Elections

On This Week’s Episode:Stories of people waking up to the fact that the world has suddenly changed.Matt ChaseThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling and provides news, depth and serendipity. It is available to Times news subscribers on iOS. If you haven’t already, download the app and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Our new audio app is home to “This American Life,” the award-winning program hosted by Ira Glass. New episodes debut in our app a day earlier than in the regular podcast feed, and we also have an archive of the show. The app includes a “Best of ‘This American Life’” section with some of our favorite bite-size clips, so you can enjoy the show even if you don’t have a lot of time. More

Despite the violence and political turmoil in Haiti, New York Times Opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that this might be the tipping point that finally brings peace to that island nation. U.S. interference in Haiti has long been criticized, and in this audio essay, she says we finally have a chance to repair the damage we’ve done and help set the country back on a course toward dignity and democracy: “Just because there is this long history of failure doesn’t mean that success is not possible.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by EA/Getty ImagesThis episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud, Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads. More

No one realized that the panel from the plane, a Boeing 737-800, was missing until it had landed safely, the airline said.A United Airlines flight that took off on Friday morning from San Francisco International Airport landed in Oregon missing an external panel, the Federal Aviation Administration said.The panel was found to be missing after the plane, a Boeing 737-800, landed safely at its scheduled destination at Rogue Valley International Medford Airport in Oregon and parked at a gate, United Airlines said in a statement. It was unclear when or how the panel went missing.According to the airline, there was no indication of any damage to the plane during the flight, and the aircraft did not declare an emergency on its way to the Medford airport.“We’ll conduct a thorough examination of the plane and perform all the needed repairs before it returns to service,” the airline said. “We’ll also conduct an investigation to better understand how this damage occurred.”The plane was carrying 139 passengers and a crew of six, according to United Airlines. No injuries were reported.The plane has been in service for more than 25 years, and it was from a previous generation of 737 aircraft, according to Airfleets.net, a website that tracks aircraft information. The airport briefly paused operations to inspect the runway, and resumed flights after no debris was found on the airfield, Amber Judd, the director of the Medford airport, said in an email.Boeing referred questions about the flight to United Airlines. The F.A.A. said it planned to investigate the episode.The discovery of the missing panel on Friday came as Boeing has faced heavy scrutiny in recent weeks after a door-sized section blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 Alaska Airlines flight in January just minutes after it had taken off from Portland, Ore. There were no major injuries during the flight, but the frightening episode, which was recorded on video, prompted government officials to look into quality control at Boeing.After the January flight, the F.A.A. began a six-week audit of Boeing, which found “multiple instances” in which the plane maker had failed to follow through with quality-control requirements.Since then, there have been a number of issues with flights on Boeing aircraft.On March 8, a United Airlines flight that had landed at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston rolled into the grass as the plane, a Boeing 737, exited onto the taxiway, according to the F.A.A.In February, a Madrid-bound American Airlines flight, a Boeing 777, diverted to Boston Logan International Airport with a cracked windshield shortly after it had departed from Kennedy International Airport in New York. More

The Justice Department, which is investigating the blowout of a panel on an Alaska Airlines flight, is using a recently convened grand jury in Seattle.The Justice Department is sending subpoenas and using a recently convened grand jury in Seattle as it widens a criminal investigation into the door plug that blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner in January, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.The detachment of the panel from the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines flight shortly after takeoff terrified passengers at 16,000 feet and required an emergency landing back at Portland International Airport in Oregon. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board said four bolts meant to secure the door plug in place were missing before the panel blew off.This month, it was reported that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation of Boeing, which had reinstalled the door plug during maintenance in Renton, Wash., before delivering the plane to Alaska Airlines in October.The subpoenas and use of the grand jury were reported earlier Friday by Bloomberg.The midair incident on Jan. 5 led the Federal Aviation Administration to ground more than 170 Max 9 planes, which were then inspected for construction flaws. Boeing said it agreed with the F.A.A.’s decision and pledged to cooperate. The company has said safety is its top priority.The Max 9s have since restarted flights, but questions remain about the malfunction. A grand jury could be asked to decide whether a criminal prosecution is warranted. A likely focus would be repairs to the Alaska Airlines plane’s rivets, which are often used to join and secure parts on planes, by workers at the Boeing plant in Renton.The episode has brought a fresh round of scrutiny to Boeing. The company made grim headlines in 2018 and 2019 when two crashes of another 737 model, the Max 8, killed 346 people. Max 8 jets were grounded for almost two years. The company subsequently spent more than $2.5 billion to settle a criminal charge that Boeing had defrauded the F.A.A., and the company’s chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, was fired.Under his replacement, Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s stock has risen, though the company has struggled to meet airlines’ demands. Production of the 737 Max fell to about half of Boeing’s stated goals last year, as the company was bedeviled by supply chain issues with key suppliers and problems with fuselages.Now, the company is facing far steeper challenges. Two days after the door plug incident, Mr. Calhoun sent a memo to employees stating that “while we’ve made progress in strengthening our safety management and quality control systems and processes in the last few years, situations like this are a reminder that we must remain focused on continuing to improve every day.” More

Legislation to force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app or have it banned in the United States sailed through the House, but the Senate has no plans to move hastily.After a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a nationwide ban sailed through the House at breakneck speed this week, its progress has slowed in the Senate.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader who determines what legislation gets a vote, has not decided whether to bring the bill to the floor, his spokesman said. Senators — some of whom have their own versions of bills targeting TikTok — will need to be convinced. Other legislation on the runway could be prioritized. And the process of taking the House bill and potentially rewriting it to suit the Senate could be time consuming.Many in the Senate are keeping their cards close to their vest about what they would do on the TikTok measure, even as they said they recognized the House had sent a powerful signal with its vote on the bill, which passed 352 to 65. The legislation mandates that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sell its stake in the app within six months or face a ban.“The lesson of the House vote is that this issue is capable of igniting almost spontaneously in the support that it has,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview on Friday. He said that there could be adjustments made to the bill but that there was bipartisan support to wrest the app from Chinese ownership.The slowdown in the Senate means that TikTok is likely to face weeks or even months of uncertainty about its fate in the United States. That could result in continued lobbying, alongside maneuvering by the White House, the Chinese government and ByteDance. It is also likely to prompt potential talks about deals — whether real or imagined — while the uncertainty of losing access to the app will hang over the heads of TikTok creators and its 170 million U.S. users.“Almost everything will slow down in the Senate,” said Nu Wexler, a former Senate aide who worked for Google, Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “They’ll need some time to either massage egos or build consensus.”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 fresh array of problems are in store for Ms. Willis and her prosecution of Donald Trump, one of the most significant state criminal cases in American history.After revelations of Fani T. Willis’s romance with a subordinate sent the Georgia criminal case against Donald J. Trump down a two-month detour worthy of a soap opera, a judge’s ruling on Friday resolved a major cliffhanger. Ms. Willis could continue prosecuting the case, so long as her ex-boyfriend withdrew from it.But the resignation hours later of the former boyfriend, Nathan J. Wade, whom Ms. Willis hired as a special prosector, only settled so much. A fresh and complicated array of problems lies ahead for Ms. Willis, and for one of the most significant state criminal cases in American history.“Her troubles are far from over,” Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor and ethics specialist at Georgia State University, said in an email on Friday.The defense effort to disqualify Ms. Willis began in early January, upending the case and making it unlikely to reach trial before the November rematch between Mr. Trump and President Biden. Any attempts to appeal Friday’s ruling by Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court could delay matters even further.Republicans have smelled blood. The G.O.P. lawmakers who dominate Georgia politics have created new ways to investigate Ms. Willis, which could potentially lead to her removal from office. And last week, a young lawyer named Courtney Kramer, a former intern in the Trump White House, announced that she would run against Ms. Willis in this year’s race for district attorney.Ms. Kramer’s campaign, while unlikely to succeed in heavily Democratic Fulton County, could amplify criticism of Ms. Willis and the case, which charges Mr. Trump and some of his allies with conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.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

To write about the increase in snake encounters in Australia, a journalist had to get hands-on with the slithering reptiles.The carpet python in the car didn’t seem angry, but it was certainly curious.The snake, thankfully, was contained inside a navy blue canvas bag, its temporary enclosure until a snake catcher and I arrived at its release location. It lifted its body, exploring the space. I watched it push the fabric this way and that from inside the bag, as if performing a peculiar puppet show.It would have been funny, had I not felt slightly sick.When I pitched an article about snake catchers on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, where snake encounters are becoming increasingly common as the climate changes, I had somehow forgotten that reporting on snakes would require spending quite a bit of time with them.I spent part of my childhood in Singapore, where snakes were an infrequent, but still present, part of our lives. We once found a cobra snoozing behind a framed picture that was propped up against the wall. News of neighbors’ missing pets sometimes preceded sightings of suspiciously well-fed pythons. I still remember the anxiety that followed a sudden, stealthy swish of long grass. And then there’s a gruesome memory of an irate snake fighting one of our cats, Fudge. (Fudge made it out unscathed. I can’t say the same for the snake.)For a time, I steered clear of walking on grass and even dark-colored carpets.When I was about 12, my family relocated to New Zealand, which has no native land snakes. I mostly forgot about them. Recently, I was able to watch videos of snake catchers without flinching, and I wondered whether I had shaken my fear. But in February, while on vacation in Thailand, I came across a dead snake smeared across the asphalt. It felt like my heart had leaped into my mouth.A venomous red-bellied black snake being released in bush land on the Sunshine Coast.David Maurice Smith for The New York TimesI realized that if I were to avoid professional embarrassment to report my article, I needed the help of an expert. A few days before flying to the Sunshine Coast, a subtropical area in the Australian state of Queensland home to many snake species, I spoke to Shawn Goldberg, a psychologist in Melbourne who has worked with people who have phobias.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 children of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who championed liberal causes and women’s rights, said the choice of recipients this year was an “affront” to the memory of their mother.When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of liberal causes whose advocacy of women’s rights catapulted her to pop culture fame, helped establish a leadership award in 2019, she said she intended to celebrate “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility.”But this year, four of the recipients are men, including Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the business magnate whose empire gave rise to conservative media; and Michael Milken, the face of corporate greed in the 1980s who served nearly two years in prison. It has prompted family members and close colleagues of Justice Ginsburg to demand that her name be removed from the honor, commonly called the R.B.G. Award.In a statement, her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.”“The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” Ms. Ginsburg said.Even as he declined to specify any of the recipients who he believed undermined the spirit of the award, Trevor W. Morrison, a former dean of New York University School of Law and one of the justice’s former law clerks, expressed concern that not all of them reflected the justice’s values.“Justice Ginsburg had an abiding commitment to careful, rigorous analysis and to fair-minded engagement with people of opposing views,” he said in a letter addressed to the organization that confers the awards, the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “It is difficult to see how the decision to bestow the R.B.G. Award on this year’s slate reflects any appreciation for — or even awareness of — these dimensions of the justice’s legacy.”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