Aurelia Butler

Mr. Trump has criticized the Biden administration for what he calls its lax handling of the border — but it has left him with tools he can use to shut down the border.President-elect Donald Trump has spent the last year railing against the Biden administration’s immigration policies, saying they left the border wide open and risked American security.But actions taken by President Biden in the past year, including a sweeping asylum ban and more streamlined deportation procedures, may make it easier for Mr. Trump to fulfill his promise to shut down the border and turn back migrants as quickly as possible.To be sure, Mr. Biden’s vision for immigration is different from Mr. Trump’s. While the White House has enacted stricter regulations at the border, it has also emphasized legal pathways to enter the country and offered temporary legal status to migrants from certain troubled countries.After promising a more humane immigration policy when he took office in 2021, Mr. Biden was confronted with a worldwide surge in migration that put pressure on the southern U.S. border. By his second year in office, annual border arrests topped 2 million.As chaotic scenes emerged of migrants crowding at the border, Republicans like Mr. Trump argued that the Democrats were unable to govern and protect American cities, and they urged a crackdown on immigration. Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida sent thousands of migrants by bus and plane to Democratic northern cities to highlight the border crisis.President Biden visiting Brownsville, Texas, in February, where he received an operational briefing from U.S. border officials. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWe 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

Where Donald J. Trump’s critics see underqualified nominees with questionable judgment, his voters described them as mavericks recruited to shake up Washington.To his detractors, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet looks like a rogues’ gallery of people with dubious credentials and questionable judgment.His supporters see something different.“It’s a masterpiece,’’ Eileen Margolis, 58, who lives in Weston, Fla., and owns a tattoo business, said of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks unveiled over the past week. “If it was a painting, it would be a Picasso.”A “brilliant alliance,’’ is how Joanne Warwick, 60, a former Democrat from Detroit, described many of the nominees.“It’s pretty much a star cast,’’ said Judy Kanoui of Flat Rock, N.C., a retiree and lifelong Democrat who voted for Mr. Trump for the first time this month.Democrats, and even some Republicans, worry that these nominees for top positions in government are inexperienced, conflicted and potentially reckless. But in interviews with almost two dozen Trump voters around the country, his supporters were more likely to describe them as mavericks and reformers recruited to deliver on Mr. Trump’s promise to shake up Washington.In Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for health and human services secretary, Mr. Trump’s supporters see a crusader searching for new solutions to chronic illnesses, not a conspiracy theorist promoting questionable and debunked ideas about vaccines and fluoride.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 left-leaning host of “The View” said the business in a Republican stronghold declined to take an order under her name. The bakery said politics had nothing to do with it.A small sponge cake topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry is the crux of a political skirmish between Whoopi Goldberg and a 146-year-old Staten Island bakery.Ms. Goldberg said Holtermann’s Bakery, in the heart of New York City’s reddest borough, refused to fill an order placed under her name, perhaps because of her liberal politics.The bakery’s owner said it wasn’t personal and that politics had nothing to do with it.Now, the bakery’s phone is ringing off the hook, and customers are lining up to show their support for a Staten Island institution — and their opposition to Ms. Goldberg.In the final minutes of Wednesday’s episode of“The View,” Ms. Goldberg said she was celebrating her birthday with an old-fashioned pastry, charlotte russe, that had been a favorite of her mother’s.“I should tell you, charlotte russe has no political leanings,” she said. “And the place that made these refused to make them for me.”The live audience gasped. Ms. Goldberg’s co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farah Griffin paused, stricken, forks frozen halfway to their mouths. Another co-host, Sara Haines, spit a forkful of the dessert back onto her plate.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 a court filing, the judge said the conviction of Melissa Lucio, whose scheduled execution in 2022 was halted, should be overturned. The state’s highest criminal court will now decide.A Texas district judge declared that a mother on death row is innocent in the 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter, according to court documents filed in October but made public this week.The decision in the case now stands with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, which in 2022 halted a scheduled execution of the mother, Melissa Lucio, to gather more evidence. That included asking the district judge in the original trial, Arturo Nelson, to file an opinion. An execution date has not been rescheduled.Ms. Lucio, 56, who lived in the border city of Harlingen, was sentenced to death in 2008 after her daughter, Mariah Alvarez, died as a result of what prosecutors said was the mother’s physical abuse. Ms. Lucio and her lawyers have long maintained her innocence, arguing that Mariah died from complications after accidentally falling down a flight of stairs. An autopsy said the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.Judge Nelson sided with Ms. Lucio in his recent findings, writing that she was “actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter.”He added that, even regardless of that conclusion, Ms. Lucio had a right to have her conviction overturned because the state had used false testimony in her trial and withheld evidence that was favorable to her case. The judge also cited new scientific evidence that was unavailable during her trial.It was unclear on Saturday when the Court of Criminal Appeals would issue its ruling. Vanessa Potkin, one of Ms. Lucio’s lawyers and a special litigation director for the Innocence Project, said it could take a couple of months. Once that court rules, the case could be returned to trial court, at which point a prosecutor would decide if the case should be retried or the charges dismissed.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 Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, which announced the death, did not say how or where he died.Vladimir Shklyarov, one of the world’s premier male ballet dancers, died on Saturday night, according to the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he was a principal dancer.The theater did not say in its announcement how or where Mr. Shklyarov, 39, died.Russia’s Investigative Committee, a federal law enforcement agency, began an investigation into Mr. Shklyarov’s death, according to RIA Novosti, a state-run news agency. “A preliminary cause of death was an accident,” RIA Novosti quoted the Investigative Committee’s office in St. Petersburg as saying.Over a two-decade career, Mr. Shklyarov gained international acclaim, performing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London and other prestigious theaters around the world.Born in Leningrad, Mr. Shkylarov graduated in 2003 from the Vaganova Ballet Academy, a famed institution with nearly 300 years of history. Its graduates include Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov.Mr. Shklyarov joined the Mariinsky directly out of school, and went on to perform in both contemporary and classical productions, including “Swan Lake,” “Don Quixote” and “Giselle.” He received multiple awards for his work, including the prestigious Léonide Massine International Prize in 2008. But the Mariinsky said that “the most precious for Vladimir” was receiving the title of an honored artist of Russia in 2020.Information about survivors was not immediately available. In 2012, Mr. Shklyarov married another dancer, Maria Shirinkina, who also performed with the Mariinsky, according to Russian news media.In a review of a performance during the company’s 2016 tour of the United States, a New York Times critic said, “The best moment came from Maria Shirinkina, supernaturally airborne, and Mr. Shklyarov, elegant and mournful, in a cobbled together extract from ‘Giselle.’ For a little while, they suggested another world.”A former ballerina, Irina Bartnovskaya, wrote on Telegram that Mr. Shklyarov had been at home, on painkillers and preparing for foot surgery before his death. She said that he went out to smoke onto “a very narrow balcony” and fell five stories in “a stupid, unbearable accident.”Her account could not be verified, but it echoed similar reports in Russian news outlets, including Fontanka, which quoted a Mariinsky Theater spokeswoman, Anna Kasatkina, as saying that he was on painkillers and expected to have surgery. More

Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, but one of her campaign slogans was vindicated in defeat. “We’re not going back!” the Democratic nominee insisted on the campaign trail, and she was unintentionally correct: Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.In Trump’s first term, he did not look like a historically transformative president. His victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed.Even if his 2016 upset proved that discontent with the official consensus of the Western world ran unexpectedly deep, the way he governed made it easy to regard his presidency as accidental and aberrant — a break from a “normal” world of politics that some set of authority figures could successfully reimpose.Much of the opposition to his presidency was organized around this hope, and the election of Joe Biden seemed like vindication: Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.But somewhere in this drama, probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.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

Elias Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto” series continues with a young man switching identities in a society seeking to erase him.CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO: Star of the Sea, by Elias Khoury. Translated by Humphrey Davies.“The beginning of life was the massacre and I have to gather together the scraps of its stories.”The speaker here is Adam Dannoun, the hero of the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s final work, the epic trilogy “Children of the Ghetto.” (Khoury died at 76 in Beirut on Sept. 15, shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.)Adam, who was a small child in the first volume, “My Name Is Adam” (2019), now appears as a teenager and young man in the second novel, “Star of the Sea.” The massacre Adam is referring to took place in 1948, inside what is now Israel. But this event is impossible to separate from today’s massacres in Gaza, or from the other crises — the mass expulsions, land thefts, imprisonment, historical appropriation and erasure — that constitute what Palestinians call the ongoing Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of their existence under occupation and in exile. The massacre is also, Khoury insists, impossible to separate from the Holocaust, the pogroms and the history of Jewish suffering that led to the creation of Israel.“Catastrophes,” Adam says bitterly, reflecting on his own experience within this hall of mirrors, “however tragic they may be, liberate their victims from the truth and drive them to find a justification for everything.”Adam has no choice about his own “liberation.” The son of a fallen resistance fighter, Hasan Dannoun, he’s rescued as a baby from the arms of his dead mother during the expulsion of Palestinians from the town of Lydda, in July 1948. He grows up with a foster mother, Manal, among the few Palestinians allowed to remain in a tiny quarter of the town, a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire.Seven years later, Manal marries an abusive man who takes them to live a safer, if still impoverished, life in an Arab enclave in Haifa. As soon as he’s able, Adam escapes the home, and immediately encounters a strange new reality. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, he can effortlessly pass as a Jewish Israeli. In nearly every way, it’s easier for him to become one.“Children of the Ghetto” is a picaresque, though one without comic intentions: Like Tom Jones or David Copperfield, Adam is an orphan and a rogue, a survivor and a trickster, even a bit of a romantic. It’s also about racial shape-shifting, appropriation and invisibility; you could put it on the same shelf with “Passing” and “Invisible Man.”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

Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday. Since that time, vaccines, sanitation and effective medications have eliminated many previously commonplace illnesses and consigned others to extreme rarity. It’s easy to take much of that for granted, especially as those days have receded from living memory, but those achievements are fragile and can be lost.The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.Kennedy has brought attention to some worthwhile public health concerns, such as the downsides of ultraprocessed foods and the value of exercise. But beyond those reasonable issues, he has filled the internet and the airwaves with views on vaccines, food safety, medicines and supplements that are a mix of grave misrepresentations and far-fetched conspiracies.His opposition to vaccines has attracted the most attention. He doesn’t say just that they merit closer scrutiny, as some “vaccine skeptics” claim. Last year he told a podcaster that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” When it later became expedient, he denied that he had ever said such a thing. The truth is that he has long promoted the lie that vaccines cause autism, and the extravagantly false claim that “researchers have done very little to study the health” of children after they get shots for once-common diseases.Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.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