Dr. Mandy Cohen has been on a national tour. The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she aims to rebuild trust in that troubled agency at a moment when Covid-19 cases are rising again and the Biden administration has begun a new vaccine campaign. She has her work cut out for […]
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By many measures, the U.S. economy is thriving: Unemployment stands close to the 50-year low set in April, the fraction of people aged 25 to 54 in work is at a two-decade high, gross domestic product is growing rapidly, inflation is falling, and the S & P 500 is a third higher than it was […]
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When the summer started, transgender-rights supporters were riding a courtroom winning streak. In state after state — Indiana, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee — civil rights lawyers persuaded judges to block limits on transition care for minors. They won in front of judges appointed by Barack Obama, and in front of others appointed by Donald J. […]
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They went to the best universities in China and in the West. They lived middle-class lives in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and worked for technology companies at the center of China’s tech rivalry with the United States. Now they are living and working in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia — and just about any developed […]
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In one attack, gang members opened fire on people called to a protest by a church leader. In another, they set seven people on fire. And after months of escalating violence in Haiti, hundreds if not thousands have been killed — spurring a desperate vigilante movement against the gangs and a mass flight from Haiti’s […]
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Extremists in my party have threatened to try and remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy for relying on the votes of Democrats to keep the government open. Some of them appear to be authoritarian separatists who reject pluralism — a founding American principle that expects disparate groups to come together to keep the government functioning. Some of […]
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If the programs fail, they could seriously mar the I.R.A.’s public image. And right now, they are faltering. Perhaps the biggest problem is inherent to their design. The most successful federal programs are simple, straightforward and easy to use. Think of the U.S. Postal Service sending free at-home Covid tests to all Americans or the […]
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I’m not sure that an assembly of presidential candidates have ever given off stronger loser vibes, if I may use a word favored by the 45th president of the United States, than the Republicans who debated at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library this week. A snap 538/Washington Post/Ipsos poll and a CNN focus group both […]
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On the day Azerbaijan’s military sliced through the defenses of an ethnic Armenian redoubt last week, American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division had just finished a training mission in nearby Armenia, a longtime ally of Russia that has been trying to reduce its near-total dependence on Moscow for its security. The Americans unfurled a […]
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The State Department accused China on Thursday of using “deceptive and coercive methods” to shape the global information environment, by acquiring stakes in foreign newspapers and television networks, using major social media platforms to promote its views and exerting pressure on international organizations and media outlets to silence critics of Beijing. The accusations, detailed in […]
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After the U.S. attorney in Manhattan announced corruption charges last Friday against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the veteran Democratic lawmaker lashed back, calling the claims false and saying prosecutors had “misrepresented the normal work of congressional office.” Mr. Menendez has said a lot more in recent days about the indictment, but his assertion […]
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A NASA astronaut safely returned to Earth on Wednesday after spending 371 days in space, a record in spaceflight for American astronauts. Frank Rubio of NASA and his crewmates, the Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, made a safe, parachute-assisted landing southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 7:17 a.m. Eastern time. […]
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Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Josh Barro, who writes the newsletter Very Serious, and Sarah Isgur, a senior editor at The Dispatch, to discuss their expectations for the second Republican debate on Wednesday night. They also dig into and try to sort out a barrage of politics around […]
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Plant breeders, by nature, are patient people. It can take them years or even decades to perfect a new variety of fruit or vegetable that tastes better, grows faster or stays fresh longer. But their work has taken on a new urgency in the face of an increasingly erratic climate. Recent floods left more than […]
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I want to begin this column by sharing with you one of the worst things I ever did. I was only 18 years old, but that was no excuse. Late one night I got a call from a close friend. “My dad’s on the way to the hospital,” he said. “It’s really bad.” His voice […]
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Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have arrived at the United States border in the last two years, part of a historic wave of migrants headed north amid growing global crises. But Venezuela has been in the midst of an economic and humanitarian crisis for roughly a decade. Why are so many people going to the […]
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On Wednesday the Biden administration announced that it will offer work permits and deportation protections to over 400,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States since 2021. On paper this is a humanitarian gesture, a recognition of the miseries of life under the Maduro dictatorship. In political practice it’s a flailing attempt to respond […]
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Defending trade is politically fraught in part because so many American leaders underestimated the impact of China’s rise on American workers and failed to ensure that the benefits were broadly shared. That failure has changed Americans’ views of how our country relates to the rest of the world. A recent study reports that younger Americans […]
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The United Automobile Workers union significantly expanded its strike today to include every spare-parts distribution center operated by General Motors and Stellantis (the parent of Jeep and Ram). More than 5,000 workers at 38 plants across 21 states walked off the job, bringing the total number of striking U.A.W. workers to more than 18,000. The […]
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In recent years, Alisa Pata, a lifelong Democrat living in Manhattan, has spent far more time worrying about Donald J. Trump than immigration. But now, as she reads about the influx of migrants coming to her city, that’s starting to change. “We have too many people coming in,” said Ms. Pata, 85, as her older […]
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Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, landed in the United States on Monday an embattled man, dogged by months of mass protests against his efforts to reduce the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. He leaves on Saturday revitalized and potentially emboldened. Through six days of high-level meetings with world leaders and tech entrepreneurs, analysts said […]
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Nearly 500,000 people, many of them children, will keep Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage after state officials discovered major errors in their procedures for reviewing eligibility for the programs, federal officials said on Thursday. After a pandemic-era policy that guaranteed Medicaid coverage lapsed in April, states began checking to see whether tens of […]
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The era of ultralow interest rates may be over. At the very least, policymakers don’t expect the type of low borrowing costs that prevailed before the pandemic to return anytime soon. The Federal Reserve decided this week to leave interest rates unchanged at their highest level in two decades, and left the door open to […]
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Is it a case of a wish come true or “be careful what you wish for”? The news that the Biden administration would grant work permits to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants who had already entered the United States was welcomed by Democratic leaders from cities overwhelmed with a large influx of migrants unable […]
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As the Biden administration struggles to tackle a humanitarian and political crisis at America’s doorstep, it is focusing increasingly on keeping migrants far from the U.S.-Mexico border by establishing migration processing centers in Central and South America. But the program is off to a rocky start, with demand for appointments far outstripping supply, leading to […]
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Twenty years ago, the Republican Party started what may have been the most lifesaving government initiative in modern history. It turned the tide of AIDS around the world and has saved 25 million lives so far — equivalent to the entire population of Australia. So it’s a reflection of the madness that has infected the […]
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For the first time since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to office last December, he and President Biden met face to face on Wednesday in a session that both soothed and aggravated tensions between the leaders and demonstrated Mr. Biden’s wider commitment to Israeli security. By ending his informal moratorium on in-person contact […]
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While he took an unrelenting stance against Russia’s brutal war and warned against appeasing Moscow, he drew a more measured line on China, repeating his commitment to “push back on aggression and intimidation” by Beijing while seeking ways to work together and denying that he was trying to contain the Asian giant. “We seek to […]
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Why does the working class no longer support the party of working men and women? Well, obviously the decline of organized labor plays a huge role; the proportion of private-sector workers represented by a union is 6 percent, about half what it was in 1992. But Lainey Newman, a law student at Harvard, and the […]
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We’ve just had the hottest summer in recorded history, with runaway wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, ruinous floods from Slovenia, Sudan and Hong Kong to Vermont and Brazil. We’ve seen nearly half of the world’s ocean waters in a heat wave, having absorbed some 90 percent of the heat produced by our greenhouse gas emissions. […]
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Two weeks after replacing its defense minister, Ukraine dismissed all six of its deputy ministers on Monday, deepening the housecleaning at a ministry that had drawn criticism for corruption in procurement as the military budget ballooned during the war. The shake-up in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wartime leadership team came as he headed to the United […]
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