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      Brazil Police Recommend Criminal Charges Against Bolsonaro

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      The federal police accused the former president of falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination records. Brazil’s federal police recommended former President Jair Bolsonaro be criminally charged in a scheme to falsify his Covid-19 vaccine card, partly to travel to the United States during the pandemic, in the latest sign of criminal investigations closing in on the former president.Federal prosecutors will now decide whether to pursue the case. If they do, it would be the first time the former president has faced criminal charges.Brazilian police accused Mr. Bolsonaro of ordering a top deputy to obtain falsified Covid-19 vaccination records for himself and his daughter, 13, in late 2022, just before the former president traveled to Florida to stay for three months following his election loss. Brazilian police said they were awaiting an answer from the U.S. Justice Department on whether Mr. Bolsonaro used a fake vaccination card to enter the United States, which could bring different criminal charges. At the time, most international visitors to the U.S. were required to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination to enter the country.Mr. Bolsonaro has said he did not receive the Covid-19 vaccine, but he has denied accusations that he was involved in any plan to falsify his vaccination records. His lawyer said in a text message that he was still reviewing the accusations.Mr. Bolsonaro, if convicted of forging his vaccine card, could face prison time.The federal police’s indictment is the first time the various investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro have moved toward charges. Mr. Bolsonaro has been subject to questioning and searches as part of several inquiries, including into the selling of watches and jewels he received as presidential gifts from Saudi Arabia and accusations that he worked with top government officials to hatch a plan to try to hold onto power following his 2022 election loss. Brazil’s electoral court has already ruled Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible for public office until 2030 for spreading false information about Brazil’s voting systems on state television, forcing him to sit out the next presidential contest in 2026.During the pandemic, Mr. Bolsonaro was critical of the Covid-19 vaccine, notoriously joking that it would turn people into alligators and instead promoting unproven treatments, such as an antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine. His administration hesitated to secure vaccines when they were first being distributed, exacerbating the pandemic in Brazil, according to a Brazilian congressional investigation that recommended the former president be charged with “crimes against humanity,” among other charges, for his actions during the pandemic. The prosecutor at the time did not charge him. Nearly 600,000 people died in Brazil because of Covid-19, the second-highest national death count after the United States.In May 2023, the police searched Mr. Bolsonaro’s home, confiscated his cellphone and arrested one of his closest aides and two of his security guards as part of the investigation into the fake vaccination records.Flávia Milhorance More

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      Assessing Donald Trump’s Claims That He Would Have Done Better

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      The war in Ukraine. Hamas’s attack on Israel. Inflation. The former president has insisted that none would have occurred if he had remained in office after 2020.Aside from falsely insisting that he did not lose the 2020 election, former President Donald J. Trump has peddled a related set of theories centered on one question: What would the world have looked like had he stayed in office?Mr. Trump, in rallies and interviews, has repeatedly asserted — more than a dozen times since December, by one rough count — that three distinct events, both in the United States and abroad, are a product of the 2020 election.“There wouldn’t have been an attack on Israel. There wouldn’t have been an attack on Ukraine. And we wouldn’t have had any inflation,” he declared during a rally in January in Las Vegas. The next month in South Carolina, he baselessly claimed that Democrats had admitted as much.Politicians routinely entertain what-ifs, which are impossible to prove or rebut with certainty. But Mr. Trump’s suppositions underscore the ways in which he often airs questionable claims without explanation and which might not be supported by the broader context.And unlike simply attacking an opponent’s record or making a campaign promise, such alternative realities enjoy the benefit of being untestable.“People already grapple with how to hold elected officials accountable,” said Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University who has researched campaign promises and accountability. “And what is super interesting here is that there’s no way to hold someone accountable at all, because there’s no way to measure any of 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

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      Does Everyone Want to Be on the ‘Mommy Track’?

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      When I caught up recently with Liz Koelsch, one of the moms that my friend Jessica Bennett profiled for our 2021 “primal scream” project — a look at motherhood during the pandemic’s peak — a lot had changed in her life. In the four years since Covid-19 was declared a national emergency, Koelsch, who was a single mom when we first met her, got married to a great guy. She completed an associate degree in paralegal studies. And she’s finally happy at work because she has moved to a job that is mostly remote and her boss is “all about time flexibility.”“I switched jobs so many times during Covid. I think I had five jobs because they just weren’t working for what was going on in my personal life,” Koelsch told me. Now, she works four days from home, one day in the office, and her life is manageable. “I can throw a load of laundry” in and “on my 15 minute break I can start soup and it’s ready by dinnertime. It’s this whole great way of living. I don’t want to give it up.” She and her new husband are trying for a child together. Remote work, and Washington State’s paid family and medical leave program, will make having another kid possible for her.When I followed up with a bunch of parents whom The Times heard from in 2020 and 2021 to find out how they’re faring these days, two topics came up most frequently. One was the negative effect of the increased volatility and outrageous expense of child care (which I wrote about on Wednesday). The other was a new flexibility, for many, around work. Parents who have increased opportunities to work remotely, or even just managers who are more understanding about their caregiving commitments, told me that these were largely positive changes in their lives.Reading through the responses of parents who said that more flexible work situations had improved their lives made me realize that a lot of the framing of the return-to-office discourse has missed the point. I’ve seen a fair number of headlines over the past few years like this one, “WFH Goes From New Path to Dead End for Working Mothers,” and this one, “‘You Are Mommy Tracked to the Billionth Degree,’” suggesting that for ambitious moms, working from home is a mistake.But while it may be more challenging for some moms to advance if they choose to work from an office less frequently (though I’m optimistic that will change over time as remote work is normalized), what I’m hearing these days from many mothers — and fathers — is that climbing the ladder is not top of mind. With those mommy-track headlines, it’s also worth remembering that working remotely isn’t just a corporate mom thing. While college-educated mothers of young children are more likely to work remotely than other college-educated women, “Looking narrowly at just college graduates, remote work patterns for women and men look more evenly distributed, with men slightly more likely to work remotely than women,” according to an analysis by my newsroom colleagues Ben Casselman, Emma Goldberg and Ella Koeze.The idea of being “mommy tracked” also sets up and cements a false binary: You’re either going straight to the top as fast as possible or you’re going to stagnate forever. More and more, parents are rejecting the notion that this is the only way to think about their work-life balance, particularly while their kids are young. They’re more concerned about having jobs that allow them to both make ends meet and still have the time and energy to enjoy their families.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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      Audience Snapshot: Four Years After Shutdown, a Mixed Recovery

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      Covid brought live performance to a halt. Now the audience for pop concerts and sporting events has roared back, while attendance on Broadway and at some major museums is still down.It was four years ago — on March 12, 2020 — that the coronavirus brought the curtain down on Broadway for what was initially supposed to be a monthlong shutdown, but which wound up lasting a year and a half.The pandemic brought live events and big gatherings to a halt, silencing orchestras, shutting museums and movie theaters and leaving sports teams playing to empty stadiums dotted with cardboard cutouts.Now, four years later, audiences are coming back, but the recovery has been uneven. Here is a snapshot of where things stand now:Broadway audiences are still down 17 percent from prepandemic levels.On Broadway, overall attendance is still down about 17 percent: 9.3 million seats have been filled in the current season as of March 3, down from 11.1 million at the same point in 2020. Box office grosses are down, too: Broadway shows have grossed $1.2 billion so far this season, 14 percent below the level in early March of 2020.Broadway has always had more flops than successes, and the post-pandemic period has been challenging for producers and investors, especially those involved in new musicals. Three pop productions that have opened since the pandemic — “Six,” about the wives of King Henry VIII, “MJ,” about Michael Jackson and “& Juliet,” which imagines an alternate history for Shakespeare’s tragic heroine — are ongoing hits, but far more musicals have flamed out. The industry is looking with some trepidation toward next month, when a large crop of new shows is set to open.Many nonprofit theaters around the country are also struggling — attracting fewer subscribers and producing fewer shows — and some have closed. One bright spot has been the touring Broadway market, which has been booming.— More

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      Public Workers Joined Ring That Stole IDs of Homeless People, D.A. Says

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      Eighteen people, including nine New York City public employees, were charged with joining a conspiracy that made ghost guns and defrauded a state Covid relief program.Eighteen people, including nine public employees, engaged in a broad criminal conspiracy that included the manufacture of ghost guns, burglary and defrauding a state pandemic relief program, according to four indictments filed Thursday by the Manhattan district attorney.The defendants include five employees of New York City’s Department of Homeless Services, a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, a worker for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, an employee of the New York City Housing Authority and a school safety police officer.The Homeless Services workers were involved in a scheme to steal the personal information of homeless people to file for fraudulent benefits, the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said.“This kind of conduct by our public servants is unacceptable and, we allege, criminal,” Mr. Bragg said at a news conference on Thursday.The investigation began in 2022 with suspicions that two people were using 3-D printers to manufacture ghost guns — untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home — in an apartment in the East Village. Evidence uncovered after the execution of a search warrant confirmed that Craig Freeman, 56, and another defendant had used eBay and Amazon to purchase machines and materials to build illegal guns in their homes. Both were employees of the Barbara Kleiman homeless shelter in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.In the summer of 2022, Mr. Freeman got a text message from a co-defendant saying, “We can make some serious bank.”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 Radical Proposal for Nikki Haley: Try to Win More Votes

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      Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary but found a cause: getting under Donald Trump’s not exactly rhinoceros-thick skin. The story of the Republican primary campaign in the days since Trump’s victory has been one where the victor acts like a sore loser and the likely loser loosens up, goads her stronger rival and finds a pool of small-dollar donors to keep her in the race.Haley’s turn toward mockery and confrontation has created modest excitement in the disillusioned world of NeverTrump punditry. Maybe the remaining non-Trump Republican is giving up on being vice president or winning some future G.O.P. primary campaign. Maybe she’s ready to make Trump’s unfitness her exclusive theme. Maybe, as The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio speculates, by needling and attacking and bringing out Trump’s worst behavior, she can even bring about the long-awaited Republican crackup that would finally defeat Trump on the scale that he deserves.I don’t think this hope makes a lot of sense. The idea that there exists some form of elite Republican denunciation, combined with egregious Trumpian misbehavior, that could shatter the G.O.P. coalition and send him to a Barry Goldwater or George McGovern-style defeat, seemed plausible enough eight years ago. It’s what I expected and what Republicans deserved.But I should have heeded the wisdom of Bill Munny in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Because since then we’ve seen all kinds of terrible behavior, coupled with attempted repudiations from all sorts of Republicans, including Trump’s own aides and cabinet appointees. And yet the rule has held: Ask people if they like Trump and majorities do not, but put Trump up against the current Democratic Party, and he becomes a viable candidate for president.Maybe Haley is the right figure to change that. But she has nowhere near the pre-Trump fame of a Mitt Romney or the ideological credibility of a Liz Cheney. And based on what we saw from Chris Christie’s campaign, a pure repudiate-Trump candidacy is only likely to enhance Trump’s margins in the remaining primaries, emphasizing Haley’s hopelessness rather than her gumption.Moreover, wouldn’t there be something a little bit strange, after two consecutive primary campaigns in which Republicans desperately competed for a chance to face off with Trump one-on-one, for the winner of that prize to immediately give up on winning any more supporters? Haley’s consolidation of gentry Republicans succeeded in boxing out Ron DeSantis’s attempt to build a larger non-Trump coalition. Is she really not even going to attempt to build a larger coalition of her own?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?  More

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      Economists Predicted a Recession. So Far They’ve Been Wrong.

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      A widely predicted recession never showed up. Now, economists are assessing what the unexpected resilience tells us about the future.The recession America was expecting never showed up.Many economists spent early 2023 predicting a painful downturn, a view so widely held that some commentators started to treat it as a given. Inflation had spiked to the highest level in decades, and a range of forecasters thought that it would take a drop in demand and a prolonged jump in unemployment to wrestle it down.Instead, the economy grew 3.1 percent last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2022 and faster than the average for the five years leading up to the pandemic. Inflation has retreated substantially. Unemployment remains at historic lows and consumers continue to spend even with Federal Reserve interest rates at a 22-year high.The divide between doomsday predictions and the heyday reality is forcing a reckoning on Wall Street and in academia. Why did economists get so much wrong, and what can policymakers learn from those mistakes as they try to anticipate what might come next?It’s early days to draw firm conclusions. The economy could still slow down as two years of Fed rate increases start to add up. But what is clear is that old models of how growth and inflation relate did not serve as accurate guides. Bad luck drove more of the initial burst of inflation than some economists appreciated. Good luck helped to lower it again, and other surprises have hit along the way.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?  More