Aurelia Butler

A federal appeals court on Friday allowed the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government to go forward by pausing a lower-court ruling in Maryland that had blocked enforcement of a series of President Trump’s executive orders.However, the concurring opinions provided by the three judges revealed a sharp political line dividing the jurists on whether diversity was a nonpartisan value of American life or a political philosophy open to scrutiny.Mr. Trump has made aggressive moves to purge diversity initiatives from the government, and administration officials have threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they fail to report on colleagues who defy the orders. Judge Adam B. Abelson of the District of Maryland had written in the lower court ruling last month that the orders sought to punish people for constitutionally protected speech.On Friday, the three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Va., found that the Trump administration had “satisfied the factors for a stay” of that order, writing that the orders “are of distinctly limited scope” and “do not purport to establish the illegality of all efforts to advance diversity, equity or inclusion.”Chief Judge Albert Diaz, who was appointed to the Fourth Circuit by President Barack Obama in 2010, wrote that ruling in the Trump administration’s favor was warranted but pushed back against the attacks on diversity initiatives, saying that “people of good faith who work to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion deserve praise, not opprobrium.”“When this country embraces true diversity, it acknowledges and respects the social identity of its people,” wrote Judge Diaz, who became the first Hispanic jurist to serve as chief judge of the court in 2023. “When it fosters true equity, it opens opportunities and ensures a level playing field for all. And when its policies are truly inclusive, it creates an environment and culture where everyone is respected and valued.”He continued, “What could be more American than that?”Judge Pamela Harris, writing in her own concurring opinion, said that she shared Judge Diaz’s sentiment.“My vote should not be understood as agreement with the orders’ attack on efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion,” wrote Judge Harris, who was also appointed to the court by Mr. Obama.But Judge Allison Jones Rushing, who was appointed by Mr. Trump during his first term, used her own concurring opinion to criticize Judge Diaz’s declaration of support for diversity, equity and inclusion.“Any individual judge’s view on whether certain executive action is good policy is not only irrelevant to fulfilling our duty to adjudicate cases and controversies according to the law, it is an impermissible consideration,” Judge Rushing wrote.She continued, “A judge’s opinion that D.E.I. programs ‘deserve praise, not opprobrium’ should play absolutely no part in deciding this case.” More

A king of the glossy-magazine era sits for a lightning-round interview.Maureen Dowd: Annie Leibovitz took your passport photo.Graydon Carter: She took my passport photo.You were told to sod off by James Bond.Confirm! One year I invited all the men who played James Bond to the Oscar party. For one reason or another, all but one were either working or unavailable. We got George Lazenby, who had appeared in the pre-Sean Connery era in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” I spotted him at the bar by himself. I went over and introduced myself. He just looked straight ahead and then turned and in the sort of fragrant language not generally permitted in a high class newspaper, told me to buzz off.When you were at Time — and single — you wrote fun tidbits for the “People” page, and you had a romantic encounter with the young woman who wrote Newsweek’s version of the people page, called “Newsmakers.”No comment.The two funniest non-comedians you’ve ever met are George Clooney and Anderson Cooper.In both cases, they were so funny that I had to tell them to stop because I thought my trachea would break.When a New York Times push alert announced the news of your departure from Vanity Fair, multiple friends later told you that seeing your name pop up on their phone, they assumed it was because you died.Yes, and for some of them, it put a spring in their step.Anna Wintour should retire.Absolutely not. I think she can go on for decades.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

After our interview, Graydon Carter emailed me.“Oh God, did I do okay yesterday? Too boring? Too indiscreet? Drank too much? Didn’t drink enough?”This was something I had failed to notice about Mr. Carter during his plummy, powerful quarter-century astride a glittering Vanity Fair. This one-time social arbiter, who ran a wildly successful magazine in the peak era for glossies, has social anxiety.How could the man who caused so much social anxiety, when he mercilessly decided who was in and who was out for the most exclusive parties on the planet, including his white-hot Oscar parties, have social anxiety?“I’m not cool — I’m the squarest person you’ve ever met,” he says, unconvincingly.We both started at Time magazine in the early ’80s, a louche era of bars in offices, clouds of cigarette smoke, cascading illicit affairs, sumptuous dining carts of roast beef rolling down the halls and expense accounts so lavish that a top editor would think nothing of sending someone from Paris to London to fetch a necktie he had left in a hotel room.I knew Mr. Carter only slightly back then, but he sure looked confident and debonair to me. Unlike a lot of the men at Time, he wasn’t condescending to the few women writers there. My impression, when I met him, was of a Canadian who seemed to want to dress and talk like a Brit, with dandy aspirations and an upper-crust pronunciation of rather as rah-ther.“It was a British suit,” he affirmed, laughing. “Well, you know, nobody’s going to buy a Canadian suit.”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

Policy uncertainty and tariff whiplash are making consumers less confident about the economic outlook and more worried about inflation, new data from the University of Michigan showed on Friday, the latest evidence that Americans are bracing for pain in President Trump’s second term.A new survey released on Friday showed consumer sentiment plummeting 11 percent in March as Americans of all ages, income groups and political affiliations turned even more downbeat about the trajectory for the economy. Consumer confidence has fallen for the third consecutive month, not only about personal finances, but also the job market and stock markets. Since December, sentiment has tumbled 22 percent.“Many consumers cited the high level of uncertainty around policy and other economic factors; frequent gyrations in economic policies make it very difficult for consumers to plan for the future, regardless of one’s policy preferences,” said Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers at the University of Michigan.Consumers also revised up their expectations for inflation, both for the year ahead and over a five-year horizon. Over the next 12 months, consumers expect inflation to rise to 4.9 percent, up from a forecast for 4.3 percent last month. Over the longer run, expectations rose to 3.9 percent in what was the largest monthly jump since 1993. According to the latest Consumer Price Index report, inflation stands at 2.8 percent.“This is an horrific report,” said Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “Elevated economic policy uncertainty and the sharp drop in stock prices have greatly undermined consumers’ confidence.”The preliminary data comes as President Trump and his top economic advisers have acknowledged that the president’s plans to reshape global trade through aggressive tariffs, to right size government spending and to alter the American immigration system, among other sweeping changes could hurt the economy or even push it into a recession.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

In talks aimed at finding common ground on tariffs, Canadian officials were told April 2 will be a crucial day in setting the Trump tariff doctrine, and any relief could come later.Top U.S. representatives told a Canadian delegation on Thursday that there was no way Canada, or any other country in President Trump’s cross hairs, could avoid a new round of sweeping tariffs on April 2, according to two people with direct knowledge of their conversation.Any negotiations to remove some tariffs or even strike a more comprehensive trade deal would come after that date, American officials told their Canadian counterparts at a meeting in Washington, D.C. Mr. Trump, through an executive order, has ordered an in-depth examination of trade between the United States and several partners, including Canada, and the imposition of “reciprocal” tariffs beginning on April 2, to match surcharges other countries impose on U.S. goods.The United States was represented in the meeting by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Canada was represented by Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman.The Canadian officials left the meeting, which lasted more than an hour, with a clearer — but not necessarily more optimistic — sense of what lies ahead, according to two of them with direct knowledge of what transpired, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press about it.While the Trump officials made clear their pledge on reciprocal tariffs, Mr. Trump has shown a repeated penchant for vowing to press ahead with tariffs only to decide at the last minute to back down or grant a reprieve.The meeting was a an effort to inject a calmer approach to the relationship between the two countries, even as Mr. Trump on Thursday continued to level threats against Canada’s sovereignty.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

A new study found that fair prices for medications like Wegovy and Zepbound would be hundreds less per month than they are now.It’s easy to make a medical case for blockbuster weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, which have been shown to prevent heart attacks and strokes and save lives.But for the employers and government programs being asked to pay for the medications, the financial case for them is less clear. Are the drugs’ benefits worth their enormous cost?The answer right now is no, according to a new study published on Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum, by researchers at the University of Chicago.To be considered cost effective by a common measure used by health economists, the price of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy would need to be cut by over 80 percent, to $127 per month, the researchers concluded. And Eli Lilly’s Zepbound would be cost effective only if its price fell by nearly a third, to $361 per month. (Zepbound warranted a higher price, the researchers said, because it produced greater benefits in clinical trials.)“There’s no doubt that the drugs are demonstrating tremendous health benefits,” said David Kim, a health economist at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the study, which was funded by government grants. “The problem is the price is too high.”There’s widespread hope that the drugs will effectively pay for themselves in the long run, by making patients healthier and preventing expensive medical bills. It’s not clear yet whether that will turn out to be true.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

<!–> [–> The Pandemic Ruined High School for Them. They’re Learning to Live Again. By the fall of 2020, many of the seniors at Oakland Technical High School had become nocturnal. Already confined to their homes for half a year and desperate for fun, they stayed up all night. They were making TikToks, watching porn, […] More

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the shuttering of the Office of Net Assessment, a small, often secretive and sometimes opaque office that for more than 50 years has helped the Pentagon’s most senior leaders think about the future of war.The office costs about $10 million to $20 million a year — a fraction of the Pentagon’s $850 billion annual budget — but its work and staff of about a dozen civilians and military officers has often had an outsize impact on how the Pentagon prepares for possible conflicts.In a short note posted on Thursday, the Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell suggested that the office would be restructured and then reopened with a new focus on the country’s most “pressing national security challenges.” He did not explain how the office’s new mission would differ from its previous approach.For most of its history, the Office of Net Assessment was run by Andy Marshall, its founder, who pioneered an innovative and somewhat mysterious approach to comparing the strength of U.S. forces with that of its potential enemies. The office also developed inventive ways of fighting adversaries. Jim Baker, a retired Air Force colonel, succeeded Mr. Marshall in 2015.The office’s influence often depended on the defense secretary’s priorities and personal relationship with its director. In the early 2000s, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld relied heavily on Mr. Marshall to develop ways of fighting that relied on speed, precision munitions and rapidly improving surveillance capabilities to quickly defeat adversaries.More recently, the office focused on developing concepts for a possible war with China. It championed a concept called Air-Sea Battle, which envisioned an initial “blinding campaign” by stealthy U.S. bombers and submarines that would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar followed by a larger naval assault.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