Elections

Digital life is cluttered with bogus text messages, spam calls and phishing attempts. You can try to block, encrypt and unsubscribe your way out of it, but you may not succeed. Welcome to Scam World Toma Vagner Welcome to Scam World You open your eyes and grope for your phone. You check your inbox and […] More

An American who won silver in Tokyo calls for an investigation. A British gold medalist demands bans. But the most bitter fight was between antidoping leaders.The revelation that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a banned drug seven months before the Tokyo Olympics but were secretly cleared and allowed to continue competing has exposed a bitter and at times deeply personal rift inside the fight to keep drugs out of international sports, and brought new criticism of the global authority that oversees drug-testing.A New York Times investigation uncovered previously unreported details of the 2021 episode, in which a contingent of Chinese swimmers, including nearly half of the team that China sent to the Tokyo Games, tested positive for a banned prescription heart medicine that can help athletes increase stamina and reduce recovery times.Within hours, the disclosure of an incident that had been a secret for more than three years was roiling swimming. An American Olympian who took home a silver medal from Tokyo said she felt her team had been “cheated” in a race won by China. A British gold medalist called for a lifetime ban for the swimmers involved on social media. And a simmering feud between global antidoping officials and their U.S. counterparts burst into the open with caustic statements and legal threats.“Any time there’s a situation where positive tests aren’t clearly identified and gone through a proper process and protocol, it allows for doubt to creep into athletes’ minds who are competing clean,” said Greg Meehan, the Stanford University coach who led the U.S. women’s team at the Tokyo Games. “When they’re going into competitions, you can’t help but think, ‘Am I competing in a clean event?’”The fallout comes less than 100 days before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. That has created uncomfortable headlines both for the sport but also for the Games themselves, which depend on global antidoping regulators to ensure fair play and the integrity of the medals awarded — which can validate years of training, define athletes’ careers and confer pride on a nation.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

This is an extraordinarily dangerous time for the United States and our allies. Israel’s unpreparedness on Oct. 7 shows that even powerful nations can be surprised in catastrophic ways. Fortunately, Congress, in a rare bipartisan act, voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key intelligence power that provides critical information on hostile states and threats ranging from terrorism to fentanyl trafficking.Civil libertarians argued that the surveillance bill erodes Americans’ privacy rights and pointed to examples when American citizens got entangled in investigations. Importantly, the latest version of the bill adds dozens of legal safeguards around the surveillance in question — the most expansive privacy reform to the legislation in its history. The result preserves critical intelligence powers while protecting Americans’ privacy rights in our complex digital age.At the center of the debate is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally passed in 1978, it demanded that investigators gain an order from a special court to surveil foreign agents inside the United States. Collecting the communications of foreigners abroad did not require court approval.That line blurred in the digital age. Many foreign nationals rely on American providers such as Google and Meta, which route or store data in the United States, raising questions as to whether the rules apply to where the targets are or where their data is collected. In 2008, Congress addressed that conundrum with Section 702. Instead of requiring the government to seek court orders for each foreign target, that provision requires yearly judicial approval of the rules that govern the program as a whole. That way, the government can efficiently obtain from communication providers the calls and messages of large numbers of foreign targets — 246,073 in 2022 alone.Since then, Section 702 has supplied extraordinary insight into foreign dangers, including military threats, theft of American trade secrets, terrorism, hacking and fentanyl trafficking. In 2022 intelligence from 702 helped the government find and kill the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11. Almost 60 percent of the articles in the president’s daily intelligence briefing include information from Section 702.Although Section 702 can be used only to target foreigners abroad, it does include Americans when they interact with foreign targets. Not only is such incidental collection inevitable in today’s globalized world; it can be vital to U.S. security. If a terrorist or spy abroad is communicating with someone here, our government must find out why.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

How internet shopping became choked with junk. People are bombarded online each day with ads for newfangled products that promise dramatic life improvements. Modish tumblers. Sleek pans. Miraculous cleaning solutions. Overblown air purifiers. Just click this link and — voilà! Productivity. Happiness. Nirvana.Don’t buy it.Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation service, tests many of the wares that clog Americans’ social media feeds. And while our testers do like some, these products are often built on empty promises. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how e-commerce, a $6 trillion global industry, became choked with junk.Paid to sellOnline shopping can expose people to a greasy influencer economy. Influencers often join affiliate-revenue networks, such as Amazon’s. When an influencer’s follower clicks a link and buys something, the influencer makes money. That’s why people on your social media feed are crowing about their 10 favorite Amazon finds or talking about how an expensive gizmo has changed their life.Many influencers have another incentive: Brands pay them to hawk stuff. Some people with large followings make deals for tens of thousands of dollars per post. Then, when enough people like or share a post, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube algorithms push it to more people. The result is a blizzard of gadgets.Consider these spin scrubbers, pitched online as the solution to all of your cleaning woes. “In videos, these devices churn up rings of soap suds, implying they are lifting away all the filth beneath them,” writes Ellen Airhart, Wirecutter’s cleaning expert.In reality, they’re the worst cleaning tools we’ve ever tested. Ellen spent six hours trying to scour a soap-scum-covered shower and a toothpaste-crusted sink with two spin scrubbers popular on TikTok. They splattered water everywhere and often cost upward of $50. Instead, Ellen recommends a humble $1 sponge.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

Bad weather in Guangdong Province forced evacuations as forecasters warned of more rain and potential flooding.Torrential rain battered Southern China on Sunday, causing flooding and forcing tens of thousands of evacuations in the country’s most populous province, as a waterspout appeared briefly in Hong Kong and forecasters warned of potentially severe flooding.Rain has been falling in Guangdong, which has a population of about 127 million people, since last week. It intensified over the weekend, hammering the north of the province and the Pearl River Delta in the south, which includes Guangdong’s capital, Guangzhou, as well as the cities of Hong Kong and Macau.The city of Yingde, in Guangdong’s north, received nearly a foot of rain from Friday to Sunday, the state owned China Daily newspaper reported on Sunday. Nearly 20,000 people were evacuated and nine rivers were at risk of overflowing, it said.In Guangzhou, the Longxue neighborhood received nearly five inches of rain over four hours on Sunday morning, the highest amount in the province. The Beijiang River, a tributary of the Pearl River, flooded on Saturday night, China’s Ministry of Water Resources said on Sunday. As the downpour continued, the river faced a risk of a “exceptionally large” flooding through Monday, the ministry said.And in Hong Kong, a Chinese territory south of Guangdong, a waterspout was sighted over water by the local meteorological agency on Sunday morning. Waterspouts are whirling columns of air and water mist that form when cold air moves over warmer water, drawing up moisture.There were no reports of the waterspout causing damage, and a rainstorm warning for the city was canceled at 2 p.m. But forecasters warned of violent winds and possible flooding.Heavy rain was also affecting parts of the neighboring Chinese provinces of Guangxi, Jiangxi and Fujian on Sunday.The heaviest rain was forecast to shift from the north to the east of Guangdong on Monday, and some areas could receive up to 10 inches of rain over 24 hours, according to the China Weather Network, an arm of the country’s meteorological authority. The rainfall was expected to begin easing on Tuesday.Thunderstorms and sometimes heavy showers were also forecast for Hong Kong on Monday. More

The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Donald Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness and a sense of power.“Sir, can you please have a seat.”Donald J. Trump had stood up to leave the Manhattan criminal courtroom as Justice Juan M. Merchan was wrapping up a scheduling discussion on Tuesday.But the judge had not yet adjourned the court or left the bench. Mr. Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the owner of his own company, is used to setting his own pace. Still, when Justice Merchan admonished him to sit back down, the former president did so without saying a word.The moment underscored a central reality for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little.Everything about the circumstances in which the former president comes to court every day to sit as the defendant in the People v. Donald J. Trump at 100 Centre Street is repellent to him. The trapped-in-amber surroundings that evoke New York City’s more crime-ridden past. The lack of control. The details of a case in which he is accused of falsifying business records to conceal a payoff to a porn star to keep her claims of an affair with him from emerging in the 2016 election.Mr. Trump in court on Friday.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesOf the four criminal cases Mr. Trump is facing, this is the one that is the most acutely personal. And people close to him are blunt when privately discussing his reaction: He looks around each day and cannot believe he has to be there.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

Intelligence, politics and personal considerations converted the Republican speaker, who had largely opposed aid to Ukraine as a rank-and-file member, into the key figure pushing it through Congress.Speaker Mike Johnson successfully defied the anti-interventionalist wing of the Republican Party and got the House to approve a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesFor weeks after the Senate passed a sprawling aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Speaker Mike Johnson agonized over whether and how the House would take up funding legislation that would almost certainly infuriate the right wing of his party and could cost him his job.He huddled with top national security officials, including William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, in the Oval Office to discuss classified intelligence. He met repeatedly with broad factions of Republicans in both swing and deep red districts, and considered their voters’ attitudes toward funding Ukraine. He thought about his son, who is set to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in the fall.And finally, when his plan to work with Democrats to clear the way for aiding Ukraine met with an outpouring of venom from ultraconservatives already threatening to depose him, Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian, knelt and prayed for guidance.“I want to be on the right side of history,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, recalled the speaker telling him.Mr. Johnson’s decision to risk his speakership to push the $95 billion foreign aid bill through the House on Saturday was the culmination of a remarkable personal and political arc for the Louisiana Republican. It was also an improbable outcome for a man plucked from relative obscurity last fall by the hard right — which had just deposed a speaker they deemed a traitor to their agenda — to be the speaker of a deeply dysfunctional House.As a rank-and-file hard-liner, Mr. Johnson had largely opposed efforts to fund Kyiv’s war effort. And early in his speakership, he declared he would never allow the matter to come to a vote until his party’s border demands were met.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 former President Donald J. Trump sat in a courtroom in New York for much of the last week, Saturday night was supposed to herald a return to the campaign trail and the large rallies where he often gives long, freewheeling speeches.With thousands gathered on the tarmac at an airport in Wilmington, N.C., Mr. Trump’s campaign was building anticipation. Two hours before he was set to speak, the campaign sent a fund-raising blast with a message from Mr. Trump: “They can’t keep me off stage! Did they think I would run and hide?”Ninety minutes later, the skies darkened to charcoal and lightning flashed. As thunderstorms swept toward the area and the National Weather Service issued watches and warnings concerning dangerous winds and hail, the rally was canceled over safety concerns.“We’ll make up for this very quickly at another time,” Mr. Trump said on a call he made into the rally that was broadcast over the speakers. “We’ll do it as quick as possible. I’m devastated that this could happen.”But the cancellation, which Mr. Trump indicated was out of his hands, highlights the challenges that he may face as he tries to balance his presidential campaign with a criminal trial that will keep him busy through May.For much of the last week, Mr. Trump’s public comments had been limited to social media posts and remarks to reporters outside the courtroom. His only campaign stop was at a bodega in New York City, in a state he overwhelmingly lost in the last two elections and that is not expected to be in play in November.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