Aurelia Butler

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    What to Know About China’s Halt of Rare Earth Exports

    Since early April, China has stopped almost all shipments of critical minerals that are needed for cars, robots, wind turbines, jet fighters and other technologies.China has suspended almost all exports since April 4 of seven kinds of rare earth metals, as well as very powerful magnets made from three of them. The halt has caused increasingly severe shortages that threaten to close many factories in the United States and Europe.Why are these metals so needed, why has China stopped exporting them and, crucially, what happens next?What are rare earths?There are 17 types of metals known as rare earths, which are found near the bottom of the periodic table. Most of them are not actually very rare — they are all over the world, though seldom in large enough ore deposits to be mined efficiently.They are called rare because it is very difficult to separate them from each other. Breaking the chemical bonds that bind them in nature can require more than 100 stages of processing and large quantities of powerful acids.A close-up of a gram of terbium.Romain Rabier/Hans Lucas, via ReutersWhy does China control so much of the rare earth supply?China mines 70 percent of the world’s rare earths. Myanmar, Australia and the United States mine most of the rest. But China does the chemical processing for 90 percent of the world’s rare earths because it refines all of its own ore and also practically all of Myanmar’s and nearly half of U.S. production.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’s Deportation Flights Increased in May, Data Shows

    <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Immigration arrests spiked immediately after Mr. Trump took office, but deportations had remained relatively flat because of a drop in the number of people apprehended at the border.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>The Trump administration has rolled back Biden-era protections for many migrants, expanding who has been targeted for deportation. […] More

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    Tesla Protesters Claim a Victory as Elon Musk Leaves Trump’s Side

    The activists behind the Tesla Takedown campaign say they intend to expand beyond protests at the company’s showrooms.Elon Musk left the Trump administration with a White House send-off on Friday. That was a victory of sorts for a group of activists who have spent much of the last four months organizing protests against Mr. Musk’s right-wing politics by targeting his electric car company, Tesla.A day later, on Saturday, hundreds of people showed up at more than 50 Tesla showrooms and other company locations to continue their protests.The campaign at Tesla sites began in February after Joan Donovan, a sociology professor at Boston University, gathered friends to hold a demonstration at a Tesla showroom in Boston, and posted a notice about her plan on Bluesky using the hashtag #TeslaTakedown. She said she had been inspired by a small protest at Tesla’s electric vehicle chargers in Maine soon after President Trump’s inauguration.“That first one on Feb. 15 was me and like 50 people,” Ms. Donovan said. “And then the next week it was a hundred more people, and then a hundred more after that, and it’s just grown.”Tesla Takedown has since expanded into an international movement, staging demonstrations at Tesla factories, showrooms and other locations in countries including Australia, Britain, France and Germany as well as across the United States. The campaign’s U.S. growth has been fueled in large part by anger over Mr. Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed government spending and dismissed tens of thousands of federal workers while gaining access to sensitive personal data.Mr. Musk departed the administration after his involvement in politics hurt his companies, especially Tesla. Sales of the company’s cars have tumbled since Mr. Trump took office and the start of protests against the company.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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    From No Hope to a Potential Cure for a Deadly Blood Cancer

    Multiple myeloma is considered incurable, but a third of patients in a Johnson & Johnson clinical trial have lived without detectable cancer for years after facing certain death.A group of 97 patients had longstanding multiple myeloma, a common blood cancer that doctors consider incurable, and faced a certain, and extremely painful, death within about a year. They had gone through a series of treatments, each of which controlled their disease for a while. But then it came back, as it always does. They reached the stage where they had no more options and were facing hospice.They all got immunotherapy, in a study that was a last-ditch effort.A third responded so well that they got what seems to be an astonishing reprieve. The immunotherapy developed by Legend Biotech, a company founded in China, seems to have made their cancer disappear. And after five years, it still has not returned in those patients — a result never before seen in this disease.These results, in patients whose situation had seemed hopeless, has led some battle-worn American oncologists to dare to say the words “potential cure.”“In my 30 years in oncology, we haven’t talked about curing myeloma,” said Dr. Norman Sharpless, a former director of the National Cancer Institute who is now a professor of cancer policy and innovation at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “This is the first time we are really talking seriously about cure in one of the worst malignancies imaginable.”The new study, reported Tuesday at the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, was funded by Johnson & Johnson, which bought Legend Biotech.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’s Tariffs Expected to Drag Down the Global Economy

    Economic growth will slow this year and next as the trade war hampers development in the United States and around the world, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.President Trump’s trade war is expected to slow growth in the world’s leading economies, including the United States, this year and in the years to come, unless world leaders can resolve their differences over trade.The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development slashed its outlook for global output to 2.9 percent this year, from 3.3 percent in 2024, the organization said in its economic report released on Tuesday.Economic growth in the United States is expected to be particularly weak, the organization said, rising 1.6 percent this year, a drop from the 2.2 percent projected in March, and 1.5 percent in 2026, down from its previous estimate of 1.6 percent. The U.S. economy grew 2.8 percent in 2024.“Through to the end of 2024, the global economy showed real resilience,” said Mathias Cormann, the organization’s secretary general. “But the global economic environment has become significantly more challenging since.”In the first three months of the year, economic growth in the countries monitored by the organization, which is based in Paris, “dropped abruptly” to 0.1 percent from the last three months of 2024, which is “the slowest rate of growth since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic some five years ago,” Mr. Cormann said.Since taking office, Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs, then halted them for several weeks, then reinstated some, in the hopes of winning new trade deals with countries ranging from once-close allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union, as well as longtime rivals like China.The lack of certainty coming from that on-again, off-again strategy, combined with frequent changes in how high the tariffs will eventually be, has roiled markets and disrupted the flow of goods and services around the world. From January to March, many companies rushed goods to the United States, hoping to avoid the higher tariffs, many of which are now set to take effect in July.Even if the Trump administration increases tariffs on most of America’s trading partners by just 10 percent, it would shave off 1.6 percent of economic growth in the country over two years, the report said. Growth on a global scale would contract nearly a full percentage point in the same time span.Further pressure is coming from the need for leading economies, such as those in the European Union, to increase military spending while also investing in the transition to a green economy, the report said.The economies of the 20 countries using the common euro currency are projected to grow to 1 percent in 2025 and 1.2 percent in 2026, in line with the O.E.C.D. forecast from March. China’s economy is expected to see 4.7 percent growth this year, and 4.3 percent in 2026, down 0.1 percent from the organization’s spring projection.Economists in the organization urged countries to reach agreements on trade and to increase investment to revive economic growth.“Our key recommendation, to all governments, is to engage with each other to address issues in a global trading system cooperatively,” Mr. Cormann said. More

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    How the ‘Purpose’ Writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Cast Juggled Revisions

    Ahead of the Tony Awards, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the acclaimed ensemble reflected on the challenges of balancing the many script revisions.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Tony-nominated play “Purpose,” set in the Chicago home of a family of Black upper-class civil rights leaders, seems, at first, to be inspired by the political drama involving the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s clan. But those assumptions are upended by the play’s highly original take on the themes of sacrifice, succession, asexuality and spirituality.The family saga, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, showcases even more of the vivid language, spitfire dialogue and sweeping sense of American history that garnered Jacobs-Jenkins a Tony Award last year for “Appropriate.” And like that production, this play’s ensemble has been nominated for multiple acting awards — five in all.Originally staged in 2023 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, and directed by Phylicia Rashad, “Purpose” was revised, refined and expanded throughout its Broadway preview period. Jacobs-Jenkins readily admits that this process is not unusual for him, much less the writers he has studied intently, like August Wilson or Tennessee Williams. On a recent afternoon, however, a conversation about his collaboration with the cast turned lively with Jacobs-Jenkins calling it “family therapy.”We were sitting on the Helen Hayes Theater stage — at the dining-room table where the play’s most memorable fight plays out — with the show’s six cast members, Harry Lennix, who plays the patriarch and preacher Solomon Jasper; LaTanya Richardson Jackson, as the pragmatic and perspicacious matriarch Claudine Jasper; Jon Michael Hill, as the narrator and the monastic younger son, Nazareth; Glenn Davis, as the beguiling older son, Junior; Alana Arenas, as his windstorm of a wife, Morgan; and Kara Young, who plays Nazareth’s naïve friend Aziza. (Arenas, Davis and Hill are all the Steppenwolf members around whom Jacobs-Jenkins originally conceived of the play.)Purpose Broadway“This is so naked,” Jacobs-Jenkins said, “because I never had this conversation in front of you all before. I have all this in my individual journal.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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    Shigeo Nagashima, Japanese Baseball Icon, Dies at 89

    A key member of the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants of the 1960s and ’70s, Japan’s most enduring sports dynasty, Nagashima was a star from his first season.Shigeo Nagashima, Japan’s most celebrated baseball player and a linchpin of the storied Tokyo Yomiuri Giants dynasty of the 1960s and 1970s, died in a Tokyo hospital on Tuesday. He was 89.He died of pneumonia, according to a joint statement released by the Giants, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and Nagashima’s management company.A star from his first season in 1958, Nagashima instantly made a splash with his powerful bat, speed on the basepaths and catlike reflexes as a third baseman. He notched numerous batting titles and Most Valuable Player Awards, and he was a key member of the Giants’ heralded “V-9” teams, which won nine consecutive Japan Series titles from 1965 to 1973.More than any player of his generation, Nagashima symbolized a country that was feverishly rebuilding after World War II and gaining clout as an economic power. Visiting dignitaries sought his company. His good looks and charisma helped make him an attraction; he was considered Japan’s most eligible bachelor until his wedding in 1965, which was broadcast nationally.Nagashima, then a student at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, signing with the Yomiuri Giants in 1957.Asahi Shimbun, via Getty ImagesThe news media tracked Nagashima’s every move. The fact that he played for the Giants, who were owned by the Yomiuri media empire, amplified his exploits. He wore his success and celebrity so comfortably that he became known as “Mr. Giants,” “Mr. Baseball” or, sometimes, simply “Mister.”“No matter what he did or where he went there was a photo of him — attending a reception for the emperor, or coaching a Little League seminar, or appearing at the premiere of the latest Tom Cruise movie,” Robert Whiting, a longtime chronicler of Japanese baseball, wrote about Nagashima in The Japan Times in 2013. “People joked that he was the real head of state.”None of that celebrity would have been possible had he not excelled as a ballplayer. Along with his teammate Sadaharu Oh, Japan’s home run king, Nagashima was the centerpiece of the country’s most enduring sports dynasty. He hit 444 home runs, had a lifetime batting average of .305, won six batting titles and five times led the league in runs batted in. He was a five-time most valuable player and was chosen as the league’s top third baseman in each of his 17 seasons. He was inducted into Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988.A full version of this obituary will be published later.Hisako Ueno More

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    Acting FEMA Chief Told Staff He Didn’t Know About U.S. Hurricane Season

    In a meeting with FEMA staff, David Richardson said he was unaware the United States had a hurricane season. Two staff members said it was unclear if he was serious, but the agency said he was joking.The acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told employees on Monday that he did not know the United States has a hurricane season, according to two people who heard the remarks and said it was unclear if he was serious.The official, David Richardson, has served in the Marines and worked in the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. After he joined FEMA in May, some FEMA workers expressed concern about his lack of experience in emergency management. The remark, coming a day after the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, could deepen those concerns.The two people who described the comment asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly.The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, said in a statement that Mr. Richardson was joking. The agency statement said FEMA would be focused on disaster response this hurricane season and said the Trump administration is in the process of reforming an agency it believes is bloated.Even if the comment was a joke, the timing would be questionable. The hurricane season, which began on Sunday and lasts through Nov. 30, is considered the agency’s most challenging period, during which the country is the most vulnerable to large-scale devastating disasters that can overwhelm state and local disaster managers. In addition, FEMA has just gone through a major reduction in staffing.During the same meeting, according to the two people, Mr. Richardson told agency employees that FEMA should plan to respond to this year’s hurricane season the same way the agency responded to last year’s hurricane season. But employees have expressed concern with that approach because of the agency’s reduced staff.Since the start of the Trump administration, FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff, including one-fifth of the coordinating officers who manage responses to large-scale disasters, according to a former senior official. The departures came after pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency, previously led by Elon Musk, for a massive culling of federal workers.Mr. Richardson’s predecessor at FEMA was Cameron Hamilton, who was pushed out in early May, a day after telling members of Congress that FEMA was vital to communities “in their greatest times of need” and should not be eliminated. The comment appeared to be in conflict with President Trump, who has suggested the agency be eliminated.On his first full day as acting administrator, Mr. Richardson told the agency’s employees that if any of them tried to obstruct his agenda, “I will run right over you.” More