TIDBITS from ELDERUPDATES.COM, NUMBER 89, MAY 12, 2024

TIDBITS from ELDERUPDATES.COM

NO. 89, MAY 12, 2024

Just some of the news that's fit to print

"A Republic, if you can keep it."

STORMY DANIELS COOL AS CUCUMBER ON WITNESS STAND; WORM IN RFK’S BRAIN; U.S. CUTS OF OFFENSIVE ARMS TO ISRAEL; LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA AT FEDERAL LEVEL WITH OREGON CASE STUDY; STUDENTS HOLDING BIDEN TO HIGHER STANDARD THAN TRUMP?; INFLATION TOP U.S. CONCERN; EUROPE PREPARING TO DEFEND ITSELF - HOWEVER, HALF-HEARTEDLY; UKRAINE FUNDING BILL HAS LOTS OF $ FOR U.S. MANUFACTURERS; BIDEN EXTENDS DACA HEALTH COVERAGE; SOME HOMELESS TO BE HOUSED ON BEACHFRONT PROPERTY; MORE....

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

BLOGGER’S NOTES AND COMMENTS

HOPE Hicks testified that Trump told her about a conversation he had with Cohen in mid-February 2018. It was the morning after Cohen had told The New York Times that he had paid the $130,000 to Stormy Daniels without Trump’s knowledge, Hicks recalled.

“Mr. Trump was saying he had spoken to Michael and that Michael had paid this woman to protect him from a false allegation. And that Michael felt like it was his job to protect him and that that’s what he was doing. And he did it out of the kindness of his own heart and he never told anybody about it.” (Politico)

Research supporting the statement indicates the Easter Bunny visited Michael Cohen’s heart and this gift was simply the result of the influence of a higher power.

OIL prices increase .1% after Israel launches attack on Rafa. (BL)

STORMY Daniels apparently gave detailed and steamy testimony in the hush-money trial; the prosecution argued the excessive detail was necessary to show why Trump was willing to pay to hide the information from voters. This voter, however, awaits the release of the transcript of today’s hearing which will most likely be the most sexually detailed testimony since... since... well, since ever. While Ms. Daniels states she did not want the money for the money (and who will believe that?) she apparently acquitted herself well on the “stand”, so to speak (if you get your blogger’s drift).

FORMER White House attorney Ty Cobb criticized Judge Aileen Cannon after she indefinitely postponed former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents case.

“All she’s really done today, though, is make official what everybody, including Jack Smith, already knew, which was she had no intention of getting this case to trial,” Cobb told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday. (TheHill.com)

GEORGIA firebrand (Marjorie Taylor Greene aka “Moscow Marge”), is backing away from her pledge to hold an ouster vote, for now... the speaker was widely expected to survive any attempted firing this week, as Democrats had committed to helping him. (Politico)

REMOTE work boom continues as estimated 291,400 people last year migrated from other areas into America’s small towns and rural areas, (BL) defined as metropolitan areas with 250,000 people or fewer. (BL)

RFK Jr. says he had parasitic brain worm and undisclosed memory loss; parasite allegedly contracted while traveling “extensively in Africa, South America and Asia in his work as an environmental advocate.” ... Also claims “short- and long-term memory loss and described himself as having “cognitive problems, clearly.” ... and suffered from Mercury poisoning (blogger notes phrase “mad as a hatter” was due to hat makers using mercury). Kennedy also stated the parasite had eaten a part of his brain (the thinking part?). Hepatitis C from intravaneous drug use in his youth, according the Kennedy, may have also affected his memory.

Your blogger notes Kennedy probably got the polio vaccine, which is most likely the cause of all his problems although having a parasite eat part of your brain can also cause side effects.

CEASE fire talks stall in Cairo... Hamas said it was sending its delegation back to the Qatari capital, Doha, and remained committed to the cease-fire proposal it received last week, The Washington Post reported. Israel has said the proposal Hamas agreed to differed from the version it reviewed. An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said the Israeli team left Cairo on Thursday evening. (WP)

SEVERAL drones attacked an oil depot in Yurovka, Russia's Krasnodar Krai, on the night of May 8 to 9. The BBC Russian Service announced this on Telegram, Ukrinform reports. "About six drones were suppressed, but several fell on the territory of the oil depot. As a result, a fire broke out -- several tanks were damaged," the post said. It added that 62 firefighters and 20 pieces of equipment were involved in putting out the blaze. (Ukrinform)

EV batteries could last much longer thanks to new capacitor with 19-times higher energy density that scientists created by mistake. ... Researchers have developed capacitors from new "heterostructures" with a novel property that reduces the speed at which energy dissipates without affecting their ability to charge quickly. ...

While batteries can store energy for a long period, they take a long time to charge and discharge electricity. This is where capacitors come in — they store electricity in an electric field that can be quickly charged and discharged for rapid access to power as needed. (LIVE Science)

TESLA has introduced a long-range version of one of its most popular models (Model Y) that the Long Range rear-wheel-drive Model Y. A social media post promoting the new model boasts that it "allows you to commute all week without charging—at an even more accessible price." When equipped with 19-inch Gemini Wheels, the new version of the Model Y can hold 600 kilometers of range on a single charge, equivalent to about 373 miles. (TC)

RUSSIAN soldiers describe French CAESAR Self-Propelled Howitzer as nightmare. In online interviews Russian artillerymen on Telegram reveal that the Caesar cannon is now their most feared weapon... The ongoing conflict in Ukraine since February 2022 provides a unique opportunity for Western armies to test their equipment and doctrines in real combat situations. This war has challenged assumptions about the superiority of Western equipment over Russian counterparts, particularly in the field of artillery. However, one particular equipment seems to stand out, the French CAESAR.

CAESAR cannon, a truck-mounted artillery system designed by France was initially considered light and lacking in protection compared to other systems such as the Swedish Archer or the German Pzh2000, [but] the Caesar has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness. (Army Recognition Global Defense and Security news)

SENATE passes FAA bill with new consumer and safety protections, also increasing the number of air traffic controllers and aircraft safety inspectors, requiring airlines to refund customers for flight delays and prohibiting airlines from charging extra to seat families together. (WK)

HEAVY rains this winter and spring sent torrential flows down local creeks and rivers, and L.A. County managed to capture and store 96.3 billion gallons. (LAT)

ARTICLES

Breach Grows Between Biden and Israel’s Leaders Over Rafah Invasion

Defiant Israelis have vowed to do “whatever is necessary” in the Gaza Strip despite the American president’s threat to withhold weapons.

A large number of military vehicles, many bearing Israeli flags.

Israeli military vehicles near the border of the Gaza Strip on Thursday at an undisclosed location.Credit...Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Adam Rasgon, Julian E. Barnes and Michael Levenson

Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem.

May 9, 2024

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Israeli leaders declared on Thursday that they would not be deterred by President Biden’s threat to withhold more arms shipments if the military launched a major assault on densely populated areas of Rafah in southern Gaza.

Defiant and at times disdainful of the Biden administration’s stance, their comments made clear the widening rift between Israel and the United States over the war and the prospect of a full-scale invasion of Rafah, where about a million Palestinians are sheltering.

And they came as high-level negotiations aimed at reaching a cease-fire and hostage deal were derailed — at least for the moment — amid anger by some of the participants over a military incursion into Rafah by Israeli forces earlier this week.

After that incursion, Mr. Biden said the United States, Israel’s closest ally, would not ship more weapons that could be fired into crowded sections of Rafah. On Thursday, an Israeli military spokesman said his nation had enough munitions on hand to proceed with its plans.

Image

The American president descending a flight of stairs from an airplane.

President Biden getting off Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Md., after a campaign trip to Wisconsin and Illinois on Wednesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Other Israeli leaders said the military would press ahead with its campaign to destroy Hamas, which led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

“I turn to Israel’s enemies, as well as to our best of friends, and say: The state of Israel cannot be subdued,” Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said at a memorial ceremony. He said the country would do “whatever is necessary” to defend its citizens and “to stand up to those who attempt to destroy us.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while not responding directly to Mr. Biden, also struck a defiant tone. “If we need to stand alone, we will stand alone,” he said.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, was openly scornful of the American president. “Hamas ♥ Biden,” he wrote on social media, drawing what appeared to be a rebuke from Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog. Even when allies disagree, Mr. Herzog said, “there is a way to clarify the disputes.”

On Tuesday, American officials disclosed that Mr. Biden had withheld 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs out of concern that they could be dropped on Rafah. The administration was reviewing whether to hold back future transfers, including kits that convert so-called dumb bombs into precision-guided munitions, the officials said.

American-made weapons, including heavy bombs, have been essential to Israel’s war effort. But as the death toll in Gaza rises, Mr. Biden has been under mounting domestic pressure to rein in the Israeli offensive. In his comments on Wednesday, during an interview with CNN, he acknowledged that U.S. bombs had killed civilians in Gaza.

The Biden administration’s concerns have only grown since Israeli tanks and troops entered eastern Rafah on Monday night, taking over the main border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. Israeli forces have stopped short of entering built-up parts of the city, but Mr. Netanyahu and others have signaled that such an operation is necessary to eliminate Hamas battalions there.

Image

Displaced people arriving in vehicles with their belongings on top.

Palestinians returning to the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on Thursday to set up shelters.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

John F. Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, reiterated on Thursday that while Mr. Biden still supports Israel’s goal of defeating Hamas, “smashing into Rafah, in his view, will not advance that objective.”

Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates

Updated

May 9, 2024, 8:59 p.m. ET6 hours ago

6 hours ago

American aid ship heads toward Gaza, but the system for unloading it still isn’t in place.

U.N. agency that helps Palestinians says it has closed its headquarters in East Jerusalem after attacks and fire.

Japanese American civil rights group pushes for a Gaza cease-fire, breaking with its Jewish allies.

Nadav Eyal, a prominent columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, a centrist Israeli newspaper, wrote on social media that Mr. Biden’s shift on weapons for Israel was “the most serious clash between an American administration and the government of Israel since the first Lebanon war.” During that conflict, which began in 1982, the Reagan administration suspended the delivery of cluster-type artillery ammunition and other weapons to Israel.

“We’ve reached a boiling point,” Mr. Eyal said in an interview. “Issues that have been negotiated behind closed doors have now been brought into the public view in a very ugly way.”

Some observers had seen signs this week that Hamas and Israel were edging closer to a deal that would result in a cease-fire and the exchange of hostages being held in Gaza in return for Palestinian prisoners detained in Israel.

But on Thursday, high-level talks in Cairo were put on hold, according to officials briefed on the negotiations and Egyptian state media. One official said anger had flared among participants over Israel’s seizure of the Rafah border crossing.

While midlevel Egyptian, Qatari and American officials remained in Cairo, the Hamas and Israeli delegations both left on Thursday, Hamas and Israeli officials said. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director and top American negotiator, also left Cairo, according to multiple officials. The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic negotiations.

Mr. Burns had met with Mr. Netanyahu on Wednesday in an effort to persuade Israel to continue negotiating over a cease-fire proposal recently revised by Hamas.

Image

Protesters, one carrying an Israeli flag, on a road with trucks.

People in Israel blocking a road on Thursday to try to stop humanitarian aid trucks from crossing into the Gaza Strip at Kerem Shalom.Credit...Leo Correa/Associated Press

One official said that negotiators did not believe that Hamas or Israel were leaving the negotiations permanently. And a senior Egyptian official told state-owned television that mediation efforts were still underway to bridge the differences between Israel and Hamas.

Hamas is seeking an end to the war and the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops, while Israel is offering a temporary cease-fire. Mr. Netanyahu has said that Israel will not stop fighting until Hamas is eliminated and all the hostages are freed.

Israel’s incursion into Rafah this week has displaced about 80,000 people there, most of whom are now sheltering in the southern city of Khan Younis or along the Mediterranean coast in Deir al Balah, both areas that lack basic services, Farhan Haq, a United Nations spokesman, said on Thursday.

The Israeli military had told about 110,000 civilians to evacuate parts of Rafah, which has become a refuge for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians, many of them living in tents without adequate food, water and sanitation.

Riyad al-Masry, a sign language interpreter, said on Thursday that he and his extended family had left Rafah even though he had already moved five times since the war began. The prospect of a sixth move was “torture beyond torture,” he said — but he said nearby fighting gave him little choice.

“We are almost in the middle of danger,” Mr. al-Masry said.

Mr. Haq said that goods and fuel had not entered through the Rafah crossing in recent days and that hospitals may have to shut down their generators in a few days. He said the World Food Program had reported that its main warehouse in Gaza was inaccessible because of fighting and that only one bakery in Gaza was still operating.

Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian office in Geneva, described Rafah as a “highly active war zone,” and said it presented “serious challenges” for aid distribution in southern Gaza and farther north in the territory.

“We reiterate that the parties’ obligation to facilitate aid does not end at the border or in a drop-off zone,” he said. “Aid must safely reach those who need it.” (NYT)

U.S. offers Israel intelligence, supplies in effort to avoid Rafah invasion

Story by Yasmeen Abutaleb • 1h

U.S. offers Israel intelligence, supplies in effort to avoid Rafah invasion

The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance if it holds back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.

Sneaky Way California Homeowners Are Getting Their Old Roof Replaced

Smart Lifestyle Trends

Sneaky Way California Homeowners Are Getting Their Old Roof Replaced

American officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks.

Related video: 'Will stand alone': Netanyahu dismisses Biden's warnings, all set for Rafah | Decoded (India Today)

what our policy was. Should they launch a Rafa operation

Current Time 0:15

Duration 3:14

India Today

'Will stand alone': Netanyahu dismisses Biden's warnings, all set for Rafah | Decoded

View on Watch

President Biden and his senior aides have been making such offers over the last several weeks in hopes they will persuade Israel to conduct a more limited and targeted operation in the southern Gaza city, where some 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering after fleeing there from other parts of Gaza under Israeli orders. Israel has vowed to go into Rafah with “extreme force,” and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a number of steps that raised fears at the White House that the long-promised invasion could be materializing.

The Phenomenal 2024 Escalade Is Close To Perfection (Take A Look)

BestSearches

The Phenomenal 2024 Escalade Is Close To Perfection (Take A Look)

Administration officials, including experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development, have told Israel it will take several months to safely relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are now living in decrepit and unsanitary conditions in Rafah. Israeli officials disagree with that assessment.

These Barefoot Shoes Are Catching Neuropathy Experts by Surprise

Walker's Weekly

These Barefoot Shoes Are Catching Neuropathy Experts by Surprise

Biden aides are stressing to their Israeli counterparts that Palestinians cannot simply be moved to barren or bombarded parts of Gaza, but that Israel must provide basic infrastructure — including shelter, food, water, medicine and other necessities — so that those who are evacuated will have livable conditions and not simply be exposed to additional famine or disease.

6 Best Travel Rewards Cards

www.fool.com

6 Best Travel Rewards Cards

Experts from across the U.S. government are advising their Israeli counterparts in great detail on how to develop and implement such a humanitarian plan, down to the level of how many tents and how much water would be needed for specific areas, according to several people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Aid groups have said safely evacuating people from Rafah is nearly impossible given the conditions in the rest of Gaza.

The unusually detailed and sensitive talks highlight the enormous stakes facing both Israel and the United States as Netanyahu prepares to invade Rafah, the last city in Gaza that has not been devastated by Israel’s onslaught. Israel has become increasingly isolated during the seven-month Gaza war, which has resulted in almost 35,000 Palestinian deaths, and Biden has attracted enormous criticism domestically and abroad for backing it.

Israeli leaders contend that they must go into Rafah to finish the job of eliminating Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and killed about 1,200 people. But destroying the city’s extensive tunnel network, where many Hamas leaders and fighters are based, would endanger tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. That has led U.S. officials to urge a large-scale, inordinately complex evacuation plan as the best option, even as they push urgently for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire.

“We have serious concerns about how Israel has prosecuted this campaign, and that could all come to a head in Rafah,” said a senior administration official.

U.S. officials are now working closely with Egypt to find and cut off tunnels that cross the Egypt-Gaza border in the Rafah area, which Hamas has used to replenish militarily, according to two people familiar the discussions.

The American offers have come during negotiations over the last seven weeks between top U.S. and Israeli officials on the scale and scope of an operation in Rafah. It is not yet clear whether Israel will heed repeated U.S. warnings not to launch a full-scale ground invasion, particularly as Biden and Netanyahu had their most public break this week after months of building tensions and open conflict.

In recent days, Israel has seized a border crossing near Rafah and ordered more than 100,000 people to evacuate the city, frustrating U.S. officials since those ordered to leave were not given a secure, livable destination.

Some U.S. officials view those actions as an effort on Israel’s part to apply pressure in its ongoing negotiations with Hamas over an extended cease-fire in exchange for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Negotiators left Cairo this week, dimming hopes for a deal, but Biden aides insist they are still working on an agreement, which they view as the most promising way to end the war.

The Biden administration has made an internal assessment that Hamas — and its leader in Gaza, Yehiya Sinwar — would welcome a major, protracted battle in Rafah that is destructive and deadly, according to a senior administration official, because it would further isolate Israel.

U.S. officials say Israel has not launched a full-scale Rafah ground invasion at this point, despite a series of raids in recent days. In private discussions, Israel has said it is taking seriously American warnings and provided assurances as recently as Friday that its soldiers would not barrel into the city before evacuating about 800,000 Palestinians, according to a senior administration official familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.

Biden this week said he would withhold the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel if the country moves ahead with a Rafah invasion that targets population centers, a notable turnaround for the president, who has long resisted imposing consequences on Israel for its conduct in Gaza despite rising pressure from fellow Democrats. Netanyahu defiantly responded that Israel “will stand alone” if necessary.

Biden said Israel has not crossed his “red line” because its forces have not begun invading or bombing densely populated areas of Rafah.

Frank Lowenstein, a former State Department official and Middle East expert, said Biden is likely to give Israel some flexibility but that further scenes of families dying and suffering could provoke a strong reaction.

“Actually restricting more weapons deliveries is a step the Biden administration would probably prefer not to take. As a result of that, they’re likely to keep the definition of the red line flexible, so they can decide based on the entirety of the circumstances whether Israel has crossed it or not,” said Lowenstein, who helped lead Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2014. “It seems like the brightest part of that pink line would be mass casualty events for civilians in Rafah and large-scale armored incursions into the city.”

Israel has already launched strikes on Rafah that have killed dozens of civilians and further crippled already crumbling hospitals. This week, it seized the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, cutting off the main artery through which a limited amount of humanitarian aid was delivered. The World Health Organization warned that hospitals in southern Gaza were days away from running out of fuel. At least 110,000 people have fled Rafah as Israel’s bombardment there intensifies, according to U.N. agencies, and the population is suffering from widespread hunger and famine.

The Biden administration this week paused the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs over fears of how they might be used in a Rafah operation, suggesting that U.S. officials are growing wary of Israel’s assurances that it will moderate its tactics. One senior administration official said the U.S. wanted to signal to the Israelis that it had options at its disposal if Israel moves ahead in Rafah in ways the U.S. opposes, such as bombing densely packed areas.

If Israel opts to “smash” into Rafah, Biden would decide on withholding additional weapons shipments, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday. “Again, we hope it doesn’t come to that,” he added.

After his unwavering embrace of Israel during much of the Gaza war, Biden has more recently sought to balance that support with explicit warnings. Last Tuesday, at a Holocaust memorial event, he put the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in the context of the Holocaust. On Thursday, he warned in a CNN interview that a major invasion of Rafah would lead to a cutoff of U.S. offensive weapons. On Friday, his administration certified that Israel was not using U.S.-provided weapons in violation of international humanitarian law, an assertion strongly disputed by human rights groups.

As U.S.-Israel talks now focus more sharply on the shape of the Rafah operation, a senior administration official said, Israeli officials are not strongly pushing back on the U.S. demands, although they disagree that evacuating the civilians would take months. Netanyahu is also facing pressure from far-right cabinet ministers in his government, who want a scorched-earth campaign in Rafah.

Israel’s recent seizure of the Rafah border crossing angered many Biden aides, who have for months been pressing Israel to allow more aid into Gaza. The World Food Program has said northern Gaza is experiencing a full-blown famine, and aid groups warn that conditions in southern Gaza will become similarly dangerous if Israel does not quickly reopen the Rafah crossing.

Some aid groups also say there is currently no safe way to relocate people in Rafah to locations elsewhere in Gaza because the territory has been reduced to rubble, with collapsed infrastructure and defunct hospitals. Rafah is the southernmost city in Gaza, and U.S. officials and humanitarian aid groups have warned there is nowhere left for Palestinians to move, in part because of Egypt’s steadfast refusal to let them in.

“The aid community generally is very skeptical there’s any safe way to relocate people out of Rafah,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former USAID official in the Obama administration. “I’ve been really concerned about the U.S. line on this — that the line has not been, ‘End the war and don’t go into Rafah.’ The line has been to find a way to safely evacuate people, and that presumes that’s a possible thing.”

Konyndyk and other human rights activists are skeptical that an incursion by the Israel Defense Forces into Rafah would be less destructive than the rest of its Gaza campaign, no matter how closely the U.S. works to limit an invasion.

“I don’t think it’s credible, based on the past seven-plus months of IDF conduct, to think a Rafah invasion would not entail a similar level of civilian harm to what we’ve seen so far,” Konyndyk said. Noting that Israel’s recent actions in Rafah are already interfering with aid delivery, he added, “This is a fractional preview of what a full-on Rafah invasion would look like.” (WP)

Gaza Isn’t Root of Biden’s Struggles With Young Voters, Polls Show

Young voters are far more likely than other Americans to support Palestinians. But few cite the conflict as a top source of discontent with the president.

President Biden walks in the White House wearing a navy blue suit and light blue tie.

President Biden on Monday at the White House. Last week he addressed the upheaval on college campuses related to the Israel-Gaza conflict.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Charles HomansNeil Vigdor

By Charles Homans and Neil Vigdor

May 6, 2024

Young Americans’ outrage over the Israel-Hamas war has dominated the political conversation for weeks. Democratic and Republican lawmakers have made pilgrimages to Columbia University and other campuses to offer support to demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza or to denounce them, and President Biden addressed the upheavals in remarks on Thursday.

But these headlines are not reflective of young voters’ top concerns this election year, according to recent polls. Surveys taken in recent months show young voters are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict, but few of them rank the Israel-Hamas war among their top issues in the 2024 election. Like other voters, young people often put economic concerns at the top of the list.

And while young voters are cooler to Mr. Biden than they were at the same point in 2020, there is little evidence that American support for the Israeli invasion of Gaza is a critical factor in their relative discontent.

“When you have two presidents that have the same stance on one issue, that automatically puts that issue — I hate to say lower down the list, because it’s obviously an important issue, but it doesn’t make it an issue where I’m going to choose Donald Trump over Joe Biden,” said Devon Schwartz, a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

A student of both Muslim and Jewish descent who is active in a campus group promoting interfaith dialogue, Mr. Schwartz, 19, thought the protests at his college, which have drawn police crackdowns, were “a historic moment.” And he said he would have liked the opportunity to vote for a candidate who is “more progressive on Israel” than Mr. Biden in November. But he plans to vote for him anyway.

“I want to see policy changes from Joe Biden,” he said. “I don’t want to vote for Donald Trump and then just see the same exact policies.”

American sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted modestly toward Palestinians over the past decade. Although 51 percent of Americans remain more sympathetic toward Israelis, 27 percent now sympathize more with the Palestinian people, up from 12 percent in 2013, according to Gallup.

The shift is substantially generational, most likely reflecting not only changes in the conflict itself, and a rightward turn in Israeli politics, but also a decade in which pro-Palestinian activists have worked to connect the cause to domestic movements in the United States like Black Lives Matter and campaigns to divest from Israel have gained ground on college campuses.

The latest polling from the Pew Research Center finds 18-to-29-year olds three times more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict than those over 65, and twice as likely as adults as a whole.

“Not necessarily everyone is as fired up about it as we see from those out protesting,” said Laura Silver, the associate director of global research for Pew. “But 18-to-29-year-olds are far and away different from older Americans.”

Recent polls suggest these sympathies have yet to translate into prioritizing the war as a voting issue in 2024.

In the Harvard Institute of Politics’ Youth Poll conducted shortly before the past month’s wave of campus demonstrations and crackdowns, 18-to-29-year-old Americans overwhelmingly faulted Mr. Biden for his handling of the conflict in Gaza, with 76 percent disapproving and 18 percent approving. But only 2 percent of them rated it their top concern in the election, compared with 27 percent who said they were most concerned about economic issues.

In an Economist/YouGov poll taken more recently, in late April, 22 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 listed inflation as their most important issue. Two percent named foreign policy as their top concern. (The poll did not specifically ask about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

“My friends and I, we all are very concerned about the war in the Middle East, and we disagree with the Biden administration’s agenda there,” said Coral Lin, 20, a student at Duke University. She said she had one friend who had voted “uncommitted” in a Democratic primary in protest over the issue.

“But I still know a lot of people who hold that view and still are voting for Biden,” she said, noting that her own concerns about the climate and her belief that Mr. Trump poses a threat to democracy have led her to continue to support Mr. Biden.

Clara Getty, 21, a student at the University of Virginia and a Biden supporter, said she saw parallels with Lyndon B. Johnson’s woes in the 1968 Democratic primary while facing outrage over the Vietnam War — and a cautionary tale. “He made so much progress on domestic issues that I think could’ve greatly benefited from a second term,” she said. “And I think so much is similar for Biden.”

Others argued, however, that even if the Gaza conflict didn’t lead to a mass exodus of young voters to Mr. Trump, it could pose problems for Mr. Biden if young people don’t vote.

“You hear from a lot of people who are just increasingly apathetic about voting for Joe Biden,” said Cameron Driggers, a 19-year-old University of Florida student and member of the youth council of the state Democratic Party.

An Israel divestment campaign organizer on his campus, Mr. Driggers noted that Mr. Biden would need not just votes but youth organizers to win in 2024, including many who had become active in the protest politics around Gaza.

“He continues to basically spit in the face of youth organizers around the country,” he said. “He’s especially enraging the people who turn out votes.”

In a statement, Mia Ehrenberg, a Biden campaign spokeswoman, pointed to the campaign’s investments in its own campus organizers and youth groups, and its intention to “continue to show up and communicate with young voters on the issues they care about,” including climate change, gun laws and student loans.

The Biden administration has recently announced more changes to student loan repayments and Mr. Biden directed his administration to consider reclassifying marijuana as a less serious drug. His campaign promoted his stance on X at exactly 4:20 p.m. on April 20.

Mr. Driggers said he had broadly supported Mr. Biden before the Gaza invasion, citing his steps liberalizing marijuana policies, support for labor rights, and withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But his support had been tested by Gaza.

“I do recognize that Trump is almost certainly going to be worse than Biden on all of these issues,” he said. “But at a certain point, you know, there has to be a line” for Biden. “And I believe he’s close to crossing that.” (NYT)

Why did Oregon recriminalize drug possession?

Arrests resume in the Beaver State, along with a new treatment effort

Illustration of Tina Kotek, Ted Wheeler and scenes of homelessness, civil unrest and drug use

(Image credit: Illustration by Stephen Kelly / Alamy / Getty / AP)

Joel Mathis, The Week US

BY JOEL MATHIS, THE WEEK US

PUBLISHED APRIL 4, 2024

Oregon's experiment with drug decriminalization is over. Gov. Tina Kotek (D) on Monday approved a new law that recriminalizes the possession of small amounts of "hard drugs" — but also "expands funding for substance abuse treatment," Oregon Public Broadcasting said. The measure comes four years after Beaver State voters backed a ballot measure to end arrests for people found possessing cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine in amounts meant for personal use.

That 2020 vote was "celebrated as a groundbreaking step toward a compassionate approach to substance use disorders," said The Guardian. But Oregonians now say that step coincided with a "spiraling drug use" that accompanied an "epidemic of cheap, widely available" fentanyl, a rise in homelessness and a shocking increase in overdose deaths. The state saw nearly 1,000 opiate overdose fatalities in 2022. "Oregon was a leader in this space," Haven Wheelock, a harm-reduction advocate, said of recriminalization. "It will set us back."

Others see a different lesson, NBC News said. "Combatting a problem by decriminalizing the problem is bad policy," Oregon Senate Republicans said in a statement. Opponents of the new law, though, worry that it will do little to put a dent in addiction problems in the state. And they lament what might have been. "We were too progressive," said one outreach worker. "Society wasn't ready for it."

Failure? Or misunderstood?

"No, Oregon's drug decriminalization law was not a failure," Robert Gebelhoff said at The Washington Post. Yes, the law was "seriously flawed." But there's "no evidence" the law created Oregon's current drug problem — the state has "fared no worse in terms of overdose deaths in recent years than similar states." The more likely culprit for those deaths: "The pandemic and the rise of fentanyl." Returning to the days of jailing Oregonians won't help. "Research consistently shows that people are at higher risk of overdose after incarceration."

Decriminalization has been an "unquestionable failure," Kevin Sabet said at Newsweek. It resulted in "more overdose deaths, crime, and public drug use." Officials were so overwhelmed by the problems that they declared a state of emergency in downtown Portland in January. None of this should have been a surprise, and it explains why Oregonians soured on the experiment so quickly. "When our laws send a message that drugs are not of public concern, what did we think would happen?"

Did Oregon give up too soon? Decriminalization advocates point to Portugal, Politico said, which has seen a 75% drop in drug deaths after adopting a similar strategy in 2001. That success "wasn't achieved overnight or even in three years," those advocates say. Portugal had something that Oregon didn't: An "expansive and trusted public health network" with experience in addiction treatment. "These things take time," said one Portuguese official. That's time Oregon no longer has.

'The war on drugs didn't work'

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler backed the new law, The New York Times said, but he isn't interested in a full-blown return to the old ways. "The war on drugs didn't work," he said. While it is "necessary" to give law enforcement the tools to deal with drug problems, officials must also do the "hard work to build the behavioral health infrastructure that was lacking." The biggest problem with the decriminalization law was a failure to have those support services in place, Wheeler said. "The treatment infrastructure has to be in place first."

That may happen under the new law. It will put $211 million into new programs, Oregon Capital Chronicle said, including "new and expanded residential treatment facilities, recovery houses" and other efforts to treat drug addiction. Arrests for drug possession will return, but they won't be the only tool in the state's toolbox. The new law, Gov. Tina Kotek said, "represents a package that encourages treatment first, while balancing the need for accountability." (WK)

Ignorance of Mideast History

In an interview on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe,” on Thursday, Ms. Clinton criticized student protesters, saying many were ignorant of the history of the Middle East, the United States and the world.

Hillary Clinton holds a microphone and wears a detailed jacket and black pants. She is seated and speaking next to an interviewer who also holds a microphone, and is wearing sneakers, black pants and a sweater.

Hillary Clinton, shown during an event in April, claimed that the Palestinians would have long had a state of their own if they had accepted a deal brokered by her husband in 2000.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Livia Albeck-Ripka

By Livia Albeck-Ripka

Published May 9, 2024

Updated May 10, 2024, 1:26 a.m. ET

Hillary Clinton on Thursday criticized campus protesters, saying young people “don’t know very much” about the history of the Middle East.

“I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months now,” she said on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” on Thursday. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”

Ms. Clinton then went on to imply that young people “don’t know” that had Yasir Arafat, the former leader of the Palestinian Authority, accepted a deal brokered by her husband, President Bill Clinton, the Palestinians would already have a state of their own. “It’s one of the great tragedies of history that he was unable to say yes,” she said.

The comments, made in response to a sprawling question about radicalization on university campuses from the host, Joe Scarborough, were criticized on social media by those who said that Ms. Clinton, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, was underestimating students’ capacity.

While some said they agreed with Ms. Clinton, others described her characterization of the failure of the Oslo peace process — a yearslong attempt to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians that began in 1993 but ultimately failed — as an oversimplification.

“For Clinton to say this is really disingenuous,” Osamah F. Khalil, a professor of history and Middle East expert at Syracuse University, said in an interview. He noted that in the lead-up to the summit at Camp David in 2000, where negotiations ultimately faltered, Mr. Arafat had warned former president Bill Clinton that “the two sides were not ready.” To lay blame squarely on the Palestinians was unfair, he added, noting that there had been other missed opportunities for a solution. “Diplomacy is not a one-time mattress sale,” Prof. Khalil said.

Ms. Clinton’s comments about the students failed to give them, or the elite institutions at which many are protesting, due credit, he said.

The comments come after students walked out of Ms. Clinton’s class in November to protest what they perceived as the school’s role in publicly shaming students who had signed a statement saying the Israeli government bore responsibility for the war. Last month, others disrupted Ms. Clinton’s visit to her alma mater, Wellesley College. (NYT)

In Holocaust remembrance, Biden condemns antisemitism sparked by college protests and Gaza war

President Joe Biden has condemned the “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world.”

By Zeke Miller | AP

May 7, 2024 at 10:15 p.m. EDT

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Tuesday decried a “ferocious surge” in antisemitism on college campuses and around the globe in the months since Hamas attacked Israel and triggered a war in Gaza, using a ceremony to remember victims of the Holocaust to also denounce new waves of violence and hateful rhetoric toward Jews.

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Biden said that on Oct. 7, Hamas “brought to life” that hatred with the killing of more than 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and warned that, already, people are beginning to forget who was responsible.

The president used his address to renew his declarations of unwavering support for Israel in its war against Hamas even as his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has grown increasingly strained over Israel’s push to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, which would surely worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis for Palestinians.

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns about Israel’s decision on Rafah.

Biden has struggled to balance his support for Israel since the attack by Hamas — the deadliest day for Jews worldwide since the Holocaust — with his efforts to protect civilian life in Gaza.

While acknowledging the ceremony was taking place during “difficult times,” Biden made no explicit reference to the deaths of more than 34,700 Palestinians since the attack by Hamas led Israel to declare war in Gaza. The tally from the Hamas-run health ministry includes militants, but also many civilians caught up in the fighting.

“My commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree,” Biden said.

“We’re at risk of people not knowing the truth,” Biden said of the horrors of the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. “This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world.”

Follow Election 2024

Biden steered clear of the upcoming presidential election in his speech. But it played out in counterpoint to former President Donald Trump’s criticism of the incumbent for not doing more to combat antisemitism. Trump has a long personal history of rhetoric that invokes the language of Nazi Germany and plays on stereotypes of Jews in politics.

Biden’s remarks at the Capitol played out as pro-Palestinian protests — some of which have involved antisemitic chants and threats toward Jewish students and supporters of Israel — rock college campuses across the country.

“As Jews around the world still cope with the atrocity and trauma of that day and its aftermath, we’ve seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world,” Biden said.

“Not 75 years later, but just seven and a half months later, and people are already forgetting, they’re already forgetting, that Hamas unleashed this terror that it was Hamas that brutalized Israelis, that it was Hamas that took and continues to hold hostages,” Biden said. “I have not forgotten, nor have you. And we will not forget.”

The Capitol event, hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, also featured remarks from House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Holocaust survivors, local youth and elected officials took part in the remembrance ceremony, which included a recitation of the Jewish prayers for the dead.

The campus protests have posed a political challenge for Biden, whose coalition has historically relied on younger voters, many of whom are critical of his public support for Israel.

Biden said “There’s no place on any campus in America” or any place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence. He added, “We’re not a lawless country — we are a civil society”

In conjunction with Biden’s speech, his administration was announcing new steps to combat antisemitism on colleges campuses and beyond. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights was sending every school district and college in the nation a letter outlining examples of antisemitism and other hate that could lead to federal civil rights investigations.

The Department of Homeland Security was moving to educate schools and community groups about resources and funding available to promote campus safety and address threats. And the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism was meeting with technology companies on how to combat the rise in hateful conflict online.

On Monday, Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris and the first Jewish spouse of a nationally elected American leader, met with Jewish college students at the White House about the administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism. He heard students describe their own experiences with hatred, including threats of violence and hate speech, his office said.

Trump’s campaign on Monday released a video on Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day, that aimed to contrast the 2024 presidential candidates’ responses on antisemitism.

The video shows images of Trump visiting Israel and speeches he has given pledging to stand with Jewish people and confront antisemitism, while showing footage of the protests on campuses and clips of Biden responding to protesters upset with his administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas.

One of the clips shows Biden saying, “They have a point,” but it does not include the next sentence in which Biden said, “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza.”

Biden campaign spokesman James Singer said in response that “President Biden stands against antisemitism and is committed to the safety of the Jewish community, and security of Israel — Donald Trump does not.” (WP)

Jewish families say anti-Israel messaging in Bay Area classrooms is making schools unsafe

Protesters hold flags bearing the Star of David.

Jewish families across the Bay Area are pushing back against what they describe as an overt anti-Israel bias in K-12 classrooms. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

By Hannah Wiley

Staff Writer

May 10, 2024 3 AM PT

Facebook

Twitter

Show more sharing options

SAN FRANCISCO — In the weeks after Hamas’ deadly cross-border attacks on Israeli border towns and Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza, a seventh-grade Jewish student at Roosevelt Middle School in San Francisco grew accustomed to seeing her classmates display their support for Palestinians.

Students wore shirts that read “Free Palestine” and “All eyes on Gaza.” But it was more of a background hum until spring, when things took a sharper turn.

During a school assembly, a classmate spoke out against the war, equating it to genocide. Then, one teacher asked students to create a “propaganda poster” that would “persuade your audience” on an issue important to them. Many students used the opportunity to create public service announcements for cleaner oceans or against food waste and texting while driving. A handful called for an end to the war in Gaza.

One poster, prominently displayed by the teacher, caught the seventh-grader’s attention. A student had drawn an image of a Star of David exuding thick chains shackling what appeared to be an outline of Israel and the Palestinian territories. Beneath the image, written in red and all capitals, was the phrase “from the river to the sea” — a slogan many Jewish people consider a call for the expulsion and genocide of Israeli Jews. Inside the star was the word “Zionism,” the student said.

“It felt really unsafe. I couldn’t be in there anymore, because there was hate against my religion up on the wall,” said the student, whose parents requested The Times not identify her by name because of concerns she would face retribution from classmates and teachers.

Her parents scheduled a meeting with school officials and said they came away startled at how little the administrators knew about the history of Israel and the region — and why Jewish families would consider the poster offensive. They said it took hours of discussion before school leaders agreed to ask the teacher to take it down.

“This is antisemitic propaganda,” the girl’s mother said. “This would not be acceptable for any other group.”

The family is hoping to transfer their daughter to a new school next year.

The incident is emblematic of what many Jewish families in Bay Area communities say is an undercurrent of antisemitism that has emerged unchecked in K-12 schools amid the divisive national debates spawned by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In San Francisco, Viviane Safrin is serving as a point person for Jewish families who want to report concerns about school lessons and activities they perceive as antisemitic.

“It often feels like I’m a triage nurse or ER doctor,” said Safrin, who sent two of her children to San Francisco public schools and overall had a positive experience. “My phone is dinging from the time I wake up until I go to bed with different photos from different things that have happened at school, or a lesson plan, or this and that was said to a student by peers.”

Disagreement over how the war in Gaza should be taught in K-12 schools has fractured a region that harbors some of the nation’s most progressive and antiwar communities. It’s also raised challenging questions about the line between free speech and hurtful bias, and what obligation public schools have to ensure all students feel welcome in their classrooms, regardless of their opinions on the conflict.

Many of the families who spoke with The Times have personal ties to Israel, whether through birth or because close family members live there. As Jewish Americans, all were raised to respect and embrace Israel as the Jewish homeland.

Some did not consider themselves overtly Zionist before the war — and disagree with some of Israel’s politics. But they believe without question that Israel has a right to exist as the world’s only Jewish state and because of that belief suddenly find themselves labeled as racists and genocide enablers.

Worse, for many parents, is watching as their children are somehow held accountable for a government on the other side of the world.

According to a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 82% of Jewish people said caring about Israel was an important part of their Jewish identity. More than a quarter had lived in Israel or visited multiple times, and 45% had visited at least once.

The Bay Area is home to an estimated 350,000 Jewish people, according to a 2021 report led by the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund. They encompass a diverse spectrum of opinions on Israel and its government, including pro-Palestinian Jewish organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which was founded in the Bay Area in the 1990s.

Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation executive director of the Hillel Jewish Student Center at UC Berkeley, sent his three sons through Berkeley schools. Naftalin-Kelman, who said he was speaking as a Berkeley parent and not in his official capacity at the student center, said it’s incumbent on K-12 educators to consider all of the experiences of young students and their families when considering how lesson plans affect their sense of belonging.

“There’s a heaviness that exists since Oct. 7 for Jewish families, families that have a connection to Israel, Zionists, Israelis,” Naftalin-Kelman said. And many now have a thudding sense that some of their teachers, classmates and colleagues have “no understanding of who they are.”

“Unfortunately, what I think is happening now is we are stuck with simple slogans that put people in camps, that remove all nuance and complexity in what is one of the most complex conversations around religion, identity, politics and nationhood,” he said. “I think there are sometimes mistakes and administrators can do more. But it doesn’t mean there is mal-intent.”

Los Angeles, CA - April 29: Graffiti at the Powell Library on the UCLA campus where pro-Palestinian demonstrators erected an encampment on the on Monday, April 29, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

CALIFORNIA

‘Are you a Zionist?’ Checkpoints at UCLA encampment provoked fear, debate among Jews

May 9, 2024

Jewish families across the Bay Area have raised a range of concerns about what they perceive as antisemitism in K-12 classrooms, including teachers displaying pro-Palestinian posters and adopting lesson plans that portray Israel as a white colonialist aggressor. Some said their children have been accused of supporting genocide because they won’t renounce Israel’s right to exist.

Some of the complaints have spawned federal investigations.

In February, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League filed a federal complaint with the Department of Education over “severe and persistent” harassment and discrimination against Jewish kids in Berkeley schools.

On Wednesday, Berkeley Supt. Enikia Ford Morthel was called before a Republican-led congressional subcommittee investigating allegations of “pervasive antisemitism” in K-12 schools. Ford Morthel forcefully rejected accusations that Berkeley schools had become a breeding ground for antisemitism, saying educators were working hard to ensure all students feel welcome.

“There have been incidents of antisemitism in Berkeley Unified School District,” she said. “And every single time that we are aware of such an incident, we take action and follow up.”

The teachers union in Oakland Unified endorsed an unsanctioned pro-Palestinian “teach-in” in December, prompting a civil rights probe by the Department of Education. The union also provided teachers with pro-Palestinian lessons to use in place of district-provided curriculum, drawing a stern warning from Oakland’s superintendent,

The division has pushed some parents, like Shira Avoth, to pull their kids out of Oakland schools.

Avoth, who was born in Tel Aviv and moved to the U.S. at age 11, said she has requested a “safety transfer” for her son, a seventh-grader, to a school in neighboring Piedmont.

Avoth said one of her son’s teachers put “End genocide now” posters up in the classroom and assigned homework that was “politically charged” even before Oct. 7. Eventually, she said, her son transferred out of that classroom. But he then spent a month working on assignments in a room by himself during that class period.

Several families spoke of a pervasive sense that pro-Israel voices are not welcome in classrooms.

A senior at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology in San Francisco, who asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals, said he had an open mind, at first, to criticism of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. But he couldn’t understand why some of his friends wouldn’t condemn the Hamas attacks that prompted Israel’s retaliation.

“I felt so ostracized,” he said.

He said those feelings only deepened when a pro-Palestinian group was brought in to speak about the war in one of his classes, and when posters advertising meetings of the Jewish Student Union were torn down.

“I’ve been bullied, but the main issue is the classroom — the intrusion of this anti-Israel ideology into the classroom,” he said. “If you just say ‘Zionist,’ you can say anything against the Jews. It’s like politically correct.”

Julia David, an English teacher at George Washington High in San Francisco, said she also has felt more estranged in recent months. David has family in Israel and became the sponsor of her school’s Jewish Student Union this year. The club was started to create a community for students to safely discuss the Jewish-American experience and how they feel about the conflict.

David said the group will talk about what it feels like to hear “Free Palestine” in the hallway or when they see anti-Israel graffiti on bathroom walls.

“When I was teaching, I had never worn a Jewish Star of David necklace before. I do every day now,” David said. “And I wear it proudly, and I make sure it is seen.”

In a January letter to San Francisco families, Supt. Matt Wayne assured families the district would not tolerate bullying and harassment.

“We are aware of these allegations and take them very seriously,” a spokesperson wrote in an email to The Times. “Due to our obligation to protect student and staff privacy, we cannot share details of completed or ongoing investigations.”

The issue of how and whether to teach about the conflict has also divided Jewish families, most notably in Berkeley, where some residents reject claims of unchecked antisemitism and consider the federal complaint a bogus effort to keep Muslim and Arab voices silenced.

Soon after Berkeley’s superintendent finished testifying before Congress, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Council on American-Islamic Relations responded by filing a federal complaint alleging “severe and pervasive anti-Palestinian racism” in Berkeley schools.

“Some [teachers] have been teaching for decades; they have never been silenced on political speech,” said Sahar Habib Ghazi, the mother of a sixth-grader and a member of Berkeley Families For Collective Liberation. “We are a political city. ... People don’t move to Berkeley to be apolitical.”

Ghazi said the war isn’t just of global significance for many students but also of deeply personal importance for their families.

“They are very aware that the war is being funded by U.S. tax dollars, and that’s the same money that’s funding their schools,” Ghazi said. “They don’t see it as a global issue. They see it as a local issue.” (LAT)

Russia Issues Direct Warning to US Over Crimea: 'Doomed to Failure'

Published May 04, 2024 at 11:25 AM EDT

Crimea Satellite Images Show Most of Russian Black Sea Fleet Left Peninsula

By Brendan Cole

Senior News Reporter

577

Moscow has accused the U.S. and other allies of Ukraine of preparing strikes on Crimea, warning that in such a scenario, there would be "retaliation."

Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Friday that the Crimean bridge, which links Russia with the peninsula illegally annexed by Moscow since 2014, was "again under attack."

Over the course of the war started by Vladimir Putin, there have been repeated strikes on the bridge, also known as the Kerch Bridge. The structure for Kyiv symbolizes Russian occupation but is also a key link to transport Moscow's troops and equipment to the front line and a strike on it could impact its war effort.

As well as the bridge, Ukraine has also stepped up its attacks on Russian naval assets in the wider region with repeated strikes on vessels and infrastructure belonging to the Black Sea Fleet, much of which Moscow has relocated to Novorossiysk, in Russia's Krasnodar region.

Crimean bridge

This image from July 17, 2023 shows a Russian warship sailing near the Kerch bridge, linking the Russian mainland to Crimea. Russia's foreign ministry has warned the U.S. against strikes on Crimea. GETTY IMAGES

Zakharova said preparations "are being carried out openly, with ostentatious bravado and with the absolute and direct support of the collective West."

She referred to the reported delivery of U.S.-supplied ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) long range missiles last month, citing the Russian defense ministry's claim that six of the missiles had been shot down over the peninsula last week.

U.S. officials said last month that Kyiv had started using ATACMS missiles for the first time on a Russian military airfield in Crimea, hitting Russian forces in another occupied area.

Washington had first delivered mid-range older models of ATACMS missiles last year with a shorter range of around 100 miles but the newer missiles have a range of up to 190 miles, potentially putting hundreds of Russian military facilities in Crimea within range.

READ MORE Russia-Ukraine War

Ukraine's Crimea Bridge Bluster Appears to Have Paid Off

In her briefing, Zakharova also noted reports that Kyiv was set to receive its first delivery of F-16 aircraft, "which, according to the British, can also be used in the operation to destroy the Crimean Bridge."

"We would like to once again warn Washington, London and Brussels that any aggressive actions against Crimea are not only doomed to failure, but will also receive an indestructible blow of retaliation," she said, without specifying further.

The U.S. State Department told Newsweek that Zakharova's allegations "are categorically false."

"No one wants this war to end more than Ukraine and its people. Russia is solely responsible for the war and is the sole obstacle to peace in Ukraine," a statement said. "Putin could end this war today. Unfortunately, the Kremlin has yet to demonstrate any meaningful interest in ending its war, quite the opposite."

Following her comments, the Russian defense ministry said on Saturday its air defense forces shot down four ATACMS missiles over the Crimean Peninsula, claiming that they had successfully downed 15 of the missiles in recent weeks.

Russia often claims to have downed Ukrainian missiles and drones without reporting damage, although later reports can show how military targets or infrastructure have actually been struck.

Update 05/07/24, 5: a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from the U.S. State Department. (NEWS)

Russian Losses Fast Approaching Four Grim Milestones: Kyiv

Published Apr 25, 2024 at 7:57 AM EDT

Russia Smashes Past Grim Milestone After Day Of Heavy Losses: Kyiv

By Brendan Cole

Senior News Reporter

Russian forces' losses of four kinds of equipment are about to hit notable milestones, according to the latest estimates by Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on Thursday that, in the previous 24 hours, Russia had lost 14 armored fighting vehicles. This took the total number since the start of Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022 to 13,942—only 58 shy of 14,000.

Newsweek has been as yet unable to verify these totals and has emailed the Russian Defense Ministry about Ukraine's latest figures. Kyiv says these "do not claim to be particularly accurate," although they do give "an idea of the general order of losses—how many billions of dollars are left in the form of Russian scrap metal in the fields of Ukraine."

Kyiv has been fighting with depleted ammunition as the Ukrainians await military assistance worth over $60 billion that has just been passed by U.S. Congress. Ukraine is expected to receive a new tranche of equipment within days.

Other round numbers of losses loom for Russian forces, according to Kyiv, which said in its latest update that 57 cars and cisterns had been lost the previous day, taking the total over the course of the war to 15,949, or 51 short of 16,000.

Ukrainian servicemen

This illustrative image from March 31, 2024 shows three servicemen from the 1st Tank Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. Ukraine's latest figures show the high number of Russian equipment losses in Vladimir Putin's full-scale... More GETTY IMAGES

NEWSLETTER

The Frontlines

Battlefront News

In-depth coverage on the War in Ukraine shared weekly.

Enter your email address

Ukraine war map shows stalled Russian advances

Russian losses in Ukraine on course to far outstrip 2023 total

Ukraine has destroyed nearly 1,000 drones, after downing 10 on Wednesday, to take the total number of destroyed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have wreaked havoc on infrastructure in Ukraine to 9,449.

Another milestone appears imminent, with 28 artillery systems taken out the previous day, putting the total number of Russian losses of this piece of equipment to 11,836—only 164 short of 12,000.

Ukraine also said on Thursday that, over the previous day, Russia has suffered troop losses of 1,040, the first four-figure number since April 12.

The latest figures put Moscow's troop losses over the course of the war at around 462,980, a tally that includes both dead and injured. Accurate troop losses are difficult to assess, and Ukraine's numbers are lower than other estimates.

In February, the British Defense Ministry said Russian losses had numbered 350,000. Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and BBC Russian reported on April 13 that that at least 50,471 members of the Russian military had died in the war. Among them were 3,300 officers of the army and other security forces, and 390 had the rank of lieutenant colonel and above.

This was based on publicly available information, such as obituaries, graves and inheritance cases, and was likely to be an underestimate.

Mediazona said that more than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of combat, showing the human cost of the marginal gains made by Moscow as the Russians engaged in the so-called "meat grinder" strategy. (NEWS)

Europe boosts its defenses, a menthol cigarette dilemma, and AI rights

Good evening,

French President Emmanuel Macron says Europe needs to be ready to go it alone. Given former President Donald Trump’s “antipathy” to NATO and signs of “disengagement” by President Joe Biden, France and the U.K. may need to become the new “nuclear umbrella” for the continent. In today’s edition, Joel Mathis explains what Europe is doing to prepare its defenses for that future.

Summer Meza

The Week Digital

TODAY’S BIG QUESTION

Is Europe ready to come to its own defense?

After decades of relying on the United States and NATO to shoulder the burden of its defense, French President Emmanuel Macron last week declared the continent must build “stronger, more integrated European defenses.” That means building industrial capacity and its own anti-missile shield. “There is a risk our Europe could die,” he said. “We are not equipped to face the risks.”

France already has a nuclear arsenal, The Wall Street Journal said, but it may be time to “Europeanize” those weapons. “This deterrence contributes to the credibility of European defense,” Macron said. Some German officials are reportedly looking to France and the U.K. to provide a nuclear umbrella for the continent “should the U.S. no longer be willing to fulfill that role.”

What did the commentators say?

Macron has been calling for “European security and strategic autonomy” since he first took office in 2017, Carine Guerout and Jason C. Moyer said at the Wilson Center. Russia’s attack on Ukraine spurred his original vision into something closer to reality. Now, “military budgets are reaching unprecedented levels.”

The French leader is “determined to make a lasting impact on the EU,” Ania Nussbaum said at Bloomberg, but the next step requires that his “ideological victories translate into concrete action.” Macron’s peers think he’s better at grandstanding than “quiet diplomatic coordination.” And while France has increased its defense production, the “continent is nowhere near being the ‘war economy’ that Macron proclaimed in the summer of 2022.”

What next?

There is some action, however. The U.K. pledged to boost its defense budget by $94 billion over six years to “pile pressure on European allies to follow suit,” said Politico. “We can’t keep thinking America will pay any price or bear any burden if we are unwilling to make sacrifices for our own security,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said during a visit to Poland.

But it’s not clear when — or if — Europe will be able to stand on its own. “Many EU officials believe there is currently no credible alternative to the U.S. military umbrella,” said NBC News. But Macron insists the continent has no choice but to prepare. “The United States has two priorities: the United States first and the China question second,” he said. “The European question is not a geopolitical priority.” (WK)

Your blogger believes Macron is on to something – the world has changed and the peace dividend of the Clinton years has been spent in the U.S. and Europe on social programs – while countries such as China and Russia just continued spending on military hardware and personnel. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but your blogger believes many of those currently protesting for the rights of Gazans would be willing, indeed eager, to take off their masks and pick up a rifle to fight for the freedoms of those heroes in Ukraine who are also being subjugated by a dominant power. If not, it won’t be the first mistake in judgement your blogger has made this year; that probably happened on January 1st or 2nd. But at least your blogger tries not to make the same mistake day after day after day after...unlike some of those written about in this blog.

Assessing the most important issue to American voters

It’s inflation, not immigration.

Analysis by Philip Bump

National columnist

May 6, 2024 at 5:28 p.m. EDT

Signs in Montgomery, Ala., in early March encourage voters to think beyond that day's vote near a polling place. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

Speaking to Semafor, New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn explained how he saw his newsroom’s role in the 2024 election.

“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have,” Kahn said, responding to criticism that his paper has been insufficiently critical of Donald Trump. “At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.”

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Raising the question: Is it?

Skip to end of carousel

Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.

End of carousel

The trick with asking people how they view issues is that you will never get a completely satisfying set of results. The nature of polling is that you can’t ask everyone about everything, and your descriptors of issues will necessarily elide some nuance. Your concern about democracy, for example, might be that Trump is threatening to undercut the results of the 2024 election, while mine might be that there is a risk that Democrats will steal a victory. (That is not actually my concern.) Even simply asking people how concerned they are about abortion glosses over a lot of nuance and distinctions in that issue.

But we work with what we’ve got. And what we’ve got suggests that immigration isn’t really a top concern of American voters — with one exception.

Before we demonstrate that, though, we have to introduce another set of complications. Some issues are viewed as important by a lot of people but as very important by relatively few. Fewer still might view it as the most important issue during the campaign. Balancing this is tricky: Is it more important that nearly everyone views an issue as important or that fewer view it as the most important issue? What’s the balance?

To answer that question, I took data from a recent YouGov poll conducted for the Economist. It presented 15 issues to respondents, asking them to identify whether the issue was very or only somewhat important to them. Then, respondents were asked to pick the most important of those 15 issues.

To compare these metrics, I made a chart showing all three metrics at once for all 15 issues. Each issue is represented by two arrows, pointing from frequency at which respondents identified it as important at all toward the frequency at which is was identified as very important (to the left) or the most important (to the right). The scale doesn’t matter because each metric is displayed from the lowest to the highest value for the respondent population.

Follow Election 2024

That’s confusing, so let’s look at an example. Here is the issue of immigration, isolated.

Immigration landed about halfway between the issue that the fewest respondents viewed as important and the issue that the most did: a score of 56 out of 100 that brings it halfway up the middle axis. Relatively few people identified it as very important, scoring a 39 of 100 (where, again, 0 is the value for the issue the fewest people rated as very important and 100 the value for the issue the most people saw as very important). It was again in the middle when considering what was identified as the most important issue.

And here are all 15 issues, using the same presentation. There’s our immigration line in the middle. And at the top? Inflation and prices.

Lots of issues arc over immigration to some extent, including jobs and health care. Immigration has a relatively high percentage of people identifying it as the most important issue, though.

If we isolate a few issues, we see that a few issues look different from the chevron-style shape (up-then-down) of most of the lines. Climate change, for example, is at the bottom of the list in how many respondents identified it as important or very important — but a big chunk of respondents viewed it as most important. Inflation, though, just sits along the top: the issue most commonly identified as important, as very important and as the most important.

Notice abortion, too. Like climate change, it shoots up when we’re talking about the percentage who identify it as the most important issue.

That’s because of Democrats. Here’s what all the issues look like for members of that party. (This chart and the ones that follow for other parties compare issue interest solely within those partisan groups.)

That’s a bit crowded, admittedly, so here are some of the more interesting issues. Inflation, for example, is not simply sitting along the top of this graph, though it was still the issue most often identified as most important.

The responses from Republicans, predictably, look quite different.

Again breaking out issues, we see more interest in immigration as an issue — and far more Republicans who identify it as the most important issue.

Abortion is relatively unimportant among Republicans — and less likely to be identified as the most important issue.

The graph for independents looks like the overall graph (which is generally what happens when you break out the results from independents).

So what does this tell us? Yes, inflation is a central issue to Americans — at least, of those asked by YouGov. Several other issues are more often identified as important or very important compared to immigration, though more people are likely to identify immigration as the most important issue.

The exception is among Republicans, among whom immigration is considered much more important in general and one of the two most important issues when poll respondents were forced to choose.

If you happen to run a major American newspaper, do with that information what you will. (WP)

Your blogger is pleased and proud to admit the price of this blog has stayed steady since it’s inception. 2 for the price of 1 and the first 1 is free.

America’s reckless borrowing is a danger to its economy—and the world’s

Without good luck or a painful adjustment, the only way out will be to let inflation rip

Dollar coins coming out of a purse hole.

illustration: carl godfrey

May 2nd 2024

If prudence is a virtue then America’s budget is an exercise in vice. Over the past 12 months the federal government has spent $2trn, or 7.2% of gdp, more than it has raised in taxes, after stripping out temporary factors. Usually such a vast deficit would be the result of a recession and accompanying stimulus. Today the lavish borrowing comes despite America’s longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment in half a century. The deficit has not been below 3% of gdp, an old measure of sound fiscal management, since 2015, and next year Uncle Sam’s net debts will probably cross 100% of gdp, up by about two-fifths in a decade. Whereas near-zero interest rates once made large debts affordable, today rates are higher and the government is spending more servicing the debt than on national defence.

How has it come to this? The costs of wars, a global financial crisis and pandemic, unfunded tax cuts and stimulus programmes have all piled up. Both Republicans and Democrats pay lip service to fiscal responsibility. But the record of each side in office is of throwing caution to the wind as they indulge in extra spending or tax cuts. The biggest economic decision facing the next president is how generously to renew Donald Trump’s tax cuts of 2017, a step that will only worsen America’s dire fiscal trajectory.

chart: the economist

This profligacy cannot go on for ever—at some point, interest costs will rise to intolerable levels. The binge must therefore come to an end in some combination of three ways.

The least painful is that good fortune comes to the rescue. Until recently, falling global real interest rates contained the cost of servicing debts even as these grew in size. Today Japan just about manages with net debts about half as big again as America’s, relative to gdp, thanks to near-zero rates. If inflation is defeated and real interest rates fall back from their present highs, America could be off the hook, too. Another source of relief could be productivity growth. If it surges, say because of artificial intelligence, America could outgrow its debts.

Yet good luck cannot be assumed. The most responsible way for politicians to end the budget binge would be to correct course as the interest bill rises. The imf estimates that America will need to cut spending, excluding debt interest, or raise taxes by 4% of gdp to stabilise its debts by 2029. It has managed a similar adjustment before, between 1989 and 2000, when “bond vigilantes” were said to have cowed Washington into submission.

The trouble is that the circumstances were then well-suited to belt-tightening. The end of the cold war yielded a peace dividend: falling defence spending accounted for fully 60% of the fiscal adjustment. As a share of the population the labour force climbed to an all-time high. A real-wage boom made the pain of higher taxes more bearable. But today war and rising global tensions are pushing defence spending up and baby-boomers are retiring in droves.

That leaves the third and most worrying option: making creditors pay. America would never be forced by the markets to default, because the Federal Reserve can act as a buyer of last resort. Fiscal laxity could cause inflation, though, which would mean bondholders and savers taking a big real-terms hit.

One way this could happen is if a populist like Mr Trump were to take control of the Fed. His advisers have floated ideas for influencing monetary policy that include appointing a pliant chairman and giving Congress oversight of interest rates. Mr Trump likes low rates; if they were combined with a growing deficit, inflation would surge.

Even if the Fed kept its independence, it could become impotent if Congress allowed debt to rise without limit. When the government’s response to rising interest rates is to borrow still more to service its debts, then tight money can stoke inflation rather than containing it—a feedback loop with which Latin America is all too familiar and which mavericks say is already under way in America. Their doomsaying is premature, but higher rates can feed into the budget very quickly. After accounting for the Fed’s balance-sheet, the median dollar of debt is on a fixed interest rate only until June 2025.

A less stable America would cause pain at home because of higher interest rates, more uncertainty and an arbitrary redistribution from creditors to debtors. But the costs would also be felt globally. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Through it America provides a unique service: a supply of plentiful assets backed by a vast economy, the rule of law, deep capital markets and an open capital account. No other asset can perform this role today. Even if the dollar attracted a risk premium to compensate for the danger of inflation, the world would probably have to keep using it.

A world whose reserve currency was being debased, however, would be a poorer one. Capital would be more expensive everywhere; the global financial system would be less efficient; and investors would be on a constant search for a viable alternative to the greenback, with the threat of a chaotic transition if one ever emerged. America’s fiscal mess is home-made. But make no mistake: it is the whole world’s problem. (ECON)

Biden expands health insurance access for DACA recipients

The move comes during an election year in which immigration has become a salient issue.

By Amy B Wang

Updated May 3, 2024 at 12:42 p.m. EDT|Published May 3, 2024 at 11:35 a.m. EDT

President Biden delivers remarks on health care in Raleigh, N.C., on March 26. (Cornell Watson for The Washington Post)

The White House announced Friday that it is moving forward with an initiative to expand access to health insurance for about 100,000 immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

The Biden administration’s move comes during an election year in which immigration has become a salient issue, and it stands in sharp contrast to former president Donald Trump’s efforts to curtail protections for DACA recipients.

In a statement, President Biden touted his administration’s efforts to “preserve and fortify” the DACA program, which allows “dreamers” — those who were brought into the country without documentation as children — to work and live in the United States. The program was originally created in 2012 under President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president.

“Dreamers are our loved ones, our nurses, teachers, and small business owners. And they deserve the promise of health care just like all of us,” Biden said Friday. “... And that’s why today we are taking this historic step to ensure that DACA recipients have the same access to health care through the Affordable Care Act as their neighbors.”

Under the plan, DACA participants who have previously been excluded from enrolling in a qualified health plan or a basic health program through the Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplaces will be allowed to do so.

The new policy will become effective Nov. 1, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. After that, newly eligible individuals will be able to select a qualifying health plan through the federal marketplaces during a special 60-day enrollment period, which will coincide with the 2025 open enrollment period for all other Americans.

The department noted that those without health insurance are less likely to receive preventive or routine health screenings, incurring high costs and debts when they do seek care.

“More than one third of DACA recipients currently do not have health insurance, so making them eligible to enroll in coverage will improve their health and wellbeing, and help the overall economy,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

Follow Election 2024

In an email Friday, a representative for Donald Trump’s campaign described Biden’s move to expand health care for DACA recipients as “handouts for illegal immigrants.”

“Joe Biden continues to force hardworking, tax-paying, struggling Americans to pay for the housing, welfare, and now the healthcare of illegal immigrants,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt wrote. “This is unfair and unsustainable. … President Trump will put America and the American worker first.”

Biden has called on Congress to act on his immigration reform plan — sent the day he took office — to provide dreamers permanent status and a pathway to citizenship.

Immigration has become a top issue for the November election, both for the campaigns of the presumptive candidates — Biden and Trump — as well as for voters. A Gallup poll released this week showed that 27 percent of Americans said immigration was the most important problem facing the country, the third consecutive month it has remained the top concern for voters.

In March, both Biden and Trump took separate trips to the Texas border to blame each other for a surge in illegal immigration. Biden has repeatedly urged Congress to pass a bipartisan border security bill that many Republicans had supported — until Trump publicly opposed the package for political reasons.

Trump, meanwhile, has amped up his rhetoric against migrants through the election cycle, accusing undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” and saying that some are “not people.” As president, Trump tried to dismantle the DACA program, but the Supreme Court blocked the effort.

Kica Matos, president of the nonprofit National Immigration Law Center, celebrated the Biden administration’s announcement Friday but, like the president, also called on Congress to pass a pathway to citizenship for dreamers.

“Even as we celebrate this victory, we must also remember that politically motivated attacks on DACA continue, DACA recipients remain in limbo, and the health and wellbeing of our communities has suffered as a result,” Matos said in a statement. (WP)

Your blogger is once again impressed by Mr. Trump’s grasp of the issue, when he categorizes DACA recipients as “illegal immigrants”, failing to note they came to this country as small children and were not likely consulted as to what they wanted. Your blogger does seem to recall, however, a certain former president’s wife was able to bring over her parents without the ordinary wait although your blogger isn’t even sure that she - that president’s wife - did not illegally overstay he work visa.

Stormy Daniels, Echoing Trump’s Style, Pushes Back at Lawyer’s Attacks

In a second day of cross-examination, Ms. Daniels resisted the implication she had tried to shake down Donald J. Trump by selling her story of a sexual liaison.

Donald J. Trump and his lawyer Todd Blanche in navy suits behind a waist-high barricade in a courtroom hallway.

Donald J. Trump’s lawyers tried Thursday to chip at the credibility of a woman who says she had a one-night stand with him. Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Jonah E. BromwichBen ProtessMaggie Haberman

By Jonah E. Bromwich, Ben Protess and Maggie Haberman

May 9, 2024

Donald J. Trump, the onetime president, and Stormy Daniels, the longtime porn star, despise one another. But when Ms. Daniels returned to the witness stand at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial on Thursday, his lawyers made them sound a lot alike.

He wrote more than a dozen self-aggrandizing books; she wrote a tell-all memoir. He mocked her appearance on social media; she fired back with a scatological insult. He peddled a $59.99 Bible; she hawked a $40 “Stormy, saint of indictments” candle, that carried her image draped in a Christ-like robe.

During Thursday’s grueling cross-examination, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to discredit Ms. Daniels as a money-grubbing extortionist who used a passing proximity to Mr. Trump to attain fame and riches. But the more the defense assailed her self-promoting merchandise and online screeds, the more Ms. Daniels resembled the man she was testifying against: a master of marketing, a savant of social-media scorn.

“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” she said on the stand, though unlike him, she did it without the power and platform of the presidency.

Ms. Daniels’s appearance plunged the proceeding into turmoil as the defense pleaded with the judge to declare a mistrial in the first criminal trial of an American president. Ms. Daniels’s graphic account of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, they argued, had inflicted irreparable damage on the defense.

But the judge, Juan M. Merchan, rejected the request and rebuked defense lawyers, noting that their decision to deny that the tryst had even occurred had opened the door for much of her explicit testimony. Ms. Daniels offered jurors a first-person account of the encounter with Mr. Trump, helping prosecutors bolster belief in an incident that underpins the case.

Her appearance also laid the groundwork for the prosecution’s star witness, Michael D. Cohen, who is expected to take the stand Monday, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, bought Ms. Daniels’s silence in the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, the payoff that led to the charges against Mr. Trump, who is accused of falsifying records to cover up the scandal.

Here’s how key figures involved in making hush-money payoffs on behalf of Donald J. Trump are connected.

Over nearly eight hours of searing testimony across two days, Ms. Daniels recounted her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006. She described accepting the $130,000 hush-money payment during his first presidential campaign. And, facing combative questions from his lawyers about subtle shifts in her story, she swung between defiance and vulnerability.

After a shaky performance on the stand earlier in the week, Ms. Daniels on Thursday conceded almost nothing. She had been frazzled. Now she was nimble as she volleyed with her questioner.

Susan Necheles, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, grilled Ms. Daniels about her account of a one-night stand at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada: “You made all this up, right?”

Ms. Daniels responded with a forceful “no.”

When Ms. Necheles suggested that the porn star had experience with “phony stories about sex,” Ms. Daniels responded that the sex in her films was “very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.” And when Ms. Necheles implied that her experience producing films showed that she knew how to spin fiction, Ms. Daniels replied, “I would have written it to be a lot better.”

Who Are Key Players in the Trump Manhattan Criminal Trial?

The first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump is underway. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.

Ms. Daniels, wearing a dark green dress and a long black cardigan, showed sensitivity at odds with the defense’s gold-digging portrayal. When a prosecutor asked her a final question — whether her experience speaking out about Mr. Trump had been positive or negative — she choked up.

“Negative,” Daniels said, barely getting the word out, seemingly on the verge of tears.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers conveyed incredulity, noting that Ms. Daniels had denied the fling at various points. They unearthed inconsistencies, most notably Ms. Daniels’s insistence that she had wanted her story out in the world and had little interest in money. Ms. Necheles, spotlighting Ms. Daniels’s effort to sell the story to the media as well as to Mr. Trump, suggested that in fact Ms. Daniels had shaken him down.

“That’s what you were asking in 2016, was for money, to be able to tell your story?” Ms. Necheles asked pointedly, adding, “That was your choice, right?”

Ms. Daniels resisted, saying she “accepted an offer” from Mr. Cohen in the waning days of the 2016 campaign because she was “running out of time.”

What to Know About Our Coverage of the Trump Trial

Expect live updates from court, daily takeaways, explainers and analysis. Learn how our reporting team has prepared for the trial, and find out why our photographers get only 45 seconds of access to the courtroom per day.

Photographing Defendant Trump in a New York Minute

April 11, 2024

But Ms. Necheles noted that she could have told her story for free. She pointed to evidence that Ms. Daniels had flirted with doing so but had abandoned discussions with a reporter from Slate magazine.

“You could have gone out any day of the week” and given a news conference, Ms. Necheles said, “but you chose not to, right?”

Image

Susan Necheles walks in a court hallway.

Susan Necheles, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, tried to break down Stormy Daniels’s credibility.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The defense chipped at Ms. Daniels’s credibility after she spent much of her earlier testimony describing an encounter with Mr. Trump in a sprawling Lake Tahoe, Nev., hotel suite in 2006.

In lurid detail — so much so that the judge scolded her Tuesday — Ms. Daniels painted the scene. She told jurors about Mr. Trump’s underwear, the sexual position they assumed and his flirtatious chitchat likening her to his daughter: “She is smart and blond and beautiful, and people underestimate her as well.”

But the testimony, while striking, was something of a sideshow to the trial’s main event. There is nothing illegal about a married man having sex with a porn star, nor is it inherently criminal to pay a person for silence.

And Ms. Daniels knew nothing about the records that, according to prosecutors, Mr. Trump falsified to conceal his repayment of Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush-money deal.

Citing her distance from the records, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought a mistrial for the second time this week, arguing Ms. Daniels’s testimony was irrelevant and prejudicial. “It almost defies belief that we’re here about a records case,” his lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, argued. The defense also asked to alter a gag order to let Mr. Trump dispute Ms. Daniels’s testimony.

Justice Merchan denied both requests, and chided Mr. Trump’s lawyers for missteps during the prosecution’s examination of Ms. Daniels, saying they did not object often enough. He also suggested that the former president’s own insistence on denying any sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels had allowed the prosecution to introduce evidence that it did in fact occur.

“That, in my mind, allows the people to do what they can to rehabilitate her and to corroborate her story,” he said.

After Ms. Daniels left the stand, prosecutors called witnesses more directly related to the records. They questioned Rebecca Manochio, a junior bookkeeper at the Trump Organization, who described mailing Mr. Cohen’s checks, his reimbursements for payments to Ms. Daniels, to Washington for Mr. Trump to sign during his presidency.

They also called Madeleine Westerhout, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides in the early White House years. She sat at a desk right outside the Oval Office and coordinated many of his communications, including a crucial meeting with Mr. Cohen just weeks into his term.

Mr. Cohen is expected to testify that they discussed the plan to falsify the records — recording the payments as ordinary “legal expenses” — and Ms. Westerhout confirmed the meeting was scheduled.

She also confirmed that Mr. Trump paid close attention to checks he signed in the White House.

That testimony, somewhat anticlimactic after two days of a porn star’s stories of sex and scandal, could nonetheless corroborate components of Mr. Cohen’s story. And ultimately, the verdict could hang on his words — as well as the question of whether the jurors blame the prosecution or Mr. Trump for subjecting them to hours of squirm-inducing testimony.

For most of Thursday, Ms. Daniels appeared calm and controlled as she quibbled over the most trivial of facts. She never broke down, even when Ms. Necheles, with a hostile tone, accused her of capitalizing on her brush with Mr. Trump’s fame.

When Ms. Necheles displayed on the courtroom screens an advertisement for her strip club tour entitled “Make America Horny Again,” Ms. Daniels said that she had hated that tagline.

When the defense played a recording of Ms. Daniels’s lawyer telling Mr. Cohen that she was desperate for money, Ms. Daniels denied saying anything of that nature.

And when Ms. Necheles accused Ms. Daniels of extortion, remarking “You were threatening to try to hurt” Trump “if he didn’t give you money,” the witness returned to one of her common refrains of the week: “False.”

Ms. Daniels said that after paying expenses, including legal fees, she netted less than $100,000 from the hush money. And despite her vast array of online merchandise — including T-shirts and comic books, some aimed at the anti-Trump resistance — she said she had yet to turn a profit.

“It covers my travel and my expenses and my security,” she explained as Mr. Trump leaned forward and stared at the screen that displayed the exhibits of her entrepreneurial efforts.

Ms. Daniels noted that she was hardly unique. Mr. Trump is himself a branding virtuoso and an evangelist for unbridled capitalism. He once wrote a book called “How to Get Rich.”

And confronted with her schoolyard insults aimed at the former president, she again cast him as the instigator.

He had belittled her appearance, calling her “horseface.” She mocked him as an “orange turd.”

“I’m not a human toilet,” she said Thursday, “so if they want to make fun of me, I can make fun of them.” (NYT)

Thinking of the comparison of Ms. Daniels to many elected Republicans in the House and Senate your blogger is reminded of an old joke: A man at a party asks an attractive woman “would you sleep with me for $1 million?”. After considering for a few minutes the woman says “yes”. The man then asks “would you sleep with me for $5"?. The woman says “what do you think I am, a common whore?”, to which the man says “we’ve already established that, now we’re just talking about the price”. Apparently, holding on to a House or Senate seat is the price for many Republicans, even those who were “Never Trumpers” prior to Trump’s first election. Your blogger would prefer to listen to Ms. Daniels rather than many of these holier-than-thou Republicans. Your blogger considers it quite sad for the country that so many elected officials prize their position so much they will literally sell their souls for it.

The Loneliness Curve

New research suggests people tend to be lonelier in young adulthood and late life. But experts say it doesn’t have to be that way.

Share full article

168

The hand of an elderly person rests on the shoulder of an adolescent.

Credit...Getty Images

Christina Caron

By Christina Caron

May 6, 2024

When Surgeon General Vivek Murthy went on a nationwide college tour last fall, he started to hear the same kind of question time and again: How are we supposed to connect with one another when nobody talks anymore?

In an age when participation in community organizations, clubs and religious groups has declined, and more social interaction is happening online instead of in person, some young people are reporting levels of loneliness that, in past decades, were typically associated with older adults.

It’s one of the many reasons loneliness has become a problem at both the beginning and end of our life span. In a study published last Tuesday in the journal Psychological Science, researchers found that loneliness follows a U-shaped curve: Starting from young adulthood, self-reported loneliness tends to decline as people approach midlife only to rise again after the age of 60, becoming especially pronounced by around age 80.

While anyone can experience loneliness, including middle-aged adults, people in midlife may feel more socially connected than other age groups because they are often interacting with co-workers, a spouse, children and others in their community — and these relationships may feel stable and satisfying, said Eileen K. Graham, an associate professor of medical social sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the lead author of the study.

As people get older, those opportunities can “start to fall away,” she said. In the study, which looked at data waves spanning several decades, starting as early as the 1980s and ending as late as 2018, participants at either end of the age spectrum were more likely to agree with statements such as: “I miss having people around me” or “My social relationships are superficial.”

“We have social muscles just like we have physical muscles,” Dr. Murthy said. “And those social muscles weaken when we don’t use them.”

When loneliness goes unchecked, it can be dangerous to our physical and mental health, and has been linked to problems like heart disease, dementia and suicidal ideation.

Dr. Graham and other experts on social connection said there were small steps we could take at any age to cultivate a sense of belonging and social connection.

Do a relationship audit.

“Don’t wait until old age to discover that you lack a good-quality social network,” said Louise Hawkley, a research scientist who studies loneliness at NORC, a social research organization at the University of Chicago. “The longer you wait, the harder it gets to form new connections.”

Studies suggest that most people benefit from having a minimum of four to six close relationships, said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of the Social Connection and Health Lab at Brigham Young University.

But it’s not just the quantity that matters, she added, it’s also the variety and the quality.

“Different relationships can fulfill different kinds of needs,” Dr. Holt-Lunstad said. “Just like you need a variety of foods to get a variety of nutrients, you need a variety of types of people in your life.”

Ask yourself: Are you able to rely on and support the people in your life? And are your relationships mostly positive rather than negative?

If so, it’s a sign that those relationships are beneficial to your mental and physical well-being, she said.

Join a group.

Research has shown that poor health, living alone and having fewer close family and friends account for the increase in loneliness after about age 75.

But isolation isn’t the only thing that contributes to loneliness — in people both young and old, loneliness stems from a disconnect between what you want or expect from your relationships and what those relationships are providing.

If your network is shrinking — or if you feel unsatisfied with your relationships — seek new connections by joining a community group, participating in a social sports league or volunteering, which can provide a sense of meaning and purpose, Dr. Hawkley said.

And if one type of volunteering is not satisfying, do not give up, she added. Instead try another type.

Participating in organizations that interest you can offer a sense of belonging and is one way to accelerate the process of connecting in person with like-minded people.

Cut back on social media.

Jean Twenge, a social psychologist and the author of “Generations,” found in her research that heavy social media use is linked to poor mental health — especially among girls — and that smartphone access and internet use “increased in lock step with teenage loneliness.”

Instead of defaulting to an online conversation or merely a reaction to someone’s post, you can suggest bonding over a meal — no phones allowed.

And if a text or social media interaction is getting long or involved, move to real-time conversation by texting, “Can I give you a quick call?” Dr. Twenge said.

Finally, Dr. Holt-Lunstad suggested asking a friend or family member to go on a walk instead of corresponding online. Not only is taking a stroll free, it also has the added benefit of providing fresh air and exercise.

Take the initiative.

“Oftentimes when people feel lonely, they may be waiting for someone else to reach out to them,” Dr. Holt-Lunstad said. “It can feel really hard to ask for help or even just to initiate a social interaction. You feel very vulnerable. What if they say no?”

Some people might feel more comfortable contacting others with an offer to help, she added, because it helps you focus “outward instead of inward.”

Small acts of kindness will not only maintain but also solidify your relationships, the experts said.

For example, if you like to cook, offer to drop off food for a friend or family member, Dr. Twenge said.

“You’ll not only strengthen a social connection but get the mood boost that comes from helping,” she added. (NYT)

Japan and South Korea are struggling with old-age poverty

Their problems may be instructive for other countries

An elderly woman pulls a cart with cardboard boxes in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea

photograph: getty images

May 2nd 2024|seoul and tokyo

Save

Give

Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

At a soup kitchen in Dongdaemun, a district of Seoul synonymous with the capital’s fashionistas, Kim Mi-kyung is busy preparing for the lunch rush. Ms Kim explains that the kitchen serves around 500 people a day, most of them elderly. “They can’t work, they can’t ask for money from their children and they can’t eat,” she says. “So they come here.”

South Korea has the second-highest rate of income poverty among the elderly in the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries (the highest is tiny Estonia). Nearly 40% of South Koreans over 65 live below the oecd’s poverty line, set at half the national median income. In Japan that rate is 20%. The oecd average is 14%. South Korea’s and Japan’s abundance of old people and lack of young ones, combined with changing labour markets and inflexible pension systems, mean the problem is likely to worsen. Other rich countries will soon face similar issues. East Asia provides an example of what works—and what doesn’t.

A South Korean on the oecd’s poverty line earns almost $22,000. That is still more than an average salary in Mexico. And this does not take into account asset wealth such as property. Still, in South Korea 63% of income-poor seniors have few assets. And Japan’s and South Korea’s pension systems are flawed.

Japan’s system dates from 1961 and has long offered wide coverage. South Korea’s was introduced in 1988, and only reached nearly universal coverage in 1999. Japan has a two-tiered pension system. The first is a basic tier, available to all, with flat-rate payments and a final payout proportional to years of contribution. The second is for those in full-time employment. Workers’ contributions, based on their earnings, are matched by their employer. The South Korean system is similar, with all but the top-earning 30% entitled to the basic old-age pension. In 2022 it amounted to 307,500 won ($220) per month. Workers in good jobs often have private pensions, too.

Those who enjoyed a long career of regular work retire with a relatively decent pay packet. But basic pensions on their own are rather stingy. In Japan a full 40 years’ worth of contributions garners a pension of around 65,000 yen per month ($410). And freelancers are less likely to make consistent contributions to their pension, or even to be enrolled. One estimate suggests that the top 10% of South Korean earners born in 1970 will retire with almost 34 years’ worth of contributions, while the bottom 10% will have only 19.

chart: the economist

A second problem is that both counties do terribly on gender equality. Women earn less and are more likely to be in precarious employment. This means that older women are especially likely to be poor (see chart). Japan’s pension system was designed for a traditional family model headed by a salaryman and a stay-at-home mother. So-called dependent spouses are exempted from making contributions if they earn less than 1.3m yen. Even so, they receive the basic pension, so married couples receive a larger pension than an individual worker. Divorcees are hit hard.

Rising life-expectancies have led to longer working lives. Some 49% of South Koreans aged 65 to 69 are still working, second only in the oecd to Japan’s 50%. Working life for older people in Japan is not perfect, but much thought has gone into making their jobs useful and rewarding. Nearly 40% of Japanese companies keep employees on beyond 70, and each municipality runs a “Silver Work” centre where older people can find jobs. Miyata Toyotsugu, a 77-year-old widower, has worked at a bicycle park in the east of Tokyo for 12 years. “Without my job,” he says, “I will lose all my ties.”

Silver surfers

South Korea’s approach is more haphazard, and old people often find themselves in low-paid, unappealing work. This is worsened by a culture of putting pressure on people to retire from their main career early, so that companies can save on pension contributions and benefits by paying a one-off lump sum. Only 25% of South Korean workers aged between 55 and 59 in 2020 had the same employer as they had five years earlier, compared with 52% on average in the oecd. The pyejijupnun halmeoni, or cardboard-collecting grandmas, are a ubiquitous symbol of this precarity, dragging carts overloaded with used boxes to sell for a pittance. Lee Young-ja, now 78 years old, has been at it for ten years. Rent and hospital bills eat through her meagre earnings and what she gets from the state.

chart: the economist

Old-age poverty will only get worse. Japan is the world’s oldest society; 30% of the population is over the age of 65. South Korea has half that share. But it is rapidly catching up (see chart). In 1960 South Korea’s fertility rate was six births per woman. Now it has fallen to 0.78, the world’s lowest. Japan is more fecund, at 1.3, but still far below the replacement rate, at which the population is stable.

This worsening ratio of workers to pensioners is putting strain on systems. South Korea’s pension fund grew to be the world’s third largest, worth over 1,000trn won ($730bn), because few qualified for a full pension until now. As the baby-boomers retire with a full working life’s worth of contributions, and too few workers pay in, that nest-egg will quickly vanish. The government estimates that the fund will stop growing by 2040. By 2055, it will be empty.

Some simple tweaks would help. South Korea is raising its retirement age from 62 to 65, and Japanese companies are now encouraged to keep workers employed until 70. South Koreans pay only 4.5% of their income into their pensions, which is matched by their employers. The oecd average is more than double that. And both countries could eliminate regressive features of their systems. Japan’s pension scheme increasingly relies on consumption taxes rather than income tax, which would raise more from higher earners. Tackling low fertility rates would also help. But mass immigration, a simple solution to the shortage of young people, remains taboo in both countries.

Politicians must figure out how to convince people that working life is not a race to retirement but an invigorating climb followed by a gentle descent. Japan and South Korea, both famed for their love of hiking, have already begun that transition, with mixed success. (ECON)

This Common Condition Can Damage Joints Long Before It’s Detected

Nearly 33 million Americans have osteoarthritis. Experts explain how it affects the body, and why it’s so hard to diagnose.

A black and white photo of a pair of elderly hands their grasping knees.

Credit...Patricia Voulgaris for The New York Times

Knvul Sheikh

By Knvul Sheikh

May 2, 2024

It may start as a twinge in your knee or hip when you get out of bed. Over time, that twinge may turn into persistent pain, swelling or reduced range of motion — signs of a condition called osteoarthritis.

But as with many other chronic conditions, doctors are unable to diagnose osteoarthritis until it has already progressed significantly and has interfered with everyday activities. Scientists are racing to find ways to diagnose osteoarthritis earlier and stave off or slow some of the damage from the disease, which affects over 32.5 million adults in the United States and more than 500 million people worldwide.

Research has started to show that osteoarthritis is not caused solely by everyday wear and tear on joints, like the deterioration of rubber treads on a tire over time. In some patients, persistent, low-grade inflammation might accelerate the progression of the disease or even cause it. And scientists now believe the damage can start long before symptoms appear. In a new study published last week, researchers from Duke University identified molecules circulating in the blood of women that might serve as markers of the disease up to eight years before an X-ray picked up changes in their bones.

“This tells us that there is an osteoarthritis continuum,” said Dr. Virginia Byers Kraus, lead author of the study and a professor of medicine at Duke. “You’re already on an escalator that’s leading you up the path to symptoms and X-ray changes way before we thought.”

What happens in the body in osteoarthritis?

The disease affects cartilage, a protective tissue that serves as padding between the bones in your joints, allowing them to glide over each other when you walk, climb stairs or bend to pick up groceries. It is constantly breaking down with exercise and everyday activities. “But our body typically knows how to repair itself,” said Dr. Elaine Husni, director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Center. The fluid surrounding joints contains enzymes that help cut up and remove worn cartilage, while special cells fix minor damage and rebuild cartilage.

But this cycle of breakdown and repair goes awry in people with osteoarthritis, Dr. Husni said. In some patients, those enzymes may be too aggressive in removing cartilage, or the healing process may be much slower than the cartilage breakdown. In others, the body senses damage or stress in the joints, which leads to inflammation. This inflammation tells cartilage-snipping enzymes that they need to come remove worn-down tissue. But if the body can’t dial the inflammation back down after repairs are completed, it can lead to more cartilage breakdown, Dr. Husni said.

Carrying extra body weight is one of the biggest risk factors for developing osteoarthritis. Injuries from sports or repetitive motion also increase the risk of osteoarthritis, as do conditions that involve increased inflammation throughout the body, such as diabetes.

Eventually, the cartilage loses its ability to cushion the bones. This leads to pain, a crackling sensation when moving your joints, reduced range of motion and swelling. The symptoms of osteoarthritis are most common in weight-bearing joints like the knee, hip and lower spine, though they may also occur in the small joints in fingers or feet, Dr. Husni said.

How is osteoarthritis diagnosed?

When a patient shows up with joint pain, a provider might start by feeling for swelling, testing a joint’s range of motion and ordering tests to rule out other problems or types of arthritis.

The current gold standard for diagnosing osteoarthritis is an X-ray, which can show changes in joint structure associated with the disease. The more worn the joint, the narrower the gap appears between bones.

However, by the time these changes show up on an X-ray, the damage to the joint is already done, Dr. Husni said. X-ray images also don’t always correspond to the severity of symptoms or pain that patients experience. “You could have two patients with the same amount of joint space narrowing — something like two or three millimeters on an X-ray — but one patient could have a ton of pain and the other may not,” Dr. Husni said.

While Dr. Kraus’s team and other researchers are studying biomarkers that might make osteoarthritis easier to diagnose, it may take years to prove a blood test is reliable enough to use in clinical settings. Researchers are also looking at whether these and other molecular markers can be used alongside drugs in trials, to measure whether experimental treatments for osteoarthritis are working or not, she said.

For now, patients have to rely on supportive treatments to manage pain, such as heating pads, physical therapy and over-the-counter medicines, Dr. Kraus said.

And people can use the knowledge that osteoarthritis is a slowly progressing disease to take steps to reduce the risk of disease or slow the inevitable wear and tear of joints, Dr. Kraus said: Keeping off excess weight, staying active and following a balanced diet rich in anti-inflammatory foods can help support your joint health and overall well-being. (NYT)

Social Security and Medicare finances look grim as overall debt piles up

A hot job market means the programs won’t run out of money as fast as once feared, but projections are still bleak.

By Jacob Bogage and Julie Zauzmer Weil

Updated May 6, 2024 at 6:27 p.m. EDT|Published May 6, 2024 at 7:52 a.m. EDT

Social Security and Medicare will run out of money in just over a decade, a new report warned Monday, putting fresh pressure on Congress to address the nation’s financial health as federal debt rises and the population ages.

Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.

The trustees for the massive retirement programs project that Social Security will be insolvent by 2035, and Medicare by 2036, which would force benefit cuts. That’s better than many experts had expected, though — last year, federal actuaries said the programs could go belly-up sooner. The report said the roaring job market and low unemployment rate means more workers are contributing to the programs, shoring up their finances even while record numbers of retirees enroll for benefits.

But that improvement may not last and can’t change an overall bleak picture, the trustees said, and Congress still must act to stabilize the programs to prevent cutting off benefits from tens of millions of seniors or plunging the nation into insurmountable debt.

“This isn’t a report where everything is fine and wonderful. It almost shows you how much we’re living on a razor’s edge," Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee, said.

Lawmakers, with eyes on November’s elections, say they could face a rare window to enact sweeping fiscal reforms in 2025, as President Biden pitches new taxes on the wealthiest Americans for a slew of new social safety net programs and Republicans eye extending trillions of dollars in Trump-era tax cuts.

“Next year will be filled with unavoidably huge fiscal moments, including the expiration of the tax cuts and the need to increase the debt ceiling at the same time that the fiscal picture is likely to continue to deteriorate. This presents a perfect opportunity to actually tackle a number of these big issues as they become increasingly impossible to ignore,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Neither Biden nor former president Donald Trump have released proposals to right Social Security’s finances. Biden has signaled a desire to raise taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 and devote that new revenue to the Social Security Trust Fund. In his past two State of the Union addresses, the president declared absolute opposition to cutting social safety net benefits.

Trump has floated cuts to the programs, but quickly backpedaled from that position and insisted he wouldn’t support reducing benefits.

The next year will bring major fiscal policy decisions for whoever wins the election and for Congress.

After a near-crisis last year, the debt ceiling suspension that Biden negotiated with congressional Republicans is set to expire Jan. 1 — though a failure to raise the debt limit would be unlikely to trigger a potential default until sometime in the spring. (The government has some last-ditch ways of freeing up extra money to avoid borrowing more.)

And major portions of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. Lawmakers in both parties want to keep at least some of them on the books, but renewing the whole package would add $3 trillion over the next decade to the nation’s already enormous burden of $28 trillion in publicly held debt.

The last time the nation’s long-term fiscal health was anywhere near the forefront of lawmakers’ agenda was in President Barack Obama’s first term, when he tried, but failed, to work out a sweeping compromise on spending and entitlements with then-House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other congressional Republicans.

More recently, lawmakers — especially in the Republican-controlled House — have tussled with Biden over parts of the federal budget. But those fights have focused mostly on what’s known as discretionary spending — items such as defense, infrastructure, education and other policies that Congress must approve each year. All told, discretionary spending accounts for a little less than a third of the money the federal government spends, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The vast majority of the federal government’s spending is on mandatory programs — including Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits — entitlements that have grown dramatically. The United States spent $2.9 trillion on Social Security and major health-care programs in fiscal 2023, according to the CBO. That’s nearly twice as much as Congress spent on the entire discretionary budget.

“If you can’t deal with your allowance, your pocket change, which is the discretionary part, how are you going to deal with the bigger issues? I just don’t think these people are ready to do it,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a leading conservative deficit hawk, told The Washington Post. He wears a lapel pin each day at the Capitol that shows a live calculation of the federal debt. “It would probably take some kind of crisis moment to get their attention.”

Social Security and Medicare are funded largely through payroll taxes, with future beneficiaries and their employers paying into trust funds for the programs so retired workers will receive a baseline income and health care. The full Social Security retirement age, when enrollees can draw the largest benefit, is 66 for individuals born before 1954, and 67 for those born after 1960. Individuals can generally enroll in Medicare at age 65.

But the United States is facing a wave of baby boomer retirees, what some experts call the silver tsunami, that is draining the trust fund’s resources. More than 11,000 Americans will turn 65 every day between 2024 and 2027, according to the Retirement Income Institute at the Alliance for Lifetime Income. That’s 4.1 million potential new beneficiaries each year, forcing the social safety net to pay out far more than it brings in from younger workers.

Many of those boomers are aging out of the disability insurance side of Social Security and into its retirement program, creating some financial cushion for the program overall. The disability trust fund will be solvent through at least 2098, according to Monday’s projections. The retirement trust fund will be insolvent by 2033.

Illegal immigration also played a key role in the rosier-than-expected numbers. Undocumented immigrants still have payroll taxes deducted from their income, but do not draw benefits from Social Security or Medicare.

“On one hand, that’s good for Social Security’s finances, but on the other hand, that means these individuals are being cheated,” said Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Without significant changes, though, retirement benefits would face a mandatory 21 percent cut that year, a hit that would upend millions of Americans’ golden years. Nearly 1 in 5 seniors rely on Social Security for at least 90 percent of their income, according to the Social Security Administration.

“I think the public wants to see a fairer tax code, and I think the public wants to see Social Security and Medicare made secure. And you put those two pieces together, I think you’ve got a winner,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told The Post.

So far, policy prescriptions to solve the shortfalls have been few and far between. And any fix would have cascading effects on the global economy.

Cutting benefits — including raising the retirement age, as a leading group of congressional Republicans recommended this spring — is a political third rail and would upend millions of workers’ and retirees’ finances, said Jason Fichtner, chief economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank. Congress could also raise Social Security payroll taxes, or do a little bit of both: A more modest benefit cut and payroll tax increase.

“You can make some changes now that don’t have to be as drastic, but we’re starting to get closer to that point where if we make some changes to the benefits side, they might not kick in soon enough,” said Joel Eskovitz, senior director for Social Security and savings at AARP Public Policy Institute.

Some conservatives insist that benefit cuts are the answer, even though many Republican leaders now view that route as politically toxic. Romina Boccia, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute who focuses on entitlement programs, argues for cutting benefits for high earners with healthy retirement savings, rather than hiking taxes.

“People don’t just continue to pay taxes,” she said. “They will work less. They will find creative ways of earning income that is not taxed as earned income.”

Left-leaning economists and some Democrats argue that Social Security benefits should be, if anything, more generous, with the increase funded by measures such as removing the cap on the level of income subject to Social Security taxes or raising the tax rate for all earners.

“Of all the issues confronting the nation in terms of policy, I think it’s the easiest, because it’s an equation — and the American people don’t want benefits cut,” said Nancy Altman, who leads the advocacy group Social Security Works. “Cutting benefits would be terrible policy … There’s plenty of ways to bring in increased revenue.”

Changing Social Security significantly has proved politically unpopular.

In the early 2000s, President George W. Bush floated allowing taxpayers to keep a portion of their payroll taxes and invest them in private retirement accounts. Opponents panned the proposal as a partial privatization of Social Security.

While politicians wait to act, dire reports like the one released Monday may make the nation’s 60 million retirees and many more people nearing retirement nervous about the future of entitlement programs.

The closer the programs come to insolvency without addressing the underlying budget math, the higher the odds that Congress will just have to authorize more borrowing to pay for benefits, Riedl said.

That would explode the federal debt and could trigger large-scale consequences, experts warn. Over the course of Social Security’s 75-year budget window, stabilizing the program through debt could mean $22.6 trillion, according to Monday’s projections. That would force interest rates much higher on U.S. bonds, Fichtner said.

And with borrowing rates already higher than the economy’s projected growth, that could spark a vicious cycle: Even under solid economic circumstances, debt would grow too quickly for the United States to ever pay it off.

There are already early warning signs of such a scenario. Congressional forecasters projected the U.S. gross domestic product to grow by 2.2 percent in 2025, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury note is already double that, hovering around 4.5 percent. (WP)

What to know about Gov. Newsom’s plan to offset California’s $45-billion deficit

California Gov. Gavin Newsom stands next to a video display

California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveils his revised 2024-25 state budget during a news conference in Sacramento on Friday. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

By Taryn Luna, Mackenzie Mays and Anabel Sosa

May 10, 2024 Updated 5:19 PM PT

Facebook

Twitter

Show more sharing options

Faced with a $44.9-billion budget deficit, Gov. Gavin Newsom described a plan to shrink the size of state government and slow his progressive policy agenda by eliminating 10,000 vacant state jobs, pausing an expansion of subsidized childcare and cutting billions in funding for climate change programs.

Newsom’s revised $288-billion budget proposal, announced Friday, projected California’s deficit to be $7 billion more than the shortfall his administration expected in January. The grim forecast was driven by lower than projected state revenues, continuing a pendulum swing from the fiscal boom of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“These are things we worked closely with the Legislature to advance,” Newsom said of the cuts. “None of this is the kind of work you enjoy doing, but you’ve got to do it. We have to be responsible. We have to be accountable.”

Newsom’s plan to close the deficit relies on $17.3 billion in savings from budget cuts he and lawmakers agreed to in April and using $4.2 billion from the state’s rainy day fund and budget reserves for the upcoming fiscal year.

The proposed spending reductions Newsom touched on Friday also reverse and slash an additional $8.2 billion in funding in 2024-25.

Newsom’s proposal includes $3.6 billion less for programs related to fighting climate change, said H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Finance Department. The plan would also cut $2 billion over two years from a program to expand internet connectivity to underserved homes, businesses and community institutions.

The governor’s revised budget proposal, which includes updated revenue projections after the state income tax filing deadline, typically jump-starts negotiations with Democratic leaders in the Senate and Assembly over a final fiscal plan for the upcoming year. The state Constitution requires lawmakers to approve the state budget by June 15.

An ‘incomplete’ plan

The governor’s budget plan released Friday was incomplete compared to prior years. The administration provided only a 50-page summary of his proposal, compared to the more detailed, 260-page document Newsom released in January.

Newsom’s budget news conference was originally scheduled for next Tuesday, the deadline for the governor to share his revised budget with the state Legislature. But Newsom is flying to Rome that day to speak at a climate conference at the Vatican and bumped his presentation up to Friday.

The change left the state Department of Finance, the fiscal arm of his administration, short on time to finalize a full budget summary, and additional documents, Palmer said. More information, his aides said, will be made available when additional documents are made public on Tuesday.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveils his proposed $286 billion 2022-2023 state budget

CALIFORNIA

Public defenders, foster kids, climate: Programs created during California’s boom may stall amid deficit

April 18, 2024

How bad is the budget problem?

Newsom cast California’s current financial situation as a return to normal after the federal government provided trillions of dollars in funding to individuals, families, businesses and state governments during the COVID-19 pandemic, payouts that resulted in a historic surplus in California.

But those flush times did not last, and poor revenue forecasts in recent years have also deepened the state’s fiscal troubles.

Newsom’s estimate of a $100-billion surplus two years ago ended up far too rosy, and revenue in subsequent years also fell short of projections. A decision by the federal government to delay the 2022 federal income tax deadline from April to November due to winter storms complicated California’s ability to project revenues last year.

Newsom’s plan seeks to solve the budget deficit for the next two budget years, including additional cuts, reductions and delays to solve an estimated $28.4-billion deficit in 2025-26.

State Sen. Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks) called out the difference between Newsom’s deficit estimates and much higher models from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“He continues to hang on to the unrealistically low deficit with the clear expertise of the LAO stating that the problem is significantly greater than that and that just means that his budget solutions are shooting too low,” Niello said. “We’ll get to the end of another fiscal year where we’re in trouble again, just like this one.”

Why does the deficit number keep changing?

In January, the Newsom administration predicted that California would have a $37.9-billion deficit to reckon with in the budget that lawmakers adopt in June.

Newsom and leaders of the Senate and Assembly reached an early agreement in April on $17.3 billion in reductions though most of those changes will not be passed into law until next month. Lawmakers passed a budget trailer bill that lowers unspent funding allocations in 2022-23 and 2023-24 by $1.6 billion last month.

The deficit number Newsom presented Friday subtracts the $17.3 billion in cuts agreed to earlier from the $37.9-billion deficit estimate from January.

Revenues have fallen short of expectations since January, deepening the budget problem by $7 billion.

Newsom is referring to the shortfall as $27.6 billion in 2024-25, but California is making cuts and reductions to solve a total budget deficit of $44.9 billion this year.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom discusses his proposed state budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, during a news conference in Sacramento,Calif., Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

CALIFORNIA

Newsom called it a ‘gimmick.’ Now he’s using the trick to lower California’s massive deficit

April 11, 2024

How will the governor’s cuts affect education?

Under Proposition 98, California has a minimum funding guarantee for schools and community colleges. Newsom is proposing an unusual maneuver to go back and lower the funding requirement for 2022-23 to reflect the lower-than-expected state revenues that came in late last year. The change could ultimately reduce funding for schools by tens of billions of dollars in future years and launch a monumental fight over education funding at the state Capitol.

Early childhood programs face cuts of more than $2 billion in the governor’s new budget proposal, including a 45% cut for the CalWORKS home visiting program, which provides supportive visits to about 3,000 low-income families following the birth of a baby.

He wants to reduce the Middle Class Scholarship program by $510 million and cut $550 million from a program that helps build and upgrade facilities for children in preschool and transitional kindergarten over the next two budget years.

Newsom called a decision to pause $1.4 billion planned to expand child-care availability over two years “difficult,” but a necessary trade-off in order to pay child-care workers higher wages.

“The state was finally making progress on childcare and early childhood initiatives which have been so ignored for so many years. To now cut back on that is disastrous for families and for our future,” said Ted Lempert, president of Children Now and a former California Assembly member.

What about healthcare?

Among proposed healthcare cuts is the elimination of more than $300 million in state and local public health funding — a move that “astounded” organizations like the County Health Executives Assn. of California, which pointed to COVID-19 pandemic woes that were worsened by underfunding and questioned if the state was backtracking.

Newsom also proposes eliminating hundreds of millions from programs meant to train and recruit health workers including nurses and social workers — both industries that have faced staffing shortages.

Healthcare providers who serve California’s low-income patients insured by Medi-Cal stand to lose extra pay meant to encourage healthcare facilities’ participation in the safety net program. The governor’s proposal takes more than $6 billion over multiple years meant for provider rate increases from a tax on managed healthcare organizations, known as the MCO tax, and uses it to support the Medi-Cal program in other ways.

Jodi Hicks, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, said she was “deeply disappointed” by Friday’s budget plan, saying it will “jeopardize access to not just sexual and reproductive care but quality, affordable health care across the board for the nearly 15 million Californians who rely on Medi-Cal.”

Will prisons lose funding?

Newsom’s proposal includes savings from the newly announced deactivation of 46 housing units at 13 state prisons, which would save $80.6 million. This comes as California’s prison population has declined by nearly 25% since 2019 and as the state prepares for the closure of its third prison, which Newsom said is now planned to close as early as November, five months ahead of schedule.

The governor said that, while he is interested in further reducing “the larger footprint” of the prison system, “we want to be mindful of labor concerns, community concerns and trends.” He also expressed concern about the possibility of unanticipated increases in prison populations . A measure that could appear on the November ballot calls for rolling back some criminal justice reforms that have helped reduce incarceration.

SUSANVILLE, CA - JUNE 08: California Correctional Center, is a minimum-security state prison, in Northern California on Tuesday, June 8, 2021 in Susanville, CA. The town of Susanville and how they are dealing with the closure of the California Correctional Center, a state prison, that has become their economic lifeline. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

CALIFORNIA

Newsom has approved three California prison closures but resists pressure to shutter more

April 1, 2024

Will the plan hurt workers?

The April agreement between lawmakers and the governor included $762 million in savings by pausing hiring for vacant state jobs. Newsom’s updated proposal permanently deletes 10,000 open positions, which unions viewed as a potentially better option than furloughs or delaying planned salary increases to save money.

Details of a costly plan to hike pay for healthcare workers to at least $25 per hour are still to come, following months of negotiations between Newsom, unions and hospital leaders.

Newsom signed a bill last year that imposed a new industry minimum wage for California healthcare workers, but has voiced concerns about how fast the state can move on wages due to the deficit. His department estimated that the wage hikes could cost the state $2 billion in its first year of implementation — a figure that SEIU California, the union backing the measure, rushed to refute, urging hospitals to pay a bigger share of the costs.

Newsom was tight lipped on the details on Friday but said a deal is near.

“This budget will not be signed without that deal,” Newsom said Friday.

The budget proposal shared Friday does not include funding for a healthcare minimum wage increase, Palmer said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom leaves the stage after delivering his budget proposal in Sacramento, Calif., Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. California faces a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the coming fiscal year, Newsom announced Tuesday, just days into his second term. It’s a sharp turnaround from last year’s $98 billion surplus. (AP Photo/José Luis Villegas)

CALIFORNIA

As deficit estimate hits $68 billion, Newsom seeks ‘major changes’ to healthcare wage law

Dec. 7, 2023

What else could be coming?

Negotiations are under way in the Legislature to place as many as three bonds on the November ballot that would ask voters to approve borrowing money to pay for low-income housing, school construction projects and climate-related infrastructure for adapting to floods, fires and droughts. Newsom declined to answer a question about how many of those he would like to go on the ballot.

Newsom said the close-call he experienced in March when his Proposition 1 bond for mental health facilities passed by barely more than 50% has “sobered” conversations about how much voters are willing to support borrowing measures.

“The public wants to see results. They’re not interested in inputs, they’re not interested to talk about how much money we’re spending,” he said. “They deserve results and they demand results. And so when we’re out there promoting these bonds, we need to be mindful of that.” (LAT)

Lawmakers press nursing home chains on corporate spending amid staffing rule fight

BY NATHANIEL WEIXEL - 05/06/24 1:36 PM ET

Congressional Democrats demanded information about the corporate spending by the operators of three of the country’s largest public, for-profit nursing homes, after the companies said they can’t afford the Biden administration’s new minimum staffing threshold.

In letters sent to the companies Sunday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), along with Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) pressed for information about buyouts, dividends, and salaries to executives and shareholders.

The lawmakers aim to contrast that with the salaries for nurses and nursing aides, amid widespread industry opposition to the new staffing requirements because they are too costly.

“These two competing claims do not add up,” the lawmakers wrote, noting that the industry “diverts hundreds of millions of dollars in cash away from nursing home staff and patient care, and into the pockets of company executives and shareholders.”

The lawmakers demand the three companies answer how they determine executive compensation and whether it is influenced by quality of care or profits. The letters also ask for answers on the three companies’ average pay and tenure for their registered nurses and nurse aides.

Since 2018, National Healthcare Corp., the Ensign Group Inc. and Brookdale Senior Living Inc. have paid out nearly $650 million in stock buybacks, dividend payments, and other financial rewards to top executives, including nearly $118 for Brookdale Senior Living, $300 million for the Ensign Group and over $226 million for National HealthCare Corp.

The lawmakers said that level of executive spending undermines “the claim that nursing homes cannot afford to pay for enough staff” to meet the new rule.

Last month, the Biden administration announced a final rule requiring nursing homes to have minimum levels of front-line caregivers for the first time or face financial penalties.

Among other provisions, the final rule will also require facilities to have a registered nurse on staff 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The rule requires nursing homes to provide each resident a minimum of 0.55 hours of care from a registered nurse and 2.45 hours from a certified nursing assistant every day.

The rule is aimed at addressing nursing homes that are chronically understaffed, which can lead to substandard or unsafe care. The rule’s requirements will be introduced in phases, with longer timeframes for rural communities.

Advocates have been calling for a minimum staffing requirement for more than two decades, arguing that residents are safer and have better care with more staff, but the industry had successfully resisted.

The American Health Care Association, the trade group representing for-profit nursing homes including the three targeted by lawmakers, said in a statement all nursing home operators from nonprofits, locally-owned and government-owned facilities, will be impacted by the staffing mandate.

“We support transparency, but this is yet another political distraction from the real challenges facing the sector: a growing caregiver shortage and chronic government underfunding,” said Clif Porter, senior vice president of government relations. “These are the realities impacting the vast majority of nursing homes today, and they’re reasons why we will continue to defend nursing homes and seniors from the negative impacts of an unfunded, unrealistic staffing mandate.” (TheHill.com)

Here’s how much the average American has in their retirement savings by age

BY ASHLEIGH JACKSON - 05/05/24 3:25 PM ET

(NEXSTAR) – While many Americans want to retire comfortably, it’s a goal that may seem out of reach for some struggling to save due to the rising costs of housing and everyday expenses.

According to a recent AARP survey, about 1 in 4 U.S. adults aged 50 and older say they never expect to retire and 70% are concerned about prices increasing faster than their income.

For those who plan to stop working, determining the right amount of money to set aside can be tricky as several factors come into play, like your spending habits, lifestyle, and location.

A GoBankingRates study, for example, found that you’d need over $1.1 million to fund a 25-year retirement in Miami, Florida, compared to nearly $570,000 in McAllen, Texas – based on the annual cost of groceries, housing, utilities, transportation, and healthcare costs.

About 1 in 4 US adults 50 and older who aren’t yet retired expect to never retire: AARP study

One way to benchmark your savings is to see how you compare with others in your age range, though, as Edwards Jones points out, it won’t “tell you how close you are to your goal.”

“The relevant data point isn’t what others your age have saved but how much money you need yourself. The answer depends almost entirely on you, your habits now and your plans for later,” the financial services firm noted on its website.

Data from the Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances (2022) indicates the median retirement savings account balance for all U.S. families stands at $87,000.

Below are the median amounts for individuals, categorized by age:

Age Range Median Retirement Savings

Under 35 $18,880

35-44 $45,000

45-54 $115,000

55-64 $185,000

65-74 $200,000

75 or older $130,000

Source: Federal Reserve

The average retirement savings account balance for all families is higher, at $333,940, since the wealthiest households tend to drive the average up. This also applies to individual account balances, as illustrated in the following table.

Age Range Average Retirement Savings

Under 35 $49,130

35-44 $141,520

45-54 $313,220

55-64 $537,560

65-74 $609,230

75 or older $462,410

Source: Federal Reserve

If you’re looking for another way to track your progress, Fidelity developed a savings guideline that factors in your age and salary.

It says by age 30, you should aim to have the equivalent of one year’s salary saved. So, if your annual salary is $60,000, your 401(k) balance should ideally be $60,000.

Here’s the full guideline from Fidelity:

By age 30: Save 1x your income

By age 35: Save 2x your income

By age 40: Save 3x your income

By age 45: Save 4x your income

By age 50: Save 6x your income

By age 55: Save 7x your income

By age 60: Save 8x your income

By age 67: Save 10x your income

However, it’s important to remember that while this can be a useful tool, it’s not a mandate.

“These milestones are aspirational. You likely won’t meet all of them,” Fidelity explained on its website. “But they can serve as goalposts to help you make a plan to save enough to maintain your lifestyle in retirement.” (TheHill.com)

Biden administration rolls out international cybersecurity plan

The State Department’s international cyber strategy is aimed at setting goals for the US in leading on cyber norms at the United Nations, on AI issues and in countering China.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken talks.

The strategy will be formally unveiled by Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. | Jake Bacon/AP

By MAGGIE MILLER

05/06/2024 06:00 AM EDT

The Biden administration is rolling out a strategy Monday for how to build global cybersecurity cooperation, following years of stepped up threats from China, Russia and cybercriminals.

The State Department’s international cybersecurity strategy is the first articulated U.S. global cyber strategy in over a decade. If successful, it could elevate the U.S.’s role globally in countering cyber threats and creating global consensus on artificial intelligence, and position the U.S. against China in setting cybersecurity norms.

While the strategy will be formally unveiled by Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Monday afternoon, POLITICO was provided an early look at the document, which lays out four main areas of focus. These are promoting a secure digital ecosystem globally; upholding “rights-respecting” digital technology approaches with allied nations; building coalitions to counter malicious cyberattacks; and enhancing the cybersecurity resiliency of partner nations.

This final commitment includes a major focus on the State Department’s newly created Cyberspace and Digital Connectivity fund. The most recent round of federal appropriations signed into law by President Joe Biden gave the fund $50 million, intended to help allied nations enhance their cybersecurity. Before the fund’s creation, the U.S. gave one-time grants for this purpose to countries including Albania and Costa Rica following separate cyberattacks on government services in those nations.

CISA director: Chinese intrusions found in cyber infrastructure

SharePlay Video

The new strategy will only carry forward these efforts. Nathaniel Fick, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy, acknowledged in an interview prior to the strategy’s release that the funds are limited. He teased that his team is working on identifying “candidate projects” to put the fund toward.

“In an overall 5 to 6 percent declining budgetary environment, we’re seeing a net new $50 million foreign assistance fund,” Fick said. “Now, it’s incumbent upon us, me, our team to prove that it’s worth the investment.”

The U.S. also plans to take an enhanced role in cyber diplomacy efforts at the United Nations. The strategy calls for pushing more “action-oriented conversations” at the U.N. on cyber issues, including implementing a framework for responsible behavior in cyberspace. Fick said a “program of action” to implement this framework is already in progress.

The advent of artificial intelligence is set to rapidly change all sectors, and massively alter the world of cyber threats and offensive measures. The new strategy pledges that the U.S. and its allies will “reach consensus on guiding principles” around the development and use of AI technologies, including advancing “global norms” in this space.

“There are a lot of issues that are far from geopolitics, that are far from military applications, where the United States, China, and economies and governments around the world have ample common ground to collaborate,” Fick said on the AI goals.

The international cyber strategy is the latest in a series of plans put forward by the Biden administration in the past year aimed at strengthening the nation’s approach to cyber and technology policy. The most significant of these was the White House’s National Cyber Strategy, which listed enhancing international cyber partnerships as one of the top five priorities.

The national cyber strategy was accompanied by an implementation plan, outlining steps to put the strategy into force. Fick noted that there will also be an implementation plan for the State Department’s strategy, and that “we will have a really concerted effort over the next six months to get as many of these ideas and initiatives baked into our diplomacy as we can.”

The timeline is directly shaped around the upcoming presidential election in November that could spell a change in administration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report, widely seen as a playbook for how a second term in office for former President Donald Trump may pan out, recommends that the U.S. engage in cyber diplomacy, but that the nation establish “enforceable norms” of behavior in cyberspace, a more forceful approach to cyber policy.

Fick acknowledged that while U.S. foreign policy may evolve should Trump be elected in November, the main goals of the strategy are likely to remain in place, noting that he was in touch with cyber leadership from the former Trump administration.

“It is so important in the world that the United States be a reliable, consistent partner,” Fick said. “We’re trying to ensure that we have maximal continuity beyond November. … and it’s certainly something that we’re trying to make clear to allies and partners when we engage with them.” (Politico)

Trump Has Long Been Known as a Micromanager. Prosecutors Are Using It Against Him.

Witnesses have described the former president monitoring the minutiae of his business, a portrait prosecutors are drawing to help convince the jury that he couldn’t have helped but oversee a hush-money payment to avoid a damaging story.

Share full article

Donald Trump stands close to the camera as he talks outdoors in Manhattan.

“I always sign my checks, so I know where my money’s going,” Donald Trump wrote in one of his books, in a passage that was read aloud in court. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Jonah E. BromwichMaggie HabermanJonathan Swan

By Jonah E. Bromwich, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

May 11, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET

At Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial, his lawyers have insisted he had “nothing to do” with any of the felony charges against him.

But testimony from prosecution witnesses over the last several weeks has called that argument into question, underscoring that Mr. Trump can be obsessive about two all-important aspects of his work: Anything having to do with the media, and anything having to do with his money.

The 34 documents at the heart of the prosecution’s case relate to both obsessions.

The Manhattan district attorney says Mr. Trump orchestrated the disguise of 11 checks, 11 invoices and 12 ledger entries to continue the cover-up of a damaging story, paying his former fixer $420,000 in the process. And the testimony about Mr. Trump’s management style could play a central role as prosecutors seek to convince the jury that there is no world in which Mr. Trump was not tracking the outflow of cash from his accounts.

The prosecutors’ strategy illustrates the risk of a criminal trial for Mr. Trump, one of the most famous men in the world, whose character and habits are familiar even to those who have not tracked his every move. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has accused him of orchestrating the falsification of the 34 documents to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.

David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer and the trial’s first witness, worked with Mr. Trump for decades, the two men trading favors as each sought to make headlines. Asked about Mr. Trump’s qualities as a businessman, Mr. Pecker described him “as a micromanager from what I saw,” adding that “he looked at all of the aspects of whatever the issue was.”

The prosecutor questioning Mr. Pecker next asked about Mr. Trump’s approach to money. “He was very cautious and very frugal,” Mr. Pecker replied.

The prosecutors have a mountain of corroborating evidence, but none that directly links Mr. Trump himself to the scheme. Instead, witness after witness has emphasized some of the former president’s most famous characteristics — some of which Mr. Trump himself has promoted for decades — eliciting a portrait of a man who prosecutors contend could not have helped but oversee a hush-money payment to avoid a damaging story.

It is unclear whether jurors will accept that narrative. Only one witness, the former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, is expected to testify to having direct knowledge of Mr. Trump instructing his underlings to falsify documents. And one employee, Deborah Tarasoff, has said that Mr. Trump did not oversee her work closely, testifying that he typically acted through at least two layers of middle management.

But the courtroom has already heard, from old friends and former employees, about the way Mr. Trump’s tendencies informed the culture of his company, the Trump Organization, where he first honed his management style.

Editors’ Picks

George Takei Keeps Faith With Democracy

Scarlett Johansson Shares Her Beauty Regimen

A Shattering Secret on the Path to Motherhood

Hope Hicks, a former spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, described it in her testimony as a “very big and successful company.” But she noted that it was “really run like a small family business.”

“Everybody that works there,” she said, “in some sense reports to Mr. Trump.”

Ms. Tarasoff’s former manager, Jeffrey McConney, told a story that may have pleased prosecutors. He said that early in his career at the Trump Organization, he had walked into the boss’s office and Mr. Trump — in the midst of a phone conversation — had told him: “You’re fired.”

Once off the phone, Mr. McConney said, Mr. Trump had taken it back. But he had warned his new employee to watch the accounts closely, noting that the “cash balances went down last week.”

“He said, ‘Now focus on my bills,’” Mr. McConney recalled. “It was a teaching moment. Just because somebody is asking for money, negotiate with them, talk to them.” Don’t just hand the money over “mindlessly.”

Trump Hush-Money Trial: Live Updates

Updated

May 10, 2024, 5:12 p.m. ETMay 10, 2024

May 10, 2024

Raunch and business records: 5 takeaways from Trump’s criminal trial.

The contact list held by Trump’s White House gatekeeper reflects his celebrity-laced orbit.

Several witnesses have brought up Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard. Where is he?

Mr. McConney’s testimony was corroborated on Tuesday by an unusual witness: a past version of Mr. Trump himself.

Sally Franklin, a top editor for Penguin Random House, was called to the witness stand to read aloud passages from two of Mr. Trump’s books in which he described himself as a fastidious custodian monitoring the minutiae of his business.

“I always sign my checks, so I know where my money’s going,” he wrote in one of the excerpts read aloud in court. In another, Mr. Trump boasted of cashing a check for 50 cents, sent by Spy magazine as a prank.

“They may call that cheap; I call it watching the bottom line,” he wrote in the book. “Every dollar counts in business, and for that matter, every dime. Penny pinching? You bet. I’m all for it.”

Prosecutors hope that it will be hard to imagine that author parting with $420,000 without good reason.

In interviews, former aides said that while Mr. Trump’s focus did not apply to everything, he was attuned to any element of his business or persona that the public might see, from visuals to advertising copy to press statements.

Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump casino executive, recalled Mr. Trump, late one night, admonishing a maintenance worker who was polishing the marble floors at one of the casinos — Mr. Trump told the worker he was using the wrong chemical. Alan Marcus, a former consultant for the Trump Organization, described Mr. Trump providing feedback on the language of a television commercial opposing a tunnel project by a casino rival in Atlantic City, and on taking the spots down when they became controversial.

Barbara Res, a former top Trump Organization executive who oversaw some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent construction projects, including Trump Tower, said that the boss didn’t have any real knowledge of high-rise construction before that project. But she said that when it came to specific superficial details, he often sought to impose his will.

That included insisting, in spite of building code requirements, that he didn’t want buttons in Braille in his elevators. “He said, ‘We won’t have handicapped people living in Trump Tower, so we don’t need that,’” she recalled. The architect working on the project overruled him.

Mr. Trump himself described this tendency in another book excerpt read in court, writing: “When you are working with a decorator, make sure you ask to see all of the invoices. Decorators are by nature honest people, but you should be double-checking regardless.”

Ms. Res described a culture where Mr. Trump’s desires were so well known that people would often do things to please him without him saying a word, paraphrasing a version of what Mr. Cohen has said.

“We knew Trump so well, he didn’t have to say anything, we knew what he wanted,” Ms. Res said. “I never did anything illegal and I stopped him from demolishing a building without a permit. But others did.”

There have also been indications during the trial of Mr. Trump’s tendency to insert himself — to micromanage — when the stakes are high. Ms. Hicks, the former spokeswoman, told a story that hinted at her former boss’s interest in the coordination of hush-money payments, even if he did not deign to involve himself directly.

At that time, Mr. Trump, famously, did not text. But Ms. Hicks did. On the stand, she described a text message that she had sent to Mr. Cohen on Nov. 5, 2016, days before the presidential election. Something had prompted her to ask Mr. Cohen for Mr. Pecker’s phone number — despite already having contact information for the publisher.

“I have it,” she told Mr. Cohen apologetically. “But Mr. Trump thinks it’s the wrong number.” (NYT)

Trump May Owe $100 Million From Double-Dip Tax Breaks, Audit Shows

A previously unknown focus of an I.R.S. audit is a dubious accounting maneuver that effectively meant taking the same write-offs twice on a Chicago skyscraper.

The I.R.S. believes that former President Donald J. Trump violated a law meant to prevent double-dipping on tax-reducing losses.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Share full article

455

By Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel

This article was published in partnership with ProPublica. Russ Buettner of The New York Times has spent years reporting on the former president’s finances, including decades of his tax returns. Paul Kiel of ProPublica has reported on the I.R.S. and the ways the ultrawealthy avoid taxes since 2018.

May 11, 2024

Updated 11:08 a.m. ET

Former President Donald J. Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an Internal Revenue Service inquiry uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.

The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Mr. Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.

But when Mr. Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the I.R.S. has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.

The first write-off came on Mr. Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.

There is no indication the I.R.S. challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Mr. Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the I.R.S. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.

The issues around Mr. Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the I.R.S. undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. The Times and ProPublica, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the I.R.S. would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.

Mr. Trump’s tax records have been a matter of intense speculation since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he defied decades of precedent and refused to release his returns, citing a long-running audit. A first, partial revelation of the substance of the audit came in 2020, when The Times reported that the I.R.S. was disputing a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump had claimed starting in 2010. That refund, which appeared to be based on Mr. Trump’s reporting of vast losses from his long-failing casinos, equaled every dollar of federal income tax he had paid during his first flush of television riches, from 2005 through 2008, plus interest.

Editors’ Picks

George Takei Keeps Faith With Democracy

Scarlett Johansson Shares Her Beauty Regimen

A Shattering Secret on the Path to Motherhood

ImageDonald Trump stands outdoors, speaking at a podium emblazoned with “Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago,” with his children Eric, Ivanka and Donald Jr. looking on.

Mr. Trump at the tower in 2008, with his three eldest children. The project kept falling short of its predicted success, with condo units unsold and retail space sitting empty.Credit...Amanda Rivkin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The reporting by The Times and ProPublica about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Mr. Trump’s quarrel with the I.R.S. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Mr. Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 I.R.S. memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Mr. Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by The Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.

It is unclear how the audit battle has progressed since December 2022, when it was mentioned in the congressional report. Audits often drag on for years, and taxpayers have a right to appeal the I.R.S.’s conclusions. The case would typically become public only if Mr. Trump chose to challenge a ruling in court.

In response to questions for this article, Mr. Trump’s son Eric, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said: “This matter was settled years ago, only to be brought back to life once my father ran for office. We are confident in our position, which is supported by opinion letters from various tax experts, including the former general counsel of the I.R.S.”

An I.R.S. spokesman said federal law prohibited the agency from discussing private taxpayer information.

The outcome of Mr. Trump’s dispute could set a precedent for wealthy people seeking tax benefits from the laws governing partnerships. Those laws are notoriously complex, riddled with uncertainty and under constant assault by lawyers pushing boundaries for their clients. The I.R.S. has inadvertently further invited aggressive positions by rarely auditing partnership tax returns.

A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations

Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.

Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker: Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.

Trump on Trial Newsletter: Sign up here to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

The audit represents yet another potential financial threat — albeit a more distant one — for Mr. Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 presidential nominee. In recent months, he has been ordered to pay $83.3 million in a defamation case and another $454 million in a civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Mr. Trump has appealed both judgments. (He is also in the midst of a criminal trial in Manhattan, where he is accused of covering up a hush-money payment to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.)

Beyond the two episodes under audit, reporting by The Times in recent years has found that, across his business career, Mr. Trump has often used what experts described as highly aggressive — and at times, legally suspect — accounting maneuvers to avoid paying taxes. To the six tax experts consulted for this article, Mr. Trump’s Chicago accounting maneuvers appeared to be questionable and unlikely to withstand scrutiny.

“I think he ripped off the tax system,” said Walter Schwidetzky, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and an expert on partnership taxation.

Image

The old Chicago Sun-Times building and other buildings lining the river in downtown Chicago.

The old Chicago Sun-Times building, which would be replaced by Mr. Trump’s 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper.Credit...Tim Boyle/Getty Images

From ‘$1.2 Billion’ to ‘Worthless’

Mr. Trump struck a deal in 2001 to acquire land and a building that was then home to the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. Two years later, after publicly toying with the idea of constructing the world’s tallest building there, he unveiled plans for a more modest tower, with 486 residences and 339 “hotel condominiums” that buyers could use for short stays and allow Mr. Trump’s company to rent out. He initially estimated that construction would last until 2007 and cost $650 million.

Mr. Trump placed the project at the center of the first season of “The Apprentice” in 2004, offering the winner a top job there under his tutelage. “It’ll be a mind-boggling job to manage,” Mr. Trump said during the season finale. “When it’s finished in 2007, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago, could have a value of $1.2 billion and will raise the standards of architectural excellence throughout the world.”

As his cost estimates increased, Mr. Trump arranged to borrow as much as $770 million for the project — $640 million from Deutsche Bank and $130 million from Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company. He personally guaranteed $40 million of the Deutsche loan. Both Deutsche and Fortress then sold off pieces of the loans to other institutions, spreading the risk and potential gain.

Mr. Trump planned to sell enough of the 825 units to pay off his loans when they came due in May 2008. But when that date came, he had sold only 133. At that point, he projected that construction would not be completed until mid-2009, at a revised cost of $859 million.

He asked his lenders for a six-month extension. A briefing document prepared for the lenders, obtained by The Times and ProPublica, said Mr. Trump would contribute $89 million of his own money, $25 million more than his initial plan. The lenders agreed.

But sales did not pick up that summer, with the nation plunged into the financial crisis that would become the Great Recession. When Mr. Trump asked for another extension in September, his lenders refused.

Two months later, Mr. Trump defaulted on his loans and sued his lenders, characterizing the financial crisis as the kind of catastrophe, like a flood or hurricane, covered by the “force majeure” clause of his loan agreement with Deutsche Bank. That, he said, entitled him to an indefinite delay in repaying his loans. Mr. Trump went so far as to blame the bank and its peers for “creating the current financial crisis.” He demanded $3 billion in damages.

At the time, Mr. Trump had paid down his loans with $99 million in sales but still needed more money to complete construction. At some point that year, he concluded that his investment in the tower was worthless, at least as the term is defined in partnership tax law.

Mr. Trump’s worthlessness claim meant only that his stake in 401 Mezz Venture, the L.L.C. that held the tower, was without value because he expected that sales would never produce enough cash to pay off the mortgages, let alone turn a profit.

When he filed his 2008 tax return, he declared business losses of $697 million. Tax records do not fully show which businesses generated that figure. But working with tax experts, The Times and ProPublica calculated that the Chicago worthlessness deduction could have been as high as $651 million, the value of Mr. Trump’s stake in the partnership — about $94 million he had invested and the $557 million loan balance reported on his tax returns that year.

When business owners report losses greater than their income in any given year, they can retain the leftover negative amount as a credit to reduce their taxable income in future years. As it turned out, that tax-reducing power would be of increasing value to Mr. Trump. While many of his businesses continued to lose money, income from “The Apprentice” and licensing and endorsement agreements poured in: $33.3 million in 2009, $44.6 million in 2010 and $51.3 million in 2011.

Mr. Trump’s advisers girded for a potential audit of the worthlessness deduction from the moment they claimed it, according to the filings from the New York attorney general’s lawsuit. Starting in 2009 Mr. Trump’s team excluded the Chicago tower from the frothy annual “statements of financial condition” that Mr. Trump used to boast of his wealth, out of concern that assigning value to the building would conflict with its declared worthlessness, according to the attorney general’s filing. (Those omissions came even as Mr. Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth to qualify for low-interest loans, according to the ruling in the attorney general’s lawsuit.)

Mr. Trump had good reason to fear an audit of the deduction, according to the tax experts consulted for this article. They believe that Mr. Trump’s tax advisers pushed beyond what was defensible.

The worthlessness deduction serves as a way for a taxpayer to benefit from an expected total loss on an investment long before the final results are known. It occupies a fuzzy and counterintuitive slice of tax law. Three decades ago, a federal appeals court ruled that the judgment of a company’s worthlessness could be based in part on the opinion of its owner. After taking the deduction, the owner can keep the “worthless” company and its assets. Subsequent court decisions have only partly clarified the rules. Absent prescribed parameters, tax lawyers have been left to handicap the chances that a worthlessness deduction will withstand an I.R.S. challenge.

There are several categories, with a declining likelihood of success, of money taxpayers can claim to have lost.

The tax experts consulted for this article universally assigned the highest level of certainty to cash spent to acquire an asset. The roughly $94 million that Mr. Trump’s tax returns show he invested in Chicago fell into this category.

Some gave a lower, though still probable, chance of a taxpayer prevailing in declaring a loss based on loans that a lender agreed to forgive. That’s because forgiven debt generally must be declared as income, which can offset that portion of the worthlessness deduction in the same year. A large portion of Mr. Trump’s worthlessness deduction fell in this category, though he did not begin reporting forgiven debt income until two years later, a delay that would have further reduced his chances of prevailing in an audit.

The tax experts gave the weakest chance of surviving a challenge for a worthlessness deduction based on borrowed money for which the outcome was not clear. It reflects a doubly irrational claim — that the taxpayer deserves a tax benefit for losing someone else’s money even before the money has been lost, and that those anticipated future losses can be used to offset real income from other sources. Most of the debt included in Mr. Trump’s worthlessness deduction was based on that risky position.

Including that debt in the deduction was “just not right,” said Monte Jackel, a veteran of the I.R.S. and major accounting firms who often publishes analyses of partnership tax issues.

Image

A close-up shot of the reflective curved glass exterior of the Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago.

After declaring the tower “worthless,” Mr. Trump claimed as much as $651 million in losses on the project. He later claimed $168 million more.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

A Second Bite at the Apple

Mr. Trump continued to sell units at the Chicago Tower, but still below his costs. Had he done nothing, his 2008 worthlessness deduction would have prevented him from claiming that shortfall as losses again. But in 2010, his lawyers attempted an end-run by merging the entity through which he owned the Chicago tower into another partnership, DJT Holdings L.L.C. In the following years, they piled other businesses, including several of his golf courses, into DJT Holdings.

Those changes had no apparent business purpose. But Mr. Trump’s tax advisers took the position that pooling the Chicago tower’s finances with other businesses entitled him to declare even more tax-reducing losses from his Chicago investment.

His financial problems there continued. More than 100 of the hotel condominiums never sold. Sales of all units totaled only $727 million, far below Mr. Trump’s budgeted costs of $859 million. And some 70,000 square feet of retail space remained vacant because it had been designed without access to foot or vehicle traffic. From 2011 through 2020, Mr. Trump reported $168 million in additional losses from the project.

Those additional write-offs helped Mr. Trump avoid tax liability for his continuing entertainment riches, as well as his unpaid debt from the tower. Starting in 2010, his lenders agreed to forgive about $270 million of those debts. But he was able to delay declaring most of that income until 2014 and spread it out over five years of tax returns, thanks to a provision in the Obama administration’s stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession. In 2018, Mr. Trump reported positive income for the first time in 11 years. But his income tax bill still amounted to only $1.9 million, even as he reported a $25 million gain from the sale of his late father's assets.

It’s unclear when the I.R.S. began to question the 2010 merger transaction, but the conflict escalated during Mr. Trump’s presidency.

The I.R.S. explained its position in a Technical Advice Memorandum, released in 2019, that identified Mr. Trump only as “A.” Such memos, reserved for cases where the law is unclear, are rare and involve extensive review by senior I.R.S. lawyers. The agency produced only two other such memos that year.

The memos are required to be publicly released with the taxpayer’s information removed, and this one was more heavily redacted than usual. Some partnership specialists wrote papers exploring its meaning and importance to other taxpayers, but none identified taxpayer “A” as the then-sitting president of the United States. The Times and ProPublica matched the facts of the memo to information from Mr. Trump’s tax returns and elsewhere.

The 20-page document is dense with footnotes, calculations and references to various statutes, but the core of the I.R.S.’s position is that Mr. Trump’s 2010 merger violated a law meant to prevent double dipping on tax-reducing losses. If done properly, the merger would have accounted for the fact that Mr. Trump had already written off the full cost of the tower’s construction with his worthlessness deduction.

In the I.R.S. memo, Mr. Trump’s lawyers vigorously disagreed with the agency’s conclusions, saying he had followed the law.

If the I.R.S. prevails, Mr. Trump’s tax returns would look very different, especially those from 2011 to 2017. During those years, he reported $184 million in income from “The Apprentice” and agreements to license his name, along with $219 million from canceled debts. But he paid only $643,431 in income taxes thanks to huge losses on his businesses, including the Chicago tower. The revisions sought by the I.R.S. would require amending his tax returns to remove $146 million in losses and add as much as $218 million in income from condominium sales. That shift of up to $364 million could swing those years out of the red and well into positive territory, creating a tax bill that could easily exceed $100 million.

The only public sign of the Chicago audit came in December 2022, when a congressional Joint Committee on Taxation report on I.R.S. efforts to audit Mr. Trump made an unexplained reference to the section of tax law at issue in the Chicago case. It confirmed that the audit was still underway and could affect Mr. Trump’s tax returns from several years.

That the I.R.S. did not initiate an audit of the 2008 worthlessness deduction puzzled the experts in partnership taxation. Many assumed the understaffed I.R.S. simply had not realized what Mr. Trump had done until the deadline to investigate it had passed.

“I think the government recognized that they screwed up,” and then audited the merger transaction to make up for it, Mr. Jackel said.

The agency’s difficulty in keeping up with Mr. Trump’s maneuvers, experts said, showed that this gray area of tax law was too easy to exploit.

“Congress needs to radically change the rules for the worthlessness deduction,” Professor Schwidetzky said. (NYT)

Tracking the Trump criminal cases and where they stand

A photo of Trump, with photos of Mar-a-lago documents, the Jan 6 insurrection, money, and a map of Georgia by his face.

(Natalie Vineberg/Washington Post illustration; Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post; Saul Martinez for The Washington Post; Ronda Churchill for The Washington Post; Department of Justice/AP; iStock)

By Derek Hawkins,

Nick Mourtoupalas and

Natalie Vineberg

Updated May 8 at 10:27 a.m.

Originally published Aug. 1, 2023

Comment

Add to your saved stories

Save

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. He has been indicted in four cases and has denied wrongdoing in each. Even if Trump were convicted, he could still run for president. Here is the latest in each of Trump’s four criminal cases.

Press Enter to skip to end of carousel

Latest update

| May 7

Classified documents case

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has indefinitely delayed the trial, saying there are too many pretrial issues to set a new trial date now.

End of carousel

INVESTIGATION

INDICTMENT

Georgia election interference case

Federal Jan. 6 election case

Classified documents case

TRIAL SCHEDULED

TRIAL UNDERWAY

Hush money case

VERDICT

Hush money case

The Manhattan district attorney charged Trump with falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.

What to know

The trial in Trump’s hush money case began on April 15 in Manhattan. Witness testimony is currently underway and the trial is expected to last until late May or early June.

Why it matters

The case marks the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president. A conviction would not bar Trump from running for or holding office.

The background

Daniels was paid $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election to keep quiet about a sexual encounter she says they had years earlier. Trump denies the affair but has admitted to reimbursing his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the payments. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleges Trump misclassified the reimbursement payments as legal expenses when they were actually campaign expenses. Read more about the charges in the New York case.

Press Enter to skip to end of carousel

MOST READ

israel-palestinians-campus-protests-42468.jpg

Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors

Russia detains US soldier on charges of theft

Forget the sex. Check out those titillating invoices at the Trump hush money trial.

Kristi Noem’s Team Told Her to Nix the Dog Story 2 Years Ago

‘Waste of a seat’: Manchin’s succession becomes a magnet for anti-establishment Republicans

Isabelle Friedman (University of California, Los Angeles): UCLA’s campus was met with extreme violence. After counterprotesters attempted to seize the encampment in our main plaza, there were a lot of injuries. One of our reporters was also injured and classes were canceled on Wednesday. And before all this happened, the chancellor was called in to testify before a congressional committee to speak on their views on rising campus antisemitism and the university’s handling of on-campus demonstrations.

Anika Seth (Yale University): Ideology aside, a lot of us, myself included, have friends who are in the plaza who are actively protesting. As a journalist, you’re watching your friends get arrested. And the only thing that you can do in that moment is report. And that was incredibly difficult emotionally, watching friends, classmates, people that I’ve worked with in other clubs be loaded on Yale shuttles that are operating as police buses with their hands held back behind their backs.

Jewish Voice for Peace hosts a Passover seder in the encampment at the University of Michigan.

Jewish Voice for Peace hosts a Passover seder in the encampment at the University of Michigan on April 22. | Julianne Yoon/The Michigan Daily

Have there been instances of antisemitism as part of these protests and counterprotests? What does that look like?

Sophia Peyser, Madi Olivier (Emory University): Some students have told the Emory Wheel that the protests are antisemitic, sometimes pointing to the use of chants such as “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and “Hey hey, ho ho, Zionists have got to go.”

Leon Orlov-Sullivan (City College of New York): I’m a Jewish student, so I can speak to some of this from my own experience, though I don’t wear a yarmulke and I’m not religious. But I do know a lot of Jewish students on campus. I personally haven’t heard anything antisemitic, and I haven’t heard any mention of my own Jewish background. I do think some Jewish students in some groups have expressed concerns that they feel the people who are against Israel are against Jews as a whole, or that they don’t feel safe on campus. I spoke to one student who said she experienced bullying for wearing a pin with the flag of Israel on it.

Jacob Wendler (Northwestern University): While of course, every student is going to have a different understanding of what constitutes antisemitism and Islamophobia, I would say the rhetoric at the protests has remained focused largely on Israel. A few posters circulating on social media have seemed to imply that there has been antisemitic imagery at the encampment (one depicted the Jewish university president donning devil horns, while another showed a Star of David crossed out). Encampment organizers have condemned these signs and taken them down, saying they don’t represent the message of the demonstration.

Manasa Gudavalli (New York University): There were some reports of antisemitic incidents at the first encampment on campus, although NYU’s American Association of University Professors and dozens of departmental leaders have said no university affiliates were involved in such incidents.

“In short, the protests themselves are nonviolent, but Jewish students hear the rhetoric espoused at them as violent.”

— Alex Steil

Alex Steil (University of Minnesota): Complaints of antisemitism have arisen not so much in response to the theme of the protests but instead to the chalk statements and posters hung around our student union, where phrases like “Intifada is revolution is armed struggle,” “Nothing but hate for Israel and Zionism” or “Al-Qassam make us proud,” were common in the days after last Tuesday’s protests. These are the main examples I have heard from Jewish leaders on campus when they say there is hateful rhetoric on campus. In short, the protests themselves are nonviolent, but Jewish students hear the rhetoric espoused at them as violent.

Have there been instances of Islamophobia as part of these protests and counterprotests? What does that look like?

Manasa Gudavalli (NYU): Many pro-Palestinian protesters say they are being unfairly disciplined for their viewpoints on the war in Gaza. Students have been continuing to push for protection of pro-Palestinian students’ rights to free expression at NYU.

Sophia Peyser, Madi Olivier (Emory University): Emory Students for Justice in Palestine told the Emory Wheel on April 28 that the administration’s actions in the last six months have “invited active harm” to Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities at Emory — after “EPD arrested 28 protestors during a pro-Palestine encampment on the Quad on April 25.” On April 6, the Emory Wheel reported that the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Palestine Legal filed a federal civil rights complaint on behalf of ESJP with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, demanding an immediate investigation into the “hostile” anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic environment on campus. The complaint claimed that students were subject to actions such as being called terrorists and being followed on campus.

Leon Orlov-Sullivan (City College of New York): As far as anti-Arab sentiment goes, I personally haven’t seen a rise on City College’s campuses. I think City College is majority minority, and there are a lot of students who are Arab or non-Arab Muslim. But a Muslim student I know did tell me that her sister, who wears a hijab, had an experience at Queens College this week where, out of a group of people, she was the only one questioned as to why she was entering her college.

Police officers push back pro-Palestinian protesters during a demonstration at Emory University.

Police officers push back pro-Palestinian protesters during a demonstration at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 25. | Jack Rutherford/The Emory Wheel

Have you seen a rise in antisemitism on campus outside of the protests? Have you seen a rise in Islamophobia or anti-Arab sentiment?

Alex Steil (University of Minnesota): Yes, there has been a stark rise in antisemitism on campus. Of 122 bias reports this year at the university, 42 are reported against Israel or tagged as antisemitism. Sixteen were reported as against Palestine or as Islamophobia.

Neil Mehta (Brown University): Students, campus groups and administrators have denounced Islamophobia and antisemitism when it has appeared on campus, such as after threats to Brown’s Muslim Student Center last year or Brown-RISD Hillel earlier this year.

Zhane Yamin (University of Michigan): The Michigan Daily has reported instances of antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus. A U-M School of Information board member was recorded verbally assaulting Arab and Muslim students. There was no disciplinary action taken by the university; however, the School of Information committed to facilitating listening groups to hear students’ concerns. The Michigan Hillel building was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti earlier this year, and the students responsible for the vandalization were punished by the university.

Anika Seth (Yale University): There are reports of antisemitic and also Islamophobic conduct that have existed throughout the year. In the fall semester, there was a report of someone having their head coverings snatched off of them. We haven’t traced down all of these specific and very individual reports of violence, but it’s worth noting that they exist on both sides.

Jared Mitovich (University of Pennsylvania): Last semester it felt like the criticism that was the most influential on the behavior of the university was the perceived antisemitism. And that’s because of the passion and the criticism that was primarily led by a group of very passionate students, but also a wave of very significant donors and alumni. And obviously, those donors, such as Marc Rowan, have the resources to be very vocal in the media, through back channels, with administration — they’ve got a pathway to voice their concerns in a way that can impact how the university goes about its business.

Signs hang outside the encampment at Northwestern University.

Signs hang outside the encampment at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, on April 25. | William Tong/The Daily Northwestern

Have Jewish students on your campus told you they feel unsafe? Have Palestinian/Arab students on your campus told you they feel unsafe?

Sophia Peyser, Madi Olivier (Emory University): We published an op-ed in the fall from a Jewish student who said they felt unsafe because “educators here dismiss the real fears of Jewish students.” Additionally, many attendees at Palestine protests and members of pro-Palestine student groups have requested anonymity from our news reporters, citing safety concerns.

Alex Steil (University of Minnesota): Jewish students have made an overt effort to express their unease. They are expressing their worries that violent rhetoric, at any moment, could turn into violent action. As the student president said for the campus Jewish student organization, “Safety, in this moment, is relative.” They mention how they don’t feel safe walking around campus, seeing mentions of armed revolution or the globalization of the Intifada. I have not heard of the same type of incidents with Palestinian/Arab students. That’s not to say it isn’t occurring, but it isn’t talked about in the same way as it is with Jewish students. There have been statements from those arrested explaining why they left their encampments early: The police presence made them feel unsafe.

Anika Seth (Yale University): I’ve heard especially in the fall, when the “doxxing trucks” were coming around campus, a lot of Muslim and Arab students and also students of color expressed really huge concern for their safety and worries about doxxing. And I think that there is a lot of truth to the reports that you see in national media about Jewish students feeling uncomfortable and unsafe on campuses. But there are also a lot who are upset by that characterization. We’ve heard students say that they feel incredibly safe and don’t appreciate being looped into this category of “all Jewish students are unsafe on American universities everywhere,” which I think is a narrative that national media outlets seem to be getting out but that students here have been totally pushing back against.

Jared Mitovich (University of Pennsylvania): In the Jewish community, there are certainly subsets of people who do feel unsafe on this campus right now, especially given the encampment — that’s created a place for them to attribute those feelings to. At the same time, you also have Jewish students who are pro-Palestinian and who want to see the university defending its Palestinian students. On the flip side, Palestinian students and their supporters do feel that the university has kind of created a state of heightened surveillance. What I know is definitely true is that they’re concerned about doxxing and their safety, given that a lot of external organizations have taken down the names of faculty, students and staff — anybody who those organizations perceived to be engaged in antisemitic or even anti-Israel conduct. Those names and faces have been plastered all over the internet. And that’s really prompted a wave of concern among those students, but also university administration, who have taken some steps to create doxxing resources and web pages.

“On the flip side, Palestinian students and their supporters do feel that the university has kind of created a state of heightened surveillance.”

— Jared Mitovich

Emmy Martin (UNC-Chapel Hill): Our administration has been pretty vocal in condemning antisemitic speech and Islamophobic speech. Students, specifically within our Arab and Muslim community have called on the administration saying they’ve not felt supported in the same way that Jewish students have experienced support from the administration. For example, UNC Hillel has often posted messages on their social media saying that they’re in communication with university administration and they’re in communication with campus security. Whereas, our Arab student organization or Muslim Student Association has folks who are saying that they don’t feel like the administration is there to provide resources for them.

How do students on your campus define antisemitism? Where do students draw the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel? Has that debate evolved in the last few months?

Jared Mitovich (University of Pennsylvania): At the university level, I believe they’ve adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. And that has drawn criticism from more of the anti-Israel side — that definition, in their interpretation, includes that anti-Israel conduct is antisemitic.

Shane Brennan (Arizona State University): I think students have been increasingly able to decipher that criticism of Israel’s government is not hate against Jewish people. There are Jewish students who support Palestine on campus.

Sophia Peyser, Madi Olivier (Emory University): One member of the Emory community directly discussed this topic in an op-ed, stating that a student group’s demand for Emory to “separate entirely from any Zionists” was inherently antisemitic, as 67 percent of religious Jews are emotionally attached to Israel, according to a Pew Research survey. On Nov. 1, 2023, the Emory Wheel reported that several other students also found these demands for separation from Zionism to be antisemitic.

“Students in the paper have expressed how people will make them feel or describe them as less Jewish for being critical of Israel.”

— Anika Seth

Alex Steil (University of Minnesota): Jewish students, again during a press conference, did conflate rhetoric against Zionism with rhetoric against Jewish students. Having talked personally with numerous members of our Jewish student organization, many see violent rhetoric against Israel as equivalent to violent rhetoric against Jewish people. That’s one of my biggest takeaways right now: Adults as well as students are synonymizing the two terms, rightly or wrongly.

Anika Seth (Yale University): Some people on campus have in the past argued that critique of Israel in any way is a critique of the Jewish people — and I will say that I think that perspective has become less prevalent from what I’ve seen since last October. Students in the paper have expressed how people will make them feel or describe them as less Jewish for being critical of Israel. And that’s another form of antisemitism that we’ve been hearing people describe to us: “You’re not Jewish if you’re not pro-Israel.”

Left: Pro-Israel protesters demonstrate outside the encampment at the University of Pennsylvania. Right: Pro-Palestinian protesters chant during a demonstration at the encampment.

Left: Pro-Israel protesters demonstrate outside the encampment at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on April 25. Right: Pro-Palestinian protesters chant during a demonstration at the encampment on May 2. | Ethan Young/The Daily Pennsylvanian

What portion of your student body is engaged in active pro-Palestine protests at this point? Is that proportion growing?

Neil Mehta (Brown University): Over the past few months, many more students have gotten involved in campus activism than in years past. Protests regarding divestment have drawn crowds of hundreds of people, and over 50 percent of respondents to our undergraduate poll said they had attended a rally or protest during their time at Brown. In that poll, held late February, we surveyed over 1,000 students. Roughly two-thirds of respondents, who are all undergraduates, said they disapproved of the university’s response to the conflict, and a similar share said they approved of a divestment proposal.

Alex Steil (University of Minnesota): It’s hard to put a number on this, as they have ebbed and flowed. That said, our reporters have put estimates of the protests at a couple hundred, although those numbers are really just determined by raw counting rather than any metric we could point to. Those numbers have dwindled as the week went on, although protestors are still saying on social media their numbers are in the hundreds. As a proportion of our overall campus, it is a fraction of our roughly 55,000 students.

Manasa Gudavalli (New York University): Most of the protests on campus, not only now but for several months, have been pro-Palestinian. While there have been large pro-Palestinian protests on campus in the past, the last two encampment demonstrations and a recent strike held in Washington Square Park have been the largest so far, indicating growing support on campus for Palestinians and divestment from companies with ties to Israel.

“Most of the protests on campus, not only now but for several months, have been pro-Palestinian.”

— Manasa Gudavalli

Leon Orlov-Sullivan (City College of New York): In recent days, I think a lot of people have developed the opinion that the CUNY administration is poorly handling the protests. And I think that might be pushing some people toward an opinion that is more pro-Palestinian or more against Israel’s actions during the Israel-Hamas war.

Have non-student protesters been an issue on your campus?

Shane Brennan (Arizona State University): The organization that promoted the ASU protest is an off-campus political organization. Students are involved with that organization, but they are not a student organization. Most pro-Palestine protests have been organized at least in part by off-campus organizations. However, there is an active Students for Justice in Palestine at ASU that has organized smaller protests consistently throughout the year.

Arianna Smith (Ohio State University): There have been non-student protesters on campus but they have for the most part been protesting alongside the student organizers, and have not been orchestrating demonstrations of their own.

Sophia Peyser, Madi Olivier (Emory University): The university reported that eight of the 28 individuals arrested on April 25 were not affiliated with the Emory community. On the night of April 27, we reported that three unidentified individuals spray painted “LAND BACK,” “FUK USA” and “DEATH 2 [ISRAEL]” on the Convocation Hall building on the Quad — protesters in attendance said that the individuals were not Emory students.

What does the media get wrong about the protests on your campus?

Zhane Yamin (University of Michigan): The protests at the University of Michigan are not equally pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. However, national media has portrayed them as so. Pro-Palestine protests are much more common, and generally bigger than pro-Israel demonstrations or rallies. However, this does not necessarily mean that student sentiment regarding the Israeli military campaign in Gaza is uniform or that there is a lack of pro-Israel sentiment on campus.

“One thing we’ve been trying to be careful about is making it clear where violence has come from and originated from on campus.”

— Isabelle Friedman

Isabelle Friedman (UCLA): One thing we’ve been trying to be careful about is making it clear where violence has come from and originated from on campus. We’ve seen some outlets portray violence as if it is not one-sided: It was coming from the counterprotesters Tuesday night. That’s something that other outlets should be critical of in their coverage.

Jacob Wendler (Northwestern University): One thing outside media may not see about the protests is that there’s a diverse array of viewpoints within the pro-Palestine encampment, and not everyone agrees on how protesters should carry out their demonstration or what might constitute a sufficient agreement with university administrators. The encampment includes Arab and Palestinian students, Jewish students, Muslim students and students of various other identities. They don’t always agree on how to respond to police escalation. For example: During the encampment’s first few hours, tents repeatedly went up and down as demonstrators disagreed over whether or not complying with police orders would be in their best interest, and there’s been dissent within the camp about how much to engage with the media.

Leon Orlov-Sullivan (City College of New York): One thing the media gets majorly wrong is the outside agitator narrative. A lot of the people that I spoke to at the encampment and the protests were CUNY students, and a lot of the older people that I spoke to were alumni or faculty or staff of CUNY. So, I definitely think that one thing the media gets wrong is portraying the encampments as though they’re not really run by or mostly populated by people from the City University of New York.

Shane Brennan (Arizona State University): The encampment itself was pretty tame and didn’t interfere with the day-to-day operations of the vast majority of students.

Counterprotesters throw away camp equipment while pro-Palestinian protesters gather in an encampment at Arizona State University.

Counterprotesters throw away camp equipment while pro-Palestinian protesters gather in an encampment at Arizona State University in Tempe, on April 26. | Paul Pascual/The State Press

How do you feel about members of Congress and other political leaders weighing in on the protests?

Anika Seth (Yale University): The antisemitism hearings before Congress that Elise Stefanik was instrumental in overseeing — that set of hearings felt deeply politically motivated to me. I will say that from the get-go made me very jaded and cynical of any type of federal response to this sort of stuff. So even if their interests are the purest, it is difficult for me to view them as anything but potentially poorly informed in some way or politically manipulative in some way. And that bothers me. Especially because these are in many respects people who aren’t on these campuses and aren’t seeing what’s happening.

Jared Mitovich (University of Pennsylvania): I was at that congressional hearing in December. It allowed me to see how close any university is to scrutiny by Congress. After the Trump election — as a wave of criticism of elite universities came from the right for their handling of free speech and supposed indoctrination — it was really interesting to see that shift. And to see Republicans in particular potentially realize that criticism of elite universities for their handling of antisemitism might be a politically helpful topic to campaign on. And I think Penn was the first example of that, because we were one of the first schools that the Committee on Education opened an investigation into. I think a lot of students on either side would say, we don’t need politicians to tell us how to operate the universities.

Manasa Gudavalli (NYU): While it is understandable that political leaders would want to weigh in on an issue that has become so deeply entrenched in national discourse, there are also concerns about this potentially causing further divisions within and oversimplification of a complex issue.

Alex Steil (University of Minnesota): I can tell you what the student response was when Rep. Ilhan Omar came to campus. Frankly, the publicity seemed to be limited to our outlet and those who were at the protests when she showed up. I saw nothing on social media about her visit, both for protesters outside of these organizations or the official student accounts posting about the protests on campus. In the end, the visits from our city council members and other legislators seemed to make little impact. In at least our instance, it seems that our protests are more student-led, student-oriented and focused on our university rather than the national scale. Our members of Congress weigh in, and that’s fine. But it seems like the students who are protesting are focusing on change it feels like they can make — calling on their university, potentially folks they have talked to before in different subject areas — rather than continue to petition at the national level.

Do you feel the events of the last few months have changed students’ political leanings? As in 1968, do you feel like these protests will have long-term impact on national politics?

Jacob Wendler (Northwestern University): I don’t know if I necessarily see it shifting people’s political views. But I think the war in Gaza has certainly made a lot of people particularly disillusioned with the U.S. government and with both parties — even more so than they previously were. We definitely might see that impact younger voter turnout rates in the fall. There were chants or signs about “Genocide Joe” at the encampment and about the Biden administration’s role in supporting the Israeli government.

“But I think the war in Gaza has certainly made a lot of people particularly disillusioned with the U.S. government and with both parties — even more so than they previously were.”

— Jacob Wendler

Jared Mitovich (University of Pennsylvania): Penn is just generally a liberal campus, people here are not really that supportive of Trump. What you’re seeing with Biden is that people aren’t necessarily behind him either. There were the Pennsylvania primary elections last week, and the uncommitted votes — or at least the write-in votes, which are correlated to uncommitted votes — were the highest in our neighborhood of Philadelphia than any other neighborhood. And I think that reflects that students’ sentiment, even within a city that’s very liberal, might be more against Joe Biden than average.

Leon Orlov-Sullivan (City College of New York): I think the impact of these protests will be a shift toward a less pro-Israel sentiment in American national politics. Polls do show that younger people are less likely to support Israel as opposed to older Americans. For many older Americans, it’s crucial to support Israel as an ally, and I think that’s less true for younger Americans. But there’s definitely a decent proportion of younger Americans who will continue to support Israel.

Anika Seth (Yale University): There feels like there’s a really different cadence to how national media is covering what’s happening now. The idea of there being these mass encampments and mass protests across the country, and students getting arrested for them and putting their arrest records on the line for it — all of that has changed how my friends from home who aren’t maybe as involved in news or geopolitics, my parents, my cousins, national media, people on the internet talk about the war. It’s much more of, “Wow, look at how much these students care about this cause”. (Politico)

Your blogger wonders what responses would be received if the people in Gaza were asked their general opinions about Jews. Would they, as did a Gazan blacksmith in an L.A. Times article several months ago, blame Hamas not for attacking Israel but only for failing to set aside enough food, medical supplies and money to protect the Gazans after said attack. Your blogger is foolish enough to suppose the leopard doesn’t change his spots, and the victims in Gaza would be more than happy to see Hamas create more Jewish victims.

$11M Homeless Housing Project in Venice Sits Empty Amid LA’s Homeless Crisis

Angela McGregor May 7, 2024 Updated 14 hrs ago

LOS ANGELES — In the midst of Los Angeles’ housing crisis, the controversial Ramada Inn project located at 3130 Washington Boulevard in Venice sits vacant. The City of Los Angeles funded the purchase of the property by PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) with an $11 million taxpayer-funded loan. The terms of the loan state that the project was to be run as a transitional housing facility for 3 to 5 years, but after 18 months, the facility was shuttered and remains empty to this day.

According to PATH, it will remain uninhabited until the first quarter of next year. "PATH Ventures [PATH's real estate holding division, the property owner] is still in the plan check phase with the City of Los Angeles and has been since December of 2022," said Tyler Renner, a spokesperson for PATH. "There have been multiple challenges through various city departments that we have been working to resolve. As of now, we are expecting to secure permits in the next month or two and to begin construction this summer. Affordable housing projects, especially rehab projects, are complicated. While we aim to bring these communities online as fast as we can, we must work through many layers of bureaucracy at every level. As of now, the site should be completed in the first three months of 2025."

Last June, Renner told the Current that PATH hoped to open the facility in December 2024 and was still "responding to comments from City Planning" on the plans they had submitted in December 2022. Planned improvements include the installation of new kitchenettes in each of the motel's 33 suites and new flooring.

The delays that Renner describes on the part of "various city departments" contrast sharply with the project's acquisition, which was voted on and funded within a month at the height of the pandemic.

On December 9, 2020, the City of Los Angeles passed a motion approving "the acquisition of The Ramada Inn, located at 3130 Washington Blvd…for a not-to-exceed amount of $9,900,000."

On December 14, a grant deed transferring the property from Marina Suites, Inc. to PATH Ventures was recorded. On December 16, the city issued an $11,000,000 promissory note to PATH for the purchase of the property (which, according to city documents, had appraised for that amount), along with closing costs and money to cover some of the cost of improvements to the property.

The 18-page note, on file with the City Administrator's office, describes the terms: "0% interest accruing during the term of the note, and a full balloon payment of the principal amount of the note due upon the earlier of (a) closing of construction financing for conversion to permanent housing, or (b) five years from execution of the note", which indicates that PATH is required to pay the city $11,000,000 on December 16, 2025.

A 20-page Project Homekey Regulatory Agreement between PATH Ventures and the City, dated the same day, also states that "the Project shall operate 33 rooms as interim housing for the homeless" and that "funding for client services provided at the property will be provided to [PATH Ventures] through a contract with LAHSA." It also restricts "the use of the property to interim or permanent supportive/affordable housing for fifty-five (55) years of project operations".

On December 23, 2020 LAHSA signed off on the aforementioned contract with PATH to provide services at the new site -- $807,705.00 for six months, between January 1, 2021 and June 30, 2021.

Once the facility had opened, this contract was amended to "extend the funding term for capital improvement funds to August 31, 2021" and PATH's compensation for those nine months to $1,312,825.00. The contract also specified that PATH was required to provide outreach, housekeeping and meals to a population defined as "low barrier", and could not deny entry to the program based on "suspicion of substance abuse, insobriety, mental disorder or criminal background unless a participant poses an imminent threat to themselves, staff, or other participants."

Shortly thereafter, a representative from then Councilmember Mike Bonin's office announced at a community meeting that the facility would be used for "transitional housing" for the next "3-5 years."

In February, 2021, dozens of Venice residents spoke at a Bureau of Engineering hearing in opposition to the building's transition to interim homeless housing, citing a lack of community outreach, a concentration of such projects within Venice, and the dire public safety consequences of the Venice Bridge Home. Their concerns (and a community benefit agreement passed by the Venice Neighborhood Council) were ultimately disregarded, and they were not informed that LAHSA had long since signed a contract with PATH which would have contradicted many of their demands (including pre-screening applicants to determine their criminal history). In March of 2021, the City Administrator recommended the City grant an additional $805,120 to PATH for "rehabilitation" of the recently acquired property, and a Coastal Development permit was issued. By June, the facility had opened.

In November 2021, for an article in the Nation entitled "An LA Councilman Tried to Help the Homeless. Now He May Lose His Job", Bonin was interviewed in the courtyard of the former motel, swapping stories and laughs with its new residents, described as fellow recovering addicts making use of their newfound stability to embrace sobriety and employment on the road to a better life. Bonin's CD11 constituents who had opposed the project were described as "white homeowners with resources…who have long wielded tremendous power".

By early 2022 a registered sex offender was living at the facility, which is located within a few blocks of three elementary schools. Two other residents died there, both from drug overdoses. In September, 2022 LAHSA signed another contract extension, agreeing to pay PATH $1,023,000.82 to operate the facility between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023. The Current reached out to LAHSA (who provided us with the contracts) to ask how much, exactly, PATH was paid to offer services at the property, and have not heard back.

In August, 2022, all of the facility's residents were notified they would have to move out within 30 days to make room for upcoming renovations to convert the property to permanent housing. Contrary to the terms of the city's promissory note and regulatory agreement, which required PATH to use the property for interim housing for "three (3) to (5) years", 3130 Washington served as interim housing for only about 18 months.

Documents available on the L.A. Department of Building and Safety's website show that the first application for a permit to convert the property's "30 existing non transient guest rooms to light housekeeping rooms" was filed on December 16, 2022. Since then, these plans have been returned to the applicant for corrections six times, most recently in September, 2023. It's unclear from the site whether those multiple requests have anything to do with the fact that the property will be used for affordable housing.

LADBS also has on file a certificate of occupancy for 3130 Washington dated April 1, 2022, for the "change of use/occupancy for 30 transient hotel guestrooms to long-term, non-transient hotel" listing Marina Suites -- the property's previous owner -- as the applicant. Marina Suites also applied for permits for plumbing and electrical improvements dated January and February, 2022 -- over two years after they signed a deed transferring ownership of the property to PATH Ventures. The Current reached out to PATH for an explanation of this (a number of developers we spoke with could cite no good reason why the previous owner would have applied for permits on the property) and Renner told us that he had spoken "with our development team, and they shared that Marina Suites has not been involved since they sold the property to the City of Los Angeles in 2020."

As of publication, PATH Ventures' website lists 21 completed projects in both Northern and Southern California, built with a variety of public funding between 2012-2022. Their most recent tax filing lists just over $70 million in total assets. The site also states they have 11 projects in "pre-development"; presumably, 3130 Washington is one of them. (Westside Current)

Your blogger notes he, too, would like to live near the beach, and wonders why this expensive piece of land cannot be sold to buy cheaper land somewhere else, albeit a bit less desirable, to provide more housing units. Even those arguing housing is a “right” cannot mean to imply that “housing near the beach in Southern California is a right”. It could only get crazier if the Pro-Palestinian demonstrators turn out to be homeless people seeking free government housing.

LA’s $1.2 Billion Graffiti Towers Put on Sale After Bankruptcy

1 / 3

LA’s $1.2 Billion Graffiti Towers Put on Sale After Bankruptcy

John Gittelsohn

Tue, May 7, 2024, 9:02 AM PDT4 min read

337

(Bloomberg) -- For sale: Steel skeletons of three towers in downtown Los Angeles, erected by a Chinese developer that spent $1.2 billion before running into financial troubles.

The site, called Oceanwide Plaza, became famous this year when graffiti artists covered the 49-floor-tall structures. Now, the property is going on the market, with lenders and other creditors needing about $400 million to recoup their money.

The brokerage Colliers and advisory firm Hilco Real Estate have been hired to market and handle a sale of the property, subject to bankruptcy court approval, according to a statement.

“We are determined to run a disciplined and orderly process to identify the right developer to finish the project in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics,” said Mark Tarczynski, an executive vice president at Colliers.

The project got off the ground in 2014 as Chinese investors were in the midst of a US buying spree, scooping up properties from trophy hotels to Hollywood studios. By 2018, that boom went bust when Beijing tightened capital policies and cut off financing for international ventures. China’s domestic property market bubble later burst as developers struggled with overbuilding and high leverage.

China Oceanwide spent about $3.5 billion on projects in San Francisco, New York, Hawaii and LA, none of which were completed. Construction in LA, the biggest project, ground to a halt in 2019. China Oceanwide reported efforts to find a buyer or new financial partners for the LA project, deals that never came to fruition.

Commercial-property values in downtown Los Angeles spiraled downward after the pandemic emptied offices. The distress has only increased in recent years as borrowing costs rose. LA’s third tallest office tower sold in December for 45% below its 2014 price.

Earlier this year, daredevil graffiti artists began sneaking onto the China Oceanwide property, scaling its towers and tagging its windows. Even bolder intruders parachuted off a tower. The invasions and graffiti prompted outrage from officials, including City Councilman Kevin de Leon, who demanded that the city enact measures to safeguard the property to prevent people from getting hurt or killed.

“We’ve obviously ignited a fire under Oceanwide to begin to take action — and the debtors as well,” Peter Brown, a spokesman for de Leon, said in an interview.

Contractors on the project, led by Lendlease Corp., filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition against the limited liability company for Oceanwide Plaza in February. The project now has debtor-in-possession financing for payroll, security, repairs to comply with the city order and to assist in a sale process, according to Sharon Weiss, lead counsel for the debtor with Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.

“I think this is a good opportunity for this building to come back alive, and to show how a bankruptcy case can fix a lot of problems,” Weiss said.

The owners owe almost $400 million to creditors, including about $180 million to EB-5 visa investors, $175 million to construction contractors, $18 million for back taxes to LA County and money to repay the city for security, Weiss said.

An April appraisal by Colliers that was submitted in the bankruptcy case estimated the as-is market value at nearly $434 million. The brokerage also projected a cost of $865 million to complete the project, which is currently 60% finished.

The appraisal report also said there are “two serious buyers with pricing negotiated at $850,000,000” in its current condition, numbers attributed to Ken Choi, an attorney for Oceanwide. The names of the buyers are confidential, the appraisal said. Choi didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“We did not place any weight on these offers,” the appraisers, Jay Kwong and Brian Tankersley, wrote in their report.

While the market will set a price for the project, any new development on the site will face some hurdles, according to Alexander Shing, chief executive officer of real estate investment firm Cottonwood Group. The project has faced vandalism and sat around unoccupied for years, and the market has changed in the intervening time.

Apartments in downtown Los Angeles have a 9.8% vacancy rate, the highest of any submarket in the region, according to CoStar Group Inc. Asking rents fell 1.5% in the 12 months through March, and the average sale price per unit dropped to $520,000, down about 20% from a recent peak in early 2022.

More than 500 “outsized condos is no longer the right product for this market cycle,” Shing said in an email. “It would be challenging for someone to get the necessary financing, in this environment, to complete the construction and project in a profitable manner.”

Weiss was working in LA Live, an entertainment complex near the Oceanwide site, when the project started a decade ago. She was excited to see something that showed downtown’s growth. Instead, the project became a symbol of that neighborhood’s post-pandemic decline.

“It was supposed to be the building,” she recalled. “To me, it’s heartbreaking.” (BL)

Your blogger wonders, if – seriously – lots of homeless people could be housed in these buildings where there is also plenty of room to place social services personnel? The buildings are already discounted and could more easily be modified than fully completed units. Or is that just too damn sensible?

Biden Is Not the First U.S. President to Cut Off Weapons to Israel

Other presidents, including, Ronald Reagan, used the power of American arms to influence Israeli war policy. But the comparisons underscore how much the politics of Israel have changed over the years.

Share full article

470

President Ronald Reagan speaking in front of microphones in 1988. He is wearing a dark blue suit.

President Ronald Reagan used the power of American arms several times to influence Israeli war policy, at different points ordering warplanes and cluster munitions to be delayed or withheld.Credit...Doug Mills/Associated Press

Peter Baker

By Peter Baker

Reporting from Washington

May 10, 2024

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The president was livid. He had just been shown pictures of civilians killed by Israeli shelling, including a small baby with an arm blown off. He ordered aides to get the Israeli prime minister on the phone and then dressed him down sharply.

The president was Ronald Reagan, the year was 1982, and the battlefield was Lebanon, where Israelis were attacking Palestinian fighters. The conversation Mr. Reagan had with Prime Minister Menachem Begin that day, Aug. 12, would be one of the few times aides ever heard the usually mild-mannered president so exercised.

“It is a holocaust,” Mr. Reagan told Mr. Begin angrily.

Mr. Begin, whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, snapped back, “Mr. President, I know all about a holocaust.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Reagan retorted, it had to stop. Mr. Begin heeded the demand. Twenty minutes later, he called back and told the president that he had ordered a halt to the shelling. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” Mr. Reagan marveled to aides afterward.

It would not be the only time he would use it to rein in Israel. In fact, Mr. Reagan used the power of American arms several times to influence Israeli war policy, at different points ordering warplanes and cluster munitions to be delayed or withheld. His actions take on new meaning four decades later, as President Biden delays a shipment of bombs and threatens to withhold other offensive weapons from Israel if it attacks Rafah, in southern Gaza.

Even as Republicans rail against Mr. Biden, accusing him of abandoning an ally in the middle of a war, supporters of the president’s decision pointed to the Reagan precedent. If it was reasonable for the Republican presidential icon to limit arms to impose his will on Israel, they argue, it should be acceptable for the current Democratic president to do the same.

But what the Reagan comparison really underscores is how much the politics of Israel have evolved in the United States since the 1980s. For decades, presidents and prime ministers have quarreled without permanently damaging the robust relationship between the two countries.

Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions and an aid cutoff to force Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after it invaded Egypt in 1956. Gerald R. Ford warned that he would re-evaluate the entire relationship in 1975 over what he considered Israel’s recalcitrance during peace talks with Egypt. George H.W. Bush postponed $10 billion in loan guarantees in 1991 in a dispute over settlements in the West Bank.

In Mr. Reagan’s day, Democrats were thought to be the party that was more supportive of Israel, a perception he wanted to change. By Mr. Reagan’s own account, “they’ve never had a better friend of Israel in the White House.” And yet it was a friendship that was tested again and again.

Editors’ Picks

George Takei Keeps Faith With Democracy

Scarlett Johansson Shares Her Beauty Regimen

A Shattering Secret on the Path to Motherhood

In June 1981, less than five months after Mr. Reagan took office, Israel used U.S.-made F-16 warplanes to bomb the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq, a surprise attack that outraged many in Washington. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, considered a friend of the Arabs, urged Mr. Reagan to halt the arms flow to Israel. Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., considered a friend of Israel, argued against it.

Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates

Updated

May 11, 2024, 11:07 a.m. ET2 hours ago

2 hours ago

Israel orders evacuation in northern Gaza, ahead of stepped up attacks against Hamas.

About 150,000 people fled from Rafah in recent days, the U.N. says.

South Africa again asks the U.N.’s top court to act against Israel in Gaza

In the end, Mr. Reagan agreed to vote to condemn Israel at the United Nations Security Council and to delay the delivery of four F-16s due that summer — what Patrick Tyler, in “A World of Trouble,” his history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, characterized as “a minimal rebuke.”

But just weeks later, an Israeli airstrike killed an estimated 300 civilians in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut, prompting Mr. Reagan to hold back another 10 F-16s and two F-15 jet fighters. Still, the standoff did not last long. By August, he lifted the freeze.

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 forced another confrontation. Mr. Reagan halted the shipment of cluster-type artillery shells out of concern that such munitions were being used against civilians in violation of agreements. Around the same time, he delayed the delivery of 75 F-16 warplanes without explanation until March 1983, when he announced that he would not release the jets until Israel withdrew forces from Lebanon.

The move caused no wave of criticism like that seen in Washington this week. “Maybe it was a necessary signal to Israel,” Mr. Reagan wrote mildly in his diary that night in describing his decision. In the days that followed, stories in The New York Times did not include criticism from members of Congress in either party. Not until a week later did William Safire, a conservative columnist for The Times, fault Mr. Reagan’s move as “a tragic flip-flop on Israel,” as he put it.

“Reagan had public support for withholding aid because the bombing of Beirut was witnessed on American television,” recalled Lou Cannon, the Reagan biographer. “As with Gaza, it was horrible.”

Since then, of course, Republicans have repositioned themselves as the party that unquestionably supports Israel while Democrats who bristle at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long conservative reign have become more divided on the issue. Today, there is none of the tempered deference that Mr. Reagan enjoyed from across the aisle on foreign policy.

The August 1982 bombardment in particular affected Mr. Reagan in a powerful way. Whatever his politics or policy, he reacted viscerally to the pictures he saw.

“Reagan was deeply upset by the bombardment of Beirut,” Richard Murphy, his ambassador to Saudi Arabia, recalled in an oral history by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober. “He made it very plain that he wanted this to come to a stop when the human side was pushed in his face.”

Mr. Reagan did not hold back and was willing to put it all on the line. “I was angry,” he wrote in his diary that last night, describing the tense conversation with Mr. Begin. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered.” And stop it did, at least temporarily. (NYT)

Most young adults, renters considering leaving L.A. due to high housing costs, poll finds

A woman and a young girl on a staircase

Heidi Gonzalez with daughter Sarita, 2, at their apartment in Koreatown in September 2022, when they were threatened with eviction. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Liam Dillon.

By Liam Dillon

Staff Writer

May 8, 2024 3 AM PT

FOR SUBSCRIBERS

Facebook

Twitter

Show more sharing options

A majority of Los Angeles voters are considering abandoning the city because housing is too expensive, according to a new poll.

The finding follows years of dissatisfaction with crushing housing costs and is threatening the city’s future as young adults and renters are the most likely to contemplate leaving.

Nearly three-quarters of renters and those under 35 have given consideration to moving out of Los Angeles compared with 37% of homeowners and 26% of those 65 or older, according to the poll, which was conducted for the Los Angeles Business Council Institute in partnership with the Los Angeles Times.

Overall, the poll found that 60% of Angelenos have debated leaving the city due to the rising cost of housing, with 35% saying they’ve given “serious consideration” to doing so.

Renters are twice as likely as homeowners to consider leaving L.A. due to rising housing costs

Stacked bar chart shows that 38% of homeowners and 74% of renters have considered leaving L.A. because of rising costs of housing.

Serious considerationSome considerationNo consideration

Renters

42%

32%

25%

Homeowners

27%

11%

62%

All

35%

25%

38%

The poll surveyed 600 registered voters in the city of Los Angeles from April 3 to April 7.

2024 LABC Institute Housing Affordability Survey in Partnership with the Los Angeles Times

Ashley Ahn

LOS ANGELES TIMES

The results reflect what voters believe to be “foundational unfairness” when it comes to housing, said Aileen Cardona-Arroyo, a senior vice president at Hart Research, the Washington, D.C., polling firm that administered the survey. Angelenos, she said, think they are working hard but still find themselves failing to keep pace with rising costs.

Subscriber Only Content

Subscribers get exclusive access to this story

We’re offering L.A. Times subscribers special access to our best journalism. Thank you for your support.

Explore more Subscriber Exclusive content.

“People feel like, ‘I’m doing the right thing. I have a job. I do my part. So why is it that I’m struggling to pay my bills when it comes to housing?’” Cardona-Arroyo said. “It’s so easy to understand and identify what makes it unsustainable for people.”

The poll, known as the 2024 LABC Institute Housing Affordability Survey in Partnership with the Los Angeles Times, surveyed 600 registered voters in the city of Los Angeles between April 3 and April 7.

LOS ANGELES, CA - NOVEMBER 15: Encampments block nearly the entire sidewalk on Spring Street near 1st Street across from LA City Hall. Councilman Kevin de Leon, who supports the new fencing while the street lights are fixed, said that part of Main Street had persistent violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Spring Street at 1st Street on Monday, Nov. 15, 2021 in Los Angeles, CA. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times).

HOUSING & HOMELESSNESS

Full Coverage: Poll seeks Angelenos’ opinions on homelessness

Dec. 1, 2021

The findings on housing were striking compared with the positive feelings expressed by those surveyed on other issues.

A narrow majority of Angelenos said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of life in the city, a figure that rose to 7 in 10 when voters were asked about their own neighborhood. A similar number reported satisfaction with safety and security in their communities, and large majorities were satisfied with the accessibility of grocery stores, parks and transportation. Almost three-quarters of renters said they aspired to become homeowners in Los Angeles.

“I feel like I live in paradise,” said Ron Allen, a 46-year-old homeowner in Playa Vista who was participating in a focus group as part of the poll. “But my bank account is screaming at me.”

Allen and other focus group participants cited housing problems as dominating their concerns, which was broadly reflected in the poll. Seven out of 10 surveyed said they personally found it difficult to afford housing in the city, including 84% of renters and 85% of those under 35.

“You can figure out food. You can figure out medical care. If you’re born and raised here, you get used to driving,” said Justice Allen, a 28-year-old renter from the San Fernando Valley. “But the idea of housing, for the most basic of shelter, is probably where 95% of my stress goes to.”

More than 40% of those surveyed said they had to find additional sources of income to afford housing in the last five years. About one-fifth said they added roommates or renters to cover costs or had fallen behind on their rent or mortgage payments. An additional 6% said they’ve lived in cars or trucks or were otherwise homeless during that time.

The poll mirrors others in recent years on the challenges of high housing costs, particularly for renters. A recent survey from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs found that nearly 4 in 10 renters in L.A. County have worried about losing their homes and becoming homeless in the last few years.

The LABC-Times survey also found remarkable persistence in Angelenos’ concerns about homelessness and housing affordability.

Of those polled, 93% and 87% believed that homelessness and housing affordability, respectively, were serious problems in Los Angeles. That’s compared with 97% for homelessness and 86% for housing affordability in a similar LABC-Times survey from 2019.

Most L.A. residents continue to believe homelessness and housing affordability are a serious problem

About 93% of L.A. residents believed homelessness is a serious problem, compared to 95% in 2019. About 85% of L.A. residents believed housing affordability is a serious problem, compared to 87% in 2019.

20192024

Homelessness

97%

93%

Housing affordability

86%

87%

The 2024 poll surveyed 600 registered voters in the city of Los Angeles from April 3 to April 7. The 2019 poll surveyed 362 registered voters in the city from Oct. 15 to Oct. 22.

2024 LABC Institute Housing Affordability Survey in Partnership with the Los Angeles Times

Ashley Ahn

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Voter attitudes reflect how ingrained housing challenges have become in Los Angeles, with data showing the problem worsening since 2019.

Average rents for new listings in the city have increased by nearly $400 a month to about $2,800, according to data from Zillow, though the rate of the increase has been lower than inflation. Home values have skyrocketed by more than a third to $974,000, per the firm’s data. The city’s homeless population on any given night has grown by 30% to 46,260, according to official surveys.

More than half of renters countywide pay more than 30% of their income on rent, an amount the federal government considers cost-burdened, with 28% spending more than half their income, according to a recent UCLA analysis.

Ken Hively Los Angeles Times MORRISON helped launch a campaign to identify and assist the 14 most dreadfully ill people living on the streets of Hollywood.

CALIFORNIA

95% of voters say homelessness is L.A.’s biggest problem, Times poll finds. ‘You can’t escape it’

Nov. 14, 2019

“You can only see high numbers on a concern for an issue for so long before something happens and people become fed up with it,” Cardona-Arroyo said.

The findings were especially worrying for young adults who were the most likely to say they are considering moving due to high housing costs despite their interest in buying a home here, she said.

“People like L.A.,” Cardona-Arroyo said. “They very much want to stay. I wouldn’t say that we’re at a point where people have lost all hope to resolve this issue. But things are boiling up. We’re at a pressure point on this.”

Frustrations emerged during the focus group sessions, where young renters lamented that they were being priced out of the communities where they’re most familiar.

“The people that grew up here can’t afford to live here,” said Bryanna Coleman, 22, a renter who lives on the Westside. “I’m about to be a recent college grad. Why can’t I afford to live in areas that I know personally?”

LOS ANGELES, CA - JUNE 15: Angie Davila, 20, left, the oldest of six children, plays video games with youngest siblings Lino Galicia, 3, and Yaretzi (cq) Galicia, 7, on the bunk beds in the family's one-bedroom apartment in the Pico-Union neighborhood on Wednesday, June 15, 2022 in Los Angeles, CA. There are eight family members sharing a one bedroom unit. Magdalena Garcia, 40, and husband Edgar Galicia, 48, live with their six children in a one-bedroom apartment. Magdalena has lived in the unit over 20 years. Overcrowded housing in Pico-Union, considered the most overcrowded neighborhood in Los Angeles. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

CALIFORNIA

Renters across L.A. are under strain and many fear becoming homeless, survey finds

April 17, 2024

Any exodus of young adults from Los Angeles would hurt the city’s dynamism and competitiveness with other regions in the country, especially if there’s a “brain drain” of students who’ve attended the region’s world-class universities, said Mary Leslie, president of the Los Angeles Business Council.

Elected officials should want young people to feel they can invest in the city and build their lives here, she said. Without that spirit, she said, the city’s long-term health is at risk.

“It’s a pretty serious wake-up call,” Leslie said.

The poll found concerns among homeowners as well. Three in 10 of those surveyed say they’re cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing.

As mortgage interest rates have risen, some focus group participants who saw themselves moving into larger homes or wealthier neighborhoods said they could no longer afford to do so.

“This wasn’t supposed to be our forever house, but I guess we’re dying here,” said Cathy Donabedian, a 43-year-old homeowner in the San Fernando Valley. “Anything else we’re looking at, our mortgage is going to go from 30% of our income to 80%. You can’t afford to do that.”

The poll surveyed registered voters in Los Angeles over the phone and via text message to the web. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points for city voters overall and higher for subgroups. Hart Research on April 9 conducted two focus group sessions, one of renters and one of homeowners, who both came from a mix of city neighborhoods. (LAT)

Your blogger has consistently told his wife, who has grandchildren, they should leave town (“blow this joint”), for a place with growth prospects that isn’t yet too expensive, possibly for Merced in CA, which has a new university.

Stocks are primed to tumble into a bear market as bullish investors have driven equities to 1929 extremes, famed fund manager says

Jennifer Sor May 7, 2024, 9:59 AM PDT

Save

Trader NYSE

A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., March 5, 2020. Andrew Kelly/Reuters

The stock market looks poised to fall from its extreme heights, legendary investor John Hussman said.

Hussman said the stock market is mirroring the extremes leading up the 1929 crash.

A market crash as steep as 65% wouldn't surprise him, he's said previously.

Insider Today

Sign up to get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in markets, tech, and business — delivered daily. Read preview

Email address

Enter your email

By clicking “Sign Up”, you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You can opt-out at any time.

Bull

The stock market's extreme bull run is about to come to an end, as overly optimistic investors have driven equities to the most extreme valuations in nearly a century, according to legendary investor John Hussman.

The Hussman Investment Trust president sounded another bearish warning on stocks this week, pushing back against the strength in equities so far in 2024. The S&P 500 has broken a series of record highs this year, and has regained momentum in recent days after a lackluster month in April.

But the rally has largely been driven by a "certain impatience and fear of missing out" among investors — and market internals are looking "unfavorable,", Hussman said in a note.

His firm's most trusted valuation measure for stocks, which is the ratio of nonfinancial market capitalization to corporate gross value-added, is showing that the S&P 500 is priced at its most extreme levels since 1929, right before the market collapsed 89% peak-to-trough.

Hussman's firm is expecting the S&P 500 to underperform Treasury bonds by 9.3% a year for the next 12 years, based on his firm's internal metrics. That's the worst 12-year performance the metric ever predicted — even worse than in 1929 when market internals suggested that the S&P 500 would underperform Treasury bonds by 6% annually over the following 12 years.

"Statistically, the current set of market conditions looks more 'like' a major bull market peak than any other point in the past century, with the possible exception of the 1929 peak," Hussman said. "That's no assurance that the market will plunge, nor that it can't advance further. Still, given the combination of extreme valuations, unfavorable market internals, and dozens of other factors that cluster among the most 'top-like' in history, we're just fine with a risk-averse, even bearish outlook."

Hussman, who was among the investors who called the 2000 and 2008 market crashes, has refrained from making an official forecast on stocks. Still, he's cast an extremely bearish tone on the outlook for equities going forward.

Previously, he said that stocks looked like they were in the "most extreme speculative bubble in US financial history," adding that a crash as steep as 65% wouldn't surprise him.

Individual investors are also starting to sour on stocks as they weigh hotter-than-expected inflation and dial back their expectations for Fed rate cuts this year. Just 39% of investors said they were bullish on stocks over the next 6 months, according to the AAII's latest Investor Sentiment Survey. (BI)

AAII, of which your blogger is a subscriber, quite often gets it wrong when predicting stock market futures. As does your blogger. Best to remember the remark of Economist John Maynard Keynes, who said “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”.

Billions of dollars of Ukraine aid are set to be spent in the US. Here are the cities that could get a boost.

Jacob Zinkula Apr 25, 2024, 3:03 AM PDT

Save

Joe Biden, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine

The new Ukraine aid could ultimately benefit US businesses and help create American jobs. Getty Images News/Getty Images

The Senate passed a $95 billion spending package that included aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

The aid, particularly for the money for Ukraine, could boost the US economy and create American jobs.

Cities in Pennsylvania, Alabama, Illinois, and Florida, among other states, could see increased spending.

On April 23, the Senate passed a $95 billion spending package that included foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

That funding could also soon provide a boost to the US economy and help create American jobs.

That's because much of the military aid — particularly the money allocated for Ukraine — could flow back to US defense manufacturers. In fact, an analysis of financial aid to Ukraine published in October by the website Breaking Defense found that a majority of the billions of dollars in Ukraine aid Congress had approved to date was ultimately spent in the US.

A Washington Post analysis published in November identified 117 production lines in roughly 31 states and 71 cities where US workers were producing weapons systems for Ukraine — including California, Arizona, Alabama, and Texas. Time reported in February that US aid to Ukraine had created thousands of jobs across at least 38 states.

In recent years, some lawmakers have argued that the US should scale back the money it's providing to Ukraine — and that the funds would be better spent on domestic problems. To the extent foreign aid benefits US businesses and workers, the political calculus could change for some in Congress.

To be sure, some Americans may wish these funds were being directed to other priorities, such as making housing and childcare more affordable for citizens. Others may be concerned about the ways defense companies, through lobbying efforts, could be influencing legislation that benefits the industry.

Which cities and states could benefit from the new aid bill?

The spending package, which President Joe Biden intends to sign, would provide about $61 billion for Ukraine to aid its war effort against Russia and $26 billion for Israel, which is engaged in a war with Hamas in Gaza. An additional $8 billion would go to Taiwan to help it counter threats from China. The Senate approved the spending package with a 79 to 18 vote, and the House approved it on Saturday.

Roughly $1 billion of the aid could soon be making its way to Ukraine, which the Biden administration says is in urgent need of support as it struggles to combat the advances of Russian forces. The Associated Press reported that the package included ammunition, artillery rounds, armored vehicles, and other weapons. The rest could be doled out in the weeks ahead.

While it's unclear exactly which cities and states will benefit from the latest foreign-aid funds, some candidates are more likely than others.

In its analysis, The Washington Post pointed to cities such as York, Pennsylvania — where the British multinational aerospace, defense, and information-security company BAE Systems produces tactical vehicles — and Troy, Alabama — where Javelin anti-tank missiles are manufactured — as places that had produced weapons for Ukraine. Peoria, Illinois; Aiken, South Carolina; Elgin, Oklahoma; Niceville, Florida; and Endicott, New York were also mentioned.

Weapons production can require more than one city to work in tandem. For example, The New York Times reported that manufacturing artillery ammunition involved a factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, producing empty projectiles and then sending them to Iowa to be filled with explosives.

The defense company General Dynamics is set to open a new factory in June in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite to produce artillery casings. The factory, which is expected to employ 150 people when it opens, is set to benefit from foreign aid to Ukraine. (BI)

The US is turning away thousands of talented foreign workers — it doesn’t have to be this way

BY JOHANNES LANG AND JULIA GARAYO WILLEMYNS, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 05/10/24 11:30 AM ET

POST

Getty Images

Last month, many high-achieving graduates of top American universities once again anxiously awaited the results of a competitive application. Yet the outcome of the annual H-1B visa lottery was entirely out of their hands. Now many of these highly qualified young people are packing their bags and preparing to depart the United States.

Each year, the U.S. government leaves the decision of who receives the popular work visa for specialty occupations up to chance. Last year, approval rates for the H-1B were lower than for Harvard Business School. America’s immigration is broken, and it doesn’t look like it is getting fixed anytime soon.

The H-1B cap has been an unprecedented drain on U.S. resources and a bane to American national interests. Half of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies were built by first- or second-generation immigrants. Eighty-three percent of computer science Ph.D.s in the U.S. — the kinds of people the country desperately needs to keep its innovative edge — were born abroad.

America’s flawed immigration system has real consequences. Over the past years, Canada has successfully “scooped” a number of international graduates left behind by the H-1B lottery.

Between 2016 and 2019, the number of Indian students attending master’s programs in STEM fell by 38 percent in the U.S. During the same time period, the rate of Indian graduate students in Canada rose by a whopping 182 percent.

Americans overwhelmingly want to fix their broken immigration system: If polled, 73 percent say there should be a visa that allows STEM graduates to work in the country. Even 60 percent of Republican voters are in favor of increasing skilled immigration. Still, policy change continues to be elusive.

The good news is that there may be an alternative.

The O-1A visa, colloquially known as the “Einstein visa,” has long been shrouded in mystique. In truth, however, approval rates for the O-1 have consistently exceeded 90 percent over the past five years. Of course, the visa is highly competitive: with a list of eight criteria that includes internationally recognized awards and original scholarly contributions, the O-1 visa likely attracts applicants that are already highly accomplished. But for many of the extraordinary international workers in the country, the O-1A visa may be within reach.

The O-1 is attractive for a number of reasons. Unlike other visas, it has no cap on the number of visas issued per year and country. Without many of the constraints of the H-1B — such as the prevailing wage requirement — the O-1 visa can be a particularly attractive option for international workers with entrepreneurial ambitions.

Under President Biden’s leadership, United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) has actively encouraged qualified individuals to apply. In January 2022, the White House announced new USCIS policy guidance, clarifying what evidence satisfies the eligibility criteria for the O-1. Since then, approvals of O-1 petitions in STEM fields have increased by over 30 percent.

But the potential is much greater still. There are over 50,000 new foreign-born STEM Ph.D.s and post-doctorates in the U.S. annually, 50 percent of whom work outside of academia. And importantly, the O-1A is not just an avenue for U.S. university graduates to stay in the country — it is also a way for the world’s best and brightest to come work in this country.

Universities, companies and immigration lawyers all have a role to play in raising awareness of the O-1 and supporting potential applicants. On the corporate side, HR teams and hiring managers should proactively educate themselves on the range of visa options and encourage eligible international hires to consider the O-1. Universities have an obligation to set their foreign-born students up for post-graduation success, including by offering practical advice on pursuing visas like the O-1. Meanwhile, the legal community must cultivate more O-1 expertise to adequately support applicants.

For now, the H-1B lottery remains a stressful gamble for America’s top international graduates. But with wider adoption, the O-1 could open up new possibilities for talented immigrants to pursue the American dream. (TheHill.com)

Your blogger’s own observations of an admittedly small set of young adults indicates the need for imported brainpower if real and really necessary.

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Bannon’s Contempt Conviction

Stephen Bannon, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, had been found guilty of defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee. He now faces a four-month prison sentence.

Share full article

Stephen Bannon sits at his desk with the image of former President Donald J. Trump on a television behind him. A portrait of Jesus and a miniature flag are also on the mantel behind him.

Mr. Bannon could soon become the second former Trump aide to be jailed for ignoring a subpoena from the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Alan Feuer

By Alan Feuer

May 10, 2024, 12:16 p.m. ET

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the contempt conviction of Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, for having defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 House select committee, a ruling that could lead to Mr. Bannon serving a four-month term in prison.

The decision by the court means that Mr. Bannon could soon become the second former Trump aide to be jailed for ignoring a subpoena from the committee. The House panel sought his testimony as part of its wide-ranging investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election, and its explosive hearings two years ago previewed much of the evidence used against Mr. Trump in a federal indictment filed last summer accusing him of plotting to overturn his defeat.

In March, Peter Navarro, who once worked as a trade adviser to Mr. Trump, reported to federal prison in Miami to begin serving his own four-month prison stint after a jury found him guilty of contempt of Congress for ignoring one of the committee’s subpoenas.

The judge who oversaw Mr. Bannon’s trial had allowed him to remain at home during the appeal of his conviction and is now in a position to force him to surrender.

Mr. Bannon had fought his contempt conviction as forcefully as he fought the initial charges during his brief trial in Federal District Court in Washington in July 2022. That proceeding was a spectacle, with the defendant delivering heated speeches outside the courthouse and promising in the days before it began to go “medieval” on the prosecutors who had brought the case against him.

A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations

Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.

Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker: Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.

Trump on Trial Newsletter: Sign up here to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

One of the arguments that Mr. Bannon raised to the appeals court was that his lawyers had advised him to ignore the committee’s subpoena — a tactic known as an advice of counsel defense. Mr. Bannon also claimed that Mr. Trump himself had ordered him to defy demands from the committee.

But in a 20-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit swept those arguments aside, upholding both the jury’s guilty verdict and the sentence imposed on Mr. Bannon by Judge Carl J. Nichols.

The panel wrote that even if Mr. Bannon’s lawyers had told him not to comply with the committee, the advice could not excuse him for having willfully and intentionally ignored the subpoena.

“This exact ‘advice of counsel’ defense is no defense at all,” the judges wrote.

The panel also rejected, as a matter of fact, Mr. Bannon’s claim that Mr. Trump had authorized him to defy the committee. It cited a letter written by one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers to Mr. Bannon’s lawyers shortly after the subpoena was originally issued, noting that the correspondence “nowhere suggested that Bannon should categorically refuse to respond” to the committee.

David Schoen, a lawyer who handled Mr. Bannon’s appeal, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

In an order issued a few weeks after he sentenced Mr. Bannon, Judge Nichols put off enforcing the prison term he had just imposed until after the appeals court made its own ruling. Judge Nichols decided that Mr. Bannon, who now runs the right-wing podcast “War Room,” was not likely to flee or pose a danger to the community, adding that his appeal raised “a substantial question of law.”

In his final hours in office in 2021, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon in a separate case. Mr. Bannon was under indictment on charges that he misused money he helped raise for a group backing Mr. Trump’s border wall, but had not yet gone to trial.

A few months after his conviction in Washington, Mr. Bannon was accused by state prosecutors in Manhattan of charges similar to those that led to his pardon. His trial is scheduled to take place later this year in the same courthouse where Mr. Trump is now being tried on charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 run for the presidency. (NYT)

Your blogger opines “it’s about time. I have always held Mr. Bannon in contempt. Why shouldn’t the Court?”

Your blogger is sending the Ukraine money every month to put his money where his mouth is. Please join in in any amount.

KEY CODE:

AAII – American Association of Individual Investors

AARP – American Association of Retired Persons

BI - Business Insider

CBPC – California Budget and Policy Center

DW -- German version of PBS

ECON – The Economist

FT - Financial Times of London

FTN – Face the Nation

GRDN - Guardian

KL – Kiplinger Letter

HILL - The Hill.com

KRR – Kiplinger Retirement Report

KTL – Kiplinger Tax Letter

KPL - Kiplinger Magazine

KPPC – Los Angeles Public Radio

LAT – Los Angeles Times

MTP – Meet the Press

NEWS - Newsweek

NRDC – Natural Resources Defense Council

NYT – New York Times

NPR – Public Radio

POL -- Politico

RCP - RealClearPolitics

RTRS - Reuters

WH – White House

WK – The WEEK

WP – Washington Post

Note: Comments in parentheses are your blogger’s opinions. Citations generally refer to material before the citation. Comments after a citation are generally my own. Citations are not necessarily the only news sites your blogger has seen reporting on a story or issue.

I focus my practice on probate, estate planning and conservatorships, with some mediation. You can reach me through the website at “BrianSheppardLaw.com” or at “BSheppardLaw@gmail.com”.

Beware of emails from vendors with whom you do not do business, do not have an account or which refer to orders you have not made, all of which may be attempts to obtain your personal information to commit identity theft.

NEVER give out your confidential information to someone who calls you. Get the number, double check with the institution at a number you know is good, before considering sharing. Identity theft is rampant and the criminals are very smart.

TO SUBSCRIBE EMAIL ME AT BSHEPPARDLAW@GMAIL.COM WITH YOUR NAME AND “SUBSCRIBE” IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

TO UNSUBSCRIBE EMAIL ME AT BSHEPPARDLAW@GMAIL.COM WITH “UNSUBSCRIBE” IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

Thank you for taking the time to read TIDBITS.

DISCLAIMER: This blog is intended to contain information of interest to my clients, colleagues and friends. The information in this blog is not to be exclusively or primarily relied upon in making any decisions relating to any matters addressed in this blog. Readers should always consult with a relevant professional (Attorney, Investment Adviser, CPA, Doctor, etc.) before making any decisions. Due to limitations of space, information may not be complete or include exceptions. Every situation has the potential to be different and call for different solutions. ALL READERS ARE EXPLICITLY ADVISED TO CONTACT THEIR RELEVANT ADVISERS BEFORE MAKING ANY DECISIONS BASED ON ANY INFORMATION IN THIS BLOG.

NOTE: THIS BLOG WILL BE DISTRIBUTED BY POSTINGS ON CONSTANT CONTACT, BRIANSHEPPARDLAW.COM AND LINKEDIN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

BRIAN J. SHEPPARD

ATTORNEY AT LAW

18075 Ventura Blvd., Suite 109

Encino, CA 91316

Phone: (818) 342-5799

Fax: (818) 342-2470

Email: BSheppardLaw@gmail.com

website: BrianSheppardLaw.com

blog: Elderupdates.com, Tidbits at Elderupdates.com