Aurelia Butler

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    2 Books From Other Shores

    A memoir of Italy; notes on Canada.Mike Belleme for The New York TimesDear readers,I’m not going to get into the various reasons you might have for wanting to go somewhere else right now — somewhere, let’s say, on the other side of an international border. The fact is that Americans have always been eager tourists and willing expatriates, game to study the histories and decode the customs of neighboring and far-flung places.There are more and less benign versions of this roving impulse, but let’s not get into that either. Also, with due respect to hard-typing globetrotters, travel writing exhausts me. What I’m in the mood for is a scrappy, burrowing cosmopolitanism, books that dig down into the soil of a place and emerge with local dirt under their fingernails. Here are two of those, one a memoir of life in a foreign land, the other an extended excursion into an exotic literature.—A.O.“Images and Shadows: Part of a Life,” by Iris OrigoNonfiction, 1970Not long before he died, Origo’s father — an American diplomat married to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat — wrote that he wished his daughter to grow up “free from all this national feeling that makes people so unhappy.” He wanted her “to be a little ‘foreign,’ too, so that, when she grows up, she really will be free to love and marry anyone she likes, without its being difficult.”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

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    The Thing That Could Be Trump’s Undoing

    If there are Martian scholars examining the United States right now, they might be puzzling over the great Trump paradox.It’s that President Trump is doing immense long-term damage to the United States by undermining democratic norms, vandalizing the federal government and siding with alleged war criminals in the Kremlin, yet if support for him falls, I doubt it will have anything to do with all this. Rather, it may be … egg prices.American voters have been, to my mind, surprisingly comfortable with a felon who pardons other, violent felons and engages in reckless attacks on our rule of law and the global system that we created in 1945 and that has hugely enriched and empowered us. Trump doubled down on his, er, “cultural revolution” in his speech to Congress a few days ago, and about three-quarters of those who watched the speech approved of it to some degree (largely because those who watched were disproportionately Republican).Attacks by Democrats on Trump as undemocratic never got much traction among working-class voters; they cared less about issues at 30,000 feet and more about economic and cultural concerns at three feet. So in a strange way, what may impede Trump and preserve American democracy is not popular revulsion at the historic damage that he is doing to America but rather alarm at the myriad banal impacts on our daily lives because of Trumpian mismanagement.Trump’s tariffs, even if partly delayed, presumably will raise consumer prices and hurt the financial markets and thus our retirement savings; they will create a mess of supply chains for manufacturing goods. One gauge of what to expect: The latest estimate from the Atlanta Federal Reserve is an astonishing 2.4 percent decline in American G.D.P. in the first quarter of 2025.Americans may put up with a president calling journalists enemies of the people, may even accept a president pardoning felons who club police officers while trying to overturn an election. But historically, they’ve not been very forgiving of presidents who preside over recessions.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

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    Trump Seeks to Bar Student Loan Relief to Workers Aiding Migrants and Trans Kids

    President Trump signed an executive order instructing administration officials to alter a student loan forgiveness program for public servants to exclude nonprofit organizations that engage in activities that have what he called a “substantial illegal purpose.”His order to restrict the program appears to target groups supporting undocumented immigrants, diversity initiatives or gender-affirming care for children, among others, as the Trump administration has sought to eliminate federal support for efforts that have drawn right-wing ire.The order, made public on Friday, is the latest of many attempts to overhaul the loan forgiveness program, which has often whipsawed borrowers with rule changes and bureaucratic obstacles.The program, known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, was created by Congress in 2007 and cannot be eliminated without congressional action, but the Education Department has some leeway to determine how it operates. Mr. Trump’s executive order directed the secretaries of education and the Treasury to amend the program to exclude workers for organizations supporting illegal actions, listing several categories of examples, including “aiding or abetting” violations of federal immigration law.The Trump administration has taken a broad view of what it considers to be support of illegal activities. The order cited as examples organizations that support “illegal discrimination,” which the administration has previously said includes diversity and inclusion initiatives.The order appeared to target groups supporting gender-affirming care. It said it would exclude from the loan forgiveness program any organization supporting “child abuse, including the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children.”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

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    C.D.C. Will Investigate Debunked Link Between Vaccines and Autism

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to conduct a large-scale study to re-examine whether there is a connection between vaccines and autism, federal officials said Friday.Dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link. But the C.D.C. now falls under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and has vowed to revisit the data.“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. C.D.C. will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement Friday. Mr. Nixon did not offer details about the scope or methods of the project. News of the study was first reported Friday morning by Reuters.In pursuing the study, the C.D.C. is defying the wishes of the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Senator Bill Cassidy, who said this week that further research into any supposed link between vaccines and autism would be a waste of money and a distraction from research that might shed light on the “true reason” for a rise in autism rates.“It’s been exhaustively studied,” Mr. Cassidy, a doctor, said during the confirmation hearing for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health. “The more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.”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

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    Trump Administration Sends Politically Charged Survey to Researchers

    Scientists on overseas projects must say whether they work with communist governments and help combat “Christian persecution.”The Trump administration has asked researchers and organizations whose work is conducted overseas to disclose ties to those regarded as hostile, including “entities associated with communist, socialist or totalitarian parties,” according to a questionnaire obtained by The New York Times.The online survey was sent this week to groups working abroad to research diseases like H.I.V., gather surveillance data and strengthen public health systems. Recipients received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Agency for International Development and other federal sources.The questionnaire appears to be very similar to one sent earlier this week to partners of the United States Agency for International Development, which has been all but dismantled by the Trump administration. Both were titled “Foreign Assistance Review.”Recipients were instructed to respond within 48 hours. Some grantees interviewed by The Times feared that impolitic or unsatisfactory answers could lead to cancellation of funding.“Taxpayer dollars must not fund dependency, socialism, corrupt regimes that oppose free enterprise, or intervene in internal matters of another sovereign nation,” the questionnaire said.“A truly prosperous America prioritizes domestic growth, innovation, and economic strength over foreign handouts,” it added.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

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    What Is Hantavirus, the Rare Disease That Killed Betsy Arakawa?

    Ms. Arakawa, the wife of the actor Gene Hackman, died from the effects of a disease often caused by contact with droppings from infected rodents.Betsy Arakawa, the wife of Gene Hackman, died from the effects of hantavirus, a rare disease often caused by contact with droppings from infected rodents.Hantavirus does not spread among people in the cases found in the United States. It can be transmitted through rodent saliva. But it is most commonly transmitted by breathing in particles of dried deer mouse droppings or urine.At first, hantavirus causes flulike symptoms, including fever, chills, body aches and headaches. But as the disease progresses, respiratory symptoms develop and patients can experience shortness of breath and then lung or heart failure.Here is what to know about hantavirus.What is hantavirus?Hantavirus refers to a family of viruses that are carried by rodents. It is often transmitted to humans by inhaling particles from dried mouse droppings. In North America, Sin Nombre virus is the most common form of this virus, said Sabra L. Klein, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.As of the end of 2022, 864 cases of hantavirus disease had been reported in the United States since surveys of such cases began in 1993, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The “classic” case of hantavirus is contracted by someone who has visited a rural cabin that has a rodent infestation, said Emily Abdoler, a doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.Hantavirus has flulike symptoms at first.Hantavirus can cause flulike symptoms that appear one to eight weeks after exposure to droppings from an infected rodent, according to Dr. Heather Jarrell, New Mexico’s chief medical examiner. Later, patients often experience shortness of breath and then lung or heart failure.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

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    An Oregon Family Vanished in 1958. Their Car May Have Been Found in a River.

    The case of the Martin family’s disappearance has bewildered local residents and investigators for more than six decades — until Friday.On Dec. 7, 1958, Ken and Barbara Martin of Portland, Ore., took their three daughters on a family trip through the mountains en route to collect Christmas greenery. They stopped at a gas station near Cascade Locks, Ore., on the banks of the Columbia River, but were never heard from again.The case of the Martin family’s disappearance has bewildered local residents and investigators for more than 66 years — until Friday.Acting on a tip from a diver, the authorities spent two days dredging up parts of a car in Cascade Locks that they believe is the Martins’ 1954 red and off-white Ford station wagon — potentially bringing at least part of the mystery of their disappearance to a close.Shortly after the family’s disappearance, the authorities speculated that their car might have gone over a cliff near the city of Cascade Locks, plunging into the Columbia River in an isolated area, The Associated Press reported at the time.But there were no immediate answers, even in 1959, after the authorities recovered the bodies of two of the three Martin daughters in the river: Virginia, 13, and Sue, 11, who were found 25 miles apart. Barbara, 14, and her mother and father, ages 48 and 54, were nowhere to be found.Ken and Barbara Martin, center, with their children in 1952. Their children are, from left, Barbara, Sue, Donald and Virginia. Donald was not on the trip when the rest of the family disappeared.Uncredited/Ken Martin family, via Associated PressWe 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

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    2 Newark Police Officers Shot, With One Critically Injured

    Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey asked people to “please pray” for the officers, who were shot around 6:30 p.m. Friday.Two police officers were shot in Newark on Friday night, and one was “critically injured,” according to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement posted online that the situation was “rapidly developing.”“Please pray for these officers, their families, and all our men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line to keep us safe,” he wrote.The shooting took place at around 6:30 p.m. near the intersection of Broadway and Carteret Street, where an elementary school and a Lutheran church face each other across a busy commercial street.The prosecutor’s office said the two police officers had been taken to University Hospital.This is a developing story and will be updated. More