Elections

Fake versions of popular drugs used for weight loss are putting people at risk.Experts have grown increasingly concerned about fake versions of Ozempic and popular weight loss drugs. These copycats can look deceptively real, and may contain dangerous substances or entirely different drugs altogether.In June, the World Health Organization warned that fake batches of Ozempic were found in the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil. Also in June, Eli Lilly issued a letter expressing concern that counterfeit versions of its own drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, were being sold online, through social media and at medical spas. Those who study the counterfeit drug market say these findings are alarming, but not all that surprising. The drugs are expensive, often hard to find and highly sought-after.“Such high demand and short supply and such a desperate population — that’s a recipe for disaster,” said George Karavetsos, a former director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations.As a result, a counterfeit market has emerged, with phony drugs sold online at low prices without a prescription or any contact with a doctor. Some websites have storefronts to sell what they claim is semaglutide, the substance in Ozempic, which customers can add straight into an online shopping cart. The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy said it had identified thousands of websites illegally selling drugs like Ozempic, including fake versions. Patients often have no way to verify what’s in these products.Shabbir Imber Safdar, the executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, said he worried about both the rise of fake drugs and also the popularity of compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide, the substance in Mounjaro. These customized versions of drugs are made at compounding pharmacies and under best practices, contain ingredients that come from facilities registered with the F.D.A. But regulators have warned about adverse events linked to compounded semaglutide, and stressed that compounded medications are subject to less oversight than traditionally approved medications.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

Some major Democratic donors have told the largest pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, that roughly $90 million in pledged donations is now on hold if President Biden remains atop the ticket, according to two people who have been briefed on the conversations.The frozen contributions include multiple eight-figure commitments, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. The decision to withhold such enormous sums of money is one of the most concrete examples of the fallout from Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance at the end of June.Future Forward declined to comment on any conversations with donors or the amounts of any pledged money being withheld. A Future Forward adviser would say only that the group expected contributors who had paused donations to return once the current uncertainty about the ticket was resolved.Separately, one donor to the group described being approached multiple times by Future Forward since the debate for a contribution, but said he and his friends had been “holding off.”The two people briefed on the frozen pledges declined to say which individual donors were pulling back promised checks, which were estimated to total around or above $90 million. It was not clear how much of the pledged money was earmarked for Future Forward’s super PAC versus its nonprofit arm, which has also been running advertising in key battleground states.The cash freeze comes as some advisers around Mr. Biden are discussing how to persuade the president to exit the race, and as his campaign has begun to test Vice President Kamala Harris in head-to-head surveys of voters against former President Donald J. Trump. The number of congressional Democrats calling for Mr. Biden to step aside is growing by the day.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

In 1973, the first chapter of an unpublished novel was photocopied and passed around the Manhattan offices of Doubleday & Co. with a note. “Read this,” it dared, “without reading the rest of the book.”Those who accepted the challenge were treated to a swift-moving tale of terror, one that begins with a young woman taking a postcoital dip in the waters off Long Island. As her lover dozes on the beach, she’s ravaged by a great white shark.“The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water,” the passage read. “The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly.”Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, had circulated the bloody, soapy excerpt to drum up excitement for his latest project: a thriller about a massive fish stalking a small island town, written by a young author named Peter Benchley.Congdon’s gambit worked. No one who read the opening could put the novel down. All it needed was a grabby title. Benchley had spent months kicking around potential names (“Dark White”? “The Edge of Gloom”?). Finally, just hours before deadline, he found it.“Jaws,” he wrote on the manuscript’s cover page.When it was released in early 1974, Benchley’s novel kicked off a feeding frenzy in the publishing industry — and in Hollywood. “Jaws” spent months on the best-seller lists, turned Benchley from an unknown to a literary celebrity and, of course, became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s blockbusting 1975 film adaptation.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

Uruguay Coach Marcelo Bielsa lamented that the sport was surrendering its appeal in service to its business. He’s right. And also wrong.Barely lifting his eyes from the floor, Marcelo Bielsa started out with an elegy for what had been lost and ended with a lament for all that is to come. Lesser managers than Bielsa, Uruguay’s philosopher-coach, might have been preoccupied by the looming material reality of a Copa América quarterfinal with Brazil. Bielsa has always been more concerned by the ethereal.The picture he painted was emotional, heartfelt and midnight black. Soccer’s glory, he said, is that it was always free, a “popular property,” one of the few pleasures available even “to the poorest people.” Now, “the business” that has swallowed the game whole has wrenched it brutally from their grasp.“Soccer has more and more spectators but it is becoming less and less attractive,” he said. “What made this the best game in the world is not prioritized today. No matter how many people watch, if you do not make what they are watching pleasant, it will only benefit the business.”Bielsa’s vision of the future is more than bleak; it is ever so slightly apocalyptic. There will, he predicted, be fewer players who “deserve to be watched.” In turn, the game will be “less enjoyable.” As the spectacle diminishes, the “artificial” boom in spectators that has turned soccer into the global cultural phenomenon it has become will start to wither and fade.So forlorn, so dystopian was his worldview that it is only really possible to conclude one thing: As well as guiding a thrilling, and apparently extremely hands-on Uruguay team to the semifinals of the Copa América, Marcelo Bielsa has probably been watching a little too much of the European Championship.Marcelo Bielsa didn’t like what he saw from his sport this summer.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockWe 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

The Labour government, which took power this past week, said it had been forced into the move because previous Conservative administrations had let the issue fester.In one of its first big decisions, Britain’s new Labour government on Friday announced the early release of thousands of prisoners, blaming the need to do so on a legacy of neglect and underinvestment under the Conservative Party, which lost last week’s general election after 14 years in power.With the system nearly at capacity and some of the country’s aged prison buildings crumbling, the plan aims to avoid an overcrowding crisis that some had feared might soon explode.But with crime a significant political issue, the decision is a sensitive one and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, a former chief prosecutor, lost no time in pointing to his predecessors to explain the need for early releases.“We knew it was going to be a problem, but the scale of the problem was worse than we thought, and the nature of the problem is pretty unforgivable in my book,” Mr. Starmer said, speaking ahead of the decision while attending a NATO summit in Washington.There were, he told reporters, “far too many prisoners for the prison places that we’ve got,” adding, “I can’t build a prison in the first seven days of a Labour government — we will have to have a long-term answer to this.”Under the new government’s plan, those serving some sentences in England and Wales would be released after serving 40 percent of their sentence, rather than at the midway point at which many are freed “on license,” a kind of parole.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

The Choir of the French Army will join the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in Paris to show support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.When President Emmanuel Macron of France refused in February to rule out sending Western troops to Ukraine, he shattered a taboo and spooked his NATO allies. But five months later, his statement looks more like a provocation than a promise, and the idea of French boots on the ground seems a distant prospect.There are other ways, however, that France’s military can aid the Ukrainian cause.In a Paris church on Friday, 30 members of the Choir of the French Army will lend their voices to a free concert to honor Ukraine’s fighting spirit.“We are here on a mission,” said the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson during a recent rehearsal for the concert, “a mission to support Ukraine, on the artistic and cultural front.”Then she led the singers of the all-male military choir, joined by 30 female members of a Ukrainian vocal ensemble, through a rendition of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the famous “Ode to Joy.” The massed voices soared in the echoing space.At Friday’s concert, Wilson, a Canadian with Ukrainian roots, will conduct the singers alongside the 74-musician Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in Saint-Eustache church. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the orchestra — some of whose members still live in the country at war — have been coming together each summer to perform across Europe, with Wilson conducting.The concert in Paris is the first stop on the orchestra’s third tour. The ensemble will perform with local choirs when it plays concerts in London, Poland and the United States, where it will perform in Washington and, on Aug. 1, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.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

Lingering worries about President Biden’s age could make Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia competitive, party operatives believe.As President Biden insists he will stay in the presidential race, Democrats are growing increasingly alarmed that his presence on the ticket is transforming the political map, turning light-blue states into contested battlegrounds.Down-ballot Democrats, local elected officials and party strategists say Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — all of which Mr. Biden won comfortably in 2020 — could be in play in November after his miserable debate performance last month.Some polls in these states suggest a tightening race between Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, with one showing a virtual tie in Virginia, which has not voted for a Republican for president since 2004, and another showing Mr. Trump squeaking ahead in New Hampshire, which has been in the Democratic column since 2000.On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report, a prominent elections forecaster, downgraded New Hampshire and Minnesota from “likely” wins for Mr. Biden to only leaning in his direction. And in a meeting at the White House last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico told Mr. Biden that she feared he would lose her state, according to two people briefed on her comments.The shakiness in the fringe battleground states is an alarming sign for Mr. Biden’s hopes in must-win contests that were already expected to be close, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. An expanding battleground map could force his campaign to divert resources away from the traditional swing states, where he has been falling further and further behind.But Mr. Biden has given no indication he is going anywhere, telling reporters at a high-profile news conference on Thursday that “I’m determined I’m running” and pushing back on his poor polling numbers.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

The fans flooded through the streets of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by the thousands, kept cool by mist machines in the 110-degree heat. A 30-foot-tall replica gold trophy towered over onlookers at the city’s center. For a moment, covered in beams of brightly colored light, a country defined by tradition looked futuristic.It was the inaugural Esports World Cup, a coming-out party for Saudi Arabia’s growing video game industry. As part of its plan to diversify its economy from oil, the Saudi government has said it will invest $38 billion in video games by 2030 through its Public Investment Fund, known as the P.I.F., a wealth fund that manages $700 billion.Crowds gathered for the opening ceremony of the tournament in Boulevard City, an entertainment and retail corridor in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Fireworks were part of the lavish opening ceremony.Visitors played with virtual reality headsets at a hall sponsored by Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, at the tournament venue.The wealth behind that commitment was on full display in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, this month, but the country’s influence in video games now extends far beyond its borders. In what has been a financially difficult year for the industry, which has seen mass layoffs, many of the world’s largest video game companies and influencers have quietly partnered with the oil-rich Saudis.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