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      German Government at Risk of Collapse After Rift on Economy

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      A breakup of the divided and unpopular coalition well before elections set for next September could leave the country directionless at a critical time for Europe.Germany’s three-party coalition government, wracked by infighting and policy paralysis over a stagnant economy, is teetering on the brink of collapse.It does not look likely to last until the next scheduled elections in September 2025 and could fall imminently over a nasty budget debate that comes to a head this month, analysts say. The main political parties are already laying out their campaign positions, and coalition leaders are barely talking.The growing rift became more evident Friday evening, when a leaked position paper by the leader of one coalition party called for a fundamental economic overhaul that contradicts government policies, and is meant to cut costs.The 18-page economic paper was written by Christian Lindner, the leader of the pro-market liberal Free Democratic Party.Mr. Lindner wants to cut some social service payments, drop a special “solidarity tax” intended to help fund German reunification, and follow European Union climate regulations rather than more ambitious national ones — all demands that his coalition partners are highly unlikely to accept.After coalition parties lost votes in three state elections in September, Mr. Lindner warned that the coming months would become the “autumn of decisions.” And he has suggested that if the coalition did not work in his favor, his party could quit the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.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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      COP16 Talks in Colombia Adopt a Novel Way to Pay for Conservation

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      The meeting created a fund that would compensate countries for the use of genetic information.Diplomats from roughly 180 countries ended two weeks of environmental talks on Saturday after agreeing on a new fund that would shift some of the profits from nature’s DNA to global conservation efforts.The agreement calls for companies that make money from genetic information stored in databases, known as digital sequence information, to pay into a fund as a sort of fee for the use of biodiversity.Scientific advances have made it easier and cheaper for researchers to sequence genetic material. That means there are now vast amounts available in databases for pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biotechnology and other companies to analyze as they seek to develop new products.Delegates at the talks, known as COP16, shorthand for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, called the agreement an important breakthrough.“Conservation is mostly funded by governments and philanthropy,” said Amber Scholz, who leads the science policy department at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research institute that focuses on microbial and cellular biodiversity. “Now, businesses that profit from biodiversity will pay into a new fund.”The final declaration made the fund voluntary, saying that companies “should” contribute.The agreement lays out specifics on how much they should pay: 1 percent of their profits or 0.1 percent of their revenue, as a guideline. Governments are “invited” to take legislative or other measures to require companies to contribute.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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      Berkshire Continues Retreat From Stocks

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      The conglomerate reported on Saturday that it had cut its holdings in Apple and Bank of America and increased its cash to a record high in the third quarter.Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate headed by Warren E. Buffett, extended its retreat from stocks in the third quarter, cutting its holdings in Apple and Bank of America and increasing its cash to a record $325.2 billion.Berkshire also reported on Saturday a 6 percent decline in quarterly operating profit, largely the result of higher liabilities for its insurance companies, including for Hurricane Helene, and currency losses from a strengthening U.S. dollar.These costs offset improved profitability at the Geico car insurer, where accident claims and expenses fell. Profit also rose at the BNSF railroad, which shipped more consumer goods, and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, where operating expenses declined.In its quarterly report, Berkshire said it sold about 100 million of its Apple shares, or 25 percent, over the summer, ending with about 300 million shares.It has now sold more than 600 million Apple shares this year, though Apple remained Berkshire’s largest stock holding, at $69.9 billion.The sales represented a large portion of the $36.1 billion of stock, including several billion dollars of Bank of America shares, that Berkshire sold in the quarter.Mr. Buffett said in May that he expected Apple to remain Berkshire’s largest stock investment, but selling made sense because the 21 percent federal tax rate on the capital gains was likely to increase.Berkshire bought just $1.5 billion of stock in the quarter, the eighth straight quarter when it was a net seller of stocks.It also repurchased none of its own stock, suggesting that Mr. Buffett doesn’t view even his own company’s shares as a bargain.Operating profit from Berkshire’s dozens of businesses fell to $10.09 billion, from $10.76 billion a year earlier.Insurance underwriting profit fell 69 percent, hurt by rising claims, $565 million of losses from Helene and a bankruptcy court settlement related to the defunct talc supplier Whittaker Clark & Daniels. The costs more than offset a near doubling of underwriting profit at Geico. Berkshire also projected $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion in pretax losses in the fourth quarter from Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida in October.Net income for Berkshire totaled $26.25 billion compared with a loss of $12.77 billion a year earlier when falling stock prices reduced the value of Berkshire’s investments.Mr. Buffett has said operating results better reflect Berkshire’s performance. Accounting rules require Berkshire to report unrealized investment gains and losses when it reports net income, adding volatility that Mr. Buffett counsels investors to ignore.Mr. Buffett, 94, has led Berkshire since 1965, and is expected to eventually transfer leadership to Berkshire’s vice chairman, Greg Abel, 62.Berkshire, based in Omaha, owns and operates an array of businesses, including Berkshire Hathaway Energy, many industrial and manufacturing companies, a big real estate brokerage, and retail businesses like Dairy Queen, See’s Candies and Fruit of the Loom. More

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      Photographing Every President Since Reagan

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      Doug Mills reflects on nearly 40 years of taking photos of presidents.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Through his camera lens, Doug Mills has seen it all: George H.W. Bush playing horseshoes. An emotional Barack Obama. A shirtless Bill Clinton. And he’s shared what he’s seen with the world.Mr. Mills, a veteran photographer, has captured pictures of every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. His portfolio includes images of intimate conversations, powerful podium moments and scenes now seared into the American consciousness — like the face of President George W. Bush, realizing that America was under attack while he was reading to schoolchildren.Mr. Mills began his photography career at United Press International before joining The Associated Press. Then, in 2002, he was hired at The New York Times, where his latest assignment has been trailing former President Donald J. Trump. In July, Mr. Mills captured the moment a bullet flew past Mr. Trump’s head at a rally in Butler, Pa., and then a photo of Mr. Trump, ear bloodied, raising his fist.Over the past four decades, cameras and other tools have changed the job considerably, he said. While he once used 35mm SLR film cameras (what photographers used for decades), he now travels with multiple Sony mirrorless digital cameras, which are silent and can shoot at least 20 frames per second. He used to lug around portable dark rooms; now he can transmit images to anywhere in the world directly from his camera, via Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable, in a matter of seconds.But it’s not just the technology that has changed. Campaigns are more image-driven than ever before, he said, thanks to social media, TV ads and coverage that spans multiple platforms. Not to mention, it’s a nonstop, 24-hour news cycle. He likens covering an election year to a monthslong Super Bowl.“It consumes your life, but I love it,” Mr. Mills said. “I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”Mr. Mills, who on election night will be with Mr. Trump at a watch party in Palm Beach, Fla., shared how one image of each president he’s photographed throughout his career came together. — Megan DiTrolioWe 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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      Kemi Badenoch, New Leader of the U.K.’s Tories, Vows to Make the Party More Conservative

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      Ms. Badenoch is expected to move the party, now in the opposition, further to the right.Britain’s Conservative Party announced on Saturday that it had selected Kemi Badenoch as its leader, putting a charismatic, often combative, right-wing firebrand at the helm of a party that suffered a crushing election defeat in July.Ms. Badenoch, 44, whose parents were immigrants from Nigeria, becomes the first Black woman to head a party that has had three other female leaders — Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss. She succeeds Rishi Sunak, who became the first nonwhite British prime minister after taking over the Tories, Britain’s oldest party, in 2022.“It is the most enormous honor to be elected to this role, to lead the party that I love, the party that has given me so much,” a smiling Ms. Badenoch said to a group of Conservative Party members after being announced the winner. “I hope that I will be able to repay that debt.”There is no guarantee, despite her swift ascent, that Ms. Badenoch will ever get to 10 Downing Street. The Labour Party’s landslide victory gave it a huge majority in Parliament and the Tories face at least four years in opposition before the next election is due.While the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has gotten off to a shaky start, his party remains more popular than the Tories, who left voters frustrated and exhausted after 14 turbulent years in government.In a lively, occasionally bitter, leadership contest, Ms. Badenoch edged out Robert Jenrick, another former cabinet minister, by a vote of 53,806 to 41,388 among the party’s 130,000 or so dues-paying members (about 73 percent voted). She and Mr. Jenrick emerged as the two finalists in a multiple-round contest that left the members with an unexpectedly narrow choice of two candidates from the party’s right.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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      Amid Flood Cleanup in Spain, Residents Try to Make Sense of the Disaster

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      Some see the floods as an example of the effect of a changing climate that is making overwhelming downpours more common. Locals also say government warnings came too late.Mari Luz Sánchez’s body lay on top of an overturned refrigerator in a corner of her kitchen when her family found her. A wave of water in the village of Chiva, in southeastern Spain, had deposited her there after devastating flooding across the region on Tuesday night.“The torrent of water took her away,” said Ms. Sánchez’s daughter-in-law, Pilar Zahonero. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”Never had locals in Chiva seen their streets turn into such furious surges of muddy water that tore through their homes. Not in the 1983 floods, nor in the ones in 2019, had waves over six feet high trapped people inside their cars and homes and taken so many lives.“I’d never seen rain like this,” said Concepción Feijoo Martínez, 66, as she stood in her house in Chiva, which had been torn open on one side by the rushing waters let loose when a nearby river overflowed its banks.“They say there is no climate change,” she added. “Then what is this atrocity?”Residents cleaning a mud-covered house in Chiva on Thursday. Locals have never seen their streets turn into such furious surges of muddy water that tore through their homes.Kai Forsterling/EPA, via ShutterstockDays after their country’s deadliest natural catastrophe in recent decades, as they swept mud off their floors and mourned their dead, Spaniards started to try to make sense of the tragedy that had struck them: Why were the floods on such an enormous scale, and why did so many die?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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      In Pro Sports, as in the U.S., Political Support Is Divided

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      A pro-Harris video from LeBron James. A pro-Trump hat on Nick Bosa. With Election Day near, more have been showing their preference.Over the past eight years, the three top American sports leagues — the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Football League — have at times dived headlong into political maelstroms.In 2016, the N.B.A. moved its All-Star Game out of North Carolina to protest a state law that eliminated anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Baseball moved its All-Star Game out of Georgia in 2021 in reaction to the enactment of more restrictive voting rules. And in 2020, as President Donald J. Trump reiterated criticism of N.F.L. players who knelt during the national anthem, Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a statement supporting players’ right to peacefully protest and condemning “the systematic oppression of Black people.”During this presidential cycle, the leagues have stayed neutral, their only message being encouraging people to vote. However, many owners, players and coaches have opened up their wallets or their mouths in support of candidates. In recent days, the Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James announced his support of Vice President Kamala Harris, and the San Francisco 49ers defensive lineman Nick Bosa sported a hat with Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan on national TV.It was a show of how the professional sports world, just like the country, is divided by presidential politics.Jonathan Isaac, who plays for the Orlando Magic, and Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, have perhaps been the most vocally conservative active athletes in the three leagues. Mr. Butker was little known outside the N.F.L. until he gave a commencement address in May at Benedictine College, a conservative Roman Catholic school in Kansas, in which he said the women in the audience were probably more excited to get married and have children than they were about their degrees. He subsequently started a political action committee to support Mr. Trump.Mr. Isaac has been well known in conservative circles since he declined to join many other N.B.A. players in kneeling during the national anthem when the league restarted in a Covid “bubble” setting four years ago in Orlando, Fla. 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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      Fears of Civil Unrest Stalk the Markets

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      Wall Street advisers say investors are increasingly anxious about the possibility of election-related violence.Wall Street strategists say their meetings with portfolio managers have taken a dark turn lately. All but gone are investors’ fears of a hard landing, replaced by a deeper anxiety that things could go very badly around Election Day.Investors are not just concerned about their investment portfolios or retirement funds. They’re worried about democracy. As in … will it hold up if the result of the election between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is contested?“The general consensus is that, one, it will take time to find the winner — so we might have to wait for weeks until the many contests and court challenges have played out,” Joachim Klement, the head of investment strategy at the investment bank Liberum, told DealBook. “And two, no matter who wins, there will be civil unrest.”Klement spoke with DealBook shortly after wrapping up a multicity investor roadshow. He said investors were worried about violence: Intelligence agencies have issued bulletins warning of possible election-related violence, and voters, too, are on high alert, some polls show.Investor pessimism may reflect the race’s increasingly negative tone. One of Trump’s former chiefs of staff said Trump met the definition of a fascist. And Harris called him a “petty tyrant.”In turn, Trump punctuates his rallies with a litany of grievances and has made ominous threats to deploy the military against “radical left lunatics” and “the enemies from within.”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