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☆ Donald Trump on Trial
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-23 | by ( David Leonhardt | Ian Prasad Philbrick | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A criminal trial is often a contest between competing stories. In the trial of Donald Trump that’s just begun, prosecutors used their opening statement yesterday to tell a story about a man they say lied — and broke the law — to get elected president. The story that Trump’s lawyers offered in their own opening statements had two main features. Second, Trump’s lawyers argued that his attempts to affect the election were ordinary politics. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s lawyers, said in his opening statement.

Persons: Donald Trump that’s, —, Trump, Michael Cohen, Trump’s, “, ” Todd Blanche, “ It’s, ”

☆ An Uneasy Arab-Israeli Alliance
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-18 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To understand the current confrontation between Iran and Israel, it helps to think about three recent phases of Middle East geopolitics. Phase 1: Before Oct. 7 of last year, Iran was arguably the most isolated power in the region. Israel, Iran’s longtime enemy, had signed a diplomatic deal during the Trump administration with Bahrain, Morocco and the U.A.E. Together, these developments pointed to the emergence of a broad alliance — among Arab countries, Israel, the U.S. and Western Europe — to check Iranian influence and aggression. Arab leaders condemned Israel, while the U.S. and other countries pressured Israeli leaders to reduce suffering in Gaza and devise an end to the war.

Persons: Biden, Iran’s, Trump Locations: Iran, Israel, East, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, . Iran, U.S, Europe, Gaza

☆ The New Great-Power Politics
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-12 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Houthis, the Iran-backed militia that controls much of Yemen, have disrupted the global economy by firing on commercial ships traveling through the Red Sea. But the Houthis have made some exceptions: Ships from China and Russia are allowed to pass without being attacked. This policy, formalized with a diplomatic agreement last month, is the latest sign that the world has entered a new period of great power politics. On the other side are China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as well as Iran-backed groups like the Houthis. These authoritarian powers “are more and more aligned,” Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, the Western alliance, told the BBC this week.

Persons: ” Jens Stoltenberg Organizations: NATO, BBC Locations: Iran, Yemen, China, Russia, United States, Japan, South Korea, Western Europe, Soviet Union, North Korea

☆ Iran’s Axis of Resistance
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-04 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Its members refer to it as the Axis of Resistance. The network’s name is a play on former President George W. Bush’s 2002 claim that Iran, Iraq and North Korea made up an Axis of Evil. The Axis of Resistance includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other groups, and both its strategy and its tactics have long been radical. Nonetheless, the conflict between the Axis and its enemies had remained limited for years. Even though Iran funds and supports the Axis, other countries have often treated its member groups as distinct from Iran.

Persons: George W Organizations: Hamas Locations: Iran, Israel, Iraq, North Korea, Yemen, America

☆ China, Russia and Trump
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

America’s biggest adversaries evidently want Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election. Some of the Chinese accounts impersonate fervent Trump fans, including one on X that purported to be “a father, husband and son” who was “MAGA all the way! !” The accounts mocked Mr. Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison jumpsuit, or claimed that Mr. Biden was a Satanist pedophile while promoting Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what China and Russia hope to gain from a second Trump term. Trump has suggested that he will end this support.

Persons: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin’s, Trump, Tiffany Hsu, Steven Lee Myers, Donald J, Biden, Biden …, ”, “ MAGA, Mr, Trump’s, Putin Organizations: Trump Locations: Beijing, China, Russia, Ukraine

☆ A New Game from The Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-24 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I still hear from readers who learned about the Connections game from this newsletter and now play it every day. Today, I want to tell you about The Times’s newest game, called Strands. In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through a puzzle from this past week — and then link to today’s, so you can try for yourself. The second letter can be above the first letter, while the third letter might be at a diagonal from the second. You begin in the very corner, go across to the H, down to the I and over to the S:

☆ The Realtors’ Big Defeat
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-18 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Free-market economic theory suggests that the American real estate market should not have been able to exist as it has for decades. Americans have long paid unusually high commissions to real estate agents. Some real estate brokers, recognizing the chance to win business by charging lower commissions, would have done so. Instead, an average home sale in the U.S. has cost between $5,000 and $15,000 more than it would have without the inflated commissions. This money has been akin to a tax, collected by real estate agents instead of the government.

Locations: U.S, Germany, Australia, Britain

☆ What Groups Need Affirmative Action?
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-15 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To do so, Abramitzky and Boustan collected millions of tax filings, census records and other data and analyzed upward mobility over time. As in the past, immigrants themselves tend to remain poor if they arrive poor, as many do. Within a generation or two, immigrant families resemble native families in economic terms. Overall upward mobility has declined sharply. For a mix of reasons — including their willingness to move to U.S. regions with strong economies — immigrant families have kept climbing society’s ladder.

Persons: — Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Princeton —, ”, Boustan Organizations: Stanford, Princeton, Immigrants Locations: United States, Gold, Asia, Latin America, Italy, Russia, U.S

☆ Should China Own TikTok?
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-13 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

After Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, TikTok flooded users with videos expressing extreme positions from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tilted toward the Palestinian side, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. On Monday, the top U.S. intelligence official released a report saying that the Chinese government had used TikTok to promote its propaganda to Americans and to influence the 2022 midterm elections. TikTok is also owned by a company, ByteDance, that’s based in a country that is America’s biggest rival for global power: China. ByteDance executives say that they operate separately from China’s government and that they regularly remove misleading content from TikTok. The most likely scenario, experts say, is that officials aligned with the Chinese government shape TikTok’s algorithm to influence what content Americans see.

Persons: Jeanna Smialek, Jim Tankersley, “, Sapna Maheshwari, China’s, Xi Jinping, Xi Organizations: Rutgers University, Rutgers, Communist Party, Soviet NBC Locations: U.S, Tibet, Hong Kong, United States, China, Soviet

☆ The Fourth Anniversary of the Covid Pandemic
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-11 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. The worst pandemic in a century had begun. Today, on the unofficial fourth anniversary, I’ll update you on where things stand. The true tollCovid’s confirmed death toll — more than seven million people worldwide — is horrific on its own, and the true toll is much worse. The Economist magazine keeps a running estimate of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths above what was expected from pre-Covid trends.

Persons: Covid, ”, Stocks, Donald Trump, Tom Hanks Organizations: World Health Organization, Economist

☆ A Trans-Atlantic Crackdown
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-05 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In today’s newsletter, I want to help you understand the emerging crackdown on big technology companies. The European Union yesterday imposed a $2 billion fine on Apple, and regulators in the U.S. are pursuing cases against Amazon, Google, Facebook and perhaps Apple. These legal cases are often complex, and I know that some readers find them hard to follow. In the book, Wu used a term — “the cycle” — to describe what happened after a new form of communication arrived, be it the telephone, radio or internet. In the early days of radio, amateur stations proliferated, much as the early internet was quirky and offered few opportunities for profit.

Persons: Tim Wu, Wu Organizations: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook Locations: U.S

☆ The Supreme Court and the Election
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-04 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

During those hearings, millions of Americans heard new details about the efforts by Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the 2020 election result. Republicans whom he had backed in primaries performed about five percentage points worse on average in the general election than other Republicans, a Times analysis found. This history feels particularly relevant after the Supreme Court issued a decision last week that will delay Trump’s federal trial for election subversion. The court agreed to hear Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution because the alleged crimes occurred while he was president. The court’s move reduces the chances of a trial verdict before Election Day.

Persons: Donald Trump, Biden’s, Trump Organizations: Republicans, Democratic

☆ Republicans Who Like Putin
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-01 | by ( David Leonhardt | Ian Prasad Philbrick | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Large parts of the Republican Party now treat Vladimir Putin as if he were an ideological ally. Putin, by contrast, continues to treat the U.S. as an enemy. It does not appear to stem from any compromising information that Putin has about Donald Trump, despite years of such claims from Democrats. Instead, Trump and many other Republicans seem to feel ideological sympathies with Putin’s version of right-wing authoritarian nationalism. Already, House Republicans have blocked further aid to Ukraine — a democracy and U.S. ally that Putin invaded.

Persons: Vladimir Putin, Putin, Donald Trump, Trump, Viktor Orban of Hungary, — Organizations: Republican Party, House Republicans Locations: Ukraine, Russia

☆ The SAT and the Supreme Court
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-28 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

After the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action last year, many people in higher education worried that it would be only the first in a series of decisions that reduced diversity at selective schools. In particular, university administrators and professors thought the court might soon ban admissions policies that gave applicants credit for overcoming poverty. And the future of admissions at selective colleges and high schools has suddenly become clearer. The Texas modelThe situation has become clearer because the Supreme Court last week declined to hear a lawsuit against a public magnet school in Northern Virginia — Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J.Until recently, T.J. admitted students based on a mix of grades, test scores, student essays and teacher recommendations. This process led to a student body that looked very different from the area it served.

Persons: Northern Virginia — Thomas Organizations: Northern Virginia — Thomas Jefferson High School for Science, Technology Locations: Texas, Northern Virginia

☆ Biden’s Next Steps on Immigration
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-26 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

President Biden has come to recognize that the surge of undocumented immigration during his presidency is a threat to his re-election. They plan to remind voters that congressional Republicans this month blocked a bipartisan bill that would have strengthened border security. Given the blatantly partisan nature of the Republicans’ decision, it’s reasonable for Biden to emphasize it during his campaign. But I would be surprised if he could eliminate his vulnerability on immigration merely by criticizing Republican intransigence. Biden is the president, after all, and a president has significant authority to shape immigration policy even without new legislation.

Persons: Biden, Donald Trump’s, Republican intransigence Organizations: Republicans, Republican Locations: Denver

☆ An Instagram Investigation
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-23 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

The evidence that smartphones damage children’s mental health has continued to grow in recent years. Feelings of loneliness and sadness began rising more than a decade ago, around the same time that smartphones and then social media became ubiquitous. The amount of time that teenagers spend socializing in person has declined on the same timeline. Many studies have found a correlation between the amount of time that teens — especially girls — spend on smartphones and the likelihood that they will be depressed or have low self-esteem. One study last year found a striking relationship between the age at which somebody first owned a smartphone and that person’s mental health as a young adult:

Persons: —

☆ Three Questions About Rafah
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-20 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The looming battle for Rafah — a city on the southern end of Gaza, farthest from where Israel’s invasion began — embodies the brutal dynamics of the conflict. During its four-month invasion of Gaza, Israel has killed more than 29,000 people, many of them children. An assault on Rafah, which has become a refuge for more than half of Gaza’s population, would worsen the misery. But the military importance of Rafah for Hamas is also real, experts say. With Israel having taken control of much of northern and central Gaza, at least some Hamas leaders and their weapons seem to be in tunnels under Rafah.

Persons: Israel Organizations: Hamas, Israel Locations: Rafah, Gaza, Israel

☆ Covid Shots for Children
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-13 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Much of the world has decided that most young children do not need to receive Covid booster shots. They say that otherwise healthy children do not need even an initial Covid vaccination. In Germany, public health experts don’t recommend vaccines for any children, including teenagers, unless they have a medical condition. Scientists in these countries understand that Covid vaccines are highly effective. The benefits are modest because children are extremely unlikely to become seriously ill from Covid and are less likely to transmit the virus than an adult is.

Locations: Britain, France, Japan, Australia, India, Germany

☆ Three Big Legal Questions
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-09 | by ( David Leonhardt | Ian Prasad Philbrick | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In a two-hour oral argument at the Supreme Court yesterday, nearly all justices appeared skeptical of Colorado’s effort to keep Trump off the ballot. Maine has also moved to bar Trump, and other states would likely follow if the Supreme Court were to allow it. The legal issues are complex, and we walk through them below. As Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The Times, told us yesterday:Donald Trump is accused of doing grave wrongs in trying to overturn the election. Many legal experts expect the court to rule quickly (as this story explains) and to issue a broad decision that applies to all states.

Persons: Donald Trump’s, Trump, Adam Liptak, Donald Trump, Neal Katyal, Obama Organizations: Colorado, Trump, The Times, ”, Republican Locations: Washington, United States

☆ Republicans Against Border Enforcement
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-07 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The United States has had a porous border with Mexico for decades, and the situation has worsened in the past few years, with more than 10,000 people entering the U.S. on some days. Mayors, governors, and immigration experts — as well as voters — have long urged Congress to fix the problem. And for anybody who has grown cynical about Washington, the plan offered reasons for both surprise and further cynicism. The surprising part is that productive bipartisanship seems to be alive, even on an issue as divisive as immigration. So do the editorial boards of The Washington Post, which leans left, and The Wall Street Journal, which is deeply conservative.

Persons: —, James Lankford, Chris Murphy, Kyrsten, Donald Trump Organizations: Washington, Oklahoma Republican, Connecticut Democrat, The Washington Post, Street Locations: States, Mexico, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Arizona

☆ A Top College Reinstates the SAT
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-05 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Dartmouth College announced this morning that it would again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, starting next year. Training future leadersLast summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement.

Persons: It’s, Sian Beilock —, New York —, Beilock, ” Organizations: Dartmouth, Barnard College Locations: New York

☆ Donald Trump’s Second-Term Agenda
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-25 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

My colleagues Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage are writing a continuing series on what Donald Trump plans to do during a second term as president. David: One question that some people have is whether Trump would govern as radically in a second term as his rhetoric suggests. He didn’t withdraw from Afghanistan. What’s your view about whether to assume he will really do what he says in a second term? Jonathan: I would challenge the statement that Trump didn’t do a lot of what he promised in his first term.

Persons: Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage, Donald Trump, Trump, didn’t, Hillary Clinton, Jonathan Organizations: Republican Locations: Afghanistan

☆ The Decline of Deaths in Gaza
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-22 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For more than a month now, the Biden administration and other allies of Israel have been urging its leaders to scale back the war in Gaza. Some Israeli officials have made the same argument. It has reduced the number of troops in northern Gaza. And the most tangible sign of the change is the decline in deaths among Gazan residents, as reported by the Hamas-controlled local government. The chart here is based on a New York Times compilation of U.N. reports that rely on information from Gazan officials:

Persons: Biden, It’s Organizations: Hamas, New York Times Locations: Israel, Gaza

☆ A 2024 Vulnerability
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-17 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I keep a running list of issues on which either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party is out of step with public opinion. For Democrats, I think immigration policy has moved to the top of the list. In a newsletter last week, I described the shift in the Democratic Party’s immigration policy over the past decade. Today, many Democratic politicians are willing to accept high levels of undocumented immigration and oppose enforcement measures that the party once favored. Some Democrats, especially on the left, argue that the government doesn’t even have the power to reduce migration much.

Persons: Donald Trump’s, Trump Organizations: Republican Party, Democratic Party, Democratic

☆ Three Questions About Iowa
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-15 | by ( David Leonhardt | More About David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The incumbent president is likely to win the Democratic nomination easily, while a former president seems to be running away with the Republican nomination. By tonight, however, voting will have begun, at least on the Republican side, thanks to the Iowa caucuses. Today’s newsletter offers a preview, in the form of three questions. The big question is whether Donald Trump wins the landslide victory that polls have forecast. Recent polls have shown Trump receiving around 50 percent of the Republican vote in Iowa, with Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis both at 20 percent or below.

Persons: Don’t, Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, Franklin D, Roosevelt, Trump, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy Organizations: Democratic, Republican Locations: Iowa

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