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      Hwang Sok-Yong: In South Korea, Young People Are Resisting Authoritarianism

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      In South Korea, the collective memory of a pro-democracy uprising inspires a new generation to resist authoritarianism.This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.Modernity is born from the struggle between remembering and forgetting, and South Koreans on all sides of the political spectrum have learned from our shared history.That history includes the Gwangju uprising, a 10-day mass protest that occurred shortly after the 1979 assassination of President Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea for 18 years as a military dictator.Taking advantage of the power vacuum, Chun Doo-hwan, an army general, staged a coup and quickly began laying the groundwork for a new dictatorship. In May 1980, he declared martial law, and the citizens of Gwangju rose up in opposition to this continuation of military rule.The military responded with lethal force, indiscriminately killing citizens regardless of their involvement in the protest. Despite this, Gwangju became a watershed moment in the fight for Korean democracy.“We know that we cannot defeat such a powerful army. But to end the resistance now would render meaningless all the blood shed by our fellow citizens. We must defend the provincial office to our deaths. That’s the only way for us to be remembered by future generations and for the resistance to be complete.”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

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      NYT Crossword Answers for June 19, 2025

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      Hannah Slovut-Einertson wants us to change.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — This is Hannah Slovut-Einertson’s second crossword in The New York Times, and it’s nice to see her back in the rotation. There has been a sizable gap between her debut in 2018 and today’s puzzle, and in that time, she appears to have married, which also extended her byline by nine letters.Today’s ThemeWhen you were solving this puzzle, did you suspect that the theme contained rebuses because there were entries you were sure you knew, but they turned out to be wrong?Me, too.No rebus theme today. Instead, Ms. Slovut-Einertson asks us to remove parts of the theme answers as they are written and replace them with other letters to get the “real” answer. These answers are clued fairly simply, but they won’t make sense until you follow the instructions in the grid.Wait, what? The hints are in the grid and not in the clues? Yes, although the theme clues point us to those instructions.Here’s how it works. Each of the four theme entries has two parts: The instructions on the left and, in the same row, the answers on the right. The instruction entry is a word that happens to contain the letters “TO.” The entries need to be read as X TO Y.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

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      An Iran Strategy for Trump

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      Nobody, perhaps even President Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said on Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever — particularly now that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.If the U.S. does attack, the most obvious target will be the Fordo nuclear site, a deeply buried facility where Iran enriches uranium and which, by most reports, can be knocked out only by a 15-ton bomb known as a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. Less well known but surely on the U.S. target list is a new, still unfinished subterranean facility south of Iran’s main (and now largely destroyed) enrichment plant at Natanz. American pilots would also almost certainly join their Israeli counterparts in attacking Iranian ballistic missile launchers and bases.And then what? Nobody doubts the U.S. can do a lot of damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, at least in the short term. What comes afterward is harder to predict.Proponents of an American strike believe that we have no realistic choice other than to help Israel do as thorough a job as possible in setting back Iran’s nuclear ambitions not just for months but years — more than enough time to allow benign forces to shape events, including the possibility of Iranians overthrowing their widely detested rulers.By contrast, skeptics fear that the lessons Iran’s leaders will draw from an American attack is that they should have gotten a bomb much sooner — and that the appropriate response to such an attack is to be more repressive at home and less receptive to diplomatic overtures from abroad. Skeptics also expect that Iran will respond to an attack by ramping up its malign regional activities, not least to embroil the U.S. in another Middle East war the Trump administration desperately wants to avoid.I’m with the proponents. A nuclear-armed Iran, fielding missiles of ever-growing reach, is both an unacceptable threat to U.S. security and a consequential failure of U.S. deterrence. After years of Iran’s prevarications, which led even the Biden administration to give up on diplomacy, to say nothing of Iran’s cheating on its legal commitments — detailed last month in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency — the world had run out of plausible nonmilitary options to prevent the regime from going nuclear.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

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      Trump, Iran and the Specter of Iraq: ‘We Bought All the Happy Talk’

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      President Trump is pondering swift military action in Iran. There were similar expectations that the war in Iraq would be quick and triumphant.A little more than 22 years ago, Washington was on edge as a president stood on the precipice of ordering an invasion of Baghdad. The expectation was that it would be a quick, triumphant “mission accomplished.”By the time the United States withdrew nearly nine years and more than 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi deaths later, the war had become a historic lesson of miscalculation and unintended consequences.The specter of Iraq now hangs over a deeply divided, anxious Washington. President Trump, who campaigned against America’s “forever wars,” is pondering a swift deployment of American military might in Iran. This time there are not some 200,000 American troops massed in the Middle East, or antiwar demonstrations around the world. But the sense of dread and the unknown feels in many ways the same.“So much of this is the same story told again,” said Vali R. Nasr, an Iranian American who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Once upon a time we didn’t know better, and we bought all the happy talk about Iraq. But every single assumption proved wrong.”There are many similarities. The Bush administration and its allies saw the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk” and promised that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. There were internal disputes over the intelligence that justified the war. A phalanx of neoconservatives pushed hard for the chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq. And America held its breath waiting for President George W. Bush to announce a final decision.Today Trump allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off event that would transform the Middle East. There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon. 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

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      U.S. to Review Social Media Posts of Student and Scholar Visa Applicants

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      The State Department is restarting the processing of visa applications from students and visiting scholars, but is screening for “hostility” toward the United States.The State Department plans to review the social media accounts of foreign citizens who apply for student and visiting scholar visas as it resumes processing those applications. Applicants will be screened for perceived “hostility” toward the United States, and they will be asked to make their social media accounts “public” for the review, State Department officials said on Wednesday.All applications for F, M and J nonimmigrant visas, which are for scholarly exchanges and research, will be reviewed, the officials said.Consular officers at missions overseas are being told to look for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.” The State Department did not provide further details on how officers would define that criteria. The agency issued the guidelines after halting the processing of student and visiting scholar visas for nearly a month.The new policy appears to be the latest prong in the Trump administration’s broad assault on universities, which is focused on trying to tamp down liberal thought at the institutions. Some of President Trump’s aides say American universities need to embrace more conservative ideas and people. 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

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      For Tennessee’s Transgender Families, Supreme Court Ruling Was Bitter, but Expected

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      The state has been a leader in the rollback of L.G.B.T.Q. rights.There had been cause for joy this June. There were events timed with Pride Month, when families and friends gathered with rainbow tattoos and flags for the annual celebration of L.G.B.T.Q. life. And there was an unexpected legal victory when a federal judge extended a temporary injunction on a federal policy requiring passports to reflect the sex on a person’s original birth certificate.Then on Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on transition treatment for transgender youth, dealing a bitter setback to their families and reviving fear about other limits that may come for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the state.For many transgender people, children and their families in Tennessee, it was not necessarily an unexpected outcome given the vitriol they have faced in recent years.The state has been at the forefront of a rollback on L.G.B.T.Q. rights as its General Assembly, with an entrenched Republican supermajority, has barred changes to gender identification on driver’s licenses, limited where drag shows can take place and prevented transgender students from using public school bathrooms that fit their identities.“I’m not surprised” at the ruling, said Eli Givens, who at 18 had testified against the ban. “I really want to be. Ever since I started all of this in 2023, it’s been whiplash every single day. There’s just always a new decision, someone saying something about the community.”Receiving treatment as a teenager “was a new chance at life for me,” Mx. Givens, 20, added. “I could savor things in a way I never could before. Everything kind of made sense and fell into place.”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

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      The Supreme Court Case on Trans Care Ruled Against My Daughter

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      There is something incredibly surreal about finding your family at the center of a landmark Supreme Court decision, from the robes and the formality to the long, red velvet curtains behind the justices. No mother imagines that her everyday fight to do right by her child would land her there.My daughter, L.W., came out as transgender late in 2020. She was just shy of 13. Four and a half years later, she is thriving, healthy and happy after pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care. But the very care that is improving her life became a primary political target of the Republican supermajority in our home state, Tennessee. When the legislature banned my daughter’s care in 2023, we fought back by suing the state. Today, we found out that we lost that case when the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to uphold Tennessee’s ban on such care.I am beside myself. Our heartfelt plea was not enough. The compelling, expert legal arguments by our lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal were not enough. I had to face my daughter and tell her that our last hope is gone. She’s angry, scared and hurt that the American system of democracy that we so put on a pedestal didn’t work to protect her.My family did not start this journey to land in Washington in front of that white marble hall of justice. We ended up there through parental and civic duty. My and my husband’s demands in our lawsuit against the ban felt quite basic: Let us do our job as parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how. Don’t let our child’s very existence be a political wedge issue. Being a teenager is hard enough. Being a parent of a teenager is hard enough.Raising a transgender kid in Tennessee, we know that not everyone understands people like her or her health care — and that’s OK. We don’t need to agree on everything. But we do need our fundamental rights respected.I have devoted myself to finding our daughter consistent care in one state after another. The nightmare of our disrupted life pales in comparison to the nightmare of losing access to the health care that has allowed our daughter to thrive. After Tennessee passed its ban, we traveled to another provider in a different state. After that state passed a ban, we moved on to another one. We are now on our fourth state. The five-hour drive each way, taking time off work and school, is hard, but thankfully, we found a clinic and pharmacy that take our insurance.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

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      Ex-Yankee Is Awarded About $500,000 in Damages for Moldy Greenwich Mansion

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      Josh Donaldson, a former American League Most Valuable Player with Toronto, sued his former landlord over the conditions at his $55,000-a-month rental property.A Connecticut jury on Wednesday awarded the former New York Yankees third baseman Josh Donaldson damages that are expected to top $500,000 from the ex-landlord of his $55,000-a-month Greenwich, Conn., rental mansion, which he complained was plagued by mold and squirrels.Mr. Donaldson, 39, terminated the lease about six weeks after moving into the five-bedroom, 4,800-square-foot home in April 2022 with his now-wife, Briana, who was pregnant at the time, and their 17-month-old daughter.In a federal lawsuit filed in Connecticut in June 2022, the now-retired baseball player accused the home’s owner, Bill Grous, of breach of contract and said that the rental in Greenwich’s backcountry section was a money pit.The neighborhood, sought after for its sprawling estates and privacy, is a magnet for professional athletes, other celebrities and financiers.Mr. Donaldson, a former American League Most Valuable Player with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2015, moved into the mansion a few weeks after being traded to the Yankees from the Minnesota Twins.His two seasons in New York were rocky. Mr. Donaldson struggled to replicate his success and was suspended by Major League Baseball in May 2022 for one game for repeatedly calling Tim Anderson, who is Black and was a shortstop for the Chicago White Sox at the time, “Jackie,” a reference to Jackie Robinson. In August 2023, Mr. Donaldson was released by the Yankees.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