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      Lebanese Residents of Baalbek Return to a Bombed-Out City

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      Tens of thousands of people who had fled the city of Baalbek returned to bombed-out restaurants, flattened apartment buildings and many of the dead still buried under the rubble.Hammers clanged against brick and metal as the residents of Baalbek set to work repairing their homes, desperate to restart their lives again.A day after a cease-fire ended Lebanon’s deadliest war in decades, tens of thousands of people who fled the violence had already returned on Thursday to the hard-hit city in the country’s east.Teenage girls snapped selfies in front of the ancient Roman temples. Excited young men on motorcycles performed doughnuts in the street, their back tires spinning up dust and shards of glass.But after weeks of pounding Israeli airstrikes, the scars were not easy to ignore: bombed-out restaurants, flattened apartment buildings, trees snapped like twigs. And many of the dead were still buried under the rubble, residents said.“I’m an old woman. I’m not affiliated with anyone. What did I do to deserve this?” said Taflah Amar, 79, as she swept debris from the front of her house, one of the few still standing on her street.“I’ve been crying all day,” she said.“What did I do to deserve this?” said Taflah Ammar, 79, at her home in Baalbek.Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesWe 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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      Why Mexico Is Eliminating Independent Watchdog Agencies

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      A vote in the country’s Senate has cleared the way to abolish seven independent organizations that provided oversight on issues such as public information and price fixing.Mexico’s Senate on Thursday night passed a sweeping proposal to dissolve several government-financed yet independent watchdog organizations, a move the president and her supporters said would help reduce corruption and waste. Critics have called it a step backward for transparency and regulation.The duties of most of the seven agencies, which provided oversight on a host of issues, such as public information requests and price fixing in the telecommunications, pharmaceutical and energy sectors, would be absorbed by other parts of the federal government, overseen by the president.Perhaps the most noteworthy of the agencies — the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data, known as INAI — would have its responsibilities divided among a handful of existing federal agencies.“The disappearance of these autonomous bodies represents a democratic setback,” the Mexican Association for the Right to Information, a nongovernmental group, said in a statement. The move, the group added, “weakens the mechanisms of control, transparency and protection of rights that have been built with great effort in our country.”The constitutional amendment dissolving the agencies is part of a series of far-reaching proposals pushed by the former Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, that are supported by his successor and mentee, Claudia Sheinbaum, and by their political party, Morena.In September, Mexico passed an amendment overhauling the country’s judiciary, which supporters of the proposal said was riddled with graft, influence-peddling and nepotism. Critics warned that the move, which will see nearly all Mexican judges elected rather than appointed, undermines judicial independence and politicizes the courts.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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      Canada Accuses Google of Creating Advertising Tech Monopoly

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      The case largely echoes an antitrust action in the United States and seeks to force Google to sell off sections of its online ad business.Canada’s competition authority on Thursday accused Google of abusing its tools for buying and selling online advertising to create a monopoly, and filed a complaint seeking to force the company to sell two of its main advertising technology services.The case strikes at the heart of Google’s business and echoes an ongoing U.S. antitrust lawsuit against the Silicon Valley giant.Both cases come amid four other lawsuits filed in the United States against Google since 2020 and other efforts by officials around the world to reign in the power that large technological companies like Google, Amazon and Apple hold over information and commerce online.Canada is also attempting to use new laws to limit harms caused by social media and to require tech companies to compensate traditional news organizations.In a statement, Canada’s Bureau of Competition Policy, a law enforcement agency, charged that Google has used its position as the largest provider of software for buying and selling ads, its marketplace for ad auctions and its services for showcasing the ads to illegally dominate the sector.The company’s conduct, it said, ensured that the Alphabet-owned Google “would maintain and entrench its market power,” adding that it “locks market participants into using its own ad tech tools, prevents rivals from being able to compete on the merits of their offering.”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 Inverted Morality of MAGA

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      I admire Mitt Romney. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father. He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples. He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor. As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney. In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him. In business he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector. As a politician he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to “extreme conservative.” As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.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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      Peggy Caserta, Who Wrote a Tell-All About Janis Joplin, Dies at 84

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      Her Haight-Ashbury clothing store was ground zero for the counterculture. But she was best known for a tawdry book — which she later disavowed — published after Ms. Joplin’s death.Peggy Caserta, whose funky Haight-Ashbury clothing boutique was a magnet for young bohemians and musicians, and who exploited her relationship with Janis Joplin in a much-panned 1973 memoir that she later disavowed, died on Nov. 21 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 84.Her partner and only immediate survivor, Jackie Mendelson, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.The Louisiana-born Ms. Caserta was 23 and working at a Delta Air Lines office in San Francisco when she decided to open a clothing store for her cohort, the lesbians in her neighborhood. She found an empty storefront on Haight Street, near the corner of Ashbury, which she rented for $87.50 a month.At first Ms. Caserta sold jeans, sweatshirts and double-breasted denim blazers that her mother made. Then she added Levi’s pants, which a friend turned into flares by inserting a triangle of denim into the side seams. When the friend couldn’t keep up with the orders, Ms. Caserta persuaded Levi Strauss & Company to make them.She named the place Mnasidika (pronounced na-SID-ek-ah), after a character in a poem by Sappho. “It’s a Greek girls’ name,” Ms. Caserta told The San Francisco Examiner in 1965, for an article about the “new bohemians” colonizing the Haight-Ashbury district.Ms. Caserta was 23 when she opened a clothing store, Mnasidika, in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.via Wyatt MackenzieWe 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 Team’s Rejection of a Transition Deal Adds a Wrinkle to Its Transparency Pledges

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      The president-elect’s team said it would disclose its donors’ names and not take donations from foreigners, but it isn’t legally bound to adhere to those promises.The refusal by President-elect Donald J. Trump’s team to sign a transition agreement with the General Services Administration means that, despite the team’s pledges to abide by several transparency customs of presidential handovers, it isn’t legally bound to follow through on its promises.Presidential transitions abide by a series of laws and norms that enable the outgoing administration to brief incoming officials with nonpublic information and to fund transition operations. Mr. Trump’s transition team, after forgoing the $7.2 million in government funds that the G.S.A. would have provided if they had reached an agreement, has promised to be transparent by disclosing the names of its donors and said it would not accept donations from foreigners. In an agreement with the White House, the transition team also released an ethics pledge, but the pledge may not be compliant with transition rules.Mr. Trump’s transition team released a statement this week saying the decision to opt for private funding alone saves taxpayer dollars.But the Trump team did not indicate when donors’ names would be made public, or if the amounts of their donations would also be released. If Mr. Trump’s team accepted the help of the G.S.A., donors would need to be disclosed within 30 days of the inauguration, which is set for Jan. 20. Past presidential transitions have also limited individual donations to $5,000, a cap that Mr. Trump’s team has not committed to. The G.S.A. would also have provided secure lines of communication and office space to conduct internal meetings.After initially missing an Oct. 1 deadline, Mr. Trump’s team this week signed an agreement with the White House that will begin formal briefings led by departing administration members. But Mr. Trump has continued to refuse to sign an agreement with the Justice Department that would allow the F.B.I. to run security checks for transition staff. Without clearances, Biden administration officials cannot share classified information with many transition team members.This week, Mr. Trump’s team published an ethics plan for its transition staff. Though President Biden’s staff accepted the plan in its agreement with Mr. Trump, the plan may run afoul of the Presidential Transition Act, which mandates that such plans detail how a president-elect himself will address his own conflicts of interest. Mr. Trump’s plan does not appear to do that.Representatives for the Trump transition team and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.“This engagement allows our intended cabinet nominees to begin critical preparations, including the deployment of landing teams to every department and agency, and complete the orderly transition of power,” Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s incoming chief of staff, said in the statement on Tuesday about the agreement with the White House.During his 2016 presidential transition, Mr. Trump signed the agreement with the G.S.A. By his inauguration, the transition had about 120 employees and disclosed $6.5 million in funds raised, as well as $2.4 million in reimbursements from the federal government.Ken Bensinger More

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      ‘The Agency’ Is a Slick and Pleasing Spy Drama

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      Based on the French show “The Bureau,” the new Showtime series stars Michael Fassbender as a spy who must readjust to life after living undercover.Pity the C.I.A. agents deploying their enhanced interrogation techniques, beating hostages and meddling; truly it is they who suffer. It’s hard work being a spy — but the hardest work of all is loving yourself.“The Agency,” beginning Friday on Paramount+ (and debuting on Showtime at 9 p.m. Sunday), is set mostly within the London office of the C.I.A., where one of the primo dudes (Michael Fassbender), code name “Martian,” has been abruptly yanked back from a mission in Ethiopia. He was undercover there for six years, living as Paul and falling in love with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), a Sudanese historian and political activist. He wasn’t ready for the mission to end, and he is definitely not ready for their relationship to end — but c’mon, what are a few bent rules in the interest of hot-people diplomacy?“This isn’t national security; this is personal,” Martian insists to his boss (Jeffrey Wright). “It’s the agency,” the boss bellows back. “Nothing is personal!” Ooooh!The series is based on the terrific French show “The Bureau,” and in the four episodes (of 10) made available for review, it deploys a lot of spy-show standards: the rookie to whom everything must be explained, the ambitious but naïve flunkies, the secretly cooperative foreign attaches, the higher-ups who seem institutional and out of touch until they drop some monologue wisdom on our heroes.Fassbender’s mesmerizing performance is the biggest draw here, giving viewers a real taste of what it’s like to love a liar. We’re never quite sure what his angle is, how much of his seemingly vulnerable moments are all part of the game. He finds an intriguing sparring partner in the agency’s therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris), with whom he is required to meet on account of how hard it is to reintegrate into real life after living undercover for so long. Other story lines for secondary and tertiary characters feel comparatively unmoored.But on the whole, it’s all very slick and overtly, pleasingly fancy-schmancy. The show’s reflective-surfaces budget alone puts some national G.D.P.s to shame. The London of “The Agency” is a pallid grayscape where even the mall is dreary, where real life is the same color as CCTV footage. Every move here is surveilled, and the show revels in that constant unease. As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. More

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      Everyone’s Going to the Book Bar

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      A glass of wine, a snack and a new book is about as good as it gets.Growing up, I was a voracious reader. I loved to crack open a book first thing in the morning and last thing at night. In second grade, I got in trouble for surreptitiously devouring “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” under my desk during other lessons because I couldn’t stand that my class was reading it one chapter at a time.After I went to college, though, other distractions crept in: the internet, peak TV, disposable income. But I’ve never stopped loving the idea of loving books — my apartment is filled with reading material for the day I rediscover the girl who was willing to risk her entire second grade education just to find out what happens next.I believe that a lot of people are trying to find their way back to a simpler time when nothing was more interesting then a new book, and along with that has come the rise of the book bar. These aren’t mere bookstores, they’re cafes, bars and restaurants that invite you to sit for a while and read with no concern about clearing out for the next patron, providing the “third place” we all so desperately crave.Book Club Bar may be the only book-focused spot that’s open until midnight on a weekday.Heather Willensky for The New York TimesWine and the newest releaseThe Lit. Bar in the Bronx, open since 2019, may be the most widely known example of the book-bar hybrid — the walls are lined with books and bottles of wine — but it’s hardly the only example anymore.Down in Alphabet City between Avenue A and Avenue B, there’s Book Club Bar, also open since 2019. Just past the long bar — emphasis on the bar, Book Club is open until midnight or 1 a.m. daily — there’s an entire bookstore filled with the latest releases, a cozy seating area and a sizable (for Manhattan) backyard, where I looked on with just a little of envy at the well-read patrons sipping wine, cocktails and coffee. (Note: Laptops are banned after 6 p.m. on weekdays and after noon on weekends.)The Lit. Bar, 131 Alexander Avenue (134th Street)Book Club Bar, 197 East Third Street (Avenue B)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