Elections

Former President Donald J. Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an Internal Revenue Service inquiry uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Mr. Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.But when Mr. Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the I.R.S. has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.The first write-off came on Mr. Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.There is no indication the I.R.S. challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Mr. Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the I.R.S. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.The issues around Mr. Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the I.R.S. undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. The Times and ProPublica, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the I.R.S. would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.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 president offered strong support to Israel after Oct. 7 but has grown increasingly frustrated over the conduct of the war. “He has just gotten to a point where enough is enough,” a friend says.President Biden laid it out for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel long before letting the public know. In a conversation bristling with tension on Feb. 11, the president warned the prime minister against a major assault on the Gaza city of Rafah — and suggested that continued U.S. support would depend on how Israel proceeded.It was an extraordinary moment. For the first time, the president who had so strongly backed Israel’s war against Hamas was essentially threatening to change course. The White House, however, kept the threat secret, making no mention of it in the official statement it released about the call. And indeed, the private warning, perhaps too subtle, fell on deaf ears.Six days later, on Feb. 17, Mr. Biden heard from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. The president’s chief diplomat was calling from his blue-and-white government plane as he was flying home from a security conference in Munich. Despite the president’s warning, Mr. Blinken reported that momentum for an invasion of Rafah was building. It could result in a humanitarian catastrophe, he feared. They had to draw a line.At that point, the president headed down a road that would lead to the most serious collision between the United States and Israel in a generation. Three months later, the president has decided to follow through on his warning, leaving the two sides in a dramatic standoff. Mr. Biden has paused a shipment of 3,500 bombs and vowed to block the delivery of other offensive arms if Israel mounts a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah over his objections. Mr. Netanyahu responded defiantly, vowing to act even “if we need to stand alone.”Mr. Biden’s journey to this moment of confrontation has been a long and tortured one, the culmination of a seven-month evolution — from a president who was so appalled by the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7 that he pledged “rock solid and unwavering” support for Israel to an angry and exasperated president who has finally had it with an Israeli leadership that he believes is not listening to him.“He has just gotten to a point where enough is enough,” said former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a onetime Republican senator from Nebraska and a friend of Mr. Biden’s from their days together in Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration. “I think he felt he had to say something. He had to do something. He had to show some sign that he wasn’t going to continue this.”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

Russia’s latest offensive has expanded the battlefield along Ukraine’s northern border, and sent thousands of civilians fleeing to the closest large city.After all-night air raid alarms, a weary Kharkiv woke up Saturday morning to a heavy gray sky and the disconcerting news that the Russian Army continued to press its advance on nearby Ukrainian territory.All night, dull explosions from battlefields 40 miles away echoed across Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. On Saturday morning, a day after Russian forces seized several villages along the border and Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the area, the ghostly wail of air raid sirens continued to drift over the city’s deserted parks and long, empty boulevards.Thousands of people are fleeing the border areas and arriving at shelters in Kharkiv.Tetiana Novikova is one of them.Until Friday, she had spent her entire 55 years in Vovchansk, a small town near the Russian border. She was born there, married there, worked in a factory there and raised two children there.But the shelling became so terrifying that she and her family made the painful decision to abandon the home they had lived in for decades. On Friday evening, she arrived with her elderly parents, shaken, hungry and a bit lost, at a Kharkiv school that has been turned into a displaced persons’ reception center.The only people left in Vovchansk, Ms. Novikova said, “are the old and the disabled, and they can’t move.”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

Mothers have been exhausted since the beginning of time, but some difficulties are specific to the millennial generation.There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr. Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called.Dr. Casares, 42, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore., tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer. “But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” — who hadn’t picked up when the school called — “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’”In that moment, said Dr. Casares, the author of “Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You’re Meant to Be,” she related to a Taylor Swift lyric: “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve.”It has always been exhausting to be a mother, but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping. Boomer moms didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it. Generation X moms had to prove that they could do everything men could do — and then come home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were children of divorce, manifested an ironic detachment from their troubles and were prescribed Prozac to deal.And then came millennial moms, the women raised on “You go, girl!” in the 1980s and ’90s and who today are in their 30s and early 40s. On average, they enrolled in college in higher numbers than men, married later and delayed having children, sometimes to prioritize careers and other times because — with student debt and less wealth than previous generations — it felt impossible not to.Still, it seemed like some things had worked out in their favor. Perhaps they could juggle work and motherhood more successfully. Maybe their male partners, if they had them, would be more attuned to gender imbalances at home.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 competition’s organizers said that Swedish police were investigating the singer Joost Klein and that it would be inappropriate for him to take part in Saturday’s final.Just hours before this year’s Eurovision Song Contest final was scheduled to begin in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday, the glitzy singing competition was thrown into crisis after organizers banned the Netherlands’ entry from taking part.On Friday, the Dutch musician, Joost Klein, whose songs mix pop with hyperfast beats, did not appear for a scheduled rehearsal to perform his song “Europapa,” which was then among the favorites to win.Shortly afterward, the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the contest, said in a statement that it was “investigating an incident” involving the Dutch artist. On Saturday morning, a Swedish police spokeswoman said in an email that officers were investigating a man “suspected of unlawful threats” toward a Eurovision employee and had passed a file to prosecutors to consider charges.Eurovision organizers said in a new statement that it was Klein under investigation, and that “it would not be appropriate” for the musician to compete in Saturday’s final while a legal process was underway.The decision caused an immediate uproar among Eurovision fans on social media, many of whom were backing Klein to win.AVROTROS, the Dutch public broadcaster that picked Klein to represent the Netherlands at Eurovision, also objected to his disqualification. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the broadcaster said that Eurovision’s action was “disproportionate” and that it was “shocked by the decision.”“We deeply regret this and will come back to this later,” the spokesperson added. More

A little-known financial tool was the talk of the Milken Institute’s Global Conference.At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference this week, a little-known risky financial tool became the subject of a hot debate among Wall Street titans.Many private equity firms have quietly begun mortgaging their investment funds, piling leverage upon leverage. In other words, they’re taking out loans against the businesses they’ve already taken out loans to buy.At a time when dealmakers are desperate to raise new cash after the boom of the pandemic era, this mechanism — known as a net asset value loan — is allowing them to do it overnight.More P.E. firms are using the tool as they set out to raise their next funds, especially those confronting a hurdle during a slow period for dealmaking: They have yet to return cash to the limited partners they tapped for their last round.“We’re having unprecedented pressure from our L.P.s to send them cash,” Jonathan Sokoloff, the founder Leonard Green, said onstage at the Milken conference. “We’ll send you cash any way we can.”The big debate at Milken was whether private equity firms that are solving this problem with N.A.V.s are risking their future to buy some time with investors.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

Barbara Kingsolver’s debut, and a bad seed’s beginnings.Monika Chatterton/Connected Archives x KintzingDear readers,For the past few months I’ve been on a scavenger hunt. Where are the fully realized babies in fiction? I wasn’t after infants who are incidental to the plot; I wanted babies whose babyhood was essential to the story.I shouldn’t be surprised by this itch. It has been the year of the baby for my loved ones. Blink, and a friend’s little bundle of semi-consciousness has grown to the size of a koala. What’s going on in there, little guy?Look, babies freak me out. Whenever I’m around them I worry about doing something that will forever alter their lives, like holding a bottle at the wrong angle or making curse words sound cool. But I don’t see them exiting my life any time soon, and this is an irrational, unbiological fear that I’d like to overcome. Enter literary exposure therapy.My holy grail? A bouncing, gurgling Chekhov’s gun. If a baby appears in the first act, I expect it to start crawling by the last. I’m pleased to share the results of my spelunking: a can-do, women-run novel from Barbara Kingsolver and a deeply weird, overlooked British story that puts a baby’s existence into grotesquely brilliant prose. The children are our future; teach them well and let them lead the way.—JoumanaWe 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

On This Week’s Episode:For years, Majid believed that if he could testify in court about what happened to him when he was held in a secret C.I.A. detention center known as a black site, a judge and jury would give him a break. Finally, he got a chance to see if he was right.This is episode 8 of “Serial” season 4, a history of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp told by people who lived through key moments in its evolution.Max GutherNew York Times Audio is home to “This American Life.” New episodes debut in our app a day early. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More