Elections

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionTrump’s RoleKey TakeawaysExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThree false claims about the election made in Mike Lindell’s new film.One America News ran an extensive disclaimer before the broadcast.Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, has long been a vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump.Credit…Al Drago for The New York TimesKellen Browning and Feb. 5, 2021, 7:22 p.m. ETThe 2020 presidential election was three months ago, but one of the biggest backers of the false theory that it was rigged against former President Donald J. Trump has not given up his hope of overturning the results.On Friday, Mike Lindell, the embattled chief executive of MyPillow who helped finance Mr. Trump’s legal efforts to challenge election results, aired a falsehood-laden film about election fraud on One America News.The network promoted the two-hour film, titled “Absolute Proof,” on Twitter Thursday, urging viewers to join Mr. Lindell “for a never-before-seen report breaking down election fraud evidence & showing how the unprecedented level of voter fraud was committed in the 2020 Presidential Election.”There has been no substantial evidence of fraud in the election, which President Biden won. Mr. Lindell’s theories have led to Twitter removing him and MyPillow from its platform and several major retailers cutting ties with the pillow manufacturer.Before showing the film on Friday, the network ran an extensive disclaimer that described Mr. Lindell as “solely and exclusively responsible for its content,” and noted that “this program is not the product of OAN’s reporting” and was “presented at this time as opinions only.”YouTube took down “Absolute Proof” on Friday, saying it violated the company’s presidential election integrity policy, which prohibits false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the vote.Two companies that provide election technology, Dominion and Smartmatic, have filed defamation suits in recent weeks against people and organizations that have made baseless claims about the companies.Here are three much-examined areas that come up in the film. One America and Mr. Lindell did not respond to requests for comment.1. No, Dominion files were not manipulated.The crux of many arguments that election fraud occurred, and repeated in Mr. Lindell’s film, is the unsubstantiated claim that Dominion software was somehow manipulated to delete votes for Mr. Trump, or to hide some sort of conspiracy.Many of these unsubstantiated claims stem from an instance in Antrim County, Mich., when a clerical error in reporting results led the county to initially show a landslide vote in favor of Mr. Biden. The error was soon corrected, but conspiracy theorists have latched onto the incident as evidence that voting was rigged.Files “were deleted from the Dominion system in Antrim County. We know that for a fact,” Matt DePerno, a lawyer who has fought to investigate the incident, told Mr. Lindell in the film. “Wow,” Mr. Lindell responded.There has been no evidence that votes were manipulated in the county, and a hand-counted audit of votes in December affirmed the outcome there.2. No, foreign countries did not interfere with voting machines.Mr. Lindell interviewed retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, another member of the movement that fought to overturn the election. Mr. Waldron, who said his military background involves “information warfare,” pushed the unfounded claim that the Chinese government invested money in Dominion and therefore has access to its files and data.“A lot of movements of votes, direct access to Pennsylvania voting precincts, county tabulation centers, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, all of that coming directly from foreign countries, China being the predominant one,” Mr. Waldron said.He also claimed that overseas servers in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom somehow played a role in manipulating results. The manipulation, Mr. Waldron said, was “part of a coup that was aided and abetted by a foreign-threat nation-state, a peer enemy nation-state: China.”Election officials and cybersecurity experts have said there is no credible evidence that China helped Mr. Biden win the election.3. No, votes for Biden were not counted multiple times.Melissa Carone, an information technology worker who said she was contracted by Dominion for the election, was brought on the show to tell Mr. Lindell that she watched thousands of ballots run through voting machines without ever seeing a single vote for Mr. Trump.Ms. Carone, whose testimony was ruled “not credible” by a Michigan judge in November, told Mr. Lindell that when ballots jammed inside the machine, people tabulating the votes were re-scanning dozens of ballots and counting them twice.“It’s like counting a deck of cards, you could sit there and run the same deck of cards through this tabulator over and over and over again,” Mr. Lindell observed.Michigan election officials have said that ballots were “not scanned multiple times inappropriately.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyU.S. Will Examine Giving F.B.I. More Resources to Counter Domestic ExtremismThe issue of violent extremist groups in the United States has come to the top of the agenda since a mob of far-right groups stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesJulian E. Barnes and Feb. 5, 2021, 6:22 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Biden administration will examine if additional F.B.I. agents are needed at the bureau’s field offices to address the threat of domestic violent extremism, a senior administration official said on Friday.Last month, the White House ordered a review of the threat of domestic violent extremism, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That assessment will inform a policy review that will consider F.B.I. resources, additional authorities, foreign influence operations and other questions.The senior administration official said that the assessment and initial policy review would take about 100 days. The official spoke on a conference call with reporters on ground rules of anonymity to broach current policy discussions.The issue of violent extremist groups in the United States has come to the top of the agenda since a mob of far-right extremist organizations stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. The assault, which aimed to stop the counting of Electoral College votes and halt the transition of power to the Biden administration, has led to a string of federal charges against the rioters.Since the attack, there have been a series of questions about the intelligence gathered before Jan. 6, and whether the federal government was taking the threat of violence and extremist groups seriously enough.There is broad interest across the government in the issue of violent domestic groups. On Thursday, both Democrats and Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee expressed support for new domestic terrorism laws intended to stop violence similar to the attack on the Capitol. And Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virgina, who is the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said this week that he had bipartisan support for his panel to investigate the matter.In a letter last month to President Biden, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a member of the intelligence committee, backed the administration’s assessment request and asked that the role of foreign adversaries be examined.“It is crucial we understand the full extent of the threat facing our nation to ensure the tragic events of Jan. 6, 2021, never happen again,” Mr. Cornyn wrote.The administration official said the bulk of the intelligence review would fall to the intelligence arms of the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, but it is the role of the director of national intelligence to coordinate assessments that involve multiple departments.However, an element of the review will look at potential links between domestic groups and foreign networks and organizations, the official added. That part of the review will involve intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A. and National Security Agency, which are restricted in their collection of intelligence on Americans.White House officials expect that as part of the policy review, the F.B.I. will seek additional resources to deal with domestic violent extremism. The official noted that a Department of Homeland Security examination found that white supremacist terrorism was the most lethal domestic threat from 2018 to 2020.While some F.B.I. field offices have a squad of agents who deal primarily with the threat of domestic extremist groups, not all of them have a full contingent of resources dedicated to the fight. However, former F.B.I. officials say the domestic terrorism threat can vary from state to state.But the official said another part of the review would look at whether the bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces were structured to address the threat of American extremist groups and antigovernmental organizations. The review will look at whether the task forces are capable of reporting episodes of domestic violent extremism and track the groups that are involved, the official said.International terrorist groups, like Al Qaeda, are far more hierarchical. In contrast, the official said, domestic extremist groups are more loosely organized. Membership can shift, and different groups can come together, as they did during the Capitol attack, and then split apart.Adam Goldman More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookThe MyPillow Guy’s Fever DreamIn a bizarre, two-hour-plus disinfomercial on OANN, an election conspiracist sells a myth of a victory stolen.In a self-made video that is airing on OANN, Mike Lindell promotes his false election fraud claims with interviews and makeshift graphics.Credit…via michaeljlindell.comFeb. 5, 2021, 5:25 p.m. ETTV’s latest, most outrageously paranoid conspiracy-thriller has arrived. It has everything: cyberespionage, evil vote-stealing machines, wicked media cabals. And it aired Friday on One America News Network.It is “Absolute Proof,” a two-hour-plus disinfomercial made and hosted by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of the MyPillow company and a fervent advocate of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump and handed to President Biden. Mr. Lindell paid OANN to air it multiple times starting Friday.In it, Mr. Lindell sits behind a news desk stamped with the seal of “WVW Broadcast Network.” He interviews a lineup of guests featured in the monthslong effort to discredit and overturn the legitimate election, whose wild charges he punctuates with a hearty “Wow!” He claims that Mr. Trump not only won the election but won by such a margin that he “broke the algorithm” of voting machines.Mr. Lindell used to sell pillows on TV. Now he’s peddling dreams. In this sweet, terrible dream, your candidate did not lose an election that he lost. Complex nefarious forces are arrayed against you. But if only the media (including, apparently, some of the most fervently pro-Trump media) would relent and let the truth be known, you might get your country back.The content of Mr. Lindell’s stolen-election case poses a challenge for a newspaper reviewer, because it is hogwash, widely discredited hogwash, and it can be irresponsible to spread the specifics unnecessarily, even to debunk them.Even OANN, which has courted election truthers, seemed to realize that “Absolute Proof” was volatile content. A mammoth disclaimer before the broadcast emphasized that Mr. Lindell purchased the airtime and that “the statements and claims expressed in this program are presented at this time as opinions only.”The message is not so much “Don’t try this at home” as “Don’t try us in court.”Mr. Lindell is less shy. He holds forth in a blustery conspiracist voice that channels “The X-Files” by way of “Homeland” by way of an old “Saturday Night Live” Mike Ditka impression.He promises to expose “all the evil in our country, all the criminals in the country, all the ones that tried to suppress this.” He complains of his suspension by Twitter and his treatment by OANN’s competitor Newsmax, which cut off an interview with him this week when he launched into an accusation of fraud by voting machines that the network had disavowed under pain of legal action. He grouses about the stores that will no longer sell his pillows.His monologues are the sort that people will change subway cars to avoid. “They’re suppressing, cancel culture, they’re trying to cancel us all out,” he says. “I’ve just seen churches, the Christian churches, they’re being attacked right now, people on social media, anyone that speaks up, they’re going, ‘You can’t say that, pfft, you’re gone.’”All while a cartoon rubber stamp slaps “CANCELED” on the screen.If the off-the-rack newsroom set was meant to give Mr. Lindell’s accusations an air of gravitas, the production undercuts it. Creepy murder-show music swells up and fades out randomly in the middle of interviews. An accusation of communist meddling is illustrated with a crude graphic of hands holding a hammer and sickle. Segues between interviews are so clumsy I have to assume editing sabotage by the deep state.The whole chintzy production has the feel of a man, and a movement, unraveling. But its existence also says something about the larger conservative-media landscape postelection.Every right-wing outlet has had to decide how much to indulge the lies about the election popular with a large chunk of its audience. OANN and Newsmax seized an opportunity to outflank Fox News, some of whose commentators have played footsie with election fraud conspiracies but whose news operation committed the heresy of acknowledging that Mr. Biden won an election that he won.But all the “rigging” talk has also raised the existential threat of enormous lawsuits from the election-machine companies that conspiracists have impugned. On Newsmax, which had sought to out-Trump Fox, the anchor who cut off Mr. Lindell read a statement that included the lines: “The election results in every state were certified. Newsmax accepts the results as legal and final.”Now, it seems, it was Newsmax’s turn to be insufficiently MAGA. Mr. Lindell’s paid vanity-cast may have given OANN the opportunity to court dead-ender Trumpists, albeit under the shield of a “please don’t sue us” card.For hours on end, Mr. Lindell spun that audience the story it craved, then implored it to help him spread that story through social media. Onscreen, a graphic showed a smartphone bubbling out the logos of social-media platforms, including, for some reason, the online-payment system Venmo and Google Plus, which shut down in 2019.It’s tempting just to laugh at all this. And make no mistake, you should laugh at all this! It is a healthy sign that after years of alternative facts, you have still retained some sense of reality and the absurd.But you should also cry, a little. Because it’s not hard to imagine an audience who wants to believe, seeing the world maps with menacing lines purporting to show “hacking,” hearing the talk of “cyberforensics,” and concluding, still, that there must be something to all this.In fact, you don’t need to imagine them. Just look at pictures from the Capitol on Jan. 6.It may seem ridiculous that a pillow executive is paying a minor cable channel to let him play Fox Mulder with the election on a faux news set, because it is ridiculous. But ridiculous does not mean harmless.Mike Lindell’s argument may not have merit or coherence. But he has a sense of his market, of what plays through their heads when they turn out the lights and their heads hit their pillows.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyThe DailySubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsThe $2.7 Billion Case Against Fox NewsSmartmatic, an election technology company, filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against the network over what the company says are false claims about its role in the 2020 election. We hear from Smartmatic’s C.E.O. and lawyer.Hosted by Ben Smith; produced by Rachel Quester, Neena Pathak and Alix Spiegel; edited by Lisa Tobin and Mike Benoist; and engineered by Chris Wood.More episodes ofThe DailyFebruary 5, 2021  •  More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She’s DoingThe once-porous border between the right and the far right has dissolved.Feb. 5, 2021, 5:27 a.m. ETMarjorie Taylor Greene during the playing of the national anthem at a Second Amendment rally in Georgia on Sept. 19, 2020. Credit…C.B. Schmelter/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated PressMarjorie Taylor Greene is the QAnon congresswoman, a far-right influencer and gun fanatic who dabbles in anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. She endorsed violence against congressional leaders, claimed that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were faked and once shared an anti-refugee video in which a Holocaust denier says that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”She showed a little contrition on Wednesday with a qualified apology to her Republican colleagues. For this, she received a standing ovation. On Thursday, after an afternoon of deliberation, the House of Representatives voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments. Or rather, Democrats voted to strip her of her committee assignments. All but 11 Republicans voted in her favor.Although it is tempting to make this episode another parable exemplifying the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party, it’s better understood as yet another chapter in an ongoing story: the two-step between the far right and the Republican Party and the degree to which the former is never actually that far from the latter.There’s a story conservatives tell about themselves and their movement. It goes like this: In the mid-1960s, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, made a decisive break with the John Birch Society, an ultra-right-wing advocacy organization whose popular co-founder, Robert Welch, believed that the United States was threatened by a far-reaching “Communist conspiracy” whose agents included former President Dwight Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren.“How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points, so critically different from their own, and, for that matter, so far removed from common sense?” Buckley asked of Welch in a blistering 1962 essay. “There are, as we say, great things that need doing, the winning of a national election, the re-education of the governing class. John Birch chapters can do much to forward these aims, but only as they dissipate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch’s smoking typewriter.”This attack on Welch, if not the John Birch Society itself, continued into the 1964 presidential election. Birchers helped carry Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to victory in the Republican primary with skillful moves on the convention floor, in what would be their greatest display of strength before a final repudiation from Buckley and other leading lights of the conservative movement the following year. “I am not a member” of the group, Ronald Reagan declared in September 1965, “I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.”With this, Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the fringe. The conservative movement would win elections and power with an appeal to the mainstream of American society.Or so goes the story.Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the margins. The extremist tag, as Lisa McGirr notes in “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” did real damage to the organization’s ability to sustain itself: “The society was simply too strongly identified with minoritarian utterances and outdated conspiracies to remain an important vehicle for channeling the new majoritarian conservatism.” However, she continues, “The sentiments, grievances, and ideas the organization helped to define mobilize lived on and were championed by organizations and political leaders who thrust forth a new populist conservatism.”A campaign button for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid quotes from his speech accepting the Republican nomination.Credit…David J. & Janice L. Frent/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe hard right wasn’t at the front of the charge, but it wasn’t purged either. Instead, it served as part of the mass base of activists and voters who propelled conservative leaders to prominence and conservative politicians to victory. If there were boundaries between the mainstream and the extreme right, they were — as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in “The Long New Right and the World It Made” — “porous,” with movement from one to the other and back again. Several key figures of the New Right and the Christian Right of the 1970s and ’80s were, Sara Diamond points out in “Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States,” “veterans of the 1964 Goldwater campaign” who were “steeped in the conservative movement’s dual strategy of forming wide-ranging political organizations and activism based on more specific issues.”To illustrate their point about the porousness of the conservative movement, Schlozman and Rosenfeld highlight a series of interviews in which a “who’s who of the right of the late 1970s and early 1980s” sat for wide-ranging discussions with The Review of the News, a front publication of the John Birch Society. Figures from inside the Reagan administration, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Anne Gorsuch (mother of Neil), then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made an appearance, as did lawmakers like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Dick Cheney of Wyoming and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.This is a column, and I may be flattening some of the nuances here for the sake of brevity. But the essential point is sound: Extremism has always had a place in mainstream conservative politics, and this is especially true at the grass-roots level.What’s distinctive right now isn’t the fact that someone like Greene exists but that no one has emerged to play the role of Buckley. A longtime Republican leader like Mitch McConnell can try — he denounced Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer” on the party — but after he served four years as an ally to Donald Trump, his words aren’t worth much.Those once-porous borders, in other words, now appear to be nonexistent, and there’s no one in the Republican Party or its intellectual orbit to police the extreme right. Representative Greene is the first QAnon member of Congress, but she won’t be the last and she may not even ultimately be the worst.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }N.Y.C. Mayoral RaceWho’s Running?11 Candidates’ N.Y.C. MomentsA Look at the Race5 Takeaways From the DebateAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew York TodayMayoral Candidates Share New York MomentsFeb. 5, 2021, 5:15 a.m. ET [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Friday. [embedded content]Weather: Mix of rain and snow in the morning; cloudy later, with a high in the low 40s. Saturday: Sunny, high around 40. Sunday: Occasional snow, high in the mid-30s.Alternate-side parking: Suspended today and tomorrow for snow removal. What’s the best way to show that you’re a New Yorker? Perhaps it’s your bagel order. Or your accent. Or your determination to avoid to Times Square.The more than 30 candidates who have thrown their hat in the ring to become the city’s next mayor will inevitably face questions about their New Yorkiness.“The candidates are starting to go after each other a bit more and distinguish themselves over policy proposals and personal narratives,” said my colleague Emma Fitzsimmons, the City Hall bureau chief.[The race to become New York City’s next mayor may be one of the most consequential political contests in a generation. Here are some of the leading candidates.]“I think there are five front-runners among Democrats at this point: Eric Adams, Ray McGuire, Scott Stringer, Maya Wiley and Andrew Yang,” Ms. Fitzsimmons said, naming them in alphabetical order.My colleague Corey Kilgannon recently talked with these front-runners and several other candidates about their New York pedigrees, specifically asking them about their favorite city moments. Here are a few of their responses, accompanied by illustrations from our Metropolitan Diary artist, Agnes Lee.You can also read all 11 responses here.Kathryn Garcia, former sanitation commissionerMs. Garcia was 14 when she and her friends decided to dress up and take the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan to try getting into Studio 54.“Going into Manhattan was considered cool, and I loved to dance,” she said. She wore “candy red high heels” and stood outside the club, which, in 1984, was past its heyday but still highly selective.Shaun Donovan, former federal housing secretary“When you’re hugging people you never met before, you know something great has happened,” said Mr. Donovan, remembering how he cheered from a grandstand seat at Yankee Stadium the day Reggie Jackson hit three home runs to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1977 World Series.Carlos Menchaca, city councilman from BrooklynThree years after moving to New York from Texas, Mr. Menchaca was riding the F train to his Brooklyn apartment after having some beers with friends. He fell asleep and missed his stop. A subway worker woke him at the end of the line in Coney Island.Taking the train back, he fell asleep and missed his stop again. He got home at dawn.From The TimesLev Parnas, Giuliani Associate, Faces New Fraud AccusationsDid the Proud Boys Help Coordinate the Capitol Riot? Yes, U.S. Suggests3 Male Guards Charged in Attacks at Notorious Women’s PrisonThe Misogynistic ‘Dating Coach’ Who Was Charged in the Capitol RiotRoss Graham Dies at 93; Tenacious Fighter for New York CityWant more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingNew York restaurant industry leaders want Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to lift the 10 p.m. dining curfew before Super Bowl weekend. [New York Post]An anonymous note sent to some Long Island residents said, “Take your Christmas lights down! Its Valentines Day!!!!!!” — but one recipient had been busy with funeral arrangements. [NBC New York]What happened to Ample Hills Creamery, Brooklyn’s beloved ice cream company? [Marker]And finally: Your virtual social weekend The Times’s Melissa Guerrero writes:Although many performance spaces, museums and community centers are closed, people are finding creative ways to connect through virtual events and programs. Here are suggestions for maintaining a New York social life this weekend while keeping a safe distance from other people.John Lewis: A Pioneer for JusticeOn Friday at 7 p.m., listen to the actor Alton Fitzgerald White recite one of John Lewis’s speeches as part of Flushing Town Hall’s Black History Trilogy series. A discussion and Q. and A. will follow.R.S.V.P. for the free livestream on the event page.Corky Lee memorialJoin the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on Friday at 7 p.m. to honor the life of the celebrated photographer Corky Lee.Register for the free livestream on the event page.‘Brown Baby’ book talkOn Saturday at noon, the authors Mira Jacob and Nikesh Shukla will discuss Mr. Shukla’s new memoir “Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home.”R.S.V.P. for the free event on Zoom or watch the livestream on YouTube.It’s Friday — embrace it.Metropolitan Diary: Sketching Dear Diary:I was prone to forgetting at least one important thing — wallet, phone, keys — when I went out, but I always remembered to bring along a notebook and pen.On days when my headphones were what I had left behind, I shortened my long commute to my job as a nanny on the Upper West Side by sneakily sketching my fellow train passengers.Those who were asleep were ideal subjects; those who were awake would inevitably ruin the pose as soon as they become aware of what I was doing.Once, a few years ago, I was on the D train a when I noticed a young man who was sketching an older woman across from him as she snored.Having a clear view of his profile, I took out my supplies and started to draw the artist as he drew. I felt strangely guilty, as if I were violating his invisibility as a fellow train sketcher. Still, I couldn’t resist.With the train pulling into 34th Street, I scrambled to finish sketching his hair while he gathered his things before getting off. As he stepped out onto the platform, I tapped his shoulder and handed him the sketch.There was just enough time to watch him process what he was looking at: the frown from being touched by a stranger to the embarrassed laugh as he saw his face on the page.Then the doors closed, and we pulled away.— Lila EliasNew York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com.What would you like to see more (or less) of? Email us: [email protected] reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPacific Islands’ Most Important Megaphone Falls Into DiscordThe future of an 18-nation group is in doubt after Palau abandoned it over a leadership dispute.A photo released by the Australian prime minister’s office showing leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu in 2019.Credit…Adam Taylor/Australian Prime Minister’s Office, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFeb. 5, 2021, 3:43 a.m. ETSYDNEY, Australia — The Pacific Islands’ most important regional body is on the brink of collapse after a dispute over the election of a new leader led the nation of Palau to abandon the organization and announce the withdrawal of its embassy from Fiji.Other Micronesian countries may follow Palau out of the group, the Pacific Islands Forum, which could hinder momentum on addressing climate change. The forum has long been the region’s megaphone, shouting for action on the world stage as those who live on hundreds of islands are inundated by rising seas and pummeled by more catastrophic storms.“They’ve said in the past that the relationship in the Pacific is unique — it’s like a family,” said Jonathan Pryke, the director of the Pacific Islands Program at the Lowy Institute, an independent think tank in Sydney. “To have a family member leave altogether, it’s just a very bad sign.”The forum was founded in 1971 as a representative body for the South Pacific, then expanded in 1999 to include the North Pacific, and divisions within the 18-nation organization (now 17 and shrinking) are not uncommon. Fiji was suspended from the group after a coup in 2009, returning in 2015. Six years ago, a dispute about who would lead the group as its secretary-general was resolved only after a walk and a long talk among a handful of influential leaders.But this year, because of the pandemic, that was not possible. Covid kept the Pacific family apart: The annual forum was conducted over Zoom, and the dozens of in-person meetings that usually precede the gathering did not happen.Mr. Pryke said that lack of connection seemed to have contributed to the explosion of long-simmering frustrations.In general, the countries of Micronesia in the North Pacific — with smaller populations and economies — have complained of being sidelined by the larger countries to the south, including Fiji, New Zealand and Australia.To help manage that, the forum developed a tradition of rotating the secretary-general position among leaders from Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.This week, that protocol broke down into a heated free-for-all.A flurry of candidates emerged in early votes, and Thursday’s final election elevated a former prime minister of the Cook Islands, Henry Puna, to the role of secretary-general. In simple terms, it was Micronesia’s turn, but its candidate, Gerald Zackios, the Marshall Islands’ ambassador to the United States, lost the final tally by one vote.Publicly, the forum said its decision had been driven by strong support for Mr. Puna.Surangel Whipps Jr., Palau’s president, described the result as an act of disrespect.“The process regarding the appointment of the secretary-general has clearly indicated to the Republic of Palau that unity, regionalism and the ‘Pacific Way’ no longer guide the forum,” he said.Mr. Pryke at the Lowy Institute called the absence of consensus “a step backward” for the group, at a time when unity is especially important.“The Pacific is facing major existential crises, the foremost of which is climate change,” he said. “They have been vocal advocates worldwide, far above their size and stature, and it’s largely because of the unity you see in the Pacific — which appears to be rapidly unwinding.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

The congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have delivered emotional testimonies about the 6 January US Capitol breach on the House floor.  Ocasio-Cortez called for the House to avoid quickly moving on from the insurrection, saying it would diminish the impact on survivors and avoid accountability for those killed. Tlaib referenced the death threats she had received before she was sworn in and pleaded for the rhetoric that led to the attack to be taken seriously More