Elections

Corrections that appeared in print on Sunday, Feb. 18, 2024.ARTS & LEISUREAn article last Sunday about photographs taken by Paul McCartney misidentified the member of the British royal family who met with the Beatles in 1963. The Beatles met the Queen Mother (and Princess Margaret) that year; they met Queen Elizabeth II in 1965.METROPOLITANAn article on Feb. 11 about comedians who are addressing the topic of global warming with humor misstated the role that Yellow Dot Studios plays in the development of the comedic material on its website. Although it produces a majority of the content, some of the videos are produced by outside artists and groups.An article on Feb. 11 about migrants from Latin America who are crossing into the United States along the northern border misstated the political party of David Favro, the Clinton County sheriff. He is a Democrat, not a Republican.VOWSA picture caption with an article last Sunday about the wedding of Yuna Yang and Christopher Seck described incorrectly a tea ceremony that figured in the wedding celebration. The ceremony was Korean, not Chinese.REAL ESTATEAn article last Sunday about backyard ice rinks misstated the size of a tarp used in the construction of one. It was a 25­-by-­45-­foot tarp, not a 25­-by­-45­-inch tarp.T: WOMEN’S FASHIONThe picture captions with an article on Page 102 about pointy shoes are ordered incorrectly. The correct order is, clockwise from top left: Celine by Hedi Slimane, $1,050. Brunello Cucinelli, $995. Toteme, $630. Gianvito Rossi, price on request. Marni, $935. Manolo Blahnik, $775. Valentino Garavani, $990.MAGAZINEAn article on Feb. 11 about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Democratic Party referred imprecisely to Rashida Tlaib’s views of the Oct. 7 attacks. She did not refer to the attacks as a “justified” resistance; the House censure of Tlaib described her statements that way. Tlaib has said she deplores the loss of any civilian lives.Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email [email protected]. To share feedback, please visit nytimes.com/readerfeedback.Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to [email protected] newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email [email protected]. More

The death of Aleksei A. Navalny in a Russian prison has been a blow to an opposition movement in which he was the figurehead. But it has also raised hopes of a united front against President Vladimir V. Putin.The death of Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader, has stunned Russian dissidents. But it is also spurring some hope that in its desperate moment, the opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin will be able to unite like never before.Doing so will be a challenge, given the often aloof approach of Mr. Navalny’s movement and the disparate assembly of other leading opposition Russian figures: nearly all of them in exile, and none with his broad national appeal.Among them is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch who fell out with Mr. Putin, spent 10 years in prison and in London became one of his most prominent opponents in exile. Then there is Maxim Katz, a YouTube influencer and a former poker champion, who is based in Israel. There is also Ilya Yashin, a longtime liberal politician who is serving an eight-year sentence for publicizing Russian atrocities in Ukraine.Beyond these figures who are trying to speak for the whole of Russia is a plethora of small antiwar groups focused on particular Russian regions, social issues or ethnic minorities. Some of their demands — like a reckoning with Russia’s imperial history — have clashed with the more conservative position of Mr. Navalny, who had flirted with Russian nationalism in order to gain a broader following.Many operate their own YouTube channels, or use other social media like Telegram and podcasts, to beam their messages to millions of viewers in Russia despite the Kremlin’s tightening its control of information.But looming over all of them will be Mr. Navalny, even after his death in a Russian prison on Friday. As of Sunday, Mr. Navalny’s family has still not been able to locate his body, according to his team.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 article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — as well as the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans.A portrait of Mary Ann Schuyler, who was one of Toussaint’s hairdressing clients. She wrote that she enjoyed their conversations as a “daily recreation.”Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating to charities, helping to finance the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life during epidemics to tend to the ill.In 1997, more than a hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” the first step on the road to sainthood. Some disagreed with the move, however, because they felt Toussaint did not resist his enslavement either in Haiti or New York and was therefore a poor candidate for sainthood.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

Millions of people in California were under a flood watch as an atmospheric river was expected to engulf much of the state in heavy rains on Sunday, forecasters said.The West Coast braced for more flooding on Sunday as heavy rains from an atmospheric river were forecast to spread over California starting on Sunday, in the latest series of storms to pound the state this month.A milder storm moved over California’s northern and central coast on Saturday night, kicking off the period of rain for the nation’s most populous state. Forecasters said it was a precursor to a more powerful system on Sunday that was expected to bring the bulk of the precipitation.“Sunday night and Monday alone, we’re looking at areas three to six inches of rain down the coast south of the Bay Area to Santa Barbara,” said Brian Hurley, a senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service.More than 37 million people nationwide were under a flood watch on Sunday. Most were in California, where the watch was in effect through Wednesday, according to the Weather Service.Atmospheric river is the name given to the narrow bands of moisture blown over the West Coast by winds in the Pacific. They are the cause of California’s heaviest rains and floods.“The weather conditions will be drastically different from Sunday morning to Sunday night,” the Weather Service said on Sunday. “A strong storm will arrive today. Rain will begin around midday and will be heavy through the night. Moderate to major impacts from this storm will last into Monday with heavy rain, strong winds, high surf, thunderstorms and flooding potential.”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

Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.Don’t think for a moment that this is unusual today. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith. For those unfamiliar, swatting is a terrifying act of intimidation in which someone calls law enforcement and falsely claims a violent crime is in process at the target’s address. This sends heavily armed police to a person’s home with the expectation of a violent confrontation. A swatting incident claimed the life of a Kansas man in 2017.The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family. Threats against members of Congress are pervasive, and there has been a shocking surge since Trump took office. Last year, Capitol Police opened more than 8,000 threat assessments, an eightfold increase since 2016.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

Senator Roger Marshall’s voice was shaking with emotion as he made the case for speedy and focused research into long Covid. Marshall, the junior senator from Kansas, is a Republican and a medical doctor. But addressing the first-ever Senate hearing on long Covid last month, he wanted the audience to know that his interest wasn’t just professional and it definitely wasn’t just political. It was also personal.One of his loved ones, he explained, suffered from severe long Covid. “We’ve taken my loved one to dozens of doctors,” he said. “I’ve talked to 40, 50, 60, 80. I’ve read everything there is to read about long Covid, talked to other members of the Senate that have had long Covid. What are they doing? So I share your frustration.”It was personal for many in the audience, as well. Four years after the Covid pandemic began, leaving millions of people suffering from long-term health effects, the hearing had been announced with about a week’s notice — a scramble for people who were ill and, in many cases, in dire financial straits. But somehow the room was overflowing.Many in attendance told me they were worried that the political polarization around everything pandemic-related would thwart even belated progress on this important issue. I came away with a very different view.Bernie Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, kicked off the hearings by making an impassioned plea on behalf of the patients. He said the medical establishment had been too dismissive of their plight, and he conceded that Congress had not done nearly enough to help.But it was Marshall who spoke with precision about the scientific literature. He rattled off the leading theories about why some people with long Covid are debilitated and described specific symptoms in detail.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

For Clint Hickman, an official who helped lead Arizona’s largest country through some of the most difficult moments of the pandemic and the 2020 election, the current moment in American life feels like the right one to quit.Amid yet more tumult and tense division in American public life, the Maricopa county supervisor announced this week that he’s not running again, choosing instead to prioritize his family – and get rid of the endless harassment that’s been a feature of his job the last few years and put him more than once in the national spotlight.“After the election in 2020, it’s gotten worse and worse,” he said. “I started to feel like all I get to do is play defense in this job any more … I thought I was looking way too much in the rearview mirror.”Hickman, a Republican, voted to certify Maricopa’s elections in 2020 despite an aggressive campaign from former president Donald Trump and his allies to reject the results and throw the state toward the Republican candidate over Joe Biden, the Democrat who narrowly won there.The threats arrived at Hickman’s door at one point, with people protesting outside his home while his wife and three kids, now teenagers, were there. “This is poor behavior brought to my doorstep, and I would like to think it hasn’t impacted my kids,” he said.Hickman, just shy of 60 years old, said his upcoming milestone birthday made him reflect on what he wants out of life now, and that’s more time with his family. But the threats he faced at work and the punishing environment in his role as a supervisor played a role in his decision to exit.He faced credible death threats, one of which resulted in a two and a half year prison sentence for an Iowa man. The threats amped up both in response to elections and in response to the county’s decision to institute a mask mandate during the pandemic, a fault line for conservatives in the purpling county.“Those [threats] didn’t just arrive to myself. It arrived to county workers, county elections workers, people in the county clerk’s office. During the pandemic, people were making threats to anybody wearing Maricopa county badge when it came to the mask mandate.”He’s still receptive to the idea of running for office someday again, but for now, he wants to get his kids away from the vitriol he’s faced. Hickman’s family is one of the Phoenix area’s biggest business families, running a giant egg farming operation. For now, it’s back to the eggs for Hickman.Maricopa county became a national flashpoint in 2020, then again in 2022. Errors like printing problems or the use of certain pens became the subject of endless speculation and conspiracies that still linger today. And 2024 will undoubtedly bring more, as the county is a critical piece of a swing state, one that both Trump and Biden will want to win to complete their electoral map.Part of his effort to move forward is getting out of the race to remain in office. He doesn’t want his name on the ballot this year, that way “no one can say that I have my thumb on an election that I’m going to rig for either myself or my friends”.The seat could, theoretically, go to someone who wouldn’t uphold the county’s elections – that’s up to the district’s voters, he said. He doesn’t think they’d go for it, but the seat belongs to the citizens there, not him.He joins a too-long line of public servants who have left their roles in the face of ongoing harassment over elections. A study of 11 states in the US west, including Arizona, by Issue One showed that more than 160 chief local election officials had left their roles since the 2020 election, leaving half of the 76 million Americans living in those states with a new top election official.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHickman called it “shocking” to see elections officials run out of their jobs, often whipped up by misunderstandings and distortions. “It is saddening to see so much of a brain drain in this space leaving due to harassment techniques by people that want to do people harm,” he said.He’s one of few officials who have seen the person who threatened them prosecuted. Mark Rissi, of Iowa, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison over threats he made to Hickman and to the state’s attorney general. In the voicemail Rissi left for Hickman in September 2021, he said he was going to “lynch” the supervisor. “You’re gonna die, you piece of [expletive]. We’re going to hang you. We’re going to hang you.”At the sentencing hearing, Hickman testified – and Rissi didn’t even recognize him, Hickman said. Rissi was supposed to enter prison on 8 January, but has so far delayed his sentence because of health issues.“I’m looking forward to the day I can stop looking over my shoulder for this guy,” Hickman said.Hickman said he isn’t sure what to do to address this kind of threatening behavior and how to stop it. Catching the people making threats and holding them accountable is part of it, but there seems to be a lot more going on – maybe the pandemic, maybe the people running for office – driving more people to conflict and chaos, he said.“I can certainly play the blame game all day long,” he said. “But we need some solutions. And I don’t know what those solutions are at this short moment. How about this? Maybe everybody needs to start watching Mr Rogers again and start treating people nicer.” More

Amid the graphic images, fierce polemics and endless media criticism that have dominated my social media feeds since the war in Gaza began late last year, I noticed a seemingly bizarre subplot emerge: skin cancer in Israel.“You are not Indigenous if your body cannot tolerate the area’s climate,” one such post read, highlighting outdated news coverage claiming that Israelis had unusually high rates of skin cancer. (They do not.) Skin cancer, these posts claimed, was proof that Israeli Jews were not native to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea but are in fact white Europeans with no ancestral connection to the region, enactors of one of the worst crimes of the modern age: settler colonialism.On one level, the claims about skin cancer — like similar ones about Israeli cuisine and surnames — are silly social media talking points from keyboard warriors slinging hashtags, hyped up on theories of liberation based on memes of Frantz Fanon quotes taken out of context. In the context of the ongoing slaughter in Gaza — more than 28,000 people dead, mostly women and children — such posturing may seem trivial. But even, or maybe especially, at this moment, when things are so grim, the way we talk about liberation matters. And I find this kind of talk revealing of a larger trend on the left these days, emanating from important and complex theories in the academy but reflected in crude and reductive forms in the memes and slogans at pro-Palestine protests — an increasingly rigid set of ideas about the interloping colonizer and the Indigenous colonized. In this analysis, there are two kinds of people: those who are native to a land and those who settle it, displacing the original inhabitants. Those identities are fixed, essential, eternal.I have spent much of my life and career living and working among formerly colonized peoples attempting to forge a path for themselves in the aftermath of empire. The rapacious carving up of much of the globe and the genocide and enslavement of millions of people by a handful of European powers for their own enrichment was the great crime of early modernity. The icons who threw off the yoke of colonial oppression — including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Fanon — were my childhood heroes, and they remain my intellectual lodestars. But I sometimes struggle to recognize their spirit and ideas in the way we talk about decolonization today, with its emphasis on determining who is and who is not an Indigenous inhabitant of the lands known as Israel and Palestine.A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is at best a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.Implicit in the emphasis on indigeneity is a promised restoration, albeit one of a very different sort from the imperial fantasies of Vladimir Putin or the gender obsessions of Ron DeSantis. Decolonization “is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes,” as the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write in an influential academic paper published in 2012, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” More