Aurelia Butler

The North Carolina Republican Party is facing one of the most predictable crises in the history of party politics.Its primary voters enthusiastically supported a candidate for governor named Mark Robinson — voting for him by a more than 45-point margin over his closest rival (he won by 64.8 percent to 19.2 percent) — even though he had a remarkable record of deeply inflammatory and even unhinged statements.Last week, a comprehensive CNN report unearthed compelling evidence that Robinson had posted on a porn site called Nude Africa. I cannot possibly repeat the worst posts, but the less graphically obscene ones included statements like this: “I’m a Black Nazi,” and “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”That’s not all. “I’m not in the K.K.K.,” he also said, according to the CNN report. “They don’t let Blacks join. If I was in the K.K.K. I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” He said he’d prefer Hitler to what he sees in Washington today.No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad 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

In 2024, the deep state that defeats Donald Trump might be his own.That, after all, is what Project 2025 was actually meant to be. The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level. But options for whom? Not for Trump himself. Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does. And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents. When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.But Project 2025 — and much else like it that has gotten less press — is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. The presidency is not one man, Diet Coke in hand, Fox & Friends on TV, barking orders. It’s 4,000-or-so political appointees — nearer to 50,000 if Trump again uses Schedule F powers to strip civil-service protections from vast swaths of the federal government — trying to do what they think the president wants them to do or what they think needs to be done. They do that by setting policy for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government and by writing regulations that the rest of society must follow.Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled. Part of this reflected Trump’s erratic leadership style and the constant conflict between the warring factions inside his White House: the traditional Republicans clustered around Mike Pence and Reince Priebus; the MAGA types led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller; the foreign policy establishment that spoke through H.R. McMaster and Nikki Haley; the corporatists led by Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. Read any book on the Trump presidency, and you will be buried in examples of Trump’s top appointees trying to foil each other — and him.But some of it reflected a federal bureaucracy that resisted Trump and the people he appointed. In a presentation at the 2024 National Conservatism conference in Washington, Katy Talento, who oversaw health care policy on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, described the obstacles she faced:There’s like a handful of political appointees at an agency with hundreds of thousands of employees and maybe one or two of those appointees is sufficiently experienced to write regulations. They can’t seek any help from experienced but hostile bureaucrats that surround them, or those drafts get leaked, or bad advice gets provided, and poison pills get put into regs, drafts get slowed down or scuttled all together. So this dramatically limits the productivity potential of a Republican administration.This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing. There is an online portal that, even now, invites applicants to apply for inclusion in “the Presidential Personnel Database.” It goes on to say that “with the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” writes Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, in one of its chapters. Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”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

From calling for mass deportations to spreading false claims about migrants’ eating pets, former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, are taking a hard line.As former President Donald J. Trump warned supporters on Saturday in Wilmington, N.C., that immigrants were “taking your jobs,” his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, campaigned about 500 miles north in Leesport, Pa., where he told his crowd that immigrants were taking their homes — and their children’s homes.Battling in a tight race, the Trump-Vance team is sharpening the anti-immigrant nativism that fueled the former president’s initial rise to power in 2016, seizing on scare tactics, falsehoods and racial stereotypes. They spread a false claim that Haitian migrants in a small Ohio city were stealing and eating the pets of their neighbors. And they are increasingly failing to draw a distinction between migrants who are in the country legally and those they call “illegal aliens,” whom they blame for a raft of social ills.Mr. Trump likened the influx to an “invasion” at his rally in North Carolina. “We are going to totally stop this invasion,” he said. “This invasion is destroying the fabric of our country.” He also claimed, falsely, “Every job in this country produced over the last two and a half years has gone to illegal aliens — every job.”Mr. Vance, at the rally in Pennsylvania, said migrants deserved some of the blame for rising home prices because they were “people who shouldn’t be here, people who are competing against you and your children to buy the homes that ought to be going to American citizens.” He faulted the policies of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration.“Our message to Kamala Harris is: Stop giving American homes to foreigners who shouldn’t be in this country,” Mr. Vance said. “Start giving them to American citizens who deserve to be here.”Both Mr. Trump, who has promised to oversee mass deportations if elected, and Mr. Vance are increasingly questioning the status of Haitian migrants who are in the country legally.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 missile fired by Hezbollah slammed into a residential neighborhood in the Israeli town of Kiryat Bialik on Sunday morning, setting cars and a building ablaze and blowing out the windows of nearby apartments, numerous videos verified by The New York Times show.The missile was part of a large overnight barrage that Israel’s military said included around 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones. Air defenses intercepted most, according to the military, but Kiryat Bialik, near the city of Haifa, suffered a direct hit.A dashcam video recorded inside a parked car in a densely populated neighborhood of the town captured the sound of loud booms before a missile was seen exploding with a flash and smoke around 30 yards away.A second video showed at least two vehicles engulfed in flames and a building next to them on fire, as people ran toward the vehicles and sprayed extinguishers. “Firefighters are on the other side,” one person says. “Get closer, get closer.”Across the street from the strike, a resident filmed inside an upper-floor apartment. The force of the blast shattered the apartment’s windows, scattered glass across the floor and kitchen countertops and knocked photographs off a wall, the video shows.A later video showed the scene after the blaze was extinguished. A large hose lay on the ground, the cars were smoldering and smoke was rising from a window of the building that had been alight but was now blackened. Debris had pockmarked the walls of other buildings in the area. More

A methane leak set off the explosion, the country’s official media said, and a rescue effort was underway for those believed to be trapped in the mine.A methane explosion at a coal mine in eastern Iran killed dozens of miners, and the death toll was expected to rise, Iranian state media said on Sunday.The miners died of suffocation from the rapid release of methane and carbon monoxide, according to a report by Iran’s state news agency, IRNA. IRNA, which said earlier Sunday that 51 miners had been killed, later put the figure at 34. Other state media had estimates of the number of people killed that ranged from 30 to 51.At the time of the explosion on Saturday, in the eastern Iranian city of Tabas, there were 69 workers in the mine, IRNA said.Many may still be trapped, according to Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.It was not possible to independently verify details of the incident.Officials say they are trying to work quickly to rescue the workers trapped in the mine, which is operated by the Madanjo Company, according to the Fars news agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran ordered an investigation into the explosion, IRNA reported. Mohammad-Ali Akhondi, a crisis management official, urged caution about the rescue efforts, IRNA reported.“The reality is that it is a difficult task to rescue the injured,” he said, according to IRNA. The report said rescuers would need to go about 2,300 feet diagonally and 820 feet vertically underground to reach the trapped workers.Industrial accidents are common in Iran, and many construction and mining sites operate with outdated and inadequate materials.In 2017, dozens of miners were killed and many were hurt after an explosion at a coal mine near the northern Iranian town of Azadshahr, in the Golestan Province. More

An excerpt from one of the most ambitious stories in The Times Magazine’s history.Today, The New York Times Magazine published one of the most ambitious stories in its long history — an account of a Russian military officer’s desertion and escape. Sarah Topol spent over a year and a half investigating the Russian military and reporting in eight countries across four continents.In the story, the officer — identified by a pseudonym, Ivan — feigns a serious back injury to escape the front in Ukraine and eventually defect. He uses a cane to make that story convincing. Now, he must retrieve his passport, which is locked with other officers’ passports in the H.R. office of his base in Russia. Each passport has a paper slip in it, logging various personal details. He buys a fake version of the passport online: good enough to fool the military, but not to fool anyone at the borders he needs to cross.So Ivan devises a plan to get his hands on the real one — and swap it with the fake. Here’s how he does it.Ivan knew the office from years of worthless paperwork and reports. The H.R. manager sat at a desk on the right side of the room. Next to him was a six-foot-high metal safe with three drawers. They were unlocked with a key. The passports were kept in folders inside the drawers.To complicate matters, Ivan could use only one arm — the other would be holding the cane as part of his act. So he had to walk in, with his cane in his left hand, take the passport out of his pocket and somehow swap it for the fake. He would also need to remove the paper slip from the original and place it into the duplicate before returning it. How could he do all that with just one hand?The H.R. manager’s desk faced the room. Ivan would have to find a way to reach into his pocket while holding both the cane and the passport. No, that wouldn’t work. He would need to find a way to sit down, put down his cane so he could have two free hands and then reach into his pocket — but that motion could be seen from the side or the back.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

At least 129 people died when inmates tried to escape from Makala Prison, where conditions are abysmal and overcrowding is a major problem.More than 700 inmates were released from the largest prison in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the country’s authorities said on Saturday, as officials sought to ease overcrowding in a facility where at least 129 people died in an attempted jailbreak this month.Congo’s justice minister, Constant Mutamba, announced their release during a visit to the Makala Central Prison, where the deadly episode highlighted the alarming conditions faced by inmates in the only prison in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital and one of Africa’s most populous cities.Mr. Mutamba promised that Kinshasa would get a new prison, though he did not give details.Of the 729 inmates released, most — 648 — were released on bail.On the evening of Sept. 2, inmates, whose cells had been without water and electricity for more than a day and a half, tried to break out to escape the stifling heat, several inmates told The New York Times.The details remain unclear, but most of the deaths occurred in a stampede that followed, while at least 24 people were fatally shot while trying to escape, the country’s authorities have said. Several female prisoners were raped, according to Human Rights Watch and Congo’s interior minister.The Makala Prison, which was built in 1957 during the era of Belgian colonial rule and little renovated since, has a capacity of 1,500, but has at times held 10 times more than that.Military reinforcements at the entrance of Makala Prison after an attempted jailbreak this month.Hardy Bope/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe prison’s director, Joseph Yusufu Maliki, has been suspended, and dozens of inmates accused of raping female inmates during the jailbreak soon faced trial.Some of the women told the television channel TV5 Monde that 10 men, some of whom were armed with scissors and knives, had raped them and threatened to kill or mutilate them if they resisted.Human rights organizations and journalists have long described conditions in Makala and other prisons in the Central African country as inhumane: overcrowded, violent and filthy.Last year, more than 500 inmates died from suffocation and various diseases at the prison, according to Emmanuel Adu Cole, a human-rights activist based in Kinshasa. Mr. Cole said that out of about 15,000 inmates, only 2,500 had been convicted; the rest were awaiting trial.“Most of the inmates have no reason to be held in such inhumane conditions,” Mr. Cole said in a telephone interview. “This cannot continue.”More than 500 inmates had been released from the Makala Prison in August, before the attempted jailbreak shed a new light on the conditions there.“There is a program, across the country, that aims at building new prisons,” Patrick Muyaya, a government spokesman, said this month on the television channel France 24. “The incident that happened is going to accelerate the process that had already started.”Mr. Muyaya did not provide details on how many facilities would be built, nor when they would be operational. More

Scroll down for hints and conversation about the puzzle for Monday, Sept. 23, 2024.Good morning, dear connectors. Welcome to today’s Connections forum, where you can give and receive puzzle — and emotional — support.Be warned: This article includes hints and comments that may contain spoilers for today’s puzzle. Solve Connections first, or scroll at your own risk.Connections is released at midnight in your time zone. In order to accommodate all time zones, there will be two Connections Companions live every day, dated based on Eastern Standard Time.If you find yourself on the wrong companion, check the number of your puzzle, and go to this page to find the corresponding companion.Post your solve grid in the comments and see how your score compares with the editor’s rating, and one another’s.Today’s difficultyThe difficulty of each puzzle is determined by averaging the ratings provided by a panel of testers who are paid to solve each puzzle in advance to help us catch bugs, inconsistencies and other issues. A higher rating means the puzzle is more difficult.Today’s difficulty is 3.3 out of 5.Need a hint?In Connections, each category has a different difficulty level. Yellow is the simplest, and purple is the most difficult. Click or tap each level to reveal one of the words in that category. 🟨 StraightforwardBUMPY🟩 ⬇️PARCEL🟦 ⬇️SCRATCHY🟪 TrickyNATIONALFurther ReadingWant to give us feedback? Email us: [email protected] to go back to Connections?Want to learn more about how the game is made?Leave any thoughts you have in the comments! Please follow community guidelines:Be kind. Comments are moderated for civility.Having a technical issue? Use the Help button in the Settings menu of the Games app.Want to talk about Wordle or Spelling Bee? Check out Wordle Review and the Spelling Bee Forum.See our Tips and Tricks for more useful information on Connections.Join us here to solve Crosswords, The Mini, and other games by The New York Times. More