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    Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

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    In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world. That’s why every year, the bureau prepares congressionally mandated human rights reports.In its early years, it struggled to defend its existence. Foreign governments resented being called out in its annual reports and attacked its legitimacy. Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.These tensions have not disappeared. But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” will hamstring my former agency’s capacity to uphold its mission in three major ways.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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      I used to laugh at my Chilean father’s paranoia about life in the US – not any more

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      View image in fullscreen“Don’t open the door to nobody,” my father warned throughout my childhood – right up until the day he died. He trusted no politicians, no organized religion and definitely no strangers knocking unannounced.Lately, his words echo louder than ever.In California, where I teach at university, the year began with wildfires. They’re out now, but there is no containment for the political blaze sweeping through higher education. One after another, Donald Trump’s executive orders have scorched the landscape: slashing funding, silencing communication, terminating grants, capping research.Each one feeds the fire. As Trump remarked in his address to Congress, he’s “just getting started”.So between grading papers and making dinner, the real questions linger: will I still have a job next year? Will my department survive? Will my students be safe? Will my work be banned for using words like disability or inequality?These questions aren’t paranoid. They’re familiar.They’re the same kinds of questions my father asked himself in 1975 before fleeing Chile for the US, trading a brutal dictatorship for freedom.The speed and ease with which words like “purge”, “erasure” and “forced removal” have flooded our lexicon, crammed into news updates about attacks on minority groups and immigrants, brings to mind 11 September 1973.Though I wasn’t born yet, that day lives beneath my skin as one of Chile’s daughters. On that day, the military overthrew the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and ushered in a 17-year dictatorship under Gen Augusto Pinochet.View image in fullscreenThe new regime tortured and murdered thousands of Allende supporters. And because Pinochet feared free speech and a free press, public debate and intellectual freedoms, he specifically targeted writers, academics, students and artists.Authoritarian regimes always do.Now consider what’s happening today to those on Trump’s growing enemy list. This includes the recently detained Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, my alma mater. Trump hasn’t even tried to hide his desire for retribution; instead, he vowed that Khalil’s arrest would be the first of “many to come”.Since then, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has revoked 300 scholars’ visas and federal agents have detained at least a dozen students and professors, often without clarity on charges or alleged crimes other than protesting and speaking out.The case of the Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk– arrested in broad daylight by plainclothes Ice agents – stands out for me. Her only known offense was co-authoring an op-ed in the campus newspaper that criticized the university’s response to students’ demands to divest from companies with ties to Israel over the Gaza conflict.Some ideas are now deemed so dangerous they must be erased, free speech be damned.View image in fullscreenWith the thought police now in full force in my country – our country – I can’t help but think of the killing of Víctor Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter often dubbed the Bob Dylan of Chile. His curly hair, olive skin and Mapuche features so resemble my father’s that I tear up watching black-and-white performances of El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (The Right to Live in Peace).Born into an impoverished peasant family and a fierce supporter of working-class and Indigenous people, he threaded their stories into song. “We’ve had enough of that music that doesn’t speak to us, that entertains us only for a moment, but leaves us empty,” he said. “We began to create a new kind of song. It was music that was born out of total necessity.”Jara was closely aligned with Allende’s leftist Popular Unity coalition, even rewriting the lyrics to its anthem, Venceremos (We Shall Prevail), which made him a prime target for the opposition.Like many workers, Jara responded to Allende’s call on the morning of 11 September to occupy their workplaces in defiance of the unfolding coup. As a professor at the State Technical University, he went to campus. Despite a strict curfew – anyone found on the streets risked being shot – hundreds of students and faculty sought refuge in university buildings, which were later shelled by tanks and raked with machine gun fire.A survivor, Osiel Núñez Quevado, recalled in a documentary: “Without absolutely no warning, they began machine-gunning the university’s central building. They got everybody out, putting professors and students on the floor with hands on their heads. There among them, was Víctor.”Pinochet’s forces found Jara’s message so threatening that when he was identified among the prisoners brought to Estadio Chile – the stadium later turned into a detention center and renamed to honor the singer’s memory – he was singled out for torture in an especially cruel way.Soldiers broke his hands and wrists, then taunted him to play his guitar and sing. Badly beaten and bloodied, in the two hours before his death he secured a pen and paper from a friend and gathered the strength to write his final song, Estadio Chile.He defiantly performed Venceremos before his captors killed him with a gunshot to the head, further riddling his body with 44 bullet wounds before dumping his corpse in the street.View image in fullscreenSuch brutality, forever seared into the consciousness of Chileans like my father, has shaped generations across national borders, thousands of miles, and decades. The ghosts of a decimated democracy haunted Dad’s nightmares, and they continue to haunt me.When I turned 18, my father actively discouraged me from voting, fearing that my name could end up on a list used against me one day, that I could be killed like one of los desaparecidos – the thousands of Chileans who were abducted by state forces during Pinochet’s rule, never to be seen again.The deeper I dig into history, the more parallels I uncover between then and now.I recently learned about Chile’s failed coup in June 1973, which eerily resembles the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. Riding on growing discontent within the military, Lt Col Roberto Souper launched an unsuccessful attempt against Allende. Though poorly coordinated, it served as a kind of dress rehearsal, helping the military understand the conditions necessary for success in a future attempt.The commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, Gen Carlos Prats, helped squelch the rebellion. But by August, having lost the military’s support, Prats resigned and personally recommended his replacement: his second-in-command, Pinochet. (The following year, while in exile, Prats and his wife Sofía were killed in a car bombing in Buenos Aires, carried out by Chile’s secret police.)Pinochet swiftly pardoned those arrested during the failed coup attempt – mostly men from various branches of the military – and assigned them to guard the Estadio Nacional, where so many were tortured and killed.The similarities are impossible to ignore: a failed insurrection, full pardons for the perpetrators, and ensuing vengeance.As the attorney Almudena Bernabéu observes, “Dictatorial regimes are fueled by arrogance and by the ability to deny that their power will ever end.”View image in fullscreenEmboldened and once again in power, Trump’s ire threatens most of the American public, save for a small segment of wealthy oligarchs.And just as in Chile, where poverty soared in the dictatorship years, the most vulnerable Trump voters will suffer most from rising prices and cuts to crucial social safety net programs.Allende’s wide-ranging platform had promised to alleviate extreme inequality, at a time when 28.5% of Chileans lived in poverty. He had pursued a number of reforms including increasing wages, providing free milk to poor children and nationalizing the copper industry. He won a close race, after having garnered nearly 37% of the vote, partly thanks to worker and peasant turnout.But his victory came at a time of extreme political polarization and foreign interference. The National Security Archive contains a trove of documents exposing the US government’s efforts to eradicate the perceived communist threat by attempting to prevent Allende’s win and then undermining his presidency with anti-leftist propaganda and economic encroachment to destabilize the country.Severe inflation and scarcity had left people like my father – an intended beneficiary of Allende’s policies – disgruntled. His frustrations help me understand the deep dissatisfaction and distrust felt by the large swathes of midwestern voters who supported Trump.Dad had never graduated from high school. He had toiled in nitrate mines in the Atacama desert, loaded cargo on ships, hauled trash in buildings – dirty jobs that left his hands calloused and his psyche bruised – eventually securing a union job as an elevator operator and later doorman.He would often recount his dissatisfaction with Allende, given long food lines and the exorbitant prices for black market goods, and had been especially stung by the indignity of a waiter at a “nice” restaurant handing him newspaper to wipe his hands instead of napkins.Between the lack of economic opportunity, especially for those like Dad born into the working class, and the violence and repression during the dictatorship, my father emigrated in 1975. He joked: “I left because I wanted to be rich.”Chile’s right wing capitalized on growing discontent, organizing the 1971 protest March of Empty Pots and Pans, which, according to a CIA memorandum, “drew more support from angry Chilean housewives than had been anticipated even by the sponsors”.View image in fullscreenArtists, writers and intellectuals continued to offer Allende strong support, including Chile’s celebrated poet Pablo Neruda, his friend and adviser. Neruda died just 12 days after the coup, before he could seek refuge in Mexico, prompting the recently confirmed speculation that he had been poisoned.This is Pinochet’s legacy: layers and layers of horrific secrets that are still being unveiled, which might explain why Dad urged me never to vote for fear of being tracked down.I had the privilege, then, of laughing off such worries. “Don’t be paranoid, Dad. They don’t keep track of who you voted for here,” I said, explaining secret ballots. He wasn’t convinced.Suddenly, Dad doesn’t seem so paranoid any more.I’ve never been good at keeping my big mouth shut. My father was a masterly kvetcher and, as a New Yorker, I consider complaining my birthright. While I enjoy commiserating as a way to connect with others, my griping also helps me search for answers, question what we take for granted, and untangle vexing puzzles.Perhaps naively, I once believed tenure would grant more academic freedom – that our right to dissent would be protected. But as we slide toward authoritarianism, the train’s moving in reverse. Instead of my horizon expanding as I near that milestone, I feel the walls closing in.Earlier in my career, when I voiced doubts, a mentor wisely cautioned: “You don’t want to twist yourself into a pretzel for a job you don’t want any more.” How far will we twist, bend, compromise, modify, avoid – or hide? One of my personal heroes, the photographer Bill Cunningham, memorably declined food and drink while working events, explaining: “Money is the cheapest thing. Liberty is the most expensive.” What price are we willing to pay for an academic job?I inherited many things from my father – his hazel eyes, his acid reflux, his politics of fear – and his stubbornness. I’ve come too far to hide now. I spent years ashamed of my socioeconomic background and ethnic surname, but I’ve come to see that what once made me feel like an outsider also sharpened my tools – especially the way I observe the world as a sociologist.And I’ve gained a deeper respect for my father’s distrust. He never returned to Chile, yet despite the pain bound up in that homeland, he held on to a fierce love for it –he never burned the bridge back. That bridge may one day provide me with an escape route, thanks to my eligibility for Chilean residency through him.Dad’s lifelong fear kept him metaphorically sleeping with one eye open, always listening for danger in the distance. Now, it’s helping me prepare for a new era of terror. I will still vote. I will still speak my mind – because he often couldn’t. But I’m no longer naive about the repercussions.Lately, I’ve caught myself practicing the words: “I was once a college professor.” It’s been a meaningful ride, but if it ends, so be it. I’d rather say, “I used to be a college professor” than “I once stood up for my beliefs and values.” Because what good is all this education if I haven’t learned the most important lesson?In that case, I might as well light the match myself.

      Stacy Torres is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America.
      Spot illustrations by Angelica Alzona. More

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      Want to beat authoritarianism? Look to Latin America | Greg Grandin

      by

      Inspiration on how to beat back authoritarianism is in short supply, but those searching for hope in these dark times might consider Latin America.It’s not the first place that comes to mind when thinking about democracy, associated as it is with coups, death squads, dictatorships, inequality, drug violence and now a country, El Salvador, offering itself up to Donald Trump as an offshore prison colony for deportees.It is a bleak place in many ways, especially for the jobless and the poor who flee their home countries in search of a better life somewhere else, often in the United States. The bleakness, though, only highlights the paradox: for all its maladies, for all its rightwing dictators and leftwing caudillos, for all its failings when it comes to democratic institutions, the region’s democratic spirit is surprisingly vital.Other areas of the world emerged broken from the cold war, roiled by resource conflicts, religious fundamentalism and ethnic hatreds. Think of the bloody Balkans of the 1990s or 1994’s Rwandan genocide.Not Latin America, where, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, most of its anti-communist dictatorships had given way to constitutional rule. With the jackboot off their necks, reformers went on the offensive, seeking to redeem not just democracy but social democracy.Today, in the United States at least, the concept of democracy is generally defined minimally, as comprising regularly held elections, a commitment to due process to protect individual rights, and institutional stability. But earlier, in the middle of the last century, a more robust vision that included economic rights prevailed – that indeed the second world war was fought not just against fascism but for social democracy. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to say. Reporting from Europe in late 1945, William Shirer described a groundswell demand for social democracy, in an article headlined: Germany is finished, communists distrusted, majority wants socialism.Latin America joined in the demand, and by 1945 nearly every country understood citizenship as entailing both individual and social rights. Latin Americans broadened classical liberalism’s “right to life” to mean a right to a healthy life, which obligated the state to provide healthcare. “Democracy, political as well as social and economic,” wrote Hernán Santa Cruz, a childhood friend of Salvador Allende and a Chilean UN delegate who helped Eleanor Roosevelt draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “comprises, in my mind, an indivisible whole”.That whole was shattered to pieces by the death-squad terror of the cold war, much of it patronized by Washington, followed by the free-market neoliberal economics pushed on Latin America during that war.Yet once the repression abated and citizens were free to vote their preference, they began to elect social democrats as presidents, men and women who represented a variety of historical social movements: feminists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, Indigenous rights campaigners, heterodox economists, environmentalists and liberation theologians. Today, a large majority of Latin Americans live in countries governed by the center left. Despite the best efforts of Friedrich von Hayek and his libertarian followers in the region to convince them otherwise, most Latin Americans do not believe that welfare turns citizens into serfs.Pankaj Mishra, in his survey of the horrors inflicted on Palestinians, has written about the “profound rupture” in the “moral history of the world” since 1945. No region has done more to heal that rupture than Latin America.And no region has had as much experience beating back fascists, long after the second world war had ended, than Latin America. Rightwing authoritarians, gripped by the same obsessions that move Trump supporters in the United States, have some momentum, though they haven’t been able to escalate occasional electoral victories, including in Argentina and Ecuador, into a full-on continental kulturkampf.Center-left democrats hold the right at bay by putting forth an expansive social-democratic agenda, one flexible enough to include demands for sexual and racial equality. As the US rolls back abortion rights, momentum in Latin America moves in the other direction – Argentina, Mexico and Colombia either decriminalizing or legalizing abortion. Gay marriage and same-sex civil unions have been recognized in 11 countries.Spasms of ethnonationalist rage gripped much of the world the 1990s – Indonesia’s 1998 anti-Chinese rampage, for example. In contrast, Indigenous peoples in countries including Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Guatemala burst into politics as the best bearers of the social democratic tradition, adding environmentalism and cultural rights to the standard menu of economic demands. Today, many countries have retreated behind an aggrieved nationalism. For the most part, Latin Americans have not. Their reaction to the depredations of corporate globalization is rarely expressed in xenophobic, antisemitic or conspiratorial tropes, as a struggle against “globalists”. Nationalism in Latin America has long been understood as a gateway to universalism.Frontline activists stand unbowed before police batons and paramilitary guns. In 2022, Latin America clocked the world’s highest murder rate of environmental activists. Unionists, students, journalists, and women’s and peasant rights activists are assassinated at a regular clip. Yet organizing continues. In Brazil during the four-year presidency of the Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), the Landless Workers’ Movement, already the largest social movement in the world, grew even larger.When it comes to interstate relations, Latin America is one of the most peaceful regions. There is no nuclear competition, thanks to one of the most successful arms control treaties in history, the 1967 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.In 1945, Latin American diplomats drew on their long history in opposing Washington’s interventionism to play a key role in founding the liberal multilateral order, the global system of governance now upended by Trump. Most importantly, the region’s leaders insisted that nations should be organized around the premise of cooperation, not competition, that diplomacy should be used to settle differences, and that war should be a last resort. Their post-cold war counterparts have loudly defended these principles, first against George W Bush during the war on terror, and more recently against Joe Biden and Trump, insisting that the art of diplomacy must be relearned. “Brazil has no enemies,” the country’s defense minister once said, notable considering that the Pentagon has marked out the entire globe as a battlefield.Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, among others, have criticized the return to power politics and balance-of-power diplomacy. If the past teaches anything, they say, it is that opening a belligerent multi-front balance of power – with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, with all countries, everywhere, angling for dominance – will lead to more confrontation, more war. As with the United States’s shapeshifting, amorphous domestic culture war, there is no clear endgame to this new era of militarized economic competition, of war by proxy and privateer, which only increases the odds of conflict spinning out of control.One need not romanticize Latin America. To recognize the strength of the social democratic ideal in Latin America does not require one to celebrate all those who call themselves socialists, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, for example. And even those we might celebrate, such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum or Chile’s Gabriel Boric, preside over states loaded with significant amount of repressive power, often directed at some of their country’s most vulnerable, such as Mapuche activists in southern Chile.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut there is no other region of the world that so persistently continues to insist on taking the Enlightenment at its word, whose leftwing politicians and social movements win by advancing a program of universal humanism. Trump has transformed the United States government into a predator-state, a tormenter of citizens and non-citizens alike. Latin American social democrats – Lula in Brazil and Mexico’s Sheinbaum, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Petro in Colombia, among others – do what they can to use state power to fulfill an obligation: the ideal that all people should live in dignity.The forcefulness in which Latin American leaders such as Lula and Sheinbaum defend social rights contrasts with the timidity of the Democratic party. Biden did pass legislation suggesting it was breaking with the old neoliberal order. But Biden’s team couldn’t find its voice, unable to link a reinvestment in national industry with a renewed commitment to social citizenship. Democrats are shrill in denouncing Trump’s extremism even as they are timid in offering an alternative.Confronted with a existential crisis that people feel in their bones, the Democratic party puts forth weak-tea fixes in an enervating technocratic jargon, its counselors saying the lesson of Kamala Harris’s loss is that the party has to think even smaller, has to shake off its activist constituencies and move to the center.A recent op-ed in the New York Times urged Democrats to lay out their own Project 2029, to counter the conservative thinktank Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025. What did the author of the op-ed believe should be in this new project? A call for national healthcare? No. Affordable housing? No. Paid vacations, universal childcare or an increase in the minimum wage? None of that. He suggested that the Democrats promise to streamline regulations and improve “the quality” of “customer-service interactions”.Woodrow Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s would-be governing liberals in the United States imagine nothing. They treat the promise of a humane future – or of any future at all – like a weight from the past, hard to bear, easy to toss aside.Democrats in the United States can’t simply mimic social democrats in Latin America; they operate in vastly different political contexts. But Latin America is a useful mirror, reflecting the considerable distance Democrats in the US have drifted from New Deal values. They might want to read Roosevelt’s Faith of the Americas speech, where he said that the best way to defuse extremism was to use government action to ensure “a more abundant life to the peoples of the whole world”.Latin America social democrats today – and not the Democratic party in the United States – are the true heirs of FDR’s vision. They know that if democracy is to be something more than a heraldic device, it must confront entrenched power. Latin American reformers know that the way to beat today’s new fascists is the same as it was in the 1930s and 1940s: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising, in a voice simple, clear and sure, to improve the material conditions of people’s lives.“People have to have hope again,” as Lula put it in his most recent successful run for re-election, “and a full belly, with morning coffee and lunch and dinner”.What’s giving me hope nowWhat gives me hope is that in a place like Latin America, where the forces of reaction are so fierce, social movements led by feminists, peasants, first peoples, and gay and trans activists continue to fight back against fierce repression with enormous courage. Political theorists like to measure “democracy” according to institutional stability and free elections, and by that standard, many places in Latin America come up short. But if we measure democracy by courage, by a tenacity to continue to fight for universal, humane values, for a more sustainable, more equal, more human world, then Latin America carries forward the democratic ideal.

      Greg Grandin, the C Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale, is the author of the recently published, America, América: A New History of the New World, from which parts of this essay were based. More

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      Chile Declares Curfew as Power Outage Sweeps Across Country

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      President Gabriel Boric said electricity was being restored, but the situation remained unstable. Chile’s government imposed a curfew and declared a state of emergency in response to a sweeping blackout that cut electricity to most of the country including the capital, Santiago, on Tuesday.The massive outage, which began in the afternoon, affected eight million households across the country, from the northern port city of Arica to Los Lagos in the country’s south, officials said. In Santiago, it knocked out traffic lights, stranded people in elevators and shut down the subway network.Hours later, the government announced a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the regions affected by the outage. Schools in those regions will be closed on Wednesday, with about 300,000 students affected, officials said.“Today has been a difficult day for millions of countrymen,” Gabriel Boric, the president, said at a news conference on Tuesday night.By late Tuesday, power had been restored to about four million households, Mr. Boric said. But he warned that the recovery was slow and unstable, and the situation remained precarious.He blamed the country’s power companies for allowing the outage to occur and for not restoring power earlier, adding, “This is outrageous.” The outage was caused by failure of a transmission system, officials said.Soldiers and national police officers were sent to affected regions, officials said, and in Santiago, helicopters circled above the city.Emergency services, hospitals, prisons and airports across the country were operating on backup electricity systems and generators, the national disaster agency said.John Bartlett More

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      California city partners with US border patrol to surveil beach for migrant boats

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      Leaders of the southern California city of San Clemente, located about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, are partnering with US Customs and Border Protection to place surveillance cameras along the city’s beach to detect boats carrying passengers attempting to enter the country without authorization.At a Tuesday gathering of the town’s city council, members ordered city manager Andy Hall to begin coordinating with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).Mayor Steven Knoblock – a Republican who was elected in November on a public safety platform – told the Los Angeles Times the cameras are intended to spot fishing boats, called pangas, attempting to dock on San Clemente’s shores and to lower crime rates.“People have observed pangas crammed with illegal aliens, hitting our beach, and then scattering in the community or jumping into a van, which is parked nearby and ready to receive them,” Knoblock told the LA Times.He added: “San Clemente has had significant crime issues with the sophisticated Chilean burglary rings hitting our neighborhoods on a very systematic basis and continues to be a problem.”The state of California has prohibited law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities since 2017, when the state passed its “sanctuary state” law in an effort to prevent mass deportations during the first Trump administration. After Donald Trump’s victory in the November 2024 election, Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom gathered lawmakers for a special legislative session to “Trump-proof” the state. But since wildfires devastated much of southern California, the state is now seeking federal aid to rebuild.Before San Clemente city council members voted to collaborate with CBP on the camera initiative, the city had been considering joining a lawsuit against the state’s sanctuary law.San Clemente will not technically be violating the sanctuary state law by coordinating with CBP. The law specifically prevents law enforcement from cooperating with CBP, but San Clemente does not have its own police force. Instead, the city will work directly with border patrol.Knoblock has proposed installing cameras that operate 24/7 and cover about 7 miles of territory.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’m recommending the cameras being aimed oceanward with a rotating telescopic lens and thermal imaging for night viewing,” Knoblock told the LA Times. “This additional visibility will hopefully provide interdiction prior to [migrants] hitting our beaches.”City officials are also considering ways to open access to the footage to the public.This is not Knoblock’s first time challenging California sanctuary laws. As a city council member in 2022 he sponsored a measure calling for California to become a “sanctuary city for life” – in contrast with California’s laws permitting abortion.Nor is it the first time a California city has challenged the state’s sanctuary law for immigrants. In December, the San Diego county sheriff said she would cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement despite state laws prohibiting such activity. More

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      Can Artificial Intelligence Rethink Art? Should it?

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      There is an increasing overlap between art and artificial intelligence. Some celebrate it, while others worry.The skeleton seems to be at the epicenter of a mystifying ritual.In a new work by the French artist Pierre Huyghe, robots powered by artificial intelligence film the unburied remains of a man, and periodically position objects next to it in a ceremony that only they seem to understand. The scene takes place in the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the planet’s oldest and driest deserts.“Camata” is on view at the Punta della Dogana – Pinault Collection exhibition space, in a show concurrent with the Venice Biennale (through Nov. 24). It’s a stirring example of the increasing overlap between art and artificial intelligence, or A.I.Those two vowels, placed side by side, seem to present a menace to many disciplines whose practitioners risk being replaced by smart and autonomous machines. Humanity itself could, at some future point, be replaced by superintelligent machines, according to some globally renowned thinkers and philosophers such as the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and Stephen Hawking.So why are artists dabbling with A.I.? And do they risk being extinguished by it?“There’s always been an attraction, on the part of artists, for chance: something which is beyond your own control, something that liberates you from the finite subject,” said Daniel Birnbaum, a curator who is the artistic director of the digital art production platform Acute Art and a panelist at the Art for Tomorrow conference here this week convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation with panels moderated by New York Times journalists.Birnbaum said that Huyghe was among the artists who — rather than “overwhelming us with A.I.-generated nonsense from the internet” — are interested in exploring “places where nature and artificiality merge,” and where “biological systems and artificial systems somehow collaborate, creating visually strange things.”In the world at large, Birnbaum acknowledged, there were “frightening scenarios” whereby artificially intelligent systems could control decisions made by governments or the military, and pose grave threats to humanity.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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      A New Search for Ripples in Space From the Beginning of Time

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      The universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago. What happened in that earliest moment is of intense interest to anyone trying to understand why everything is the way it is today.“I think this question of what happens at the beginning of the universe is a profound one,” said David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports research at the frontiers of mathematics and science. “And what is remarkably exciting to me is the fact that we can do observations that can give us insight into this.”A new $110 million observatory in the high desert of northern Chile, $90 million financed by the foundation, could uncover key clues about what happened after the Big Bang by looking at particles of light that have traveled across the universe since almost the beginning of time.The data could finally provide compelling corroboration for a fantastical idea known as cosmic inflation. It holds that in the first sliver of time after the universe’s birth, the fabric of space-time accelerated outward to speeds far faster than the speed of light.Alternatively, the observatory’s measurements could undercut this hypothesis, a pillar in the current understanding of cosmology.The observatory is named after the foundation and its founders: Jim Simons, the hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist who died on May 10, and his wife, Marilyn, a trained economist. Two of the four telescopes began taking measurements in April, in time for Dr. Simons’s 86th birthday on April 25.Traces of Ancient LightAn illustration shows how light from the early universe might have been polarized by the push and pull of gravitational waves as the universe expanded. The Simons Observatory will search for evidence of this polarization. More