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      In Poland, Supporters of Opposition March in Warsaw Ahead of Key Election

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      The fate of democracy and aid for Ukraine undergird the October vote, which will decide whether the governing Law and Justice party secures an unprecedented third term in a row.Huge crowds marched through Poland’s capital, Warsaw, on Sunday, converging around a giant flag commemorating a 1944 uprising against Nazi Germany, as opponents of the governing party sought to rally voters for a critical general election that they see as the last chance to save the country’s hard-won democratic freedoms.The Warsaw city government, which is controlled by the opposition, put the crowd at a million people at its peak. But state-controlled television, which mostly ignored the event, instead broadcasting a pre-election convention by the governing Law and Justice party, estimated fewer than 100,000 had turned out, citing police sources.The march was the biggest display of antigovernment sentiment since Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement rallied against communism in the 1980s. It set the stage for the final stretch of an increasingly nasty election campaign. Poland, bitterly polarized on everything from relations with the rest of Europe to abortion rights, will hold a general election on Oct. 15 that will decide whether the conservative Law and Justice party secures an unprecedented third term in a row in government.In a speech peppered with references to Poland’s past struggles for liberty, Donald Tusk, the main opposition leader, appealed for patriots to cast out a right-wing nationalist government that he said was pitting Poles against Poles, defiling the legacy of national heroes who had resisted foreign occupation.He promised to end what he called “the Polish-Polish war” stoked by the governing party’s denunciation as traitors Poles who deviate from traditional Catholic values or look to the European Union for help against discrimination and government meddling in the judiciary.“Change for the better is inevitable,” he said.Billed as “the march of a million hearts,” the event featured Polish and E.U. flags, as well as a few American ones waved by Poles with family in the United States. Before leading a huge crowd in singing the Polish national anthem, which starts with the words “Poland has not yet perished,” Mr. Tusk said the opening line “has never had such a strong and authentic ring as it does today.”Seeking to reclaim patriotism from Law and Justice, which presents itself as a protector of Polish values and sovereignty against E.U. bureaucrats in Brussels and accuses Mr. Tusk of being a stooge for Germany or Russia or at times both countries, the opposition leader said: “They are not Poland. We are Poland!”Donald Tusk, the leader of opposition Civic Coalition, attended the march in Warsaw on Sunday.Omar Marques/Getty ImagesSpeaking to his own supporters at a pre-election party convention in the southern city of Katowice, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice’s chairman and Poland’s de facto leader, mocked Mr. Tusk as “such an idiot” whose victory would lead to the country’s enslavement by foreign powers.He claimed that Mr. Tusk’s term as prime minister, from 2007 to 2014, had made “Poland subordinate to external forces,” especially Germany and Russia. Law and Justice, he said, needed “mobilization, faith, determination and work” to “ensure that Tusk’s system does not return to Poland.”Recent opinion polls give Law and Justice around 38 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for Mr. Tusk’s Civic Coalition, an alliance of centrist and center-left forces, with smaller left and far-right parties trailing far behind. The gap narrowed sharply over the summer, but after a full-throated media campaign demonizing Mr. Tusk and his supporters as enemies of the Roman Catholic Church, Law and Justice picked up support, particularly in areas that rely on the party-controlled state broadcasting system.No single party is expected to win a majority in the vote, and the shape of the next government will depend on which of the front-runners — Law and Justice or Civic Coalition — can find allies to form a coalition.As Mr. Tusk spoke to supporters in Warsaw, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, addressed the Law and Justice convention in southern Poland, hammering the party’s favorite theme that the opposition serves German and Russian interests.“Tusk was their handmaiden,” he claimed, referring to energy deals struck between Berlin and Moscow while Mr. Tusk was Poland’s prime minister before taking a job in Brussels as president of the European Council — another strike against him, in the governing party’s view.Worried about competition from Konfederacja, a far-right group that has been vocal about reducing Poland’s assistance to Ukraine, Law and Justice has sent mixed messages in recent weeks about its policy toward Kyiv. It has insisted that it would not do anything to reduce the flow of weapons to fight Russia’s invading forces, while suggesting recently that it might do just that.Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Morawiecki told a national broadcaster that Poland was “no longer transferring any weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming ourselves with the most modern weapons.” Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, later walked back Mr. Morawiecki’s remarks, clearly made for electoral reasons but still unsettling for Poland’s foreign partners.Desperate to hang on to voters in rural areas, an important base of support, Law and Justice has vowed to halt the import of cheap Ukrainian grain and protect Polish farmers from the damage this has caused to their income. The grain was meant to just transit through Poland, but some of it was siphoned off for sale on the domestic market.Pre-election promises by the Polish government, along with those of Slovakia and Hungary, to halt all deliveries of Ukrainian grain did not stop the leader of a Polish farm lobbying group, Agrounia, from speaking on Sunday in support of the opposition.Law and Justice’s pre-election shifts and maneuvers have confused and annoyed fellow European countries that previously viewed Poland as a solid anchor of the West’s support for Ukraine, particularly those like Germany that Warsaw has repeatedly chided for not being steadfast enough in helping Kyiv.Janusz Michalak, 71, a retired logistics manager who joined the march with his wife, Alicija, said he had lived through communism and worried that Law and Justice — through cynical maneuvers to win support, the tight control of state broadcasting and the demonization of its political foes — want “us silent under their boot like the communists did.”“If we don’t change this government, democracy dies in Poland,” he added.Anatol Magdziarz More

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      UAW Strike: Biden to Visit Michigan to Support Autoworkers on Picket Line

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      In an extraordinary show of support for organized labor, President Biden said he would join workers in Michigan on the front lines of their strike against leading automakers.President Biden announced that he would travel to Michigan on Tuesday to “join the picket line” with members of the United Automobile Workers who are on strike against the nation’s leading automakers, in one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of U.A.W. as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Mr. Biden wrote on Friday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.The trip is set to come a day before Mr. Biden’s leading rival in the 2024 campaign, Donald J. Trump, has planned his own speech in Michigan, and was announced hours after Shawn Fain, the union’s president, escalated pressure on the White House with a public invitation to Mr. Biden.“We invite and encourage everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket lines, from our friends and family all the way to the president of the United States,” Mr. Fain said in a Friday morning speech streamed online.It was not immediately clear where Mr. Biden would go in Michigan. The White House had already announced plans for Mr. Biden to fly to California on Tuesday as part of a three-day trip to the West Coast. Mr. Biden made the decision on Friday, after Mr. Fain’s public invitation, according to two people familiar with the White House deliberations.Mr. Fain on Friday announced the expansion of the U.A.W.’s work stoppage from three facilities to 38 assembly plants and distribution centers in 20 states, including six — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — that are expected to be presidential battlegrounds in next year’s election.Michigan, the home of the American automotive industry, is home to the bulk of the facilities and striking workers.There is little to no precedent for a sitting president joining striking workers on a picket line.Seth Harris, a former top labor policy adviser for Mr. Biden, said he was not aware of any president walking a picket line before.“This president takes seriously his role as the most pro-union president in history,” Mr. Harris said. “Sometimes that means breaking precedent.”Earlier Friday, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign posted on social media a video of Republican presidential candidates and Fox News anchors bemoaning his support for unions. The caption from Mr. Biden read: “Yes.”Mr. Fain’s invitation came a week into an expanding work stoppage by autoworkers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis plants. The union president announced on Friday that the strike, which began last week at three plants in the Midwest, would expand to 38 more locations in 20 states across the country. He said that talks with General Motors and Stellantis had not progressed significantly, but that Ford had done more to meet the union’s demands.Mr. Biden has defended the striking autoworkers since the stoppage began last week, and the White House has dispatched Julie Su, the acting secretary of labor, and Gene Sperling, a top White House economic adviser, to seek an end to the strike.Mr. Biden has referred to himself as “the most pro-union president in American history” and has long made his alliances with and support for organized labor a central part of his political identity. But his administration’s push for a transition to electric vehicles has put him at odds with the U.A.W., because electric vehicles require fewer workers to produce.The U.A.W. has broken with other major unions in so far declining to endorse Mr. Biden’s re-election bid.Mr. Trump is skipping next week’s Republican presidential primary debate and instead delivering a speech in Michigan before current and former union workers. Mr. Trump pulled away significant portions of union workers from Democrats in his 2016 victory by denouncing international free trade agreements. In his current campaign, he has staked out a position against the federal push for more electric vehicles.Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said Mr. Biden would not be going to Michigan if Mr. Trump had not announced a trip there first. On social media, he called Mr. Biden’s visit “nothing more than a cheap photo op as he finds himself between a rock and a political hard place.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — who, like the rest of the Republican presidential candidates, trails far behind Mr. Trump — sought to inject himself into the news cycle about the strike this week by suggesting that the autoworkers should be fired, a move the companies are legally prohibited from carrying out.On Thursday, the U.A.W. postured back by filing a complaint against Mr. Scott with the National Labor Relations Board (such complaints are often dismissed). On Friday, Mr. Scott called the U.A.W. “one of the most corrupt and scandal-plagued unions in America” and said the union’s contract proposal would lead to government bailouts.Mr. Fain, who appeared at a rally with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont when the strike began, has been critical of Mr. Trump and Republicans. More

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      Christine Quinn Fights for Migrants and the Homeless. Could It Destroy Her Dream?

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      Christine C. Quinn was impatient. The leader of New York City’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, she peered over her fuchsia reading glasses at her team, assembled in a conference room, and rattled off a list of instructions.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.It was a few weeks after she had helped persuade the City Council to pass some of the most consequential legislation on the worst homelessness crisis in New York City’s history, and a few days before Mayor Eric Adams would veto those bills.Ms. Quinn, the former City Council speaker, directed one of her staff members to offer to brief a deputy mayor on the legislation. She named a handful of journalists who might write more about the bills, a move that she knew would frustrate City Hall’s press office.She rolled her eyes at the mention of one advocacy group she considered especially ponderous, joking it would take months to release new data. And she snapped her fingers at no one in particular as she asked whether a meeting scheduled for the next day could be moved up to that afternoon, or even sooner.“I miss being able to pick up the phone and say, ‘Do this, do it now, get it done,’” she said later.It only takes a few minutes in Ms. Quinn’s presence to understand that she is itching to return to the action and authority of elected office.Once the city’s second-most powerful politician, Ms. Quinn is now a high-profile advocate on one of the most divisive issues in New York City — one that could threaten her chances with voters in the future.As protests against waves of migrants coming into the city grow louder and larger, and New York’s Democrats cannot seem to settle on a path forward, the city’s shelter population has exploded to over 100,000 people — all while affordable housing lags pitifully behind demand.Ms. Quinn has jumped into the fray.Over the past few months, she helped set the stage for the most contentious fight yet between the Council and Mr. Adams, after leading an effort to secure enough votes for the Council to override the mayor’s opposition to the bills.The package of bills that she helped create is part of a push to help free up space in shelters for asylum seekers. The bills will reduce the time homeless people need to wait to look for permanent housing after they enter a shelter, make more homeless people eligible for vouchers that help them pay rent for permanent housing and provide vouchers for those at risk of being evicted.Ms. Quinn, 57, has spent the last eight years using her knowledge of local politics to build an advocacy arm for Win, the shelter provider, and the organization has since become a frequent thorn in the mayor’s side — even as it receives most of its annual funding through contracts with the city.She may no longer run the Council, but she has become a kind of elder stateswoman on homelessness and housing for an especially green group of legislators.For a while after she lost the Democratic primary for mayor in 2013, it was weird to come back to City Hall, Ms. Quinn said. But these days, she embraces the Council’s security guard and janitor on her way into the building.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThough Ms. Quinn is firmly back in the mix of New York politics, there is only so much an advocate can do from the outside. The kind of power she really wants is still to be found elsewhere.Ms. Quinn was once considered the person most likely to become the city’s first female and first openly gay mayor. That expectation evaporated in 2013 amid a disastrous Democratic primary in which she went from front-runner to also-ran. For years afterward, she operated largely behind the scenes.Now, she is not coy about still wanting to be mayor one day.That aspiration has created a conundrum for Ms. Quinn: The better she is at expanding Win’s influence, the more she risks alienating the New Yorkers who increasingly view the influx of migrants as a strain on the city and say officials have done enough for them.“Quinn is trying to have a really hard conversation with New Yorkers,” said Christina Greer, a professor of political science at Fordham University. “She’s chosen an issue that is of great import but doesn’t really do her any favors” if she wants to run for any elected office in New York.Even as she says she has no plans to run in a primary against Mr. Adams, she has emerged as a prominent foil, challenging his warnings that the migrant crisis will “destroy” New York and protesting his push to weaken the city’s right-to-shelter law and his declaration that migrant families might be moved into mass shelters.She likes to tell a story about mothers at a Win shelter pooling their extra clothes to donate to migrants as proof that vulnerable families will not be pitted against each other.But the city’s twin homelessness and migrant crises defy such neat packaging.As she looks ahead, Ms. Quinn says she knows full well that these issues are stubborn, at the very least. Making a real dent in homelessness — to say nothing of the migrant crisis — would take a decade or more, Ms. Quinn says, a challenge no mayor can credibly promise to solve in two terms.She knows that voters are not always forgiving of her perceived stumbles. And she is not surprised that some regard her as a politician playing at advocacy before she runs again.For now, Ms. Quinn insists she is unconcerned.“When are you really going to use your capital, when are you really going to do something? In the next job?” she said. “You know, I thought I was going to get the next job. I didn’t.”Crossroads of powerWin, the nation’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, operated shelters but did not have an advocacy arm when Ms. Quinn became its chief executive in 2015. She quickly set about changing that.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe George Washington statue in the white marble lobby of City Hall stands at a crossroads of power.To the right are the Council’s offices, where Ms. Quinn long made her mark on the city.To the left is the mayor’s office, where she assumed she was heading as 2013 drew closer.That race was supposed to be Ms. Quinn’s coronation, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was leaving an open seat for a Democrat to seize. By then, Ms. Quinn had earned a reputation as a pragmatic speaker who vastly expanded the Council’s influence, passing legislation in part by her sheer force of will, including the occasional burst of straight-up yelling.In the primary’s final stretch, her opponents cast her as the second coming of Mr. Bloomberg, a moderate at a moment that demanded something more radical. In what ended up being a fatal blow to her chances, Ms. Quinn had paved the way for Mr. Bloomberg to run a third time by helping overturn the city’s term limits law, a move that voters had soured on.To some, Ms. Quinn seemed to be saying she should be mayor simply because she really, really wanted to be.She finished third, losing to Bill de Blasio.Ms. Quinn spent the first few months of 2014 willing herself to leave her Chelsea apartment.After finishing a distant third in the primary, Ms. Quinn endorsed Bill de Blasio, the winner. She said she spent the next few months struggling to get out of bed.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesEventually, after a stint working as a special adviser for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and a fellowship at Harvard, Ms. Quinn got a call from a headhunter about Win. Part of it felt like a homecoming. She had spent the early part of her career as a tenant organizer, and, as speaker, she successfully sued Mr. Bloomberg’s administration over its push to limit eligibility for shelter spots and made it easier for tenants to sue their landlords.When she took over in 2015, she quickly began trying to shift the public’s perception of homelessness. New Yorkers knew they were seeing mentally ill people on the streets, but they often did not realize that the majority of the city’s homeless population is made up of families with children, many of whom have 9-to-5 jobs.But there was no way to get people to listen without changing something about Win, which ran shelters but did not advocate on behalf of homeless families.Ms. Quinn began training her staff to become political activists. They have distributed iPads and other devices to 1,600 homeless students learning remotely and created a legal clinic to help migrants apply for asylum.Under her direction, Win — which employs 1,000 people with an annual budget of about $150 million — added seven new shelters and now operates 14. They serve about 7,000 people nightly, and, recently, over 270 families seeking asylum, including about 700 children. Ms. Quinn makes $424,000 a year, roughly triple what she made as speaker.While she has found her way back to a version of a life she never wanted to leave, some of her former peers or rivals have struggled to do the same. Several — Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Bloomberg, and her two successors as speaker — have run for other offices they did not win. Some of her male peers fell in sexual misconduct scandals, including Anthony Weiner, who helped topple Ms. Quinn in 2013.Ms. Quinn may be the only one of the bunch who still has a job that requires telling people things they do not want to hear, over and over.She is used to that.Nice until it wasn’tMs. Quinn visited children living at the Shirley Chisholm Family Residence, a new Win shelter in Park Slope that drew some opposition from local residents.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesSome years ago, Ms. Quinn and an aide walked to the back of a restaurant and found James Gandolfini, the star of “The Sopranos,” waiting for them. He was unhappy. Ms. Quinn had been pushing to open a sanitation department garage in his TriBeCa neighborhood.Mr. Gandolfini, who died in 2013, told her if she did not reconsider, he was prepared to blanket TriBeCa with fliers criticizing her. She told him to do what he needed to do.“It was a nice conversation until it wasn’t,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “You can’t have a city that calls itself fair and equitable if only some parts of the city are doing their part.”That is particularly true when you are building homeless shelters in neighborhoods where many residents do not want them.Consider Win’s newest shelter, set to serve about 200 families on Staten Island.At a 2019 town hall, Ms. Quinn sought to explain that Staten Island needed a shelter in part so that the borough’s many homeless families could remain close to their children’s public schools. Residents appeared unmoved, and Ms. Quinn was greeted by “an aggressively pissed off” group, she recalled.Afterward, The Staten Island Advance published an opinion piece dismissing her chances amid rumors of another run: “Christine Quinn for mayor? Not after homeless shelter debacle.”It is a change for Ms. Quinn, who spent years fending off criticism from progressives who found her too cozy with Mr. Bloomberg and his conservative allies. Now, she is going up against a highly passionate force that is skeptical of new shelters. While the migrant crisis has prompted a reshaping of that movement to include more Democrats, it has been led by Republican politicians and advocates.Protesters rallied against a facility housing migrants on Staten Island in August. Demonstrations against migrant shelters have become larger in recent months.Stephanie Keith for The New York TimesRepresentative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, said Staten Islanders she represents are fed up with Democrats like Ms. Quinn “building shelter after shelter in communities that don’t want them” — particularly for migrants.But even some who might have been sympathetic to Ms. Quinn say they were turned off by the debate over the Win shelter, set to open later this year in an area that tends to vote Democratic.“You don’t poke a stick in the eye of a potentially favorable community,” said Michael Harwood, a member of the St. George Civic Association.Mr. Harwood said Win did not communicate effectively with residents about the impact of the shelter and noted that Ms. Quinn had opposed a new shelter in her own Manhattan district when she was speaker.Ms. Quinn says she has a new calculus for decision making.She acknowledges that some of her choices as speaker were made more because of future ambitions rather than the right policy, and she regrets it.So even as she weighs whether and how to return to elected office, she says she is focused on immediate goals: moving more families into permanent housing faster, raising more private money, making Win into a top developer of affordable housing with services for formerly homeless families — and continuing to shape city policy.But it does not always feel like enough.She recently remembered something that Judith S. Kaye, the late chief judge of New York State, once told her: She would have paid a million dollars to keep her job for just five more minutes.It was a joke, sort of. But it is how Ms. Quinn feels about being speaker, and the reason she is given to daydreaming about how much more she could accomplish on homelessness, the migrant crisis and housing if she ran the city one day.The idea of actually getting elected on the agenda of addressing those crises might seem like a bit of a fantasy.But Ms. Quinn believes, still, that there is a first time for everything in New York City politics.“In a way, it would be the greatest issue for a mayor to take on,” she said. “If you solve the unsolvable, you get credit.”Audio produced by More

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      Why So Many Americans Are So Down on Biden

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      Unemployment is near historic lows, and inflation has come way down. We are inflicting a strategic humiliation on Russia by arming Ukraine without putting American forces at risk. The homicide rate fell by about 10 percent across 30 cities compared with last year. Democrats defied electoral trends by holding the Senate, scoring major legislative victories and easily confirming a Supreme Court nominee.Why, then, do only 20 percent of voters rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” versus 49 percent who call it “poor,” according to a New York Times/Siena poll? Why are Americans overwhelmingly pessimistic about the country’s future, according to the Pew Research Center? Why does Gallup find a significantly smaller percentage of Americans have confidence in the presidency today than they did in the last, disastrous year of Donald Trump’s tenure? And why is President Biden polling dead even with his predecessor in multiple surveys despite the former president’s 91 felony charges?In short, with everything so great, why are people so down? That’s a question that, as The Times’s Reid Epstein wrote last week, stumps the White House and its political allies, who seem to think the problem is a failure to communicate all the good news.But there’s another explanation: The news isn’t all that good. Americans are unsettled by things that are not always visible in headlines or statistics but are easy enough to see.Easy to see is the average price of a dozen eggs: up 38 percent between January 2022 and May of this year. And white bread: up 25 percent. And a whole chicken: up 18 percent. As for the retail price of gasoline, it’s up 63 percent since January 2021, the month Biden became president.Yet none of these increases make it into what economists call the core rate of inflation, which excludes food and energy. The inflation ordinary people experience in everyday life is not the one the government prefers to highlight.Easy to see is the frequent collapse of public order on American streets. In April hundreds of teenagers wreaked havoc in the Chicago Loop. Two boys were shot. A young couple was beaten by the doorway of a building on North Wabash. Yet only 16 people were arrested. Similar scenes unfolded last month in New York’s Union Square and again in Boston, where police officers were assaulted in two separate riots largely by juveniles.In New York, there were at least 66 arrests. In Boston, just 13.Easy to see is that the kids are not alright. The causes are many; social media companies have a lot to answer for. But so do teachers’ unions, handmaids of the Democratic Party, who pushed to keep school doors closed during the pandemic, helping themselves while doing lasting harm to children. The Biden administration spent much of its early months saying it wanted more than half of schools open at least one day per week by the 100th day of his presidency.“It is a goal so modest and lacking in ambition as to be almost meaningless,” Politico’s Playbook newsletter noted at the time.Easy to see is that the border crisis has become a national one. In May the administration boasted that new policies had contributed to a sharp decline in the “number of encounters” between border patrols and migrants crossing the southwestern border illegally. By August, arrests of migrants who crossed the border with family members had hit a monthly record of 91,000. In New York City alone, more than 57,000 migrants seek food and shelter from the city’s social services on an average night.Nobody can say for certain how many migrants who crossed the border during Biden’s presidency remain in the U.S., but it’s almost certainly in the millions. In 2021 the president dismissed the initial surge of migrants as merely seasonal. “Happens every year,” he said.Easy to see is that the world has gotten more dangerous under Biden’s watch. The president deserves credit for arming Ukraine, as he does for brokering a strategic rapprochement between Japan and South Korea. But he also deserves the blame for a humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal that almost surely played a part in enticing Vladimir Putin into launching his invasion of Ukraine and whetted Beijing’s appetite for Taiwan.How large a part is unquantifiable. Yet it was predictable — and predicted.Easy to see is that the president is not young for his age. The stiff gait and the occasional falls. The apparent dozing off. The times he draws a blank or struggles to complete a thought. Yet the same people yelling #ResignFeinstein or #ResignMcConnell don’t appear to be especially vocal when it comes to the president’s fitness, as if noting the obvious risks repeating a Republican talking point.But people notice, and they vote.Easy to see are tents under overpasses, from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York to the I-5 in Seattle. And the zombified addicts passed out on sidewalks in practically every city and town. And the pharmacies with everyday items under lock and key to prevent shoplifting. And women with infants strapped to their backs, hawking candy or gum at busy intersections. And news reports of brazen car thefts, which have skyrocketed this year.“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith said. Not all the ruin mentioned above is Biden’s fault, and none of it is irreversible. But there’s much more ruin than his apologists — blinkered by selective statistics and too confident about the president’s chances next year — care to admit.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Gloria Johnson Announces Bid for Marsha Blackburn’s Senate Seat

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      Gloria Johnson, who barely avoided expulsion for her role in a gun control rally in the State Legislature, is hoping to unseat Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Gloria Johnson, a Democratic state representative from Tennessee who narrowly avoided being expelled from the Legislature in April after taking part in a gun control protest on the statehouse floor, announced plans on Tuesday to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Ms. Johnson, 61, received a flood of national attention after she joined two other Democrats, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, to interrupt debate on the floor of the Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives and rally for stricter gun control measures in late March, just days after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville that killed six people.In retribution, Republicans moved to expel the three Democrats — sometimes called the Tennessee Three — from the Legislature. Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson were both ousted. Ms. Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments but avoided expulsion by just one vote. (Both men were later voted back into their positions.)Last week, the State Legislature held an emotional and chaotic special session meant to be devoted to public safety that ended without agreement on any significant new restrictions on firearm access.In a video announcing her Senate campaign, Ms. Johnson led with that issue, playing clips of news coverage of the Nashville shooting and highlighting her involvement in the gun control protest.“When my friends and I believed mothers and fathers who lost children at Covenant deserved a voice, and we fought for it, they expelled them,” she says in the video.Ms. Johnson, who represents parts of Knoxville, was first elected to the Tennessee House in 2012, then lost subsequent elections in 2014 and 2016 before again winning in 2018. For the 2024 Senate race, she is running in a contested Democratic primary against Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental justice activist who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2020.Both hope to unseat Ms. Blackburn, 71, who in 2018 became the first woman elected to represent Tennessee in the Senate.In her video, Ms. Johnson suggested that Ms. Blackburn was beholden to “extremists and billionaires,” criticizing her views on abortion.Senator Blackburn’s campaign spokeswoman, Abigail Sigler, accused Ms. Johnson in a statement of being a “radical socialist” who “would be a puppet” for President Biden and progressive Democrats. More

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      Ramaswamy Relies on Denialism When Challenged on Flip-Flopping Positions

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      In clashes with the news media and his rivals, the Republican upstart has retreated from past comments and lied about on-the-record statements.In his breakout performance in the Republican primary race, Vivek Ramaswamy has harnessed his populist bravado while frequently and unapologetically contorting the truth for political gain, much in the same way that former President Donald J. Trump has mastered.Mr. Ramaswamy’s pattern of falsehoods has been the subject of intensifying scrutiny by the news media and, more recently, his G.O.P. opponents, who clashed with him often during the party’s first debate last Wednesday.There are layers to Mr. Ramaswamy’s distortions: He has spread lies and exaggerations on subjects including the 2020 election results, the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol and climate change. When challenged on those statements, Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who is the first millennial Republican to run for president, has in several instances claimed that he had never made them or that he had been taken out of context.But his denials have repeatedly been refuted by recordings and transcripts from Mr. Ramaswamy’s interviews — or, in some cases, excerpts from his own book.Here are some notable occasions when he sought to retreat from his past statements or mischaracterized basic facts:A misleading anecdoteAt a breakfast round table event organized by his campaign on Friday in Indianola, Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy recounted how he had visited the South Side of Chicago in May to promote his immigration proposals to a mostly Black audience.He boasted that nowhere had his ideas on the issue been more enthusiastically received than in the nation’s third most populous city, where his appearance had followed community protests over the housing of migrants in a local high school.“I have never been in a room more in favor of my proposal to use the U.S. military to secure the southern border and seal the Swiss cheese down there than when I was in a nearly all-Black room of supposedly mostly Democrats on the South Side of Chicago,” he said.But Mr. Ramaswamy’s retelling of the anecdote was sharply contradicted by the observations of a New York Times reporter who covered both events.The reporter witnessed the audience in Chicago pepper Mr. Ramaswamy about reparations, systemic racism and his opposition to affirmative action. Immigration was barely mentioned during the formal program. It was so absent that a Ramaswamy campaign aide at one point pleaded for questions on the issue. With that prompting, a single Republican consultant stood up to question Mr. Ramaswamy on his proposals.Trump criticismAt the first Republican debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey accused Mr. Ramaswamy of changing positions on Donald Trump.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIn one of the more heated exchanges of last week’s G.O.P. debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for lionizing Mr. Trump and defending his actions during the Jan. 6 attack.He sought to cast Mr. Ramaswamy as an opportunist who was trying to pander to Mr. Trump’s supporters by attributing the riot to government censorship during the 2020 election.“In your book, you had much different things to say about Donald Trump than you’re saying here tonight,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Ramaswamy bristled and said, “That’s not true.”But in his 2022 book “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” Mr. Ramaswamy had harsh words for Mr. Trump and gave a more somber assessment of the violence.“It was a dark day for democracy,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote. “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”When asked by The Times about the excerpt, Mr. Ramaswamy insisted that his rhetoric had not evolved and pointed out that he had co-written an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal five days after the Jan. 6 attack that was critical of the actions of social media companies during the 2020 election.“Also what I said at the time was that I really thought what Trump did was regrettable,” he said. “I would have handled it very differently if I was in his shoes. I will remind you that I am running for U.S. president in the same race that Donald Trump is running right now.”Mr. Ramaswamy parsed his criticism of the former president, however.“But a bad judgment is not the same thing as a crime,” he said.During the debate, Mr. Ramaswamy also sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence, whose senior aide and onetime chief of staff Marc Short told NBC News the next day that Mr. Ramaswamy was not a genuine populist.“There’s populism and then there’s just simply fraud,” he said.By blunting his message about the former president’s accountability and casting himself as an outsider, Mr. Ramaswamy appears to be making a play for Mr. Trump’s base — and the G.O.P. front-runner has taken notice.In a conversation on Tuesday with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Mr. Trump said that he was open to selecting Mr. Ramaswamy as his running mate, but he had some advice for him.“He’s starting to get out there a little bit,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s getting a little bit controversial. I got to tell him: ‘Be a little bit careful. Some things you have to hold in just a little bit, right?’”Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11Since entering the race, Mr. Ramaswamy has repeatedly floated conspiracy theories about a cover-up by the federal government in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a narrative seemingly tailored to members of the G.O.P.’s right wing who are deeply distrustful of institutions.In a recent profile by The Atlantic, he told the magazine, “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the twin towers.”While he acknowledged that he had “no reason” to believe that the number was “anything other than zero,” Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that the government had not been transparent about the attacks.“But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to,” he said.Yet when Mr. Ramaswamy was asked to clarify those remarks by Kaitlan Collins of CNN two nights before last week’s debate, he backtracked and accused The Atlantic of misquoting him.“I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually,” he said.Soon after Mr. Ramaswamy claimed that his words had been twisted, The Atlantic released a recording and transcript from the interview that confirmed that he had indeed been quoted accurately.When asked in an interview on Saturday whether the audio had undercut his argument, Mr. Ramaswamy reiterated his contention that the news media had often misrepresented him.“I think there’s a reason why,” he said, suggesting that his free-flowing way of speaking broke the mold of so-called scripted candidates. “I just don’t speak like a traditional politician, and I think the system is not used to that. The political media is not used to that. And that lends itself naturally then to being inaccurately portrayed, to being distorted.”Mr. Trump’s allies have used similar justifications when discussing the former president’s falsehoods, citing his stream-of-consciousness speaking style. His allies and supporters have admired his impulse to refuse to apologize or back down when called out, an approach Mr. Ramaswamy has echoed.Mr. Ramaswamy said that he was asked about Sept. 11 while discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his repeated calls for an accounting of how many federal agents were in the field that day. His campaign described The Atlantic’s recording as a “snippet.”At the start of The Times’s conversation with Mr. Ramaswamy, he said that he assumed that the interview was being recorded and noted that his campaign was recording, too.“We’re now doing mutually on the record, so just F.Y.I.,” he said.Pardoning Hunter BidenIn one of many clashes with the news media, Mr. Ramaswamy accused The New York Post of misquoting him in an article about Hunter Biden.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesNo news outlet has been off-limits to Mr. Ramaswamy’s claims of being misquoted: This month, he denounced a New York Post headline that read: “GOP 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ‘open’ to pardon of Hunter Biden.”The Aug. 12 article cited an interview that The Post had conducted with him.“After we have shut down the F.B.I., after we have refurbished the Department of Justice, after we have systemically pardoned anyone who was a victim of a political motivated persecution — from Donald Trump and peaceful January 6 protests — then would I would be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family in the interest of moving the nation forward,” Mr. Ramaswamy was quoted as saying.The next morning on Fox News Channel, which, like The Post, is owned by News Corp, Mr. Ramaswamy told the anchor Maria Bartiromo that the report was erroneous.“Maria, that was misquoted and purposeful opposition research with the headline,” he said. “You know how this game is played.”The Post did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ramaswamy described the headline as “manufactured” and said it was part of “the ridiculous farce of this gotcha game.”Aid to IsraelMr. Ramaswamy clashed with Fox News host Sean Hannity Monday night when confronted with comments he has made about aid to Israel. Mr. Ramaswamy accused Mr. Hannity of misrepresenting his views.“You said aid to Israel, our No. 1 ally, only democracy in the region, should end in 2028,” Mr. Hannity said in the interview. “And that they should be integrated with their neighbors.”“That’s false,” Mr. Ramaswamy responded.“I have an exact quote, do you want me to read it?” Mr. Hannity asked.Mr. Ramaswamy’s rhetoric about support for Israel has shifted.During a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this month, Mr. Ramaswamy called the deal to provide Israel with $38 billion over 10 years “sacrosanct.” But a few weeks later in an interview with The Free Beacon, a conservative website, he said that he hoped that Israel would “not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.” by 2028, when the deal expires.Wearing masksIn the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Masks for All Act, a bill proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that aimed to provide every person in the United States with three free N95 masks, appeared to receive an unlikely endorsement on Twitter — from Mr. Ramaswamy.“My policy views don’t often align with Bernie, but this strikes me as a sensible idea,” he wrote in July 2020. “The cost is a tiny fraction of other less compelling federal expenditures on COVID-19.”Mr. Ramaswamy was responding to an opinion column written for CNN by Mr. Sanders, who is a democratic socialist, and Andy Slavitt, who was later a top pandemic adviser to Mr. Biden. He said they should have picked someone from the political right as a co-author to show that there was a consensus on masks.But when he was pressed this summer by Josie Glabach of the Red Headed Libertarian podcast about whether he had ever supported Mr. Sanders’s mask measure, he answered no.When asked by The Times for further clarification, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged that he was an early supporter of wearing masks, but said that he no longer believed that they prevented the spread of the virus. He accused his political opponents of conflating his initial stance with support for mask mandates, which he said he had consistently opposed.An analogy to Rosa Parks?Mr. Ramaswamy appeared to compare Edward J. Snowden to Rosa Parks before immediately distancing himself from the comment.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesWhen he was asked by the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on his show in June whether he would pardon the former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden for leaking documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, Mr. Ramaswamy said yes and invoked an unexpected name: the civil rights icon Rosa Parks.He said that Mr. Snowden, a fugitive, had demonstrated heroism to hold the government accountable.“Part of what makes that risk admirable — Rosa Parks long ago — is the willingness to bear punishment he already has,” he said. “That’s also why I would ensure that he was a free man.”To Mr. Hewitt, the analogy was jarring.“Wait, wait, wait, did you just compare Rosa Parks to Edward Snowden?” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy immediately distanced himself from such a comparison, while then reinforcing it, suggesting that they had both effectuated progress of a different kind.“No, I did not,” he said. “But I did compare the aspect of their willingness to take a risk in order for at the time breaking a rule that at the time was punishable.” More

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      Imran Khan Sentenced to Prison in Pakistan

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      The former prime minister of Pakistan was taken into custody, sentenced to three years after a court found him guilty of illegally selling state gifts and concealing the assets.Former Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan was arrested on Saturday after a trial court sentenced him to three years in prison, a verdict likely to end his chances of running in upcoming general elections.The police took Mr. Khan into custody from his home in the eastern city of Lahore soon after the court’s decision was announced in Islamabad.The verdict is a climactic turn in a political showdown between Mr. Khan and Pakistan’s powerful military that has embroiled the country for over a year.It comes on the heels of a monthslong intimidation campaign by the military aimed at hollowing out Mr. Khan’s political party and stifling the remarkable political comeback he has made since being ousted from office last year in a vote of no confidence.Now, the prospect that Mr. Khan, a cricket star turned populist politician, will be disqualified from running in the country’s general elections — the next ones are expected this fall — has offered a major victory to a military establishment that appears intent on sidelining him from politics.It has also sent a powerful message to Mr. Khan and his supporters, who have directly confronted and defied the military like few else in Pakistan’s 75-year history: The military is the ultimate hand wielding political power behind the government, and no amount of public backlash will change that.“Imran Khan’s arrest marks a significant turning point in the state’s actions against P.T.I.,” said Zaigham Khan, a political analyst and columnist based in Islamabad, using the initials of Mr. Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. That effort seems “designed to hinder the P.T.I.’s chances in the upcoming elections,” he added.Supporters of Mr. Khan clashed with the police in Peshawar in May.Arshad Arbab/EPA, via ShutterstockIn its ruling on Saturday, the trial court found the former prime minister guilty of hiding assets after illegally selling state gifts.“The allegations against Mr. Khan are proven,” said Judge Humayun Dilawar, who announced the verdict in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. The court also imposed a fine of around $355.The case is related to an inquiry by the country’s election commission, which found last October that Mr. Khan had illegally sold gifts given to him by other countries when he was prime minister and concealed the profits from the authorities.Mr. Khan has denied any wrongdoing. He and his lawyers had accused Judge Dilawar of bias and sought to have the case transferred to another judge. They are likely to appeal this ruling.In a statement, Mr. Khan’s party rejected the verdict, calling it “the worst example of political revenge.”Members of the country’s governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, welcomed the outcome. In a statement, the country’s information minister, Marriyum Aurangzeb, hailed Mr. Khan’s arrest and denied that it was linked to “political persecution” or that it was part of a plot to prevent the former prime minister from running in the country’s next elections.“My message to Imran Khan is straightforward: Your time is up,” she said.The verdict is the culmination of a nationwide political saga that has escalated since Mr. Khan was ousted in April 2022. In the months that followed, he drew thousands out to protests where he railed against the country’s powerful military establishment and accused Pakistan’s generals of orchestrating his fall from power — an accusation they deny.Mr. Khan, who is facing an array of court cases, was briefly arrested earlier this year in a different one. That arrest, on May 9, set off violent protests across the country, as well as attacks on military installations. Days afterward, the country’s top court declared that the authorities had unlawfully detained Mr. Khan and ordered his release.The protests channeling anger toward the military were widely considered to have crossed an unspoken red line of defiance — a rare rebuke in a country where few defy military leaders. Since then, Pakistan’s military establishment has staged an extensive crackdown.Security forces near an office of Mr. Khan’s party in Karachi on Saturday.Rehan Khan/EPA, via ShutterstockThrongs of supporters of Mr. Khan were arrested in connection with the protests in May. Media personalities considered sympathetic to him said they were intimidated. And many prominent leaders of his party resigned — after they were arrested or said they had been threatened with criminal charges and arrests.After Mr. Khan was arrested on Saturday in Lahore, the police in several cities were put on alert in case his supporters again took to the streets.In a prerecorded message before his arrest in Lahore on Saturday, Mr. Khan urged his supporters to stage peaceful protests and not remain silent at home. In the port city of Karachi and in Peshawar, a few dozen supporters staged small protests.But unlike when Mr. Khan was arrested in May, by Saturday evening there were no mass protests in support of Mr. Khan — a sign of the effectiveness of the military’s efforts to intimidate his supporters in recent months, analysts say.In recent weeks, Pakistan’s governing coalition had signaled that it was considering postponing the fall elections so that the military’s crackdown on Mr. Khan’s party could continue and so that the coalition’s political leaders could be sure that he would not pose a major political threat in the race. But now, his arrest and likely disqualification may make that unnecessary, observers say.“Khan’s removal from the scene may actually expedite the election process, potentially allowing them to be held within 90 days, if not sooner,” said Zaigham Khan, the political analyst. “What remains to be seen is whether he can obtain any immediate relief from the superior courts, where his sentence could be suspended.” More

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      In Belarus, the Protests Were Three Years Ago. The Crackdown Is Never-Ending.

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      The recent high school graduate selected her wardrobe carefully as she headed off to a summer folk festival.She dressed all in white, as is customary for the event, and wore a large flower wreath in her golden hair. But when it came to choosing a sash for her skirt, she grabbed a brown leather band, avoiding the color red.In Belarus, red and white are the colors of the protest movement against the country’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. And even the smallest sign of protest can land a person in jail. “I worry about attracting the wrong kind of attention from the authorities,” said the young woman, who spoke on the condition that her name not be used so she would not draw scrutiny.After claiming victory in a widely disputed presidential election three years ago — and violently crushing the outraged protests that followed — Mr. Lukashenko has ushered in a chilling era of repression.He is moving ever closer to his patron, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, positioning himself as an invaluable military ally to Russia in its war against Ukraine, but also cracking down on dissent in a way that is invisible to much of the world but rivals that of Mr. Putin’s punitive regime.Children in the Minsk region playing near the “Mound of Glory,” a memorial to those who fought in World War II.An exhibit at the Belarusian State Museum of the history of the Great Patriotic War.Belarusian security forces are rounding up opposition figures, journalists, lawyers and even people committing offenses like commenting on social media memes or insulting Mr. Lukashenko in private conversations with acquaintances that are overheard and reported.In particular, activists and rights groups say, the country’s security forces are intent on finding and punishing the people who participated in the 2020 protests. Belarusians are getting arrested for wearing red and white, sporting a tattoo of a raised fist — also a symbol of the protest movement — or for just being seen in three-year-old photographs of the anti-government demonstrations.“In the last three years, we went from a soft autocracy to neo-totalitarianism,” said Igor Ilyash, a journalist who opposes Mr. Lukashenko’s rule. “They are criminalizing the past.”Belarusians interviewed by The New York Times over three days this month echoed that sentiment, expressing fear that even a slight perceived infraction related to the revolution could bring prison time.The crackdown has made people much more cautious about overtly showing their anger at the government, said Mr. Ilyash. That, in turn, has prompted the authorities to focus on participation in old protests in an attempt to intimidate and stifle dissent.Scrutiny of Mr. Lukashenko’s repressive reign has increased since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, and in particular in recent months.Belarus let the Kremlin invade Ukraine from its territory last year. In March, Russia announced it would station tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory. Video evidence suggests Belarus is now housing forces from Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group, and on Thursday, the government said Wagner forces were training special Belarusian operations units only a few miles from the border with Poland.The security crackdown has thinned the ranks of lawyers: More than 500 have been stripped of their law licenses or left the profession or the country.And Belarus has become particularly perilous for journalists. There are now 36 in jail, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists, after the arrest on Monday of Ihar Karnei, 55. He has written for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which Belarus has banned as an “extremist” organization. People can be sentenced to up to seven years in prison for just sharing its content.“In the last three years, we went from a soft autocracy to neo-totalitarianism,” said Igor Ilyash, a journalist whose wife, also a journalist, is imprisoned.Mr. Ilyash does not leave his apartment without a small backpack holding essentials that he would need in case he were detained and imprisoned.According to Viasna, a human rights group that shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, security forces raided Mr. Karnei’s home and seized his electronic devices. He is in Belarus’s notorious Okrestina detention center, the group said, and neither his family nor his lawyers have had access to him.Belarus has criminalized most independent news outlets and the journalists’ association as “extremist,” which makes following them on social media a crime.Mr. Ilyash’s wife, the award-winning journalist Katsiaryna Andreyeva, was sentenced to eight years in prison in two separate cases and now labors in a penal colony as a seamstress, earning less than $4 a month, her husband said.In the prison, she is forced to wear a yellow badge on her chest identifying her as a political prisoner. When she is released in 2028, if the same government is still in power, she will still be considered an “extremist” and barred from certain activities, including journalism.Mr. Ilyash himself spent 25 days in prison, and with one criminal case against him still open, he is barred from leaving the country. He does not leave his apartment without a small backpack that contains the essentials for prison, in case he is detained: a toothbrush, toothpaste, spare underwear and socks.Activists and opposition figures are also being targeted. This month, the artist Ales Pushkin died in a penal colony at age 57. He is believed to be the third political prisoner to die in Belarusian custody since the protests began in 2020.Several of the country’s best-known political prisoners, like the leading opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova, have neither been seen by their family members or lawyers, nor permitted to write letters, meaning they have been out of touch for months.Viasna, the rights group, has identified almost 1,500 political prisoners in Belarus today, and a further 1,900 people convicted in what the group calls “politically motivated criminal trials.”“Arrests for what happened in 2020 are occurring practically every week, almost every day,” said Evgeniia Babayeva of Viasna, a human rights group that shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year.The Okrestina detention center in Minsk. Former inmates who spent time there described beatings and horrific conditions. “The security services are still watching people’s videos, and scouring social media and photos of the protests all these years later,” said Evgeniia Babayeva, a Viasna staff member who catalogs politically motivated detentions in Belarus from exile in Lithuania.Ms. Babayeva was arrested in July 2021, on the same day as the group’s founder, Ales Bialiatski, along with a handful of other colleagues. She was released only because she signed an agreement to collaborate with the security services, but she said she fled Belarus the same day.In March, Mr. Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “cash smuggling” and “financing actions and groups that grossly violated public order,” charges widely viewed by watchdog groups as spurious and intended to discredit the organization.On the surface, visitors to the country’s capital would have to look closely to see any signs that the protests in 2020 happened at all. Minsk, which takes pride in its cleanliness, is tidy, with a modern city center. Billboards trumpet 2023 as the “year of peace and creation,” and the roadside public gardens are manicured in national Belarusian motifs.But residents say a more ominous sensibility hangs over the city and the country. Cameras with facial recognition ability watch over public spaces and residential elevators, keeping tabs on ordinary Belarusians carrying out day-to-day activities.One evening in June, a Minsk resident was out for a walk when she was approached by the police, who reprimanded her for a simple administrative violation, less serious than jaywalking.A Belarusian military billboard in Minsk. Belarus and Russia have grown closer over the past few years, especially when it comes to the military.A Minsk resident who was jailed for a simple administrative violation while she was out walking.The officer searched her name in the police database, turning up evidence of previous detention for participation in the 2020 protests. Police officers soon drew up an accusation that she had cursed in their station — which she denies — and she was put into the Okrestina detention center for 10 days on a “hooliganism” charge.She shared a small cell with 12 other women, she said. There were no mattresses or pillows, and the light was on 24 hours a day. Though everyone became sick — she contracted a bad case of Covid — they had to share toothbrushes. There were no showers, and if a woman got her period, she was given cotton balls rather than pads or tampons.(The woman’s name and her offense are being withheld at her request because the information could identify her and draw retribution. Her identity was confirmed by The Times, and friends confirmed that she had given similar accounts to them.)The repressive environment is stifling people and prompting many to leave. The high school graduate who went to the celebration of the summer solstice and the Belarusian poet Yanka Kupala said she had attended because of a dearth of public events since 2020.“There is nowhere for us to go anymore,” she said, complaining that control was so tight that even traditional songs had been approved in advance by the authorities. She said most good musicians have been named “extremists” and left the country.Floral headwear was a popular choice for festival attendees.The festival in the Minsk region celebrated Kupalle, which is tied to the summer solstice.The girl said she planned to follow them, hoping to continue her studies in Cyprus or Austria. At least half of her classmates had already left Belarus.Another festivalgoer, Vadim, 37, said he had the impression that at least half of his friends had spent time in prison because of their political views.He said his wife had already emigrated, and he was contemplating joining her.“The war was a trigger for many people to leave,” he said.“Before, we thought this situation would eventually end,” Vadim said, “but once the war started, we knew it would only get worse.”A tour group near the Lenin Monument in Minsk. More