Elections

A few days after the United Auto Workers endorsed President Biden for re-election, former President Donald J. Trump raged at the union’s leader, Shawn Fain, on Sunday night.Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that Mr. Fain “is selling the Automobile Industry right into the big, powerful, hands of China.”He claimed that Mr. Biden’s support for electric vehicles would destroy the American auto industry and send jobs overseas. “Shawn Fain doesn’t understand this or have a clue,” he wrote. “Get rid of this dope & vote for DJT. I will bring the Automobile Industry back to our Country.”The provocation for Mr. Trump’s comments appeared to be a CBS News interview on Sunday in which Mr. Fain said that Mr. Biden had “a history of serving others and serving the working class,” while Mr. Trump had “a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class.”Mr. Fain also emphasized Mr. Biden’s decision to meet with striking U.A.W. workers in September, which made him the first sitting president to join a picket line. Mr. Trump has sought to position himself as a champion of the workers’ interests, and he tried to court blue-collar workers with a speech the same week — but at a nonunion factory.Michael Tyler, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign, said in a statement, “Apparently losing the U.A.W. endorsement to Joe Biden has left Donald Trump’s wounded ego with quite the SCAB.” He argued that the corporate tax changes Mr. Trump signed as president had themselves encouraged companies to move jobs overseas. More

Valieva, once a 15-year-old gold medal favorite, was punished in a doping case that upended the figure skating competition at the Beijing Games.Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian figure skater whose positive doping test upended her sport at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was banned from competition for four years on Monday by the top court in sports.The punishment, announced by a three-member arbitration panel empowered by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, was related to a tainted sample Valieva, who was 15 at the time, gave at a competition. The positive result only emerged two months later — in the middle of the Olympics, and only a day after Valieva had led Russia to victory in the team competition.The ban will be retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021, the arbitrators ruled, meaning it will end in 2025, just in time for Valieva to compete at the next Winter Olympics, in 2026. Now 17, she was ordered to forfeit “any titles, awards, medals, profits, prizes and appearance money” earned after her positive doping sample was collected.Valieva had claimed that she had mistakenly taken a heart medication, Trimetazidine, prescribed for her grandfather. Russia’s anti-doping body had cleared her of any wrongdoing, not because of her reasoning for ingesting the banned substance but because of her age, saying she could not be held responsible because she was a minor at the time, and therefore a “protected person.”The CAS panel, in Monday’s ruling, dismissed the premise that minors competing in adult competitions should be treated different from their rivals.“There is no basis under the rules to treat them any differently from an adult athlete,” the arbitrators wrote.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?  More

The retailer has been raising wages for store associates. It’s now turning its attention to improving salaries and benefits for their bosses.Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, is raising salaries and benefits for store managers as it looks for ways to retain them.Walmart said on Monday that managers of its U.S. stores would be eligible for grants of up to $20,000 in company stock every year. The stock will vest over a three-year period, with a percentage vested each quarter.The announcement came a few weeks after Walmart said it would increase the average salary for store managers to $128,000, up from $117,000. The big-box retailer also said bonuses for store managers could reach up to 200 percent of base salary, with a store’s profitability becoming a bigger factor in the calculation.Store managers are crucial in driving sales and profitability within their stores and keeping morale high in a dynamic business. The managers are also seen as an important pipeline for leadership at the company.A store manager at a Walmart Supercenter oversees hundreds of associates who work across a variety of departments, including food, apparel, pharmacies and auto centers. These stores often attract scores of shoppers and bring in millions of dollars in sales each year. At the start of the Covid pandemic, store managers were given even more responsibilities as the company adapted to changing consumer behavior, including managing e-commerce capabilities like in-store pickup for online orders and navigating goods that are out of stock as well as excess inventory.“It’s fair to say that we’re asking them to act like owners and to think like owners,” John Furner, the chief executive of Walmart U.S. who was previously a manager at a company store, said in a briefing with reporters. 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?  More

The Eugene Weekly was forced to lay off all 10 of its staff members last month after it discovered tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.A weekly newspaper in Oregon that laid off all of its workers in December after an employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars will resume its print edition on Feb. 8 after raising enough money through donations, its editor said on Sunday.The newspaper, The Eugene Weekly, abruptly stopped printing after it discovered financial problems, including money not being paid into employee retirement accounts and $70,000 in unpaid bills to the newspaper’s printer, leading it to lay off all 10 of its staff members just days before Christmas, its editor, Camilla Mortensen, said at the time.Over the past month, however, Ms. Mortensen has continued publishing articles online with the help of interns, freelancers and retired reporters and editors — many of whom were willing to work without pay to keep the paper afloat — she said on Sunday.As of this week, Ms. Mortensen and three other staff members will be brought back onto the payroll in preparation for the Feb. 8 edition, she said, noting that the return to print was made possible by readers and members of the public who raised at least $150,000 after the financial problems were reported.“With all this support from people, there’s just no way we can’t try — we have to try printing,” Ms. Mortensen said.The theft, leaders of the newspaper said in a Dec. 28 letter to readers, had been hidden for years and left its finances “in shambles.” The paper has hired a forensic accountant to investigate.Leaders of the paper said that while the situation was unprecedented, they believed in the newspaper’s mission, and were “determined to keep EW alive.”The Eugene Police Department could not be immediately reached on Sunday evening for comment about the embezzlement but said previously that it was investigating. The now-former employee accused of stealing, who was involved in the newspaper’s finances, has not been publicly identified.The free paper, founded in 1982, previously printed 30,000 copies each week. Copies could be found in bright red boxes in and around Eugene, Oregon’s third-largest city.Ms. Mortensen, who became editor in 2016 after nearly a decade at the paper, said Sunday that the closure had been painful.“Every time I walk by one of our little red boxes, there’s no paper in it, it stabs me in the heart,” she said, noting that the plan was to print 5,000 fewer copies so that the paper could remain sustainable.“Obviously, this outpouring has been amazing,” she said, “but we also want to go back to being this free weekly paper that pays for itself.” More

Klaus Teuber’s fortune-building game requires finely honed negotiation skills, a passing knowledge of probability and, in some cases, card counting.When your journalistic beat consists of providing helpful tips on how to win games, people naturally assume that you are an expert at playing them. That’s not always true, but I like to think that I make up for it with moxie and a reasonably consistent positive attitude.That is why I would like to get the following confession out of the way: I have played Catan, the civilization-building strategy game, in real life only once — and I honestly think it was because my editorial director felt sorry for me. Catan was first published in 1995, but I never got around to playing it, so she kindly brought the base set to the office and showed me and a few other Catan-deprived colleagues how to play.Klaus Teuber, a German game designer who died in April, created the game, which is easy enough to learn. A total of 10 points are needed to win, but since you begin with a point for each of your two initial settlements, you’re really playing for eight points.Catan.comI managed to emerge from that first game with a grand total of two points. But it was enough to trigger an intense interest in learning more, so I spoke to some experienced Catan players about their strategies.If you can’t figure out how to become a resource mogul, you’ll love my first tip, straight from the experts’ mouths.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?  More

Danvers and Navarro both must face some cold realities about who and what they represent in a community being poisoned by its biggest employer.Season 4, Episode 3: ‘Part 3’By Scott TobiasIn the first two episodes of “Night Country,” we knew Annie Kowtok as a dead person, a young Inupiaq activist who was stabbed 32 times and whose memory haunts the living every bit as much as the hallucinations that seem to slip in their minds during permanent darkness do.And so it’s especially powerful to meet Annie when she is associated with life, thanks to a stealthily placed flashback in the cold open in which she is helping an expectant mother through a water birth. Navarro has turned up to arrest her in connection with trespassing and destruction of private property at the mine, but the officer is literally disarmed by the scene she witnesses and is enlisted to help with: Annie is defiant about bringing an Inupiaq baby, the next generation, into the world.In perhaps the season’s strongest hour to date, the episode moves the procedural elements forward as expected, but the one common thread is the tug Annie and the town’s Indigenous population has on the consciences of our two lead characters. It starts with that flashback, in which Navarro has been put in the awkward spot of enforcing the law on the mine’s behalf, only to be put in a situation where she is disrupting an Inupiaq birth. For as much tension as we’ve witnessed in Danvers’s relationship with Ennis’s Native population, the show reminds us that Navarro, too, has complicated feelings about her place in the community. An Inupiaq herself, she has been hiding away from her own identity. Her sister has the kakiniit tattoo on her chin. Navarro, conspicuously, does not.To be a police officer in Ennis is often to represent the interests of the town’s biggest employer. Navarro and Danvers are not in the business of administering environmental justice or blowing the whistle on polluted groundwater. If there is tension around the mine, they’re the ones squelching protests or arresting activists like Annie for breaking the law. That, inevitably, puts them on one side of a stark racial line.The discomfort for Navarro is more acute, given her roots, but there is a lot of evidence in this episode that Danvers has been fighting her own conscience — and is perhaps starting to lose the battle. She rages at Leah to wipe the temporary tattoo marks off her face, perhaps as a protective instinct, but they’re on Annie’s face, too, and the weight of it seems to stir her sympathies.Meanwhile, the law is being administered much less delicately. It is a sharp narrative strategy to cut from the flashback with Navarro and Annie to a scene in which Hank is rounding up a civilian army to “search” for Raymond Clark, the missing scientist who had a secret affair with Annie. The term “search” is in scare quotes because Hank seems to have deliberately gathered a collection of armed-to-the-teeth yokels for a bounty hunt. He tells them that Clark is armed and dangerous and sends them on their way. When Navarro turns up to remind Hank that they want Clark alive, he replies, “Do we?”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?  More

After multiple delays and even a few faint glimmers of hope, a Hong Kong court has sounded the death knell for what was once China’s biggest real estate firm.Months after China Evergrande ran out of cash and defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted I.O.U.’s, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out.On Monday it became clear just how misguided that bet was. After two years in limbo, Evergrande was ordered by a court in Hong Kong to liquidate, a move that will set off a race by lawyers to find and grab anything belonging to Evergrande that can be sold.The order is also likely to send shock waves through financial markets that are already skittish about China’s economy.Evergrande is a real estate developer with more than $300 billion in debt, sitting in the middle of the world’s biggest housing crisis. There isn’t much left in its sprawling empire that is worth much. And even those assets may be off limits because property in China has become intertwined with politics.Evergrande, as well as other developers, overbuilt and over promised, taking money for apartments that had not been built and leaving hundreds of thousands of home buyers waiting on their apartments. Now that dozens of these companies have defaulted, the government is frantically trying to force them to finish the apartments, putting everyone in a difficult position because contractors and builders have not been paid for years.What happens next in the unwinding of Evergrande will test the belief long held by foreign investors that China will treat them fairly. The outcome could help spur or further tamp down the flow of money into Chinese markets when global confidence in China is already shaken.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?  More

Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are superb as a midcentury-modern couple free-falling into addiction in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s musical.Seldom have a pair of alcoholics looked as glamorous as they do in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s bruised romance of a Broadway musical, “Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James as midcentury-modern Manhattan lovers free-falling all the way to hell, drinks in hand.What’s astonishing about this show, though — aside from the central performances, which are superb, and Guettel’s anxious, spiky, sumptuous score, which grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go — is the way its devastating chic snuggles right up to catastrophic self-destruction.For all the glossy come-hither of Michael Greif’s tone-perfect production, which opened on Sunday night at Studio 54, not for an instant does it glamorize the boozing itself. And yet we can sense the allure: how alcohol might become the one true thing that matters, smoldering wreckage be damned.Adapted from JP Miller’s recovery-evangelizing 1958 teleplay and 1962 film of the same name, this “Days of Wine and Roses” is like a jazz opera melded seamlessly with a play. Deeper, wiser and warmer than it was in its premiere at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year, it is no longer so wary of melodrama that it’s afraid of feeling, too. Gone is the emotional aridity that kept the story at a strange remove.Granted, the opening scene is still perplexing, too sparely written and staged to situate the audience properly, or let us grasp the skin-crawling 1950s creepiness of what James’s Joe Clay is up to on a yacht in the East River. A public relations guy, Joe has arranged a corporate party onboard, and procured female guests for the pleasure of the male executives.So there is a certain rancidness to his mistaking O’Hara’s Kirsten Arnesen — the impeccable secretary to the boss at the firm where they both work — for one of the women in his Rolodex. Not exactly a meet-cute, even if she does set him straight, puncturing his condescension with a tight, nice-girl smile pasted to her face.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?  More