Elections

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      In Orange County, House Race Tests What Asian Americans Want

      by

      WESTMINSTER, Calif. — Dozens of Vietnamese-speaking volunteers filled a community center on a recent Wednesday to phone bank for Representative Michelle Steel, Republican of California, a Korean American lawmaker whose campaign signs and fliers in Vietnamese and English lined the walls.A few neighborhoods down, Jay Chen, a Democrat and Navy reservist of Taiwanese descent who is challenging Ms. Steel, passed out fliers outside of Zippost, a shipping business that residents often use to send packages to relatives in Vietnam. Mr. Chen, donning a Navy hat, walked around the plaza with a Vietnamese-speaking volunteer in tow helping residents register to vote.Ms. Steel and Mr. Chen are vying to appeal to the Asian American voters who dominate the electorate in this slice of Orange County, making up a quarter of the voting population. Their race — one of only a few dozen competitive ones that could determine which party controls the House — is being watched closely for clues about what may move voters in this increasingly critical bloc.“The Asian vote can really give enough votes for a candidate to win,” said Mary Anne Foo, the executive director of the nonprofit Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance, a nonpartisan resource center. “What’s significant now is the number of Asian Americans running for office. Having representation is exciting.”Across the country, Asian American voters, who comprised 4 percent of the electorate in 2020, are the fastest-growing population of eligible voters. The Asian American Voter Survey found in July that nearly half of Asian Americans identified as Democrats, about a third as independents and about a fifth as Republicans. About two-thirds voted for Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump, surveys show.However, an analysis by The New York Times found that immigrant communities shifted to the right as they had a surge in voters in 2020. The Asian American Voter Survey found that older Asian voters tended to identify as independent or Republican at higher rates than those in younger generations. Vietnamese Americans, who make up a large proportion of Asian residents in Orange County, also leaned more to the right.Asian American voters dominate the electorate in this Orange County district.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesBoth candidates in the race have made tackling inflation the centerpiece of their campaigns, and both have also focused on safety amid an increase in reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans — themes that are top of mind for many Asian voters, according to analysts.Karthick Ramakrishnan, the founder of AAPI Data, which helps conduct the annual Asian American Voter Survey, said the economy and crime were top issues for respondents, which could give an advantage to Republicans. But health care has also been a major issue, he said, which could boost Democrats, who recently pushed through Congress sweeping climate, health and tax legislation that would lower prescription drug costs and subsidize health insurance, among other benefits.“The ethnicity of the candidate is a bit of a wash in terms of how much it will make a difference here, so it’ll be important to see the kind of appeals each of these candidates make,” Mr. Ramakrishnan said.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries winding down, both parties are starting to shift their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Abrams’s Struggles: Stacey Abrams has been trailing her Republican rival, Gov. Brian Kemp, alarming those who celebrated her as the master strategist behind Georgia’s Democratic shift.Battleground Pennsylvania: Few states feature as many high-stakes, competitive races as Pennsylvania, which has emerged as the nation’s center of political gravity.The Dobbs Decision’s Effect: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of women signing up to vote has surged in some states and the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage are hard to see.How a G.O.P. Haul Vanished: Last year, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans was smashing fund-raising records. Now, most of the money is gone.Still, race has hung heavily over the contest, sometimes in ugly ways.Ms. Steel, who was born in South Korea and raised in Japan, has accused Mr. Chen of mocking her accent; he said at a campaign event in April that people need “an interpreter to figure out exactly what she’s saying.” Mr. Chen said in an interview that his comments were misconstrued and that he meant he did not understand her policies.In the campaign feud, he has accused Ms. Steel of “red-baiting” by painting him as sympathetic to China’s authoritarian government. An accusation of communist sympathies may be particularly resonant to the county’s many refugees who still have bitter memories of fleeing a communist regime.Mr. Chen, the Harvard-educated son of immigrants who is a member of the board of trustees of Mt. San Antonio Community College and owns a local real estate business, said he has tried to appeal to right-leaning voters with his military experience. He served stints in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula with the Seventh Fleet, which helped evacuate refugees after the Vietnam War.“Whenever I mention that, it really resonates,” Mr. Chen said.Jay Chen, the Harvard-educated son of immigrants who owns a real estate business, is challenging Ms. Steel.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesMs. Steel became one of the first Korean American women to serve in Congress in 2020.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesMs. Steel, a former member of the county board of supervisors and a local business owner, is fighting to hold onto her seat in a changed political environment. She narrowly defeated Representative Harley Rouda, a Democrat, in 2020 in a district along the California Coast that leaned Republican, becoming one of the first three Korean American women to serve in Congress. But she was displaced by redistricting and opted to run in a new district that tilts slightly toward Democrats.Lance Trover, the communications director for Ms. Steel’s campaign, said in a statement that she was focused on standing up to China and lowering taxes.“Michelle is the campaign’s greatest asset because AAPI voters know and trust her,” Mr. Trover said in the statement, using the abbreviation for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Ms. Steel declined to be interviewed.Orange County was once described by President Ronald Reagan as a place “where the good Republicans go before they die.” Its partisan bent has since shifted as a younger, more diverse population has moved from the Los Angeles metropolitan area seeking more affordable living. Now, Democrats outnumber Republicans in voter registration, and there is a sizable no-party preference voter bloc, according to the latest statistics from the county voter registrar.The pendulum swung for the first time in 2018, when Democrats swept into the House majority by flipping four seats in the area, giving Democrats control of all seven congressional seats in the county. It swung in the other direction in 2020, when Republicans reclaimed two seats in Orange County.But the shifts reshaping the area are lasting, and they reflect similar ones underway in suburban enclaves across the country, as immigrant communities relocate out of cities, said Christine Chen, the executive director of Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, which helps conduct the Asian American Voter Survey.As immigrant communities around the country move from cities to the suburbs, the politics of those areas are shifting.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe same trend is underway in Virginia, a state that has leaned toward Democrats in recent years, and in Georgia, she said. Mr. Ramakrishnan added that districts in New Jersey and the suburbs of Houston and Dallas are experiencing a similar dynamic.“The Asian American population, in all of those instances, has increased so much that, really, elected officials have no choice but to make sure they engage and develop a relationship with the Asian American voters, because they’re coming out to vote,” said Ms. Chen, who is not related to the Democratic candidate challenging Ms. Steel.Asian Americans make up over a fifth of residents of Orange County, which is known for having the largest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam, many of whom sought refuge in the region after the Vietnam War.The district encompasses Little Saigon, a stretch of Vietnamese-owned homes and businesses in the city of Westminster, which looks like most aging suburbs in Southern California: palm trees, stucco single-family homes and sun-bleached signs. Vietnamese and occasionally Korean and Chinese characters are predominantly featured on storefronts, and the political signage clogging up street corners feature mainly candidates with Asian surnames. Both campaigns and local organizations have been investing heavily on advertisements in Vietnamese.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced in July that it planned to make a seven-figure investment to reach Asian voters in California, and the Republican National Committee has opened several Asian Pacific American community centers across the county, a multimillion-dollar investment aiming to recruit volunteers for voter outreach to support Republican candidates, with one of the first in Little Saigon.John Le, 57, a Vietnamese American Microsoft engineer from Lake Forest who described himself as a traditional Republican, said that, partisan politics aside, he was proud to be in a district with two Asian American candidates. He said he planned to vote for Ms. Steel.“It’s the American dream,” Mr. Le said. “We should be proud of these people who are giving back to the community. I will look at who will represent me the most.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Your Friday Briefing: Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96

      by

      Plus the Solomon Islands postpones its election and tycoons leave China.Queen Elizabeth II was the longest-serving monarch in British history.Eddie Mulholland/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/AFP Via Getty ImagesQueen Elizabeth II is dead at 96Queen Elizabeth died peacefully yesterday afternoon after more than 70 years as the British head of state. She was Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. Here is her obituary, photos from her reign and live updates.The queen was widely revered as she presided over Britain’s adjustment to a post-colonial era and saw it through its divorce from the E.U. Her years as sovereign were a time of upheaval. Still, she sought to project the royal family as a bastion of permanence in a world of shifting values, and to preserve the mystique that underpinned its survival.“There is no analogous public figure who will have been mourned as deeply in Britain — Winston Churchill might come closest — or whose death could provoke a greater reckoning with the identity and future of the country,” writes Mark Landler, our London bureau chief.Two days before her death, Queen Elizabeth II saw Britain through a fraught government transition. After months of scandal and a divisive campaign, Boris Johnson resigned on Tuesday, and the queen met with Liz Truss, making her the 15th and final prime minister to serve during her reign.What’s next: Charles, her eldest son, is now king, and will be known as King Charles III. The country will now begin its “London Bridge” plan for the days after her death. (The Guardian has a fascinating explanation.)Details: British news media outlets switched to rolling coverage after news of her deteriorating health yesterday. Family members rushed to Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, where she died.Economy: The queen’s death comes at a precarious time for Britain. A cost-of-living crisis and fears of skyrocketing energy costs have gripped the nation, and fears of a recession are growing. Yesterday, Truss laid out a broad plan to freeze gas and electricity rates for two years.Manasseh Sogavare, the leader of the Solomon Islands, pushed a constitutional amendment through Parliament to postpone national elections.Mark Schiefelbein/Associated PressSolomon Islands delays its electionThe Solomon Islands will delay next year’s national elections until 2024, which could give an advantage to Manasseh Sogavare, its prime minister.Sogavare claims the country can’t afford to hold national elections next year because it also plans to host the Pacific Games, an international sporting event. Sogavare reportedly sees the games as his crowning achievement, and hopes to win over the public with a sports spectacular.His opponents see a power grab linked to Beijing’s influence. Sogavare bet big on China, cutting the Solomon Islands’ ties with Taiwan and signing secretive agreements with Beijing. Critics have worried that the budding friendship will weaken the Pacific Island nation’s young democracy and expand Beijing’s influence in the region.Diplomacy: Australia’s foreign minister said that her government had offered to pay for the elections to be held as scheduled, expanding on similar past assistance. Sogavare described it as “an attempt to directly interfere into our domestic affairs.”The State of the WarZaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid continuing shelling and fears of a looming nuclear catastrophe, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.Russia’s Military Supplies: According to newly declassified American intelligence, Russia is buying millions of artillery shells and rockets from North Korea — a sign that global sanctions have severely restricted its supply chains and forced Moscow to turn to pariah states.Far From the War: Though much of Russia’s effort on the battlefield has not gone as Mr. Putin had planned, at home he has mostly succeeded in shielding Russians from the hardships of war — no draft, no mass funerals, no feelings of loss or conflict.The Road to Rebuilding: With a major conference on post-war reconstruction scheduled for next month, Ukraine’s allies face complicated questions about the process and the oversight of the funds.Beijing’s efforts to rein in a housing bubble, together with frequent pandemic lockdowns, have caused the entire real estate market to stumble.Pool photo by Selim ChtaytiChina’s tycoons leave the countryChina’s billionaire tycoons helped build the country’s economy into a powerhouse. Now, they are keeping low profiles — or leaving the country.In the latest exodus, two of China’s best-known entrepreneurs, Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, resigned this week as leaders of their struggling real estate empire, Soho China. The husband-and-wife team moved to the U.S. during the pandemic and had tried to manage their business remotely.Their resignations underscore the growing concern among private entrepreneurs that China is veering away from an era of freewheeling capitalism, toward an increasingly state-driven economy that prioritizes politics and security over growth.Resignations: Other very wealthy entrepreneurs have also stepped down from top jobs in recent months, including Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba; Colin Huang, founder of Pinduoduo, a rival to Alibaba; and Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.Departures: Zhou Hang, a prominent tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, recently left Shanghai’s lockdown for Canada. There, he denounced China’s current policies.THE LATEST NEWSAsia and the PacificStudents went on strike in Sydney, Australia, in May to demand action on climate change.Loren Elliott/ReutersAustralia passed a new climate bill that codified a pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 43 percent by 2030, and to be net zero by 2050, BBC reports.The Philippines rejected a request from the International Criminal Court to resume an inquiry into Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs. The death toll from a fire at a karaoke bar in Vietnam has risen to 33. It is the country’s deadliest fire since 2002.Here’s an explanation of China’s “zero-Covid” policy.The War in UkraineUkraine has begun to gain ground with a counteroffensive.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesAntony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, visited Kyiv and announced another $2 billion in long-term support to Ukraine and other countries in the region, bringing the total U.S. aid to $13.5 billion.The C.I.A. director said Russia’s invasion looked like a “failure” after six grinding months of fighting.The U.S. accused Moscow of forcibly deporting up to 1.6 million Ukrainians to Russia or Russian-controlled territory.The head of the Ukrainian national energy company said conditions at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant were getting “worse and worse and worse.”Around the WorldThere is no real effort to improve public services in Iraq.Emily Garthwaite for The New York TimesIraq’s instability is deepening. The government is still paralyzed, militias have fought in Baghdad and — despite its oil wealth — the state can’t provide basic services.The second suspect in a deadly stabbing rampage in Canada died after being taken into police custody.Europe is suffering through economic turmoil. Yesterday, the European Central Bank raised interest rates, an aggressive move to fight inflation. Here are key takeaways.Steve Bannon, who was pardoned by Donald Trump, was charged with two felony counts of money laundering, two felony counts of conspiracy and a felony count of scheming to defraud.A Morning ReadPetro Fedorovych’s bees had to fly to the front lines to find sunflowers.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesThe war has devastated Ukraine’s vast fields. One surprise consequence: Bees are flying toward the front lines to gather nectar.One 71-year-old beekeeper, Petro Fedorovych, has stayed put and is still gathering honey. “I built this house with my hands,” he told The Times late last month. “I will never leave.”Lives Lived: For a time, Anne Garrels was the only U.S. network reporter broadcasting from Baghdad, where she said she subsisted on Kit Kat bars. She died at 71.ARTS AND IDEASClimate change roils supply chainsChinese factories were shuttered again in late August, a frequent occurrence in a country that has imposed intermittent lockdowns to fight the coronavirus.But this time, the culprit was extreme weather, exacerbated by climate change. A record drought crippled economic activity across the southwest, freezing international supply chains for automobiles, electronics and other goods that have been routinely disrupted over the past three years.The interruptions could be a sign of the toll that climate change will most likely continue to wreak on the global economy. Many major companies source parts and products from places routinely affected by worsening extreme weather. Academics say the effect of these disasters, and of higher temperatures in general, will be particularly obvious when it comes to food trade.“What we just went through with Covid is a window to what climate could do,” one expert said.In other climate news:Prescribed burns are crucial to reducing the risk of major wildfires. But in a warming world, they are harder to do safely.Europe is burning wood pellets in the name of clean energy. But much of the wood comes from ancient, protected forests.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJoe Lingeman for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.Dal adas, a red lentil and tamarind soup from southern Iran, is a spicy and warming meal.What to WatchIn “The Bengali,” a travelogue-meets-mystery documentary, an African American woman seeks out her Indian grandfather’s past.What to ReadHere are 33 books coming this fall.Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Brainiac (four letters).Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Happy 126th birthday to The Times Magazine, which debuted this week in 1896.The latest episode of “The Daily” is on electric vehicles.You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The Disappearing World of Wolfgang Tillmans

      by

      It doesn’t seem like a titillating photograph: an orderly queue of Germans, waiting to enter a nondescript industrial site. It is dark. Just a single light illuminates the door. What does it look like? Like a color remake of Depression-era imagery: the factory entrance, the bread line.But the men in single file — they are all men — are at this factory not to work but to play. This old train shed in the former East Berlin has been reborn as Snax, a raunchy gay nightclub, and that light in the darkness is the gateway to pleasure. It’s 2001 now, the wall is a memory. The world is flat, we are young and proud. We got here on a train, there are no more border controls, or maybe we got here on a cheap new airline called easyJet.We are ready to dance, and to do other things in the dark. The party will go on well past sunrise. It feels like it might go on forever.Wolfgang Tillmans, “Outside Snax Club,” 2001.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Outside Snax Club” (2001) is one little star in a constellation of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans at the Museum of Modern Art: one node in a life’s network of tender portraits, straightforward still lifes and streaky abstractions. The sky from a window seat. A boy’s feet in tube socks. An apple tree in the London morning, a kiss stolen in the London night. The German photographer has been taking these deceptively natural pictures since 1986, and linking them in exhibitions and books that absorb different modes of photography into idiosyncratic associations. These have made Tillmans (especially to gay audiences) not just a renowned artist, but someone we feel we know personally. He is just “Wolfgang,” even to many who have never met him; his photos are intimacy enough.“Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear,” which opens to museum members this weekend and to the public Monday, is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year; actually, it’s been anticipated longer than that. Roxana Marcoci, a MoMA senior curator, has been working since 2014 on this tremendous, pandemic-detained overview, the largest of Tillmans’s career. It rambles across the museum’s sixth floor, vacant for more than a year and a half. It includes 417 works (mostly photographs, though there are a few minor videos) displayed, as always with Tillmans, in asymmetric arrays of large and small prints. He affixes the majority to the wall with Scotch tape or bulldog clips — although, as with the soft lighting and easy cropping of his photography, the ostensibly “informal” hang is actually calculated to the quarter-inch.Tillmans presents his photographs taped to or clipped to the wall, and prints them anew for each exhibition. Left, “Deer Hirsch” (1995). Right, “Smokin’ Jo” (1995). Emile Askey/The Museum of Modern Art, New York“Omen” (1991), printed at small scale and taped to the side of a free-standing gallery wall of the Museum of Modern Art.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe show is candid, unaffected, breezily intelligent; moralistic, too, in the later galleries. It is required viewing for both photography scholars and sportswear fetishists, and a worthy retrospective of one of the most significant artists to emerge at the end of the last century. (The show will tour next year to Toronto and San Francisco.)It is also — in a way I was not prepared for — one of the saddest museum exhibitions I have ever attended. It is a show of friends lost, of technologies abandoned, of cities grown insular, of principles forsaken. It maps, over 35 years, the ascent of a photographer to the height of his profession, and then the disintegration of almost everything he loved, the art form of photography not least among them.We follow the fragile peace of the ’90s into a century of war, extremism, post-truth and privation. We follow the artist through the last days of the darkroom and the rise of digital cameras, which he adopted with only moderate success. A sunset in Puerto Rico, a club night in Hackney, the transit of Venus, liquid concrete before it hardens: “To Look Without Fear” confirms that Tillmans has always been a photographer of transience, of things here today and gone tomorrow. Now his two hometowns, Berlin and London, are both facing frigid winters with life-threatening power shortages, and his whole world feels on the cusp of vanishing.Tillmans was born in 1968 in the industrial heartland of West Germany. He had a childhood love of astronomy, acquiring his first telescope at age 12, and of British pop groups like New Order and Culture Club that inspired a lifelong passion for London. (In 1983, on an exchange program in the British capital, the 14-year-old Tillmans somehow got past the bouncer at the gay nightclub Heaven, but left early to get the last Tube home.)The artist considers “Lacanau (self),” from 1986, to be his first self-portrait. Lila Barth for The New York Times“Selbstportrait (Self-portrait),” from 1988, when Tillmans was 20.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Faltenwurf (Keithstrasse),” a 2021 example of Tillmans’s drapery studies.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London.Photography came more accidentally. On the beach in France one summer, Tillmans aimed a point-and-shoot camera at his flexed knee and silky black Adidas shorts: a first, abstracted self-portrait. That picture is in the first room at MoMA, and one of the funnier leitmotifs of “To Look Without Fear” is the three stripes of the Adidas logo, a queer sportswear fixation that endures even as cities and bodies change. At the show’s entrance we see the 20-year-old Tillmans in a skimpy red Adidas bathing suit. At its exit is a photograph from three decades later of another, crumpled pair of glistening red Adidas shorts: a drapery study, a memento mori.He moved to Britain for art school but got his break in magazines, shooting raves, festivals, and also fashion editorials. The London indie magazine i-D first published this show’s well-traveled photographs of his friends Lutz and Alex, gripping each other’s androgynous bodies. A giant portrait of the British DJ Smokin’ Jo, her silver sequined dress twinkling in the golden hour, was a commission for Interview. There were new gay magazines like Attitude, for which he photographed Tony Blair, and Butt, which printed his images of half-dressed fashion designers on pink paper, like a not-safe-for-work Financial Times.“Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees” (1992), a double portrait of Tillmans’s childhood friends.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHe was shooting on 35 mm rather than in large formats; he disdained the tripod, abjured conspicuous lighting. Nan Goldin comes to mind before some of his halcyon ’90s pictures, and she herself appears with two nudes in a 1996 Tillmans idyll: a millennial remake of Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” But he’s far less diaristic than Goldin, and a more relevant influence may be the New Objectivity of 1920s Berlin, where painters and photographers like Christian Schad and Otto Dix made a virtue of hard surfaces and louche life.His partyers are often standing still. His nudes are almost always staged. The same cool, surface-level gaze falls upon the windows of London skyscrapers, the water of pools and oceans, and the great love of his youth, the painter Jochen Klein. Klein appears in two of this show’s largest prints: “Deer Hirsch” (1995), a rare black-and-white photograph of Klein and a young buck, staring wondrously at each other on an empty beach, and “Jochen taking a bath” (1997), shot months before his death from AIDS-related pneumonia. (The memory of that photo haunts a 2015 image of the singer Frank Ocean, another sad young man with closely cropped hair against white tiles.)Wolfgang Tillmans, “Jochen taking a bath,” 1997.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Frank, in the shower” (2015), depicting the singer Frank Ocean.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonWhat mattered more than the photographer’s subjects was the photographer’s regard. It was applied equally, unobtrusively, across genres — portrait, landscape, nude, still life — and united in the taped-up arrangements he first tried out in 1993. All together, on the gallery wall, the modest photographs could express a new, politically and sexually charged way of being in the world. They were promiscuous: not (or not only) in the word’s libertine sense, but freely mixing, ready to be rearranged, most themselves when with others. They were urban, too, and came to typify a newly vibrant and international London, where the mammoth Tate Modern opened in 2000 and, in the same year, Tillmans became the first non-British laureate of the Turner Prize.Later, in the 2005 exhibition “Truth Study Center,” Tillmans introduced a new display module that mixed his photographs with newspaper clippings (about war, fundamentalism, and also scientific breakthroughs) on low wooden tables. With these didactic works he meant to resist the absolutes of Bush-Blair rhetoric, but they ended up as preachy show-and-tell displays: a first act in the 21st-century domestication of Tillmans’s youthful freedom. Anyway, by the time of “Truth Study Center,” different and more disruptive photographic arrangements were coming into view on our (desktop) screens. The tacked-up pictures and the carefully laid-out tables would give way to the image-search grid and the social feed. Tillmans’s unframed printouts were becoming atavistic. The independent magazines where he found his voice were on their last legs.“Freischwimmer 26,” 2003. The abstract work is one of a series of pictures Tillmans has made without a camera, by exposing photo paper to lasers and other light sources.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHis most powerful response to this century’s explosion of images has been the cameraless “Freischwimmer” abstractions, begun in 2003. So beautiful, these pictures: grand, streaky expanses of color, suggesting bodies or currents, made by exposing photosensitive paper to lasers and other hand-held lights. Yet something began to go sour in the Tillmans method around the time of his adoption of a digital camera in 2008. Large, colorful prints of a Shanghai street or an Argentine shantytown are too crisp, artificially alienated. Recent portraits, such as the Frank Ocean photograph, forsake the soft-focus intimacy of the ’90s for hard-candy sheen. The later party pictures are really dreadful: The black tones have lost all their mystery, the sex appeal has drained, and in a time of ubiquitous cameraphones his no-style style feels redundant.Absent at MoMA, though discussed in Marcoci’s catalog, is Tillmans’s most widely seen digital endeavor: his posters for the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Made in a season of now justified panic, these balmy images of jet-trail-crossed skies or the cliffs of Dover, overlaid with pleas for apathetic youth to vote Remain, were freely distributed online. “What is lost is lost forever,” read the caption on the most ethereal of these posters, and he wasn’t kidding. With Brexit, the imagery of borders introduced earlier that decade — the concrete walls of Gaza, the customs line at Gatwick — arrived at Tillmans’s doorstep. He thought the lack of artifice, the pictures everyone could read, might inspire people to live together; it turned out he was speaking a language narrower than he’d ever known. A 2021 photo of worn-out maroon passports (the color of all E.U. member states’ travel documents; the Johnson government replaced Britain’s with a blue one) might as well be a grave marker for Tillmans’s London. Some people really did have more freedoms when they were young.Recent works by Wolfgang Tillmans at MoMA, including, at center, “Kae Tempest” (2021).Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe all age. We all lose things. And yet I don’t blame Tillmans at all for considering, as he tells my colleague Matthew Anderson in this Sunday’s New York Times, that he might take a sabbatical and leave art for electoral politics. The democratic impulse in his photography, manifested through simple commercial lenses and unpretentious printouts, has receded into self-righteousness now, and his collisions of self-portraits, celebrity pictures, handsome sunsets and political slogans — well, how can these retain their force when a hundred million social media profiles do the same? He has reached the end of something, summed up with panache and great melancholy in this important show, and his accomplishment, not unlike E.U. membership, is easier to appreciate once it’s lost. Those late, sweaty ’90s nights: then, we were sure we had met the chronicler of a new millennium’s freedoms. What if Tillmans was instead a harbinger of the artist as entrepreneur of the self, and of how we would all go on posting pictures even as our misfortunes piled up offscreen?Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without FearOpens to members Sept. 9 and to the public Sept. 12 through Jan. 1, 2023, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, moma.org. More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Iraq’s Instability Deepens Amid Political Paralysis and Clashes

      by

      BAGHDAD — On most days in the Iraqi capital, jackhammers and electric drills provide the soundtrack to a construction boom, with multistory restaurants taking shape and a new $800 million central bank building rising above the skyline.But this apparent prosperity in parts of Baghdad belies what many Iraqi officials and citizens see as the crumbling foundation of the state — an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that the United States had intended to be free and democratic when it led an invasion 19 years ago to topple the dictator Saddam Hussein.After the invasion, Iraq’s long-sidelined Shiite Muslim majority came to dominate government, and the power struggle between Shiite and Sunni political groups fueled a sectarian war. Now, in a dangerous threat to the country’s already tenuous stability, rival Shiite armed groups, the most powerful among them tied to neighboring Iran, are fighting each other, and are beyond the control of the central government.“Internally, externally, at the political level and at the security level, Iraq is now a failed state,” said Saad Eskander, an Iraqi historian. “The Iraqi state cannot project its authority over its territory or its people.”A street in an impoverished neighborhood of Baghdad, where many live below the poverty line and do not have access to enough clean water or government-supplied electricity.Sleeping through the midday heat in Baghdad.Iraq’s weaknesses once again came into sharp relief last week when a stalemate over forming a new government — almost a year after the last elections — exploded into violence in the heart of the capital.Followers of the influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the heavily guarded Green Zone in an antigovernment protest after Mr. Sadr announced he was withdrawing from politics. Then rival pro-Iranian Shiite paramilitary fighters on the public payroll began shooting at the protesters, and armed members of a Sadr militia emerged to fight them.Ordered by the prime minister not to shoot at the demonstrators, government security forces were largely sidelined while the rival militias fought it out. After two days of fighting killed 34 people, Mr. Sadr ordered his followers to withdraw from the Green Zone, restoring an uneasy calm.The violence was rooted in a stalemate over forming a government that has dragged on since the elections in October 2021.Mr. Sadr’s followers won the largest bloc of seats in Parliament, although that was not enough to form a government without coalition partners. When he failed to put together a ruling coalition, the major Iran-backed parties with paramilitary wings — Shiite political rivals to Mr. Sadr — stepped in and tried to sideline him.Mr. Sadr then turned to his power on the street rather than at the negotiating table, ordering his followers to set up a protest camp at Parliament — a tactic he has used in the past.“If we discuss post-2003 Iraq, then we have to say it has never actually been a functioning state,” said Maria Fantappie of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Swiss-based conflict management organization. “We never had a prime minister with total control of the security forces or the borders.”Relatives of patients await news at a Baghdad hospital that treats poorer communities.Muhammed Said Jihad received oxygen while his cousin watched over him at a Baghdad hospital.That Iraq has not collapsed is thanks largely to the country’s immense oil wealth. But most citizens never see the benefit of that wealth, suffering through daily electricity cuts, decrepit schools and a lack of health care or even clean water.Last month, the country’s respected finance minister, Ali Allawi, resigned with a stark warning that staggering levels of corruption were draining Iraqi resources and posed an existential threat.“Vast underground networks of senior officials, corrupt businessmen and politicians operate in the shadows to dominate entire sectors of the economy and siphon off literally billions of dollars from the public purse,” Mr. Allawi wrote in his resignation letter to the prime minister. “This vast octopus of corruption and deceit has reached into every sector of the country’s economy and institutions: It must be dismantled at all costs if this country is to survive.”Mr. Allawi, who also served as finance minister in 2006, said he was shocked when he returned at “how far the machinery of government had deteriorated” under the domination of special interest groups tied to various countries in the region.“You have the people who fly off to Tehran, fly off to Amman, fly off to Ankara, fly off to the U.A.E., fly off to Qatar,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in June. “Before, they used to fly off to Washington, but they don’t do that anymore.”A garbage truck dumping trash in a Baghdad area that is home to generations of Iraqis who migrated from the south seeking better prospects. A street vendor fixing a fan for a customer in Baghdad.The United States, meanwhile, has increasingly disengaged from the Arab world, focusing mainly on containing Iran and fostering normalization with Israel. For years the target of hostility over its occupation of Iraq, the country now appears to be losing relevance as Shiite militias battle it out for primacy.Iraq sits on the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, and oil revenues have both fed corruption and propped up the economy.According to state and local officials, militias and tribal groups siphon off customs revenue from Iraq’s Gulf port of Umm Qasr. Crossings along the 1,000-mile border with Iran are another source of illicit revenue. Iran-backed militias in Iraq control sectors like scrap metal, and they extort payments for protection from businesses.Government contracts are another major source of corruption.Iraq’s health ministry, traditionally run by officials loyal to Mr. Sadr, is the monopoly buyer of almost half the medications imported into Iraq and is considered one of the most corrupt ministries, according to Iraqi officials and outside experts.Three years ago, Ala Alwan, a former World Health Organization official, resigned as health minister, saying he could no longer fight corruption in the ministry or ward off threats.Mr. Allawi, in the interview in June when he was still finance minister, described a country that had essentially become ungovernable.“You can’t do anything but manage daily affairs, given that in this country, there’s a crisis every day,” he said.Baghdad residents on a city bus. Iraq has one of the youngest populations in the Middle East, and there are fears that the economy will not be able to support them.Medical waste flowing into the Tigris River near a hospital in Baghdad.With the war in Ukraine driving up oil prices state revenue has recently come from oil exports — a lack of diversification that could prove disastrous as the world increasingly turns to alternative energy sources.But with dysfunctional ministries and a weak central government, there is no real effort to improve public services or life for the one-quarter of the population estimated by the government to live in poverty.Large parts of the country suffer from shortages of electricity or clean water — a continuing crisis that fueled widespread protests three years ago, leading to the fall of the government.Few sectors are as blatantly dysfunctional as the country’s once-respected educational system. For almost seven years, thousands of temporary teachers have worked without pay, waiting for a chance to be hired by the education ministry. The ministry has now begun making payments.Schools are so overcrowded they operate in shifts, offering only half a day of classes to students. Many schools lack running water or enough toilets. Most are lucky if they have fans in the 100-degree heat.More than half of Iraqi students drop out before high school. In Baghdad and other cities, children who have left school push wooden carts in outdoor markets or hawk bottles of water to drivers in traffic.Relatives of patients lining up to collect prescriptions at a Baghdad hospital.A classroom for trainee doctors at a Baghdad hospital.“We didn’t receive new textbooks this year,” said Um Zahra, a primary schoolteacher who was doing paperwork at the education ministry this week. “We are trying to use old ones,” she added, saying she did not want to give her full name because she did not have her husband’s permission to speak.Um Zahra said her own neighborhood in Baghdad, the second biggest city in the Middle East, had not had regular running water since 2014.There is so little faith in the political system that in Baghdad, voter turnout was about 30 percent in the last elections. Many expect the same corrupt politicians to remain in power thanks to a post-2003 system that ensures key posts for specific religious and ethnic groups.With neighboring Iran and Turkey both frequently breaching Iraqi sovereignty, the weakness of the Iraqi government and state institutions poses a threat to regional stability — as it did in 2014 when the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of an Islamic State assault that conquered large parts of the country.Mr. Eskander, the historian, said Iraq’s instability can be traced back to before Saddam was toppled, when it lost control of some of its borders and territory in the Iran-Iraq war. But he said he still had hope that the country would survive.“A change of leaders — a change of generations — is the only way,” Mr. Eskander said.Open sewage in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Solomon Islands’ Leader, a Friend of China, Gets an Election Delayed

      by

      The prime minister claims the country can’t afford to hold national elections next year. His opponents see a power grab linked to Beijing’s influence.HONIARA, Solomon Islands — When Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare bet big on China, cutting the Solomon Islands’ ties with Taiwan and signing a bundle of secretive agreements with Beijing, critics worried that the budding friendship would weaken the Pacific Island nation’s young democracy.On Thursday, his opponents say, Mr. Sogavare validated their fears: He pushed through Parliament a constitutional amendment that delayed next year’s national elections until 2024. That means he will face voters at what could be a more advantageous time for him, after the Solomon Islands hosts the Pacific Games, an international sporting event to be held in a complex that China is building.“The bill does not in any way inhibit or prohibit the right to vote,” Mr. Sogavare said as he opened debate in Parliament with a speech that portrayed the postponement as a minor issue. He added that his government continued to “uphold the principles of democracy and uphold national interests.”Mr. Sogavare, whose coalition government has a clear majority in Parliament, had been laying the groundwork for the delay for months, claiming that the country could not afford to hold both the vote and the Pacific Games in the same year.Opposition leaders argued that the Solomon Islands could and should do both. Australia’s foreign minister said this week that her government had offered to pay for the elections to be held as scheduled, expanding on similar assistance that Australia had offered in the past.“The government is saying it’s a one-off to accommodate the Games, but many of us look at that as an excuse,” Peter Kenilorea Jr., the deputy opposition leader, said in an interview. “It’s directly linked to China’s influence, and trying to keep certain people in power.”The Chinese Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. But while prolonging Mr. Sogavare’s tenure may benefit China, which has increased its focus on the Pacific and signed a security deal with his government this year, analysts and local observers believe that the main driver of the delay is the prime minister.China is building a stadium in Honiara, the Solomon Islands’ capital, that will be used for the Pacific Games next year.Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesAn emotional leader with what some describe as a streak of paranoia, Mr. Sogavare has served as prime minister three times before, never remaining popular enough to finish a term.In this case, people who have known him for years say that Mr. Sogavare sees the Games — and the new stadium on the main road in the capital, Honiara — as his crowning achievement.Delaying the election, his critics argue, is political opportunism: He hopes to win over the public with a sports spectacular, while also giving his coalition more time to line up deals with the Chinese government and Chinese companies, with all the infrastructure, resource extraction and influx of money that could entail.“He thinks he’s saving the Solomon Islands,” said Archbishop Chris Cardone, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in the island nation, an American from Long Island who has spent 32 years in the country. But, he added, “the prime minister is really acting like a dictator in the model of Xi.”Mr. Sogavare has begun to resemble Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in other ways. He has become noticeably less tolerant of questions, and quicker to see enemies all around.In Parliament on Thursday, he said he was “extremely disappointed” by Australia’s disclosure about the offer of electoral aid, which he called “an attempt to directly interfere into our domestic affairs.”And before the session opened — in a round, gray parliamentary assembly building paid for by the United States in the 1990s — government officials told journalists outside that photos could no longer be taken in the public parking lot, because Mr. Sogavare had been angered by reporters who filmed him as he entered a few weeks earlier.Mr. Sogavare with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, in Honiara in May. Xinhua, via Associated Press“Soga wants to hang on as long as he can; he’s not the first politician in the world to be like that,” said Graeme Smith, a Pacific Islands expert at the Australian National University.“Where the P.R.C. gets the credit,” he added, referring to the People’s Republic of China, “is they seem to have put him in a financial position to meet the needs of enough of his M.P.s to assure him of his job, no matter how erratic he gets.”Solomon Islands politics “is all about the money,” Archbishop Cardone said. When Mr. Sogavare faced a no-confidence vote last year, leaked government documents show, he distributed tens of thousands of dollars to fellow members of Parliament from a slush fund that started with money from Taiwan, only to be replenished by China.Whatever its cause, the election delay is another setback for a country of 700,000 people and nearly 1,000 islands, and a potential spark for social unrest.Since gaining independence from Britain in the wake of World War II, the Solomon Islands has been repeatedly shaken by violence, in ways that still shape the present.Ethnic and regional tensions exploded in 1998, with rebels on the main island, Guadalcanal — where the capital, Honiara, is situated — fighting to overthrow the dominant minority from the province of Malaita. As the unrest continued, a prime minister from Malaita was deposed in 2000 — and succeeded by Mr. Sogavare.Many Malaitans have never forgiven him for playing an instrumental role in toppling a prime minister they respected. And, after seeing him cozy up to Chinese Communists — who have always been eyed warily in a country that is deeply Christian, without a separation of church and state — their anger has intensified. Malaitans were among the leaders of antigovernment protests in November that led to the torching of 65 buildings, including most of Honiara’s Chinatown.The central market in Honiara last month. Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesMany islanders now worry that the postponement of the election, to no later than April 2024, will exacerbate the unresolved tensions.“Some people want change, they want new leaders,” said Phillip Subu, president of the Malaita Youth Council, a group that works with young people in the island province. “They don’t want to wait.”In Parliament on Thursday, these issues played out in tones both high-minded and accusatory, especially among Malaitan ministers on opposite sides of the debate.Matthew Wale, the opposition leader, whose mother is Malaitan, called the bill “a hijacking of the people’s right to exercise their vote.” John Dean Kuku, the leader of the independent group in Parliament, said it would “bring us injury with no cure.”Mr. Sogavare’s allies focused on the benefits they said the Pacific Games would bring, including dormitories that would later be used by local schools. Some of them attacked the news media and, echoing authoritarian governments elsewhere, accused the opposition of catering to nefarious “foreign elements,” like Australia and the United States. “Shame on you,” said Bradley Tovosia, the mining minister, who often works closely with Chinese officials, shouting at the opposition. “You talk to people you’re not representing.”In the public gallery, only a handful of people watched. A wall near the entrance celebrates the Constitution, enacted in 1978, featuring a photo of those who wrote it. They include Peter Kenilorea, the Solomon Islands’ first prime minister and the father of Mr. Kenilorea, the deputy opposition leader. In the photo, he is smiling with visible pride. Four and a half decades later, his son expressed disappointment in Thursday’s result.“It’s very much dictatorial,” Mr. Kenilorea said. “A vote delayed is a vote denied.” More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      County Official Arrested in Las Vegas Reporter’s Stabbing Death, Prosecutor Says

      by

      Robert Telles, the Clark County public administrator, was taken into custody in the killing of Jeff German, a reporter at The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the district attorney said.A county official in Las Vegas was arrested on a murder charge on Wednesday, hours after the police searched his home in connection with the fatal stabbing of a reporter at The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the district attorney said.The official, Robert Telles, the Clark County public administrator, was taken into custody in the killing of the reporter, Jeff German, according to the Clark County district attorney, Steven B. Wolfson.Mr. Telles was wheeled out on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance after the police returned to his home in tactical gear, The Review-Journal reported. “The suspect in the homicide that occurred on September 2, 2022, has been taken into custody,” the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night, without naming the person. The department said it planned to provide an update on the investigation at a news conference on Thursday morning.Mr. Telles, a Democrat elected in 2018, lost a June primary after he was the focus of investigative stories by Mr. German, who detailed claims that Mr. Telles had presided over a hostile work environment and had engaged in an “inappropriate relationship” with a staff member. Mr. Telles and the staff member denied the accusations.Mr. German, 69, was found fatally stabbed outside his home in Las Vegas on Saturday morning. The police believe he was killed after an altercation on Friday.“The arrest of Robert Telles is at once an enormous relief and an outrage for the Review-Journal newsroom,” Glenn Cook, The Review-Journal’s executive editor, said in a statement on Wednesday night. “We are relieved Robert Telles is in custody and outraged that a colleague appears to have been killed for reporting on an elected official,” Mr. Cook said. “Journalists can’t do the important work our communities require if they are afraid a presentation of facts could lead to violent retribution.”He thanked the Las Vegas police for responding to the killing with urgency and hard work. “Now, hopefully, The Review-Journal, the German family and Jeff’s many friends can begin the process of mourning and honoring a great man and a brave reporter,” Mr. Cook said.Mr. Telles did not respond earlier on Wednesday to phone messages, texts and emails, and it was unclear if he had a lawyer. The Review-Journal reported that after his home was searched, Mr. Telles had returned at about 2:20 p.m. local time, wearing what appeared to be a white hazmat suit. He did not respond to reporters’ questions as he entered his garage and closed the door, the newspaper reported.Earlier Wednesday, the police would not confirm that they were searching Mr. Telles’s home.In a statement, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department would confirm only that it was serving search warrants related to the investigation into Mr. German’s death. “No further information will be provided at this time,” the statement said.“They’ve been here all day, since about 7 a.m.,” David Zanella, a neighbor who lives two doors from Mr. Telles, said in a phone interview earlier on Wednesday. “They towed both of the cars from the house, and they’ve been in the house, taking things.”On Tuesday, the Police Department released a video that it said showed the person who killed Mr. German wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a reflective orange jacket. The video also showed the person’s vehicle, which appeared to be a red or maroon GMC Yukon Denali, the police said.The Review-Journal reported that a vehicle matching the description of the Yukon Denali had been towed from Mr. Telles’s property on Wednesday.The police have not said whether they believe that Mr. German was targeted because of his reporting. At a news conference on Tuesday, Capt. Dori Koren of the Police Department said that investigators were evaluating every single lead and every theory.“We are exploring all possibilities in this investigation,” Captain Koren said. “But at this time, we believe we have evidence that shows that the suspect was in the area prior to the homicide, and it appears that they were casing to commit other crimes.”He asked the public for home security video or other information that could help identify the person responsible for killing Mr. German, whose career as a columnist and a senior investigative reporter spanned more than three decades.Over that period, Mr. German broke stories on organized crime, politics, casinos and corruption for The Las Vegas Sun and then for The Review-Journal.Jeff German, an investigative reporter, on the Las Vegas Strip last year.K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal, via APThis year, Mr. German wrote investigative stories about Mr. Telles’s office, which secures the property of deceased people and administers estates in court. In May, Mr. German reported that the office had been “mired in turmoil and internal dissension over the past two years, with allegations of emotional stress, bullying and favoritism leading to secret videotaping of the boss and a co-worker outside the office.”The story, based on interviews with a half-dozen current and former employees, described a “hostile work environment” and accusations that Mr. Telles had engaged in an “inappropriate relationship” with a staff member.In the story, Mr. Telles blamed “a handful of old-timers” for exaggerating the relationship and for falsely claiming that he had been mistreating them. “All my new employees are super happy, and everyone’s productive and doing well,” Mr. Telles was quoted as saying.In another story in late May, Mr. German reported that Clark County managers had hired a former coroner to try to ease tensions in the office.After the June primary, Mr. Telles posted a letter online criticizing The Review-Journal and rebutting claims made in Mr. German’s reporting. Mr. Telles also wrote about Mr. German on Twitter.“Typical bully,” Mr. Telles wrote. “Can’t take a pound of critism after slinging 100 pounds of BS. Up to article #4 now. You’d think he’d have better things to do.” He included an emoji of a winking face with a tongue sticking out.After Mr. German was killed, Mr. Cook told the paper that Mr. German had not communicated any concerns for his safety or any threats made against him.“There are no words for a loss like this,” Mr. Cook wrote on Twitter on Sept. 4.Sheelagh McNeill More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Truss Forms a Cabinet Diverse in Background but Not in Ideology

      by

      Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, has recruited cabinet members from diverse backgrounds, though her inner circle retains a hard Conservative edge.LONDON — One attended Britain’s most famous private high-school, Eton College, another is a top-drawer lawyer, and the third holds a senior rank as an Army reservist. The résumés of those handed the three top cabinet posts by Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, are typical of generations of high-achievers in her ruling Conservative Party.What is different is that none of the three are white.In choosing her top team, Ms. Truss has created a strikingly diverse cabinet. The country also has its first female deputy prime minister.“What is extraordinary is the pace of change, how this is already normal, and this isn’t contentious,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research institute that focuses on immigration, integration, race and identity. “There aren’t people going around saying ‘give us our country back.’”Still, Ms. Truss’s inner circle, while progressive in its ethnic makeup, also has a hard ideological edge, which critics say makes it unlikely to pursue policy friendlier to Britain’s minority population, or for refugees arriving on the country’s shores.Indeed, some argue that the diversity among cabinet ministers gives Ms. Truss the cover to pursue even more radical approaches, such as a plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda — a policy now the responsibility of Suella Braverman, the new home secretary, whose father came to Britain from Kenya in 1968.Suella Braverman, the new home secretary, leaving the first cabinet meeting.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via Shutterstock“There’s a difference that makes no difference, and a change that leads to no change,” said Kehinde Andrews, a professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University, citing as one example the Conservatives’ immigration policy and the Rwanda plan.“The fact is that you should judge it on the policy,” he said, “and the government’s track record is horrendous.”Ms. Braverman’s legal background — she is a barrister — is relevant to her new position because the government is fighting a battle in court with opponents who have stalled the Rwanda flights. She has already established herself as a hard-liner and has called for Britain to limit the influence of the European convention on human rights, which protects basic human rights and which was written into domestic British law in 1998.The chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, shares Ms. Truss’s faith in free markets, desire to cut taxes and approach to deregulation. His parents, an economist and a lawyer, came to Britain from Ghana as students in the 1960s. Cerebral and self-confident, Mr. Kwarteng attended Eton College and then won a place at Cambridge University, where he excelled academically.The new foreign secretary is James Cleverly, whose mother came to the Britain from Sierra Leone, and who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel as an Army reservist. He is perhaps the least ideological of the three, though like the other two, he was a strong proponent of Brexit.The new foreign secretary, James Cleverly, on Wednesday. Ms. Truss held the position before she became the prime minister.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockCritics point out that, unlike the overwhelming majority of Britons, Mr. Kwarteng, Ms. Braverman and Mr. Cleverly were all educated at private schools (albeit sometimes with financial aid, as in Mr. Kwarteng’s case) — proof that social class, rather than race or gender, is perhaps the more telling dividing line in British politics.For all that, Ms. Truss’s appointments put Britain indisputably ahead of many other European countries in the diversity of its political elite. On Wednesday, Ms. Truss used her first appearance in Parliament to point out that she is the third female Conservative prime minister, while the opposition Labour Party has never elected a woman as leader.“It is quite extraordinary, is it not” Ms. Truss said, “that there does not seem to be the ability in the Labour party to find a female leader, or indeed a leader who does not come from north London?” — a reference to Keir Starmer, the party leader, and his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, both of whom represent parliamentary constituencies in same part of the capital.In fact, the diversity of the cabinet can be traced to a former prime minister, David Cameron, who, after becoming party leader in 2005, altered the selection process for potential Conservative lawmakers. That effectively forced local parties to choose parliamentary candidates from lists with a bigger proportion of female, Black and minority ethnic backgrounds.“Look what’s happened to the Conservative Party,” Mr. Cameron said in an interview with The New York Times in 2019. “It used to be people like me: white, posh, male, rural southerners. It has now got a gender balance. It’s every people from every Black and minority ethnic group in the country.”David Cameron, the former prime minister of Britain, in 2019.Mary Turner for The New York TimesMr. Cameron rejected the contention that the ethnic and racial diversity masked a lack of class diversity. Among those he named to his cabinet, he noted in the interview, was Sajid Javid, whose Pakistani immigrant father drove a bus.“The fact that the old fusty Conservative Party is managing to produce people like that says a lot,” he said.Britain’s first Black cabinet minister, Paul Boateng, was appointed in 2002, but until recently there was little change at the highest reaches of government. When in 2010 a member of the House of Lords, Sayeeda Warsi, was appointed to the cabinet she was the first British politician of South Asian heritage to take up such a position. It was another four years before an elected lawmaker of South Asian heritage, Mr. Javid, joined the cabinet.In part, the gains in government by people of color reflect social change and advances through education. On average, ethnic minority pupils have outperformed white Britons at school in recent years. In every year from 2007 to 2021, white pupils had the lowest entry rate into higher education.“Cameron’s effective intervention catalyzed and sped up some that was happening in Britain,” said Mr. Katwala of British Future. He added, “In Britain we are a generation ahead of most other western European countries.”Yet critics note that the greater ethnic and gender diversity has not changed the policies of successive Conservative governments, which have grown increasingly hard-line on immigration and often embraced tax cuts and other economic policies that tend to favor wealthy people.Ms. Truss has acknowledged that her most notable tax cut proposal — a reversal of last April’s increase in national insurance rates — would disproportionately benefit those with higher incomes, since they pay the most taxes.“To look at everything through the lens of redistribution, I believe, is wrong,” Ms. Truss said to the BBC last Sunday, in what some noted was a full-throated defense of “trickle-down” economics. “What I’m about is about growing the economy and growing the economy benefits everybody.”Ms. Truss facing questions on Wednesday in a photograph released by Parliament.Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/EPA, via ShutterstockProfessor Andrews, from Birmingham City University, said the Conservatives were practicing a particularly cynical form of identity politics by promoting the diversity among its senior leaders, while also advancing retrograde policies.Mr. Katwala argued that diversity at the top of politics doesn’t do anything automatically, but can shift attitudes by providing role models and “makes a difference in what your expectations are at a societal level.” The example he cited was that of Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who came to power in 1979.“I don’t think she had a policy agenda that was good for women or any ambition to promote women,” Mr. Katwala said. “Yet when Liz Truss was at school she saw that there was a woman in Downing Street.” More

    • 88 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      On Brazil’s Bicentennial, Bolsonaro Softens Campaign Rhetoric

      by

      President Jair Bolsonaro called his supporters and the military to the streets to celebrate Brazil’s 200th anniversary. Then he softened his campaign tone.RIO DE JANEIRO — On the 200th anniversary of Brazil’s independence, President Jair Bolsonaro had roughly half the country celebrating and half the country on edge.Tanks rolled down the streets of São Paulo, the country’s largest city, on Wednesday. Warships paraded off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Jets soared over the nation’s capital, Brasília. And more than a million of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters took to the streets across the vast nation, draped in the green and yellow of Brazil’s flag.For months, the bicentennial had been billed as a test of Brazil’s democracy.The left in Brazil feared that Mr. Bolsonaro would use the moment to declare war on Brazil’s democratic institutions and preview an attempt to hold onto power if he loses the presidential election next month. The right said it would simply be a peaceful Independence Day celebration — with a clear tilt toward the nation’s president — as it had been in years past.In the end, the atmosphere was more of a party than an uprising. And Mr. Bolsonaro — who for months has made worrisome comments about the security of the elections and his willingness to accept the results — took a markedly softer tack in two speeches to his supporters.An aircraft team performing acrobatics over Copacabana beach during Independence Day celebrations in Rio de Janeiro.Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesHe touted what he said were his accomplishments — cheap fuel, relatively low inflation — and focused on campaign promises, including keeping abortion and drugs illegal and fighting what he calls “gender ideology,” or the movement to re-examine the concept of gender.Perhaps his most forceful comments were calling his political rivals “evil” and warning that they would try to break the laws in the Constitution. “Wait for the re-election and see if everyone plays by the rules,” he said. At one point, he appeared to reflect on his past comments: “We all change. We all improve. We can all be better in the future.”The shift in tone was in line with advice Mr. Bolsonaro has been receiving from some senior advisers, who have warned him that attacking the country’s elections systems and democratic institutions is not particularly popular with the moderate voters he needs to win over to prevail in October’s election, according to one senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential meetings.There have also been recent signs of a truce between election officials and Brazil’s armed forces, which have backed Mr. Bolsonaro’s claims that Brazil’s elections systems are vulnerable.Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the election in Brazil will be rigged.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesYet Mr. Bolsonaro has shifted tones frequently in the past. The morning before the bicentennial celebrations, he was casting doubt on Brazil’s voting machines in an interview with a right-wing news network. And last Independence Day, his speech caused a brief institutional crisis after he said he would not respect the decisions of one Supreme Court justice. Days later, he walked those comments back.The election, pitting Mr. Bolsonaro against the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will be one of the most closely watched votes in Latin America in decades. Brazilians will cast their ballots on Oct. 2 and, if no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, again on Oct. 30 in a runoff. Mr. da Silva has held a steady and comfortable lead in the polls.Mr. Bolsonaro, a right-wing nationalist, has made attacks on Brazil’s Supreme Court and its elections systems central to his political rhetoric for years. He has argued, with little evidence, that Brazil’s electronic voting machines are vulnerable to fraud, and he has accused several Supreme Court justices of political persecution..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Those judges cleared corruption charges against Mr. da Silva, freeing him from prison and allowing him to run in this year’s election. They have forced social networks to take down inflammatory or false posts from Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters (as well as from Mr. da Silva). And they are investigating Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies in a number of cases, including for accusations of spreading misinformation and leaking classified information.One judge, Alexandre de Moraes, who is also Brazil’s new elections chief, stoked tensions further last month when he ordered several prominent businessmen’s homes to be searched, their bank accounts to be frozen and some of their social-media accounts to be blocked. His evidence supporting the action was a series of leaked text messages that suggested the businessmen would support a military coup if Mr. da Silva won the presidency.A military parade on Wednesday commemorating the 200th anniversary of Brazilian independence in São Paulo.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesMr. Bolsonaro has called Mr. Moraes’s actions against the businessmen a gross abuse of power. On Wednesday, he said the men’s privacy was violated. Earlier in the day, one of those businessmen, Luciano Hang, the owner of a Brazilian department-store chain, stood between Mr. Bolsonaro and the president of Portugal for a period as they watched the military parade in Brasília.Mr. Bolsonaro had called his supporters to the streets to celebrate “our sacred liberty.” Political analysts and leaders on the left had worried about the prospects of violence; a group of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters had tried and failed to get past the barricades of the Supreme Court during similar Independence Day celebrations last year.Yet the festivities were peaceful. There were families with children, older people in wheelchairs, and vendors selling beer, snacks, Brazilian flags and shirts with Mr. Bolsonaro’s face. Authorities had increased security, including deploying snipers and drones, and there were few signs that supporters were planning to challenge the country’s institutions beyond chants that Mr. da Silva belonged in jail and that Mr. Moraes should be impeached.Despite Mr. Bolsonaro’s toned-down rhetoric, his supporters still wanted to focus on the Supreme Court and the voting machines.“The Supreme Court is supposed to be the guardian of the Constitution, and yet every day they’re finding a new way to rip it up,” said Gabriel Miguel, 32, a real-estate lawyer draped in a Brazilian flag and wearing a camouflage hat. He accused Mr. da Silva’s party of cheating in past elections, and said there would be consequences if they attempted fraud this year. “They wouldn’t dare to do anything against democracy,” he said.Supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro in São Paulo on Wednesday, where merchants peddled Bolsonaro-related items.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesMany Brazilians on the left accused Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters of co-opting Brazil’s bicentennial celebrations for a political event. Mr. da Silva told his supporters to instead join him for a rally in Rio on Thursday.Mr. Bolsonaro arrived at his speech in Rio on a motorcycle, leading a parade of motorcycles driven by supporters. Such “motociatas,” or motorcycle rallies, have been a hallmark of his political brand, featured prominently in his campaign videos, and his way of visiting areas of Brazil outside major population centers.In Brasília, he watched the military parade from a stage with his wife, Michelle, and a phalanx of government and military officials. “We are here to fulfill God’s calling,” Michelle Bolsonaro told the crowd. “The enemy shall not win.”In his speech there, Mr. Bolsonaro continued his strategy of making his masculinity a central part of his campaign. “I’ve been telling single men, singles who are tired of being unhappy, find a woman,” he said. “A princess. Marry her.” He then kissed Michelle.The crowd began chanting “imbrochável,” a slightly vulgar Portuguese word that translates roughly to “never limp” that Mr. Bolsonaro has adopted as part of his political brand.Mr. Bolsonaro joined the crowd and chanted: “Never limp! Never limp! Never limp!”More than a million supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro turned out across the country on Wednesday, including in São Paulo.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesAndré Spigariol contributed reporting from Brasília, and Lis Moriconi from Rio de Janeiro. More