangerous, you could easily do that again if you lose a couple of studies.” (NYT)

Bolsonaro and Allies Planned a Coup, Brazil Police Say

Brazilian federal police raided former government officials and ordered the former president to hand in his passport over accusations that they tried to overturn the 2022 election.

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Jair Bolsonaro, gesturing and speaking into a microphone.

Jair Bolsonaro campaigning for a second term in 2022 in São Paulo, Brazil.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

Jack Nicas

By Jack Nicas

Reporting from Rio de Janeiro

Feb. 8, 2024

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Former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil oversaw a broad conspiracy to hold on to power regardless of the results of the 2022 election, including personally editing a proposed order to arrest a Supreme Court justice, according to accusations unveiled on Thursday by the Brazilian federal police.

Mr. Bolsonaro and dozens of top aides, ministers and military leaders worked together to undermine the Brazilian public’s faith in the election and set the stage for a potential coup, the federal police said.

Their efforts included spreading disinformation about voter fraud, drafting legal arguments for new elections, recruiting military personnel to support a coup, surveilling judges and encouraging and guiding protesters who eventually raided government buildings, police said.

The explosive allegations were contained in a 134-page court order that authorized a sweeping federal police operation on Thursday that targeted Mr. Bolsonaro and about two dozen of his political allies, including Brazil’s former defense minister, former national security adviser, former justice minister and former head of the Navy.

The operation involved search warrants and arrest warrants for four people, including two Army officers and two of Mr. Bolsonaro’s former top aides.

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Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former defense minister and Army commander, said that he saw Brazil’s election officials as “the enemy.”Credit...Joedson Alves/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Bolsonaro was ordered to hand over his passport, to remain in the country, and to have no contact with any other people under investigation.

Mr. Bolsonaro said on Thursday that he was the innocent victim of a politically motivated operation.

“I left the government more than a year ago and I continue to suffer relentless persecution,” the former president told Folha de São Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper. “Forget about me. There is already someone else running the country.”

For more than a year ahead of Brazil’s 2022 election, Mr. Bolsonaro openly sowed doubts about the security of his nation’s election systems and warned that if he lost it would be the result of fraud.

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When he, in fact, lost to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mr. Bolsonaro declined to unequivocally concede and his supporters staged monthslong protests that culminated in a January 2023 riot at Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices.

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Damage to the Supreme Court caused by right-wing protesters last year.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

Mr. Bolsonaro has already been ruled ineligible to run for office until 2030 over his attempts to undermine the voting systems. Now he could be facing arrest and criminal prosecution.

Mr. Lula said in a radio interview on Thursday that he hoped the investigation into Mr. Bolsonaro would be fair and impartial. “What I want is for Bolsonaro to have the presumption of innocence, which I didn’t have,” he said.

Mr. Lula served 580 days in prison on corruption charges that were later annulled after Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that the judge in his cases had been biased.

The accusations unveiled on Thursday lay out how the former president and his allies tried to subvert Brazil’s young democracy, including alarming details for a country that was ruled by a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

In one moment in November 2022, after Mr. Bolsonaro lost the election but was still president, Filipe Martins, a top aide, brought him a draft of a legal document claiming that Brazil’s Supreme Court had illegally interfered in the executive branch’s affairs, according to federal police. The document ordered the arrest of two Supreme Court justices and the Senate president and called for new elections, the police said.

Mr. Bolsonaro ordered changes to the document so that it called for the arrest of only one of the Supreme Court justices, police said. Once the document was updated, Mr. Bolsonaro called top military leaders to the presidential residence to present them with the document and push for a coup, the police said. The result of that meeting was unclear.

The Supreme Court justice who would have been arrested under that order was Alexandre de Moraes, the same judge who has overseen investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies for years, making him one of the former president’s archrivals.

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Mr. Moraes issued the court order authorizing the arrests and police actions on Thursday. The order revealed that the federal police also discovered evidence that two of Mr. Bolsonaro’s aides had monitored the travel of Mr. Moraes in case the government attempted to arrest him.

In the court order unsealed on Thursday, Mr. Moraes said that the aides’ precision in knowing his schedule suggested they may have been using technology to surveil him.

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Several men in dark suits in a hallway. A TV camera is visible in the background.

Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, has overseen investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies for years, making him one of the former president’s archrivals.Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York Times

Federal police have separately accused Mr. Bolsonaro’s son and the former chief of Brazil’s intelligence agency of using Israeli spyware, among other tools, to surveil political enemies of the former president, including Mr. Moraes.

The court order unsealed on Thursday also details a meeting in July 2022, three months before the election, in which Mr. Bolsonaro ordered top government officials and military leaders to spread claims of voter fraud, despite a lack of evidence. “From now on, I want every minister to say what I’m going to say here,” Mr. Bolsonaro said at the meeting, according to a recording obtained by police.

Transcripts of the recording in court documents revealed that the former president appeared to believe, or at least continued to peddle, several conspiracy theories claiming his rivals were rigging the election.

He falsely claimed that electronic voting systems had been pre-loaded with results and that electoral judges had received tens of millions of dollars in bribes.

“I have no proof, man. But something strange is happening,” Mr. Bolsonaro said, according to the police. “Losing an election is no problem. What we can’t do is lose democracy in a rigged election.”

In another moment, he asked his ministers and military leaders to sign a public letter that Brazil’s election system could not be trusted. (Such a letter was never released.)

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No evidence of fraud in Brazil’s voting machines has ever emerged.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

Several government ministers and military leaders at the meeting, however, agreed with Mr. Bolsonaro’s view of the election system.

Anderson Torres, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, urged others at the meeting to act, saying they faced consequences if Mr. Lula became president. “I want everyone to think about what they can do beforehand because everyone will get screwed,” he said, according to the police.

Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former defense minister and Army commander, said that he saw Brazil’s election officials as “the enemy” and that military leaders were meeting weekly to ensure clean elections.

“May we succeed in re-electing you,” he told Mr. Bolsonaro, according to the police. “That is all our wish.”

But there were also internal signs of doubt among Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies. Two days after the first round of Brazil’s election, which sent Mr. Bolsonaro and Mr. Lula to a runoff, an Army officer sent a text message to Mr. Bolsonaro’s personal aide, Mauro Cid, saying that he hoped Mr. Bolsonaro’s team “knew what they were doing.”

“Me too,” replied Mr. Cid, who was instrumental in planning a coup, according to police. “If not, I’ll be arrested.”

Mr. Cid was arrested shortly after Mr. Lula’s election and accused of helping to falsify Mr. Bolsonaro’s vaccine records. He signed a plea deal to cooperate with authorities.

The Army officer then asked if Mr. Bolsonaro’s team had found evidence of voter fraud.

“Nothing,” Mr. Cid replied, according to the police. “No evidence of fraud.” (NYT)

Defending Troops, Haley Says Golf Course Is Closest Trump Has Come to Combat

After months of treading lightly about the former president’s legal travails and increasing authoritarian rhetoric, Nikki Haley came out swinging in South Carolina over a personal attack.

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Nikki Haley stands and gestures beside an American flag in a Harley-Davidson dealership. There are microphones in front of her and at least three TV cameras pointed at her.

Nikki Haley kept up her attacks on Donald J. Trump on Monday. “The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart,” she said, “and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military?”Credit...Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

Anjali Huynh

By Anjali Huynh

Reporting from Elgin, S.C.

Feb. 12, 2024

Nikki Haley, in the final stretch before the South Carolina primary, is going all in on attacking former President Donald J. Trump, her former boss and chief rival, whom she trails by a huge margin in her home state.

Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has used Mr. Trump’s comments over the weekend, about foreign policy and her family, to question his fitness for office, after months of treading lightly on his legal travails and increasing authoritarian rhetoric.

In Elgin, S.C., on Monday, she cast Mr. Trump as disrespectful to military personnel, a threat to national security, and too addled by old age to effectively serve. The harsher approach is central to her argument that the country does not want a rematch between President Biden and Mr. Trump and that she is more electable than the former president in a general election, even as polls show her behind Mr. Trump by over 30 points in South Carolina.

Ms. Haley has used a special counsel report that suggested Mr. Biden struggles with memory problems to argue that the same is true of Mr. Trump, pointing to his conflation of her with Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and his seemingly off-script remarks.

“The special counsel comes out and says he’s mentally diminished,” Ms. Haley said of Mr. Biden, before adding: “That’s not far from Donald Trump.”

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“I’ll be 70 on my next birthday. I think people need to stop being presidents at the age of 70.” — Kathi Sweetman, 69, Rochester, N.Y., unaffiliated

She criticized the former president’s comments over the weekend insinuating that her husband, who is deployed to Africa with the National Guard, left the country to escape her. Those remarks, Ms. Haley said on Monday, were insulting to all military personnel, adding, “With that kind of disrespect for the military, he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them.”

Speaking to reporters afterward, she got more personal.

“The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart, and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military?” she said. “I don’t care what party you’re in, that’s not OK.”

Ms. Haley also hit Mr. Trump for suggesting he would encourage Russian aggression against U.S. allies behind on payments to the military alliance. She said the remarks put service members and “all of our allies in harm’s way.”

“Donald Trump is taking the side of a thug,” she said, noting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its detainment of Evan Gershkovich, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

And she said Mr. Trump had his “fingerprints on” a slew of other examples of what she called Mr. Trump’s chaotic influence over the party, like the collapse of a bipartisan border deal in Congress and reports of turnover at the Republican National Committee. Ms. Haley has also, in recent weeks, criticized Mr. Trump for spending $50 million in campaign funds on court appearances.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, pointed to his record in office in saying “there has been no greater advocate for our brave military men and women than President Trump.”

“Nikki Haley advocates for greater foreign intervention and supports endless wars that would leave more American heroes dead,” Ms. Leavitt said in a statement. “It’s a good thing she will never be commander in chief.”

Before the first Republican nominating contest in Iowa in January, Ms. Haley’s stump speech, which she rarely deviated from, often played up her record in South Carolina, foreign policy experience as Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador and her vision for the future. But since the Iowa caucuses, where she finished third, she has gradually ramped up her attacks on Mr. Trump, progressing from offhand jabs about his administration’s raising the national debt to centering his weaknesses in speeches.

Asked about her harsher approach, and why she didn’t strike that tone sooner, Ms. Haley said she had avoided such attacks because she wanted to focus on a vision for the future.

“If I make it about me, that’s no different than what Donald Trump does every single day because all he does is make everything about himself,” she said.

Ms. Haley’s biggest challenge, however, was perhaps best exhibited by her events themselves: At the Harley-Davidson dealership where she spoke on a rainy afternoon on Monday, she addressed around 50 people, where some chairs that were set up went unfilled.

And some who attended were not necessarily voters she needs to cut into Mr. Trump’s lead. John Schuller, a 76-year-old Democrat, said he believed it was “arrogant and selfish” for Mr. Biden “not to step off the stage and let someone new come on.” Ms. Haley, whom he plans to back in the primary, seemed like a “reasonable voice” — though he acknowledged that her path forward would be tough.

“Miracles happen,” Mr. Schuller said. “I hope South Carolina can make a miracle happen.” (NYT)

Trump Backs His Candidate for R.N.C. Chair, and His Daughter-in-Law for Co-Chair

Lara Trump, who is married to the former president’s son Eric, has worked closely with the Republican National Committee for several years.

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Lara Trump walks onto a stage in a blue dress waving to the audience, with signs for the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in the background.

Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, is seen as a prolific fund-raiser.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Maggie HabermanJonathan Swan

By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Feb. 12, 2024

Former President Donald J. Trump on Monday night made public what he has been discussing privately for days: He has settled on someone to replace Ronna McDaniel as the chair of the Republican National Committee, and wants his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to be the co-chair.

“The RNC MUST be a good partner in the presidential election,” Mr. Trump wrote in his statement. “It must do the work we expect from the national Party and do it flawlessly. That means helping to ensure fair and transparent elections across the country” and getting out the vote, he said.

He said he wanted his “friend” Michael Whatley, currently the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party and the national committee’s general counsel, and “my very talented daughter-in-law, Lara Trump,” to serve as party leaders.

“Lara is an extremely talented communicator and is dedicated to all that MAGA stands for,” Mr. Trump said of his daughter-in-law, who is married to his middle son, Eric. “She has told me she wants to accept this challenge and would be GREAT!”

The statement came hours after The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump had told people he was considering endorsing Ms. Trump. The Times had previously reported that Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Whatley — a supporter of his false claims about widespread voter fraud — as the next R.N.C. chair.

What Older Americans Say About Age and Leadership

Card 1 of 7

We asked readers whether they thought the ages of President Biden, 81, and former President Donald Trump, 77, affected their ability to be president.

“I’ll be 70 on my next birthday. I think people need to stop being presidents at the age of 70.” — Kathi Sweetman, 69, Rochester, N.Y., unaffiliated

Both the chair and co-chair are paid positions.

Mr. Trump cannot simply appoint them. An election must be called to replace Ms. McDaniel when she ultimately decides to step down. And despite Mr. Trump’s heavy influence over the party, his endorsement of Mr. Whatley in 2023 as co-chair was not enough to pull him across the finish line to win.

Ms. Trump had considered running for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, which is her and Mr. Whatley’s home state, in 2021 ahead of the primary the following year. But she ultimately opted against running.

Mr. Trump added in his statement that one of his current top campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita, would move over to become “in effect” the chief operating officer of the R.N.C. — solidifying total Trump control over the party apparatus.

“Every penny will be used properly,” Mr. Trump concluded his statement, referring to widespread concerns among Republicans about the R.N.C.’s strained finances. “New Day.”

Ms. McDaniel, who has served as the head of the party’s official body for several years, has told Mr. Trump that she plans to step down shortly after the South Carolina primary on Feb. 24, according to two people briefed on the matter. Mr. Trump has publicly described Ms. McDaniel as a “friend,” but she has been the focus of intense pressure from both inside and outside the Trump campaign.

Mr. Trump’s team plans to meld the R.N.C. with his campaign as much as possible. That would be a change from 2016, when he was the insurgent nominee whose team was often at odds with the party’s stalwarts, and from 2020, when he was the incumbent president with a team that allocated core functions to the party committee. This time, Mr. Trump’s team is aiming for as little daylight between the two entities as possible, according to several people briefed on the matter.

And they’re hoping to commence the partnership with the R.N.C. well before the Republican National Convention in mid-July — cementing Mr. Trump’s status as he stares down at least one potential criminal trial before then and four criminal trials overall.

Mr. Trump and his advisers have been heavily focused on what resources will be available to him as a nominee, as he faces enormous legal bills. Those bills have so far been paid for by a political action committee he controls, Save America.

Mr. Trump is fighting what remains of his Republican primary opposition with Nikki Haley, who had been his ambassador to the United Nations. But Ms. Haley is trailing Mr. Trump in South Carolina, her home state, as well as in Super Tuesday states.

After Mr. Trump beat Ms. Haley in the New Hampshire primary — the early state where she was best positioned to defeat him — Ms. McDaniel, who had remained publicly neutral until then, said it was time for the party to unite around Mr. Trump. (NYT)

Trump’s Legal Cases: Here, There and Everywhere

Tracking the many criminal and civil proceedings against the former president highlights their tangled and interconnected nature, and the challenge to the judicial system.

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Two people holding flags in support of former President Donald J. Trump. Two police officers stand nearby.

Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump outside the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., on Monday.Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Alan Feuer

By Alan Feuer

Feb. 12, 2024

Former President Donald J. Trump sped in and out of the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., on Monday for a closed-door hearing in the case accusing him of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office.

In Washington, the Supreme Court received a filing that same day from Mr. Trump involving his last-ditch efforts to claim immunity from separate charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The judge in Georgia overseeing the case accusing him of seeking to overturn his election loss in that state will hold a hearing on Thursday about whether to disqualify the district attorney who filed the charges.

And in New York, two proceedings related to Mr. Trump were set to take place later in the week on two consecutive days, in two different courthouses, just two blocks from each other, with major implications for both him and his real estate business.

That is how it has been for nearly a year now as Mr. Trump has become ensnared in a web of legal cases so tangled that it almost defies comprehension. The panoply of proceedings amounts to a test of the judicial system’s capacity to handle a range of criminal and civil accusations against a once and potentially future president fairly, efficiently and against the backdrop of a campaign in which he has made his treatment a central issue.

Catch Up on Where the Trump Investigations Stand

The logistics alone are daunting, with Mr. Trump facing four criminal trials in four cities, plus several civil cases, even as he campaigns to return to the White House.

Takeaways From Trump’s Indictment in Georgia

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A fourth criminal case. Former President Donald Trump was indicted for a fourth time on Aug. 14, this time over what prosecutors in Atlanta described as his efforts to unlawfully undo his election loss in Georgia in 2020. The indictment includes 13 charges against Trump, as well as charges against 18 of his allies. Here are some key takeaways:

Trump was charged under Georgia’s RICO Act. Prosecutors charged Trump and his allies under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, which allows them to link various crimes committed by different people by arguing that they were acting together for a common criminal goal. At its heart, the statute requires prosecutors to prove the existence of an “enterprise” and a “pattern of racketeering activity.”

The charges reach far beyond Trump. Among the 18 Trump allies charged in the case are Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and lawyer for Trump, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Also charged are several more lawyers who are accused of working to try to overturn the election, including John Eastman and Sidney Powell.

The charges fall into several baskets. Several of the individual counts stem from false claims of election fraud that Giuliani and two other Trump lawyers made at legislative hearings in December 2020. Another batch of charges concerns a plan to vote for a false slate of pro-Trump electors. A third raft of charges accuses several Trump allies of conspiring to steal voter data and tamper with voting equipment in Coffee County, Ga.

No single person or authority is coordinating the arrangements, as this week makes clear. The task has seemed at times as if competing air traffic controllers have been trying to land several different airplanes on the same runway with a hurricane blowing in.

Each new development has ripple effects, and several cases could reach inflection points this week, with possibly profound but as yet unknowable implications for his broader legal standing and the future of his presidential bid.

Complicating matters even further, Mr. Trump has hardly shied away from his legal travails, opting instead to make the proceedings something akin to campaign events.

Flying in the face of the normal rules of politics, his litany of courthouse woes hasn’t seemed to harm him or his electoral ambitions, but appears instead to have only boosted his standing with his followers.

He has frequently appeared in court spouting talking points and assailing the array of legal cases he is facing as one collective “witch hunt” purposefully designed to damage his standing in the polls. In turn, he has also used actual campaign events to describe his prosecutions as partisan acts of persecution.

And at least so far, he has succeeded, managing to wrest political gain out of playing up, not playing down, the efforts to use the courts to hold him accountable. Still, opinion surveys have suggested that his popularity with voters could seriously suffer if any of the cases he is facing results in a conviction.

Part of the reason for the complexity of the various proceedings is that Mr. Trump has relentlessly sought to postpone his trials until after the election in November. If successful, that strategy would deprive the public not only of hearing the evidence collected against him, but also of considering a potential guilty verdict when deciding on his candidacy.

Indeed, this strategy of delay was front and center in the petition his lawyers filed to the Supreme Court on Monday.

A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations

Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.

Key Cases and Inquiries: The former president faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers. Here is a close look at each.

Case Tracker: Trump is at the center of four criminal investigations. Keep track of the developments in each here.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign? Can a convicted felon even run for office? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.

Receive a Weekly Update: Sign up for the Trump on Trial newsletter to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

As a technical matter, Mr. Trump asked the court to extend a pause in his election interference case in Washington as the justices consider a novel question: whether he should be immune from prosecution on the underlying charges, which arose from actions he took while he was president.

But winning the immunity claim on its merits is not his only goal. Mr. Trump is also hoping his Supreme Court appeal will take enough time that it will be impossible to try him on the election charges until after Election Day.

It remains unclear when the court will lay out its plans for taking on or rejecting the immunity appeal. But its decision could arrive within days of another ruling by the justices that will help decide Mr. Trump’s future: whether he should be disqualified from the ballot in Colorado for helping stoke the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

And its ultimate decision on the question of immunity will determine whether Mr. Trump goes to trial in the election case this spring, this summer or in 2025. It is also likely to have an effect on the timing of at least one of his other criminal cases.

On Thursday, for instance, at one of the two hearings in state courts in New York, Justice Juan M. Merchan, who is overseeing the case accusing Mr. Trump of being involved in hush money payments to a porn star, could decide to proceed to trial, as originally planned, on March 25.

While that would allow the election trial to start in Washington later in the year, Justice Merchan will probably have to make his decision without a crucial piece of information: the Supreme Court’s schedule on the immunity appeal, which will be instrumental in determining when the federal election trial will start in the first place.

The other hearing in New York this week will not present a threat to Mr. Trump’s liberty, but it could severely damage his wallet.

At the hearing, which is scheduled for Friday, Justice Arthur F. Engoron is expected to deliver a decision about whether to strip Mr. Trump of control of his company, the Trump Organization, after having found him liable for business fraud.

Mr. Trump’s aides have said he might attend the hearing — as he has attended others in the case. But if he does, he will not be able to show up at a different hearing scheduled for that same day in a different case in a different city: one that concerns the disqualification of the district attorney, Fani T. Willi, from the racketeering case he is facing in Georgia accusing him of conspiring to subvert the election in that state. (NYT)

The soft landing is global, but it's cushiest in America

Economies all over the world are lowering inflation while avoiding serious recession — but growth in the United States stands out.

BY JEANNA SMIALEK, ANA SWANSON, ALAN RAPPEPORT AND JIM TANKERSLEY, THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE – 02/02/2024

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The world is starting 2024 on an optimistic economic note, as inflation fades globally and growth remains more resilient than many forecasters had expected. Yet one country stands out for its surprising strength: the United States.

After a sharp pop in prices rocked the world in 2021 and 2022 — fueled by supply chain breakdowns tied to the pandemic, then oil and food price spikes related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — many nations are now watching inflation recede. And that is happening without the painful recessions that many economists had expected as central banks raised interest rates to bring inflation under control.

But the details differ from place to place. Forecasters from the Federal Reserve to the International Monetary Fund have been most surprised at the remarkable strength of the U.S. economy, while growth in places like the United Kingdom and Germany remains more lackluster. The question is why America has pulled out ahead of other developed economies in the pack.

The I.M.F. said this week that it expected the United States to grow 2.1 percent, a sharp upgrade from the previous estimate of 1.5 percent. Other major advanced economies are also expected to grow, albeit less quickly. The euro area is expected to notch out 0.9 percent growth, as is Japan, and the United Kingdom is forecast to expand by 0.6 percent.

“This is a good situation, let’s be honest, this is a good economy,” Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, said at a news conference this week — two of nearly 20 times that he called the data “good” during his remarks.

Evidence of that strength continued on Friday, when a blockbuster jobs report showed that employers had added 353,000 jobs in January and wages grew at a rapid clip.

America’s outperformance has come from a combination of luck and judgment, economists said. Below is a rundown of some of the factors behind the comparatively strong performance — starting with those that reflect policy choices and moving to factors that owe more to fortune.

One reason for U.S. resilience: fiscal policy.

Part of the reason that economic growth has been so surprisingly strong in the United States is simple: The American government has continued to spend a lot of money.

Government expenditures as a share of overall output hovered around 35 percent in America in the years leading up to the pandemic, based on I.M.F. data. But in 2020 and 2021, they jumped above 40 percent as the government responded to the coronavirus with about $5 trillion in relief and stimulus to people, businesses, institutions, and state and local governments.

Both states and households have only slowly spent down the savings they amassed during those pandemic years, so the money has continued to trickle through the economy like a slow-release booster shot. On top of that, government spending has remained elevated as the Biden administration has begun to make sweeping infrastructure and climate investments.

“As the economy recovered, the U.S. just poured more kerosene onto the fire,” said Kristin Forbes, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a former Bank of England official.

Ms. Forbes noted that America’s deficit as a share of its gross domestic product is larger than that in many other advanced economies, and today’s spending is adding to the American debt pile. Given that, strong growth today could come at a cost — including higher interest bills — down the road.

Administration officials have suggested it was worth the trade-off.

Lael Brainard, who heads President Biden’s National Economic Council, told reporters last week that the combined outlays had allowed families to “weather this really disruptive period of time and bounce back.”

Yet government spending doesn’t fully explain the divergence between the United States and other economies. Other countries also spent a lot in response to the pandemic, and places like the euro area and the United Kingdom are still spending more than they did before the pandemic in recent years, as a share of output.

Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, said that he believed that the gross domestic product data — which can be volatile and gets revised — could be overstating the divergence between U.S. growth and those in other countries. But to the extent that there is a gap, he does not think government spending has been a big driver of the stronger U.S. performance over the past year.

Instead, a number of economists said, what is happening could owe partly to policy design differences — and luck.

Pandemic layoff responses were not created equal.

America took a different approach than its European peers when it came to how it designed policy relief for workers displaced by pandemic shutdowns: It paid workers to stay at home, with one-time checks and expanded unemployment insurance, whereas countries in Europe paid workers to stay in jobs.

The resulting churn as Americans have sorted themselves into new and better jobs could be leading to the stronger productivity growth that the United States is seeing now, said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Ahead of time, “it was not clear which was going to be the better way to go,” Mr. Posen said, noting that many economists had worried that the U.S. approach would actually perform slightly worse. “As always, it is better to be lucky than to be good.”

Proximity to geopolitical problems is also important.

Other advanced economies have also fallen victim to misfortune. European countries have been much more exposed to the aftershocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a conflict that has pushed up gas and grocery prices — roiling the business environment and limiting households’ abilities to afford other discretionary products.

While the United States imported relatively little oil and gas from Russia, that was not the case for Europe. According to a 2023 survey by the European Investment Bank, 68 percent of European Union businesses had seen their energy prices increase by 25 percent or more, compared with 30 percent of U.S. businesses experiencing the same increase.

Speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Tuesday morning, Valdis Dombrovskis, the European commissioner for trade, said that Europe had been working to address its dependence on Russian fossil fuel, but that cutting those ties “came at a cost.”

Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the I.M.F., told reporters on Thursday that the resilience of the U.S. economy stemmed from several factors — including insulation from volatility in global energy markets.

“There have been good economic forces and winds blowing into U.S. sails,” Ms. Georgieva said.

Now, tensions in the Red Sea that are roiling shipping routes there could have bigger spillover effects for Europe. The disruptions have started to push up shipping prices and delay deliveries, particularly for goods traveling to Europe from Asia.

Biden administration officials are monitoring those disruptions, but they are less concerned since they are “a little bit less salient for American supply chains than for other parts of the world,” Ms. Brainard said.

Demographics play a role.

When it comes to the absolute level of growth in the United States versus advanced economies like the euro area and Japan, America also has the benefit of a younger population. The median age in the United States is about 38.5, whereas it is 46.7 in Germany and 49.5 in Japan.

Youth helps to make an economy more dynamic: Younger adults work more, and families who are having children, buying houses and building lives spend more than retirees.

All of this could matter to policy.

Whatever is causing the divergence, it could matter for economic policy.

The Fed, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England are all nudging toward cutting interest rates as they try to avoid undermining growth. Central bankers don’t want to lower rates too early and fail to fully stamp out inflation. They also want to avoid keeping them too high for too long, inflicting more pain than is necessary to wrestle price increases under control.

For the E.C.B. and the Bank of England, slower growth could make that an especially delicate process — policy errors could tip those economies from slight growth to slight contraction. But completing the soft landing is a looming challenge for many central banks.

“At this time of the cycle, there is risk of premature loosening, but there is also risk of keeping interest rates higher for longer,” Ms. Georgieva said. “They now need to land the plane smoothly.” (NYT on Fidelity.com)

A New Perk for Some Student Loan Borrowers: A 401(k) Match

Legislation that went into effect this year makes it easier for student loan borrowers to save for retirement while paying down their debt.

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Tara Siegel Bernard

By Tara Siegel Bernard

Feb. 2, 2024

Student loan borrowers who are lucky enough to have access to a 401(k)-type plan, but are too stretched to save in it, may soon be helped by a new workplace benefit: Paying off their student loans can generate retirement savings contributions from their employer.

Starting this year, workers with student loans can receive employer matching contributions in workplace plans, even if they’re not able to save anything on their own. The loan payments count instead.

The new feature was made possible by legislation known as Secure 2.0, which included a package of retirement-related provisions intended to boost savings. It’s hard to know exactly how many companies are planning to offer the benefit — they aren’t required to — but several large companies, including Dow Inc., News Corp., Masco Corp., Unilever and others, recently introduced it to employees, according to Fidelity Investments, one of the nation’s largest plan administrators for retirement and student loan benefits.

“Employers can distinguish themselves in attracting and retaining workers by offering such benefits,” said Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit, particularly those “who are struggling with their finances and have student loan debt.”

The student loan benefit takes effect just months after 28 million people restarted federal student loan payments after a nearly 42-month pandemic-related pause. There is already evidence that many people are struggling to add those payments to their household budgets, which have already been squeezed by inflation.

“Since the student loan repayment moratorium ended in September, we’ve seen a real spike in customers looking to add support for student loan repayment to their benefits package,” said Edward Gottfried, senior director of product management at Betterment at Work. “Many of those customers have been eager to find a way to marry their student loan benefits more naturally with their 401(k) plan.”

Student loan matches are the latest addition to employers’ collection of education-related benefits, which have included tuition assistance and tuition reimbursement programs, debt counseling and even direct help to pay off student loans. The latest twist, providing free money in 401(k) plans, is widely seen as a potentially effective recruitment and retention tool, particularly in industries that are trying to attract workers in health care, professional services and other fields in which young employees carry higher debt loads.

In a typical workplace plan — be it a 401(k), 403(b) or a government plan — employers can choose to provide a matching contribution on the amount workers save; they might match every dollar each worker contributes, for example, up to 4 percent of their salary. But some student borrowers may delay saving for retirement while they focus on whittling down their debt, which means losing years of free money from their employer.

After hearing about these challenges from its own work force, Abbott, the health technology company, pioneered a program to address it: It has offered a student loan employer contribution, Freedom 2 Save, since 2018. Roughly 1,600 workers participated in the program at some point last year.

“Because Freedom 2 Save was the first program of its kind, there was no road map to follow,” said Mary Moreland, executive vice president, human resources, at Abbott, which received special permission from the Internal Revenue Service to move forward.

The idea seemed to catch on. Later, members of Congress introduced legislation that would codify the feature, and it eventually was written into law as part of Secure 2.0.

At Abbott, employees must contribute at least 2 percent of their salary to their 401(k)s to receive a 5 percent matching contribution. But under its Freedom 2 Save program, if employees can show they are using at least 2 percent of their salary to pay down their student loans, they are eligible for the 5 percent match, without any 401(k) contributions of their own.

For example, if an employee with a starting salary of $70,000 participated in the program, they would accumulate about $3,500 in their first year, or $48,000 over 10 years, the standard term of a student loan. That assumes the worker makes annual student loan payments of at least $1,400; has annual merit raises of 2 percent; and earns a 5 percent market return on average, according to Abbott.

Of course, lower-income workers — and those with less generous matching programs — won’t accumulate as much.

Several retirement plan administrators said their clients are still figuring out how the new benefit might work in practice, and whether it makes sense for their employees. And not all employers will rush in: Some companies have wondered, for example, if the feature might seem unfair if people who chose more costly schools are benefiting. There are also administrative complexities to consider.

“2024 is going to be a year that student loan match provisions could come to some 401(k) plans near you, but it may be closer to the end of the year,” said David Stinnett, head of strategic retirement consulting at Vanguard, which oversees workplace plans for five million participants.

The plight of student debt borrowers has increasingly become a national focus, as tuition costs accelerated faster than income growth and total loan balances eclipsed credit card and other consumer debts. The issue was catapulted into the spotlight again when President Biden made student debt relief a centerpiece of his agenda. After his plan to forgive up to $20,000 in debt for millions of borrowers was shut down by the Supreme Court, the administration turned its focus to more targeted relief, along with the introduction of more generous income-driven repayment plan called SAVE.

In fact, SAVE enrollees who qualify for zero-dollar monthly payments — or those earning less than $32,800 as single borrowers, or those in a family of four with incomes less than $67,500 — wouldn’t qualify for the 401(k) match because they’re not making payments.

Younger workers have been enrolling into workplace plans at higher rates than they have historically, plan administrators say, in large part because they are often automatically enrolled.

“It is just getting people started,” said Rob Austin, head of research at Alight Solutions, which oversees plans for large employers and recently worked with Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, to add the feature. “And then hopefully they will begin contributing on their own behalf.” (NYT)

A Key Inflation Gauge Came In Hotter Than Expected Last Month

Overall prices cooled slightly from a year ago, but the report included worrying signs for the Federal Reserve.

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A chart showing inflation, which was up 3.1 percent in January, and inflation that excludes energy and food prices, which was up 3.9 percent.

Inflation

+3.9%

excluding

food and

energy

+3.1%

in Jan.

–

1965

’70

’75

’80

’85

’90

’95

2000

’05

’10

’15

’20

Year-over-year change in the Consumer Price IndexSource: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy Karl Russell

Jeanna Smialek

By Jeanna Smialek

Feb. 13, 2024

Updated 12:13 p.m. ET

Inflation cooled less than expected in January and showed worrying staying power after volatile food and fuel costs were stripped out — a reminder that bringing price increases under control remains a fraught, bumpy process.

The overall Consumer Price Index was up 3.1 percent from a year earlier, which was down from 3.4 percent in December but more than the 2.9 percent that economists had forecast. That figure is down from the latest peak of 9.1 percent in the summer of 2022.

But after stripping out food and fuel, which bounce around in price from month to month, “core” prices held roughly steady on an annual basis, climbing 3.9 percent from a year earlier. The measure jumped by the most in eight months on a monthly basis.

American consumers, the White House, and Federal Reserve officials had welcomed a recent moderation in inflation. Central bankers in particular will likely take the fresh report as a reminder that they need to remain cautious. Policymakers have been careful to avoid declaring victory over inflation, insisting that they needed more evidence that it was coming down sustainably.

Investors sharply pared back chances for an imminent Fed rate cut, betting that central bankers will not lower interest rates at their next meeting in March and sharply dialing back the odds that it will do so even at their meeting in May — a sign that they think the fresh inflation figures will keep officials wary. Stock markets tumbled as traders revised their forecasts for Fed actions.

Fed policymakers have raised interest rates to about 5.3 percent, up from near zero in early 2022, in a bid to cool consumer and business demand and force companies to stop raising prices so quickly. Because inflation has been coming down notably in recent months, they have paused their rate increases and are contemplating when and how much to lower borrowing costs.

Inflation F.A.Q.

Card 1 of 5

What is inflation? Inflation is a general increase in prices, which will cause a loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys.

What causes inflation? It can be the result of rising consumer demand. But inflation can also rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions, such as limited oil production and supply chain problems.

Is inflation bad? It depends on the circumstances. Fast price increases spell trouble, but moderate price gains can lead to higher wages and job growth.

How does inflation affect the poor? Inflation can be especially hard to shoulder for poor households because they spend a bigger chunk of their budgets on necessities like food, housing and gas.

Can inflation affect the stock market? Rapid inflation typically spells trouble for stocks. Financial assets in general have historically fared badly during inflation booms, while tangible assets like houses have held their value better.

But they want to avoid cutting rates before inflation is fully snuffed out, because they worry that doing so could allow rapid price increases to become a more permanent feature of the American economy.

“They were right to be patient, because this is the kind of number that is going to cast doubt on whether there really is a lot of deceleration in store for inflation,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights. “This is definitely a spooky number.”

Slower inflation over recent months had also been a welcome development for President Biden. Surging living expenses have eaten away at household budgets, weighing on voter confidence even though the job market is strong and wages are climbing at a brisk pace. As price increases have begun to ease, people have started to report sunnier economic outlooks.

But the fresh inflation report could cast doubt on whether the cool-down over the previous six months will continue. The Fed has been paying close attention to whether that trend would persist.

“Is it sending us a true signal that we are, in fact, on a path — a sustainable path — down to 2 percent inflation?” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during his Jan. 31 news conference. “That’s the question.”

The Fed aims for 2 percent inflation on average using a separate but related measure, the Personal Consumption Expenditures index. That gauge is set for release on Feb. 29.

Part of the problem with Tuesday’s report, from the Fed’s perspective, is that the pickup in the core inflation index came from services: Prices for airfares, hotel rooms, haircuts and financial help all climbed in January. Service inflation tends to be driven by slow-moving forces like wage growth, and it can be very stubborn.

A bar chart showing the December-to-January changes in a selection of categories of the Consumer Price Index, adjusted for seasonality. 16 of the 24 categories shown rose led by piped utility gas service and hospital services. At a declines of 4.5 and 3.4 percent, fuel oil and used cars and trucks fell the most.

Monthly changes in January

Piped utility gas service

+2.0

Hospital services

+1.6

Motor vehicle insurance

+1.4

Airline fares

+1.4

Nonalcoholic beverages and materials

+1.2

Electricity

+1.2

Motor vehicle maintenance and repair

+0.8

Physicians’ services

+0.6

Food away from home

+0.5

Fruits and vegetables

+0.4

All items excluding food and energy

+0.4

Rent of primary residence

+0.4

All items

+0.3

Alcoholic beverages

+0.3

Tobacco and smoking products

+0.3

Dairy and related products

+0.2

Meats, poultry, fish and eggs

New vehicles

Cereals and bakery products

–0.2

Medical care commodities

–0.6

Apparel

–0.7

Gasoline (all types)

–3.3

Used cars and trucks

–3.4

Fuel oil

–4.5

December-to-January changes in a selection of categories of the Consumer Price Index, adjusted for seasonality.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy Karl Russell

And while the hotter-than-expected inflation figures were just one month of data, they came alongside other evidence that the economy was growing more quickly than expected. Hiring picked up in January, wage growth was solid, and consumers continue to spend.

Some analysts have suggested that in an economy this hot, wrestling inflation the rest of the way to normal will prove more difficult than the initial cool-down. In other words, the “last mile” on inflation might be the toughest one. Tuesday’s report could give that argument more heft.

“It is too early to declare victory over inflation,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. He noted that key economic measures like hiring picked back up after the Fed hinted late last year that it was done with rate increases — evidence of the potential risks of backing off too early.

“The last mile will be harder,” Mr. Slok said.

So far, bringing inflation down has been less painful than economists had expected. Many had predicted that it would take a substantial cooling in the economy — and a jump in unemployment — to lower price increases. Instead, inflation has fallen gently even with a strong job market.

The cool-down came partly as supply chains healed. Prices for goods started jumping in 2021 as shipping route and factory disruptions tied to the pandemic left semiconductors, automobiles and furniture in short supply. Those problems have been clearing, allowing goods prices to calm or even drop. Used car prices fell sharply in January, for instance.

But even as goods inflation fell, the question remained: Could service price increases moderate without a broader economic slowdown?

For a while, it seemed like that was happening, but the trend stalled out in January. Economists are likely to watch the next several months of data to determine whether that is a blip — or the start of a new and concerning trend.

One services category is likely to remain in especially close focus: housing. Rents have been climbing more slowly in recent months, and many analysts have been expecting that trend to continue as cheaper new leases feed into official inflation figures. Housing makes up such a big chunk of American spending that the expected cooling would help to lower overall inflation.

But January’s report offered reasons for caution. A measure that estimates how much it would cost to rent a house that someone owns — called owner’s equivalent rent — picked up on a monthly basis.

The acceleration “looks at odds with other surveys of rent data that we monitor,” said Blerina Uruci, chief U.S. economist at T. Rowe Price.

On the whole, she said the report underscores that the Fed will need to remain cautious.

“The main takeaway is that what Powell said during the January press conference was the right strategy,” Ms. Uruci said. “They really need to make sure that inflationary pressures will not re-accelerate before they can cut interest rates.” (NYT)

Biden has bragging rights on the economy. He should use them.

Author Headshot

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

The U.S. economy has just gone through an extraordinarily successful year. Many economists (although not all of us) predicted that getting inflation under control would require a recession and an extended period of high unemployment. Instead, inflation has plunged — over the past six months the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation has been running slightly below the target rate of 2 percent — even as the economy has boomed, with real G.D.P. rising 3.1 percent and employment rising by 2.9 million.

In case you’re wondering, Tuesday’s somewhat hot inflation report doesn’t change the story much. You never want to read too much into one month’s data, especially for January, which is often erratic. As Goldman Sachs noted in advance in a newsletter, the bank expects “a temporary boost to core C.P.I. from start-of-year price increases, which we expect to be most pronounced in the prescription drugs, car insurance, tobacco, and medical services categories.”

Fundamentally, the economic picture remains very good.

Yet I keep hearing political analysts and commentators saying that President Biden shouldn’t boast about the good economy, because Americans aren’t feeling it, and talking up the good news makes Democrats seem out of touch.

This is very strange advice.

For one thing, when has being humble about the economy ever worked as a political strategy? Donald Trump boasted about job creation in May 2020, when the unemployment rate was 13.3 percent, because it was down from 14.7 percent the previous month. Did this hurt him? Are pundits suggesting that Biden emulate Jimmy Carter by talking about national malaise?

More to the point, the factual premise of this commentary is wrong. All the major surveys of consumer sentiment say that Americans are, in fact, aware that the economy is improving. The venerable Michigan survey says that consumer sentiment has rocketed up over the past few months. Another long-running survey, from the Conference Board, says that consumers’ evaluation of the “present situation” is back roughly to where it was at the beginning of 2018. And a new entrant, Civiqs, also shows a substantial improvement since 2022, which has accelerated in recent months.

Why is consumer sentiment surging? It might be the rising stock market. It might also reflect the fact that news reporting on the economy, as tracked by the San Francisco Fed, has become much more positive in recent months:

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

It’s true that these surveys still show consumer sentiment significantly worse than you might have expected given low unemployment, falling inflation and rising real wages. But a lot of this reflects the growing role of partisanship in economic sentiment. Americans have become increasingly likely to judge the economy based on whether the political party they prefer is holding the White House.

And while this effect applies to both sides of the political divide, it’s much stronger for Republicans. According to the Civiqs data, Republican views of the economy switched from strongly negative to overwhelmingly positive after Donald Trump took office, then became almost unanimously negative when Biden came in, and have stayed there despite the good news over the past year:

Civiqs

According to Michigan data, Republicans rate the current economy as being worse than the economy of June 2009, when unemployment was 9.5 percent, or June 1980, when inflation was more than 14 percent:

University of Michigan

Democrats’ perceptions behave very differently. It’s not just that they view the Biden economy much more favorably than Republicans do; their evaluation is responsive to conditions in a way that Republicans’ is not. One simple measure of the state of the economy is the “misery index,” the sum of unemployment and inflation; this index got worse during Biden’s first 18 months as inflation shot up, then improved greatly:

FRED

Sure enough, Democrats’ views fell as the misery index rose, then rose as the index fell:

Civiqs

What about independents? Basically, there’s no such thing. Political scientists have long known that most voters who claim to be independent actually behave like Republicans or Democrats.

What this says to me about the politics is that while average assessments of the U.S. economy are still somewhat depressed, that largely reflects the unmovable hostility of people who will never, ever vote Democratic no matter what. Potentially persuadable voters are, in fact, aware that the economy is doing well.

So where does the view that Democrats shouldn’t talk up their economic success come from? My guess is that at least some pundits decided a year or more ago that voters just weren’t feeling the good news and are clinging to that view even though the evidence has changed. That is, at this point they aren’t even saying that we should ignore the economic data and focus on the vibes; now that the vibes have changed, they’re saying that we should focus not on consumer surveys but on their own vibes about the vibes.

One special issue: I keep hearing that Americans don’t care about the inflation rate, only about the level of prices. That may sound plausible, but the fact is that persuadable voters started feeling much better about the economy once inflation came down, even though prices are still rising.

One thing that is true is that so far voters don’t seem to be giving Biden credit for the good economy. This may or may not just be a matter of time. But if you’re presiding over a good economy, and persuadable voters seem to be aware that it’s a good economy, why on earth wouldn’t you try to claim credit?

And for what it’s worth, I’d argue that Biden does deserve at least partial credit for an economy that is doing better than that of any other major advanced nation. At the very least, U.S. performance refutes the harsh criticisms of Biden policy made not just by Republicans but by some Democrats.

So yes, Biden should talk up his economic record. It’s bizarre to argue otherwise. (NYT)

A New Perk for Some Student Loan Borrowers: A 401(k) Match

Legislation that went into effect this year makes it easier for student loan borrowers to save for retirement while paying down their debt.

Credit...Andrea Chronopoulos

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Feb. 2, 2024

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The idea seemed to catch on. Later, members of Congress introduced legislation that would codify the feature, and it eventually was written into law as part of Secure 2.0.

Of course, lower-income workers — and those with less generous matching programs — won’t accumulate as much.

Younger workers have been enrolling into workplace plans at higher rates than they have historically, plan administrators say, in large part because they are often automatically enrolled.

Employers Can Now Enroll Workers in Some Emergency Savings Accounts

But many companies are spurning the “clunky” legal requirements for accounts linked to retirement plans. Instead, some have stand-alone rainy day offerings.

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Ann Carrns

By Ann Carrns

Feb. 9, 2024

Starting this year, a federal law allows employers to enroll workers in emergency savings accounts that are linked to their retirement accounts. But some companies, put off by the law’s complex rules, have begun offering rainy day benefits outside workplace retirement plans.

“I do think there is tremendous interest in emergency savings programs,” said Matt Bahl, vice president and head of workplace financial health at the Financial Health Network, a nonprofit that promotes financial well-being. “Having access to liquid cash can greatly reduce levels of financial stress.”

The Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit, found that about three-fourths of large employers (those with 500 or more workers) offered or planned to offer hardship or emergency assistance programs to workers last year. Of those, about a third said they offered an emergency savings account feature and another third planned to do so in the next year or two.

But while the law, known as Secure 2.0, has helped draw attention to the need for rainy day savings, its rules for setting up emergency accounts within retirement plans are “clunky,” Mr. Bahl said. For instance, only workers making under a certain income limit ($155,000 for 2024) may participate, and their emergency savings are limited to $2,500, though employers can set lower ceilings. And though employers can help with contributions, they must deposit any match into the worker’s retirement account — not the emergency savings account.

While employers may eventually choose to offer such “sidecar” savings accounts, stand-alone emergency savings programs are already available from financial technology start-ups and established retirement plan administrators. With emergency savings offerings, “it’s really important to be broadly available and simple to use,” said Emily Kolle, a vice president who oversees the emergency savings offering from Fidelity Investments, one of the largest retirement plan administrators.

Emergency savings — a cash cushion available in the event of a job loss or surprise expenses like car repairs or medical bills — are a concern for many Americans. In a recent survey by the financial site Bankrate, about a third said they would have to borrow to cover a $1,000 unexpected expense. And almost a quarter of consumers have no savings set aside for emergencies, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Secure 2.0 law has two main provisions aimed at helping workers cover surprise expenses. First, it allows employers to automatically enroll workers in emergency savings plans tacked on to their 401(k) accounts. (Stand-alone account offerings, in contrast, can’t sign up workers by default; employees must choose to enroll.)

Second, employers may let workers withdraw up to $1,000 a year, without penalty, from their retirement accounts to cover surprise expenses. (Employers may already offer “hardship” withdrawals from retirement plans, but workers typically owe a 10 percent tax penalty if they are younger than 59½, in addition to ordinary income tax on the amount withdrawn.)

The Plan Sponsor Council of America, a nonprofit group representing employers, found tepid interest in the Secure 2.0 options. In a recent survey of council members, only about 2 percent said they were interested in offering both the savings and withdrawal options. Half said they weren’t interested in either option, while more than a third said they weren’t sure.

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Some employers said in written comments in the survey that the time and cost necessary to offer the provisions weren’t worth their value to employees. Others objected to linking rainy day and retirement savings — even though one rationale for offering emergency savings accounts is to reduce workers’ need to tap retirement funds to manage personal financial difficulties.

Tom Armstrong, vice president of customer analytics and insight at the financial services firm Voya Financial, said its data showed that employees lacking adequate emergency savings were 13 times as likely to take a “hardship” withdrawal from their retirement account and 30 percent more likely to decrease their retirement contributions.

Brian Graff, chief executive of the American Retirement Association, an umbrella group that includes the employers’ plan sponsor council, said many companies and plan administrators had focused on mandatory aspects of the hefty Secure 2.0 law — like a provision requiring improved access to retirement plans for long-term, part-time workers. They haven’t had time yet to fully consider whether to adopt other optional offerings, like emergency savings, he said. “It’s early stages.”

At the same time, some employers have started offering rainy day savings tools outside their workplace retirement plans. Details can vary by employer and provider.

In January, for instance, Whole Foods Market began offering an emergency savings program through Fidelity. Workers can have funds deposited through payroll deductions and withdraw them when needed. It joined companies like Delta Air Lines, which began offering an emergency savings program through Fidelity in January 2023.

Employees who register for Delta’s program open a cash management account at Fidelity. After completing the required financial coaching, they receive a $750 deposit from Delta. The airline will then match up to $250 in employee contributions. As of last fall, 21,500 employees had participated, a Delta spokesman said.

Here are some questions and answers about emergency savings:

What is a reasonable goal for an emergency savings fund?

That depends on your financial situation. A common rule of thumb is to save at least three months of living expenses, but that can seem daunting for some people. Research shows that even smaller savings balances can help people avoid turning to risky alternatives, like high-interest credit cards. America Saves, an initiative of the Consumer Federation of America, recommends aiming for $500 to start.

Is it better to save lump sums for emergencies or to save a little bit at a time?

Either way — or a combination of both — can work, depending on what’s best for your situation. Tax time is here, and many filers get a significant refund. The average federal refund last year was just under $3,200, the Internal Revenue Service reported. Setting aside a chunk of your refund in a savings account can help start your emergency fund.

Do I have to participate in a formal program to have money from my paycheck sent to a savings account?

Probably not. Most employers offer electronic deposit and allow “split deposits,” in which you direct part of your paycheck to automatically go to a separate savings account. Ask your payroll department. You’ll typically need to fill out a request form with your bank account number. Alternatively, banks and credit unions and many budgeting apps offer automatic transfers from your checking account to a savings account. (NYT)

Congress might just pass an astonishingly sensible tax deal

But too much attention could scupper it

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image: alberto miranda

Feb 8th 2024|washington, dc

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The “secret congress” theory holds that bills which attract public attention are born to partisan rancour, endure a life of torture and usually die a miserable death. For a recent example, look only to the much-hyped bipartisan deal that sought to patch up America’s broken immigration system and steer much-needed funds to Ukraine. It took months of work to craft the compromise; when it was unveiled on February 4th it barely lasted one business day before being left for dead. But the theory also holds that successful compromises happen all the time as long as no one makes a fuss over it.

It is with some trepidation, then, that we mention the rather good bipartisan tax deal that the House of Representatives passed by an overwhelming margin of 357-70 on January 31st. (This article will be short to avoid attracting too much additional attention.) The $78bn package trades something Democrats want—more generous tax credits for families with children—for something Republicans want: more generous tax credits for businesses. It plans to completely pay for this by eliminating a tax credit unloved by anyone, a covid-era relief programme for firms that kept employees on staff that was notoriously abused by fraudsters (95% of the time, according to one whistleblower).

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If the bill actually became law there would be plenty to crow about. Capital and labour would split the spoils almost equally. Businesses would be able to immediately deduct their research and development costs. (Under current law, these must be amortised over five years.) They would also be able to deduct more aggressively some capital and, less justifiably, interest expenses. The revision of the child-tax credit would ensure that families at the bottom of the income distribution receive greater sums. (Because benefit levels scale down at low levels of income, middle-income families are currently more likely to receive the maximum credit amount of $2,000 per child than poor families.)

This proposal would not be as generous (or as expensive) as the brief policy experiment conducted in 2021, when the child-tax credit was converted into a de facto monthly child allowance, which had the effect of reducing child poverty by as much as 40%. But it would still be significant. The Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think-tank, calculates that the changes would increase benefits for 16m children in poor families and that 400,000 of them would be pulled above the official poverty line in the first year.

Some objections are already being voiced above a whisper. A handful of Republican senators have complained that the more generous child-tax credits do not come with enough work requirements on parents. There are technical reasons to think that their objections could be assuaged. The proposed redesign still preserves the “phase-in” structure whereby poor taxpayers earn more of the credit as their income increases, creating an incentive to work. A study by the Joint Committee on Taxation, the non-partisan research body in Congress, pointed out that “the proposed expansion of the child tax credit on net increases labour supply.”

What could really scupper the deal is even more attention to it. The White House called it a “welcome step forward” and urged its passage. But one side endorsing a bill often risks greater opposition by the other. “Passing a tax bill that makes the president look good—mailing out cheques before the election—means he could be re-elected,” Chuck Grassley, a nonagenarian Republican senator from Iowa, admitted a bit too truthfully to reporters. If the deal is to pass, future discussions might have to happen sotto voce. (ECON)

Senator Lankford paints a stark portrait of GOP border-deal critics

Pushback from Trump and House Republicans would seem to be dooming the deal. But this Republican senator isn’t letting it go — and his commentary has turned more aggressive.

Analysis by Aaron Blake

Staff writer

February 2, 2024 at 12:24 p.m. EST

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) walks out of a weekly policy luncheon on Capitol Hill in December. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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For many years now, conservative media and right-wing immigration hawks have done an exceptional job making any Republican who would dare work with Democrats on immigration regret their life choices.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) undoubtedly knows this. He even backed off a bipartisan immigration deal before — in 2018 — dealing it a critical blow.

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But as Lankford has increasingly become an outcast in certain Trump-oriented corners of the Republican Party for trying to forge a border security deal with Democrats, he’s not exactly shying away from the fight.

Repeatedly in recent days, Lankford has taken on critics directly. He has suggested that his own conservative allies are spreading misinformation about the deal (whose text has yet to be released). He’s effectively accused them of choosing political expediency and presidential campaign politics over border security. And significantly, he’s had some backup from other Senate Republicans.

It appears unlikely that the deal will ultimately become law; even if it passes in the Senate, its prospects in the House appear dim. But as hopes for it have dwindled, Lankford has doubled down on spending his political capital.

It seemed to begin, quietly, in a mid-January post on X.

“Only in Washington is our southern border political gamesmanship instead of a national security crisis,” he said, as the right wing started ramping up its opposition.

Lankford over the weekend seemed to expound on his meaning. He suggested that Republicans were flip-flopping and prioritizing Donald Trump’s 2024 election hopes — and there’s evidence for this contention.

“It is interesting: Republicans, four months ago, would not give funding for Ukraine, for Israel and for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy,” Lankford said on CNN.

He added: “And now, it’s interesting, a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, ‘Oh, just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year.’”

GOP says no need for new immigration laws. That’s not what it used to say.

Lankford has rejected GOP claims that all that’s needed is to have a president like Trump with the will to secure the border. He has noted that even Trump as president emphasized the need for legislation to change things like asylum laws — as his proposal would.

When asked about opposition from the likes of Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Lankford has repeatedly suggested that they are relying on misinformation.

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Asked Sunday on CBS News about Trump’s opposition, Lankford said he looked forward to Trump actually being able to read the bill and quickly invoked the “misinformation” label.

The Fact Checker: Does Biden need a new law to shut down the border?

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there right now. … I hear this comment that it waves in 5,000 people, it hands out work permits, that — all those things are not true,” he said. “There’s just a lot of internet rumors that are running around on this right now.”

Punchbowl News reported Thursday that Lankford said his office had repeatedly reached out to Johnson about Johnson’s comments invoking the 5,000 number. (Johnson’s office said Lankford’s office hasn’t been forthcoming with details.)

Both Trump and Johnson have claimed that the deal would allow 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day. In fact, that’s merely the threshold at which a president would be compelled to shut down the border. “This is not someone standing at the border with a little clicker and saying, ‘I’m going to let one more in; we’re at 4,999 and then it has to stop,’” Lankford told Fox News on Sunday.

Negotiators have said those detained at the border would no longer be released into the country while they await immigration hearings; asylum claims would have to be decided within 15 days for those who don’t cross at a port of entry.

Does Biden need a new law to ‘shut down the border’?

Lankford told Punchbowl: “I’m not confident anyone who has been attacking it … will come out and speak to y’all and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’ None of those folks are going to look at it and come to the press and apologize. They’ll find something different.”

He added some particularly pointed comments suggesting that his colleagues were grandstanding.

“For any of my colleagues that want to do this, go do the work on it,” Lankford said. “But don’t just do a news conference. Actually sit down with the other side and figure out what we can actually resolve.”

Precisely what the endgame is here is a valid question. The deal seems to have little hope in a House in which the speaker must constantly mind his right flank. Trump holds considerable sway; congressional Republicans don’t always abide by his wishes, but election-year politics loom large, and immigration is a pretty big issue on which to break with him.

We’ve also seen before how this can pan out. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in 2013 joined the “Gang of Eight” and took to conservative media to make a case for the deal. Then he wavered on the final product, and he ultimately effectively disowned the effort after the bill passed in the Senate. (It soon died in the House.)

If this time is to be different, it has a few things working for it. One is that the deal doesn’t include redline proposals for conservatives like a pathway to citizenship (the focal point of the 2013 effort) or protecting the children of undocumented immigrants, or “dreamers” (as the deal Lankford worked on in 2018 would have).

Lankford also isn’t the only one who continues to defend and push the effort. So too have the top two Senate Republicans and the likes of Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). Many of them have made principled cases, like Lankford, that this a conservative proposal and that the problem is too significant to bow to Trump’s wishes.

It seems likely to be for naught. But the refusal to let it go, at least for now, has been something. (WP)

America’s economy is booming. So why are bosses worried?

Three of the forces that propped up profits may now be weakening

Cartoon depiction of an aircraft taking off from a runway made of steps.

image: travis constantine

Feb 4th 2024

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America’s stockmarket is on a tear. Over the past three months the s&p 500 index of large companies has soared by nearly 15%, reaching a record high (see chart 1). Recent economic data support investors’ optimism. On February 2nd statisticians reported that 353,000 jobs were created in January, far more than expected. The economy grew by a healthy 3.3% (at an annual rate) in the final quarter of 2023. Despite that, inflation slowed to 2.6% on the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, not far off its 2% target. Investors are now betting that by the end of the year the Fed will lower its benchmark interest rate from its current range of between 5.25% and 5.5% to below 4%, putting a rocket booster under America’s economy—and with it America Inc.

image: the economist

This wager is not, however, by any means sure-fire. On January 31st Jerome Powell, chairman of the Fed, scuppered hopes of an imminent rate cut, arguing inflation was “still too high”. As cheap pandemic-era debts begin to mature, the interest bill on America’s $21trn pile of non-financial corporate debt will continue to creep upwards. Profits are more or less stagnant. In the final quarter of last year, which s&p 500 firms are currently reporting, they grew by a modest 1.6% year on year. What is more, three of the forces that propped up profits may now be weakening.

One source of concern is America’s consumers. Some of the fuel that had sent consumption soaring, confounding expectations of a recession in 2023, is running out. The excess savings accrued by shoppers during the pandemic, thanks in part to government stimulus cheques, have now largely been spent, according to a recent paper by Francois de Soyres and co-authors from the Fed. Default rates on credit cards have been steadily rising. Student loan repayments, which resumed last October after the Supreme Court quashed a pandemic-era moratorium, are adding to pressure on pocketbooks.

As a result, pedlars of discretionary goods are bracing for tough times. On January 23rd Wayfair, an e-emporium for furniture, announced it would lay off 13% of staff in response to “persistent category weakness”, just weeks after its boss sent an inspiring Christmas memo to staff extolling the joys of “working long hours” and “blending work and life”. On January 25th Levi Strauss, maker of America’s favourite jeans, said it expected its revenue to grow between 1% and 3% this year, below what analysts had anticipated, and announced it would fire 10% to 15% of its workforce. On January 30th Whirlpool, a maker of home appliances, said it expected like-for-like sales to be flat in 2024.

That same day Mary Barra, boss of General Motors, America’s biggest carmaker, cheerily predicted that the number of cars sold in America would rise by 3% this year—not bad, but well below last year’s 12% increase. And prices are expected to fall to bolster demand, squeezing margins just as car firms are digesting higher costs from a new wage deal won by their unionised workers late last year. American consumers are also switching more slowly to pricier electric vehicles (evs) than carmakers had anticipated. On January 24th Tesla, America’s ev champion, warned that its growth “may be notably lower” this year. Its shares plunged by 12% in response, wiping $80bn from its market value.

Even sellers of consumer staples are signalling caution. Over the past two years makers of packaged food and home essentials have managed to protect profits from rising costs by jacking up prices without crushing demand. That strategy now looks to be running out of road. On January 26th Colgate-Palmolive, a purveyor of toothpastes, said it expected sales to grow between 1% and 4% this year, down from 8% last year. On January 30th Mondelez, a confectioner, estimated revenue growth for 2024 of 3-5%, down from 14% in 2023.

A second worry for some companies is the health of consumers in China. A collapse in the country’s property sector has weighed on consumer sentiment. In December Nike’s share price plunged after it reported slowing sales growth in China as a result of “increased macro headwinds”. An order by a Hong Kong court on January 29th compelling Evergrande, once China’s biggest property developer, to liquidate could further dampen the mood. The next day Laxman Narasimhan, boss of Starbucks, an American coffee chain, warned that “a more cautious consumer” in China was weighing on its growth. Although Apple, the iPhone-maker, managed to notch up year-on-year 2% growth in the final quarter of last year, its sales in China slumped by 13%. On February 5th Estée Lauder, a perfumer, said it would slash 3,000 jobs owing in part to weak Chinese demand. For Western firms, stiffening local competition is adding to their woes.

image: the economist

Back at home, America’s manufacturing boom may be slowing—a third source of concern. In the first half of last year monthly factory construction in America surged by 17%, adjusting for inflation. In the second half this growth slowed to 8% (see chart 2). tsmc, a Taiwanese chipmaker, announced last month that it would delay the opening of a second chip factory in Arizona by one or two years. It had already delayed the first in July. On February 1st it was reported that Intel, an American chip manufacturer, would delay the opening of a factory in Ohio. That may be because subsidies promised by Joe Biden’s administration have been slow to materialise. Of the $52bn designated in the chips act for supporting domestic chipmaking, only a small fraction has been allocated. American car firms are also postponing investments in ev production in response to disappointing demand. That could weigh on the factory builders and suppliers that have benefited from the boom.

One area of activity that shows no sign of slowing down is artificial intelligence (ai). Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft—America’s cloud-computing triumvirate—reported year-on-year growth in their cloud divisions of 13%, 26% and 30% in the latest quarter, powered in part by increasing demand from customers for the computationally hungry technology. All three told investors that their lofty ambitions for ai would lead them to raise capital spending in 2024. On February 1st Meta, which too harbours ai ambitions, reported blockbuster earnings and said it would spend up to $37bn this year, a lot of it on data centres to host ai models. In contrast to its previous splurge, on its unloved virtual-reality metaverse, investors lapped it up—as they did news that the company would buy back more shares and pay out its first-ever dividend. The next day Meta’s market value soared by $200bn, to $1.2trn, the biggest one-day jump in Wall Street history.

It may be some time, however, before the rest of corporate America sees a boost to the bottom line from ai. According to a recent survey by bcg, a consultancy, only 5% of companies are doing nothing whatsoever with the technology. But 71% are merely “pursuing limited experimentation and small-scale pilots”. As America Inc runs low on other fuel, many more such pilots may be needed to ensure a smooth journey ahead. (ECON)

Plug-in hybrids vs. electric cars: We did the math on which is better for you

Hybrids make sense for some people

Advice by Michael J. Coren

Climate Advice Columnist

January 30, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EST

(Illustration by Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Unsplash; iStock)

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We are entering the electric era. But millions of drivers want their gas engines too.

While electric vehicle sales are booming — 14 percent of all new cars sold globally were electric in 2022, up from less than 5 percent in 2020 — sales of plug-in hybrids are rising even faster. They accounted for almost 30 percent of all electric cars sold in 2022.

This presents drivers considering a new car with something of a conundrum: Should I switch to all-electric? Or drive away in one of the slew of new — and old — hybrid models now on the market?

I looked at a dozen models powered by gasoline, electrons or both to help you make that decision. What I found is that it will all depend on how you plan to use your new car and what’s most important for you. To gauge that, you should ask yourself three main questions: How will you charge, how will you drive, and what’s your budget?

Here’s what to consider.

1. Can you easily plug in?

Electric vehicles charging at the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in July. (Francis Chung/Politico/AP)

Plugging in is easier than you think. You can just use a standard 120-volt wall outlet, known as a Level 1 charger, which adds about four to six miles of range per hour, equivalent to about 50 miles overnight, more than enough to cover most Americans’ daily routine. If you don’t have a garage, there are some effective options if you live in an apartment, rely on street parking or can access public chargers.

If these don’t work, go with a standard hybrid, or the most efficient vehicle that fits your needs. You can even consider an e-bike.

Gil Tal, director of the Plug-In Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California at Davis, says that when it comes to efficiency, “it doesn’t matter if it’s hybrid or not, just look at the mpg.” Some new gasoline vehicles such as the Mitsubishi Mirage (39 mpg) can edge out hybrid models. “From a cost perspective, hybrid is just one technology that makes it more or less efficient,” he adds.

Standard hybrid vehicles, which use a small battery to assist the gasoline engine, composed 7.2 percent of U.S. sales in the second quarter of 2023, compared with 1.7 percent for plug-in hybrids. Most offer between 29 and 60 miles per gallon. The Toyota Prius, which debuted in 1997, boasts a 57 mpg rating from the Environmental Protection Agency.

You’ll get much better mileage with a plug-in hybrid, with many new models achieving more than 120 miles per gallon, according to ratings from the EPA.

But don’t buy a plug-in hybrid if you won’t be able to recharge it. That’s not only less efficient, it’s pricey, usually adding several thousand dollars to the sticker price, as well as requiring higher maintenance. “Some people buy a plug-in [hybrid] and never plug them in,” Tal says. “I see that behavior all the time.”

If you can plug in easily, either at home or at work — where more than 80 percent of EV owners charge — or on the road, then you’ve got options.

2. Do you drive long distances?

Traffic during rush hour on a Los Angeles freeway in April. The U.S. transition to electric cars has hit a speed bump, with concerns about vehicle range and limited charging capacity adding to core affordability issues. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

If you’re generally driving less than about 200 miles a day and can access charging, switching to all-electric makes the most sense. You’ll be able to top up your battery, saving money and emissions.

Plug-in hybrids will give you longer range without refueling but are less efficient, since they carry around both an electric and a gasoline drivetrain. “Where the plug-in hybrid fails is that you pay for two drivetrains. It’s a suboptimal solution,” says Tal, comparing the technology to a spork, neither a superior spoon nor fork. “If you don’t need the [gasoline] engine, don’t take the engine with you.”

But plug-in hybrids can maximize flexibility: They’re a pragmatic choice if you need a car that handles daily and long-distance driving with limited charging access, or special applications such as towing and heavy-duty cargo. EVs such as the Ford F-150 Lightning have significantly diminished range when towing heavy loads such as a trailer. And while public charging networks are improving fast, some regions, especially in areas of the Midwest and Deep South — lag behind, making it inconvenient to recharge during long road trips.

For drivers looking to take advantage of the plug-in hybrid’s range flexibility, the technology shines when two conditions are met: You can finish your daily routine without starting the gasoline engine, and you have easy access to charging most of the time.

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The average American drives just under 40 miles a day. Today’s plug-in hybrid batteries typically have enough juice for 25 to 50 miles of all-electric driving. That puts most trips well within the all-electric range. Once the battery is nearly drained, the cars operate like a standard hybrid, recharging during braking and normal engine operation.

For some families, including Tal’s, plug-in hybrids allow them to own just one car, rather than one for driving around town and another for road trips. “It can save you a lot of money if you need this Swiss army knife,” he says. “For me, the plug-in hybrid is the way to stay a one-car household. Most of our routine is electric.”

3. How much do you want to spend?

A Mitsubishi i-MiEV charges at an Electrify America charging station in Waco, Tex., in May. (Shelby Tauber for The Washington Post)

If plug-in hybrids have a rosy future, they must beat all-electric vehicles on the road. That means competing on cost and performance over the lifetime of the car. Fuel, maintenance and incentives make this a complicated calculation.

For help crunching the numbers for some of the top-selling vehicles, I turned to Energy Innovation, a policy think tank aimed at decarbonizing the energy sector.

How did plug-in hybrids fare against their all-electric peers? Not well, at least financially. I found that while gas cars remain the cheapest on the lot, it’s now very tough, if not impossible, to beat battery electric vehicles on a total cost-of-ownership basis. The plug-in hybrid was the most expensive in this sample of popular SUVs and crossovers.

Driving a Toyota RAV4 plug-in hybrid for 10 years costs about $15,000 more than a Tesla Model Y or Volkswagen ID.4, two similar SUVs. It costs about $8,000 more over the same period than the Hyundai Ioniq 5, which currently doesn’t qualify for the federal $7,500 EV rebate. Even the gasoline RAV4 was about $5,500 cheaper over a decade compared with its plug-in counterpart, which is nearly 40 percent more expensive than the gasoline model.

EVs were cheaper to maintain at a cost of 6 cents per mile, compared with 9 cents for plug-in hybrids and more than 10 cents for conventional gasoline vehicles, according to the latest Energy Department data.

What should you drive?

Models of the Mustang Mach-E and F150 Lightning pickup truck at a Ford dealership in Broomfield, Colo., on Jan. 21. (David Zalubowski/AP)

Depending on where you live, your mileage may vary: Electricity prices in markets such as California and New York have spiked in recent years, especially during peak hours, while gasoline prices have also become more volatile. Other costs, such as higher insurance premiums or repair costs for EVs, may eat into those savings, although Consumer Reports says these are now trending down.

What’s the takeaway based on price? If you want the lowest sticker price, gasoline cars are still the winner — but they will cost you over time in fuel and maintenance, not to mention much higher carbon emissions. If you’re looking for the biggest savings over five years or more, and charging is accessible, go with electric.

EV models on the market at virtually every price point deliver respectable range, plenty of performance and big savings. If the flexibility of a gasoline engine is essential, buying a standard hybrid or paying a little more for plug-in models delivers the functionality you need, especially if you want one car that does it all.

In the long run, EVs are poised to become the hands-down financial winner for the vast majority of Americans, as battery technology and charging networks improve. But plug-in hybrids aren’t going away anytime soon. Even California, which plans to phase out the sale of most internal-combustion cars by 2035, will permit 20 percent of “zero-emission” vehicles sold in the state to be plug-in hybrids with at least 50 miles of range beyond that deadline.

“While EVs will be the wave of the future, gas hybrids make more sense now and, for many of us, always will,” writes George Shaeffer, a reader from Clearwater Beach, Fla., who drives a Camry Hybrid. “I don’t see any reason it can’t last until it’s 20 or 30 years old.” (WP)

Paramount Lays Off Hundreds of Workers

The company, which is moving away from traditional TV, lost more than $1 billion last year at its streaming division.

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A man holds flowers while striking in front of the Paramount Pictures Melrose Gate.

The entrance to the Paramount Pictures lot during the SAG-AFTRA strikes last year.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin

By Benjamin Mullin

Feb. 13, 2024, 9:00 a.m. ET

Sign up for the Watching newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Streaming TV and movie recommendations from critic Margaret Lyons and friends. Get it in your inbox.

Paramount, the owner of TV networks like Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central, is laying off hundreds of employees, cutting costs as it continues its painful transition away from traditional television.

About 3 percent of the company’s roughly 24,500 employees will be affected by the layoffs, according to a person familiar with the cuts, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive corporate information.

Bob Bakish, Paramount’s chief executive, said in a memo to employees that the cuts were part of a bid to “return the company to earnings growth.”

“While I realize these changes are in no way easy, as I said last month, I am confident this is the right decision for our future,” Mr. Bakish wrote. “These adjustments will help enable us to build on our momentum and execute our strategic vision for the year ahead — and I firmly believe we have much to be excited about.”

Paramount is at a crossroads. The company’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is considering selling her stake in the company, a deal that could bring decades of family ownership to an end. Skydance, the media company that helped produce Paramount franchises like “Top Gun” and “Mission Impossible,” has expressed interest, but no deal has yet materialized.

Like all its peers in traditional media, Paramount has struggled to keep pace with Netflix as streaming services supplant traditional TV and moviegoing. The company’s biggest streaming service, Paramount+, has not yet become profitable, putting a drag on the company’s profits. Paramount’s streaming division, which also includes the ad-supported service Pluto TV, lost more than $1 billion last year.

Though viewership of Paramount’s cable networks is in decline, parts of its TV business remain resilient. Paramount’s CBS network, which broadcast the Super Bowl on Sunday, generated record ratings for the game, which saw the Kansas City Chief defeat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime. About 123.4 million people watched the game, according to Nielsen, up from 115.1 million the year before. (NYT)

Walmart to Add 150 U.S. Stores in Five-Year Expansion Drive

The retail giant, which last opened a domestic location in 2021, said most of the stores would be newly built.

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An aisle in the grocery section of a Walmart stocked with goods and lined with shoppers.

A Walmart store in Miami. The retail giant’s plan to add stores signals confidence in the brick-and-mortar model.Credit...Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via Shutterstock

J. Edward Moreno

By J. Edward Moreno

Jan. 31, 2024

Walmart will add 150 stores in the United States over the next five years, a major expansion drive for the retail giant.

The company said the move, which it announced in a statement on Wednesday, would involve millions of dollars in investment. Walmart employs roughly 1.6 million people in the United States, and said it hires hundreds of people each time it opens a new store.

Walmart had just over 4,600 stores nationwide at the end of October, down from more than 4,700 a year earlier. The company has not opened a new U.S. store since late 2021.

Most of the stores that Walmart plans to open will be newly built, while others will be conversions of existing locations to new formats. The first two new stores will open in the spring, in Florida and Georgia, and the company is completing construction plans for 12 other stores this year. It also said it would remodel 650 locations.

Walmart announced this week that it was raising salaries and benefits for store managers and offering them stock grants.

The company reported sharply higher profit in the first three quarters of 2023, and its share price is hovering near a record high. It has yet to report earnings for its most recent quarter, which included the holiday season.

Consumer spending, which powers the U.S. economy, has been resilient even though shoppers have been squeezed by high inflation and rising interest rates. Credit card data from the holiday season showed retail sales increased from a year earlier.

“This is a huge vote of confidence in the American consumer,” Craig Johnson, the founder of the retail consultancy Customer Growth Partners, said of Walmart’s announcement.

Mr. Johnson said investors might be concerned over how this could affect Walmart’s Sam’s Club stores, which have increasingly moved from a destination for business owners to stock up on supplies to a place where individuals shop for groceries.

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Walmart’s choice to open new stores and remodel some existing ones reflects the company’s focus on enhancing its in-store and pickup experiences even as e-commerce has gained popularity, said Edward Yruma, an analyst at the investment bank Piper Sandler.

“As we settle into the new normal, what we’ve come to is that the consumer likes great, physical retail locations,” he said. (NYT)

Bitcoin E.T.F.s Come With Risks. Here’s What You Should Know.

Federal regulators have made it easier for everyday investors to buy funds that track the price of Bitcoin, using traditional brokerage accounts. Most financial advisers remain skeptical.

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An illustration of a man with a suit diving into water filled with Bitcoin and other symbols.

Credit...Rune Fisker

Tara Siegel Bernard

By Tara Siegel Bernard

Published Jan. 19, 2024

Updated Jan. 21, 2024

Nearly a dozen new investments funds that hold Bitcoin began trading last week, making it easier for anyone with a basic brokerage account to buy a slice of the digital currency.

Several established financial institutions, including Fidelity and BlackRock, have coalesced around Bitcoin because it is the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency.

But Bitcoin remains an enigma to most everyday investors, and it’s hard to separate the buzz from any true potential. It’s also wildly volatile.

In other words, it’s a bet. And institutions are wagering that plenty of investors want in.

But putting crypto into a traditional investment wrapper does not paper over the underlying risks. Here’s a look at how it works:

What is an exchange-traded fund?

Exchange-traded funds are similar to mutual funds, but they can be traded on an exchange like a stock. E.T.F.s track the performance of the assets they hold, which might include a diversified basket of securities like stock or bonds, or even single commodities, like gold, silver and crypto.

They were initially designed to track indexes (like the S&P 500) or spheres of the market, and were heralded for their low costs and tax efficiency. But they’ve grown in popularity in recent years. Many E.T.F.s now track narrower and more esoteric slices of the markets, while others use leverage to magnify bets on a specific stock or sector or the market overall.

What is a Bitcoin E.T.F.?

The Bitcoin exchange-traded products that recently started trading are designed to track Bitcoin’s price, minus the fees and cost of trading. This throws open the gates to any investors with a traditional brokerage account who can now buy the shares as if they were buying stock in Apple or Google.

These investments are similar to gold exchange-traded products, which provide an easier way to get exposure to gold without holding the gold bars themselves.

There are several other ways to gain direct exposure to Bitcoin, including through crypto exchanges as well as specialized digital wallets. But with Bitcoin E.T.F.s, you’re delegating the complicated part to large financial institutions, meaning you don’t have to worry about “hot wallets,” “cold storage” and lost passwords that can forever lock you out from access to your Bitcoin.

Didn’t Bitcoin E.T.F.s already exist?

Yes, but they’re different: E.T.F.s that invest in Bitcoin futures contracts — or agreements to buy or sell an asset at a certain price sometime later — have been around since 2021. The reason the new products are called “spot” Bitcoin E.T.F.s is that they’re holding Bitcoin itself, and not a derivative that provides secondary exposure. So-called spot markets trade something, often some type of commodity, on the spot, or instantly.

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The futures-based Bitcoin E.T.F.s can end up being more expensive because the contracts expire and must be sold and repurchased, or “rolled,” each month. Those costs can be potentially significant, particularly when the new contracts cost more than the previous month’s, causing managers to buy high and sell low.

VanEck recently said it would shutter its Bitcoin futures E.T.F. now that it offered a spot version.

Do the new products come with any investor protections?

The new Bitcoin products are not your standard-issue exchange-traded funds, which, like mutual funds, are typically registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 and come with more regulatory protections than these investments.

Instead, these “exchange-traded products” are subject to looser controls around their fees and conflicts of interest. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t have the same authority to conduct examinations of these products as with typical E.T.F.s.

If you’re considering making a small bet, take the time to read the product’s prospectus, which is a typically dense and lengthy document that explains an investment’s objective, high risks, costs and other pertinent information.

The prospectus for the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund is 112 pages, but you need to read only six paragraphs before you’re hit over the head with the following, in all caps: THE SHARES ARE SPECULATIVE SECURITIES. THEIR PURCHASE INVOLVES A HIGH DEGREE OF RISK AND YOU COULD LOSE YOUR ENTIRE INVESTMENT. Disclosures from other providers use the same language.

Does the S.E.C.’s approval suggest these investment products are safe for ordinary investors?

Nope. Just because everyday investors have been granted easy access in a well-known investment wrapper does not change anything about the underlying holdings.

Crypto supporters had been pushing for a Bitcoin E.T.F. for more than a decade, but the S.E.C. rebuffed them, arguing that the market was awash with fraud and subject to manipulation. (More than 20 related products were denied approval in recent years.) But this time, a federal appeals court decision seemingly forced the S.E.C.’s hand: The court ruled that the S.E.C.’s rejection of Grayscale Investments’ application didn’t adequately explain its denial since it had already approved similar products using Bitcoin futures.

The matter was sent back to the S.E.C., which voted 3 to 2 to approve the products. The S.E.C. chair, Gary Gensler, who voted in favor, said the agency’s product approvals were not an endorsement of Bitcoin, and he called it “primarily a speculative, volatile asset that’s also used for illicit activity including ransomware, money laundering, sanction evasion and terrorist financing.”

Caroline Crenshaw, a Democratic commissioner who voted to deny approval, ran through a list of investor safety concerns in her dissent, from inadequate oversight of the markets to wash trading, where traders artificially increase trading volume by buying and selling products simultaneously, to drum up interest and drive prices higher.

There are 11 new E.T.F.s. How do they differ?

They’re pretty similar in both structure and price.

But a couple of familiar names — BlackRock and Fidelity — set themselves apart from the pack early on with higher trading volumes, which can translate into lower costs for investors. They were followed by Cathie Wood’s Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF and Bitwise, a boutique firm that specializes in cryptocurrency. All four products had already amassed roughly $2.5 billion in total assets as of Thursday.

But they were eclipsed by Grayscale Bitcoin Trust BTC, which had a head start: It has been around for more than a decade and converted its established Bitcoin trust into an E.T.F., which has about $26 billion in assets.

Having nearly a dozen products drop onto the market at once was a huge win for investors: Providers immediately began undercutting one another on price — most fees range from 0.19 percent of assets annually to 0.39 percent, according to Morningstar, with many firms waiving fees for an introductory period. Since many online brokerage firms have eliminated most trading commissions, the cost of entry is minimal.

There is an outlier: Grayscale has a fee of 1.5 percent. But more than $1.5 billion had recently flowed out of the fund, probably because some investors are turning to cheaper alternatives.

How safe is the Bitcoin held by these exchange-traded products?

They will be held by a third party. Most of the new E.T.F.s have hired Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange platform, to be their custodian, which means it will be responsible for the security of all the private keys to Bitcoin held by these E.T.F.s, explained Bryan Armour, director of passive strategies research at Morningstar. It is also likely to be the exchange where much of the trading occurs when the shares of these products are created and cashed out. “Much relies on Coinbase’s safe passage,” Mr. Armour noted.

The VanEck Bitcoin Trust hired Gemini, another exchange with an institutional operation. (VanEck’s trading symbol is HODL, an abbreviation for “Hold on for dear life,” which refers to holding on to Bitcoin despite its stomach-churning volatility.)

Fidelity is an exception: Its fund will hold its products’ Bitcoin on its own platform, Fidelity Digital Asset Services.

What are the tax implications?

For tax purposes, the Internal Revenue Service views Bitcoin and other digital currencies as property, not currency, which means it is treated similarly to an investment in stocks.

“The tax treatment of a Bitcoin E.T.F. will be similar to holding Bitcoin directly,” said Selva Ozelli, a certified public accountant and the author of “Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally.”

If you’ve held the shares for more than a year in a taxable account, any gains would be taxed at the less onerous capital gains rates (generally 0, 15 or 20 percent, depending on your taxable income and tax bracket that year). Short-term gains, which apply to investments held for a year or less, are taxed as ordinary income.

Do financial planners recommend cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, in this new format?

A vast majority do not.

“At best, it’s deemed too volatile,” said Michael Kitces, an influential thinker in the financial advisory industry, who added that advisers were at risk of being sued when markets crashed more than 35 percent, so there wasn’t much appetite for something that periodically crashed 80 percent or more. “At worst, the advisers are skeptics about crypto and its viability altogether.”

In a 2023 survey conducted by the Journal of Financial Planning and the Financial Planning Association, cryptocurrency was dead last on a list of what advisers were using in their clients’ portfolios. The survey found that just 2.3 percent of advisers allocated crypto, up from 0.3 percent in 2019, but 3.1 percent said they planned to recommend it more in the next year. Will that meaningfully change with the availability of user-friendly, low-cost Bitcoin E.T.F.s.?

Mr. Kitces said he would expect a segment of advisers to allocate 1 or 2 percent of a client’s portfolio to Bitcoin E.T.F.s, particularly if the individual expressed interest. But others are likely to argue that such a small allocation won’t make a material difference over the long term, so they would rather not introduce the risk. There’s a long list of alternative investments that can help diversify a portfolio — with less volatility — before you resort to crypto, he said.

What do retirement account regulators say about the new products?

They have serious concerns about Americans using their retirement money to invest in crypto, echoing a stance regulators issued a couple of years ago.

Few workplace retirement plans offer crypto, but after hearing that more plans were receiving pitches from firms to add digital assets to their investment menus, the Labor Department issued guidance in March 2022, reminding plan administrators of their responsibilities. The department oversees workplace retirement plans, which held $8 trillion on behalf of 96 million 401(k) participants.

Retirement plan administrators — who must act solely in the best interest of the employees participating — are responsible for choosing prudent investment options. If they include what could be deemed an imprudent option, and leave it to the worker to decide its merits, that would amount to a failure of fiduciary duty, the department said in its guidance.

“Before they expose plan participants to the risks associated with cryptocurrency, they should study our guidance carefully and make certain that they can square their actions with their duties of care and loyalty to the plan participants they are charged to protect,” said Lisa M. Gomez, assistant secretary for employee benefits security at the Labor Department.

Are Bitcoin E.T.F.s available everywhere, given their risks?

Not all mainstream institutions are embracing the new crypto E.T.F.s, and firms that make them available will have guardrails.

Vanguard has no plans to introduce its own Bitcoin E.T.F., and other firms’ shiny new Bitcoin products won’t be available for purchase on its brokerage platform, either.

“These products are not aligned with our longstanding focus on offering core building blocks for long-term investment portfolios to help clients meet goals such as retirement or saving for college,” Vanguard said in a statement. “Unlike equities and bonds, they generally lack intrinsic economic value and do not generate cash flows like dividends and interest payments.”

Merrill, part of Bank of America, is making them available only to people with $10 million in investable assets.

Others are offering the products, but with some restrictions: Schwab and E-Trade, for example, said the Bitcoin E.T.F.s could not be sold short or sold on margin, which involves borrowing money from the brokerage to trade (and can increase gains but amplify losses).

Now that the S.E.C. has approved this, can we expect more crypto-based exchange-traded products?

Yes. There are already seven applications — from many of the same players — to track the spot price of Ether, another digital currency, according to Deborah Fuhr, founder and managing partner of ETFGI, a research and consulting firm. And ProShares is seeking approval for a handful of E.T.F.s that make bets on the direction of Bitcoin’s price.

Industry experts expect these products to be ushered through by regulators, too.

“That’s likely all we get for a while,” said Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, an E.T.F. data and analytics firm. “The government remains uncertain about cryptocurrency in general.”

I’m still thinking about wading in.

Before you do, perform a small thought experiment: What would happen if I woke up one morning and my investment had dropped 40 percent? How would I react? What would it mean for my finances overall?

Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, said his firm’s research had found that once investors allocated more than 5 percent of their portfolio to cryptocurrency, it became the biggest driver of a portfolio’s steepest losses.

“It’s the thing that gives you a pit in your stomach,” he said. (NYT)

Crypto PAC Jumps Into Senate Race, Opposing Katie Porter in California

A group called Fairshake recently revealed that it and two affiliated super PACs had amassed roughly $80 million combined in 2023. Now it’s planning to deploy some of that cash.

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Katie Porter stands behind a lectern speaking into a microphone and gesturing with her right hand. The lectern has a sign that says “Democracy demands a fair, ethical court.”

The crypto PAC Fairshake is planning a blitz of negative advertising against Representative Katie Porter and had begun booking time in markets statewide on Monday.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Shane Goldmacher

By Shane Goldmacher

Feb. 13, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

The biggest name and the biggest spender of crypto money in the 2022 election cycle is now awaiting his prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy. But new super PACs have sprouted up as the successors to the collapsed Sam Bankman-Fried empire, and they are making their first big bet of the 2024 election cycle: trying to crush Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat running in next month’s California Senate primary.

The biggest new crypto-focused super PAC, Fairshake, began reserving television and digital advertising across California in a multimillion-dollar buy late on Monday, and it could be a major player in the race’s final three weeks.

Fairshake revealed two weeks ago in federal filings that it and two affiliated super PACs had amassed a combined roughly $80 million in 2023, with most of the money coming from three major cryptocurrency players: Coinbase, Ripple Labs and Andreessen Horowitz.

The California Senate race pits Ms. Porter against Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat, and Representative Barbara Lee, another Democrat, as well as Steve Garvey, a Republican and a former baseball player. The top two finishers in the March primary will advance to November, even if both are Democrats.

In a statement, Fairshake accused Ms. Porter of taking campaign cash from other industries and misleading the state about her record, saying, “Katie Porter says one thing and does another.”

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Maryland: Larry Hogan, a Republican and a popular former governor, announced that he would run for the state’s open Senate seat, a surprising move that immediately made Maryland a top battleground for control of the chamber.

Montana: Former President Donald Trump endorsed Tim Sheehy for the state’s Republican Senate nomination, putting his powerful imprimatur on the primary race.

R.N.C. Chair: The disclosure that Ronna McDaniel is planning to step down as the leader of the Republican National Committee has set off a new round of jockeying between two of the same men who battled for the co-chairman post in 2023.

Ranked-Choice Voting: Most conservatives have opposed the voting method, which could be on the November ballot in four states. But some say that attitudes toward it on the right could be changing.

The group is planning a blitz of anti-Porter advertising and had begun booking time in markets statewide on Monday.

It is not exactly clear what about Ms. Porter has drawn the crypto industry’s ire other than her record as a progressive who favored regulating the industry to better favor consumers and made the grilling of a financial chief executive a viral moment a few years ago.

The crypto financiers behind Fairshake and its two affiliated groups, Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs, are fairly open about their agenda: to ensure a favorable set of regulations as the federal government considers how to regulate the crypto industry and to use political spending to get it.

Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, who personally gave $1 million in September, told Axios that same month: “Money moves the needle. For better or worse, that’s how our system works.”

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Mr. Armstrong said at the time, “If you look at like the oil and gas lobby or the banking lobby — I mean they’re spending, I don’t know, in the order of $100 million a year.” Interestingly, the statement from Fairshake cited some of those same industries as supporting Ms. Porter.

The new crypto mega group and its affiliates have attracted prominent Democratic and Republican consulting firms.

Fairshake has so far paid money to Impact Research, a polling firm that worked for President Biden in 2020, as well as Jamestown Associates, an ad-making firm that produced commercials for former President Donald J. Trump that same year. Records show the group is employing two other prominent polling firms: Schoen Survey Research, which was founded by Doug Schoen, and Global Strategy Group, which works for a wide range of congressional Democrats.

On Capitol Hill, Ms. Porter has been a close ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who was once her professor at Harvard Law School. Ms. Warren has been an outspoken critic of the lax regulations around cryptocurrency, and Ms. Porter once signed onto a letter with Ms. Warren to Texas regulators about crypto, according to the crypto news-tracking site Bitcoin.com.

Mr. Schiff, who has been campaigning to elevate Mr. Garvey over Ms. Porter into the general election, has a statement about the crypto industry on his policy page, writing about the need to nurture such innovative industries. “We need to develop comprehensive regulatory frameworks to ensure that these companies and jobs stay here and grow here,” the page reads.

Fairshake and its affiliated groups have already spent relatively small sums on other races, for candidates including Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the House Financial services Committee, last year before he announced he would retire.

The other biggest spending to date, from the affiliated crypto group Protect Progress, has been to aid Shomari Figures, a Democrat running for the House in Alabama. On the issues page of his website, Mr. Figures plays up the importance of supporting crypto, writing that he would work to “embrace the new landscape around digital assets, like cryptocurrency, to stimulate innovation and technological advancement.”

Mr. Figures has benefited from nearly $750,000 in crypto spending since late January — reminiscent of the huge sums that Mr. Bankman-Fried and others poured into congressional contests in 2022.

Mr. Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm, FTX, collapsed in late 2022, and he was arrested and charged with fraud following the multibillion-dollar implosion. He was found guilty in November. (NYT)

For First Time in Two Decades, U.S. Buys More From Mexico Than China

The United States bought more goods from Mexico than China in 2023 for the first time in 20 years, evidence of how much global trade patterns have shifted.

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Workers at an aluminum injection molding plant.

A factory in the northern Mexico industrial hub of Saltillo. Mexico was among the markets that American consumers and businesses turned to last year for car parts, shoes, toys and raw materials.Credit...Daniel Becerril/Reuters

Ana SwansonSimon Romero

By Ana Swanson and Simon Romero

Ana Swanson reported from Washington and Seoul, and Simon Romero from Mexico City.

Feb. 7, 2024

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In the depths of the pandemic, as global supply chains buckled and the cost of shipping a container from China soared nearly twentyfold, Marco Villarreal spied an opportunity.

In 2021, Mr. Villarreal resigned as Caterpillar’s director general in Mexico and began nurturing ties with companies looking to shift manufacturing from China to Mexico. He found a client in Hisun, a Chinese producer of all-terrain vehicles, which hired Mr. Villarreal to establish a $152 million manufacturing site in Saltillo, an industrial hub in northern Mexico.

Mr. Villarreal said foreign companies, particularly those seeking to sell within North America, saw Mexico as a viable alternative to China for several reasons, including the simmering trade tensions between the United States and China.

“The stars are aligning for Mexico,” he said.

New data released on Wednesday showed that Mexico outpaced China for the first time in 20 years to become America’s top source of official imports — a significant shift that highlights how increased tensions between Washington and Beijing are altering trade flows.

The United States’ trade deficit with China narrowed significantly last year, with goods imports from the country dropping 20 percent to $427.2 billion, the data shows. American consumers and businesses turned to Mexico, Europe, South Korea, India, Canada and Vietnam for auto parts, shoes, toys and raw materials.

Imports from China fell last year

U.S. imports of goods by origin

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Bureau of Economic AnalysisBy The New York Times

Mexican exports to the United States were roughly the same as in 2022, at $475.6 billion.

America’s total trade deficit in goods and services, which consists of exports minus imports, narrowed 18.7 percent. Overall U.S. exports to the world increased slightly in 2023 from the previous year, despite a strong dollar and a soft global economy.

U.S. imports fell annually as Americans bought less crude oil and chemicals and fewer consumer goods, including cellphones, clothes, camping gear, toys and furniture.

The recent weakness in imports, and drop-off in trade with China, has partly been a reflection of the pandemic. American consumers stuck at home during the pandemic snapped up Chinese-made laptops, toys, Covid tests, athleisure, furniture and home exercise equipment.

Even as concerns about the coronavirus faded in 2022, the United States continued to import a lot of Chinese products, as bottlenecks at congested U.S. ports finally cleared and businesses restocked their warehouses.

“The world couldn’t get access to enough Chinese goods in ’21, and it gorged on Chinese goods in ’22,” said Brad Setser, an economist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Everything has been normalizing since then.”

But beyond the unusual swings in annual patterns in the last few years, trade data is beginning to provide compelling evidence that years of heightened tensions have significantly chipped away at America’s trading relationship with China.

In 2023, U.S. quarterly imports from China were at roughly the same level as they were 10 years ago, despite a decade of growth in the American economy and rising U.S. imports from elsewhere in the world.

“We are decoupling, and that’s weighing heavily on trade flows,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said of the United States and China.

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Economists say the relative decrease in trade with China is clearly linked to the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and then maintained by the Biden administration.

Research by Caroline Freund, the dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, showed that trade with China fell for products that have high tariffs, like screwdrivers and smoke detectors, while trade in products that do not have tariffs, like hair dryers and microwave ovens, continued to grow.

Ralph Ossa, the chief economist for the World Trade Organization, said that trade between the United States and China had not collapsed, but that it had been growing about 30 percent more slowly than trade between those countries and the rest of the world.

There were two episodes in recent history where U.S. trade with China slowed notably, he said. The first was when trade tensions between the countries escalated in 2018. The second was when Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting the United States and its allies to impose strict sanctions and further reshuffling global trade relationships.

Image

Two workers in orange safety vests loading containers onto a cargo ship.

The Port of Nanjing in the Chinese province of Jiangsu. Trade between the United States and China has fallen for products that have high tariffs.Credit...Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock

“There was a period where geopolitics didn’t really matter for trade much, but as uncertainty increases in the world, we do see that trade becomes more sensitive to these positions,” said Stela Rubinova, a research economist at the World Trade Organization.

Some economists caution that the U.S. reduction in trade with China might not be as sharp as bilateral data shows. That is because like Hisun, the Chinese vehicle producer, some multinationals have shifted portions of their manufacturing out of China and into other countries but continued sourcing some raw materials and parts from China.

In other cases, companies may simply be routing goods that are actually made in China through other countries to avoid U.S. tariffs.

U.S. trade statistics do not record such products as coming from China, even though a significant portion of their value would have been created there.

Ms. Freund, who wrote a recent paper on the subject, said the two countries’ trade relationship was “definitely being attenuated, but not as much as the official statistics suggest.”

Still, geopolitical risks are clearly pushing companies to look to other markets, particularly those with low costs and stable trading relationships with the United States, like Mexico.

Jesús Carmona, the president for Mexico and Central America at Schneider Electric, the French electrical equipment giant, said that the Biden administration’s 2022 climate law and geopolitical tensions stemming from the war in Ukraine were both factors pushing companies toward Mexico.

When China appeared to align with Russia in the conflict, “it triggered all sorts of alarms,” Mr. Carmona said. “People realized we cannot have such dependencies on China, which we built up over the last 40 years as we were making China the factory of the world.”

Schneider, which already had a substantial presence in Mexico with nine factories and nearly 12,000 employees, decided in 2021 that it needed to grow further in the country. Now, after opening new manufacturing sites and expanding existing plants, the company has about 16,000 employees in Mexico, with plans for that number to soon reach about 20,000.

Schneider sends about 75 percent to 80 percent of its production in Mexico to the United States, including an array of products like circuit breakers and panels used to distribute and regulate electrical power.

While foreign direct investment in developing countries fell 9 percent in 2023, the flow of such investment to Mexico surged 21 percent last year, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Another economy caught in the shifting tides between the United States and China has been South Korea. Like Mexico, South Korea is subject to lower tariffs because it has a free trade deal with the United States. In December, U.S. imports from South Korea were the highest on record.

South Korean firms have also particularly benefited from President Biden’s new climate legislation. The U.S. government is offering tax credits for consumers who buy electric vehicles, but it has set certain limits on sourcing parts of those cars from China.

As major manufacturers of electric vehicle batteries and components, South Korean firms have seized the opportunity to participate in newly expanding U.S. vehicle supply chains. One Korean battery manufacturer, SK On, has invested $2.6 billion in a factory in Georgia and is building new facilities in Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky in partnership with Hyundai and Ford.

Image

A group of people walking toward a manufacturing plant as workers in bright shirts stand outside.

The SK battery factory in Commerce, Ga.Credit...David Walter Banks for The New York Times

Min Sung, the chief commercial officer of SK On, said that China was getting more restrictive for Korean businesses. Meanwhile, the U.S. constraints on China benefitting from electric vehicle tax credits had given Korean businesses “more space to play.”

“In order for business to survive, you always find the market that’s got more potential,” Mr. Sung said.

As major South Korean companies like SK, LG, Samsung and Hyundai build new facilities to make products in the United States, that also appears to be increasing U.S. trade with South Korea since companies are importing some materials, machinery and parts from their home countries to supply the new facilities.

In December, Korean exports to the United States surpassed Korean exports to China for the first time in 20 years, driven by shipments of vehicles, electric batteries and other parts.

Mr. Sung agreed that increasing American skepticism of China was pushing the United States and South Korea closer together.

“It’s never been stronger than the last couple of years between two allies,” he said. (NYT)

The renewables business faces a make-or-break moment

Supply-chain dysfunction, rising interest rates and protectionism are making life tough

A wind turbine at CS Wind in Pueblo, Colorado, USA.

image: getty images

Dec 4th 2023|dubai

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Afew years ago renewables were having their moment in the sun. Rock-bottom interest rates lowered the cost of clean power, which is expensive to deploy but runs on sun and wind that come free of charge. The price of solar panels and wind turbines fell as technologies matured and manufacturers gained scale. These developments brought the levelised cost of electricity (lcoe)—which accounts for capital and operating expenditures per unit of energy—for solar, onshore wind and offshore wind down by 87%, 64% and 55%, respectively, between 2010 and 2020 (see chart 1). Clean energy became competitive with dirty alternatives, and was snapped up by big corporate power-users directly from developers.

image: the economist

Infrastructure investors such as Brookfield and Macquarie made big renewables bets. So did some fossil-fuel firms, such as bp. Utilities such as edp and Iberdrola in Europe and aes and NextEra in America poured money into projects. Average returns on capital put to work by developers rose from 3% in 2015 to 6% in 2019, a similar level to oil-and-gas extraction but with less volatility. The industry’s prospects looked so bright that in October 2020 the market value of NextEra briefly eclipsed that of ExxonMobil, America’s mightiest oil giant, making it America’s most valuable energy company.

Today these prospects look considerably dimmer. Over the past two years the economics of renewables have been hit by rising interest rates, supply-chain snags, permit delays and, increasingly, the protectionist instincts of Western governments. The “green premium” in stocks has turned into a “green discount”. The s&p global clean-energy index, which tracks the performance of the industry, has declined by 32% over the past 12 months, at a time when the world’s stockmarkets have risen by 11% (see chart 2). aes has lost more than a third of its value. NextEra is worth roughly a third as much as ExxonMobil, which has been buoyed by a surge in the oil price. Manufacturers of wind turbines went from just about profitable to lossmaking (see chart 3).

image: the economist

That is a problem, and not just for the renewables companies and their shareholders. On December 2nd, at the annual un climate summit being held in Dubai, 118 countries pledged to increase their combined renewable-energy capacity to 11,000 gigawatts (gw) by 2030, up from 3,400gw last year, as part of their decarbonisation efforts. That will require adding some 1,000gw a year, three times what the world managed last year. For this to happen, renewables must once again look like a business to bet on.

The industry’s recent troubles are the result of a confluence of factors. One problem is rising costs along the supply chain. The price of polysilicon, a key material in solar panels, rocketed from $10 per kilogram in 2020 to as much as $35 in 2022, thanks to pandemic-era supply-chain problems in China. The price of solar modules jumped in response.

image: the economist

Costs related to wind turbines have soared, too. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up the price of steel, an important input of which both countries are big producers. What is more, to create longer and more powerful blades, their makers have pushed into new technological territory, including experimenting with materials like carbon-fibre composites rather than fibreglass. To capture stronger winds at bigger heights, the average tower is now almost 100 metres tall. In 2018 ge unveiled a 260-metre offshore wind turbine, not much shorter than the Eiffel Tower. Suppliers of the 8,000-odd parts of a wind turbine have struggled to keep up. Ships and lorries are having trouble transporting parts the size of football pitches.

All this has led to delays and manufacturing failures for wind turbines. In October a turbine made by Vestas, a Danish firm, caught fire in Iowa. Around the same time the blades on a ge turbine in Germany snapped and fell into a field. Warranty provisions in sales contracts make manufacturers bear the cost of such incidents. In the past 12 months such warranties cost Vestas €1bn ($1.1bn). Quality problems at Siemens Gamesa, including creases in its blades, drove annual operating losses for its parent company, Siemens Energy, to €4.6bn. On November 14th the parent was granted a loan guarantee by the German government to help it avert a crisis.

Can green stay out of the red?

To stem the bleeding, equipment-makers have been raising their own prices. Western ones now charge a fifth more than they did at the end of 2020, according to s&p Global, a data provider. These price rises have combined with higher interest rates to push up the lcoe for American offshore-wind projects by 50% over the past two years, calculates Bloombergnef, a research firm—even after including subsidies wrapped up in the Inflation Reduction Act (ira), President Joe Biden’s mammoth climate law.

Developers that locked in electricity prices with customers before locking in costs have found themselves stuck with unprofitable projects. In America they have either cancelled or sought to renegotiate contracts for half the offshore-wind capacity being built in the country, according to Bloombergnef.

In October Orsted, a Danish company that is the world’s largest offshore-wind developer, took a $4bn writedown when it cancelled two large projects off the coast of New Jersey. In Britain, a government auction in September to provide offshore wind power to the grid at a maximum guaranteed price of £44 ($56) per megawatt-hour (mwh) received no bids.

Renewables bosses also grumble about bureaucratic delays. In America it takes on average four years to get approval for a solar farm and six for an onshore wind one. An eu rule that approval times for renewable projects in the bloc should not exceed two years is honoured mostly in the breach. Because solar and wind farms typically produce less energy than conventional power plants and, with easy-to-connect sites already taken, are being built in increasingly remote places, they often need new transmission lines. These, too, need to be approved. In America the interconnection queue for renewable energy is 2,000gw long and growing.

All this is made worse by rising green protectionism. America has, in effect, locked out Chinese solar manufacturers with hefty anti-dumping duties and the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act of 2021, which bars American developers from importing modules containing polysilicon from the Xinjiang region, source of half of the global supply. As a result of such policies, solar modules are more than twice as expensive in the United States as elsewhere, according to Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy.

Those costs may rise further. In August the Department of Commerce found that some South-East Asian suppliers were merely repackaging products from China, and would thus also be slapped with the same anti-dumping duties from the middle of next year. The Biden administration is using the ira’s domestic-content requirements to lure production home. First Solar, the biggest American maker of modules, is expanding its domestic production capacity from 6gw this year to 14gw by 2026. Yet that is a tiny fraction of what America will need to meet its decarbonisation goals. It will also do little to lower prices in the industry as a whole.

image: the economist

Europe is sending mixed signals. The eu has dropped earlier anti-dumping duties on Chinese solar panels. Now, however, Europe is in the midst of negotiating the Net Zero Industry Act, which in its current form will seek to favour domestic producers in public renewable-energy auctions. The European Commission is also mulling a probe into China’s subsidies for its turbine manufacturers, which sell their gear for 70% less at home than Western rivals charge elsewhere in the world (see chart 4). Chinese firms are already gaining traction outside their home market. They are now bidding more regularly on projects around the world, notes Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade, chief executive of edp.

Trade restrictions will not just keep out cheap Chinese solar panels and wind turbines. They will also affect the availability of parts. Siemens Gamesa plans to outsource more of its supply chain to trim costs. Western turbine manufacturers already purchase nacelles, towers and other components from China, which dominates their production. For offshore-wind projects, America will need to import the majority of components to meet its 2030 targets, according to the Department of Energy. Supply shortages are likely as the world races to deploy more renewable power. Tariffs and local content regulations could make the problem worse.

There are few signs of the protectionist mood lifting. But the industry is at least starting to get a grip on some more immediate challenges. Polysilicon prices have fallen and production capacity is increasing up and down the solar supply chain. Western turbine manufacturers may be turning a corner, too, helped by a fall in commodity prices and greater technological and financial discipline. The industry is realising that “bigger is not always better” for turbines, says Henrik Andersen, chief executive of Vestas. On November 8th the Danish firm reported that it returned to profitability in the third quarter.

image: the economist

Developers, for their part, are managing to raise prices without hurting demand. In the past two years prices for solar and wind power received by developers in America under power-purchase agreements have increased by nearly 60%, according to figures from LevelTen Energy, an energy marketplace (see chart 5). Andres Gluski, chief executive of aes, says that his company is on track to put more than twice as much renewable-energy capacity into service this year as in 2022. Returns are holding steady, he adds. In next year’s offshore wind auction Britain will lift the maximum price from £44 per mwh to £73. Germany, too, has been raising ceiling prices for solar and wind auctions.

“No one enjoys seeing prices go up, but they are accepting it,” says Mark Dooley of Macquarie. If approval rules are not relaxed and protectionism goes unchecked, a lot more acceptance will be necessary. (ECON)

American Firms Invested $1 Billion in Chinese Chips, Lawmakers Find

A congressional investigation determined that U.S. funding helped fuel the growth of a sector now viewed by Washington as a security threat.

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A woman in a white lab coat looking down, with machinery in a factory.

A worker at a chipmaker in China. A House report said American venture capital firms had invested more than $1 billion in China’s semiconductor industry before such investments were banned last August.Credit...China Daily/via Reuters

Ana SwansonErin Griffith

By Ana Swanson and Erin Griffith

Ana Swanson reported from Seoul, and Erin Griffith from San Francisco.

Feb. 8, 2024

A congressional investigation has determined that five American venture capital firms invested more than $1 billion in China’s semiconductor industry since 2001, fueling the growth of a sector that the United States government now regards as a national security threat.

Funds supplied by the five firms — GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Walden International — went to more than 150 Chinese companies, according to the report, which was released Thursday by both Republicans and Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

The investments included roughly $180 million that went to Chinese firms that the committee said directly or indirectly supported Beijing’s military. That includes companies that the U.S. government has said provide chips for China’s military research, equipment and weapons, such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker.

The report by the House committee focuses on investments made before the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions aimed at cutting off China’s access to American financing. It does not allege any illegality.

In August, the Biden administration barred U.S. venture capital and private equity firms from investing in Chinese quantum computing, artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors. It has also imposed worldwide limits on sales of advanced chips and chip-making machines to China, arguing that these technologies could help advance the capabilities of the Chinese military and spy agencies.

Since it was established a year ago, the committee has called for raising tariffs on China, targeted Ford Motor and others for doing business with Chinese companies, and spotlighted forced labor concerns involving Chinese shopping sites.

The Global Race for Computer Chips

CHIPS Act Grants: The Biden administration awarded its first federal grants from a government program aimed at shoring up U.S. manufacturing of critical semiconductors to BAE Systems and Microchip Technology.

A Renewed Crackdown: The United States is trying to slow China’s progress toward technological advances that could help its military by clamping down on sales of chip-making machinery to China.

A Geopolitical Test: South Korea, a critical U.S. ally with a semiconductor sector that depends on China, is wedged between Beijing and Washington in their trade war over technology.

A Chip-Making Superpower?: India, seizing on the world’s desire to reduce reliance on China, wants to build a semiconductor manufacturing industry from the ground up, an ambition as unlikely as it is bold.

The report recommended that Congress curb investments in all Chinese entities that are subject to certain U.S. trade restrictions or included on federal “red flag” lists, as well as their parent companies and subsidiaries. That would include companies that work with the Chinese military or have ties to forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. The U.S. government should also consider imposing controls on other industries, like biotechnology and fintech, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said.

Sequoia said in June, before the committee announced its investigation into private funding, that it would separate its China arm from its U.S. operations and rename it HongShan. A few months later, GGV Capital said it would separate its Asia-focused business.

Walden did not respond to a request for comment. A representative from GSR declined to comment. GGV provided a list of corrections and clarifications to the report and stated that it had been in compliance with all applicable laws. GGV is also trying to sell its stakes in three companies discussed in the report.

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A Sequoia spokeswoman said the firm took U.S. national security issues seriously and had always had processes in place to ensure compliance with U.S. law. The firm completed its split from HongShan on Dec. 31.

A Qualcomm spokeswoman said its investments were small compared with those of the venture capital firms and made up less than 2 percent of the investments discussed in the report.

Officials in Washington increasingly see business ties even with private Chinese technology companies as problematic, arguing that China has tried to draw on the expertise of the private sector to modernize its military.

Committee leaders conceded that many of these investments were made when the United States was encouraging greater economic engagement with China.

“We all made this bet 20 years ago on China’s integration into the global economy, and it was logical,” said Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the committee’s chairman. “It just happened to have failed.” He added, “Now, I just I think there’s no excuse anymore.”

The 57-page report draws on information provided to the committee by the firms about their investments, as well as interviews with senior executives at multiple firms.

The committee’s report looked at just some of the funding flowing to China. Between 2016 and July 2023, Chinese semiconductor companies raised $8.7 billion in deals that included U.S. investment firms, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-up funding. That investment peaked in 2021.

Venture capital firms pursued aggressive global expansion, particularly into Asia, for several decades. But they have known since the Trump administration took a more aggressive stance toward China that investments in Chinese companies would be subject to increasing scrutiny.

“No one is touching China now,” said Linus Liang, an investor at the venture firm Kyber Knight Capital.

Splitting off investment entities with ties to China, as Sequoia and GGV did, may not resolve the committee’s concerns that American financing and technology will end up in Chinese companies, the report stated. Sequoia’s newly separated Chinese-based firm, HongShan, counts U.S. investors among its backers. And HongShan and GGV’s new unit, GGV Asia, could still invest in U.S. start-ups, the report said.

Much of the report focuses on Walden International, a California-based company that was one the earliest and most influential foreign investors in the Chinese chip sector. Walden is led by Lip-Bu Tan, a former chief executive of Cadence Design Systems, a chip design firm, and a current member of Intel’s board.

Walden International created various funds for the chip sector in partnership with the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned companies, including a prominent military supplier, the report said.

It was a founding shareholder and early source of financing for SMIC, which is now subject to U.S. trade restrictions because of its ties to the Chinese military. Walden gave $52 million to SMIC over several decades, the committee found, as well as tens of millions of dollars to SMIC affiliates. Mr. Tan also served on SMIC’s board of directors.

He is credited with bringing SMIC and other firms a combination of financing, tools and intellectual property for chip design, as well as profitable connections with customers.

While the U.S. government labeled SMIC a “trusted customer” in 2007, skepticism of the company’s activities has grown in Washington in more recent years. Today, the company is key to China’s ambitions to create a thriving chip sector and lessen its dependence on the United States.

Walden, along with Qualcomm Ventures, the investing arm of chipmaker Qualcomm, invested tens of millions of dollars into Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, or AMEC, a Chinese company that makes the machines needed to manufacture chips. AMEC, a supplier to SMIC and other Chinese chipmakers, is vital to China’s efforts to build up its chip-making industry after the United States placed restrictions on selling China the most advanced chip-making machines.

China’s semiconductor companies are well funded by the country’s government. But ties with U.S. venture capital firms provide Chinese companies with managerial expertise as well as access to technology and the American and European markets. American venture capital firms have also tried to sway U.S. officials and regulators on behalf of Chinese companies in their portfolio, like TikTok. (NYT)

How China Built BYD, Its Tesla Killer

The leading Chinese electric vehicle company, with origins as a battery maker, has posted two years of million-car growth in sales.

Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

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Keith Bradsher

By Keith Bradsher

Keith Bradsher, who has covered China’s auto industry since 2002, reported from Shenzhen, China.

Feb. 12, 2024

China’s BYD was a battery manufacturer trying its hand at building cars when it showed off its newest model in 2007. American executives at the Guangzhou auto show gaped at the car’s uneven purple paint job and the poor fit of its doors.

“They were the laughingstock of the industry,” said Michael Dunne, a China auto industry analyst.

Nobody is laughing at BYD now.

The company passed Tesla in worldwide sales of fully electric cars late last year. BYD is building assembly lines in Brazil, Hungary, Thailand and Uzbekistan and preparing to do so in Indonesia and Mexico. It is rapidly expanding exports to Europe. And the company is on the cusp of passing Volkswagen Group, which includes Audi, as the market leader in China.

BYD’s sales, over 80 percent of them in China, have grown by about a million cars in each of the past two years. The last automaker to accomplish that in even one year in the American market was General Motors — and that was in 1946, after G.M. had suspended passenger car sales during the four preceding years because of World War II.

“BYD’s growth is unlike anything the industry has seen in many decades,” said Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

Based in Shenzhen, the hub of China’s electronics industry, BYD has shown how Chinese carmakers can tap the country’s dominance of electrical products. No company has benefited as much from China’s embrace of battery-electric cars and plug-in gasoline-electric cars. These vehicles together make up 40 percent of China’s car market, the world’s largest, and are expected to be more than half next year. Like most Chinese automakers, BYD doesn’t sell its cars in America because Trump-era tariffs remain in place, but BYD does sell buses in the United States.

ImageThree people standing with streamers in the foreground and a car in the background parked with ribbon on it.

Celebrating a customer’s BYD purchase in Shenzhen, the hub of China’s electronics industry and BYD’s hometown.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Image

A close-up of the trunk of a shiny black car, with the words “Build Your Dreams” embossed in a row.

“Build your dreams” is the motto of BYD, which has disclosed receiving $2.6 billion in government assistance from 2008 through 2022.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

BYD is leading China’s export push in electric cars, and is rapidly building the world’s largest car carrier ships to transport them. The first of the ships, the BYD Explorer No. 1, is on its maiden voyage from Shenzhen with 5,000 electric cars on board, and is expected to arrive in the Netherlands by Feb. 21.

With China’s and BYD’s success has come more scrutiny.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, warned about the strength of Chinese electric car exports in a company earnings call in January. “Frankly, I think if there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other companies in the world,” he said.

The Rise of Electric Vehicles

Losing Luster: Ford’s F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck was once in hot demand. But some buyers said it did not meet expectations, and Ford has slashed its production plans because of lagging sales.

Teaming Up: There are more than four million electric vehicles on American roads, but fewer than 1,000 of them are heavy-duty trucks. Daimler, Navistar and Volvo want to remedy that deficit by calling on governments and utilities to help them build many more places to charge big rigs.

A Hybrid Car Renaissance: Automakers like Ford, Kia and Toyota are offering more hybrid options to appeal to buyers who aren’t ready for fully electric vehicles.

A Harsh Foe: In freezing temperatures, the batteries of electric cars can be less efficient and have shorter range. Drivers in Chicago learned that lesson during a bout of brutal weather.

The rapid gains by BYD and other Chinese automakers in Europe have prompted a European Union investigation of Chinese government subsidies and could result in tariffs. BYD’s annual reports show a total of $2.6 billion in government assistance from 2008 through 2022. And that does not include other help, like making sure that taxi companies in BYD’s hometown buy only BYD electric cars.

BYD declined to comment about subsidies. In a statement, the company said the BYD Explorer No. 1, its new ship, “signifies a significant milestone for BYD as it expands into international markets and contributes to the development of the global new-energy vehicle industry.”

China has built enough factories to make more than twice as many cars as its market can buy. That has led to a price war in China, particularly between BYD and Tesla, with discounting that has inflicted heavy losses. One of BYD’s newest models, the subcompact Seagull, starts at less than $11,000.

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A large carrier ship anchored at sea. A circular red BYD logo is on the side of the ship, which is white on the top half and navy on the bottom.

The BYD Explorer No. 1, carrying 5,000 electric cars, during a stop off Singapore on its way to the Netherlands.Credit...Ore Huiying for The New York Times

A real estate crisis and a falling stock market are now making Chinese consumers warier about buying a car at all. But BYD’s low manufacturing costs have left it in a better position than most rivals to survive any long slowdown in sales and industry shakeout.

BYD’s chairman, Wang Chuanfu, founded the company in 1995 to make batteries for Motorola and other consumer electronics companies. He had studied at Central South University in Changsha, an elite institution famed for battery chemistry research. But he dreamed of making cars.

In 2003, BYD bought a factory in Xi’an that was building gasoline-powered cars. But the company had trouble at the start, gaining an early reputation for building clunkers. In a visit to the factory in 2006, a large repair area at the end of the assembly line was clogged with newly built cars that already needed more work.

BYD’s sales grew as the Chinese market soared. Warren E. Buffett bought a nearly 10 percent stake for $230 million in 2008, giving BYD not just a cash infusion but also global cachet. The same year, Mr. Wang promised to start exporting battery-electric cars to the United States within two years.

But electric cars at the time cost a lot to build and had limited range, and Mr. Wang had to scotch his plans to enter the American market. In an interview in 2011, he second-guessed his emphasis on battery-electric cars. Automakers should focus on gasoline-electric hybrids, he declared. He added, “There is still tremendous potential in the Chinese market for electric cars.”

Image

A rectangular gray, six-story building in the distance behind an iron fence and a walkway in the foreground.

Central South University, which is known for its battery research, is where BYD’s founder and chairman, Wang Chuanfu, studied.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

By 2012, car production in China had caught up with demand. Buyers became choosier. BYD’s car sales and stock price plunged as multinationals offered more stylish models. Industry executives and analysts questioned whether BYD had a future.

But Mr. Wang proceeded to make two risky bets that paid off.

In 2016, he hired Wolfgang Egger, a prominent Audi designer, who in turn hired hundreds more car engineers with bold tastes. They completely redesigned BYD’s models.

Mr. Wang also figured out how to replace the industry’s standard chemicals in rechargeable lithium batteries — nickel, cobalt and manganese — with cheaper iron and phosphate. But early batteries made from the inexpensive chemical compounds ran out of juice quickly and had to be recharged after even short trips.

In 2020, BYD introduced its Blade batteries, which closed most of the so-called range gap with nickel-cobalt batteries at a fraction of what they cost.

Tesla began making and selling large numbers of cars in China the same year, and enthusiasm for electric cars swept the nation. BYD was ready with inexpensive battery chemistries and Mr. Egger’s new designs.

Tesla also began using lithium iron phosphate batteries in less expensive models. BYD still sells mostly cheaper cars with lower range, while Tesla mostly sells costlier cars with more range.

The Swiss bank UBS found last year that a BYD Seal electric hatchback sedan cost 35 percent less to make than a slightly smaller Volkswagen ID.3 of similar quality made in Europe. The savings came only partly from the cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries.

BYD makes three-quarters of the Seal’s parts. Like Tesla, BYD uses only a few electronic systems in each car. By contrast, VW outsources up to two-thirds of its components. BYD also has benefited from lower labor costs in China, although those have risen as factories compete to hire skilled workers.

Image

A silver car surrounded by visitors at an auto show.

A display for BYD’s luxury Yangwang brand at the Shanghai auto show last year. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Image

An aerial view a hexagonal building with a monorail running along it.

The headquarters of BYD, which recently announced that it would invest $14 billion in autonomous driving technology.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

BYD now has its own walled town in Shenzhen, a southeastern city next to Hong Kong. An airport-style monorail carries workers from 18-story company apartments to BYD’s office towers and research labs.

Liu Qiangqiang, an engineer at the Shenzhen center, said the staff of his car development team had almost tripled since he joined the company from General Motors 15 months ago.

“The pace is fast,” he said.

After dismissing autonomous driving a year ago, BYD swung into action when the consumer electronics companies Huawei and Xiaomi introduced cars with considerable autonomous driving abilities. Mr. Wang announced in January that BYD had 4,000 engineers working on assisted driving, a limited form of autonomous technology that works mainly on highways and large roads, and would invest $14 billion in the technology.

BYD has a lingering advantage over Tesla: Mr. Wang’s decision by 2011 to develop plug-in hybrid cars, which account for nearly half of BYD’s sales.

Li Jingyu, a salesman at a BYD dealership in Shenzhen, said many families bought a hybrid as their first car so they could drive at Lunar New Year back to their ancestral villages. Most villages in China now have chargers, Mr. Li said, but not enough for the throngs of visiting drivers at Lunar New Year, which started on Friday night.

“People are just worried,” he said, “about the waiting time.” (NYT)

Is That Polar Bear Getting Enough to Eat? Try a Collar With a Camera.

Scientists collected video from 20 bears during ice-free months to understand whether the animals can survive longer periods on land in a warming world.

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A female polar bear with seaweed hanging from her mouth walks along a rocky shoreline with her cub following behind.

A female polar bear and her cub on Hudson Bay, near Churchill, Manitoba, in 2022.Credit...Olivier Morin/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images

Delger Erdenesanaa

By Delger Erdenesanaa

Feb. 13, 2024

Updated 11:39 a.m. ET

Climate change is stretching the length of time parts of the Far North go without sea ice, which polar bears rely on to hunt their preferred prey: blubbery, calorie-rich seals. When the ice melts in summer, the bears move onto land and face two options. They can rest and slow down to a state approaching hibernation, or they can forage for alternative food like berries, bird eggs and small land animals.

Scientists tracking 20 polar bears in Manitoba, below the Arctic Circle at the southern end of the animals’ range, found that the option the polar bears chose didn’t make much difference. Bears who foraged generally got just enough calories from their small meals to replenish the energy they spent finding them, but not enough to maintain their body mass.

“Terrestrial foods are not adequate to prolong the period that polar bears can survive on land,” said Anthony Pagano, a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey and the lead author of a study based on the research, published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

In western Hudson Bay, the ice-free period is three weeks longer now than it was in the 1970s, and polar bears currently spend about 130 days on land during the year. Scientists estimate that, going forward, there will be five to 10 more days without sea ice each decade.

The question of whether polar bears can survive for longer periods on land has been politicized at times as the creatures became a symbol of climate change.

A 2015 assessment by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature found a high probability of the global polar bear population declining by more than 30 percent by 2050. This local population in Hudson Bay may have shrunk by half already, from an estimated 1,200 bears in the 1980s to about 600 bears in 2021.

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A significant threshold. Over the past 12 months, the average temperature worldwide was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than it was at the dawn of the industrial age. That number carries special significance, as nations agreed under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to keep the difference between average temperatures today and in preindustrial times to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or at least below 2 degrees Celsius.

New highs. The exceptional warmth that first enveloped the planet last summer is continuing strong into 2024: Last month clocked in as the hottest January ever measured, and the hottest January on record for the oceans, too. Sea surface temperatures were just slightly lower than in August 2023, the oceans’ warmest month on the books.

A revised history. Scientists have examined the chemical composition of the skeletons of centuries-old spongy sea creatures living in the Caribbean Sea to piece together a new history of the earliest decades of global warming. The research points to a startling conclusion: Humans have raised global temperatures by a total of about 1.7 degrees Celsius, or 3.1 Fahrenheit, not 1.2 degrees Celsius, as widely suggested until now.

A giant parasol in outer space? With Earth at its hottest in recorded history, and humans doing far from enough to stop its overheating, a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists are proposing a fix that could have leaped from the pages of science fiction: the equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space.

A compounding effect. A new study found that on days when California experienced both extreme heat and wildfire smoke, there were disproportionate numbers of hospitalizations for heart and lung ailments. The impact was greater in communities with lower income, education, health insurance coverage and tree cover, according to the research.

Nearly all the bears followed in the new study lost weight, and two individuals were on track to starve before the sea ice returned.

Anecdotal observations of individual polar bears eating ducks, geese, seabird eggs and even caribou on land have offered hope that the animals could adapt to a warmer world. But research simply documenting what polar bears are eating hasn’t been enough to figure out whether the bears get enough calories from that food to help them survive longer periods without sea ice.

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For this study, Dr. Pagano and colleagues traveled to Wapusk National Park in northern Manitoba. Over three summers, they captured 20 polar bears and fitted them with video cameras on collars to provide bear’s eye views of their days.

The scientists weighed the bears, took blood samples and measured their breathing to paint detailed pictures of their body conditions, levels of activity and energy expenditure. They recaptured each bear after about three weeks, retrieving the cameras and repeating their measurements.

Putting cameras on polar bears is a new technique, and going through the video was “amazing,” Dr. Pagano said. “To watch what a polar bear is actually doing in the wild was really gratifying.”

Six of the bears (fewer than the scientists had expected) appeared to rest and fast, while the others foraged and a few even went on long-distance swims.

The foraging bears were mostly seen eating grass, kelp and berries, with occasional bird carcasses, bones, caribou antlers, eggs and small mammals. Two of the swimmers found seal and beluga whale carcasses, but couldn’t eat much while swimming in open water.

Regardless of whether the bears fasted or foraged, all except one lost similar amounts of weight. The scientists calculated a “predicted date of starvation” for each bear based on how much body fat and muscle it had, and how much energy it was estimated to be expending each day.

Most were predicted to be fine until the sea ice returned in November, but two young females, which tend to be the smallest polar bears, had predicted dates of starvation before then, and a few others were close to that time. (The researchers had to leave in September and don’t know what ultimately happened to the bears.)

Dr. Pagano noted that the study didn’t include any females with cubs, who burn much more energy while nursing. The researchers did include some pregnant bears, but left before they gave birth.

These findings are “what we feared and what we hoped not to see,” but also somewhat expected, said Melanie Lancaster, a conservation biologist who specializes in Arctic species at the World Wildlife Fund.

Dr. Lancaster, who wasn’t involved in the study, cautioned that these 20 bears only represent one population in one region. “Polar bears aren’t experiencing the effects of climate change uniformly across the Arctic,” she said. At higher latitudes where thicker sea ice persists over multiple years, polar bears are still doing well.

But for this declining population in Hudson Bay, the individual variability the researchers found is significant, said Gregory Thiemann, an associate professor at York University in Toronto who studies Arctic carnivores but wasn’t involved in this research.

Each polar bear tried in its own way to cope, but the variation shows that there isn’t one winning solution. “It paints a collective picture that this is a group of bears sort of stretched to their biological limits,” he said. (NYT)

A 30-Second Kennedy Ad Collides With a Decades-Long Family Legacy

A Super Bowl commercial that echoed a 1960 campaign ad for John F. Kennedy deepens a growing estrangement between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and much of his family.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking into microphones on a stage. He is wearing a suit and tie, and the curtains behind him have a purple hue.

Prominent members of the Kennedy circle said that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had repeatedly identified himself with the family legacy in promoting his own agenda over the last decade.Credit...Emily Elconin/Getty Images

Adam Nagourney

By Adam Nagourney

Adam Nagourney covers national politics and has written about the anguish in the Kennedy family over the actions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Feb. 13, 2024

Updated 8:04 a.m. ET

A Super Bowl advertisement promoting the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a remake of a 1960 spot that helped put his uncle John F. Kennedy in the White House — has struck a nerve with Kennedy family members and friends, who worry that it exploits and potentially tarnishes the legacy of a storied political family.

The 30-second advertisement is built on the foundation of one of the most famous political ads in American history, still memorable to many in politics 63 years after it was first shown. That historic ad presents John F. Kennedy — then a senator from Massachusetts — as a young, vibrant and experienced challenger to Richard M. Nixon, the Republican vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The slightly altered version of the original ad superimposes pictures of Robert Kennedy Jr. over John F. Kennedy’s image and keeps the jaunty jingle — Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy — that remains burned in some people’s memories to this day. In the process, it repurposes an advertisement created for John F. Kennedy into one for his 70-year-old nephew, an appropriation of a legacy that many Democrats have long argued Robert Kennedy should not be able to claim.

Raymond Buckley, who has been chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2007, said he had viewed the vintage advertisement numerous times while visiting the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, so his head shot up in surprise when he heard it during the Super Bowl.

“It was jarring,” Mr. Buckley said. “I was like, what? Eccch. And to see Bobby Jr.’s photo imposed over J.F.K.’s was gross. Whoever would have thought to do such a thing? It was disrespectful.”

What Older Americans Say About Age and Leadership

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We asked readers whether they thought the ages of President Biden, 81, and former President Donald Trump, 77, affected their ability to be president.

“I’ll be 70 on my next birthday. I think people need to stop being presidents at the age of 70.” — Kathi Sweetman, 69, Rochester, N.Y., unaffiliated

The Super Bowl advertisement is the latest chapter in what has been years of growing estrangement between Mr. Kennedy and much of his family. It began in earnest as he emerged as one of the nation’s leading skeptics of the Covid vaccine and intensified when he went on to challenge President Biden, who has the support of some of the best-known members of the Kennedy family, for the Democratic presidential nomination.

As his long-shot hopes for winning the Democratic nomination evaporated, Mr. Kennedy announced that he would run as an independent, raising concern among Democrats that, should he get on the ballot in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan, he could siphon votes away from Mr. Biden and help the election of Donald J. Trump.

Prominent members of the Kennedy circle said that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had repeatedly identified himself with the family legacy in promoting his own agenda over the last decade.

“He’s done this over and over again,” Robert Shrum, a longtime adviser to the Kennedy family, said. “R.F.K. and Teddy went out of their way not to exploit J.F.K.’s memory and loss. I almost fell out of my chair.”

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A cousin of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bobby Shriver, noted that the ad included images of his mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of both the candidate’s father and the president, both of whom were assassinated. “She would be appalled by his deadly health care views,” Mr. Shriver wrote on X. “Respect for science, vaccines, & health care equity were in her DNA.”

Mr. Kennedy apologized on X “if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain.” He asserted that the ad had been created by an independent political action committee supporting his campaign without his involvement or his campaign’s approval. Even so, he pinned a link to the ad at the top of his X feed, which has 2.7 million followers.

No matter how much the ad has riled up people in the Kennedy world, the actual political impact of the ad, which cost $7 million to run during the Super Bowl, is far from clear. “The Kennedys have long since passed into history, legend, lore and mythology,” said Evan Thomas, a historian and biographer of Mr. Kennedy’s father. “People barely remember World War II or the Vietnam War. One of the reasons for my double take is, I was put off by it, but also that most people are barely old enough to remember.”

That said, Mr. Kennedy has scored in the double-digits in many polls, owing in no small part to name recognition, political analysts said. And Mr. Kennedy would certainly benefit with being seen as the latest member of this family of Democrats looking to serve the nation.

Bill Carrick, a Democratic consultant and one-time adviser to Edward M. Kennedy, the former senator, said that the new advertisement, which he called distasteful, was particularly hurtful because the original had become part of Kennedy lore. It represented a turning point in how political advertisements were made.

“It’s a historic ad,” he said. “In the early days of television, and the Eisenhower campaign, the campaign ads were very cookie-cutter: still photography and portraits. The 1960s campaign changed all that.”

Mr. Shrum said he taught the advertisement in his political science class at the University of Southern California. “It’s a far more effective ad than people think,” he said. “It’s full of message: He’s old enough to understand and young enough to try something new. The message of the campaign is encapsulated in that ad.”

Mr. Buckley said he did not think, when all is said and done, that the new ad would damage the Kennedy legacy. “The only tarnish is to Bobby’s campaign in putting it on,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a permanent tarnish of the Kennedy legacy. It certainly doesn’t add to the legacy.” (NYT)

Military Judge to Rule on C.I.A. Torture Program in Sept. 11 Case

Lawyers argued over the rare legal doctrine in an effort to dismiss the case at the start of pretrial hearings in the Sept. 11 case at Guantánamo Bay.

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A white sign reading “Courtroom Access Here” is behind a chain-link fence and razor wire.

The entrance to the legal complex at Guantánamo Bay, where the Sept. 11 conspiracy case is being held.Credit...Marisa Schwartz Taylor/The New York Times

Carol Rosenberg

By Carol Rosenberg

Reporting from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

Feb. 12, 2024

A defense lawyer asked a military judge on Monday to dismiss the Sept. 11 conspiracy charges against a Saudi prisoner who was tortured in C.I.A. custody, describing the secret overseas prison network where the man was held as part of a “vast criminal international enterprise” that trafficked in torture.

Defense lawyers in the case have said for years that the case should be dismissed based on a rarely successful legal doctrine involving “outrageous government conduct.”

On Monday, Walter Ruiz became the first defender to present the argument to a military judge on behalf of Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who is accused of helping the Sept. 11 hijackers with money transfers and travel arrangements.

The interrogation and detention program as carried out on his client so “shocks the conscience,” he said, that Mr. Hawsawi should be dropped from the conspiracy case.

In a nearly daylong presentation, Mr. Ruiz used government documents to argue that the prisoner was sexually assaulted in his first month of detention, waterboarded by C.I.A. interrogators without permission, deprived of sleep and kept isolated in darkened dungeonlike conditions starting in 2003.

In order to build their cases against former C.I.A. prisoners, prosecutors had so-called clean teams of federal agents reinterrogate the defendants at Guantánamo Bay in 2007, without using or threatening violence.

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But “no matter how many cleaners they bring into this court, they cannot clean it up,” Mr. Ruiz said. “It smells and reeks of coercion, torture, brutality and depravity.”

The C.I.A.’s black site program was established by the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was shut down by President Barack Obama. About 100 suspects were held incommunicado and uncharged in C.I.A. prisons in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland and elsewhere, beyond the reach of U.S. courts.

To create and sustain the program, Mr. Ruiz said, the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying foreign countries to let them establish C.I.A. facilities abroad, shuttled prisoners around the world and employed two psychologists to run it. He called it “a vast international criminal enterprise operating squarely outside the confines of domestic and international law.”

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The lead prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., defended the program, and revelations that the F.B.I. collaborated with the C.I.A. in the black sites, as the response of a wounded and fearful nation at war “while the towers were still smoldering.”

On Sept. 12, 2001, Mr. Trivett said, Mr. Bush concluded that the United States could “no longer afford” to continue its “simple catch, apprehend, indict and prosecute” approach to law enforcement.

Mr. Trivett said it made sense that the F.B.I. coordinated its investigation with the C.I.A., particularly because a lack of intelligence coordination was blamed for failing to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. “It would be outrageous if it didn’t,” he said.

The timing of the argument suggests that Col. Matthew N. McCall, the fourth judge to preside in the case, will be able to decide the potentially case-turning issue before he retires later this year. The judge has a busy schedule of testimony about the C.I.A. program and the F.B.I. role in it this month and later in the year.

To make his argument in open court, Mr. Ruiz devoted hours to showing the judge — but not the public — secret documents. He accused the U.S. intelligence community of over-classifying information to hide “dirty secrets.”

One in particular, he said, “would not necessarily implode the national security of the United States. But certainly it would be embarrassing. And ugly. And shocking.”

Mr. Ruiz argued that, despite the Bush administration’s effort to “legalize torture” through Justice Department memos authorizing waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the record showed that Mr. Hawsawi’s captors “exceeded, ignored and violated even those specific guidelines.”

The C.I.A., for example, has never acknowledged the waterboarding of Mr. Hawsawi. But in April 2003, his second month of custody, according to a Senate study, Mr. Hawsawi “cried out for God” while he was subjected to a waterboarding technique at a particularly brutal C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan with the code name Cobalt.

Some violations were “outright vengeance or retribution,” Mr. Ruiz said. Others were a result of a lack of training and guidance, or what Dr. James E. Mitchell, the psychologist who waterboarded prisoners for the C.I.A., testified years ago constituted “abusive drift.”

Mr. Ruiz urged the judge to reject a prosecution argument that, at trial, the government would rely on evidence gathered by the F.B.I. as part of a criminal investigation, rather than intelligence gathering by the C.I.A., which was interrogating the Sept. 11 defendants from 2002 to 2006, before their transfer to Guantánamo Bay.

Testimony for years, he said, demonstrated a “symbiotic relationship between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., with no clear line of demarcation.”

The presentation illustrated the hold that intelligence agencies have on what the public can know.

Mr. Trivett, a prosecutor, asked the judge to prohibit Mr. Ruiz from publicly showing the court a newspaper article, as well as a brief that was publicly posted on the website of the U.S. Supreme Court. Colonel McCall, the judge, agreed. “I have a duty to protect what I am told is classified information,” he said.

Mr. Hawsawi and the three other defendants were absent from court during the presentation.

Matthew Engle, representing the defendant Walid bin Attash, said there was tension at the prison over changing practices or policies that resurrected “security precautions that haven’t existed for over a decade.”

The Pentagon recently installed the 23rd commander of the two-decade-old prison operation, an Army colonel who had been in charge of a Military Police Battalion at the prison from 2018 to 2020. (NYT)

Hamburg bank suspected as ‘financial hub’ for Iranian terror

Investigation has led Varengold Bank to all but close commercial banking operations.

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The Hamburg skyline is seen from the har

Varengold denies any wrongdoing and insists that its dealings with Iran were limited to the shipment of humanitarian aid, including medical equipment and food | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images

FEBRUARY 9, 2024 4:00 AM CET

BY MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG

BERLIN — A small Hamburg bank was at the center of a clandestine financial network Iran relied on for years to funnel money to its terror proxies in the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, officials from two western intelligence agencies say.

POLITICO can reveal that western intelligence flagged evidence to German financial authorities that the Islamic Republic was using Varengold Bank AG to fund its terror affiliates, leading to a sweeping investigation that has forced the bank to all but shut down its commercial banking operations.

Iran's military complex relies on European banks to launder the proceeds of its illicit sale of oil and other goods, western intelligence officials say, in order to get it hands on hard currency, which is easier to move through the global financial system without detection.

If the authorities’ suspicions about Varengold’s Iran business are borne out, the bank would serve as a glaring example of the relative ease with which Tehran has circumvented western sanctions, while also underscoring the high risks firms face when they fail to adhere to the highest standards of money laundering prevention.

Money laundering concerns

German financial regulator Bafin announced an investigation into Varengold last year, citing money laundering concerns, but did not disclose the suspected links between the bank and Tehran’s terror network.

Varengold denies any wrongdoing and insists that its dealings with Iran were limited to the shipment of humanitarian aid, including medical equipment and food.

“Our customers in the commercial banking or payment transaction business are mainly producers and global wholesalers of food and pharmaceuticals,” a Varengold spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO. “In this context, the bank supports, for example, exporters and importers in processing payments for urgently needed humanitarian goods that were not subject to EU or US sanctions.”

Yet according to western intelligence sources, some of the Iranian front companies that used Varengold are linked to Iran’s Quds Force, an affiliate of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that trains and finances Iran’s terror proxies in the Middle East.

Instead of handing the IRGC and Quds Force cash to fund their clandestine operations, Iran's central government grants them allotments of oil which they then sell, primarily to China, via a labyrinthine underground financial network in order to skirt sanctions. The advantage for the buyer is that the price of the sanctioned crude is significantly lower than market rates.

Bank transfers and invoices viewed by POLITICO detailed some of the dealings between Varengold and known Iranian front companies that are part of the secret network, including two firms sanctioned by the U.S. government for their connections to the Quds Force.

The Varengold spokesperson said the bank was not aware of any links between its customers and the Quds Force.

The affair has also raised questions about why Varengold’s auditor, PwC, gave the bank a clean bill of health. A spokesman for PwC declined to comment.

“No one ever connected the dots,” said one of the intelligence officials, adding there had been ample reason to suspect something was amiss at the bank. “In recent years Varengold has become a financial hub for the Iranians to transfer funds to Europe.”

In search of a niche

Founded as a small asset management firm in Hamburg in 1995, Varengold did not become a fully fledged bank until 2013, when it received a German banking license.

With total assets of just €600 million in 2015 — tiny by German standards — the bank needed a niche. It found one by focusing on international payments involving the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

“The board is of the opinion that Varengold Bank AG has an advantage here,” the bank wrote in its 2015 annual report. “As a result of its modest size it can acquire customers who do not appear profitable to traditional providers.”

At first glance it appeared to be a good call. Varengold’s commission income from international payments surged from just under €4 million in 2015 to nearly €45 million in 2021.

“This gain was achieved though consistent new customer acquisition as well as higher business volume with existing customers,” Varengold said in its annual report that year.

Yet according to the intelligence officials, Iranian front companies were the main drivers of the business, especially after the U.S. reimposed sanctions on Tehran in 2018, when demand for the bank’s payment services surged. A typical commission for the kind of services Varengold offered is around 1 percent, suggesting the bank’s international payment arm was handing billions of euros of transactions. It’s not clear what percentage of those transactions involved Iran, however.

Signs of trouble

The first signs of trouble at Varengold emerged last year.

On June 2, Varengold announced that Bafin had begun a probe into its commercial banking division and issued a profit warning. The news had a devastating impact on Varengold’s share price, triggering a more than 70 percent collapse. With its core payments business all but paralyzed, Varengold was forced to lay off about 20 percent of its workforce of some 100 employees.

On August 3, Bafin said in a press release it had discovered “high money laundering risks and grave deficits” with Varengold’s compliance safeguards.

“Credit institutions like Varengold Bank must ensure that they are not abused for money laundering or terror financing,” Bafin said, without making specific accusations that such abuse had occurred.

The danger of terror financing was not a theoretical one, according to the western intelligence officials, all of whom spoke to POLITICO on the condition that they not be named in order to discuss privileged information. By the time the authority began investigating the bank, the officials said, Varengold had already laundered billions in illicit transactions.

As part of Bafin’s intervention, the authority barred Varengold from carrying out transactions with entities and persons connected to Iran — a pillar of its business. Bafin also installed a special auditor to supervise the bank’s activities and ensure it didn’t violate the regulator’s orders.

Underground economy

Many of the transfers under scrutiny involved what Bafin referred to as “payment agents" — suspected Iranian front companies — that held accounts in Varengold.

Iran relies on front companies to launder the proceeds from the sale of oil and petrochemicals, primarily to China and Russia, the officials said. Those transactions are often disguised as humanitarian aid, which isn’t sanctioned.

Under U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran in connection with its nuclear program, foreign companies and banks that conduct business with the Islamic Republic outside of humanitarian aid risk severe penalties, including being barred from the U.S. market.

One of the front companies that appears in transaction records related to Varengold is Hong Kong-registered Hua Gong HK Trading Ltd. It was founded in October 2018, shortly after the U.S. began to reintroduce sanctions against Iran. Western diplomats say Hua Gong is a front company operated by the Tahayyori Guarantee Society, one of Iran’s biggest “money exchange houses,” or clearinghouses for illicit foreign transactions.

On June 5, 2020 Hua Gong submitted a request to Varengold to transfer €201,617 to Geneva-based Royys Capital, which officials said is also controlled by Iran. The transfer request is part of a trove of financial documents published by WikiIran, an opposition website, and independently verified by POLITICO.

Neither Hua Gong nor Royys could be reached for comment. Royys went into liquidition in July, just weeks after German authorities moved in on Varengold.

Organizations like Tahayyori, which number in the dozens, operate a network of front companies abroad that are typically registered in China, UAE and Turkey, according to western intelligence officials and diplomats. The houses are under the close supervision of the regime.

If an Iranian firm needs to undertake a foreign transaction prohibited by sanctions, its local bank can turn to one of the houses to filter the payment through a labyrinth of front companies, making it extremely difficult to trace its true origin.

Another Varengold transaction to catch investigators’ attention involved two Turkey-registered firms. In April 2021, Istanbul-based Baslam Transport and Foreign Trade billed Rain Trade Gida Ic Ve Dis Ticaret Limited Sirketi, also of Istanbul, €5.5 million for “sunflower seed oil,” which the latter paid via its Varengold account. Investigators believe the deal really involved payment for Iranian crude.

On December 8, 2022, the U.S. government sanctioned Rain Trade “for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, the IRGC-Quds Force.”

That same day, Washington also sanctioned Baslam for seeking “to facilitate the illicit sale of Iranian oil to purchasers in the People’s Republic of China.”

A history of abuse

Iran’s use of its clandestine financial network to circumvent western sanctions is well documented.

In 2022, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Turkish businessman Sıtkı Ayan, a friend of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after POLITICO published a lengthy investigation that exposed evidence he led a smuggling ring that sent Iranian oil to buyers in China and Russia to raise funds for Tehran’s terror proxies (both Rain Trade and Baslam were allegedly part of Ayan’s network).

POLITICO has also reported how Iran helped Russia erect an underground financial system similar to its own to dodge the sanctions Moscow faced after its all-out invasion of Ukraine.

Bafin has yet to complete its investigation into Varengold, and so far no individuals from the bank have been accused of any wrongdoing. A spokeswoman for Bafin declined to say when the probe would be concluded or if the authority has referred the case to Germany’s prosecutors.

The Iran business is not the first time Varengold has caught the eye of German authorities, however.

German prosecutors have accused the bank’s founder and former CEO, Yasin Sebastian Qureshi, of involvement in the so-called Cum Ex affair, a far-reaching scam by international banks, traders and hedge funds to defraud European governments of billions by claiming refunds for taxes they never paid.

Prosecuters allege Qureshi, who denies any wrongdoing, was involved in a series of Cum Ex transactions that defrauded the German government of €93 million. Qureshi stepped down as CEO in 2015, but the charges against him date back to his tenure running the bank. His trial began in a Bonn court in Germany earlier this week.

Meanwhile, Germany’s accounting supervisor, known as APAS, is reportedly investigating whether PwC, Varengold’s independent auditor, made any errors in its evaluation of the bank’s books. The firm’s accountants, who began auditing Varengold in 2016, raised no red flags about its international payments business other operations.

“We were satisfied that the systems and processes implemented, as well as the established controls, are appropriate overall and that the estimates and assumptions made by the executive directors for the proper recording and accrual of commission income are adequately documented and justified,” PwC wrote in its 2021 evaluation. (Politico)

Houston Megachurch Shooter Had an AR-15 and Brought Her 7-Year-Old Son

Officials said a 36-year-old woman who opened fire at Lakewood Church, which is led by the televangelist Joel Osteen, had a documented history of arrests and mental illness. She was killed by off-duty officers.

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Two police officers stand in the foreground, with a Lakewood Church building in the distance.

A woman opened fire at the Lakewood Church in Houston on Sunday.Credit...Kirk Sides/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

J. David GoodmanEdgar SandovalRuth Graham

By J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval and Ruth Graham

Reporting from Houston, San Antonio and Dallas

Feb. 12, 2024

As afternoon services were beginning at Lakewood Church in Houston on Sunday, a woman arrived in a trench coat and carrying a backpack, her 7-year-old son at her side. She brought two rifles and had a piece of yellow rope resembling a detonation cord, law enforcement officials said on Monday.

The woman pointed an AR-15 at an unarmed security guard, officials said, and then made her way inside the church, which is led by the televangelist Joel Osteen. Almost immediately, she opened fire in a hallway with the assault-style rifle.

As they provided new details of the shooting that rattled Lakewood Church, law enforcement officials said that what might have been a mass shooting inside one of the nation’s largest megachurches had been narrowly averted by a pair of off-duty officers working security at the church, a commonplace feature of worship at large congregations across the United States.

The officers — a Houston police officer and an agent from the state alcoholic beverage commission — confronted the woman, exchanged fire with her and killed her. Her son was also struck in the head by gunfire, officials said. He remained in critical condition on Monday. A man in the church was also wounded.

“They were a wall that existed between worshipers and terror, between freedom of religion and murder,” Kevin J. Lilly, the chairman of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, said at an afternoon news conference, referring to the off-duty officers.

Officials identified the woman as Genesse Ivonne Moreno, who lived in Conroe, Texas, north of Houston, and had a history of previous arrests, including one in 2022 on misdemeanor weapons charges. Chief Troy Finner of the Houston Police Department said that she had “a mental health history that is documented.”

Image

Joel Osteen, gesturing with his right hand, speaks in front of a bank of microphones, with law enforcement officers behind him.

After the shooting, Pastor Joel Osteen said, “We don’t understand why these things happen, but we know God’s in control.”Credit...Kirk Sides/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

It was not clear what had drawn Ms. Moreno to the prominent megachurch, located along a major Houston highway in a former N.B.A. arena. But according to legal filings in her acrimonious divorce fight, her mother had once attended Lakewood.

A representative for the church, Don Iloff, said he did not believe the attacker was known to members or leaders of the church.

The police also discovered “antisemitic writings” made by Ms. Moreno, said Christopher Hassig, the commander of the department’s homicide unit. The AR-15 carried a sticker with the word “Palestine” on its stock. He said that the feelings expressed in her writings appeared to stem from disputes with her ex-husband’s family, some of whom are Jewish.

Mr. Osteen has hosted evangelistic events in Israel and, like many evangelical leaders, has expressed general solidarity with the country over the years. In 2022, he interviewed the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, calling Mr. Netanyahu “a modern-day David” and comparing him to the biblical patriarch.

Chief Finner said during the news conference that the shooting was not at the moment being treated as a hate crime. “I just want us to simply wait on the facts,” he said. “You got mental illness here. Got a lot of things going on.”

Ms. Moreno had used male names in the past, which appeared in connection with some of her arrest documents. But officials said that she had always been identified in those documents as a woman.

Before she was shot and killed by the off-duty officers, the attacker at the church stated that she had a bomb, according to a search warrant for Ms. Moreno’s Conroe home. The officers said she was carrying a yellow cord that “appeared to be a detonation cord” that was “consistent with the manufacture of explosive devices.” The officers opened fire after she pointed her weapon at them, according to the warrant.

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The police searched the shooting suspect’s one-story home on Sunday night, according to a person familiar with the search. They were looking for firearms, computers and cellphones, as well as materials used to make explosives or a “hoax bomb,” according to the warrant.

Officials said during an earlier news conference on Sunday that despite her statements and the fact that she had sprayed some sort of substance on the ground, the assailant did not have any explosives inside the church.

According to the warrant, the woman shot one man, whom officials have said was a bystander and did not appear to have been targeted. Chief Finner said the police “don’t know” if the boy was shot by the woman, or by the off-duty officers as they confronted her. Officials could not say if she had been using her son to shield herself, or where he had been standing when the gunfire erupted.

Farrah Signorelli, a neighbor of Ms. Moreno, said that she and others in the neighborhood had at times been fearful of Ms. Moreno.

“She was very mean, very angry,” said Ms. Signorelli, who is a life skills teacher at an elementary school in Conroe. She said Ms. Moreno had begun antagonizing her after Ms. Moreno learned that her son was in Ms. Signorelli’s class.

“At first I didn’t have any issues with her, until she realized I was his teacher,” she said.

Since last fall, Ms. Signorelli said, Ms. Moreno drove by her house on more than one occasion, slowed down and appeared to be taking pictures of it on her cellphone. In another instance, Ms. Signorelli said she was walking with her 12-year-old daughter when Ms. Moreno stopped her car, rolled her window down and asked the girl repeatedly: “Is that your teacher? Is that your teacher?” She said she had ignored Ms. Moreno and had kept walking to avoid a confrontation.

“I was scared — I watched every step I took,” she said.

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Two people hug near a patch of grass.

Carlos Gonzalez hugging a fellow churchgoer after the shooting incident.Credit...Callaghan O'Hare/Reuters

Officials said Ms. Moreno appeared to have purchased the AR-15 in December and that she had taken a .22 caliber rifle in her bag to the church as well but had not used it. It was not immediately clear how or where she had been able to purchase the weapon she used.

At a news conference, a beaming Mr. Osteen said he intended to continue his mission of providing hope.

“We don’t understand why these things happen, but we know God’s in control,” said Mr. Osteen, who tends to avoid wading into politics. “There are forces of evil, but the forces that are for us, the forces of God, are stronger than that.”

The shooting took place around 2 p.m. on Sunday, after an English-language service had ended and as a Spanish-language service was beginning. The church occupies the former home of the Houston Rockets basketball team. Services draw tens of thousands in person, and many more watch online and on television.

The attacker drove to the church in a white car and entered the building. She began firing after getting inside, said Mr. Hassig, the homicide commander, and almost immediately the two off-duty officers began firing at her.

“Multiple shots are exchanged by all three,” he said. “There’s a few-minute gun battle.”

She was struck, he said, and fell to the ground, along with the boy. She was pronounced dead at 2:07 p.m., about 12 minutes after she had opened fire. (NYT)

C.D.C. Considers Ending 5-Day Isolation Period for Covid

Americans may be advised that it’s safe to return to regular routines after one day without a fever.

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A medical worker in a yellow plastic gown and a mask talks to a person in a car at a drive-through clinic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering loosening its recommendations regarding how long people should isolate after testing positive for the coronavirus.Credit...Michael Hanson for The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli

By Apoorva Mandavilli

Feb. 13, 2024

Updated 1:13 p.m. ET

Under the proposed guidelines, Americans would no longer be advised to isolate for five days before returning to work or school. Instead, they might return to their routines if they have been fever free for at least 24 hours without medication, the same standard applied to the influenza and respiratory syncytial viruses.

The proposal would align the C.D.C.’s advice with revised isolation recommendations in Oregon and California. The shift was reported earlier by The Washington Post, but it is still under consideration, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

The C.D.C. last changed its policy on isolation in late 2021, when it scaled down the recommended period to five days from 10. If adopted, the new approach would signal that Covid has taken a place alongside other routine respiratory infections.

But by focusing on the isolation policy for Covid, for example, the agency is squandering an opportunity to foster better public health policies, several experts said.