Elections

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil recalled his ambassador to Israel on Monday, as tensions escalated between the countries over the Brazilian leader’s sharp remarks against Israel’s war on Hamas.Mr. Lula summoned the ambassador, Frederico Meyer, back to Brazil “for consultations,” according to a statement from the country’s foreign ministry.Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, reprimanded Mr. Meyer on Monday about comments in which Mr. Lula compared Israel’s actions in the war to the Holocaust. “What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments,” Mr. Lula told reporters during the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, on Sunday. But, he then added, “it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”Also on Monday, Mr. Katz said Mr. Lula was not welcome in the country until he takes back his remarks.Citing “the seriousness” of statements made by Israeli officials, Brazil’s foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, also summoned the Israeli ambassador for a meeting in Rio de Janeiro on Monday, according to the statement.Mr. Lula’s recall of his envoy does not represent a permanent rupture in diplomatic relations, as Brazil’s Embassy in Israel will remain open. But the discord does highlight a growing rift between Israel and countries that have been reluctant to align themselves in support of its military action in Gaza, most notably South Africa and Brazil. More

His winding social media post on Monday contained no reference to Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, who has been widely condemned after the death of one of his most vocal critics, Aleksei A. Navalny.Days after the death of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was first reported, Donald J. Trump broke his silence in a social media post on Monday that barely mentioned Mr. Navalny and that did not condemn President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Instead, he used Mr. Navalny’s death to suggest that his own legal battles amounted to political persecution.It was a note he hit first on Sunday, when he shared screenshots of an opinion essay that compared his relationship with President Biden to the one between Mr. Navalny and Mr. Putin.“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” the former president wrote on Truth Social on Monday, using an alternative spelling of Mr. Navalny’s given name. He pointed to what he called “CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”But the winding social media post contained no reference to Mr. Putin, who has drawn widespread condemnation from politicians in the United States and abroad amid speculation that he or the Russian government had a hand in Mr. Navalny’s death. Instead, Mr. Trump cited “Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions” in casting the U.S., in all capital letters, as a “nation in decline, a failing nation.”Mr. Trump, who has been indicted in four criminal cases and is facing 91 felony counts, was ordered on Friday to pay about $450 million, after a New York judge found in his civil fraud case that he had conspired to manipulate his net worth. He has repeatedly tried to blame Mr. Biden for his legal problems, though Mr. Biden has no purview over the cases.Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s rival in the Republican presidential primary and his former ambassador to the United Nations, attacked him over his response.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

¿Qué gana el expresidente Donald Trump cuando vende tenis a 399 dólares?¿Hay algo más trumpiano que las zapatillas Never Surrender de 399 dólares presentadas el fin de semana en la Sneaker Con de Filadelfia? De toda la mercadería promocionada por el expresidente y actual candidato a la presidencia Donald Trump y otras entidades relacionadas con él en los últimos meses —las barras de oro (de chocolate), los vinos, las NFT de superhéroes—, los tenis son como una hoja de ruta del sistema de valores y la estrategia electoral de Trump en forma sartorial.Son unos tenis altos dorados tan brillantes como las lámparas de araña de Mar-a-Lago, con una bandera estadounidense que envuelve el tobillo, algo así como el bosque de banderas que surge detrás de Trump cada vez que sube a un escenario. Tienen las suelas rojas a juego con sus características corbatas rojas (y con la bandera) y quizá como guiño socarrón a los tacones Christian Louboutin y a la semiología del calzado de lujo. Además, tienen una gran “T” en relieve en el costado y en la lengüeta.Aunque son “atrevidas, doradas y resistentes, como el presidente Trump”, según el sitio web de las zapatillas Trump, y permiten a sus posibles propietarios “formar parte de la historia”, no ofrecen ningún atributo técnico de rendimiento. Aunque tienen una forma similar a las Nike Air Force 1 (¿lo entendiste? ¡Air Force One!), son imitaciones descaradas del original.Resulta tentador desestimar la oferta por considerarla pura ostentación y publicidad con poca sustancia. Eso es lo que hizo Michael Tyler, vocero de la campaña de Biden, que dijo: “Que Donald Trump aparezca para pregonar unas Off-Whites piratas es lo más cerca que volverá a estar del Air Force One en lo que le queda de vida”.También es tentador pensar en ellas como la respuesta de Trump a la presencia en TikTok de la campaña de Biden: un esfuerzo por asociarse con lo cool a través de la cultura de las zapatillas deportivas, por no mencionar la energía y el atletismo del modelo “Just Do It”. Pese a que al propio Trump casi nunca se le ve llevando calzado deportivo, ni haciendo mucho ejercicio.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 European Commission said it would investigate whether the site violated online laws aimed at protecting children from harmful content.European Union regulators on Monday opened an investigation into TikTok over potential breaches of online content rules aimed at protecting children, saying the popular social media platform’s “addictive design” risked exposing young people to harmful content.The move widens a preliminary investigation conducted in recent months into whether TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, violated a new European law, the Digital Services Act, which requires large social media companies to stop the spread of harmful material. Under the law, companies can be penalized up to 6 percent of their global revenues.TikTok has been under the scrutiny of E.U. regulators for months. The company was fined roughly $370 million in September for having weak safeguards to protect the personal information of children using the platform. Policymakers in the United States have also been wrestling with how to regulate the platform for harmful content and data privacy — concerns amplified by TikTok’s links to China.The European Commission said it was particularly focused on how the company was managing the risk of “negative effects stemming” from the site’s design, including algorithmic systems that it said “may stimulate behavioral addictions” or “create so-called ‘rabbit hole effects,’” where a user is pulled further and further into the site’s content.Those risks could potentially compromise a person’s “physical and mental well-being,” the commission said.“The safety and well-being of online users in Europe is crucial,” Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s executive vice president overseeing digital policy, said in a statement. “TikTok needs to take a close look at the services they offer and carefully consider the risks that they pose to their users — young as well as old.”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

Oni Press will revive the beloved horror and sci-fi name with new stories starting this summer.EC Comics, which specialized in tales of horror, crime and suspense, and was shut down in the “moral panic” of the 1950s, is making a comeback.Oni Press will publish two new anthology series under the EC Comics banner. The first, Epitaphs From the Abyss, coming in July, will be horror focused; Cruel Universe, the second, arrives in August and will tell science fiction stories. Hunter Gorinson, the president and publisher of Oni Press, said the new stories will interpret the world of today, much as EC Comics explored the American psyche of the 1950s. The cover designs will feel familiar to EC Comics fans: Running down the top left is a label declaring the type of story — “Terror” or “Horror” or “Science-Fiction” — and the logo evokes the bold colors and fonts of past series like “Tales From the Crypt” and “The Vault of Horror.”The series are a partnership between Oni and the family of William M. Gaines, the original publisher of EC Comics, who died in 1992. Gary Groth, the editor of The Comics Journal, told The New York Times in 2013 that EC Comics was “arguably the best commercial comics company in the history of the medium.”Cathy Gaines Mifsud, a daughter of William M. Gaines, who is also president of the family company, William M. Gaines Agent, said, “We’re very excited it is coming back for a whole new generation.” The new stories will be written by comics all-stars like Jason Aaron, Rodney Barnes, Cecil Castellucci and Matt Kindt. EC’s original subversive content brought it to the attention of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954 and its hearings on whether comics were linked to moral decay. Gaines testified: “The truth is that delinquency is the product of the real environment in which the child lives and not of the fiction he reads.” The hearings resulted in comic book publishers founding the Comics Code Authority, to self-impose standards on what comics could depict. Gaines soon closed down EC and shifted his focus to his humor publication, Mad.EC has remained highly revered, and collected editions of its stories have been sold by various publishers over the years. The original art for one EC story, “Master Race,” about a postwar encounter between a Nazi war criminal and a Holocaust survivor, sold for $600,000 at Heritage Auctions in 2018.Along with the top-notch writers, the artists of the new stories include Peter Krause, Malachi Ward and Dustin Weaver. Covers will be drawn by Lee Bermejo, Greg Smallwood, J.H. Williams III, among others. More

The Times was honored for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. And ProPublica won a prize for revealing the lavish gifts and luxury trips given to Justice Clarence Thomas.The New York Times on Monday won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The prizes were among the five that honored journalism on that conflict and the war in Ukraine.Long Island University, the home of the journalism awards, announced the winners in 13 categories, which were selected from 497 submissions of work done in 2023.“As horrific as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine were, they provided us with no shortage of magnificent reporting, done at great peril, from which to choose,” John Darnton, the longtime Polk Awards curator, said in a statement.This year is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Polk Awards, which will be celebrated with an event in April inviting all past recipients. Sixteen will be honored as George Polk career laureates, including Dean Baquet, a former New York Times executive editor; Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at The Times Magazine; the CNN chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour; and the former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron. The awards are named for the CBS journalist George Polk, who was killed in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.The staff of The New York Times was awarded the foreign reporting prize for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, which included extensive reporting on Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s aggressive military response in Gaza. Times reporters showed that Israel had known of Hamas’s plan of attack for more than a year but ignored warnings and was ill-prepared.Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times won the award for photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.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

Trump. Indian food. Matthew Perry. And books, books, books. Excerpts from letters obtained by The Times show Mr. Navalny’s active mind, even amid brutal prison conditions.Confined to cold, concrete cells and often alone with his books, Aleksei A. Navalny sought solace in letters. To one acquaintance, he wrote in July that no one could understand Russian prison life “without having been here,” adding in his deadpan humor: “But there’s no need to be here.”“If they’re told to feed you caviar tomorrow, they’ll feed you caviar,” Mr. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, wrote to the same acquaintance, Ilia Krasilshchik, in August. “If they’re told to strangle you in your cell, they’ll strangle you.”Many details about his last months — as well as the circumstances of his death, which the Russian authorities announced on Friday — remain unknown; even the whereabouts of his body are unclear. Mr. Navalny’s aides have said little as they process the loss. But his final months of life are detailed in previous statements from him and his aides, his appearances in court, interviews with people close to him and excerpts from private letters that several friends, including Mr. Krasilshchik, shared with The New York Times.A portion of an August letter Mr. Navalny sent to his acquaintance Ilia Krasilshchik from prison. Court hearings “distract you and help the time pass faster,” he wrote.via Ilia KrasilshchikThe letters reveal the depth of the ambition, resolve and curiosity of a leader who galvanized the opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin and who, supporters hope, will live on as a unifying symbol of their resistance. They also show how Mr. Navalny — with a healthy ego and incessant confidence that what he was doing was right — struggled to stay connected to the outside world.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

What is Trump really selling when he is selling footwear?Of all the merch hawked by the former president and current presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and related entities over the past few months — the gold (chocolate) bars, the wines, the superhero NFTs — is any of it more Trumpian than the $399 Never Surrender sneakers unveiled over the weekend at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia? They are like a road map to Mr. Trump’s value system and electoral strategy in sartorial form.Gilded hightops as shiny as the chandeliers at Mar-a-Lago, they have an American flag wrapping the ankle like the forest of flags that spring up behind Mr. Trump whenever he takes a stage. They have red soles made to match his trademark red ties (and the flag) and perhaps as a sly nod to Christian Louboutins and the semiology of luxury footwear. Also, there’s a large embossed “T” on the side and on the tongue.While they are “bold, gold and tough, just like President Trump,” according to the Trump sneakers website, allowing potential owners to “be a part of history,” they boast zero technical performance attributes. While they have a shape similar to Nike Air Force 1s (get it? Air Force One!), they are unabashed imitations of the original.It’s tempting to dismiss the offering as all flash and marketing with little substance. That’s what Michael Tyler, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, did, saying, “Donald Trump showing up to hawk bootleg Off-Whites is the closest he’ll get to any Air Force Ones ever again for the rest of his life.”Or to think of them as Mr. Trump’s answer to the Biden campaign’s TikTok presence: an effort to associate himself with the cool embedded in the whole idea of sneaker culture, not to mention the energy and athleticism implied by the “Just Do It” model. Despite the fact that Mr. Trump himself is almost never seen wearing a sneaker, or doing much exercise.Yet the merching of the moment is more dangerous than it may initially appear.There has been a lot of eye-rolling since the sneakers’ debut, and jokes about the fact that, given the millions of dollars in penalties levied on Mr. Trump in his various civil cases, he has to make more money somewhere. And there was a lot of focus on the boos that met his appearance at Sneaker Con. (To be fair, the sneakerhead community is not the market for the kicks since there’s nothing original about them; it’s the MAGA market.)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