Aurelia Butler

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    Netanyahu Will Meet Trump in Washington

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is set to meet with President Trump at the White House on Monday, according to a White House official, in the second such visit by the Israeli leader since the new administration began in January.Mr. Netanyahu will arrive in Washington after renewing Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza late last month, despite efforts by Mr. Trump’s aides to broker a new truce to stop the fighting there and free more hostages.A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond to a request for comment. The Israeli prime minister has been in Hungary on a state visit, where he met with the country’s leader, Viktor Orban.During Mr. Netanyahu’s last visit, Mr. Trump described a vision for Gaza that involved a U.S. takeover and the mass exit of Palestinians from the enclave. Mr. Netanyahu has since issued a call for what he calls voluntary emigration by Gazans, which critics have denounced as effectively forced displacement.Israeli forces have been steadily bombarding Gaza and advancing deeper into the enclave since the war resumed in late March. Israel has also barred aid from entering Gaza in an apparent attempt to pressure Hamas, leading to fears of a worsening humanitarian crisis for Gaza’s civilians.The Trump administration has thrown its weight behind Israel, blaming Hamas for the return to fighting. Hamas has accused Israel of overturning the cease-fire that Mr. Trump’s aides had helped broker. More

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    Firing of National Security Agency Chief Rattles Lawmakers

    As soon as word spread that President Trump had fired Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, current and former administration officials began floating theories about why he had been let go.Had General Haugh opposed one of Mr. Trump’s initiatives, perhaps moved too slowly on purging officers who had worked on diversity issues? Or was he a casualty of the administration’s shifting priorities to counter narcotics?Whether any of that was true, it had little, if anything, to do with why he was fired.General Haugh was ousted because Laura Loomer, a far-right wing conspiracy theorist and Trump adviser, had accused him and his deputy of disloyalty, according to U.S. officials and Ms. Loomer’s social media post early Friday. He was one of several national security officials fired this past week on her advice.“I predict you are going to see some nonsense statement about some policy difference or something General Haugh wasn’t doing, but we all know what happened,” said Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who is on the intelligence and armed services committees. “Laura Loomer said it. She is the one who told Trump to fire him.”Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and former majority leader, lamented that the Trump White House had ousted General Haugh and was appointing people to Pentagon posts who were skeptical of America’s engagement with allies and the world.“If decades of experience in uniform isn’t enough to lead the N.S.A. but amateur isolationists can hold senior policy jobs at the Pentagon, then what exactly are the criteria for working on this administration’s national security staff?” Mr. McConnell said. “I can’t figure it out.”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 Endangered Galápagos Tortoise Is a First-Time Mother at 100

    Mommy, a Western Santa Cruz tortoise, recently welcomed four hatchlings at the Philadelphia Zoo, where she has lived since 1932.Four endangered Western Santa Cruz Galápagos tortoises hatched at the Philadelphia Zoo.Philadelphia ZooCongratulations are in order for Mommy, a Galápagos tortoise and a longtime resident of the Philadelphia Zoo, who recently became a first-time mother at the estimated age of 100.Mommy, who has lived at the zoo since 1932, laid 16 eggs in November. Four of them have since hatched — the first successful hatching for her species at the zoo, which opened in 1874.She had help, of course — from Abrazzo, a male tortoise who is also estimated to be about a century old.Mommy and Abrazzo, both members of the Western Santa Cruz subspecies, are the oldest animals at the Philadelphia Zoo. But Galápagos tortoises can live as long as 200 years, the zoo said, putting them squarely in middle age.The first hatchling emerged on Feb. 27, the zoo announced on Thursday. The others followed within days, with the last one hatching on March 6.The hatchlings, none of which have been named, are expected to be on view to the public starting on April 23, the zoo said. They are doing “fantastic,” according to the zoo’s director of herpetology, Lauren Augustine. (Herpetology refers to the study of reptiles and amphibians.)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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    ‘White Lotus’ Has an Old-School View of Relationships

    The hotly anticipated final episode of the third season of HBO’s hit “White Lotus” airs Sunday. The show has earned a reputation for revealing the sordid emotional lives of the 1 percent, the types who regularly vacation at five-star-resorts like the White Lotus on fabulous Thai islands.No matter who on the lavish grounds is sacrificed tomorrow night for our entertainment, I predict that if all of the couples literally survive, their relationships will probably survive, too. And the traumatic events they endure will only bring them closer, no matter how much they’ve previously lied to each other and themselves.In many ways, married couples and nuclear families are the two pillars of society that the show’s director and creator, Mike White, doesn’t want to blow up.In spite of the more provocative, sexually transgressive plotlines Mr. White has explored — this season’s Ratliff brothers’ incestuous three-way comes to mind — ultimately, the show has its own old-school view of marriage: ‘Til death do us part.If the pop cultural vogue in relationships emphasizes radical honesty, and talking through feelings in a therapeutic environment, in all three seasons of the show, marriage is about loyalty, strategic deception, and keeping up appearances. This is true even as the characters individually dabble in new age wellness practices like meditation that are meant to get at deeper truths and self-knowledge.The show has a satisfying honesty about the role money plays in marital cohesion, even as we like to pretend that modern marriage is built on love, fidelity and compatibility. As the historian Stephanie Coontz explained in her sweeping 2005 book “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” for millennia, marriage for the upper crust was not about affection, it was a financial and political arrangement meant to consolidate power. “The marriages of the rich and famous in the ancient and medieval worlds can be told as political thrillers, corporate mergers, military epics and occasionally even murder mysteries.”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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    A Tariffs Cheat Sheet

    An escalating global trade war has tanked markets and plunged corporate America into chaos. DealBook asked economists, investors and other experts to help make sense of what’s next.It was much worse than expected. President Trump’s attempt to reverse the rules of global trade through sweeping tariffs against dozens of nations, including major partners like the European Union, Japan and China, has caused a meltdown in global markets and sent corporate boardrooms scrambling.Today, 10 percent tariffs go into effect on all of America’s trading partners except Canada and Mexico. Additional, “reciprocal” tariffs will go into effect on dozens of other nations on Wednesday. China faces the toughest levies — at least 54 percent — and it hit back with its own toll on U.S. goods yesterday. Expect a response from the E.U. next week.Trump has argued that the economic pain caused by the tariffs will be short term and ultimately justified by a boom in the U.S. economy, but news of the measures hit investors hard. The benchmark S&P 500 closed yesterday near bear market territory, with analysts warning of an increased risk of recession.Jerome Powell, the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, offered a somewhat glum outlook yesterday on the prospects for growth and warned of higher prices that he acknowledged could be more than temporary.There’s a lot going on. DealBook asked economists, investment researchers and other experts to help make sense of what’s next.How have the new tariffs changed the risk of a recession?We asked: Jason Furman, a professor of economics at Harvard and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama.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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    2 Books to Keep You Pleasantly Diverted

    A collection of autobiographical sketches; a complicated Japanese mystery.Archive Photos/Moviepix, via Getty ImagesDear readers,There’s a movie house here in New York that, on Sundays, shows a series of revivals appropriate for kids, complete with booster seats. My 5-year-old and I go often, and, a few months ago, went to see the 1944 musical “Meet Me in St. Louis.” We were having a lovely time watching the Technicolor evocation of 1903 St. Louis, and Judy Garland asking us to meet her at the fair and pining for the boy next door, when an old man in the row behind us hissed, loudly, “JUMP HIS BONES!” He continued to repeat this exhortation whenever the teenage characters of Esther and John Truett had a scene together. The kids in attendance seemed confused, but mercifully uncomprehending.I came home bursting with our adventures, but also eager to reread the Sally Benson book on which the musical was based. And, accordingly, next time I had access to my boxes at my parents’ house, I dug out my paperback.—Sadie“Meet Me in St. Louis,” by Sally BensonFiction, 1942Benson was known as a short story writer; both this book and her collection “Junior Miss” were composed mostly of stories she’d published in The New Yorker. Originally, the semi-autobiographical sketches gathered here — about growing up in a large St. Louis family — appeared between 1941 and 1942, as a series she called “5135 Kensington.” But by the time the book was published, the MGM adaptation was already underway, and Benson changed her title to match theirs. She also added four new vignettes, and structured the book as a year in the life of the Smith family.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 Theories Behind the Trump Shock

    There are two related theories of what Donald Trump’s dramatic revision of the global trade system is intended to accomplish.First, the goal is to revitalize American manufacturing, our capacity to build at home and export to the world. The global free trade system that took shape in the late 20th century served the American empire and American G.D.P. but at the expense of America’s earlier role as a manufacturing powerhouse — and because manufacturing jobs were such an important source of blue-collar male employment, at the expense of the working-class social fabric.Meanwhile, over time, our manufacturing base didn’t just move overseas, it moved into the territory of our greatest rival, the People’s Republic of China. So rebuilding industry in America has two potential benefits even if it sacrifices some of the efficiencies offered by global trade. Factory jobs fill a particular socioeconomic niche that’s been filled instead by drugs, decline, despair. And having a real manufacturing base is essential if we’re going to be locked into great power competition for decades to come.Under this theory, though, it would seem like tariffs would be most effectively deployed against China, countries in China’s immediate economic orbit, and developing countries that are natural zones for outsourcing. But the Trump administration has deployed them generally, against peer economies and allies. The policy seems much more sweeping than the goal, the potential damage to both growth and basic international comity too large to justify the upside.Which is where the second argument comes in — that this policy is about fiscal deficits, not just trade deficits and manufacturing. The same global system that made America a net importer also enabled us to borrow immense sums, but we are reaching the point where that borrowing cannot be sustained, where interest rates on the debt will crush our policymaking capacities even if there isn’t an overall flight from the dollar.Here tariffs serve several purposes. Most straightforwardly they generate revenue without striking the kind of grand bargain on Medicare and taxes that the two parties are just too polarized to make. (The only way a Republican president can preside over tax increases is to implement them unilaterally while insisting that they will fall mostly on foreigners.)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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    ‘White Lotus’ Takes On Touchy Subjects. The Southern Accent Is One of Them.

    <!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–> <!–> –><!–> [–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug, seems to be having a moment, thanks to Ms. Ratliff’s frequent mentions, where her accent dances along the open vowels. [–> <!–>Lorazepam–> <!–> [!–> <!–>Lorazepam–> <!–> [!–> <!–>Lorazepam–> <!–> […] More