Herschel Walker, the former University of Georgia football star pressed into politics by former President Donald J. Trump, won Georgia’s Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, cruising past a crowded field. His victory, called by The Associated Press, sets him up to challenge the Democratic nominee, Senator Raphael Warnock, in November.With Mr. Trump’s endorsement, Mr. Walker faced five opponents for the nomination — but no real challenge. His closest competitor was Gary Black, the state’s agriculture commissioner. Mr. Walker ran largely on Mr. Trump’s endorsement and his own popularity in the state, which has lingered since he powered the University of Georgia to a national championship in 1980 and then won the Heisman Trophy in 1982.Though Mr. Black ultimately could not compete, he may have caused trouble for Mr. Walker. He doggedly raised allegations of domestic violence against Mr. Walker, some of which Mr. Walker admitted to and some of which he denied, as well as questions about Mr. Walker’s inflated claims of academic and business achievements.Mr. Black called the accusations of violent behavior and the mental health struggles that Mr. Walker had admitted to “disqualifying,” and said he could not endorse him in the general election.Other Republicans in the state have also said Mr. Walker needs a better answer to charges that he threatened to kill himself and his wife, threatened to kill a girlfriend and stalked a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader when he played professional football.But the Republican electorate appeared comfortable with its choice. At large rallies with Mr. Trump and smaller stump speeches, Mr. Walker was cheered for his displays of humility, his story of transformation from an overweight boy with a speech impediment to a star in football, track and even bobsledding, and his assurances to largely white audiences that racism is overblown.Mr. Walker is a political newcomer who has never held elective office. But Mr. Warnock, who was the pastor at the same church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, does not have much more experience, with just two years in the Senate. And in what is expected to be a strong year for Republicans, the general election contest between the two could be among the closest, most expensive and most closely watched in the country. More

The company has told countries that it can supply only 18.8 million of the 29.6 million doses it was contracted to deliver this year.Nearly 1.5 million teenage girls in some of the world’s poorest countries will miss the chance to be protected from cervical cancer because the drugmaker Merck has said it will not be able to deliver millions of promised doses of the HPV vaccine this year.Merck has notified Gavi, the international organization that helps low- and middle-income countries deliver lifesaving immunizations, and UNICEF, which procures the vaccines, that it will deliver only 18.8 million of the 29.6 million doses it was contracted to deliver in 2024, Gavi said.That means that more than 10 million girls will not receive their expected HPV shots this year — and 1.5 million of them most likely will never get them because they will be too old to qualify for the vaccine in subsequent years.Patrick Ryan, a spokesman for Merck, said the company “experienced a manufacturing disruption” that required it to hold and reinspect many doses by hand. He declined to give further details about the cause of the delay.“We are acting with urgency and rigor to deploy additional personnel and resources to resolve this matter as soon as possible,” he said.Mr. Ryan said that Merck would deliver the delayed doses in 2025. He also said the company would ship 30 million doses of the vaccine to Gavi-supported countries this year. However, about a third of these are doses that were supposed to have been sent in 2023, leaving Gavi with the 10.7 million dose shortfall.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Source: Elections – nytimes.com More

Unemployment is near historic lows, and inflation has come way down. We are inflicting a strategic humiliation on Russia by arming Ukraine without putting American forces at risk. The homicide rate fell by about 10 percent across 30 cities compared with last year. Democrats defied electoral trends by holding the Senate, scoring major legislative victories and easily confirming a Supreme Court nominee.Why, then, do only 20 percent of voters rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” versus 49 percent who call it “poor,” according to a New York Times/Siena poll? Why are Americans overwhelmingly pessimistic about the country’s future, according to the Pew Research Center? Why does Gallup find a significantly smaller percentage of Americans have confidence in the presidency today than they did in the last, disastrous year of Donald Trump’s tenure? And why is President Biden polling dead even with his predecessor in multiple surveys despite the former president’s 91 felony charges?In short, with everything so great, why are people so down? That’s a question that, as The Times’s Reid Epstein wrote last week, stumps the White House and its political allies, who seem to think the problem is a failure to communicate all the good news.But there’s another explanation: The news isn’t all that good. Americans are unsettled by things that are not always visible in headlines or statistics but are easy enough to see.Easy to see is the average price of a dozen eggs: up 38 percent between January 2022 and May of this year. And white bread: up 25 percent. And a whole chicken: up 18 percent. As for the retail price of gasoline, it’s up 63 percent since January 2021, the month Biden became president.Yet none of these increases make it into what economists call the core rate of inflation, which excludes food and energy. The inflation ordinary people experience in everyday life is not the one the government prefers to highlight.Easy to see is the frequent collapse of public order on American streets. In April hundreds of teenagers wreaked havoc in the Chicago Loop. Two boys were shot. A young couple was beaten by the doorway of a building on North Wabash. Yet only 16 people were arrested. Similar scenes unfolded last month in New York’s Union Square and again in Boston, where police officers were assaulted in two separate riots largely by juveniles.In New York, there were at least 66 arrests. In Boston, just 13.Easy to see is that the kids are not alright. The causes are many; social media companies have a lot to answer for. But so do teachers’ unions, handmaids of the Democratic Party, who pushed to keep school doors closed during the pandemic, helping themselves while doing lasting harm to children. The Biden administration spent much of its early months saying it wanted more than half of schools open at least one day per week by the 100th day of his presidency.“It is a goal so modest and lacking in ambition as to be almost meaningless,” Politico’s Playbook newsletter noted at the time.Easy to see is that the border crisis has become a national one. In May the administration boasted that new policies had contributed to a sharp decline in the “number of encounters” between border patrols and migrants crossing the southwestern border illegally. By August, arrests of migrants who crossed the border with family members had hit a monthly record of 91,000. In New York City alone, more than 57,000 migrants seek food and shelter from the city’s social services on an average night.Nobody can say for certain how many migrants who crossed the border during Biden’s presidency remain in the U.S., but it’s almost certainly in the millions. In 2021 the president dismissed the initial surge of migrants as merely seasonal. “Happens every year,” he said.Easy to see is that the world has gotten more dangerous under Biden’s watch. The president deserves credit for arming Ukraine, as he does for brokering a strategic rapprochement between Japan and South Korea. But he also deserves the blame for a humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal that almost surely played a part in enticing Vladimir Putin into launching his invasion of Ukraine and whetted Beijing’s appetite for Taiwan.How large a part is unquantifiable. Yet it was predictable — and predicted.Easy to see is that the president is not young for his age. The stiff gait and the occasional falls. The apparent dozing off. The times he draws a blank or struggles to complete a thought. Yet the same people yelling #ResignFeinstein or #ResignMcConnell don’t appear to be especially vocal when it comes to the president’s fitness, as if noting the obvious risks repeating a Republican talking point.But people notice, and they vote.Easy to see are tents under overpasses, from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York to the I-5 in Seattle. And the zombified addicts passed out on sidewalks in practically every city and town. And the pharmacies with everyday items under lock and key to prevent shoplifting. And women with infants strapped to their backs, hawking candy or gum at busy intersections. And news reports of brazen car thefts, which have skyrocketed this year.“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith said. Not all the ruin mentioned above is Biden’s fault, and none of it is irreversible. But there’s much more ruin than his apologists — blinkered by selective statistics and too confident about the president’s chances next year — care to admit.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

President Trump on Tuesday night fired his administration’s most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the presidential election, Christopher Krebs, who had systematically disputed Mr. Trump’s false declarations in recent days that the presidency was stolen from him through fraudulent ballots and software glitches that changed millions of votes.The announcement came via Twitter, the same way Mr. Trump fired his defense secretary a week ago and has dismissed other officials throughout his presidency. Mr. Trump seemed set off by a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security late last week, the product of a broad committee overseeing the elections, that declared the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate,” Mr. Trump wrote a little after 7 p.m., “in that there were massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.” He said Mr. Krebs “has been terminated” as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a post to which Mr. Trump himself had appointed him.Mr. Krebs, 43, a former Microsoft executive, has been hailed in recent days for his two years spent preparing the states for the challenges of the vote, hardening systems against Russian interference and setting up a “rumor control” website to guard against disinformation. The foreign interference so many feared never materialized; instead, the disinformation ultimately came from the White House.The firing stirred an immediate backlash in the national security community and on Capitol Hill.“Of all the things this president has done, this is the worst,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who led a commission on improving cyberdefenses. “To strike at the heart of the democratic system is beyond anything we have seen from any politician.”He said Mr. Krebs was one of the most competent people he had met in the government. “In this administration, the surest way to get fired is to do your job,” Mr. King said.Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, issued a statement calling Mr. Krebs “a dedicated public servant who has done a remarkable job during a challenging time.”“I’m grateful for all Chris has done,” Mr. Burr said.Only two weeks ago, on Election Day, Mr. Krebs’s boss, Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, had praised Mr. Krebs’s work, including the “rumor control” effort. But behind-the-scenes efforts by some administration officials to keep Mr. Trump from firing Mr. Krebs apparently failed.Mr. Krebs started telling colleagues he expected to be fired after the election as early as June, when the president started claiming that mail-in voting would be “rigged.”The refusal by Mr. Krebs and his agency to back up the president’s claims put him on a list of disloyal officials, Mr. Krebs believed, that included Mark T. Esper, who was fired as secretary of defense shortly after the election; Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director; and Gina Haspel, the director of the C.I.A. Mr. Wray and Ms. Haspel remain in their jobs.In recent weeks, Mr. Krebs drew the president’s ire again with his refusal to echo Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories about software glitches and dead people voting. Quite the contrary: Within hours of Mr. Trump tweeting false reports that millions of Trump votes were deleted, Mr. Krebs joined election officials in calling the election “the most secure in American history.”As of Tuesday, he was still scheduling public speaking engagements on behalf of his agency. On Wednesday, he was due to participate in two, including a fireside chat on “Foreign Interference and Election Meddling.”Mr. Krebs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But after his termination, he tweeted from his personal account: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomrorow. #Protect2020.”Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency had nothing to add to the president’s tweet.Mr. Krebs had told friends he was planning to leave government after Mr. Trump’s term. Mr. Krebs has five young children and was running one of the fastest-growing agencies in the federal government, with a broad mandate to secure power plants, water systems and networks that were subject to relentless cyberattacks by criminals and foreign states. Until recently, members of the Trump administration often cited the agency’s progress and its innovations, as did some prominent Democrats. Last week, a parade of Silicon Valley executives praised his work in securing the election.The day before the election, he had given briefings every few hours, describing how the usual tribulations of the day were being dealt with, and squelching rumors. “It’s just another Tuesday on the internet,” he said with a shrug when asked about some of the misinformation.Many in the administration believed that Mr. Trump, while angered, would not actually fire him — it would only highlight how the president’s claims were being contradicted by his own department.And Mr. Krebs himself kept turning out announcements over the weekend, including a brief celebration of the second anniversary of his agency: He included a photograph of homeland security officials, himself included, crowded behind Mr. Trump’s desk as he signed legislation. Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush and a Republican, called the firing of Mr. Krebs “nothing more than Trump’s personal vindictiveness.”“He’s done everything you would want a senior official at D.H.S. to do,” Mr. Chertoff said. “As far as I’m concerned, this firing is a badge of honor for Chris Krebs.”Even if he were invited to return in President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration, Mr. Krebs has told colleagues he would most likely demur. Not out of politics, but because, he said, he enjoyed the freedom of public speaking and engaging with the news media and feared that Mr. Biden’s administration, like President Barack Obama’s before it, would keep a tighter lid on officials.Before he was fired Tuesday, Mr. Krebs managed to engage with the public once more, firing off a pointed retweet aimed at the president: “Please don’t retweet wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president,” said the original tweet from David Becker, an election expert. “These fantasies have been debunked many times.”Julian Barnes and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting. More