Elections

Over platters of fried rice, egg rolls and crab rangoon, Sheng Thao took the microphone and asked for support in June from several dozen people gathered at a Hmong restaurant in Wisconsin.Ms. Thao, 37, was running to become the mayor of Oakland, Calif., but she took a detour to the Upper Midwest because it has some of the nation’s largest communities of Hmong Americans.When Ms. Thao spoke, Zongcheng Moua, 60, found himself nodding along, never mind that he lived 2,000 miles away from California. Like Ms. Thao’s parents, Mr. Moua landed in a refugee camp in Thailand after fleeing the war in Laos nearly 50 years ago. His siblings, like Ms. Thao’s parents, struggled to adapt to life in the United States after arriving with no money, formal education or language skills. “Our Hmong community for the longest time did not have a voice,” Mr. Moua, one of the organizers of the event, said. “So regardless of where Sheng lives, her success is our success.”In November, Ms. Thao, 37, narrowly edged out Loren Taylor, her fellow Oakland council member, by a few hundred votes thanks to support from progressive groups and labor unions, but also from a tightly knit Hmong network that contributed about one-fifth of her campaign funds.When she is sworn into office in January, Ms. Thao will become Oakland’s first Hmong mayor and the most prominent Hmong American officeholder in the United States to date. She will lead a major city of 440,000 residents that is grappling with a rise in violent crime and homelessness but remains a vibrant counterweight to the city across the bay, San Francisco.In St. Paul, Minn., home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of Hmong Americans, Angelina Her shops with her sister, Maleena Her, 2, for the Hmong New Year celebration.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesA portrait of General Vang Pao, a major general in the Royal Lao Army and a leader in the Hmong American community in the United States, sits inside the Hmong Village in St. Paul, Minn.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesMs. Thao was part of a wave of Hmong Americans to triumph this year in state and local elections across the country. In Minnesota, home to the nation’s second-largest concentration of Hmong residents, a record nine Hmong candidates won their races for the State Legislature. In Wisconsin and California’s Central Valley, Hmong Americans also won local seats.“I didn’t do this on my own — I did it with the help and support of Oaklanders and the Hmong community far and wide throughout the whole nation,” Ms. Thao said in a recent interview.It is a remarkable feat for a small contingent that arrived in the United States about 40 years ago from Laos as refugees of the “secret war” backed by the C.I.A. against Communists there during the Vietnam War. While Hmong immigrants have come to the United States from various nations, most came as refugees from Laos during the post-Vietnam era.After settling in the United States, Hmong immigrants as a group struggled socioeconomically. In the face of language and cultural barriers, and lacking transferable skills, many Hmong lived in low-income neighborhoods and worked in low-skilled factory jobs, like food processing and textiles manufacturing.Hmong Americans have improved their standing over the years as some members of the first generation saved money and bought homes in the suburbs and the second generation earned degrees and entered higher-paying professions. But all told, they still fare worse than most ethnic groups on multiple measures of income: 60 percent of Hmong Americans remained low-income, and more than one in four lived in poverty, based on a 2020 report.Representative Samantha Vang, at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, is a second-generation Hmong American who was first elected to her seat in 2018.Tim Gruber for The New York Times“We have definitely advanced much faster than some other groups, but we’re still struggling,” said Samantha Vang, a Minnesota state representative and a second-generation Hmong American who was first elected to her seat in 2018.A refugee camp in Thailand, near the Laos border, on April 20, 1979. There were 11,000 refugees in this camp — 90 percent of them Hmong.Eddie Adams/Associated PressHmong students in a class at the Lao Family Community Center inside the St. Paul Y.M.C.A. in Minnesota in 1980.Michael Kieger/Minnesota Historical SocietyAn ethnic minority in Laos, Hmong people were secretly recruited by the United States to help disrupt supply lines and rescue downed American pilots in the fight against Communists in Southeast Asia, an effort first confirmed by a congressional report. After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, they were targeted by the Communist-run government in Laos, and many fled to refugee camps in Thailand before eventually resettling in the United States in the Twin Cities in Minnesota and Milwaukee, as well as Fresno and Sacramento in California.Unlike the Vietnamese refugees, who came from diverse backgrounds, the Hmong people who came to the United States were mostly farmers, said Carolyn Wong, a research associate at the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Because of the clandestine nature of the conflict in Laos, few Americans knew about how Hmong people had helped the United States as allies during the war.Undeterred, and with no homeland to go back to, Hmong refugees embraced the United States as their home. Experts suggest that because Hmong Americans generally came to the United States in the same post-Vietnam era, they have more cohesion than larger Asian American groups that attained earlier political prominence.“Perhaps that’s been our strength — we’re hungrier for that sense of visibility,” said Mee Moua, a former Minnesota state legislator and an early political pioneer in the community.In 1991, Choua Lee was elected to the school board in St. Paul, Minn., becoming the first Hmong to hold public office in the United States. In 2000, Hmong lobbied for a bill that helped make it easier for many former Hmong servicemen to gain citizenship. As of 2019, 81 percent of foreign-born Hmong people in the United States had become naturalized citizens, the highest rate among Asian American communities, according to the Pew Research Center.In Minnesota, especially, the growing number of naturalized citizens and the state’s already-strong tradition of political participation created fertile ground for the emergence in the early 2000s of a young generation of Hmong American leaders like Ms. Moua and Cy Thao, a former state representative.“In those early days, they didn’t necessarily understand what a political party was, or a party slate, so all of these things had to be learned through experience,” Ms. Wong, the research associate, said. “But very quickly those ways of running and building the support of the community became a time-tested path to success.”Minnesota is home to the country’s second-largest concentration of Hmong. A group of friends at the Hmong Village in St. Paul.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesRoughly 300,000 Hmong Americans now live in the United States, still largely concentrated in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin. California has about one-third of the nation’s Hmong residents, the most in the nation, and relatively few of them live in the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles. Many have remained in the Fresno and Sacramento regions where immigrants first settled, and some have moved to the far northern reaches of the state to grow marijuana.Fewer than 1,000 live in Alameda County, where Oakland is the county seat. While Ms. Thao did not have a sizable Hmong voter base to draw from, she benefited from the nationwide Hmong clan system, which has been key to the success of some Hmong American political campaigns.Organized around the 18 main surnames within the Hmong community, the system has been largely preserved by Hmong in the United States, and it remains an important source of identity, social support and, increasingly, political backing.In Ms. Thao’s race for the Oakland City Council in 2018, her father, in accordance with the clan system’s patriarchal traditions, approached local Thao clan leaders to seek help.The leaders were not familiar with Ms. Thao, said Louansee Moua, a longtime campaign consultant to Ms. Thao and other Hmong political candidates. Born and raised in Stockton, Calif., to parents who met in a refugee camp in Thailand, Ms. Thao had grown up at a relative distance from the Hmong community, in part because of her parents’ concerns that their sons might get trapped in the Hmong street gang culture that was active at the time, Ms. Thao said.The Thaos still held tight to Hmong traditions, including the Hmong language and the practice of shamanism, which made Ms. Thao feel self-conscious in the predominantly white, working-class neighborhood where she grew up.“I remember growing up feeling like, why can’t we just be like everyone else?” she recalled. “But it’s such a beautiful culture that, in hindsight, I wish I was raised around other Hmong people so I could be proud of who I was a lot sooner.”A self-described “rebellious” teenager, Ms. Thao left home at age 17 and soon found herself in an abusive relationship, she said. At 20, she spent several months alternating between living in a car and couch surfing with her son, then an infant.Later, while working a full-time administrative job, she enrolled in a community college and then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating, she started to work her way up in local politics in Oakland.When Ms. Thao was ready to run for City Council, the clan elders swung into action, helping to mobilize a statewide network of Thaos and other Hmong residents to raise money and volunteer for her campaign, Louansee Moua said. When Ms. Thao won the race, the Thao clan threw a baci ceremony attended by more than 500 people for her in Merced, Calif., during which many in the community tied a blessing string around her wrists for good luck.When it came to Ms. Thao’s mayoral race this year, the clan was once again eager to help out.“There’s this strong cohesive network within the Hmong community and a sense that because she’s a Thao and we’re Thaos, of course we have to help her,” Louansee Moua explained.To win in Oakland, Ms. Thao relied on a broad coalition of voters who supported her progressive policies, as well as endorsements and funding from major labor unions that are influential in the heavily Democratic city. But Ms. Thao said her narrow victory simply would not have been possible without the help of her nationwide family of Hmong elders, aunties, uncles, brothers and sisters.“This wave of Hmong electeds across the nation — they go out and they ask for support in the Hmong community,” Ms. Thao said. “Then the Hmong community shows up and they show up big time.” More

Ronna McDaniel’s quest for a fourth term atop the Republican National Committee has triggered an ugly intraparty fight between the right and the farther right. Figuring out how to win back swing voters is not a top priority.Since former President Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory in 2016, the Republican Party has suffered at the ballot box every two years, from the loss of the House in 2018 to the loss of the White House and Senate in 2020 to this year’s history-defying midterm disappointments.Many in the party have now found a scapegoat for the G.O.P.’s struggles who is not named Trump: the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel.But as Ms. McDaniel struggles for a fourth term at the party’s helm, her re-election fight before the clubby 168 members of the Republican National Committee next month may be diverting G.O.P. leaders from any serious consideration of the thornier problems facing the party heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.Ms. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump in late 2016 to run the party and whom he enlisted in a scheme to draft fake electors to perpetuate his presidency, could be considered a Trump proxy by Republicans eager to begin to eradicate what many consider to be the party’s pre-eminent problem: the former president’s influence over the G.O.P.Those Republicans, whose voices have grown louder in the wake of the party’s weak November showing, see any hopes of wooing swing voters and moderates back to the G.O.P. as imperiled by Mr. Trump’s endless harping on his own grievances, the taint surrounding his efforts to remain in power after his 2020 defeat, and the continuing dramas around purloined classified documents, his company’s tax fraud conviction and his insistence on trying to make a political comeback.But Ms. McDaniels is not facing moderation-minded challengers. Her rivals are from the Trumpist right. They include the pillow salesman Mike Lindell, who continues to spin out fanciful election conspiracies, and — more worrying for Ms. McDaniel — a Trump loyalist from California, Harmeet Dhillon, who is backed by some of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a youthful group of pro-Trump rightists.Ms. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump in late 2016 to chair the party, is running for a fourth term.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMs. McDaniel has accused Ms. Dhillon, who was co-chair of the election denying group Lawyers for Trump in 2020, of conducting “a scorched-earth campaign” against her by rallying outside activists “to put maximum pressure on the R.N.C. members” who will choose the party leader for the next two years in late January in Dana Point, Calif.“It’s been a very vitriolic campaign,” Ms. McDaniel said in an interview, adding: “I’m all for scorched earth against Democrats. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do against other Republicans.”The candidacy of Mr. Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who exemplifies the conspiracy-driven fringe, has put still more right-wing pressure on Ms. McDaniel, who refuses to say Joseph R. Biden Jr. was fairly elected in 2020. (Mr. Lindell’s latest conspiracy theory is that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s biggest rival so far for the 2024 presidential nomination, unfairly won re-election in November.)The circus brewing ahead of the R.N.C.’s Jan. 25 gathering does not bode well for members who believe the party’s troubles stem from Mr. Trump.“The former president has done so much damage to this country and to this party,” said Bill Palatucci, a committee member from New Jersey, who described the R.N.C. chair election as shaping up to be “a Hobson’s choice.”“We have to acknowledge that 2022 was a disaster, and we need to do things differently,” he said, adding, “I would prefer and still hope there would be a different option.”The R.N.C. has undertaken what it says is a serious analysis of the 2022 results, led by Henry Barbour of Mississippi, the nephew of the state’s former governor, Haley Barbour, and a co-author of the so-called autopsy that the party ordered up after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. That report counseled a more inclusive attitude toward voters of color and moderate swing voters, and a more open stand on overhauling immigration laws — the opposite tack taken by the party during the Trump era.The 2022 review committee includes Jane Brady, a former attorney general of Delaware, and Kim Borchers, a committee member from Kansas, but it is also being co-chaired by Ms. Dhillon, who, at least for now, has spent the past weeks rallying the hard right, not courting the center.Ms. Dhillon, in an interview, suggested replacing Ms. McDaniel was a prerequisite for change.“There may be many reasons for the various losses over the last several years, but what they all have in common is that they occurred under the current leadership, which has promised to change exactly nothing in the next two years,” she said. “The most unifying thing that Ronna could do would be to move on to new challenges, and allow us to unite around a vision that includes much-needed reforms, improvements, and investments in a winning future.”Ms. Dhillon has rallied the hard right rather than court the center.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesAnd the forces gathering against Ms. McDaniel are multiplying. The Republican Party of Florida scheduled a no-confidence vote on Ms. McDaniel in the second half of January. The chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party withdrew his support of Ms. McDaniel, citing an “ever growing divide” among both R.N.C. members and “now, even more so, Republicans across the nation.” The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party unanimously passed a nonbinding vote of no-confidence in Ms. McDaniel, and the Arizona G.O.P. publicly called on her to resign. Still, the Republican National Committee chair’s race is the ultimate inside game; only members get a vote. And Michael Kuckelman, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and an R.N.C. member, said he still thinks Ms. McDaniel will easily win another term.Ms. Dhillon’s pressure campaign is likely bolstering Ms. McDaniel’s support among committee members she has befriended over the past six years, he said, and potentially damaging Ms. Dhillon’s chances of leading the party in the future. Around two-thirds of the committee’s members have already said they will back Ms. McDaniel’s re-election.Ms. McDaniel with Mehmet Oz, who lost the Senate race in Pennsylvania to Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat.Laurence Kesterson/Associated PressMr. Kuckelman also said Ms. McDaniel was being unfairly blamed for losses in key Senate and House contests. “Everybody needs to bring the temperature down a little bit,” he said. “Ronna McDaniel does not pick candidates. Republicans do that in the primaries. Her job is to get the vote out, and she does get the vote out.”Moreover, Ms. Dillon’s tactics have antagonized some committee members.At Turning Point USA’s conference last week in Phoenix — where recriminations and sniping at fellow Republicans seemed to be a theme — Ms. Dhillon appeared on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” show and took her own shots at the committee she seeks to lead.“Consultants are running the building at the R.N.C.,” she told Mr. Bannon before a cheering crowd. “Those consultants get paid whether we win or lose.”Her accusations are rankling her colleagues. On an internal committee listserv, Jeff Kent, a committee member from Washington, wrote that Ms. Dhillon “does not have the right to go on national television and defame the character of the R.N.C. members who have chosen not to support her.”Audience members at a conference in Phoenix hosted by Turning Point USA. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThe Turning Point conference concluded with a straw poll in which only 2 percent of the 1,150 conference attendees chose Ms. McDaniel as their preferred party chairwoman going forward. Mr. Kirk then emailed all 168 voting members of the committee to tell them the group would challenge any member who did not heed the call of the party’s activists.Given the circumstances, Mr. Palatucci said Ms. McDaniel remains favored for re-election, but anything could happen over the next month.“A lot of her support is soft, and some could be convinced to vote for somebody else,” he said. “R.N.C. members are very experienced politicians. They’re experts at looking you in the eye and saying, ‘I love you,’ and in a secret ballot slitting your throat.”All of this fighting is over a position whose salary topped $358,000 in 2022 but whose responsibilities are tangential to midterm elections at best.In the interview, Ms. McDaniel boasted of investments the party has made — in community centers to engage voters of color, especially Latinos; in voter registration drives; and in get-out-the-vote efforts. She cited a New York Times analysis that showed that Republican voter turnout in November was robust. The problem: Many of those Republicans appeared to vote for Democrats.“We don’t pick the candidate,” she said. “We do not do the messaging for the candidates, right? They pick consultants, and their own pollsters. So what does the R.N.C. do? We build the infrastructure. We do the voter registration.”The committee’s role becomes more pivotal during the presidential campaign, raising money for the party’s nominee and staging the convention, which is set for mid-July 2024 in Milwaukee. It will also try to unify the party during what may be an exceptionally contentious primary season.Party chairs usually take a back seat to the president, who commonly calls the shots from the White House. And Ms. McDaniel said she had really only begun to put her imprimatur on the R.N.C. since Mr. Trump left the White House. “These last few years, in my mind, have been the first few years I’ve been able to really innovate,” she said.She cited efforts like those on Republican community centers, voter registration and legal actions around voting as important to continue. “We have to keep that going heading into a presidential year,” she said. “After that, I will happily step aside.”But Ms. McDaniel’s keep-it-going attitude may be her biggest liability. Some committee members who do not like Ms. Dhillon’s tactics or solutions nevertheless worry about the current chairwoman’s insistence that all is well.“We need a leadership change; the bottom line is the status quo is unacceptable,” Mr. Palatucci said. “This election is a month and a half away. A lot can happen. I’m expecting some movement. And certainly the storm that Harmeet is instigating is causing a very good debate within the committee, and that’s worth having.” More

BANGUI, República Centroafricana — En marzo, cuando la invasión rusa de Ucrania iniciaba su tercera semana, un diplomático ruso que se encontraba a unos 4830 kilómetros de distancia, en la República Centroafricana, hizo una visita inusual a la presidenta del máximo tribunal de ese país. Su mensaje fue contundente: el presidente pro-Kremlin del país debe permanecer en el cargo de manera indefinida.Para eso, el diplomático, Yevgeny Migunov, segundo secretario de la embajada rusa, argumentó que el tribunal debía abolir la restricción constitucional que limita a dos los mandatos presidenciales. Insistió en que el presidente del país, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, quien está en su segundo mandato y se ha rodeado de mercenarios rusos, debía permanecer en el cargo por el bien del país.“Me quedé absolutamente atónita”, recordó Danièle Darlan, de 70 años, quien en ese entonces era la presidenta del tribunal. “Les advertí que nuestra inestabilidad provenía de presidentes que querían hacer eternos sus mandatos”.El ruso no se inmutó. Siete meses más tarde, en octubre, Darlan fue destituida por decreto presidencial con el fin de abrir el camino a un referéndum para rescribir la Constitución, aprobada en 2016, y abolir la limitación de mandatos. Eso consolidaría lo que un embajador occidental denominó el estatus de la República Centroafricana como “Estado vasallo” del Kremlin.Con su invasión de Ucrania, el presidente de Rusia, Vladimir Putin, desató un nuevo desorden en el mundo. Ucrania presenta su estrategia contra el vasallaje ruso como una lucha por la libertad universal, y esa causa ha resonado en Estados Unidos y Europa. Sin embargo, en la República Centroafricana, Rusia ya se ha salido con la suya, con escasa reacción occidental, y en la capital, Bangui, ya se exhibe un tipo diferente de victoria rusa.Mercenarios rusos del mismo tenebroso Grupo Wagner, que ahora lucha en Ucrania, dominan la República Centroafricana, un país rico en oro y diamantes. Su impunidad parece total mientras se trasladan en vehículos sin identificación, con pasamontañas que les cubren la mitad del rostro y portando de manera abierta rifles automáticos. Los grandes intereses mineros y madereros que ahora controla Wagner son razón suficiente para explicar por qué Rusia no quiere amenazar a un gobierno complaciente.Desde Bangui, donde las fuerzas de Wagner roban y amenazan, hasta Bria, en el centro del país, y Mbaiki, en el sur, vi mercenarios de Moscú por todas partes durante una estancia de dos semanas y media, a pesar de las presiones para vayan a combatir en Ucrania.“Amenazan la estabilidad, socavan la buena gobernanza, despojan a los países de sus riquezas minerales, violan los derechos humanos”, declaró el secretario de Estado estadounidense, Antony Blinken, sobre los operativos de Wagner durante una cumbre de líderes de Estados Unidos y África celebrada en Washington a mediados de diciembre.Sin embargo, aunque se les teme, a menudo los rusos son recibidos como una presencia más eficaz en el mantenimiento de una paz frágil, a diferencia de los más de 14.500 cascos azules de las fuerzas de paz de las Naciones Unidas que se encuentran en este país devastado por la guerra desde 2014. Como en otros lugares del mundo en desarrollo, Occidente parece haber perdido el corazón y la mente de los ciudadanos. El enfoque del presidente de Estados Unidos, Joe Biden, para esta época —la lucha entre la democracia y la autocracia en ascenso— resulta demasiado binario para una época de desafíos complejos. A pesar de la guerra en Ucrania, incluso debido a ella, los centroafricanos se muestran intensamente escépticos ante las lecciones sobre los “valores” occidentales.La invasión de Ucrania de Putin y la espiral inflacionista han hecho más desesperada la complicada situación de esta nación sin salida al mar. Los precios de productos básicos como el aceite de cocina han subido un 50 por ciento o más. La gasolina ahora se vende en bidones o botellas de contrabando, pues las gasolineras carecen de ellos. El hambre está más extendida, en parte porque las agencias de la ONU a veces carecen de combustible para repartir alimentos.Sin embargo, muchos centroafricanos no culpan a Rusia.La invasión de Ucrania por el presidente Vladimir Putin ha hecho más desesperada una situación que ya lo era, pero muchos centroafricanos no culpan a Rusia.Mercenarios rusos comprando en octubre en el Bangui Mall, un lujoso supermercado utilizado sobre todo por el personal de embajadas y organizaciones no gubernamentales con sede en el país.Una iglesia ortodoxa rusa en BanguiCansados de la hipocresía y las promesas vacías de Occidente, enojados por la indiferencia que la guerra en África suscita en las capitales occidentales en comparación con la guerra en Ucrania, muchas de las personas que conocí se inclinaban por apoyar a Putin frente a sus antiguos colonizadores de París. Si la brutalidad rusa en Bucha o Mariúpol, Ucrania, horroriza a Occidente, la brutalidad rusa en la República Centroafricana se percibe de manera amplia como una ayuda para apaciguar un conflicto que ya dura una década.África representará una cuarta parte de la humanidad en 2050. China extiende su influencia mediante enormes inversiones, construcciones y préstamos. Biden convocó la Cumbre de Líderes África-Estados Unidos “para construir sobre nuestros valores compartidos” y anunció 15.000 millones de dólares en nuevos acuerdos comerciales, mientras Occidente se esfuerza por ponerse al día y superar un legado de colonialismo.La Rusia de Putin, por el contrario, nunca construye un puente, sino que es la maestra de los despiadados servicios de protección, el saqueo y la propaganda. Gana amigos a través del poder duro, ahora extendido a más de una decena de países africanos, incluidos Mali y Sudán. Como en Siria, su disposición a utilizar la fuerza garantiza el resultado que busca.En marzo, solo 28 de los 54 países africanos votaron en las Naciones Unidas para condenar la invasión rusa de Ucrania, la misma escasa mayoría que posteriormente votó para condenar la anexión rusa de cuatro regiones ucranianas, lo que sugiere una creciente reticencia a aceptar un enfoque estadounidense de lo que está bien y lo que está mal.“Cuando tu casa está ardiendo, no te importa el color del agua que usas para apagar el fuego”, dijo Honoré Bendoit, subprefecto de Bria, capital regional, a casi 450 kilómetros al noreste de Bangui. “Tenemos calma gracias a los rusos. Son violentos y eficientes”. More

A little book bases its forecasts on a geomancer in Hong Kong, and says next year will be “nowhere near as bad” as 2022.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. It’s time to venture into predictions for 2023. We’ll also look at how progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans are clashing on what may be the most ideologically diverse City Council ever.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThis time last year, I asked Joanna Lee about predictions for 2022. She said, “My heart sank.”She had her husband, Ken Smith, have compiled and annotated the “Pocket Chinese Almanac” annually since 2010. So — after a year with a war in Ukraine, stubborn inflation in this country and a chronic housing shortage in New York — what do they see ahead?“It’s nowhere near as bad,” Smith said.Financial businesses and the travel industry will have “particularly rocky periods coming up,” Lee said — and it is not clear what will do well in 2023.They base the forecasts in their little book on the calculations of a geomancer, a Hong Kong architect named Warwick Wong. He said 2023 would be dominated by “wood and fire,” a shift away from “metal,” which had been dominant in recent years.Smith said “fire” includes energy — oil, natural gas and electricity — as well as what he called “high-energy fields” like public relations, marketing and the law.“At every turn, you have people who are trying to grab and control the narrative in some way that will offer some kind of clarity” as the pandemic fades, Smith said. He said the arts provided an example: “The initial story was going to be people are going to flock back to entertainment and into theaters, that two years of isolation would be over,” he said. Lee finished the thought: “Now that is not the case, or it is in some areas and not others. People are going out, but they’re more judicious.”Lee said it was less clear how to translate “wood” to modern life. It could be taken to refer to construction, but when I asked if there would be a construction boom, she said not necessarily. “When one place builds a lot, another place sees a lot of destruction,” she said. “We just don’t know where there will be the boom.”“The Pocket Chinese Diary” is an ultra-Reader’s Digest version of predictions in larger Chinese almanacs. Each page in their 128-page book measures a mere 4⅛ inches by 2½ inches. It is faithful to the original Chinese and, in turn, to the agrarian society that China once was. So, for each day of the year, there is an entry with two headings: “good” and “bad.”Some days are good for rituals, weddings, breaking ground or other pursuits like “building stoves,” “raising pillars and beams,” “placing doors,” “digging ditches” or “the maiden voyage of a boat.” Some days are bad for those things. Next Tuesday — Jan. 3, the first workday of 2023 — will be good for such things as “cleaning house” and “pest control.”It is not the day to make wine or distill alcohol. It’s also a bad day for “breaking ground.”All of those terms are metaphors. Lee said that “cleaning house” was about “paring down to the essentials, or at least what is useful.” As for “pest control,” the almanac notes that “pests today are hardly limited to insects and rodents.”Lee also said Jan. 3 was not the day to look to. It’s still in the Year of the Tiger. The Lunar New Year, ushering in the Year of the Rabbit, does not begin until Jan. 23, a day that has an unusually long list of “good” pursuits, including some that do not sound metaphorical: meeting friends, moving, starting new jobs, starting a business and “renovating warehouses.”WeatherThe sun will be shining and temps will be in the low 40s. At night, it will be mostly clear with low temps around the high 30s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Sunday (New Year’s Day).The latest New York newsLaylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesTeen shootings: Since Jan. 1, 149 people under 18 have been shot, according to Police Department data. Roughly one in every 10 New Yorkers struck by a bullet was a child.Blizzard deaths: The death toll from the storm in western New York continued to climb, with the mayor’s office in Buffalo reporting eight more fatalities.Santos comes clean: For a week, Representative-elect George Santos avoided answering questions from the media. Now, Santos is taking a new approach: creating the appearance of coming clean.On an ideologically diverse City Council, the G.O.P. gainsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesAri Kagan used to be 1 of 46 on the New York City Council. Now, after doing the politically unthinkable, he is one of only six.Kagan was a Democrat, and Democrats have an overwhelming majority on the 51-person Council. But he switched parties, joining the Council’s five other Republicans.My colleague Jeffery C. Mays writes that the switch might help when Kagan runs for re-election next year, even if it means a loss of power and influence on the Council between now and Election Day. Kagan’s district in South Brooklyn is becoming more conservative. But Kagan said that was not the main reason he crossed the aisle. He said he believed that the Democratic Party, especially in New York, had drifted too far to the left.“It’s not me leaving the Democratic Party,” Kagan said. “The Democratic Party started to leave me.”There are other signs that Republicans are making inroads in New York City, where Democrats outnumber them seven to one. Every borough voted more Republican in last month’s elections than in the 2020 presidential year. Three Democrats in the State Assembly lost to Republicans in South Brooklyn.Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor, won Staten Island by 19 points more than Republicans won the borough by in the 2020 presidential election. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, defeated Zeldin by the smallest margin in a governor’s race in more than 30 years, in part because of how well Zeldin did in parts of New York City.Some on the far left have accused Mayor Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat who is a former registered Republican, of serving as an unspoken ally to Republicans. Adams regularly criticizes left-leaning Democrats, including members of the Council, and has a working relationship with Joseph Borelli, a Republican who is the Council’s minority leader.On the Council, policy disagreements have underscored the gulf between liberals and the handful of Republicans.Tiffany Cabán, a Queens councilwoman who is on the progressive caucus and leads the Committee on Women and Gender Equity, received threatening emails and calls from the public, along with derogatory and vulgar comments about her Latina heritage and sexual orientation earlier this fall.The threats closely followed an appearance on Fox News by Joann Ariola, a Republican councilwoman, who called Cabán a “chaos inciter” for suggesting ways that small-business owners could deal with homeless or mentally ill people without calling the police.“What they’re doing is part and parcel of that far-right playbook,” Cabán said of Republicans on the Council. “You whip up fear and hatred of people of color, queer people, and you foment political violence. It’s what Tucker Carlson does every day. It’s what Marjorie Taylor Greene does.”METROPOLITAN diaryOwenEvery week since 1976, Metropolitan Diary has published stories by, and for, New Yorkers. Readers helped us pick the best Diary entry of the year, and Owen was a finalist in this year’s voting.Dear Diary:My mother died earlier this year. It was sudden and unexpected. In the weeks that followed, I was taking care of my father in addition to my children. I was so busy that I barely had a chance to cry.After about a month, I took a day off work to go to the Fotografiska Museum and then to meet my husband for lunch nearby.After viewing an exhibition of nude photography, I walked directly into one that was a chronicle of the life and death of the artist’s mother.The weight of the previous month and the unexpected connection to the artist hit me hard. I sat down in the mostly empty museum and sobbed.I tried to be quiet and inconspicuous there in the dark room, but before long a man approached me and asked if I was OK.I told him that my mother had died recently and that I just missed her so much.He sat down next to me, rubbed my back after politely seeking my consent and told me he would sit with me as long as I needed.I asked his name.Owen, he said.He asked mine.Suzie, I replied.And my mother’s?Stephanie.He said he would hold us in his heart and he asked if I needed a hug.I did. Even in heels, I stood on tiptoes to embrace a total stranger and sob into his shoulder. I thanked him with every fiber of my being.I skipped the final exhibition and ran to meet my husband. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t bear to see Owen’s face in the light.— Suzanna Publicker MetthamIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Morgan Malget and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected] up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

The group said that Representative-elect George Santos would be barred from its events, but it stopped short of calling for him not to serve in Congress.The country’s most prominent group of Jewish Republican political donors said Tuesday that it was “disappointed” that Representative-elect George Santos had misrepresented himself as Jewish, and that it would bar him from its events. But the group, the Republican Jewish Coalition, stopped short of calling him unfit to serve in Congress or demanding his ouster.Mr. Santos, a Republican who was elected last month to represent a New York district that includes much of Long Island’s North Shore, has been embroiled in a widening scandal over misstatements and lies he told about his education, employment and finances.He also claimed repeatedly to be a descendant of European Jews who fled to Brazil to escape the Holocaust and said that while he was religiously Catholic, he also identified as a nonobservant Jew. He described himself as a Jew on the campaign trail in a heavily Jewish district and regularly attended events with rabbis and other leaders of the religious community.But in an interview with The New York Post published Monday, he said that he “never claimed to be Jewish” and was instead “Jew-ish.” He also denounced reporting that said he misled voters about his Jewish ancestry.Matt Brooks, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement that Mr. Santos had “deceived us and misrepresented his heritage” and that he “will not be welcome at any future R.J.C. event.”Mr. Santos, 34, was a featured speaker at the coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas last month. On Dec. 18, he was a featured guest, along with Representative Lee Zeldin, at a Hanukkah party thrown by the group on Long Island. The New York Times investigation into his background was published the next day.A spokesman for the R.J.C. said that no one at the coalition could recall a previous instance of an elected official falsely claiming to be Jewish.The coalition, which spent at least $3 million to help G.O.P. candidates in the midterm election through its political arm, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, did not make any contributions to Mr. Santos before his victory. But a spokesman confirmed that the group sent Mr. Santos $5,000 earmarked for “debt retirement” after his election.Norm Coleman, the former Minnesota senator who now serves as the R.J.C.’s chairman, called Mr. Santos’s statements “shameful” in an email. “I anticipate he will have a very short tenure in the United States Congress,” he added.The group’s Democratic counterpart, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, took a harder line, calling on Mr. Santos “to not take the oath of office” in a post on Twitter and challenging the R.J.C.’s integrity for not doing the same.The R.J.C. has taken a tougher stance on perceived affronts to the Jewish community before.It repeatedly demanded that Congress remove Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee for remarks about Israel and Israeli politics that the group termed “antisemitic tropes.”The coalition also condemned Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in 2021 for making antisemitic comments on social media, and called her out a second time — along with Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona — for speaking at a white nationalist conference.Gabriel Groisman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Fla., and a member of the coalition’s board of directors, said he had met Mr. Santos at the Las Vegas event and had been excited that a Jewish Republican was elected to the New York delegation in Congress, but called the recent revelations “extremely offensive.”He went beyond the R.J.C. statement, saying that “the Republican leadership should condemn Santos publicly, and he should not be given any committee assignments.”“Thankfully, terms in Congress are only two years,” Mr. Groisman added. “Hopefully we can get him out as soon as possible.”But one of the group’s new board members, Josh Katzen, the president of a Massachusetts commercial real estate firm, pointed to multiple examples of Democrats who were accused of embellishing their records in the past, including Hillary Clinton, who claimed in 2008 that she had to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire during a 1996 trip in Bosnia, and President Biden, who said he finished in the top half of his law school class and attended on a full academic scholarship.Mr. Katzen, in an email, added: “And I’m supposed to care if, in an age of rabid antisemitism, a politician wants to join my tribe? Not at the forefront of my concerns.” More

Mr. Santos admitted that the information in his résumé about where he worked and went to school was not true. Other discrepancies in his biography remain a mystery.For a week, Representative-elect George Santos avoided answering questions from the media, after The New York Times reported several notable fabrications on his résumé.Now, Mr. Santos has swapped out silence for a new tactic: creating the appearance of coming clean.In three separate interviews — two of them with conservative media, none with The Times — Mr. Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé, even as he has denounced “elitist” institutions seeking to hold him to account and suggested that he is no more duplicitous than your average member of Congress.‘Did I embellish my résumé? Yes, I did,” he told City & State, a New York political publication. “And I’m sorry, and it shouldn’t be done. And words can’t express 100 percent how I feel, but I’m still the same guy. I’m not a fraud. I’m not a cartoon character. I’m not some mythical creature that was invented.”Voters from New York’s Third Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Nassau County and Queens, elected Mr. Santos, 34, a Republican, in November. When he enters Congress in 2023, several important unanswered questions will still hang over him.Here is what we do and do not know about the representative-elect.Mr. Santos did not work where he said he did.Over the course of his two campaigns for Congress, the first of which was unsuccessful, Mr. Santos cast himself as an accomplished veteran of Wall Street, with work experience at both Citigroup, where he said he was “an associate asset manager,” and at Goldman Sachs. Both firms told The Times that they had no record of Mr. Santos’s ever working for them.In recent interviews, Mr. Santos has claimed that he did not actually work for those companies, but rather with them, when he was employed at a company called LinkBridge Investors, which says it connects fund managers with investors.Mr. Santos told The New York Post that he had merely used a “poor choice of words.”Mr. Santos did not graduate from the schools he said he had.Mr. Santos has said he graduated from Baruch College in Manhattan with a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. A biography on the website of the House Republicans’ campaign committee said he had also studied at N.Y.U. But neither college could find records verifying those claims, and in his interview with The Post, Mr. Santos admitted that he had lied about his education.“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.” he told the newspaper. “I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé.”Mr. Santos says he is not Jewish, so much as “Jew-ish.”Mr. Santos has said that his mother was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium and again fled persecution during WW II.” And he has identified as both Catholic and as a nonobservant Jew.But citing genealogy records and Brazilian records, both The Forward, a Jewish publication, and CNN have reported that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents appear to have been born in Brazil before World War II. Mr. Santos has responded to those revelations by modifying his story ever so slightly.“I always joke, I’m Catholic, but I’m also Jew-ish — as in ‘ish,’” he told City & State. “I grew up fully aware that my grandparents were Jewish, came from a Jewish family, and they were refugees to Brazil. And that was always the story I grew up with, and I’ve always known it very well.”Mr. Santos amends story on Pulse nightclub shooting.After he won election, Mr. Santos, who says he is gay, claimed to have “lost four employees” at the 2016 shooting at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, a claim for which The Times could find no evidence.During an interview on WABC radio, Mr. Santos said that those “four employees” did not actually work for his Florida company. Rather, those four individuals were in the process of being hired, he said.“We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando,” he said.Mr. Santos denied committing any crimes.Contrary to records unearthed by The Times, Mr. Santos has seemed to insist that he was never charged with fraud for writing checks with a stolen checkbook in Brazil.“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”In the radio interview with WABC, Mr. Santos offered to provide documents to corroborate his assertion. But he declined to provide any documentation to The Times.Mr. Santos does not own 13 properties.During his most recent congressional campaign, Mr. Santos cast himself and his family as the owners of 13 properties. He also suggested he was a beleaguered landlord whose tenants were unjustly withholding rent.On Monday, he said his family owns property, but he does not.“George Santos does not own any properties,” he told The Post.The sources of Mr. Santos’s $700,000 campaign loan remain unclear.Though Mr. Santos’s adulthood has been marked by a trail of unpaid debts to landlords and creditors, in 2021 and 2022, he lent $700,000 to his congressional campaign, according to federal campaign finance documents. It remains unclear where that money came from.Mr. Santos continues to claim it originated with his work at The Devolder Organization, which he described as a consulting firm to City & State.Mr. Santos has disclosed little about the operations of his company, and The Times could find no property or public-facing assets linked to the firm. More

Also, Ukraine is fighting to retake a city in the Donbas.Associated PressChina’s hospitals on the front lines of CovidChina’s medical system was already overcrowded, underfunded and inadequately staffed in the best of times. But now with Covid spreading freely for the first time in China, it is being pushed to its limits.The Times examined several videos that showed scenes of desperation and misery at one hospital in northern China. Above, three stills. Sickened patients slump in wheelchairs and lie on gurneys, waiting for help as the corridors ring with the sounds of coughing.There are reports that physicians are being pulled from eastern provinces to help in Beijing as the capital grapples with an explosive outbreak. Doctors and nurses are continuing to work after contracting the virus because of the staff shortage.In Shanghai, one hospital predicted half of the city’s 25 million residents would eventually be infected and warned its staff of a “tragic battle” in the coming weeks. “All of Shanghai will fall, and all the staff of the hospital will be infected!” according to a now-deleted statement the hospital posted last week on the social media platform WeChat.On the brink: A doctor in Wuhan said the hospital staff was so depleted that a neurosurgeon recently had to perform two operations in one day while fighting symptoms of Covid. “About 80 to 90 percent of the people around me have been infected,” the physician said.Soaring cases: Data released by local authorities in recent days seem to confirm that the virus is running rampant, with reports of hundreds of thousands of infections recorded daily. Questions abound about the number of Covid-related deaths because officials count only those who die from respiratory failure directly linked to a Covid infection. Officially, seven people have died from the virus since pandemic rules were relaxed on Dec. 7.A Ukrainian soldier in Lyman, which Ukraine recaptured this fall. Fighting has since spread to Kreminna.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesUkraine sets its sights on a key city in the eastUkrainian officials say their troops are edging closer to Kreminna, a fiercely defended city in northern Luhansk Province. It’s one of the most hotly contested places in the fight for the Donbas region.Luhansk is almost entirely occupied by Russia and one of the four provinces that Russia illegally annexed in September. Recapturing Kreminna, as well as the neighboring cities of Svatove and Starobilsk, could enable Ukraine to continue its advance toward the Russian border and take back more territory seized by Moscow.Understand the Situation in ChinaThe Communist Party cast aside restrictive “zero Covid” policy, which set off mass protests that were a rare challenge to the Communist leadership.Medicine Shortages: As Covid rips through parts of China, millions are struggling to find treatment — from the most basic cold remedies to take at home to more powerful antivirals for patients in hospitals.Traumatized and Deflated: Gripped with grief and anxiety, many in China want a national reckoning over the hard-line Covid policy. Holding the government accountable may be a quixotic quest.A Cloudy Picture: Despite Beijing’s assurances that the situation is under control, data on infections has become more opaque amid loosened pandemic constraints.In Beijing: As Covid sweeps across the Chinese capital, Beijing looks like a city in the throes of a lockdown — this time, self-imposed by residents.It would also give Ukraine control of a triangle of roads that provide access to two larger cities farther south, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, which fell to Russia this summer. “The Russians understand that if they lose Kreminna, their entire line of defense will ‘fall,’” the regional governor of Luhansk said yesterday.Background: Ukraine’s campaign to recapture Kreminna began this fall, around the time that it reclaimed Lyman, a city in the neighboring Donetsk Province. The campaign started at the end of a sweep through the northeastern region of Kharkiv, which forced Russia back toward the border.Other updates:The Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny said that he had been injected with an unknown medication after suffering from bad back pain while in prison.Ukraine’s economy is projected to shrink about 40 percent this year.Ryazan, a city near Moscow, is mourning its fallen soldiers. But residents do not resent the war. Lee Myung-bak, center, was arrested in 2018.Pool photo by Chung Sung-JunFormer South Korean president pardonedLee Myung-bak, a former president imprisoned for embezzlement and corruption, received a presidential pardon that will go into effect today. Lee, 81, will be released from a hospital in Seoul, where he was treated for chronic illnesses, and will not be returning to prison.The pardon of Lee, who was president from 2008 to 2013, is intended “to restore the potential of a South Korea united through pan-national integration,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement.Critics said the move would be popular among conservative supporters. Both Lee and South Korea’s current president, Yoon Suk Yeol, who granted the pardon, are conservative politicians.Details: Lee was sentenced to a 17-year term in 2020. The pardon will cancel the remaining 15 years of his sentence and nullify the unpaid part of his fine, totaling 8.2 billion won ($6.4 million). The charges against Lee included collecting bribes, mostly from Samsung, and embezzling more than 30 billion won ($23.6 million.)Other pardons: The pardon also applies to more than 1,300 other people convicted of white-collar crimes, including those who served under the former president Park Geun-hye, who was ousted in 2017 on charges of bribery and abuse of power. She was pardoned last year.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificThe long-haul Sydney Hobart sailing race is underway. For competitors, it can be a sleepless endeavor.Taiwan’s president said that mandatory conscription on the island would be extended from four months to one year, because of the rising threat from China, Reuters reports.Japan’s prime minister dismissed his fourth minister in two months following a string of scandals, Nikkei reports.Around the WorldThe telescope is on a mission to observe the universe in wavelengths no human eye can see.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production TeamLaunched a year ago, the James Webb Space Telescope is working even better than astronomers had hoped.The number of Nicaraguans fleeing to the U.S. has surged in recent years.Thousands of holiday travelers remained stranded in the U.S. after more than 2,900 flights were canceled during the winter storm. Most were from Southwest Airlines.A Morning ReadExpect more Japanese-inspired flavors next year.Jenny Huang for The New York TimesHow will we eat in 2023? My colleague Kim Severson spoke to food forecasters about coming fads in a time of inflation, climate change and global tensions.Among their predictions: Briny flavors, chicken skins, high-end Jell-O shots, and Ube, a slightly nutty-tasting, vanilla-scented purple yam from the Philippines. As concerns about the pandemic recede, communal tables may also make a comeback.ARTS AND IDEASKendrick Lamar, left, and Dave Free.Rafael Pavarotti for The New York TimesKendrick Lamar’s next chapterHe is one of the greatest rappers of his generation: In addition to obtaining myriad Grammys, Kendrick Lamar is the first artist outside jazz and classical music to win the Pulitzer Prize. Now at 35, Kendrick has started pushing himself onto unexpected terrain.Notably, he’s opening up. “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers,” the album he released last spring, is more personal and out-and-out emotional than his previous work.Kendrick shocked the rap world when he left Top Dawg Entertainment, the label that discovered and nurtured his talent. He started his own company, pgLang, with his longtime collaborator, Dave Free. “Everybody got their own journey. I was just fortunate enough to have a group of guys around me that gave me that courage to feed myself with the arts,” Kendrick said.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookRyan Liebe for The New York TimesChestnut risotto feeds a crowd.What to ReadIn “Have You Eaten Yet?” Cheuk Kwan traces Chinese-owned restaurants from the Arctic to the Amazon.What to Watch“Corsage,” starring Vicky Krieps as the Empress of Austria, is a visually striking and ingeniously anachronistic portrait.HealthProlonged and extreme anger can affect your heart, brain and gut.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and here’s a clue: Macaroni shape (five letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. My colleague Kashmir Hill got help from a special contributor for her story: a 7-month-old baby.“The Daily” is about the first union at Amazon.We welcome your feedback. Email us at [email protected]. More

More from our inbox:Sam Bankman-Fried’s Release on BondHarmful Stereotypes About AfricaWhy Fewer Women Become TeachersCuba’s DepopulationPhoto illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “Santos Admits to a Long List of Falsehoods” (front page, Dec. 27):Representative-elect George Santos told The New York Post that he was “embellishing my résumé.” No. They were lies!As a constituent of the Third Congressional District, I don’t want Mr. Santos representing me. We don’t need a deadbeat liar who has not answered where the $700,000 donation that he made to his campaign came from. We need to see the paperwork. We don’t need another politician who promises to release his return after the audit.He’s worse than a joke. Have we no respect for the truth and a little integrity?Robert DetorPort Washington, N.Y.To the Editor:I am grateful to George Santos for redefining lying as a “poor choice of words.” For the past few years, I’d been confined to explaining eye-opening statements as “alternate facts.” I can finally bid farewell to Kellyanne Conway’s creativity and move on to the new standard for political opportunism without consequences.Michael EmmerBrooklynTo the Editor:Re “How Opposition Research Really Works,” by Tyson Brody (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 26), about opposition research on George Santos:After 40 years of working with my late husband, who delved into the background of dozens of high-level candidates, I do know this: It’s a serious job that requires diligent work and professional skills.The real work is in following up. It’s the legwork — hours searching paper land records, visiting residences, interviewing people — that makes the real difference. A candidate cannot simply rely on computer research or popular websites to get the job done.Once the information is found the opposition researcher works directly with reporters with whom they have developed a relationship and whom they trust. Reporters often don’t have time or resources to do all the legwork. Nor can a candidate rely on political party committees.Persistence, attention to detail, legwork, and an honest relationship with the press and professional campaign staff are often the key to winning an election.Otherwise, the voters may have the kind of buyer’s remorse that so many of Mr. Santos’s new constituents are now experiencing.Sandy CheitenNew YorkTo the Editor:Tyson Brody describes the process behind the Democrats’ failure to expose George Santos’s multiple misrepresentations about his life. He explains that “a junior researcher” documented some of the issues, which appeared “in small sections interspersed through a nearly 90-page document.”As a corporate investigator who has spent more than 30 years supervising hundreds of researchers producing thousands of reports, I always insist on executive summaries covering the key points in the report. I have, on countless occasions, repeated the admonition, “Don’t bury the lede.”Ernest BrodNew YorkThe writer is president of Brod Global Intelligence.Sam Bankman-Fried’s Release on BondSam Bankman-Fried, founder of the crypto firm FTX, leaving Federal District Court in Manhattan after being released on a $250 million bond.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Disgraced FTX Co-Founder Freed on $250 Million Bond” (Business, Dec. 23):So, Sam Bankman-Fried, the Bernie Madoff of his generation, is freed on bond less than two weeks after his arrest at a luxury apartment complex in the Bahamas. How lovely for him that his parents were willing and able to secure this bond, risking their own home — and perhaps, their reputations — in the process.It took years of vigorous advocacy for New York State to enact some form of cash bail reform for nonviolent offenders who so often languished at Rikers Island because they couldn’t raise even the minimal funds they needed to be released pending trial.It strikes me as obscene that Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose treachery and cheating have ruined so many lives, spent virtually no time in jail. Even with a firmly affixed ankle bracelet, he will clearly be living a pretty comfortable life safely ensconced in his parents’ home.One can only hope that he will eventually receive the punishment he so richly deserves.Carol NadellNew YorkHarmful Stereotypes About AfricaMauricio Lima for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Putin Wants Loyalty, and He’s Found It in Africa” (front page, Dec. 25):I was disappointed in The Times’s portrayal of Russian involvement in the Central African Republic. On what basis is the relationship between Russia and the Central African Republic characterized as one of African fealty and passive subjugation — of “master” and “vassal”?African states, and countries in the Global South more generally, continue to be inaccurately portrayed as lacking agency in how they conduct their foreign relations. We can certainly debate and inquire into the motives of the leaders of the Central African Republic in partnering with Russia. We can also debate the wisdom of this decision or how likely Russia is to be a good partner to smaller, weaker countries (just as we can question how good of a partner the West is to these same countries).However, it perpetuates harmful stereotypes to presume that the leaders and citizens of African states are merely passive recipients of the desires of foreign actors or to suggest that Western governments know what is best for them.Katherine BeallPrinceton, N.J.The writer is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.Why Fewer Women Become TeachersCalla Kessler/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 14):The enormous drop in the number of college students graduating with degrees in education (from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11) coincides perfectly with the rise of the feminist movement, which gave women a far greater range of employment opportunities than earlier, when teacher, nurse and secretary were the predominant jobs for female college graduates.Without denigrating the many excellent K-12 teachers, I think it is safe to say that many women who would have been teachers a generation earlier chose different career paths with higher salaries and, often, prestige.Ellen T. BrownSt. Paul, Minn.Cuba’s DepopulationEliana Aponte Tobar for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Largest Exodus Imperils Future of Ailing Cuba” (front page, Dec. 11):Cuba has had many mass migrations since 1959. In fact, the exodus has never stopped, only waxed and waned as the government alternatively cracked down on or encouraged emigration, or as the means to escape became more, or less, easy.In the nearly 64 years of communist rule, one of every six Cubans has left the island. More than 10,000 have drowned or disappeared in the Florida Straits, trying to reach the freedom of the U.S. Scores have been murdered by the regime’s security forces trying to escape.This depopulation is not because of U.S. sanctions; it is because of political repression and Marxist economics. Fidel Castro himself, while alive and the sole ruler, ridiculed the embargo, because he was receiving ample economic aid from the Soviets. It was only when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that Castro began blaming the U.S. for the problems communism had created.Otto J. ReichFalls Church, Va.The writer is the president of the Center for a Free Cuba and a former diplomat in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. More