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The Kings Visit Was a Hit With The American Congress But Not So With The British Public

2026-04-29T10:06:08.280-04:00

King Charles received multiple standing ovations and rounds of laughter during his address to a joint meeting of Congress in Washington on Tuesday.Credit...Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Megan Specia

Reporting from London

New York Times

King Charles III’s visit to Washington has been unpopular among the public in Britain, where some politicians even called for it to be canceled.Credit...Pool photo by Jane Barlow

The state visit by King Charles III has been months in the making, but the British public’s view of the trip soured as it drew closer and the relationship between the longtime allies grew more strained.

After weeks of President Trump aiming disparaging remarks at Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government over their position on the war with Iran, opinion polls have shown that in Britain, where Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular, more people oppose the king’s visit than favor it. Some politicians even called for the trip to be scrapped before the king and Queen Camilla arrived in Washington on Monday.

Even so, some experts say there is diplomatic value in deploying the monarch in his official capacity as head of state, especially as Mr. Trump has shown a fondness for the king and for the royals more broadly. The president clearly reveled in being the guest of honor, seated next to Charles, at a Windsor Castle banquet in September.

“If you’re going to have a monarchy, the place that can shine most is on the international stage,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian and expert on Britain’s royal family. “It is something that Britain has that many other countries don’t have.

The king may be able to soften some of the rougher edges in the relationship with the United States, Mr. Owens said — the kind of diplomacy he has mastered through five decades of engaging as a representative for Britain internationally.

“One of the calling cards of royal diplomacy is that they put their personal tastes to one side in order to carry out their duty on behalf of the country,” Mr. Owens added.

Since the United States and Israel began the war with Iran two months ago, some British politicians called on the government to cancel the king’s visit. Ed Davey, the leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats party, said last month that the government was “showing a staggering lack of backbone by pushing ahead with this state visit while Donald Trump treats our country with contempt.”

Later, in Parliament, Mr. Davey said that he feared “for what Trump might say or do while our king is forced to stand by his side.” He added: “We cannot put His Majesty in that position.”

British officials, for their part, have been eager to avoid an awkward moment in which Mr. Trump might belittle Mr. Starmer in the king’s presence. As a result, on Tuesday the men appeared before reporters only for a brief photo opportunity ahead of their private meeting, with no chance for reporters to yell questions.

Iran Accumulated 11 Tons of Enriched Uranium, How?

2026-04-29T09:53:17.930-04:00

By Blacki Migliozzi and William J. Broad

New York Times

Since eight years ago when President Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal with Tehran, Iran has accumulated 22,000 pounds, or 11 tons, of enriched uranium. But the fate of Iran’s stockpile remains a mystery, two months after the United States began a war meant to prevent Iran from ever building an atomic bomb.

Uranium can light cities or destroy them. Low concentrations can power nuclear reactors. Higher concentrations, from a process called enrichment, can make nuclear bombs.

Concentrations in Iran’s stockpile

20%

60%

Low-enriched uranium

Highly enriched

Uranium enrichment gets increasingly easy and fast as concentrations rise. It’s much harder to get to 20 percent from 0 percent than to 60 percent from 20 percent, or even to 90 percent — the preferred level for making nuclear arms.

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000pounds

Iran began enriching uranium on an industrial scale in 2006, describing its aims as peaceful. Reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency showed the stockpile growing over the next few years.

Chart shows the increasing stockpile of uranium enriched up to 5 percent, in light purple, from 2008 to 2010.

In 2010, Iran said it would begin enriching uranium up to 20 percent — ostensibly to make fuel for a research reactor. This level is the official dividing line between civilian and military uses.

Chart shows the increasing stockpile of uranium enriched up to 5 percent, in light purple, from 2008 to 2013, when it reaches about 20,000 pounds. A new area on the chart, in medium purple and indicating 20 percent enrichment, grows from 2010 onward.

The 20 percent level was alarming because it was about 80 percent of the way to bomb-grade fuel.

Chart zooms in into the area of uranium enriched to 20 percent.

As the stockpile kept growing, the Obama administration began talks to curb it.

In 2015, Iran and six nations led by the United States reached an accord that limited the purity of its enriched uranium to 3.67 percent and the size of its stockpile until 2030.

Chart extends to show the increasing stockpile of uranium enriched to 5 percent, in light purple, from 2008 to 2015. The area of enriched to 20 percent is visible from 2010 to 2014.

Under the deal, Tehran shipped 25,000 pounds of enriched uranium, or 12.5 tons, and restricted the size of its stockpile to under 660 pounds.

Chart extends to show the stockpile of uranium enriched up to 2018, with the limit on its size imposed by the 2015 deal marked with a red line. The chart also shows a huge drop in the levels of enriched uranium after 2016.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, when Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the pact and reimposed a series of tough economic sanctions.

Then Iran began to enrich above the deal’s limit, first at low enrichment levels to pressure the West and then up to 20 percent in early 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office.

Chart shows the stockpile of uranium enriched from 2016 to 2022, and highlights May 2018, when Trump revoked the Iran nuclear deal.

The Biden administration tried, unsuccessfully, to restore aspects of the abandoned deal. Throughout the negotiations, Iran enriched uranium to an unprecedented level of up to 60 percent — a hairsbreadth away from the preferred grade for atom bombs.

Chart shows the stockpile of uranium enriched from 2019 to 2025, with all levels of enrichment increasing. Enrichment to 60 percent is also visible in dark colors from 2021 to 2025.

With Mr. Trump again in office in 2025, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium grew at the fastest rate since the International Atomic Energy Agency started reporting.

Chart zooms out to see the entire extent of the timeline, from 2006 to 2025.

In June 2025, during the 12-day war, the United States bombed Iran’s enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow, as well as its uranium storage tunnels at Isfahan. One month later, Iran suspended cooperation with the I.A.E.A., ending the monitoring of the nation’s enrichment sites.

In the absence of on-site inspections and despite satellite monitoring, the location of the 11-ton stockpile remains uncertain.

Radioactive and chemically hazardous, parts of the stockpile remain hidden or buried under wartime rubble, making them difficult targets to access or destroy. It's even a challenge to confirm they exist.

Even if Iran were to dig out the uranium, experts said, it would take many months — perhaps more than a year — to turn it into a warhead. Experts said that Iran, when the war started, posed no imminent threat, as it was up to years away from making a nuclear weapon.

The Trump administration has argued that U.S. satellites are monitoring the deeply buried uranium and that the cache is of little or no use to Iran because of the wide destruction of its nuclear sites and know-how.

Analysts question these assertions. They say Iran last year may have set up an enrichment plant in the mountain tunnels that adjoin its Isfahan site, where Tehran is also seen as storing the bulk of its uranium stockpile. If so, they say, that raises the possibility that Iran has a covert site where it might conduct new rounds of fuel enrichment to make fuel for an atomic bomb.

King Charles With Jokes and Decorum but Also With A needle For Tump

2026-04-29T09:36:20.167-04:00

King Charles III addressing Congress on Tuesday.Credit...Salwan Georges for The New York Times

King Charles III gently pushed back against President Trump’s attacks on Britain and NATO, and he spoke of the importance of checks and balances.

By Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Michael D. Shear is the chief U.K. correspondent and is covering the king’s trip to Washington, New York and Virginia. Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a reporter covering the White House.

King Charles III quoted Oscar Wilde, joking that the British have everything in common with America “except, of course, language.” President Trump said the morning’s gloomy rain reminded him of a “beautiful British day” and noted that his mother thought young Prince Charles was “so cute.” Both men waxed poetic about the bonds between their countries.

And yet, on the first full day of a state visit focused on the shared history between the United States and Britain, the king sprinkled in some ever-so-subtle rebuttals to Mr. Trump. Charles spoke on Tuesday of the value of the trans-Atlantic alliance, the importance of checks and balances and his passion for the environment. He even spoke of his time in the Royal Navy, after Mr. Trump belittled British naval capabilities in recent weeks.

The king tucked his rejoinders into a mostly lighthearted speech to Congress on Tuesday afternoon and during evening remarks at a formal banquet at the White House.

“Please rest assured I am not here as part of some cunning rear-guard action!” the king told lawmakers in the afternoon, only the second time a British monarch had addressed Congress.

The mostly disciplined and careful public appearances by both Charles and Mr. Trump came at a dire moment in American-British relations, arguably at their lowest point in decades over the war in Iran and Mr. Trump’s scathing attacks on NATO.

But for a day (and maybe just a day), the special relationship that has developed over the past 250 years seemed — on the surface at least — special.

In a rarity for the Trump era, the president stuck mostly to his script during the day’s ceremonial events. He did not invite a horde of reporters into the Oval Office just before their meeting to field questions on Iran, the ballroom or Greenland in the presence of his visiting foreign dignitary. He did not lash out at another global ally.

In one apparently unscripted remark during the state dinner, Mr. Trump referred to the war in Iran and insisted that “Charles agrees with me.” It was an awkward moment because Charles studiously stays out of such matters of war and politics.

For the most part, though, Mr. Trump lavished the king with praise throughout the day.

Charles and President Trump at the White House on Tuesday. The king was invited to review the troops, the highest diplomatic honor that can be extended to a visiting head of state. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

“Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts — moral courage — and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday morning as he welcomed Charles to the White House.

There is little evidence in more recent history that an era of good feeling will last much beyond the departure of the royal couple’s jet from American shores on Thursday, particularly as Mr. Trump’s well-known affection for the royals does not extend to the British government.

Mr. Trump is furious at Britain for its refusal to join the fight against Iran, and his administration continues to accuse the British government of denying free speech to conservative voices. In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer vows not to be dragged into another war of America’s choosing, and bristles at the president’s description of Britain’s aircraft carriers as nothing more than “toys.”

Those differences were never likely to be erased by the king’s first visit to the United States as the British monarch. By law and tradition, the king is supposed to rise above the disputes that often bedevil the leaders of both governments.

Mr. Trump was a guest of the royal family for a state dinner at Windsor Castle in September, an experience he described as “one of the highest honors of my life.” Months later, he belittled Mr. Starmer as a coward for not entering the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Charles and Queen Camilla with Mr. Trump and Melania Trump, the first lady, at the White House on Tuesday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Charles chose his words carefully during his public remarks.

“That was not very long ago and look where we are in terms of the bilateral relationship,” said Philippe Dickinson, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative. “It can be cited as evidence by those who are going to make the case that it’s nice words one day and then forgotten the next day.”

During his speech to Congress, he appeared to address — obliquely — the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which has caused political headaches for the Trump administration and led to a rupture in the royal family.

“In both of our countries, it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength, including to support victims of some of the ills that, so tragically, exist in both our societies today,” Charles said.

The king greeting members of Congress after his speech to the joint meeting on Tuesday.Credit...Salwan Georges for The New York Times

He also drew a standing ovation during his speech to Congress when he spoke about how the concept of checks and balances in American government has its roots in English history. Mr. Trump has worked to significantly expand executive power.

Charles said the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society found that Magna Carta was cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, “not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

He spoke of “the natural wonders” of the United States and “our shared responsibility to safeguard nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.” Charles is an avid environmentalist; Mr. Trump, by contrast, pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change, making the United States the only country in the world to abandon the international commitment to slow global warming.

The king spoke of his own service in the Royal Navy more than a half-century ago, and repeated Mr. Starmer’s assertion that Britain had “committed to the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War.”

He also pushed back, gently, against Mr. Trump’s attacks on Britain and on the NATO alliance for not joining in the Iran war. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the king told lawmakers, “We answered the call together — as our people have done so for more than a century.”

And at the start of the evening’s state dinner, Charles recalled how the two nations have had “moments of difficulty” in the past, including in 1957 when Queen Elizabeth II visited the United States after the Suez Canal crisis.

“It is hard to imagine anything like that happening today,” Charles said, as some dinner guests laughed, causing Trump to turn and smile. “But it is not hard to see how important the relationship remains in matters both seen and unseen.”

While it was unclear whether the king’s appeal would be enough to mend the wounds in the trans-Atlantic relationship, Mr. Dickinson said the British were probably hoping the visit created a pathway to recovery.

“That’s why the government values the royal family as a diplomatic ace in the hand,” he said. “It’s not a magic wand, but it helps.”

Tops Stories by NPR

2026-04-28T10:19:29.319-04:00

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Federal prosecutors have charged Cole Allen, the alleged gunman at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, with attempting to assassinate President Trump. Allen made his first public appearance in federal court yesterday. He also faces other charges for allegedly transporting a firearm and ammunition in interstate commerce for use in a felony and for the discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. Allen could face more charges as the investigation progresses, according to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. If convicted, Allen could face life in prison.

🎧 Prosecutors said that Allen emailed family and friends to outline his reasoning for the attack minutes before he left his hotel room to execute his plan. The letter stated he didn't want to be represented by someone he called “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” presumably targeting Trump, NPR’s Jaclyn Diaz tells Up First. Allen listed administration officials as his targets, prioritizing them from highest to lowest rank. Allen's next hearing is on Thursday. Trump has talked about rescheduling the dinner.

➡️ The Washington Hilton hosts the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in part because of its unique design that is specifically intended for presidential security. The venue includes a special entrance and a dedicated holding room behind the stage with a presidential seal engraved on the floor. Here's a look inside security at the correspondents' dinner.

King Charles III is set to address Congress today as part of a four-day state visit to mark the 250th anniversary of the U.S.' independence from the U.K. It's only the second time a British monarch will give such an address. Charles' mother, Elizabeth II, stressed the importance of democracy, international cooperation and multilateral organizations such as the UN and NATO during her 1991 address to Congress. She also highlighted the U.S. and U.K.'s cooperation during the Gulf War. In contrast, Charles' address comes at a time when Trump frequently attacks allies and criticizes NATO, and as tensions grow between the U.S. and the U.K over the war in Iran.

🎧 NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben says NPR has learned from the palace that Charles' speech will focus on reconciliation while also addressing points of disagreement between the two countries, including NATO, Ukraine and the Middle East. The king is supposed to remain politically neutral, which could mean he may not debate important topics, Kurtzleben says. Even without policy conversations, the visit could still help ease tensions between the two nations.

The Iranian Foreign Minister arrived in Russia yesterday, where President Vladimir Putin expressed strong support for Iran in its conflict with the U.S. and Israel. The visit followed a whirlwind week of diplomacy for Iran as it seeks political leverage and foreign backing. Talks with the U.S. remain on hold. Meanwhile, the Israeli military launched strikes in Lebanon yesterday, causing many Lebanese to question the ceasefire in Lebanon to pause the fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

🎧 Diplomatically, the ceasefire agreement is holding steady, meaning none of the involved parties — Israel, Lebanon or Hezbollah — have officially declared it over, NPR’s Kat Lonsdorf says. But Israel is conducting multiple airstrikes daily against what it identifies as Hezbollah targets, primarily in the south. Lonsdorf was in southern Lebanon speaking to residents, and says the region does not feel like it's under a ceasefire. The sporadic air strikes taking place while she was there a few days ago have since intensified. Israel has also issued new evacuation orders for several communities beyond the zone it occupies. Many people are reevacuating after trying to go back to their homes. Abed Ammar, 35, said to Lonsdorf in a voice note, “If this was a ceasefire, we could be at home. This is not a ceasefire.”

Hundreds of lawsuits nationwide allege that State Farm has been running a scheme to avoid paying what it owes for hail damage. A significant number of these cases are centered in Oklahoma, where more than 600 lawsuits were pending against the U.S.' largest home insurer as of this spring, according to a law firm involved in some of the cases. The litigation comes as homeowners face rising insurance costs, driven in part by climate change threats. NPR analyzed nearly two dozen lawsuits involving insurance claims following hailstorms as part of our ongoing coverage of extreme weather's effects on the home insurance industry. The litigation sheds light on the specific strategies State Farm allegedly employs to deny coverage. When asked about the accusations that it runs a wide-ranging program to reduce insurance payouts for hail and wind damage, State Farm said in a statement to NPR that it pays claims according to the terms of each individual policy and the specific facts of each case.

King Charles Visits Washington DC, Trump

2026-04-28T10:06:30.956-04:00

President Donald Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, welcoming King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the White House on Monday. Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

Presidents use state visits to show off all that is appealing about American culture. But the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner has cast a shadow over the visit.

By Katie Rogers and Michael D. Shear

Reporting from Washington

New York Times

The Visit of the king to a president with the lowest popularity and one who is being accused of sexually abusing little girls. Most people giving the chance will fly the opposite way away from Washington DC.

But he is coming to try and mend the relationship between the two countries.

When King Charles III and Queen Camilla of Britain arrived at the White House for a state visit on Monday afternoon, President Trump pointed to a large hole where the East Wing used to be before taking his guests inside for tea and a private audience with the White House beehive.

Presidents use state visits as an occasion to showcase the best of American culture — and, in this case, perhaps, subtly highlight the resilience of a people who, 250 years ago, rose up and wrested themselves from a king’s control.

The shooting over the weekend at the White House correspondents’ dinner has featured the darker side of the United States at a time when Mr. Trump is supposed to be showcasing America’s 250th birthday for the British royalty. For a moment over the weekend, it was unclear if King Charles would travel to Washington at all, before he reassessed and ultimately committed to his plans for a four-day visit to Washington, New York and Virginia.

Threats of violence against public figures in the United States have accelerated so much that administration officials have moved to live in military installations out of fear for their safety. The visit has also highlighted the nature of a president who has opted, time and time again, to show aggression rather than diplomacy when on the world stage.

Shortly before the arrival of the king and queen, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, took the podium inside the briefing room to admonish Mr. Trump’s enemies for creating “left-wing cult of hatred against the president,” as she fielded questions and assigned blame for the conditions that caused a gunman to rush toward a ballroom where Mr. Trump was scheduled to address members of the Washington news media on Saturday night.

She also addressed the rampant skepticism and conspiracy theories questioning the events that led to them: “Hopefully people will believe the truth rather than the lies,” she said.

Image

And Mr. Trump, who appeared relatively unfazed after the shooting on Saturday evening, spent Monday returning to form, taking to the presidential Truth Social account to attack a late-night television host and share pictures of his latest construction project, which entails cleaning large amounts of goose excrement out of the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

This all complicates the unofficial diplomatic mission that lies ahead for King Charles, who will try to soothe ruffled feathers in a relationship between Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer that has gone south rapidly over the last several months.

Early in Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Starmer tried heaping praise on the president, even once bending down to pick up papers the president dropped on the ground. But more recently, the prime minister’s decision not to join the U.S.-Israel war in Iran has darkened Mr. Trump’s mood. The president has called Mr. Starmer a coward for not entering the fight and has belittled the British navy.

More recently, a memo drafted at the Pentagon suggested that the Trump administration could stop supporting British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

The conflict has also strained the so-called “special relationship” between the two countries. Officially, the king is above all of that, and few people on either side of the Atlantic expect the monarch to engage in a war of words with Mr. Trump. But privately, many British officials hope that this week’s visit could help charm the president into softening his tone.

While they are in the United States, the royal couple will be under protection by the Secret Service, at a moment when there are new questions about the agency’s ability and capacity to protect public figures in an age of rising threats.

“In some ways I am surprised that the Secret Service would say, ‘Yes, come ahead, King Charles, it’ll be fine,’ and it’s a little bit surprising that he wanted to come,” said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “On the other hand, this will be a way for him to prove that we have this bond and at that, despite what happened on Saturday night, he is willing to come and possibly risk his life.”

The King and Queen arriving at Joint Base Andrews on Monday afternoon. The U.S. Secret Service is providing security for the Royal couple during the state visit. Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

The king and queen hosted Mr. Trump for a state visit last September, treating the president to a royal banquet and an overnight stay in Windsor Castle. Mr. Trump, a former hotelier, is looking to return the lavish favor.

White House officials were initially planning for the king and queen to stay in the White House residence, according to two officials familiar with the planning, where King Charles’s mother and father, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, once stayed during a visit in 1957. In the end, the royals have opted to stay across the street at Blair House, which is larger and reserved for visiting dignitaries.

The schedule released by the White House ahead of the visit illustrated how sequestered the Trumps have become amid heightened fears about their safety. For past state visits, Mr. Trump has traveled the country — or at least left the White House — with his guests. In 2018, the Trumps took a tour of Mount Vernon with President Emmanuel Macron of France and his wife, Brigitte Macron, and Mrs. Trump took Ms. Macron to view art at the National Portrait Gallery. In 2019, Mr. Trump visited a factory in Ohio with Scott Morrison, the former Australian prime minister.

This week, the Trumps are not leaving the complex, which Mr. Trump has altered by tearing down the East Wing, festooning the Oval Office with gold and paving over the Rose Garden. Outside of the royal couple’s quarters at Blair House, the bricks in Lafayette Park have been torn out — too easy for protesters to pick them up throw them, the president has said. The fountains in the park have been turned on.

Rather than leaving the White House, the Trumps have opted instead to host “thousands of guests on the South Lawn,” a group that includes members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Mrs. Trump will host Queen Camilla and American students at the White House Tennis Pavilion, where the group will use “A.I.-enabled glasses to learn about American history,” according to a release from the White House.

Trump Started The War in Iran but It has Upended the Global Economy

2026-04-27T10:07:22.796-04:00

The fallout from two months of war in Iran is shuttering textile mills in India and Bangladesh, grounding airplanes in Ireland, Poland and Germany, and prompting energy rationing in Vietnam, South Korea and Thailand. The only country, it seems, that has been relatively spared from the economic chaos is the one that started the war: the United States.

By Patricia Cohen and Ben Casselman

Patricia Cohen is the global economics correspondent in London. Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent, is based in New York.

New York Times

While warning signs of a recession are flashing across countries in Asia and Europe, the United States is likely to outperform most of the world’s advanced economies. Growth is steady and unemployment low. “It’s still hard to bet against the U.S. economy,” the Royal Bank of Canada said last week.

The United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s richest countries, with sovereign wealth funds that total more than $2 trillion, has asked the United States for a financial lifeline in the wake of missile-damaged gas fields and a halt to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

In just eight weeks — less time than it takes to age a traditional English fruitcake — the global economic outlook has been knocked sideways.

The worst economic pain will be felt in poor countries, where consumers cannot afford higher energy prices, and governments cannot afford to provide aid to offset the costs. And as financing tightens, the cost of desperately needed borrowing for these countries increases.

A multilane street is packed with cars, motorcycles and three-wheeled vehicles. People walk on the sidewalks and through the slow traffic.

Vehicles lining up for fuel in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earlier this month.Credit...Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters

Soaring prices now for fuel and fertilizer mean higher prices for food later in the year. In Africa, “food insecurity looms large,” the International Monetary Fund said last week. In the Asia-Pacific region, millions of people are at risk of falling into poverty because of the conflict, the United Nations Development Program warned.

Already, many countries in Asia are grappling with fuel shortages, which will grow only worse as the war drags on, said Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago and a former governor of the Bank of India.

“The shortages will start hitting more and more,” said Mr. Rajan, who formerly served in a top role at the International Monetary Fund. In many countries, the real consequences are only just beginning to be

Energy inventories are running out, and some shipments have stopped. “The water’s on the boil, the frog is in the water and the temperature’s rising,” Mr. Rajan said. “And now, increasingly, you’re going to see industry shut down.”

Steel plants in India and automakers in Japan have cut production because of higher energy prices and concerns about reduced demand. Toy factories in China, already suffering from U.S. tariffs, are contending with discontent from thousands of workers angry about losing their jobs.

Workers assemble plush toys at tables in a factory. Orange and white toys are piled up, with white fluffy material in the background.

In China, toy factories already hit by the trade war are contending with discontent from thousands of workers. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

One morning last week, in Firozabad, a city in northern India, workers were idly milling at an open-air labor market. “Because of the war, work has dwindled,” said Muhammad Waseem, a plasterer. He was haggling with a potential employer who wanted to pay him 500 rupees ($5.30) for a construction job, significantly less than what he usually earns.

Aas Muhammad, 25, a laborer who loads bricks and cement onto trucks, had walked five miles to the market from his home. He was willing to take the 500 rupees, but even that wouldn’t go far. A kilogram of cooking gas that would normally cost 80 rupees now costs 200.

Millions of other Indian workers who usually live and work in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and collectively send billions of dollars in remittances home every year, are stranded abroad without work.

Shortages of other commodities that ordinarily travel through the Strait of Hormuz, like helium, aluminum and naphtha, are affecting the supplies of a dizzying array of other goods, from condoms to microchips.

Of course, the U.S. economy isn’t entirely insulated from the shock. Gas prices have jumped more than $1 a gallon since the war began, a tax on American consumers that has hit lower-income households especially hard.

On Wall Street, banks have marked their growth forecasts down and their inflation forecasts up since the war began and have all but given up on the possibility of further interest rate cuts before the fall at the earliest.

A blurred person in the foreground. A city street with pedestrians, parked cars, tall buildings and an American flag flying.

Banks in the United States have lowered their growth forecasts and raised inflation outlooks.Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times

Compared with the rest of the world, though, the impact on the domestic economy has been muted. Consumer spending remains strong, layoffs remain low and forecasters still expect solid growth this year.

Economists say it would take a much more significant spike in oil prices, perhaps as high as $150 a barrel, for them to begin worrying seriously about the possibility of a recession in the United States.

That is not the case elsewhere, where the dreaded combination of slower growth and higher inflation is already raising alarms about stagflation.

Around the world, scarcity and high prices are setting off a worrying cycle of reduced economic activity: High prices lower the demand for fuel, and the lower demand, in turn, shrinks production, employment and spending.

The German airline Lufthansa canceled 20,000 flights scheduled for this summer. As jet fuel prices have doubled, all 20 of the world’s top air carriers have cut at least some flights, according to Freightos, a digital shipping marketplace. Fewer flights cut sharply into tourism and business travel, reducing spending at hotels, restaurants and retailers.

For the United States, the biggest advantage is that, unlike most of its global peers, it produces more oil and gas than it consumes. That doesn’t mean it is unaffected by what happens in global energy markets, but it helps dampen the impact.

An airport runway with a white Lufthansa airplane in the foreground. Large white fuel tanks are in the background.

Lufthansa cited higher fuel costs in canceling 20,000 summer flights.Credit...Jana Rodenbusch/Reuters

The U.S. economy is also heavily based on services and depends relatively little on the energy-intensive manufacturing industries that have been hit hardest by the spike in oil prices. And it went into the war with a stronger economy than many other countries, giving it more of a buffer against a slowdown.

“We’re not feeling the same pain the rest of the world is,” said Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

“In a shock this large, the physical shortages are showing up in Asia, and they’re trickling through to Europe,” he added. “We’re the last to feel the effects.”

The toll on the U.S. economy will grow if the war drags on. Higher fuel prices will further raise the cost of shipping, and that could drive up prices for other consumer goods.

“We don’t know how long this shock will last, and I think if it persists we’ll probably be having a very different conversation six months from now,” said Ben Harris, a Brookings Institution economist who served as chief economist at the Treasury Department under the Biden administration.

Even if the war were to end tomorrow, most energy executives and political analysts doubt that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critically important shipping lane for oil and gas, will ever return to the way it was before. The war has demonstrated how easily free passage can be stopped, raising risks and costs.

A person in a khaki uniform raises an arm as two people carrying red gas cylinders pass by.

Villagers carry empty liquefied petroleum gas cylinders to buy refills near Jewar, India, where cooking gas prices have soared.Credit...Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The shortfall caused by the halt in oil and gas production and the missile damage inflicted on infrastructure also mean that oil prices are likely to remain elevated or rise over the next four years, according to High Frequency Economics, a research consulting firm.

“We are more resilient to energy shocks, but I don’t think that’s going to last,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Many countries, including allies, had already been re-evaluating their relationship because of President Trump’s punitive trade policies and erratic behavior, including his demands to take over Greenland.

Now American pre-eminence has been undercut by Mr. Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran that has had severe economic consequences for much of the world, Mr. Posen said.

“As a snapshot at the moment, the U.S. is less directly troubled,” Mr. Posen added. “I wouldn’t make too much of that.”

Netanyahu Like Trump is a Criminal But Expecting a Pardon The President of Israel Said No

2026-04-26T11:03:05.370-04:00

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, left, with President Isaac Herzog, in Jerusalem last week.Credit...Pool photo by Ilia Yefimovich

President Isaac Herzog of Israel has decided not to issue a pardon to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his corruption case at this time, and instead will seek mediation, officials say.

By Isabel Kershner

Reporting from Jerusalem

New York Times

For months, President Isaac Herzog of Israel has deliberated over the politically fraught question of whether to grant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon in his long-running corruption trial. It’s a highly contentious issue that has divided Israelis and drawn pressure from President Trump, who has aggressively intervened on Mr. Netanyahu’s behalf.

But Mr. Herzog does not plan to give Mr. Netanyahu a pardon anytime soon. Instead he will first try to initiate a mediation process to reach a plea deal, according to two senior Israeli officials with direct knowledge of Mr. Herzog’s thinking.

Mr. Herzog, the officials said, believes that there are many options beyond the binary pardon-or-no-pardon choice, and that the main role of Israel’s president is to foster unity. So he does not plan to say yes or no to Mr. Netanyahu’s request for a pardon at this stage, the officials said, preferring to try to resolve the issue through negotiations.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the issue is so politically sensitive.

In response to a request for comment, Mr. Herzog’s office said in a statement: “President Isaac Herzog has stated on several occasions that he regards reaching an amicable solution between the parties as an important public interest. As for the decision on the pardon request, the president will act solely in accordance with Israeli law, guided by his conscience, and in the best interests of the state of Israel.”

The prime minister’s office and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Netanyahu, 76, a conservative, has been on trial for almost six years. Charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust, he is battling three separate but interlocking cases centered on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage of him and his family.

Mr. Netanyahu, in a dark suit, stands amid a crowd of people and looks down.

Mr. Netanyahu at his trial on corruption charges in 2024. The trial has lasted more than five years, and he has denied all wrongdoing.Credit...Pool photo by Stoyan Nenov

He denies all wrongdoing and says he is the victim of a political witch hunt by a liberal “deep state,” finding a kindred spirit in Mr. Trump in that regard. The American president has pressed Mr. Herzog hard for a pardon and called him “disgraceful” and a “weak and pathetic guy” for not already granting one.

Israel is deeply divided over the issue. Polls indicate that about half of all Israelis oppose a pardon. Opinions are split roughly along political lines, with conservatives more sympathetic to the prime minister.

Mr. Herzog is acutely aware that the atmosphere in the country is tense, the officials said, because of the wars in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, and with national elections slated to take place within six months.

Though the president’s role in Israel is largely ceremonial, one of the few powers Mr. Herzog has is granting pardons. A decision either way would be momentous and defining for both his and Mr. Netanyahu’s legacies and for the country’s future trajectory.

The officials who spoke of Mr. Herzog’s plans declined to elaborate on the potential outlines of a deal at this point, before the sides were even on board with mediation.

A plea agreement usually involves an admission of wrongdoing by the defendant and some kind of sanction. Israeli legal experts have said that any plea deal should be conditioned on Mr. Netanyahu agreeing to resign from public office.

Mr. Netanyahu has so far shown no inclination to admit any wrongdoing or to quit political life.

“Netanyahu knows the option of a plea bargain is always available to him,” said Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research group based in Jerusalem. “An admission of guilt, expressing remorse and agreeing to leave — or not to run for — office would be the essence of any plea bargain,” he said, adding, “If you are giving up on a prison sentence, that’s the minimum that should be required.”

A man in a group of protesters holds up a white sign. “No pardon” is written on it in Hebrew.

A protest against Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem in December. The sign reads, “No pardon.”Credit...Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Still, the officials said, Mr. Herzog believes that with good will, the legal landscape leaves room for creativity and innovation and that mediation would be the only way to heal the rifts threatening to tear Israel apart.

Mr. Netanyahu submitted a formal, pre-emptive request for a pardon midtrial last November. Though he said he would prefer to prove his innocence in court, Mr. Netanyahu argued that canceling the trial would help alleviate Israel’s divisions and free him to attend to the crucial affairs of state without the distraction of court hearings.

His request came amid a persistent pressure campaign by Mr. Trump for a pardon. During a visit to Israel in October, the American president turned to Mr. Herzog on the podium in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and said, “Mr. President, why don’t you give him a pardon?” A month later, Mr. Trump made the same request in a letter to Mr. Herzog. Two weeks later, Mr. Netanyahu made his formal request.

Mr. Herzog, who worked as a lawyer before entering politics and previously led the Labor Party, called the pardon request “extraordinary.” Critics — including legal experts, liberals in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s political opponents and nongovernmental watchdogs — said granting it would run counter to the rule of law.

The general rule in Israel, according to legal experts, is that a president can pardon people who have been convicted. They say that a request for a pre-emptive pardon subverts a cornerstone of Israeli democracy: the principle of equality before the law.

In line with procedure, Mr. Herzog sought an opinion from the Pardons Department of Israel’s Ministry of Justice. The department issued a detailed response last month saying there was no legal basis for a pardon unless Mr. Netanyahu admitted some guilt, took responsibility by resigning or was found guilty in court. It said it was unable to conclude or recommend that the presidential authority for pardoning should apply in this case.

But the department also said it did not have the tools to consider the nonlegal aspects of Mr. Netanyahu’s request, such as the implications for national security and the rifts the trial was causing in the country.

The officials with knowledge of Mr. Herzog’s thinking said that he was assessing an alternative opinion submitted by Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right member of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, on behalf of the government.

Mr. Eliyahu’s opinion took the Pardons Department to task for examining the issue through what it described as the narrow, technical lens of the law. It argued that the president had the authority to take a broader approach and a historical view that goes beyond the usual realm of the justice system.

Mr. Herzog, wearing a suit and a blue shirt, walks with other people amid debris. A tall fence is behind them.

Mr. Herzog visiting the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh, Israel, last month.Credit...Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Mr. Herzog is now waiting for his office’s legal counsel to study all the material and make a recommendation, according to the officials. The general assessment in the president’s circles, they said, is that he does have the authority to pardon Mr. Netanyahu but that such a decision would need to pass judicial review and would most likely be challenged in the Supreme Court, creating further strife.

A decision not to pardon Mr. Netanyahu would most likely fire up his supporters before the election with claims that the prime minister was being persecuted by the liberal establishment, and fuel their crusade against the courts.

Mr. Netanyahu has done nothing to suggest that he will meet the usual conditions for a pardon. He appears to be campaigning for the next election rather than thinking of resigning, and if he decides to call more witnesses, he could stretch out the trial for years.

Mr. Herzog is proposing a way out of the conundrum, the officials said, by seeking to hold informal talks under presidential auspices, with the state prosecution and the attorney general on one side and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyer on the other.

At least one prior effort to reach a plea deal in Mr. Netanyahu’s case was unsuccessful. A former Supreme Court president tried to arbitrate an agreement in late 2021 and early 2022 under a previous attorney general who had served the indictment against Mr. Netanyahu, who was then the leader of the opposition.

But the sides failed to agree, and time ran out as the former attorney general was coming to the end of his term.

Asked if those favoring or opposing a pardon might see a negotiation as weakness or a cop-out, the officials dismissed that as a factor. Even if there is only a slight chance of success, they said, it is worth trying to resolve the predicament without acrimony

A Man Shoots Inside The Hotel Where The President and Staff Were All Together

2026-04-26T10:43:04.527-04:00

At the Washington Hilton last night.Credit...Salwan Georges for The New York Times

By the staff of The Morning

New York Times

Investigators are searching for a motive after a shooting in the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was taking place last night. President Trump was rushed offstage after a man armed with a shotgun, a handgun and knives charged a security checkpoint. Trump is unharmed.

Gunfire rang out just after the dinner began, and Trump, the first lady and hundreds of journalists looked up from their conversations. “Shots fired,” a member of the Secret Service shouted. Then agents, their guns drawn, sprinted to reach the president. Guests dressed in gowns and tuxedos hid under their seats. See the dramatic video.

The man was tackled by law enforcement officers and was taken into custody. A Secret Service officer was shot but was “saved” by his bulletproof vest, Trump said.

Trump posted two images of a man he said was the attacker being detained. He also posted surveillance footage on social media of a man making a mad dash through the cavernous halls of the hotel.

Trump held a news conference in the White House briefing room later last night, still dressed in his tuxedo and bow tie, to talk about the events of the evening.

“Well, thank you very much,” he said. “That was very unexpected!”

Melania Trump stood near him, looking stoic. The president said that it was “a rather traumatic experience for her.”

President Trump with his arm raised standing behind a lectern.

President Trump at the White House last night.Credit...Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Here’s what else we know.

The suspect: Two law enforcement officials have identified Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., as the suspect in the shooting. Federal authorities surrounded his home late Saturday.

At the hotel: See maps of the gunman’s movements inside the Washington Hilton, where the event took place.

Inside the ballroom: Attendees dropped to the floor, crouching beside chairs and ducking under tables as a sense of danger spread through the room.

Party postponed: Trump said that he had hoped to continue the dinner, because he didn’t want “sick people” to “change the fabric of our life,” but that he ultimately decided to reschedule it. Some afterparties, however, continued as scheduled.

Security threats: After two previous assassination attempts against Trump, this latest incident is reigniting the conversation about political violence in the U.S.

Follow the latest news of the shooting here.

A Cartel Gold Mine on a Columbian Military Base

2026-04-26T10:27:53.950-04:00

Illegal gold mining inside the military base. The blue tarps are just outside the base’s perimeter.

Officers denied that an illegal, large-scale gold operation was underway within earshot of their posts. But we had seen it with our own eyes.

Visuals and Text by Federico Rios

New York Times

Leer en español

It was during my third visit to La Mandinga, a gold mine controlled by a Colombian drug cartel, when I understood just how badly the institutions that are supposed prevent illegal mining had failed.

The mine abutted a Colombian military base. Weren’t people worried about operating under the noses of the authorities? After all, the mine supported the notorious Clan del Golfo cartel.

Hardly. One miner told me and my colleagues that the operation had even expanded beyond the military perimeter line and that workers were mining for gold directly on the base.

“Fly a drone and see,” the miner said.

So we did. The images were clear: Miners with high-pressure hoses were tearing up a forested area of the base, home to the Rifles Battalion 31, a Colombian military unit. We could see what appeared to be a former fence line — but no sign of a fence separating the base from La Mandinga. After we shared the images with the military and asked for comment, the base’s commander, Col. Daniel Echeverry, denied any gold mining was happening on his base.

ImageMiners work in a vast, muddy landscape of brown water pools and excavated earth.

Miners working inside the perimeter of the base. The military denied this was happening.

An armed soldier in camouflage stands beside a muddy mining pit.

The mine’s diesel generators can be heard from the buildings on the base.

That made no sense to us. The diesel generators on a working mine are deafening and, from satellite imagery, we could see that the mines had expanded to within about 150 yards of the base’s swimming pool and outbuildings.

Colonel Echeverry invited me to the base to talk, so I went. He told me that in the six months he’d been in charge, he’d been aware of the illegal miners next door but noted that the military was hesitant to take armed action against civilians, even if they were committing crimes. But he was adamant that the miners were not on the base.

As a journalist, I’m not in the business of leading the authorities to the site of criminal activity. I never want to become part of the story. But here was a colonel denying, on the record, what I had seen with my own eyes.

So I asked if we could go for a walk.

I could hear the generators in the distance. After five minutes, the forest opened into a panorama of torn-up soil and muddy pits. Miners with high-pressure hoses were running a full-scale illegal gold-mining operation, just as we’d seen from the sky.

An aerial photo of a military base shows large pools of yellow mining runoff.

The muddy mining pits on the right side of this photo are on military property. The operation has expanded steadily closer to the base’s swimming pool and outbuildings.

A soldier in green camouflage and a cap and glasses stands in front of a group of other troops in camouflage in a wooded area.

Col. Daniel Echeverry investigating claims of mining.

Colonel Echeverry froze. “This is inside the base,” he said. He ordered the miners to leave. “We can shoot you for trespassing!” he shouted.

I don’t know whether the miners had been working there surreptitiously or whether they’d had an understanding with someone on the base. Either way, I expected them to scatter.

Instead, they shouted obscenities and kept working.

As we were on a military base, reinforcements were close by.

Soldiers arrived with gasoline canisters. They doused the mining equipment and lit it on fire.

“You can’t burn our equipment!” shouted a miner working in his underwear. He swore at the soldiers before grabbing his gold ore and running off.

Some miners pulled out machetes. Others threw rocks. The soldiers began cutting hoses with chain saws.

Workers tried to rescue their equipment and to extinguish the flames with buckets of muddy runoff.

In a muddy opening in a forest, a miner in a baseball cap douses a fire with a bucket full of muddy water as soldiers pour liquid on machinery.

A miner tried to douse the fire, even as a soldier poured gasoline on the equipment to accelerate the flames.

A shirtless worker tries to wrest control of a burning hose. A soldier with a gasoline can is nearby.

Soldiers trying to destroy the miners’ equipment as the miners tried to save it.

The miners pay the Clan del Golfo for the right to mine at La Mandinga. It was clear that, as far as many of them were concerned, they believed that right extended to where we stood — military property or not.

One miner threatened the colonel with a stick. Then he doused the soldiers and me with gas and shouted, “We’re all going to burn!”

The colonel said it was time to go. The soldiers and I retreated.

Armed soldiers stand at the edge of a mining pit in a wooded area while others burn a hose inside the pit.

Colonel Echeverry with his soldiers as they destroyed equipment.

Miners scramble as a hose burns in a muddy forest opening.

Some miners fought back and tried to rescue their gear.

Colonel Echeverry seemed shaken. He oversees about 800 men who are responsible for clamping down on the Clan and other armed groups in the area. The gold trade keeps those groups awash in arms and in control of the region.

We hadn’t come to La Mandinga to report on the military base. We came because we had learned that Clan del Golfo gold was making its way to the U.S. Mint, despite laws requiring the Mint to buy only gold mined in the United States.

Colonel Echeverry initially had the same reaction to our findings that many others in the gold supply chain had displayed. Like the Mint, the Mint’s suppliers and the exporters who send the gold to the United States, the colonel had insisted that there was no way illicit gold was moving right under his nose.

When we showed him the evidence, he, like everyone else, said he was surprised and promised to crack down.

It left us wondering: We had such an easy time tracking this gold. Were others even looking?

The Political Malpractice Of Elon Musk

2026-04-25T10:42:51.067-04:00

Chip Somodevilla/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

This week’s action in the Senate yielded a predictable setback for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would impose identification requirements for voter registration nationwide. Conservatives had hoped to use the bill to test the filibuster, but the most recent vote confirmed what had been clear for a while: There aren’t 50 Republican votes for passage in the first place.

Why, then, has the bill garnered so much attention? In part because it’s a familiar priority of conservative activists, and in part because of Donald Trump’s eagerness to suggest that American elections aren’t on the level.

But the bill’s prominence also owes a great debt to Elon Musk. After the unwinding of his Department of Government Efficiency and his brief third-party flirtation, the SAVE America Act became the billionaire’s most notable political priority, at least judging by the attention he’s devoted to it on social media. And like DOGE’s failure to move the spending needle, the voter-identification debate is a study in squandered influence, with the world’s most successful businessman engaging in politics in a profoundly ineffective way.

At this phase of the second Trump administration, Trump himself is primarily to blame for his escalating problems. But when the history of Trump 2.0 is written, Musk’s political malpractice will loom large — because at the outset of the administration, no figure in the inner circle was so well positioned to play a shaping role.

Unlike much of the second-term cast, Musk was not a creature of Trump’s influence: He had his own fame, power base and funding. The social network formerly known as Twitter gave him a unique influence over the national conversation. His embrace of anti-wokeness gave him credibility on the grass-roots right that most rich Republicans do not enjoy.

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This leverage seemed as if it could be brought to bear on the territory Musk knew best: space travel, technology policy, overregulation and its discontents. (One could even hope that his unusual personal commitment to pronatalism would yield some kind of policy interest as well.) And his devotion to dynamism seemed like a potential check on Trump’s zero-sum mentality around tariffs and trade wars.

I don’t want to say that Musk has had no influence along these lines. The fact that a SpaceX associate is running NASA, for instance, seems like what an optimist might have expected.

But Musk certainly didn’t moderate Trumpian trade-warring; that role was played primarily by the bond market. And my personal hope that he had become involved in politics as a step on the ladder up to colonizing Mars gave way to the realization that he wanted to be involved in politics in order to push hard for some of conservatism’s least plausible ideas.

The first of these ideas was the notion that there exists some immense quantum of discretionary spending — on foreign aid, waste and fraud, ideological grant-making — that can be pruned away without the public minding, yielding major fiscal savings. This conviction drove the DOGE hype and ultimate failure, in which Musk’s team repeatedly cut deeper than just the layer of spending that could reasonably be called “woke,” yet still achieved nothing meaningful in the larger budgetary picture.

This was not an unexpected outcome, and it was strange to watch a man of Musk’s capacities burn political capital and the energy of his apprentices just to discover that the real money is in big popular entitlements that can’t be cut by presidential fiat.

Then, in a different key, Musk decided to do it again with the SAVE America Act, embracing (and hyping, with a strong dose of paranoia) the conceit that elections are rigged against Republicans because some vast number of noncitizens are casting illegal votes.

We have years of investigations by Republican administrations and years of evidence from voter ID laws to indicate that this is not the case. There are sound reasons to think that ID requirements don’t have the dramatic vote-suppressing effects alleged by left-wing critics. But neither do they have the election-protecting effects promised by their conservative champions. Voter fraud is just not an important reason that Republicans lose elections. (Moreover, now that the Republican coalition includes more low-propensity and downscale voters, any effect of ID requirements might actually cut against conservative turnout.)

In Musk’s defense, one could note that voter-ID provisions often poll well, and DOGE was far from the least popular thing the Trump administration has embraced.

But the problem in both cases is not unpopularity per se but simple waste — of time, attention, effort, opportunities. Of all the causes to rally behind, Musk chose two that were distant from his core competencies, detached from his most admirable ambitions and disconnected from the serious challenges facing the country.

Many of Musk’s critics expected his involvement with the Trump administration to be defined by self-interest and self-dealing. The failure has been otherwise: He threw himself into causes unrelated to his business empire, and the country would probably be better off if he’d just played the tycoon’s part.

Jet Fuel Shortages This Summer Will Badly Affect Travel to Europe and More

2026-04-25T10:20:47.816-04:00

The German airline Lufthansa cut nearly 20,000 flights over the next six months to conserve jet fuel, which could begin to run low in Europe as soon as next month.Credit...Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Facing sky-high fuel costs linked to the war in Iran, airlines are cutting routes and raising prices. European vacations are looking a lot less affordable.

By Christine Chung

New York Times

This summer is shaping up to be an expensive and uncertain time to fly, especially if you’re planning a European vacation.

Volatile fuel prices because of the war in Iran are straining airlines around the globe, but perhaps nowhere as much as in Europe, where jet fuel supplies could run low by mid-May. European airlines like Lufthansa and KLM have announced they are cutting flights, and others could follow.

Carriers everywhere are increasingly passing costs on to passengers wherever they can by raising airfares, charging more for bags and tacking on additional charges for fuel. Some are canceling flights.

For travelers, the prospect of a reasonably priced summer vacation is growing dimmer by the day.

“There is a level of uncertainty here that we have not seen since Covid when it comes to travel,” said Katy Nastro, a travel expert at Going.com, a membership service for finding cheap flights, adding, “This will be a challenging year for the average traveler hoping to take an affordable summer vacation.”

Cutting Capacity

U.S. airfares — both domestic and international — have continued to climb since the war began at the end of February, according to an analysis of economy round-trip tickets by the travel search engine Kayak. On April 13, an average international trip cost $1,064, compared with $776 on Feb. 23, and a domestic U.S. trip cost $358, compared with $335 on Feb. 23.

Global prices of jet fuel have soared by more than 70 percent since the start of the war, according to the Platts Jet Fuel Price Index. This situation has U.S. carriers expecting to spend billions extra on fuel this year, and at least one, Spirit Airlines, already in bankruptcy, has asked the government for a bailout. Jet fuel is one of the largest operating costs for airlines.

Rob Britton, an adjunct professor of crisis management at Georgetown University and a retired American Airlines executive, emphasized that even when the war ends, it will take months for fuel prices and airfares to stabilize.

“It won’t happen overnight,” Dr. Britton said. “It’s a total, total mess.”

A blue and white airplane with a blue refueling rig under its wing on a tarmac. Red hoses connect the rig to a hole in the pavement.

KLM, a Dutch carrier, said it would cut 160 flights to and from destinations it serves multiple times a day, including London and Düsseldorf, Germany.Credit...Piroschka Van De Wouw/Reuters

While domestic airlines noted in earnings reports this month that consumer demand has remained steady, some said they were bracing for it to taper off. Some are scaling back routes through the end of the year and reconsidering planned growth for next year if jet fuel remains so costly.

Andrew Nocella, United’s chief commercial officer, said in an earnings call on Wednesday that the airline had raised prices “across the board” five times since the start of the war. He also said United was “proactively” canceling lower-demand flights like red-eyes as well as those on off-peak days like Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, ultimately removing 5 percent of capacity through the rest of the year.

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Airlines have levers they can pull, such as consolidating several low-demand flights into fewer, fuller flights, said Mike Arnot, a spokesman for Cirium, an aviation analytics firm. Across U.S. airlines, domestic capacity is down by up to 2 percent this summer compared with before the war, Cirium data shows.

For now, airlines are making small adjustments largely tied to regional flights, Ms. Nastro said. This means that while international nonstop routes may not be as affected, multi-leg journeys to small cities or flights booked on separate carriers could be riskier for travelers, she added.

Europe as a ‘Leading Indicator’

The outlook for American carriers is rosier than that of European and Asian airlines, which rely far more heavily on oil from the Middle East, aviation analysts said. The United States has significant oil reserves and refining infrastructure.

For European airlines, fuel supplies are currently guaranteed to the middle or end of May, according to a J.P. Morgan report published this week. However, fuel shortages and continued high prices will “likely lead to summer capacity cuts from June onwards, starting with domestic and marginal routes,” the report said. The bank’s analysts flagged Britain as higher risk relative to other European countries because of its reliance on Middle Eastern oil imports.

“Europe is going to be like this leading indicator. Any of the issues that are going to sort of hit the U.S. traveler, we’re going to see those roll out in Europe first,” said Christopher Anderson, a professor of services management at Cornell University. “If this persists, air travel is going to get way more expensive and with way less flexibility to get there.”

In recent days, European and Asian airlines have made notable flight reductions.

The German airline Lufthansa announced it would remove 20,000 flights over the next six months in a bid to conserve jet fuel. The Dutch carrier KLM said it would ax 160 flights from destinations it serves with multiple daily flights, such as London and Düsseldorf, Germany. Norse Atlantic Airways, a low-cost Norwegian carrier, canceled its flights to Los Angeles. Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific is eliminating 2 percent of its flights from early May through the end of June, a move that the airline called a “last resort.”

Experts advised that travelers planning to fly this summer and fall book now, if they haven’t already, stressing that nobody knows how long the fuel shortage will last and how much worse the pressures on airlines could become.

“At some point, the cost of the trip, including the price of fuel, will exceed the revenue that can be earned,” said Mr. Arnot, the Cirium spokesman

Trumps Seeks To Abolish A Nuke Stockpile He Helped Create

2026-04-25T10:08:19.824-04:00

In February in preparation for a possible war with the United States, Iran moved missile launchers into positions within striking distance of Israeli and American military forces.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear accord in 2018, saying it was the worst deal ever. But Iran responded with an enrichment spree that haunts the negotiations to this day.

y William J. Broad and David E. Sanger

William J. Broad and David E. Sanger have written about the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades.

NewYork Times

As nuclear talks restart in Pakistan this weekend, President Trump will confront the complicated legacy of his own decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”

That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before.

Now, Mr. Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time.

Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just shy of what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Mr. Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.

Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.

Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97 percent. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.

Now, matching or exceeding that diplomatic accomplishment is one of the most complex challenges facing Mr. Trump and his two lead negotiators, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who are expected to leave for Pakistan on Saturday.

Mr. Trump is acutely aware that whatever he can negotiate with the Iranians will be compared with what Mr. Obama achieved more a decade ago. While the two countries are still exchanging proposals, and could well come up empty-handed, Mr. Trump is already judging his own, yet-to-be-negotiated agreement as superior.

“The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site on Monday. The Obama-era deal “was a guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon, which will not, and cannot, happen with the deal we’re working on.”

Based on Mr. Trump’s often-shifting objectives for the conflict with Iran, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff face a daunting list of negotiation topics, many of which the Obama team failed to address. They have to find a way to limit Iran’s ability to rebuild its arsenal of missiles. (The 2015 deal never addressed Iran’s missile capability, and Tehran ignored a United Nations resolution imposing limits.)

They need to find a way to fulfill Mr. Trump’s mandate to protect anti-regime protesters, whom Mr. Trump promised to help in January when they took to the streets. In fact, those protests were among the triggers for the American military buildup that ultimately led to the Feb. 28 attack.Credit...Reuters

And they must negotiate a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians shut down after the American-Israeli attacks, a move Mr. Trump was clearly unprepared for. Now Iran has discovered that a few inexpensive mines and threats to ships have given it huge leverage over the global economy, pressure it can dial up or down in ways that nuclear weapons cannot.

But it is the fate of the atomic program that lies at the negotiations’ heart. As in the 2015 talks, the Iranians declare they have a “right” to enrich under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, one they refuse to give up. But that still leaves room for “suspension” of all nuclear efforts for some number of years. (Vice President JD Vance demanded 20 years when he met his Pakistani interlocutors two weeks ago, only to have Mr. Trump declare a few days later that the right period was “unlimited.”)

William J. Burns, the former C.I.A. chief who played a lead role in the Obama-era negotiations, said in The New York Times on Friday that a good deal would require “tight nuclear inspections, an extended moratorium on the enrichment of uranium and the export or dilution of Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium in exchange for tangible sanctions relief.”

He also called for the Trump administration to delineate every term. “Unless the lines are clearly drawn and strictly monitored,” Mr. Burns said, “the Iranians will paint outside them.”

That is exactly what happened when Mr. Trump pulled out of the Obama agreement in 2018 and replaced it with nothing. At the time, Iran did not have a single bomb’s worth of uranium. Then it started enriching with a vengeance.

In the current war, Mr. Trump has spoken publicly about a possible raid to seize Iran’s half ton of near-bomb grade material, which could make roughly 10 weapons. But he has not talked about the overall 11-ton cache and the threat it poses to the United States and its allies.

It is hardly a new problem. In 2006, Iran began enriching uranium on an industrial scale. While it described its aims as peaceful and civilian in nature, its aggressive moves convinced experts that Tehran wanted to build a bomb.

The alarms rang louder in 2010, when Iran began enriching uranium to 20 percent. That level of purity marks the official dividing line between civilian and military uses. Iran said it wanted the 20 percent fuel for a research reactor at the University of Tehran.

President Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal at the White House in 2018.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The 20 percent enrichment alarmed the Obama administration. It put the Iranians on the road to the 90 percent fuel used to make a warhead light and compact enough to fit atop a missile. (It is possible to make a weapon from 20 percent fuel, but it would be so large and heavy that a truck, boat or aircraft would be needed to deliver it.)

In the Obama-era pact, the Iranians were prohibited from enriching fuel to a purity level greater than 3.67 percent, which is sufficient to fuel nuclear reactors for civilian power. The country’s entire stockpile was limited to about 660 pounds. The constraints were supposed to remain in place for 15 years, until 2030. But the Iranians were permitted to continue the low-level enrichment, and they built more efficient centrifuges.

That loophole turned out to set them up well for what happened after Mr. Trump scrapped the agreement three years later and reimposed economic sanctions. The Iranians responded by blowing past all those limits.

Early in 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office, Iran reinstituted its goal of raising the enrichment level to 20 percent.

Then a mysterious blast knocked out power at Natanz, which is Iran’s main enrichment complex. Iranian officials blamed it on Israeli sabotage, and retaliated by raising part of its stockpile to the 60 percent level, the biggest jump in the history of its enrichment program. That was just a hairbreadth away from the highest military grade.

From early 2021 to early 2025, the Biden administration tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate new limits. Throughout the negotiations, Iran kept enriching, expanding its cache of 60 percent fuel.

Image

The enrichment is taking place in Iran’s newest nuclear facility, Fordow, shown here in a satellite image from 2013.Credit...DigitalGlobe, via Getty Images

Then, in June 2025, Mr. Trump bombed Iran’s enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordo, as well as uranium storage tunnels and other facilities at Isfahan. He declared that the nuclear program had been “obliterated.”

Officially the U.S. government was more circumspect, saying the program had been “set back.” But if “Operation Midnight Hammer” did, in fact, cripple much of Iran’s atomic infrastructure, the Trump administration said little or nothing about the survival of Iran’s cache of enriched uranium, which the International Atomic Energy Agency has estimated at 10.9 tons, with purity levels ranging from 2 percent to 60 percent.

One of the few officials who did discuss it was Mr. Witkoff, who called the stockpile “a move towards weaponization — it’s the only reason you would have it.” Iran, he added, could turn its most enriched fuel into roughly three dozen bombs.

While public discussion has focused on whether a U.S. commando team could retrieve Iran’s half ton of uranium enriched to 60 percent, nuclear experts say Tehran could turn the entire 11 tons into bomb fuel, if it can activate new centrifuges, probably underground, to boost its levels of enrichment.

Edwin S. Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Iran’s stockpile could yield roughly 35 to 55 weapons depending on its skill in making not only the bomb’s fuel core but such nonnuclear parts as detonators that spark the chain reactions.

Thomas B. Cochran, a nuclear weapons expert who wrote an influential study on enrichment levels, concluded that Iran’s stockpile was sufficient for 50 to 100 bombs if further enriched.

For the United States, the location of the 11-ton stockpile is a major uncertainty. For Iran, it’s political leverage.

“Yes, a lot of their top scientists have been killed,” said Gary Samore, who advised the Obama White House on Iran’s nuclear program. “But they still have the basic industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons if they decide to do that.”

Iran has another card in the nuclear game — uncertainty over the exact location of a new enrichment complex that Tehran was about to declare on the eve of the 12-day war with Israel last June. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that a disclosure meeting set for June 13, 2025, was “canceled due to the commencement of the military attacks on that day.”

Analysts now believe that Iran may have set up the plant in the maze of mountain tunnels that adjoin its sprawling Isfahan industrial site. That’s near where Tehran is thought to store the bulk of its uranium stockpile, raising the possibility that Iran harbors a deeply buried industrial site that could conduct new rounds of fuel enrichment.

“We can’t bomb away their knowledge,” said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear specialist at Harvard. And since a plant to enrich uranium can be “comparable in size to a grocery store,” he added, the mountainous terrain of Iran offers many places to hide a clandestine bomb effort.

Trump war With Iran Has Weakened America

2026-04-24T10:21:55.205-04:00

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

When President Trump attacked Iran on Feb. 28, we called his decision reckless. He went to war without seeking congressional approval or the support of most allies. He offered thin and contradictory justifications to the American people. He failed to explain why this naïve attempt at regime change would end better than earlier attempts by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In the six weeks since, the recklessness of his war has become clearer yet. He has disdained careful military planning and acted on gut instinct and wishfulness. After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel predicted to Mr. Trump that the attacks would inspire a popular uprising in Iran, the director of the C.I.A. countered that the notion was “farcical,” The Times reported. Mr. Trump proceeded nonetheless. He was so confident that he assembled no plan to respond to an obvious countermove available to Iran: causing a spike in oil prices by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Nor did he develop a feasible strategy for securing the enriched uranium that Iran can use to rebuild its nuclear program.

Last week he careened from illegal and immoral threats about erasing Iranian civilization to a last-minute cease-fire that accomplishes few of his announced war aims. Iran continues to defy a central part of the deal and block most traffic from crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump’s irresponsibility has left the United States on the cusp of a humiliating strategic defeat.

As we have emphasized, Iran’s regime deserves no sympathy. It has spent decades oppressing its people and sponsoring terrorism elsewhere. And the current war, combined with the June attacks by the United States and Israel and other Israeli operations since 2023, weakened Iran in important ways. Its navy, air force and air defenses have been degraded, and its nuclear program has been set back. Its murderous network of regional allies — including Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria’s fallen government — has been eroded.

Yet these successes cannot mask the ways in which the war has weakened the United States. We count four main setbacks for America’s national interests that are the direct result of Mr. Trump’s carelessness. These setbacks likewise weaken global democracy when authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere were already feeling emboldened.

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The most tangible blow to the United States and the world is the increased influence that Iran has secured over the global economy by weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz. About 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows through the strait, which is next to Iran’s southern shore.

Before the war, Iran’s leaders feared that blocking traffic would invite new economic sanctions and a military attack. Once the attack happened anyway, Iran closed the strait to nearly all traffic except its own ships. The policy is inexpensive because it mostly involves a threat, namely that a drone, missile or small boat may blow up a tanker. Forcibly reopening the strait, by contrast, would require an enormous military operation potentially including ground troops and an extended occupation.

Mr. Trump’s lack of foresight about the strait reveals glaring incompetence. The two-week cease-fire does not bring back the status quo because Iran is still limiting traffic and has threatened to impose tolls as part of a final peace deal. The war has shown Iran’s leaders that controlling the waterway is a real possibility. Eventually, other countries are likely to develop alternatives, including pipelines, but those solutions will take time. For now, Iran appears to have won diplomatic leverage that it could have only dreamed of six weeks ago. The only apparent way to change the situation would be for a global coalition to demand the strait’s reopening — the sort of coalition that Mr. Trump is distinctly unsuited to lead.

The second setback is to America’s military standing around the world. This war, together with recent U.S. assistance to Ukraine, Israel and other allies, has burned through a substantial portion of the stockpile of some weapons, such as Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors (which can shoot down other missiles). Experts believe the Pentagon used more than one-quarter of its Tomahawk missiles just in the war against Iran. Returning the stockpile to its previous size will take years, and the United States will have to make tough choices about where to maintain its military strength in the meantime. Already, the Pentagon has pulled missile defenses from South Korea.

The war has also revealed that the U.S. military is vulnerable to new ways of warfare. America used billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech munitions to destroy Iran’s traditional air and naval forces, while Tehran used cheap, disposable drones to halt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and hit targets in the region. The world saw how a country that spends one-hundredth of what the United States does on its military can seek to outlast it in a conflict. It is a reminder of the urgent need to reform America’s military.

The war’s third big cost is to America’s alliances. Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and most of Western Europe refused to support the United States in this war — unsurprisingly, given Mr. Trump’s treatment of them. When he demanded their help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, most allies declined. These countries will remain allies in important ways, but they have made clear that they no longer consider the United States a reliable friend. They are working to build stronger relationships with one another so that they can better resist Washington in the future. “Perhaps the greatest long-term damage to the United States from the Iran war will be in its relationships with allies around the world,” Daniel Byman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote on Wednesday.

The situation in the Middle East is more nuanced. Iran’s decision to attack its Arab neighbors during the war may draw those countries closer to the United States. But that prospect is uncertain. Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries have been damaged economically by the war and feel abandoned by Mr. Trump’s cease-fire. The past six weeks have given them reason to question his judgment and his understanding of their interests.

The fourth setback is to America’s moral authority. For all the flaws of this country, it remains a beacon to many around the world. When pollsters ask people where they would move if they could, the United States is consistently the runaway No. 1 answer. America’s appeal stems not only from its prosperity but also from its freedom and democratic values. Mr. Trump has undercut those values for his entire political career and perhaps never more than in the past week, when he made odious threats to erase Iranian civilization. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, made a series of bloodthirsty remarks, including a threat to offer “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

Those would be war crimes. Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have embraced a brutal approach to armed conflict that the United States led the world in rejecting after World War II. By doing so, they have undermined the foundations of America’s global leadership, which claims to place human dignity at the center of an argument for a freer and more open world.

Our editorial board has long opposed Mr. Trump’s approach to politics and governing. Yet we take no pleasure in his failures over the past six weeks. For one thing, there have been deaths, injuries and destruction, in Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. At least 13 U.S. service members have died in the war.

It is also a mistake for any Americans, including Mr. Trump’s critics, to root for this country to fail. We all have a stake in the nation that he leads. So does the rest of the free world. There are no other democracies with the economic and military strength to counter China and Russia. When America is weaker and poorer, as this war has made us, authoritarianism benefits.

The best hope now may sound naïve, but it remains true. Mr. Trump should at long last recognize the ineptitude of his impulsive, go-it-alone approach. He should involve Congress and seek help from America’s allies to minimize the damage from his war.

Even Before The Age of Drones Battleships were Obsolete, Trump Says No and Fires Navy Secretary

2026-04-24T10:03:59.260-04:00

President Trump wanted one thing, more than anything else, from his secretary of the Navy, John Phelan: a new class of battleships.

“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far — 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Mr. Trump boasted at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate and resort in Florida a few days before Christmas. Mr. Phelan, a billionaire investor who has a home near the club, stood next to the president as he made the announcement.

Mr. Phelan’s job was to deliver the first of Mr. Trump’s battleships by 2028.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Phelan, who had struggled to come up with a plan to deliver the ships on the nearly impossible timeline that Mr. Trump has demanded, senior defense and administration officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Mr. Phelan is the first service secretary to be forced from the Defense Department during this administration, though he is far from the only senior Pentagon official to be dismissed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals and admirals over the past year, including the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, earlier this month. Mr. Hegseth has also butted heads with the secretary of the Army, Daniel P. Driscoll, over promotions and a host of other issues.

The churn of senior Pentagon officials at a time when the U.S. military is engaged in war with Iran has alarmed top Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

The Pentagon did not respond to questions regarding the circumstances surrounding Mr. Phelan’s dismissal. Mr. Phelan could not immediately be reached for comment.

The breaking point for Mr. Phelan, who often said that he and Mr. Trump texted and talked on the phone regularly, came in the last two weeks as the president’s frustration over Mr. Phelan’s management of his prized battleship program grew and Mr. Phelan’s enemies in the Pentagon, including Mr. Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen A. Feinberg, mounted a campaign to force him out.

Earlier this month, Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg told Mr. Trump that the Navy secretary was not a team player and needed to go, military officials said. Mr. Trump called Mr. Phelan to talk about his poor relationship with other leaders in the Pentagon.

Mr. Feinberg and Mr. Hegseth had recently seized some decision-making authority from Mr. Phelan, tapping a three-star admiral to oversee the Navy’s submarine portfolio and having him report directly to Mr. Feinberg.

That left Mr. Phelan with oversight of a major investment in new ships that Mr. Trump has called a “golden fleet,” built around the president’s beloved battleship program.

Presidents rarely pay close attention to military procurement, but Mr. Trump has spoken repeatedly about his plans for a new “Trump-class” battleship. In a February speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., Mr. Trump insisted that he had helped design the new class of ships that bear his name.

“I put a little more spirit in the hull,” Mr. Trump told the troops. “I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.”

For Mr. Trump, the ships recalled “Victory at Sea,” a documentary television series that ran in the 1950s and touted the role that battleships and other Navy vessels played in World War II.

“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he mused to reporters in January when talking about the new battleships. “What a great thing that is to watch!”

Mr. Phelan played a prominent role in selling Mr. Trump on the new ships and his ambitious plans for revitalizing the U.S. Navy’s fleet and the U.S. shipbuilding industry.

In his confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Phelan said that the president often texted him late at night to ask him about “rusty ships or ships in a yard” and what Mr. Phelan was going to do about them. Before the Navy settled on its plans for the Trump-class battleship, Mr. Phelan wooed the president to the idea by showing oil paintings of some of the service’s great battleships from earlier eras, defense officials said.

In its $1.5 trillion defense budget, released earlier this week, the Trump administration is asking for $65.8 billion for shipbuilding, the second-largest shipbuilding budget proposal since 1955, according to Congressional Budget Office data.

The Navy is also projecting that it will be asking for $17 billion in fiscal year 2028 to start construction on the first of the Trump class, Navy officials said.

But senior defense officials said the program, along with Mr. Trump’s ambitious plans for his golden fleet, was marred by problems. The U.S. shipbuilding industry has nowhere near the capacity to build a technologically advanced battleship of the sort Mr. Trump is envisioning in the next few years, senior military officials said.

The Trump administration has failed over the last 16 months to nominate anyone to serve as assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition — who is supposed to oversee the Navy’s weapons programs. And the Navy’s civilian work force, which plays a critical role in developing and testing new warships, has been devastated by cuts and early retirements, military officials said.

In the days after Mr. Trump announced his plans for the new battleships, defense experts raised questions about whether they would ever be built.

“The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion,” wrote Mark F. Cancian, an expert on military budgeting with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail.”

The ship would take “years to design,” Mr. Cancian noted. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

In Mr. Trump’s imagination the new warship would be massive, weighing as much as 40,000 tons, and would be packed with new high-tech weapons, like lasers, hypersonic missiles and electric rail guns, most of which are still in development and years from being deployed.

In recent weeks, it had become clear to Mr. Phelan that the Navy and the U.S. shipbuilding industry did not have the ability to deliver on Mr. Trump’s vision. Mr. Phelan recently suggested to Mr. Trump that the Navy might have to rely on European shipyards to deliver the battleships on the ambitious timeline Mr. Trump was demanding, senior military and administration officials said.

Mr. Trump rejected the suggestion.

In his December news conference, announcing his plans for the battleships, Mr. Trump had vowed that the vessels — “the largest battleship in the history of the world ever built” — would be made in the United States with U.S. steel.

“We’re going to restore America as a major shipbuilding power,” he said.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth agreed that the Navy needed new leadership, officials said, and the president asked Mr. Hegseth to handle the resignation.

On Wednesday, Mr. Phelan heard he was being fired and went to the White House to see Mr. Trump, the officials said. He never saw him, but the president later phoned him to confirm the news, the officials added.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump wrote a message on social media that seemed designed to salve his fellow billionaire’s feelings.

“John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”

Michael Jackson "Second Fam"They Now Say He Sexually Abused Them

2026-04-24T09:50:12.960-04:00

The Cascio siblings: from left, Dominic, Aldo, Marie Nicole and Eddie.Credit...The New York Times

By Matt Stevens

Reporting from Greenville, S.C.

2010

In December 2010, Oprah Winfrey invited Dominic and Connie Cascio and three of their five children onto her talk show to discuss Michael Jackson.

The pop star and Dominic, a manager of a Manhattan hotel where Mr. Jackson often stayed, had become good friends. For more than two decades, Mr. Jackson had eaten at the Cascios’ New Jersey home, brought them to his Neverland Ranch, took them along on tours around the world and celebrated with them on holidays.

The Cascios had become, as they often said, Mr. Jackson’s “second family.”

So a year and a half after Mr. Jackson’s death, the family came forward to talk to Oprah at length about their special relationship — and also to shield their friend from the ugly sexual abuse accusations that had long trailed him.

“Were there ever any improprieties with you and Michael Jackson?” Ms. Winfrey asked the Cascio siblings, Eddie, Frank and Marie Nicole, who were now adults, at the interview.

They responded in unison: “Never.” They each shook their heads.

Their friend Michael, Eddie asserted, “was a target.”

More than 15 years later, the Cascios now say that was a lie. All five of the Cascio children say they were groomed to protect Mr. Jackson and became, as they call it, his “soldiers” — the front line of his defense.

Four of the five siblings now say in a lawsuit and in an interview with The New York Times that, in fact, Mr. Jackson had repeatedly sexually assaulted each of them. (The fifth sibling told The Times he was abused, but for legal reasons, his lawyers say he cannot join his siblings’ suit.)

Some of the siblings say they recognized at an early age that Mr. Jackson’s behavior was wrong but felt too overwhelmed by his celebrity and signs of affection to come forward publicly, or to one another. Others say they did not recognize that what had happened to them was abusive until they watched a 2019 documentary containing allegations by two men who said Mr. Jackson had molested them.

A man in a plaid shirt.

Aldo Cascio is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Michael Jackson’s estate.Credit...The New York Times

Aldo, now 35, said he was around 7 and in bed with Mr. Jackson one day, playing a Game Boy, when Mr. Jackson began giving him oral sex. He said the sex acts continued for years, and he eventually became aware that what he was enduring was wrong. But he said he so convinced himself that he could never disclose it that he came to believe: “I’m just going to live to die.”

Court documents say the abuse happened at a variety of places, including Mr. Jackson’s home, on trips and during tour stops. Just days before the pop star died in 2009, Aldo said, Mr. Jackson requested they go to “Disneyland” — a which he described as a coded request for sex.

Mr. Jackson and, since his death, the Jackson estate have consistently denied all allegations that the pop star molested children. Marty Singer, a lawyer for the estate, characterized the lawsuit as “a desperate money grab.”

“The family staunchly defended Michael Jackson for more than 25 years, attesting to his innocence of inappropriate conduct,” Mr. Singer said in a statement. “This new court filing is a transparent forum-shopping tactic in their scheme to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars from Michael’s estate and companies.”

Debate over the truth of Mr. Jackson’s life has been revived not just by the lawsuit, but also by a biopic, “Michael,” set to debut on Friday. The film, which is expected to have a sequel and was produced in partnership with the estate, ends in 1988, before the first of the allegations surfaced.

Years before filing their lawsuit, the Cascio siblings told the estate that, actually, they had been abused by Mr. Jackson. But the parties reached an agreement in 2020 and the siblings received, in total, roughly $16 million in payments over five years. The accusations were never aired. In the estate’s view, Mr. Jackson’s family avoided being confronted by more “false allegations.”

But the payments ended in 2025 as the siblings were seeking additional compensation, and negotiations became strained. Now what was once a quiet dispute has erupted into bitter litigation.

A man with his arms spread out to either side in a white shirt and dark pants.

Mr. Jackson and his estate have said that none of accusations made against him by people who say they were sexually abused are true.Credit...Steve Granitz/WireImage

Four Siblings, Now Plaintiffs

In an interview this month, the Cascio siblings suing the Jackson estate each provided grim details of what they say they endured.

Marie Nicole Porte, now 37, said she was 12 the first time Mr. Jackson abused her inside her family home, where he stayed for months following the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Jackson, she said, would have her spread her legs and sometimes masturbated while looking at her naked.

Dominic, 39, said he was on a trip to Euro Disney with Mr. Jackson when he was about 8 years old when the pop star began having them lie nude in bed together. In later encounters, he said, Mr. Jackson would have him suck and manipulate his nipples while Mr. Jackson masturbated.

The Cascio family’s relationship with Mr. Jackson led its members, by their accounts, into a world of closely guarded secrets. None of the children told their parents or one another what was happening, they said. When their parents did ask about their relationship with Jackson, the children said they denied that anything untoward had occurred.

The parents, Connie and Dominic, declined to be interviewed through the family’s lawyer, Howard King. But in a prior interview they described a mix of feelings — betrayal, remorse and responsibility — for what their children say they encountered.

“I should have known, and I didn’t,” Connie told GB News last month. “Honestly, God knows, I didn’t.”

Why did the children stay quiet? Several said that Mr. Jackson stressed to them that their relationship with him was special, the only one like it, and that if anyone found out, his life — and their lives, too — would be destroyed.

“We were brainwashed, we were groomed,” said Eddie, who said that Mr. Jackson, whom he described as “the biggest star in the world,” taught the siblings to defend the popstar against the allegations.

But the siblings said that in 2019, after they watched the “Leaving Neverland” documentary about Mr. Jackson, they were struck by how closely the allegations of child abuse in the film matched their own experiences.

Various family photos in a collage.

Family photographs captured some of the settings in which the Cascio children interacted with Mr. Jackson over more than a decade.Credit...The New York Times

Aldo was the first to approach his family to say he had been abused. A few days later, Dominic, the son, said he told Eddie that Aldo was telling the truth — because it had happened to him. Eddie said he then also came forward. And finally Marie Nicole.

“I felt like he took my manhood away,” Eddie, 43, said in the interview, beginning to cry. He said he had sexual encounters with Mr. Jackson into adulthood. But when they began, he said his penis was so small that Mr. Jackson held it using only three fingers.

The Cascio siblings began meeting with representatives of the estate in 2019, according to court documents. And eventually, after they shared “explicit details about Jackson’s abuse,” the court papers say, the estate eventually agreed to pay each plaintiff what the family called “the wholly inadequate sum of five annual payments of approximately $690,000.” Lawyers for the estate say in their own filing that it “reluctantly” entered into the agreement “to prevent Michael’s family, particularly his children, from having to be subjected to any further false allegations.”

But as the payments were nearing their end in 2024, the estate says in court papers that one of the siblings, Frank, through his lawyer, had demanded that he and his brothers and sister be paid $213 million more, and that he had threatened to file a “bogus public lawsuit.”

Frank said in an interview that he too was abused. But because he is involved in an arbitration proceeding with the estate over the original agreement and other matters, his lawyer said Frank was barred from being a party to the federal lawsuit filed by his siblings.

Mr. Singer said that all of the siblings were involved in the pending arbitration proceeding and that their lawsuit is an effort to try to evade their obligation, under the prior agreement, to arbitrate any disputes. The estate plans to ask the court to dismiss the federal case or to put it on hold while the arbitration goes forward.

Asked to address the specific accusations leveled by each of the siblings, Mr. Singer said: “The Cascios are the epitome of unreliable sources. Their stories have repeatedly shifted and changed to suit whatever their current agenda happens to be.”

Bringing Home a Pop Star

When Mr. Jackson stayed at the Helmsley Palace in Manhattan in the 1980s, it was Dominic Cascio, the general manager of the towers and the suites, who took care of him. Their friendship built to the point where one night, Jackson showed up at their home in Hawthorne, N.J.

Frank later recounted the evening in a fawning book, “My Friend Michael: An Ordinary Friendship With an Extraordinary Man,” in which he repeatedly denied that Mr. Jackson ever acted inappropriately with children. “My brother and I sprang out of bed to greet him,” Frank wrote of himself and Eddie.

Mr. Jackson would visit the home many more times, helping their mother clean and enjoying her turkey dinners, Frank wrote. The Cascios sat on the side of the stage at Mr. Jackson’s concerts. They had a sleepover at F.A.O. Schwarz. Mr. Jackson covered these expenses and the family installed a phone line at their home just for him.

By 1993, the Cascios had begun to visit with Mr. Jackson at Neverland, his estate in Santa Barbara County that was outfitted with a movie theater, a zoo and even amusement park rides. Frank and Eddie were later permitted to go alone, Frank wrote in his book.


	A large home with amusement park rides on its grounds. Mr. Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, where each of the Cascio siblings said in court papers that they were sexually assaulted. Credit...Steve Starr/Corbis, via Getty Images

“He made us feel like he was everything: a friend, father, like every sort of emotional support,” Eddie said in the interview. “And he was.”

When Mr. Jackson was accused of molestation by the family of a 13-year-old boy in the 1990s, Frank recalled in his book how, he, Eddie and their father flew to join him on tour in Tel Aviv in a sign of support. When their father had to return home, he allowed his sons to stay. Eddie says now that it was the time when Mr. Jackson first began to molest him.

A year later, in 1994, Mr. Jackson reached a roughly $23 million civil settlement with the boy’s family that had accused him of molestation. Mr. Jackson denied any wrongdoing.

A decade after that, prosecutors in Santa Barbara County brought charges against Mr. Jackson that included several new counts of child molesting and serving alcohol to minors. “All bullshit,” Frank wrote. “These people were after Michael’s money.”

Frank recalled in the book that he went on “20/20” and “Good Morning America” to defend Mr. Jackson. The rest of the family flew to California to testify on the singer’s behalf, the siblings said, but once they got there, they were told they were not needed.

Following a 14-week trial, Mr. Jackson was acquitted by a jury.

After Mr. Jackson died, some of the Cascios profited from their relationships with him. In addition to revenues from his book, Frank sold Jackson memorabilia. Eddie sold the rights to three songs known as the “Cascio tracks” that were said to have been recorded in the basement of the Cascios’ home in 2007.

A woman in glasses looking to her left.

Marie Nicole Porte joined three of her brothers at an interview in South Carolina where each sibling described their experiences with Mr. Jackson. Credit...Will Crooks for The New York Times

The demos were included by Sony Music in an album released after Mr. Jackson’s death. But their authenticity came under scrutiny, and Sony Music removed the tracks in 2022 amid a court battle. It ended in a settlement with the defendants, including Sony, the Jackson estate and Eddie, according to court documents.

Sony and the estate did not concede that the songs had been sung by an impersonator, as had been contended, but said that removing them was “the simplest and best way to move beyond the conversation associated with these tracks once and for all.”

When the siblings saw the “Leaving Neverland” documentary, they were suddenly “deprogrammed,” their lawsuit says — forced to confront the reality of their experiences with Mr. Jackson. Released by HBO in 2019, the film focused on the accounts of two men — Wade Robson and James Safechuck — who came forward with separate lawsuits a few years after Mr. Jackson’s death that accused him of having abused them as children.

The Jackson estate denied all of the allegations and sued the network. Court documents show that the case was dismissed in 2024 after what a spokesman for HBO described as an amicable resolution. Civil cases for both Mr. Robson and Mr. Safechuck are ongoing in Los Angeles.

After the documentary’s release, the Cascios say in court papers that representatives of the estate sought them out, falsely representing that they were trying to help get them fair compensation “for the suffering Jackson had caused.” This, they said, led to the settlement agreement that involved the annual payments.

The Cascio lawsuit says that two years ago, the estate’s representatives began discussing the possibility of additional compensation and “further arrangements to ensure plaintiffs’ continued silence.”

But the lawsuit says that, after the siblings hired lawyers and demanded more compensation, the estate and its representatives started leaking “false and defamatory statements” saying that the estate was being blackmailed by the siblings.

The estate’s court filings present a starkly different narrative. They paint the Cascios as opportunists who are seeking to extort the estate by lying about Mr. Jackson’s alleged abuse. The siblings are said to have used the negative publicity of “Leaving Neverland” as an opening to “repudiate their prior support of Michael and manufacture false and specious allegations against him unless they were paid money.”

The Cascios say that, actually, their goals now are about more than money — they are about telling the truth about Mr. Jackson to the world and to some they hold close.

Like Eddie’s daughter, who is 16 and was born just months after Mr. Jackson’s death. For years, she too lived under the impression that the pop star had been a great friend to the family.

After all, her middle name is “Michael.”

Today's Top News From NPR

2026-04-23T09:56:31.761-04:00

Today’s top stories

Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

Tensions are rising in the two ceasefires in the Middle East.Iran has not officially recognized the ceasefire that President Trump unilaterally extended this week. Yesterday, Iran attacked at least three commercial ships and seized two ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The move jeopardized potential U.S.-Iran peace talks and came after a senior Iranian official said that Trump's ceasefire extension "means nothing." Meanwhile in Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes killed at least five people, including Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil. Israeli and Lebanese diplomats are expected to meet in Washington for a second round of talks aimed at extending a truce and paving the way for future talks.

Navy Secretary John Phelan is leaving his position "effective immediately," according to an X post from the Pentagon yesterday. Phelan served as the Navy's top civilian leader, overseeing its budget, its personnel and an effort to build more ships. His exit marks the latest in a series of high-level dismissals at the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and it comes as the Navy plays a crucial role in the war in Iran.

🎧 There were signs of tension between Phelan and Hegseth, seemingly stemming from both personal conflicts and disagreements over how the shipbuilding effort was being handled, NPR’s Greg Myre tells Up First. Upon arriving at the Pentagon, Hegseth immediately began dismissing senior officials, often without explanation, demonstrating his desire to reshape the Pentagon leadership. Myre says that the dismissals aren't a great optic during a time when the U.S. is in the middle of a war with Iran. He adds that, for the time being, Hegseth seems to have Trump’s full support.

Senate Republicans introduced a budget resolution Tuesday to fund immigration enforcement agencies. It's the first step in a lengthy budgetary process to end the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. After federal immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, congressional Democrats said they would not fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection until significant reforms are made. Republicans plan to use a budget tool called reconciliation to fund the remaining DHS agencies, allowing them to proceed along party lines without Democratic support. The process can be complicated and lengthy. Here's a look at what's involved.

In their quest to regain control of Congress, Democratic candidates are outpacing Republicans in midterm fundraising for key House and Senate races. This enthusiasm comes even as the party grapples with record-low voter approval ratings. But Republican-aligned committees have a massive cash advantage over Democrats. GOP committees and super PACs are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in reserves. Trump's MAGA Inc. super PAC holds nearly $350 million in cash, which could influence what his last two years in office look like — if he decides to use it. Here are four charts that illustrate the current political landscape surrounding control of the House and Senate.

Local stories from WNYC (edit station)

Gothamist/Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist

Inside the massive men's homeless shelter Mamdani is closing after decades of disrepair

Several mayors have tried closing the Bellevue shelter on 30th Street in Midtown.

Gothamist/Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Would Donald Trump have to pay the NYC pied-à-terre tax?

It depends, in part, on whether the Trump Tower triplex is now technically Barron's apartment.

Deep dive

Alon Skuy/Getty Images

The Trump administration is arguing that a nearly 50-year-old law requiring the preservation of presidential records is unconstitutional. Historians are taking legal action, warning that the fate of millions of papers and electronic messages is at stake — not only for Trump's second term, but also for future presidents and people who want to understand them.

➡️ The origin of the PRA dates back to July 1974, when the Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over White House recordings. When Nixon left office, Congress passed a law putting Nixon's presidential papers in the custody of the National Archives. In 1978, Congress acted again to apply that law to future presidents.
➡️ Trump's Justice Department says the PRA is unconstitutional because it violates the separation of powers.
➡️ The American Historical Association last week asked a federal judge to block government employees from discarding presidential materials.
➡️ White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a written statement that staff members will receive training on document preservation. However, lawyers for the historical association and watchdog group American Oversight noted that this training seems to exclude the country's top leaders, Trump and Vice President Vance.
➡️ Historians use presidential documents to understand key moments in history, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Columbia University history professor Matthew Connelly questions whether targeting orders and other operations could remain secret forever if Trump's interpretation of the PRA prevails.

Picture show

Carol Guzy/ZUMA Press, iWitness for Miami Herald

An image of a family being separated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents has been named World Press Photo's 2026 Photo of the Year. Separated by ICE was captured by four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Guzy, ZUMA Press, iWitness, for the Miami Herald. The photograph captures a moment inside one of the few U.S. federal buildings that allowed photographers access. In a single hallway, Guzy and others showed up day after day, determined to document the unfolding events. Executive director of World Press Photo, Joumana El Zein Khoury, said the image " shows the inconsolable grief of children losing their father in a place built for justice." Guzy spoke with Morning Edition about the photo, which is part of a larger body of work, and the story's global significance. Read what she had to say on the topic and see more of the images from Ice Arrests at New York Court.

FBI Investigated Reporter After The Article On Patel's Girl Friend

2026-04-23T09:34:09.846-04:00

Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, during a House hearing last month. A New York Times reporter wrote about how he used bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend with government security and transportation.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

The bureau said it is not pursuing a case, but the scrutiny is an example of the Trump administration weighing whether to criminalize routine news gathering.

By Michael S. Schmidt

The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter last month after she wrote about the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend with government security and transportation, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for information on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Ms. Williamson broke federal stalking laws, the person said.

Those actions prompted concerns among some Justice Department officials who saw the inquiry as retaliation for an article that Mr. Patel and his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, did not like, and who determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation, according to the person briefed on the matter.

In response to questions from The Times this week, the F.B.I. said that “while investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking,” the F.B.I. is not pursuing a case.

The scrutiny of Ms. Williamson is an example of the Trump administration examining whether to criminalize routine news gathering practices that are widely considered protected by the First Amendment.

Journalists are more often caught up in criminal investigations as potential witnesses when the authorities are trying to determine who leaked them classified information.

In preparing the article about Mr. Patel and Ms. Wilkins, Ms. Williamson followed normal procedures for a journalist working on a story, which typically involve reaching out to the subject and seeking a variety of perspectives. In this case, Ms. Williamson contacted numerous people who had worked with or knew Ms. Wilkins.

Ms. Williamson had one phone call at the beginning of her reporting process with Ms. Wilkins — Ms. Wilkins insisted that it be off the record — and exchanged emails with her before publication of the article. At that early stage in her reporting, Ms. Williamson asked Ms. Wilkins to provide a list of people she might speak to for the article, but Ms. Wilkins did not respond.

Ms. Williamson was never in Ms. Wilkins’s presence.

Joseph Kahn, the executive editor of The Times, criticized the bureau for investigating a reporter for doing her job.

“The F.B.I.’s attempt to criminalize routine reporting is a blatant violation of Elizabeth’s First Amendment rights and another attempt by this administration to prevent journalists from scrutinizing its actions,” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s alarming. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s wrong.”

The Times article, published Feb. 28, described how Ms. Wilkins has a full-time protective detail of Special Weapons and Tactics team members drawn from F.B.I. field offices around the country to accompany her to engagements including singing appearances and a hair appointment.

The disclosure intensified questions over Mr. Patel’s use of taxpayer-funded resources for personal use, not long after he drew headlines for celebrating in Milan with the U.S. men’s hockey team after its gold medal victory in the Olympics.

In a statement provided for the Feb. 28 article, a spokesman for the F.B.I. said that active death threats against Ms. Wilkins warranted the level of protection she was receiving, but he did not question the accuracy of Ms. Williamson’s reporting.

The inquiry into Ms. Williamson played out in the days and weeks following publication of the article.

On the day of the article’s publication, Ms. Wilkins received a threatening email from an anonymous sender. Ms. Wilkins forwarded the email the same day to the F.B.I., according to an affidavit later filed in a criminal prosecution of the alleged sender of the email, who was in Boston. According to the affidavit, the sender acknowledged emailing the threat after reading the article by Ms. Williamson.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated

April 22, 2026, 3:58 p.m. ET53 minutes ago

Kennedy continued to back away from his criticism of the measles vaccine.

The Trump administration nears a loan to rescue Spirit Airlines.

The C.D.C. canceled the publication of a study showing the benefits of Covid vaccines.

Several days later, the F.B.I. interviewed Ms. Wilkins, who told them how the reporting Ms. Williamson had done for the article had left her unnerved and feeling harassed, according to the person familiar with the matter. Ms. Wilkins had raised similar concerns with the F.B.I. as early as January, when Ms. Williamson first contacted her, the person said.

A lawyer for Ms. Wilkins also wrote to editors of The Times before the article’s publication, saying that extensive reporting by Ms. Williamson “raises troubling questions about proportionality and journalistic purpose.”

Following the interview with Ms. Wilkins, the F.B.I. combed through the bureau’s databases to determine whether the federal government had any information on Ms. Williamson to help make the argument that she deserved further scrutiny, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The F.B.I. cited statutes dealing with stalking and with targeting someone with threats to their safety and reputation to justify investigating Ms. Williamson, the person said.

After that initial stage of inquiry, F.B.I. agents recommended moving forward with a preliminary investigation, the person said. At that point, the F.B.I. appears to have run into obstacles at the Justice Department, where officials determined there was no legal basis to proceed, according to the person briefed on the matter.

Neither The Times nor Ms. Williamson was informed of the steps taken by the F.B.I. to look into her and her reporting. Ms. Williamson declined to comment.

Asked about the sequence of events, a spokesman for the F.B.I. said it was “false” that the bureau had ever investigated Ms. Williamson. He said the inquiries were spurred by the threat Ms. Wilkins had received after the publication of the Feb. 28 article.

“Ms. Wilkins was interviewed by F.B.I. agents in relation to a death threat in Boston, which specifically referenced an article published by Williamson the previous day,” the spokesman said in an emailed reply. “During this questioning, the agents inquired about the related reporting. While investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking, no further action regarding Williamson or the reporting was ever pursued by the F.B.I.”

The spokesman did not respond to questions about whether Mr. Patel was aware of the inquiry into Ms. Williamson or whether he condoned the use of government resources to examine routine news gathering activities by a reporter.

In social media posts in January, before the article was published, and in April, as The Times continued to report on Mr. Patel’s use of government resources, Ms. Wilkins accused Ms. Williamson of stalking her, calling her out for conduct that is considered routine for reporting.

A supervisory agent at the F.B.I.’s headquarters in Washington who oversees violent crime investigations was involved in the early stages of the inquiry into Ms. Williamson, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The involvement of the bureau’s headquarters is notable. Dating back to the investigations of Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server and Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia, Mr. Trump’s allies have contended that the involvement of F.B.I. officials in Washington, rather than employees from field offices, allows for political influence.

Mr. Trump’s hostility toward journalists is a hallmark of his time in office, and Mr. Patel shares his adversarial stance. Before becoming F.B.I. director, Mr. Patel equated journalists to the “most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen” in a 2024 speech.

In January, the F.B.I. searched the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter, in connection with an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. It is exceptionally rare for the authorities to search reporters’ homes as part of such an investigation when they are not the focus of the investigation.

In April, after news organizations reported details about the downing of a U.S. fighter jet in Iran, Mr. Trump promised to go after an unnamed outlet over its coverage. Early last year, the White House punished The Associated Press over its refusal to comply with an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico, curtailing its access to press events.

Mr. Trump is suing The Times and three of its journalists for defamation, saying that a series of articles during the 2024 campaign were intended to damage his candidacy and undercut his reputation as a businessman.

The Times sued the Pentagon in December, accusing the administration of infringing on the constitutional rights of journalists by imposing a set of restrictions on reporting about the military. A federal judge in March ruled that the limits violated the First Amendment and ordered that parts of the administration’s policy be tossed. The legal battle in that case continues.

A Drunk FBI, Past Director Taken to Court For Doing His Job~Is The Nation Crazy or Is it just MAGA and Trump?

2026-04-22T10:20:55.477-04:00

Im not drunk look into my yes (Adamfoxie)

CNNWashington ExaminerMediaite

FBI's Patel denies drinking claims as Congress seeks test

FBI Director Kash Patel has forcefully denied allegations from The Atlantic that he engaged in excessive drinking and unexplained absences, calling the claims false and politically motivated. Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche dismissed the reporting, while Patel filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine. The controversy escalated as House Democrats urged Patel to take a formal alcohol screening test, citing multiple accounts of troubling behavior.

Patel and Blanche reject allegations in press conference

Congressional Democrats demand alcohol screening

Contradiction emerges over system lockout claim

From report to lawsuit and political stakes

Patel and Blanche reject allegations in press conference

At a Justice Department press conference, FBI Director Kash Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly dismissed The Atlantic's report alleging excessive drinking and unexplained absences. Patel emphasized his work ethic, claiming he has served twice as many days as previous directors, and repeated that he has never been intoxicated on the job. Blanche criticized the article as relying on anonymous sources and containing 'blatantly false' information, while The Atlantic defended the work of its reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick. CNN + 3

FBI Director Kash Patel speaks during a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC on Tuesday.

CNN

Congressional Democrats demand alcohol screening

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, sent a letter urging Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. The letter cited accounts of Patel consuming alcohol to the point of illness, verbally abusing staff, and being unreachable behind locked doors, with agents reportedly using breaching equipment to wake him. Lawmakers described these alleged behaviors as alarming and indicative of a public emergency, pointing to past incidents such as his Olympic celebrations. HuffPost

Contradiction emerges over system lockout claim

During a tense exchange with NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly, Patel denied ever being locked out of FBI computer systems, calling contrary claims lies. However, his own lawsuit against The Atlantic acknowledges a brief login issue on April 10, 2026, though it frames it as a routine technical problem. Acting Attorney General Blanche intervened during the exchange, accusing the reporter of rudeness, while The Atlantic maintained its reporting and labeled the lawsuit 'meritless.' HuffPost + 1

From report to lawsuit and political stakes

The Atlantic’s article, based on anonymous sources, alleged repeated episodes of conspicuous inebriation and erratic behavior by Patel, prompting his $250 million defamation lawsuit. Legal analysts warn the suit could expose Patel, his inner circle, and Justice Department officials to depositions, potentially revealing more about his conduct. The White House has publicly supported Patel’s leadership, while fact-checking outlet Snopes noted it could not independently verify the claims but confirmed the lawsuit’s filing.

Shock after Judge threw out law suit

Kash Patel’s 'nightclubs' lawsuit against news analyst is thrown out

Story by Joe Sommerlad

FBI Director Kash Patel has seen a defamation lawsuit he brought against an MS NOW pundit who accused him of spending more time in nightclubs than at the office dismissed by a Texas court.

Patel was incensed when former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi appeared on the Morning Joe breakfast show on May 2 last year and told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that the director had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of” the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Iran Claims Seizure of Two Ships After Trump Extends Cease Fire At The Straights of Homuz

2026-04-22T09:53:20.494-04:00

A banner of Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in Tehran on Tuesday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Here’s the latest.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had seized two container ships on Wednesday in the area of the contested Strait of Hormuz, Iranian news media reported, hours after President Trump announced that he was extending a cease-fire.

Earlier Wednesday, U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, a shipping monitor run by the British Navy, reported that two ships had been attacked near the strait, one by a gunboat belonging to the Revolutionary Guards. Iranian news media reported that the Guards had targeted two cargo vessels, the MSC Francesca and Epaminondas, and the force’s Navy later claimed to have seized the ships after they attempted to navigate “without the necessary permits.”

The Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The attacks showed how both Iran and the United States were seeking to exert control over shipping in the area. Even as Mr. Trump announced the cease-fire extension late on Tuesday, before it was set to expire, he said the United States would continue to block ships heading to and from Iranian ports — a move that Iran’s foreign minister called “an act of war.”

Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Pakistan for a second round of peace talks was put on hold Tuesday because Tehran had not responded to American demands in the negotiations, a U.S. official said. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, said Wednesday that Iran remained open to the idea of further talks but stood ready to defend itself militarily.

In a social media post, Mr. Trump said he had renewed the truce on a request from Pakistan, which is trying to mediate an end to the war. He said the cease-fire would remain in place until Iran’s “leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”

Here’s what else we are covering:

Strait of Hormuz: In London, Britain and France were set to host military planners from more than 30 countries to “advance military plans to reopen the strait, as soon as conditions permit, following a sustainable cease-fire agreement,” according to a statement from Britain’s defense minister.
Fuel prices: Germany’s Lufthansa Group said Tuesday that it would cut 20,000 short-haul flights through October, citing the doubling of jet fuel prices since the start of the Iran war.
Lebanon: An exchange of attacks along the Israeli-Lebanese border on Wednesday put pressure on the countries’ already tenuous truce.
The Headlines: A special episode of the podcast answers listeners’ questions about the war.

9 minutes ago

Lynsey Chutel

MSC, a global shipping company based in Geneva which owns one of the vessels that Iranian forces claim to have seized, has not confirmed the episode and could not immediately be reached on Wednesday. According to shipping data, the MSC Francesca, a container ship flying under the flag of Panama, was bound for Sri Lanka.

24 minutes ago

Euan Ward

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

Attacks along the Israel-Lebanon border put a cease-fire under strain.

Image

A family drove through the ruins of Mansour, a village in southern Lebanon, on Tuesday.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

An exchange of attacks along the Israeli-Lebanese border on Wednesday put pressure on the two countries’ already tenuous truce, as President Trump’s parallel cease-fire with Iran was also coming under strain.

The 10-day truce agreement between Lebanon and Israel, reached last week, halted weeks of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group backed by Iran. The conflict, which erupted soon after the Iran war began in late February, has killed roughly 2,300 people in Lebanon, including 13 Israeli soldiers, and two civilians in Israel, according to the authorities in each country.

The U.S.-mediated cease-fire has largely held. But with Hezbollah and Israel trading accusations of violating the agreement, it is fraught with uncertainty.

Israeli forces are still deployed in a broad section of southern Lebanon, a six-mile-wide strip of land that stretches along the entire border. Israel has signaled that it plans to occupy that area indefinitely; its defense minister, Israel Katz, said last week that operations to “clear out” the area would continue despite the cease-fire.

Hezbollah said on Wednesday that it had launched a drone at Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, which the Israeli military said it had intercepted. A day earlier, the group fired rockets and drones into northern Israel, its first attack since the truce took effect, raising fears of further escalation. Hezbollah said both attacks, which caused no casualties, were in response to Israeli violations of the truce agreement.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Israeli military targeted a number of Israeli border towns with airstrikes and artillery fire, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. It also demolished civilian homes and infrastructure, the agency said.

Israel says its continuing military operations in Lebanon do not violate the agreement, citing a clause that allows it “to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent or ongoing attacks.” Analysts have characterized Israel’s interpretation of that clause as overly broad.

Hezbollah has criticized the cease-fire agreement, which was signed by only the Lebanese and Israeli governments, and leaders of the group have pledged to respond to Israel’s continued attacks. Lebanese and Israeli officials are set to meet in Washington on Thursday for another round of rare direct talks aimed at brokering a longer-term arrangement.

47 minutes ago

Lynsey Chutel

Danger escalates in the Strait of Hormuz as Iran says it seized 2 cargo ships.

Image

In the Strait of Hormuz off Musandam, Oman, on Wednesday.Credit...Reuters

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that its naval forces had seized two cargo ships near the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, the Iranian news media reported, as Tehran sought to exert control over the strategic waterway.

Hours after President Trump extended a cease-fire with Iran, the Revolutionary Guards’ Navy said that two vessels, the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, had tried to navigate through the contested strait “without the necessary permits,” according to a statement shared by the semiofficial Tasnim news agency. The statement said that the ships were being directed toward Iran’s coast, adding: “Disrupting the order and security of the Strait of Hormuz is our red line.”

Earlier on Wednesday, United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a British Navy agency, said that two cargo vessels had come under attack in the area of the strait. One of them, a container ship sailing off the coast of Oman, was said to have been struck by a gunboat belonging to the Guards. The ship’s captain said that the gunboat gave no radio warning before firing on it, according to the agency, which said that no crew members were hurt but that the ship’s bridge had been heavily damaged.

The British agency said that a second unnamed outbound cargo ship had come under fire eight nautical miles off the coast of Iran. The captain of that vessel said the crew were unharmed, according to the agency, which did not name either vessel.

MSC, the global shipping company that owns the Francesca, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The vessel was flying a Panamanian flag and bound for Sri Lanka.

The seizures showed how the Strait of Hormuz remains heavily contested by both the United States and Iran even after Mr. Trump renewed a cease-fire just before it had been set to expire.

In announcing the extension of the truce, Mr. Trump said that a U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports would remain in place, which Iranian officials have described as a violation of the truce. The U.S. Navy has turned back more than two dozen ships trying to enter or leave Iranian ports since it began the blockade more than a week ago, according to the U.S. military’s Central Command.

The Strait of Hormuz, normally a conduit for one-fifth of global oil and a significant share of gas supplies, remains a high-risk area, maritime security officials said, while the future of U.S.-Iran negotiations remains unclear. Since March 1, the day after the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began, the British Navy’s maritime trade agency has recorded 34 security incidents in the strait and the surrounding waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

Multiple ships have been struck by unknown projectiles, causing hull damage or fires on board. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have also threatened vessels, the agency said.

“The operating environment remains high-risk,” the agency said in a report on Tuesday. “The cease-fire remains fragile, and blockade-related enforcement activity continues.”

European leaders were meeting on Wednesday in London to discuss how to reopen the critical shipping route. Britain and France were set to host military planners from more than 30 countries to “advance military plans to reopen the strait, as soon as conditions permit, following a sustainable cease-fire agreement,” according to a statement from Britain’s defense minister.

The meeting builds on an earlier gathering of officials from more than 50 countries to condemn the closure of the strait, and to call for a diplomatic solution.

Trump is Going to Need to Know What Obama's2015 Deal with Iran Was~He Already Blinked Now

2026-04-22T09:41:23.772-04:00

Negotiators from the United States, Iran and European countries meeting to discuss a nuclear deal in Vienna in 2015.Credit...Joe Klamar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Trump has ridiculed President Barack Obama and the agreement, which he withdrew from during his first term. His critics say he could have avoided a war had he left it in place

By Michael Crowley

Reporting from Washington

New York Times

President Trump has vowed to secure a “far better” agreement with Iran than one struck by President Barack Obama more than a decade ago.

That agreement, commonly known as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, was designed to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. It required Iran to limit its nuclear program in return for economic sanctions relief.

Mr. Trump withdrew from that deal during his first term in office, reimposing sanctions and leading Iran to dramatically increase its nuclear activity. Mr. Trump attacked Iran last June and again this year to block its progress toward a potential atomic bomb, which Iran denies seeking.

Critics say that Mr. Trump could have avoided a costly war had he left the 2015 agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in place. They also warn that Mr. Trump may wind up accepting terms little better than the ones Mr. Obama secured more than a decade ago.

In a social media post on Monday, Mr. Trump trashed the 2015 agreement as “one of the Worst Deals ever made having to do with the Security of our Country,” and “a guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon” for Iran. He also ridiculed it for delivering $1.7 billion in cash-filled pallets to Tehran.

Why did President Obama want a deal with Iran?

Iran has insisted that its decades-old nuclear program is for peaceful purposes such as research, medicine and energy. But once established, a peaceful program can be expanded for military use.

By the time Mr. Obama took office in 2009, Western officials saw ominous signs that Iran’s theocratic regime was interested in nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama, who campaigned on ending the Iraq War, was reluctant to use force, and also worried that Israel could strike Iran’s nuclear sites and drag the United States into another war. In 2013, he offered to negotiate the matter with Tehran, which saw an opportunity to free itself from punitive U.S. and European economic sanctions.

The Obama administration led several other powers — Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — through 20 months of negotiations with Tehran. Their goal was to keep Iran at least a year away from having enough nuclear material to fashion a bomb. (Constructing a nuclear device could take at least several more months, experts believe.)

That one-year boundary was meant to give the United States and its allies plenty of time to respond to any Iranian dash toward a bomb. Before the agreement, the United States estimated that Iran could be within two to three months of that threshold.

Some Obama officials also hoped that diplomacy would be its own reward. A nuclear deal could promote positive change in Iran by empowering moderates who favored better relations with the West, they said, and by removing sanctions that had disconnected Iran’s economy from the outside world.

What did the Obama deal require Iran to do?

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action required Iran to give up most of its nuclear material, sharply limit its nuclear activity, accept international monitoring, and forswear nuclear weapons.

Under the deal, Iran shipped 98 percent of its uranium stockpile out of the country. Iran previously had enough uranium to fashion eight to 10 atomic bombs once fully processed; afterward it was left without enough for even one.

Iran also dismantled two-thirds of its centrifuges, the devices that process, or enrich, uranium to a potent form usable for nuclear energy or weapons. It also agreed to operate no more than 5,060 centrifuges at a time, using only its least-advanced models for a decade. No uranium was to be enriched or stored at Iran’s deeply buried Fordo facility for 15 years.

The deal barred Iran from enriching uranium until 2030 beyond a level of 3.67 percent — enough for research and medicine but not bombs. Iran also disabled a nuclear reactor that produced plutonium waste that could be used for weapons.

To ensure compliance, Tehran agreed to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to keep a close watch, including monitoring by cameras and inspectors of its uranium stockpile and centrifuge use.

What did opponents of the deal say?

Critics say the 2015 agreement was fatally flawed because it allowed several key provisions to expire, or “sunset,” after 15 years, including limits on Iran’s enrichment and stockpile of uranium.

Opponents of the deal often say that it effectively granted Iran a green light to expand its nuclear activities after 2030. Obama officials insist that Iran never would have agreed to longer limits, and that the agreement bought the world valuable time, including for future negotiations to extend the deal.

And contrary to Mr. Trump’s past assertions that Iran has never promised not to develop a nuclear weapon, the agreement’s preamble includes an Iranian pledge “that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”

What did Iran get in return?

The United States and its European allies lifted the many sanctions they had placed on Iran over more than a decade to punish it for nuclear activity. Sanctions were removed from Iran’s oil, shipping, banking and insurance industries. The United States also removed its “secondary” sanctions, which targeted any third country that transacted with Iran — removing a major obstacle to Iran’s ability to do business with the rest of the world.

Iran was allowed to resume legal oil sales, accept overseas investment and make foreign purchases, including long-awaited upgrades for its dilapidated commercial airliner fleet.

Iran also gained access to long-frozen foreign assets. At the time the deal was concluded, the U.S. Treasury Department estimated that Tehran could withdraw about $50 billion from overseas accounts, although the deal’s critics insist the real figure was closer to $100 billion.

It is difficult to assess how Iran used any of those billions. Critics of the deal, including many Republicans and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, argue that Iran sent much of the money to its foreign proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen.

Iran has complained bitterly that it never saw many promised economic benefits. Iranian officials say that is partly because conservative opponents of the agreement intimidated foreign trade partners and investors with warnings that they could face political or even legal jeopardy for doing business with Tehran.

What about the “pallets of cash”?

Few issues animate Mr. Trump and other deal critics as much as the U.S. shipment to Tehran of $1.7 billion in cash a few months after the nuclear deal was agreed upon.

While that amount pales next to the at least $50 billion in Iranian foreign assets unfrozen under the deal, the image of a U.S. plane transporting large, cash-filled wooden pallets carries unseemly and even criminal connotations.

Fueling the criticism is the timing of the delivery of the first and most discussed payment, in January 2016, when the United States announced that Iran was in compliance with its major initial obligations under the nuclear deal.

Iran also released several long-held American detainees, leading to charges that Mr. Obama had paid a “ransom” for their release.

The connection between the cash and the prisoner release is ambiguous but difficult to deny entirely. The nuclear deal contained no mention of the $1.7 billion.

Before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the country’s government had paid the United States to purchase weapons. But the United States refused to deliver the arms after that government was overthrown, and Iran had long demanded reimbursement.

In September 2016, a State Department legal adviser told Congress that Iran had originally paid $400 million into a U.S. arms sales account that accrued $1.3 billion in interest as its fate was disputed over decades. The money was subject to a binding international arbitration case that U.S. officials expected to lose.

The Obama administration agreed to send Iran a first installment of $400 million, reflecting the original payment. Cash was required because U.S. sanctions limiting Iran’s access to the global financial system remained in place, and it was converted to foreign currencies, including Swiss francs, because direct U.S. dollar transactions with Iran remained illegal.

The remaining $1.3 billion was delivered in later installments.

While Obama officials denied they had paid Iran a ransom, they acknowledged withholding the cash until the Americans were freed.

Allegations that their release was contingent on the money’s delivery remain unproven.

Mom Watches on Vid Her 15 Yr Old Prodigy Boy Suckered Punched, Beaten, Shot in Queens, WHY?

2026-04-21T11:05:00.003-04:00

A group of people stand and sit near candles against a fence.

Mourners place candles at a memorial during a community vigil to remember Jaden Pierre at Roy Wilkins Park in Queens on Monday.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Andy NewmanNate Schweber

"OH My Baby"

By Andy Newman and Nate Schweber

New York Times

On a stretch of asphalt stained with blood at a park in Queens on Monday evening, Shanelle Weston dropped to her knees and wept.

“Oh, my baby,” Ms. Weston cried. “Oh, my baby.”

She was crying for her son Jaden Pierre, 15. Last Thursday, Jaden was fatally shot in broad daylight at Roy Wilkins Park in South Jamaica.

His killing was captured on video by at least two of the dozens of young bystanders. They watched, shouting with excitement, as a group of other teenagers surrounded Jaden and started punching him, the video shows. And they watched in horror as one of the youths pulled a gun and fired a single shot into Jaden’s chest.

Members of Jaden’s family were among the hundreds of mourners who filled the basketball court at the park on Monday at a vigil for Jaden. They placed lit votive candles, white roses and letters that spelled out his name on the ground

Jaden’s father, who did not give his name but who was identified by another family member as Gardy Pierre, addressed the crowd.

“That was my life — he was everything to me,” he said, his voice rising with emotion. “I love you with everything in my heart, my blood, my soul.”

A man holding a microphone puts his arm around a woman crying into her hands as they stand in a crowd.

Gardy Pierre, Jaden’s father, comforted Jaden’s mother, Shanelle Weston.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Jaden’s killer has not been caught. The police released a photo on Friday of a young man they were seeking in connection with the shooting, but provided no details about his identity or age. At the vigil, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, told the crowd that the police not only know who shot Jaden, “they even know where he is.” She urged the gunman to turn himself in.

It remained unclear what had led to the fight or why it escalated, but the killing of a 15-year-old in a city park reverberated first across the neighborhood and then across the city.

Former Mayor Eric Adams shared a video on X on Friday that was apparently taken by one of the bystanders. “A 15-year-old kid was beaten and shot to death at a Southeast Queens playground yesterday. And somehow this isn’t the top story,” he wrote, and added, “Where is everyone else? Where is NYC Mayor Mandani?"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani was not at the vigil and had not initially spoken about the shooting, but he addressed it Monday evening, when a reporter asked him about it.

“When you see that video, as many New Yorkers have, you feel a sense of heartbreak at the fact that this has happened to a young person in our city,” the mayor said. “This is something that is unacceptable. And it is something that his family — his entire community — now has to bear the loss of. And we extend not only our condolences to the family, but frankly a necessity of recommitting ourselves to ending the scourge of gun violence in this city.”

Two videos of the shooting have circulated. In the one posted by Mr. Adams, at least three youths can be seen punching Jaden, who is wearing a book bag on his back and holds up his hands. “Fight back,” someone yells. “Fight back!”

One youth lands a direct blow to Jaden’s face, and the crowd erupts. Another video, filmed from a different angle, captures the next moment. It shows a flash of silver: A youth is pointing a gun at Jaden at point-blank range.

There is a single pop. Jaden falls instantly. The crowd — suddenly all witnesses to a fatal shooting — scatters, shrieking and sprinting away.

At the vigil, the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, also wept as he spoke of the shooting and the callousness of those who filmed Jaden’s final moments.

“Why was his life not worth putting the phone down?” Mr. Williams asked, drawing pained shouts of agreement. “His life was worth saving. His life was worth protecting.”

Jaden was a student at Eagle Academy, an all-boys public school. An uncle, Eddie Washington, said that Jaden was multitalented: a basketball player, a rapper, a drummer, an actor. “The boy was incredible,” he said. Jaden’s English teacher at Eagle, James Johnson, said, “Jaden was a jovial, happy-go-lucky, down-to-earth young man.”

The former City Council president Adrienne Adams also wept as she spoke, saying that her grandson attends Eagle Academy, and it could have easily have been him.

“We need to make sure that our children, our beautiful children, have a tomorrow to look forward to,” she said.

Jaden’s great-grandmother, Nellie Washington, 80, said she had watched the video of his shooting.

“That pain went through my heart,” she said. “I felt my great-grandson’s pain.”

Canada Breaks With The US and Trump in The Arctic

2026-04-21T10:44:00.001-04:00

Canadian military aims to show it can go it alone in the Arctic

Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st U.S. state have pushed Canada to rethink relations with its neighbor. But defending the Arctic is too much for any one country.

By Maria Cheng

Reuters

Canadian troops conduct Arctic operations

A member of 41 Canadian Brigade Group conducts a ski patrol as part of Task Force Grizzly during "Operation Nanook-Nunalivut," a yearly series of drills designed to highlight the military's ability to defend the Canadian Arctic, in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, February 16, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio

CAMBRIDGE BAY, Nunavut, Canada - Over the past three months, Canadian soldiers conducted a more than 5,000-kilometer snowmobile patrol in extreme Arctic conditions traveling from Inuvik, Northwest Territories to Churchill, Manitoba, braving blizzards and minus-60 degree Celsius temperatures in military exercises designed to prepare for a foreign threat – and demonstrate Canada’s ability to take care of itself.

That’s a tall order. The political climate has changed since U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threats to make Canada an American state, take control of Greenland and withdraw from NATO, but the harsh realities of operating in Canada’s frozen north have not.

“There are Canadians up here defending (the country) at all times of the day,” said Travis Hanes, a commanding officer of the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group, a special unit of the Canadian Armed Forces’ reserve. “They’re stretching their abilities across some of the most inhospitable terrain and climate that you can possibly imagine.”

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He spoke to Reuters while recovering from a frostbitten nose after weeks of being on the snowmobile patrol.

To Hanes and many of his fellow Rangers, the idea that any foreign power might challenge Canada's sovereignty in a region that is about 40% the size of continental Europe is baffling. "We are the landowners and it's hard to see how someone thinks it could be taken away," he said.

Canada's Armed Forces deploy above the Arctic Circle for "Operation Nanook"

NATO members Canada and the United States have worked together for decades in the Arctic. They officially formed NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, in 1958 because neither country could independently respond to a threat by the Soviet Union.

Trump’s jibes about making Canada the 51st U.S. state and his growing tensions with NATO, only heightened by the U.S. war in Iran, have prompted Canadians to rethink their reliance on their southern neighbor.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has vowed to ensure that Canada can protect the Arctic without any outside help. As he unveiled a new plan last month detailing how Canada would spend C$35 billion reinforcing its military in the far north, Carney said Canada was now taking "full responsibility" for its Arctic sovereignty.

“We will no longer depend on any one nation,” he declared.

Canada's Armed Forces deploy above the Arctic Circle for "Operation Nanook"

Lt. Col. Travis Hanes, commanding officer of the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (1 CRPG), speaks with Maj. Matt Wookey, a Royal Canadian Air Force CC-138 Twin Otter pilot, during a stop on the sea ice as the unit makes its way from Cambridge Bay to Gjoa Haven on a long-range patrol during "Operation Nanook," March 18, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio

In interviews with nearly two dozen people including Canadian military leaders in the Arctic, government ministers, diplomats, analysts and serving members of the armed forces during a nine-day trip to the Arctic, Reuters found that despite the prime minister’s pledge, the deep ties between the Canadian and American militaries remain unchanged and the challenges to defending the Arctic are formidable. Not only is it highly unlikely that Canada could be completely self-reliant, but the U.S. too depends on Canada for its own security.

"Donnyland" Ukraine proposed a Change of Name of The Dombass Region Putin Wanrts

2026-04-21T09:54:00.000-04:00

The town of Izyum, a military hub in Ukraine’s Donbas region, earlier this year.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

By Anton Troianovski and Andrew E. Kramer

Anton Troianovski reported from Washington. Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kyiv, Ukraine.

When Poland sought a U.S. military base in 2018, it pitched the idea as Fort Trump.

When Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace pledge at the White House last year, they called the transport link it created the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

But the most improbable instance of President Trump’s name being lent to a geopolitical flashpoint may be one that has remained out of public view until now. In Ukraine peace talks in recent months, Ukrainian officials have suggested that the slice of the country’s Donbas region that Russia is still fighting for could be named “Donnyland.”

Source: The Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (as of April 19, 2026).Leanne Abraham/The New York Times

The moniker, a reference to “Donbas” and “Donald,” was described by four people familiar with the negotiations, who all spoke about it on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding them.

When a Ukrainian negotiator first mentioned the term, partly in jest, it was as part of an attempt to convince the Trump administration to push back more against Russia’s territorial demands, according to three of the people familiar with the talks. President Vladimir V. Putin has vowed to keep fighting until Russian forces reach a key administrative boundary on the edge of the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine where the Kremlin first started waging war in 2014.

That a name evocative of Disneyland has been applied to a depopulated, decimated swath of Ukrainian coal-and-steel country could appear jarring as Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War II continues to rage. But it also reflects a global reality in which governments appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity in order to get American might on their side.

Sloviansk, in the industrial Donbas region, which was first invaded by Russia in 2014. Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

For Ukraine, the effort has not yet paid off. The term has continued to be used in the talks, though it is not known to be written into any official documents. Negotiators have also floated the possibility of Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace playing a role in administering the area, though neither Russia nor Ukraine have joined it so far, according to four people familiar with the talks.

But Russia has not agreed to an arrangement that would be acceptable to Ukraine. That has left the fate of the area the Ukrainians proposed calling Donnyland — about 50 miles long and 40 miles wide — as one of the main sticking points in the negotiations.

The Ukraine talks have ticked along behind the scenes in recent weeks, even as the lead U.S. negotiators — Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s close friend and special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — have been focused on the war with Iran. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this month that he was expecting Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner to visit Ukraine soon. But a person familiar with the talks said that the Americans were still waiting for enough progress to warrant such a trip and that they intended to make another visit to Russia as well.

“Ukraine is moving along. I wish they could get along,” Mr. Trump told reporters last week. “We’ll see what happens. There’s things happening there.”

Mr. Trump, of course, promised in his presidential campaign that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. He and his top negotiators have now spent more than a year trying to forge a peace deal, spending hours in talks with Mr. Putin and frustrating Ukrainian officials with the appearance that they were acting like mediators rather than defending Ukraine.

“Donnyland” was one way in which the Ukrainians tried to get Mr. Trump to be more on their side. Ever since Mr. Trump met with Mr. Putin in Alaska last August, the Trump administration has signaled that it could support a peace deal in which Ukraine withdrew to the administrative border of the Donetsk region, one of the provinces in the Donbas — a move that critics saw as a major concession to the Kremlin.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Donald J. Trump during a meeting in Alaska last summer. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Ukrainian officials say about 190,000 people live in this territory now. Others close to the talks say the real number may be about half that. It is so close to the front that the main highway into the area is draped in netting to protect against Russian exploding drones.

Little is left of the local economy other than one working coal mine and businesses serving the soldiers based in the area, including shops selling balloons and flowers for soldiers to buy for visiting wives or girlfriends.

Ukraine insists it can defend this area and that it will not give it up. But in December, Mr. Zelensky signaled openness to a compromise that would form a demilitarized zone or a free economic zone under neither warring party’s full control.

The Ukrainians considered, but did not endorse, proposals for a neutral administrator or a governing body that would have both Russian and Ukrainian representatives, so long as Russia could not claim the land after the war.

The Kremlin said Russia could be open to the formation of a demilitarized zone if Russian police or national guard soldiers were allowed to patrol it — a measure that was unacceptable for Kyiv.

Ukraine wanted the Trump administration to pressure Moscow to soften its position further. Ukrainian negotiators took to calling the proposed zone Donnyland, an area that would not be fully controlled by either side and branded as an accomplishment for Mr. Trump.

Samuel Charap, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation think tank who has followed the negotiations closely, argued that both Moscow and Kyiv have shown some flexibility on the future of this part of the Donbas that Ukraine still controls.

For Ukraine, a key concern is the risk that ceding that territory, along with the fortifications Ukraine has built there, could make it easier for Russia to renew its invasion in the future. Mr. Charap said that Ukraine appeared to see a security benefit in having Mr. Trump’s name attached to the area.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Mr. Trump during a meeting in Mar-a-Lago in December. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

“Having a Trump imprimatur on a free economic zone, I think, probably, they would consider to be something of a deterrent,” Mr. Charap said, referring to Ukraine.

Another suggestion called the postwar arrangement the “Monaco model,” a reference to the city-state on the French Mediterranean. Like Donnyland, it referred to a possible, semiautonomous ministate that would benefit from a status as an offshore economic zone. The phrase Monaco model appeared in treaty drafts, while Donnyland only came up in discussions, according to a person with direct knowledge of Ukraine’s negotiating strategies.

But the talks stalled in late February on the territorial issue, just as the Iran war distracted the U.S. negotiating team. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Russia would accept only full legal control of the Donbas. And Mr. Zelensky downplayed the prospects of trading land for peace, saying doing so would be a “big mistake.”

Russia and Ukraine haven’t budged since on control of territory, even as talks continued on other issues, including U.S. commitments to guaranteeing Ukraine’s postwar security, according to people familiar with the talks.

A Ukrainian negotiator did create a flag for Donnyland — colored green and gold — and a national anthem, using ChatGPT, the person with knowledge of Ukraine’s negotiating strategies said. It’s not clear that the U.S. side ever saw them.

Hard To Believe For Some, A Dem Senate Could Be At Hand

2026-04-20T10:38:00.002-04:00

Mary Peltola could help overcome a brand problem for Democrats in Alaska. Credit...Ash Adams for The New York Times

Helped by a favorable national environment and strong candidate recruitment, Democrats are tied or ahead in four Republican-held seats, polls show.

By Nate Cohn

At the start of the 2026 election cycle, the Senate looked far out of reach for the Democrats. The House always seemed competitive, but retaking the Senate would require flipping at least four Republican-held seats — including at least two seats in states that President Trump won by double digits in 2024. In today’s polarized era, Democrats would need everything to break their way.

So far, everything is breaking the Democrats’ way. With Mr. Trump’s approval rating falling and inflation rising, along with the uncertainty of a war in the Middle East, it’s not hard to imagine a Democratic tsunami in November. A blue wave is not guaranteed, of course, and Democrats would not be assured to flip two reliably Republican states even if it were. But a feasible path for the party to win the Senate is coming into focus.

Democrats could win the Senate by flipping seats in four states Democrats could win the Senate by flipping seats in four states

2024 PRESIDENTIAL MARGIN

R+40

R+20

Even

D+20

Held by Democrats

Massachusetts

Democrats can win by retaining all 13 of their seats up for election ...

Delaware

Oregon

Rhode Island

Colorado

Illinois

New Mexico

New Jersey

Virginia

Minnesota

New Hampshire

Michigan

Georgia

Held by Republicans

... and flipping four held by Republicans. In recent polls, Democrats appear tied or even ahead in these races.

Maine

North Carolina

Ohio

Alaska

Florida

Iowa

Texas

Kansas

South Carolina

Montana

Nebraska

Louisiana

Mississippi

South Dakota

Tennessee

Kentucky

Alabama

Arkansas

Oklahoma

Idaho

West Virginia

Wyoming

The New York Times

In recent polls, Democrats appear tied or ahead in four Republican-controlled seats — the number they would need to take the Senate. These include Maine and North Carolina, where the likely Democratic nominees hold clear leads, as well as Ohio and Alaska, where Democrats have recruited strong candidates in states Mr. Trump won by double digits in 2024. There are also signs that Republicans could be in danger in two more states where Mr. Trump won by double digits: Iowa and Texas.

Over the last few weeks, the betting markets have shifted to make the Senate a tossup, though some analysts haven’t gone quite so far. Whether the Senate is a tossup or not, it’s clearly competitive — and that’s something that might have been hard to imagine a year ago.

In the Trump era, Democratic Senate candidates haven’t had much success at winning in red states. They failed to flip vigorously contested seats in Texas, Tennessee and Montana in 2018 and 2020. And most Democratic red-state incumbents — including those in Florida, Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri — lost re-election. Today, every Democrat in the Senate represents a state that voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Looking even further back, no party has managed to flip two states that leaned so much toward the other party since 2008. Only one such seat (Illinois in 2010) was flipped in a regularly scheduled election; two more flipped in memorable special elections (Massachusetts 2010 and Alabama 2017). Most of these victories took extraordinary circumstances, like a criminal conviction, a child molestation allegation or a bank seizure.

This time, Democrats aren’t benefiting from anything as unusual as a criminal conviction.

Instead, they’re counting on a favorable national political environment, strong candidates and the possibility that several of these states may not be quite as Republican-leaning as they seem.

Strong tailwinds

Let’s start with the national environment. There’s no doubt that the political winds are at the party’s back — and might get stronger.

The easiest measure is Mr. Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen to 40 percent with 56 percent disapproving, according to our average. That’s lower than his rating during the 2018 campaign, when Democrats won the combined national House popular vote by seven percentage points. It’s also lower than Bill Clinton’s approval rating in 1994 or Barack Obama’s approval rating during 2010 and 2014, when Republicans won sweeping midterm victories. It’s pretty similar to George W. Bush’s approval rating in November 2006, when Democrats dominated.

For the MailbagSend in a question to Nate Cohn at dear.upshot@nytimes.com

Even if Mr. Trump successfully negotiates a quick end to the war in Iran, it will be hard for his standing to improve much by November. His ratings have been in steady decline for about a year, and the war has only added to the weight of persistent inflation. If the conflict isn’t resolved quickly, the risks are enormous: Historically, quagmire abroad and rising prices at home are the ingredients of a failed presidency.

There’s one reason to question whether the national political environment is as good for Democrats as it seems: They lead by only five or six points on the so-called generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they’ll support for Congress. This is a sizable lead, but it’s smaller than the Democrats’ edge at this point during the 2006 or 2018 cycle.

These polls, however, generally reflect the opinions of all adults or registered voters, not the smaller group of voters who turn out in midterms. Democrats clearly have an enormous advantage among these highly engaged voters: In recent special elections, Democrats have significantly outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 showings. For good measure, there’s a longstanding tendency for the generic ballot polling to drift toward the party out of power.

To the extent Democrats are held back by the party’s national brand on a “generic” question, strong candidates with their own distinct brands might be better positioned to capitalize.

Sherrod Brown was a senator in Ohio for three terms before losing narrowly in 2024.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Strong recruitment

If there’s a single reason Democrats have a realistic chance to win the Senate, it’s that they’ve recruited unusually strong candidates in three states that supported Mr. Trump three times: North Carolina, Ohio and Alaska.

In all three states, the Democrats’ likely nominees are popular recent statewide office holders. They either won their last campaign or were highly competitive in losing re-election under less favorable political conditions. So far, the polls show those Democrats running well ahead of what one might otherwise expect.

In light-red-to-purple North Carolina, the former governor Roy Cooper’s decision to run for the Senate might turn the contest into a snoozer. He won comfortable re-election as governor in 2020, even as Mr. Trump carried the state. And he’s running against a candidate — Michael Whatley, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee — who has never held office. The polls taken since the primary show Mr. Cooper ahead by three to 14 points.

Perhaps more significant are the candidacies of the former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio and the former House member Mary Peltola in Alaska. Their entries into the race are certainly more unusual. The minority party doesn’t usually have many strong candidates in states that lean heavily toward the other party. It would be fortunate for Democrats to have even one established candidate in a red state, let alone one for both Alaska and Ohio.

Ms. Peltola and Mr. Brown lost re-election in 2024, but their strong showings make it easy to imagine how they could prevail in this year’s more favorable political environment. In Ohio, Mr. Brown lost by 3.6 points in 2024; Ms. Peltola lost by around two points in Alaska. Today, the Democrats are faring about eight points better on the generic congressional ballot than they did in the 2024 combined U.S. congressional popular vote. Or put another way: Mr. Brown and Ms. Peltola probably would have won re-election in 2024 if those contests had been held in this political environment.

There haven’t been many polls in either state, but every recent poll in Alaska shows Ms. Peltola ahead; every poll in Ohio shows a very close race.

Gov. Janet Mills. But she trails in the Democratic primary against Graham Platner, a first-time candidate and veteran running as a populist progressive. In recent polls, he leads Ms. Mills by a staggering two-to-one margin — or even more.

In a blue state like Maine, Mr. Platner’s progressive bona fides are not necessarily a disadvantage, even against an electoral juggernaut like the Republican moderate Susan Collins. A lengthy trail of provocative online comments and a now-covered tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol might be expected to be bigger liabilities. But, perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Platner still holds a clear lead in the polls against Ms. Collins in the general election.

Texas and Iowa

Even with Alaska and Ohio in play and with North Carolina and perhaps Maine looking favorable, the Democrats’ path to control of the Senate is still daunting.

To win, they would need to go four for four in those Republican-held seats while defending seats in Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire. It’s hard to argue that Democrats are even-money favorites to take the Senate if they need to go seven for seven.

Enter Iowa and Texas. On paper, it’s not obvious that either state ought to be competitive, even in this political environment. Mr. Trump won them by a slightly bigger margin than he did in Alaska and Ohio, and Democrats don’t have well-established candidates. By the numbers, these states seem like Florida, which isn’t as serious an option for Democrats. But for different reasons, Democrats can still picture a victory in Texas and Iowa.

Texas has the clearer case. While Mr. Trump won the state by 14 points, the Lone Star may not be as red as it seems. In 2020, Texas voted for Mr. Trump by just 5.6 points; his double-digit victory in 2024 was built on enormous gains among nonwhite voters, who have snapped back to the Democrats in recent polls. That would send Texas zooming back toward the left — and, in this national environment, into contention. In the state primary in March, more voters cast ballots for Democrats than Republicans.

The Republican position could weaken further if the incumbent, John Cornyn, loses the primary runoff to Ken Paxton, the state attorney general and a conservative firebrand. The polls don’t show Mr. Paxton performing that much worse than Mr. Cornyn against the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, but Mr. Paxton brings distinct liabilities — including a lengthy F.B.I. bribery investigation (no charges were brought).

Iowa, on the other hand, is one of the whitest states in the country; a reversion among nonwhite voters there won’t do much to help Democrats. The Democrats don’t have a high-profile candidate, and the likely Republican nominee, Representative Ashley Hinson, is a solid candidate.

But Iowa has a case of its own. While it didn’t swing disproportionately toward Mr. Trump in 2024, only North Dakota swung more toward Mr. Trump in 2016. It’s possible that Iowa’s relatively moderate, white working-class voters might still be open to swinging back in a Democratic-leaning national environment.

In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats actually won the House popular vote in Iowa — something they did not come close to achieving in any of the other red states we’ve mentioned. Democrats are expected to be highly competitive in the state’s race for governor; the presumptive nominee is the state auditor, Rob Sand, who won statewide in 2018 and 2022. And Mr. Trump’s tariffs have hit this agricultural state hard.

Democrats don’t have many serious options beyond Texas and Iowa. Nebraska, where the independent Dan Osborn is running again, seems unlikely so long as a Democrat is on the ballot. But even without another long-shot state, competitive races in Iowa and Texas would give Democrats breathing room. If a blue wave materializes, Democrats have a chance to ride it to Senate control.

Epstein Wanted The Harvard Connections, Files Show Many Were Happy to Comply

2026-04-20T10:14:00.000-04:00

Jeffrey Epstein had a special obsession with Harvard, which he sought to infiltrate more than any other American institution.

By Mark Arsenault and Debra Kamin

New York Times

Jeffrey Epstein walked out of Palm Beach County jail in July 2009, after serving 13 months for solicitation and prostitution with a minor.

Back at his waterfront mansion, he immediately began working to rebuild a cherished relationship, his connection to Harvard University.

“home and free,” Mr. Epstein wrote by email the day of his release, in a message contained among documents recently made public by the federal government. The recipient was Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard professor of psychology at the time.

“HI Jeffrey!!!!!” the professor replied. “THIS IS FABULOUS!”

For a decade, Mr. Epstein had used the power of his money and the force of his personality to carve a unique place for himself at Harvard. He became not just a patron of the sciences but also a faux researcher himself.

While that relationship has been well documented for years, a review of the new materials released by the Justice Department shows for the first time how far Harvard professors went to help him, even after he became a convicted sex offender and Harvard banned his donations. It also highlights gaps in Harvard’s own review of the depth and extent of Mr. Epstein's ties to powerful people on campus.

After Mr. Epstein died in 2019, the university investigated connections to the sex criminal, including those of Dr. Kosslyn, who helped Mr. Epstein get a Harvard research fellowship. That investigation led to sanctions against a math professor, Martin Nowak, and the closure of a program that Dr. Nowak had led and Mr. Epstein had funded.

But the review, completed in 2020, did not explore a number of clues suggesting that Mr. Epstein’s ties to people at Harvard went far deeper.

Some of the evidence was already public, including past news coverage of Mr. Epstein’s friendship with the Harvard economist and former university president Lawrence H. Summers. Other evidence, it is now known from recently released files, may have been in the work or personal email accounts of various Harvard faculty members. Investigators noted but did not follow up on donations from Mr. Epstein to a nonprofit run by Mr. Summers’s wife, Elisa New, a Harvard professor emeritus, for example.

A number of Harvard faculty members acknowledged during the investigation that “they visited Epstein at his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico or the Virgin Islands, visited him in jail or on work-release, or traveled on one of his planes,” according to Harvard’s 2020 investigative report. But the review did not dig into those relationships, noting “these actions did not implicate Harvard rules or policies.”

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor, offered some of the rare public criticism of the 2020 review, which mentioned Mr. Summers just once in passing. Harvard should have done more to dig into Mr. Epstein’s ties with one of its most famous and powerful academics, Mr. Lessig said in an interview.

“They wanted to minimize the embarrassment,” he said.

Stephen Kosslyn often discussed science with Mr. Epstein and described him as the “only collaborator” on one of his social science theories, according to a letter of recommendation he wrote for Mr. Epstein.Credit...Stephen Lam/Reuters

Mr. Epstein had a special obsession with Harvard. His exploitation of his attachments to the elite school granted him status, business and personal connections, and a chance to repair his reputation after serving jail time. The emails show how multiple people at Harvard helped him, treating him as if he belonged among academia’s towering intellects.

Some recently discovered emails, such as the ebullient exchange with Dr. Kosslyn on Mr. Epstein’s release day in 2009, have not been previously reported. Mr. Epstein also eagerly sought to reconnect with Mr. Summers not long after leaving jail, the new messages show.

Now six years after its prior investigation, Harvard is engaged in yet another painful examination of Mr. Epstein’s ties to professors at the school, reviewing millions of documents released by the government since November. Already, two professors, Dr. Nowak and Mr. Summers, face consequences over the new revelations.

“The university will continue to evaluate, based on its ongoing review, what additional actions may be warranted considering information that has come to light in these documents,” said Jason Newton, a Harvard spokesman, in a statement.

The school did not address criticisms of the 2020 report, and it is unclear when the new review might be complete.

A Mutually Beneficial Relationship

Lawrence H. Summers in 2006. New details about the relationship between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Summers are some of the clearest examples of how damaging the new documents have become for Harvard.Credit...Chitose Suzuki/Associated Press

Mr. Epstein entered the Harvard community more than three decades ago, long before any of his crimes became public. Senior leaders at Harvard, smelling a potential donor, began courting him as far back as 1992.

His first donation was in 1998. By the time of his 2006 arrest in Florida, he had made 22 gifts to the school totaling $8.4 million.

That appears to be more than he directly donated to any other school, according to a New York Times analysis of available records and prior reporting, and about 10 times the amount he directly donated to M.I.T., another institution where he concentrated time and money.

Mr. Epstein never gave enough to get his name on a building, but he got what he wanted: insider status with the science elite.

Though Mr. Epstein never completed his bachelor’s degree, stars of academia and scientific research routinely agreed to speak to him, one on one or in small gatherings. Mr. Epstein combined personal charm with a willingness to listen to the esoteric research passions of leading academics. He showed genuine interest in their ideas — or knew how to fake it. Mr. Epstein seemed to have considered himself a serious thinker, too. In 2009, he searched for a writer to collect his ideas on paper. A contact connected him with John Markoff, then a New York Times tech reporter, whom Mr. Epstein asked for recommendations.

“I would like to find a good writer to put together a summary of my science projects, past and current,,quantum computing, string theory , loop quntum gravity, chinese chi , complexity, neuroscience, bio physics, evolutionary dynamics, cosmology, cognitive neuro, foundations of morals,” Mr. Epstein wrote, with his typical indifference to rules of grammar and punctuation.

Mr. Markoff told The Times recently that he had “no memory of receiving this email.”

“As a full-time New York Times employee, I frequently received similar messages and my practice was to refer them to others,” he said.

The records show that Mr. Markoff, who retired from the Times in 2016, suggested a former Times freelance writer, Larry Fisher.

Mr. Epstein asked Mr. Fisher for a writing sample. Mr. Fisher told The Times recently that he had not heard of Mr. Epstein before their 2009 exchange. He sent a writing sample “and never heard from him again,” he said.

Some of Mr. Epstein’s efforts were detailed in Harvard’s 2020 report. His early gifts to Harvard included $200,000 to support the research of Dr. Kosslyn, the psychology professor, the report noted. And in 2005, Mr. Epstein leveraged the relationship into an official post at Harvard, as a visiting fellow to study Dr. Kosslyn’s theories.

Dr. Kosslyn had often discussed science with Mr. Epstein and described him as his “only collaborator” on one of his social science theories, according to a letter of recommendation he wrote for Mr. Epstein, detailed in the report. “I wish I could have even a single student who asks such good questions,” Dr. Kosslyn wrote.

Dr. Kosslyn later acknowledged in the Harvard investigation that Mr. Epstein was not qualified to conduct all the research proposed in his application, yet Mr. Epstein got the fellowship.

Mr. Epstein did little work as a fellow, the Harvard investigation found, but was approved for a second year in 2006.

He cultivated many other relationships at the school.

Mr. Epstein, in a 2014 email released among the new files, listed others at Harvard whom he supported, including Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education; Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science; and Andrew Strominger, a professor of physics.

Ms. Harrington told The Times by email that she was introduced to Mr. Epstein in the late 1990s, and that he provided funding for her work on two projects. She referenced a statement she gave in 2018, which said she would have never accepted the money “had I known then even a hint of what we all have subsequently learned about him.”

Mr. Gardner, in an email to The Times, said he met Mr. Epstein at a dinner party in the mid-1990s. Mr. Epstein then supported some of his research and connected him to “thought leaders.” Mr. Gardner said he told Mr. Epstein after his arrest in 2006 that he could not accept any more donations from him, and they “remained in loose touch for some years thereafter.” When Mr. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors in 2019, “I was horrified and often asked myself why I had not suspected anything like this,” Mr. Gardner said.

Mr. Strominger did not respond to a request for comment.

At least a half-dozen other academics appear on Mr. Epstein’s schedules for meetings with him when he visited campus.

He maintained contact with Mr. Summers and his wife, Ms. New, the professor emerita of English. He facilitated donations for Dr. Nowak and for George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. The emails suggest that Mr. Epstein and Dr. Church, who did not respond to a request for comment, explored forming a biotech firm together in 2014.

Harvard also provided social cachet. Mr. Epstein’s support of the Hasty Pudding Institute, the Harvard student social club and theatrical group, was a footnote in the 2020 report. The group is independent and not controlled by the university. But it is now clear that the group was a major element of Mr. Epstein’s efforts to stay connected to people on campus after the university barred him by late 2008 from giving to the school, according to the school’s review.

The new files show that Mr. Epstein’s friend and business partner, Andrew Farkas, a Harvard alumnus and chair of the Hasty Pudding Institute, continued to solicit donations for the club from Mr. Epstein. From 2013 to 2019, Mr. Epstein gave at least $375,000 to the institute, facilitated by Mr. Farkas.

In return, he earned a table at Hasty Pudding’s annual gala, which some years he packed with models and photographers. In the years he did not attend, he made sure his generosity was noted. Asked in a 2018 email if he wanted his gift listed as “anonymous” in the program, Mr. Epstein was quick to respond:

“Full name,” he wrote back.

Helicopters and SCUBA Lessons

Image

Martin Nowak in 2007. Dr. Nowak has said that he regrets accepting and fostering Mr. Epstein’s support. In a statement, he wrote that he stayed in touch with Mr. Epstein after his conviction in part because other academics did so, too.Credit...Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

Mr. Epstein offered the scientists something more than funding for research. He fueled egos and provided a heady taste of high life.

Mr. Epstein first won Dr. Nowak’s attention before the professor moved to Harvard from Princeton in 2003. It started with a phone call to ask about his research. Dr. Nowak described their budding relationship in a long passage in his 2011 book.

After the conversation, next came a donation for his research, and then an invitation to Mr. Epstein’s New York mansion. “I had been invited for dinner and I was flattered to find that I was the only guest,” Dr. Nowak wrote of the encounter.

Later came a plane ticket to San Juan, P.R., and then a helicopter ride to Mr. Epstein’s private island.

“Now I felt like an extra in a James Bond movie,” Dr. Nowak gushed.

“Every day I breakfasted with Jeffrey as the sun rose,” he continued. “We would have endless conversations about science, about my work.”

In 2003, Dr. Nowak wrote in his book, Mr. Epstein negotiated with Mr. Summers — then Harvard’s president — to set up a program on evolutionary dynamics for Dr. Nowak to run at Harvard and gave $6.5 million to support it, his largest gift to Harvard.

In a statement to the Times, Dr. Nowak said he was urged by Mr. Summers to cultivate Mr. Epstein’s support.

After Mr. Epstein was charged in 2006, Harvard, as an institution, began to back away. But Mr. Epstein did not let up in his pursuit.

He withdrew as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s request over the criminal charges. But Harvard continued accepting his money. From July 2006 to July 2007, Mr. Epstein made four more gifts to the university, totaling $736,000, bringing his total contributions to Harvard to about $9.2 million, according to the school’s review.

The university’s president at the time, Drew Faust, barred Mr. Epstein from giving after that.

Still, Harvard sent “mixed signals” on Mr. Epstein, the school’s review found. The university’s development office in 2013 invited him to a fund-raising campaign kickoff, the school’s investigation found. School officials did not return Mr. Epstein’s money, though Harvard ultimately donated to charity about $200,000 from his gifts that was still unspent in 2020.

Despite the ban, individual professors continued to reach out to him, to meet with him and to do him little favors. Dr. Kosslyn visited Mr. Epstein in jail, according to news reports and visiting logs.

When Dr. Kosslyn, who left for Stanford University in 2010, published a new book in 2013, he promised in an email to autograph a copy for Mr. Epstein and noted that Mr. Epstein was “already thanked.” He had listed Mr. Epstein, by that time a registered sex offender, in the authors’ notes, among those who read early versions of the manuscript or discussed key ideas.

Dr. Kosslyn did not respond to a request for comment.

Epstein’s Biggest Conquest

Harvard’s review, completed in 2020, did not investigate a number of clues pointing to Mr. Epstein’s reach at the school going much farther.Credit...Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

New details about the relationship between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Summers are some of the clearest examples of how Mr. Epstein plied powerful people associated with Harvard.

Three weeks after he left jail in 2009, Mr. Epstein directed an associate to write Mr. Summers, who was then a major figure in the Obama administration.

“send larry summers an email that I am home and Free,” Mr. Epstein wrote. “give him the home number and email address.”

This exchange, not previously reported, shows how durable their relationship had become, despite Mr. Epstein’s prosecution and jail sentence.

Mr. Summers flew on Mr. Epstein’s private plane in 1998, records show. And Mr. Summers and his wife visited Mr. Epstein’s island in 2005 during their honeymoon, according to newly released emails.

Mr. Summers invited Mr. Epstein to his home in Brookline, Mass., in 2018, the emails show, and he leaned on Mr. Epstein as a confidant, updating Mr. Epstein on his stalled pursuit of an affair with a woman whom Mr. Summers described as a mentee. Mr. Epstein referred to himself as “a pretty good wing man” for Mr. Summers.

Representatives for Mr. Summers did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Summers issued a statement in November expressing regret for the “misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.”

A representative for Ms. New, Mr. Summers’s wife, referenced her statement from November, in which she expressed “profound regret over accepting a donation from Jeffrey Epstein.”

Mr. Epstein also visited Dr. Nowak’s program some 40 times from 2010 to 2018, the Harvard review concluded. Mr. Epstein had a key to get in and a room there, known as “Jeffrey’s office,” which he decorated with his own rug and photos.

Just as valuable was the high-profile platform that the program provided.

After leaving jail, Mr. Epstein wanted to influence what came up in internet searches on his name, and he signed onto a plan to create flattering content about himself.

“nothing for me more important,” he wrote to an associate in 2010.

In 2013, Dr. Nowak’s program added links to two websites for Mr. Epstein’s foundations. The next year, Dr. Nowak agreed to add a page about Mr. Epstein to its website, after Mr. Epstein’s publicist told him “it would be very helpful in terms of Google results if his name were attached to a Harvard.edu url,” according to Harvard’s 2020 report.

Dr. Nowak has said that he regrets accepting and fostering Mr. Epstein’s support. In a statement, he wrote that he stayed in touch with Mr. Epstein after his conviction in part because other academics did so, too.

“I am horrified by my own blindness to the abusive nature of his relationships with women and to what I have come to understand — although I should have earlier — was his mastery of manipulation,” Dr. Nowak said. “I am deeply disappointed in the awe I felt for his impressive wealth and connections.”

After the 2020 report, Harvard prohibited Dr. Nowak from serving as principal investigator on new grants and advising new students for two years. The university also shut down his evolutionary dynamics program.

But the extent of the relationships between Mr. Epstein and others at Harvard would remain quiet for another several years.

Leaning on a Harvard Friendship a Last Time

In November 2018, The Miami Herald published a series of articles on Mr. Epstein’s crimes and his lenient plea deal in Florida. A federal judge found in February 2019 that prosecutors had illegally withheld information on the deal from Mr. Epstein’s victims.

Two days after the judge’s ruling, Mr. Epstein sent a note for help. He emailed the same message, with the same typos, to about a half-dozen associates, among them Mr. Summers:

“I’d really appreciate your input in how I respond, or, if I respond ,to this new wave of putrid press,” Mr. Epstein wrote. “Its difficult to portray the allegations as tabloid as it now come from a federal judge.” Allegations that he trafficked young girls were “soo nuts,” he wrote, “but now, part of the story.”

“I’d be very surprised if your writing anything or appearing is good,” Mr. Summers responded.

Mr. Epstein replied, “odd that though I almost never involve myself with the public there is such a tirade.”

A grand jury indicted Mr. Epstein on trafficking charges that July. That August, he was found dead in a jail cell, in what was ruled a suicide.

A month later, Lawrence Bacow, the Harvard president at the time, announced that the school would review Mr. Epstein’s donations to Harvard and his designation as a visiting fellow. Investigators interviewed some 40 people, reviewed 250,000 pages of documents and set up tip lines.

Investigators were aware that “some members of the Harvard community continued their relationships with Epstein even after his conviction,” a school lawyer wrote to Mr. Bacow. But those relationships “in and of themselves did not violate Harvard policies.”

Mr. Lessig, from Harvard Law School, argued the review did not provide the full picture of Mr. Epstein’s connections to the school, instead largely blaming Dr. Nowak as if he were a rogue actor. “There were people who made the decision to protect Larry Summers. Who are they?” he said in an interview.

But Peter Lake, a professor at Stetson University College of Law, said it was not unusual for new threads to crop up after an internal review.

“At this point any contact with the devil will make you wonder, should I have asked more questions?” he said of Mr. Epstein. “But there’s a difference between not covering everything the first time you look, and obfuscation.”

The new information has led to some new consequences. Mr. Summers has resigned from Harvard. Dr. Nowak has been placed on leave.

But some students say the school is moving too slowly. There have been calls to rename Farkas Hall — named in honor of Mr. Farkas’s father — and a Harvard Kennedy School building named for the billionaire Leslie Wexner, another associate of Mr. Epstein’s.

Representatives for Mr. Farkas and for Mr. Wexner declined to comment.

Rosie Couture, a Harvard senior, was one of two students who faced a disciplinary investigation by the school after sharing a video of Mr. Summers addressing a class about Mr. Epstein. She said the drip of revelations over the past few months had been painful and she wanted the school to do more to hold people associated with Mr. Epstein accountable.

“It’s horrifying and sad especially for young women to be on campus and come to class and be mentored by professors who have ties to Jeffrey Epstein,” she said.