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      Spanish Vote Threatens Efforts to Recover Franco’s Victims

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      Spain’s left-wing government has tried to accelerate exhumations of mass graves left from the dictatorship. If it wins Sunday’s election, the right may end that.When she first heard of a project to exhume and identify the remains of hundreds of Civil War victims — her grandfather possibly among them — Ángela Raya Fernández said she was “filled with hope, a lot of hope.”Ever since she was a girl, she had heard stories about how her father’s father, José Raya Hurtado, was executed during the Spanish Civil War, his body ignominiously dumped in a ravine by forces loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco. She had only ever known him from black-and-white photos: round glasses, a receding hairline and a resolute gaze.“We’ve long hoped that somebody could find him and give him a dignified burial,” said Ms. Raya, a soft-spoken, 62-year-old librarian.But with general elections Sunday and polls predicting a right-wing victory, Ms. Raya and her family, along with thousands of others, fear that years of efforts to find their loved ones may suddenly grind to a halt.A photo of José Raya Hurtado, who is believed to have been executed during the Spanish Civil War, is affixed to a tree in Viznar, Spain.The conservative Popular Party, which grew partly from Francoist roots, has pledged to repeal a memory law passed last autumn under the current Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, aimed at accelerating the exhumations. A possible alliance between the conservatives and the far-right Vox party, which has long opposed attempts to address the crimes of the past, has only heightened these fears.“It would be a catastrophe,” Ms. Raya said, “a huge step backward.”The to and fro over the memory law reflects how the traumas of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War and Franco’s subsequent dictatorship, which ended with his death in 1975, still divide the country today.To some, Franco, a nationalist, consolidated Spain’s postwar economic growth and served as an anti-Communist bulwark. To many others, his rule was one of repression, marked by mass executions, exile for thousands and the abduction of children.An estimated 100,000 people were executed by Franco’s supporters during and after the Civil War, and buried in more than 2,000 mass graves scattered across the country.Some 2,200 people were shot by Franco’s firing squads against a wall in Paterna that is still pockmarked with bullet holes.No one dared disturb those sites in a country where Franco’s legacy has long been left unexamined. Conservatives, in particular, have argued that exhumations would only reopen old wounds.For the left, the silence has been anything but therapeutic, even enraging. During the dictatorship, Spaniards were forbidden to talk about the killings. An amnesty law, passed in 1977, hoped to draw a line under the crimes of the past, but in effect made forgetting a crucial part of the effort to heal a divided nation in transition to democracy.“It was a culture of silence,” said Agustín Gómez Jiménez, 49, a health worker who recounted how his father had long refused to even show a picture of his own father, executed in 1936.Mr. Gómez said it took his sister rummaging through their father’s belongings to finally find some pictures, five years ago. One of them shows their grandfather on a beach, holding hands with his small, soon-to-be-orphaned son. “I have goose bumps just thinking my father hid the photos. He was so traumatized,” he said.Agustín Gómez Jiménez and his sister Maria Del Mar Gómez with a portrait of their grandfather who was executed in 1936.The first efforts to deal with the mass graves began in 2007, when a center-left prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, passed a “law of historical memory” that lent government support to exhumations.But the legislation was slow to take effect and when the conservative Popular Party took power in 2011, the conservatives promptly defunded the law.It took another decade, the commitment of Spanish left-wing-controlled regions and last year’s law — which created a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains — for the exhumations to finally gain momentum.Such efforts are evident in Viznar, a small, whitewashed village perched in the mountains overlooking Granada. For three years, a team of archaeologists has been digging in the ravine where Ms. Raya’s and Mr. Gómez’s grandfathers were buried along with about 280 other victims, including possibly the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.On a recent morning, the researchers were hunched over a 3-by-13-foot pit, using brushes and small blades to delicately remove the earth covering eight skeletons. Their spines and femurs were interlaced, a sign that bodies had been dumped one upon the other. Several skulls were pierced by round holes, evidence that the victims had been shot in the head.Researchers excavate skeletons in a mass grave in Viznar.“It’s a page of our history that was blank and that we’re writing today,” said Francisco Carrión Méndez, the archaeologist coordinating the project, standing beside the grave. Many relatives, he explained, want to find their loved ones and rebury them because “their dignity was stolen.”Mr. Carrión pointed to photos of the victims that families had hung on nearby pines: a university rector with slicked-back hair; an imposing-looking barmaid. “They shouldn’t be forgotten,” he said.Not everyone agrees. At the entrance of the ravine, a sign paying tribute to the victims has been defaced by graffiti reading “¡Viva Franco!” To which someone responded: “Fascism must not be discussed, it must be destroyed.”“In Spain,” García Lorca once wrote, “the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.”To date, the remains of 75 people have been recovered in Viznar. The passage of time and lack of records about the killings make identification difficult, so researchers are using bone samples to perform DNA tests in a Granada laboratory. The first results are expected this fall.The small town of Viznar, where a team of archaeologists has been digging in a ravine with about 280 victims, including possibly the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.But many relatives worry it will be too late.“Who’s responsible for the samples? Who?” Francisca Pleguezuelos Aguilar, 73, anxiously asked a perplexed forensic expert during a recent visit to the laboratory.Pointing at a window behind which two lab assistants in white overalls were showing the DNA testing process to families, Ms. Pleguezuelos said she worried that the conservatives would block the study of the samples if they win this week’s general elections.She wasn’t the only one afraid. “They’ll paralyze all the projects,” said María José Sánchez, a great-niece of the barmaid who was killed, her eyes swollen with tears. “The curtain is about to fall again.”A spokesperson for the Popular Party suggested that exhumations could continue after the elections, saying that “relatives have the right to claim the bodies of their loved ones.”But many relatives said they remembered how Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s previous conservative prime minister, boasted of having cut public funding for the 2007 memory law to zero.Researchers identify bodies in Viznar, where the remains of 75 people have been discovered so far.The possibility of a national alliance between the conservative Popular Party and the hard-right Vox party — which polls suggest will be the only way for the right to secure a majority in Parliament — has only exacerbated the fears of victims’ families.In recent weeks, they have been looking anxiously at local governing coalitions forged between the two parties following regional elections in May: they almost always included plans to clamp down on memory projects.“The central government is our last bulwark, our Alamo fortress,” said Matías Alonso Blasco, who represents families in the Valencia region, where the right recently took political control. “If it falls, it’s over.”Several representatives of Vox declined to comment for this article.In the Valencia region, the new right-wing coalition said, “the norms that attack reconciliation in historical matters will be repealed.” Many took it as a reference to the 2017 local memory law that has helped excavate about two-thirds of the area’s 600 mass graves.Many of the bodies were recovered from the cemetery of Paterna, a suburb of Valencia. There, some 2,200 people were shot by Franco’s firing squads against a wall that is still pockmarked with bullet holes. So numerous are the mass graves that they have been given numbers.Standing between two wooden signs marked 100 and 101, Marilyn Ortíz Bono said the body of her grandfather had yet to be identified because the remains found in the grave where he is believed to have been buried had decayed too much.Ms. Ortíz said that shortly after Vox gained power in the Valencia region, she sent a sample of her DNA to a state-funded laboratory, hoping to get the identification process completed before the general elections.“I haven’t heard back from them,” she said. “I’m afraid I never will.”An old Spanish Republican flag lies on a mass grave in the cemetery in Paterna. More

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      Why We Should Politicize the Weather

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      After officially beginning his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. He brushed the issue aside: “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all.First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight.Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub.And while the rest of America hasn’t gotten that hot, everyone in the Northeast remembers the way smoke from Canadian wildfires led to days of dangerously bad air quality and orange skies.But extreme weather events have always been with us. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the burgeoning field of “extreme event attribution” comes close. Climate models say that certain kinds of extreme weather events become more likely on a warming planet — for example, what used to be a heat wave we’d experience on average only once every few decades becomes an almost annual occurrence. Event attribution compares the odds of experiencing an extreme event given global warming with the odds that the same event would have happened without climate change.Incidentally, I’d argue that extreme event attribution gains credibility from the fact that it doesn’t always tell the same story, that sometimes it says that climate change wasn’t the culprit. For example, preliminary analyses suggest that climate change played a limited role in the extreme flooding that recently struck northeastern Italy.That was, however, the exception that proves the rule. In general, attribution analysis shows that global warming made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We don’t yet have estimates for the latest, still ongoing series of disasters, but it seems safe to say that this global concatenation of extreme weather events would have been virtually impossible without climate change. And this is almost surely just the leading edge of the crisis, a small foretaste of the many disasters to come.Which brings me back to the “politicization of the weather.” Worrying about the climate crisis shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. As of last year, only 22 percent of Americans who considered themselves to be on the political right considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was far larger than it was in other countries. And only in America do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s booming renewable energy sector.The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments haven’t changed at all over the years: Climate change isn’t happening; OK, it’s happening, but it’s not such a bad thing; besides, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster.And none of these arguments are ever abandoned in the face of evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in America, the usual suspects will once again assert that climate change is a hoax. Spectacular technological progress in renewable energy, which now makes the path to greatly reduced emissions look easier than even optimists imagined, hasn’t stopped claims that the costs of the Biden administration’s climate policy will be unsupportable.So we shouldn’t expect record heat waves around the globe to end assertions that climate change, even if it’s happening, is no big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to soften their opposition to climate action, no matter what is happening in the world.What this means is that if the G.O.P. wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost surely try to dismantle the array of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that experts believe will lead to a major reduction in emissions.Like it or not, then, the weather is a political issue. And Americans should be aware that it’s one of the most important issues they’ll be voting on next November.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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      It’s Getting Really Awkward for Speaker Kevin McCarthy

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      Some days, Speaker Kevin McCarthy must look out over his House conference in awe and think: Are you maniacs trying to lose us the majority?Thursday may well have been one of those days, as hard-right crusaders larded up the National Defense Authorization Act with divisive, culture-warring amendments taking aim at abortion access, transgender medical care and diversity training. The annual N.D.A.A. usually garners solid bipartisan support, passing without excessive turbulence for the past 60 years. Last week, the House Freedom Caucus and its allies labored to insert more poison pills into the package than a back-alley fentanyl mill. After much drama, and much futile pleading by Mr. McCarthy with his right flank, the House passed the bill Friday, 219-210, on a mostly party-line vote.Rest assured, the spectacle is far from over.The odds of the bill’s extreme measures passing muster with the Democratic Senate and White House are worse than Mike Pence’s odds of winning the presidency next year. So, less than zero. But House conservatives aren’t aiming to make serious policy gains here — at least, not the ones who understand how a divided government works. They are looking to make trouble, to prove they are loud, uncompromising fighters for the conservative cause. They are also looking to make a point, one directed in no small part at Mr. McCarthy, with whom they remain spitting mad over the debt-ceiling deal he negotiated with Democrats in May. And if they need to imperil their nascent majority to make that point, then so be it. Life is full of difficult trade-offs.Mr. McCarthy’s debt-deal machinations this spring won plaudits from many political watchers: What leadership skill! Maybe we underestimated him! Maybe he really can keep his conference in line! But his hard-liners raged that he had sold them out and promptly committed to making the House as dysfunctional as possible, even if it meant bogging down their own team’s policy goals. Their hostage-taking and acting-out have been a warning to Mr. McCarthy: Fool us once, and we’ll turn this chamber into a do-nothing freak show just to teach you a lesson. Try to fool us twice, and things will get really dark and weird.This purity-over-progress approach isn’t just making life awkward for the speaker. It is making the entire Republican conference look like a pack of obstructionist zealots. This may play well in deep-MAGA districts, but not so much in battleground areas. Those are, admittedly, increasingly rare. But with a majority this scrawny, House conservatives are playing with fire. All Democrats need to do is flip a handful of seats to snatch the gavel from Mr. McCarthy’s hand. They could, say, claw back some of the ground unexpectedly lost to Republicans in New York in the midterms (starting with George Santos’s district). And they could pick up a seat or two thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act that may lead to various Southern states redrawing their congressional districts to address sketchy gerrymandering. (Alabama has already been given its marching orders.)Even if Republicans hold on to the House — where, to be fair, a certain level of crazy has come to be expected — the wingers’ shenanigans are doing nothing to help the party’s brand. Many, many Americans are weary of political chaos and performative jerkiness. And many are particular tired of it on the issue of abortion, which drew key numbers of swing voters to Democrats in last year’s midterms. But time and again, Mr. McCarthy’s troops seem dead set on signaling that the G.O.P. is a pack of bomb-throwing fringe-dwellers actively trying not to govern. Swing voters aren’t generally all that keen on posturing, do-nothing Congresses, either.Some Republican House members are cheesed off over these political games. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, for instance, was overheard Thursday dropping all kinds of colorful language, including an “f” bomb or two, about people being forced to vote on the abortion amendment, according to Politico. Though Ms. Mace did not bother abbreviating her pejorative. Nor, it should be noted, did she risk voting against the offending amendment, much less the overall bill. “It’s not going to pass the Senate anyway; it doesn’t matter,” she told The Hill.It doesn’t matter. Well, except that, going forward, Ms. Mace can expect the situation to get so much worse. However much blood and tears get shed in passing the N.D.A.A., they are nothing compared to the carnage anticipated in the coming cage match over funding the government. Already, the hard-liners have made clear that they are going to cause as much trouble as possible in pursuit of their outside-the-mainstream aims. In protest of the debt deal, a pack of conservatives ground action on the House floor to a halt for several days in June while lobbying (or, if you prefer, blackmailing) the speaker to give them more power — including more leeway to slash spending beyond the levels set in the debt-ceiling agreement. With the conservative knife at his throat, Mr. McCarthy has been allowing the conference to move ahead with appropriations proposals that do just that.Ramping up the drama, a passel of conservative members sent a letter to Mr. McCarthy last week, laying out their conditions, including much lower spending levels, for funding the government. Spoiler alert: None were aimed at making the process easier or more efficient.But, after getting crosswise with his wingers on the debt deal, the speaker now seems to have retreated back into a policy of appeasement. This bodes ill for keeping the government running smoothly in the coming months — and for any future legislative efforts.There is no point in feeling sorry for Mr. McCarthy. He’s a political creature. Coming into this job, he knew the risks of negotiating with, and bowing to, ideological terrorists. And he was apparently cool with that. His party is earning whatever electoral comeuppance it gets. But it is shameful that the rest of America may wind up forced to pay a price as well.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. 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      Today’s Top News: A New Voting Map in Alabama, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s current map violated the Voting Rights Act. Now, the state must redraw it.Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated PressOn Today’s Episode:Alabama Scrambles to Redraw Its Voting Map After a Supreme Court Surprise, with Emily CochraneThe Gilgo Beach Serial Killings: What We KnowHow a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World, with Lauren LeatherbyTo Ease Global Warming, the Whitest of Paints, with Cara BuckleyEli Cohen More

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      Alabama Scrambles to Redraw Its Voting Map After a Supreme Court Surprise

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      State lawmakers have until Friday to come up with new congressional districts that do not illegally dilute the power of Black voters.Under orders from the Supreme Court to produce a voting map that no longer illegally dilutes the power of Black voters in Alabama, the state’s lawmakers are now facing a high-stakes scramble to come up with an acceptable replacement by the end of this week.A little over a month after the court’s surprise ruling, the Alabama legislature will convene for a special five-day session on Monday, with the Republican supermajority having given little public indication of how it plans to fulfill a mandate to craft a second district that allows Black voters to elect a representative of their choice — one who could well be a Democrat.The effects of the revised map, which must be passed by Friday and approved by a federal court, could reverberate across the country, with other states in the South confronting similar voting rights challenges and Republicans looking to hold onto a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year.The session also comes at a pivotal moment in the debate over the constitutionality of factoring race into government decisions, as conservatives have increasingly chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other longstanding judicial protections centered on equality and race.“The eyes of the nation are looking at you,” Evan Milligan, one of several Alabama residents who had challenged the legality of the map, told lawmakers during a committee hearing in Montgomery on Thursday. “If you can cut out the noise, look within — you can look to history, you can make a mark in history that will set a standard for this country.”Alabama has a long list of bitter disputes over the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark law born out of the civil rights movement whose key provisions were gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision. Litigation forced the creation of Alabama’s first majority-Black congressional district in 1992, and the seat has been represented by a Black Democrat ever since then.But the current fight stems from lawsuits filed to oppose the map drawn after the 2020 census. In a state where 27 percent of the population is Black, the Republican-controlled legislature packed nearly a third of the Black population into that one district. The state’s remaining six districts each elected a white Republican.There is little disagreement that voting in Alabama is highly polarized, but lawyers for the state legislature attributed the situation to politics rather than race. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that a gerrymander that discriminates against one party’s voters is a political problem, not a legal one.)Evan Milligan, an Alabama resident who sued over the state’s voting map, speaking with reporters outside the Supreme Court in Washington last year.Patrick Semansky/Associated Press“Black Alabamians’ ‘candidates of choice’ tend to lose elections in Alabama not because they are Black or because they receive Black support, but because they are Democrats,” the state’s lawyers wrote.And with about 80 percent of Black voters in Alabama identifying as Democrats or leaning toward Democratic candidates, according to the Pew Research Center, “that just makes them easy prey in terms of redistricting,” said Seth C. McKee, a University of Oklahoma professor who has written about political realignment in the South. “And once Republicans get control, it’s just difficult for them not to dominate.”But a federal panel of three judges unanimously said the map had most likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered it redrawn, four months before the 2022 primary elections. The Supreme Court, while agreeing to consider the challenge, allowed the map to go into effect ahead of the November elections.Many experts expected the Supreme Court to say in the Alabama case what it essentially said in its decision outlawing affirmative action in education: Making allowances to remedy discrimination against one group inevitably ends up discriminating against other groups.However, in June, the court narrowly upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the principal remaining clause of the law, which outlaws any election law or rule that discriminates based on race, color or language. That decision has already had ramifications elsewhere: a similar lawsuit is now moving forward in Louisiana, while voting rights advocates in Georgia have begun sparring with the state over whether the ruling affects similar lawsuits there.“We’re already showing how this opinion is going to have ripple effects,” said Abha Khanna, who represented some of the Alabama plaintiffs as the head of the Elias Law Group’s redistricting practice. She added, “You are sending a message to states and jurisdictions.”The Alabama legislature now has until Friday to create another map that gains approval from a federal court, and has solicited public proposals. Should the legislature fall short, the map could again be challenged, leaving open the possibility that the court would draw its own map and cut out the legislature altogether.“It is critical that Alabama be fairly and accurately represented in Washington,” said Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, as she formally summoned the legislature back for the special session. “Our legislature knows our state better than the federal courts do.”But it leaves Republicans with a task that could jeopardize the electoral security of one of their own in Congress. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report now marks the once solidly Republican First and Second Congressional Districts as toss-ups, citing “the presumption that one of their seats will ultimately become a Montgomery and Mobile-based Black majority seat that comfortably elects a Democrat.”On Thursday, multiple Black Republicans spoke during the committee hearing, including Belinda Thomas, a Dale County councilwoman and Republican Party official who later described herself as “living proof” that the current map made it possible for Black candidates to succeed. Some residents and officials also raised concerns about diminishing the representation of rural communities and economic opportunity under some of the proposed maps.State Senator Rodger Smitherman comparing congressional maps during a special session on redistricting at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery in 2021.Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated PressDemocrats appeared divided over which plan to back, with some lawmakers supporting one that relies on a combination of traditionally Democratic voting blocs to create a new district in order to avoid drawing on racial lines. At least one of the plaintiffs wore a T-shirt emblazoned with their preferred map, which would enshrine the 18 counties of Alabama’s Black Belt, the stretch of historically rich soil that fueled cotton plantations worked by slave labor, into two districts with at least 50 percent of the Black voting population.“I want myself and my community to have a seat at the table, rather than be on the menu,” said Shalela Dowdy, a Mobile resident and one of the plaintiffs.But notably absent from the public discussion on Thursday was any plan backed by the Republican supermajority. State Representative Chris Pringle, a Republican from Mobile, said that a final map would be shared before a committee meeting on Monday, although Democrats balked at being left out of the process and at the public getting little time to review a final plan.“This is a really tortured process,” said State Representative Chris England, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa. He added that “everybody else has been presenting the maps that they believe best represent the state of Alabama, give everybody an opportunity to be represented, but the supermajority has not.”Mr. Pringle said that the committee tasked with overseeing the creation of the new map had been overwhelmed with a number of submissions, including from as far away as France and New Zealand. A little over a dozen had been made public online or in a hearing, with Mr. England sharing a few more maps circulated among the committee on Twitter on Friday evening.“We have been pretty much overwhelmed,” Mr. Pringle said.Adam Liptak More

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      Canadian Politicians Who Criticize China Become Its Targets

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      The polls predicted a re-election victory, maybe even a landslide.But a couple of weeks before the vote, Kenny Chiu, a member of Canada’s Parliament and a critic of China’s human rights record, was panicking. Something had flipped among the ethnic Chinese voters in his British Columbia district.“Initially, they were supportive,” he said. “And all of a sudden, they just vanished, vaporized, disappeared.”Longtime supporters originally from mainland China were not returning his calls. Volunteers reported icy greetings at formerly friendly homes. Chinese-language news outlets stopped covering him. And he was facing an onslaught of attacks — from untraceable sources — on the local community’s most popular social networking app, the Chinese-owned WeChat.The sudden collapse of Mr. Chiu’s campaign — in the last federal election, in 2021 — is now drawing renewed scrutiny amid mounting evidence of China’s interference in Canadian politics.Mr. Chiu and several other elected officials critical of Beijing were targets of a Chinese state that has increasingly exerted its influence over Chinese diaspora communities worldwide as part of an aggressive campaign to expand its global reach, according to current and former elected officials, Canadian intelligence officials and experts on Chinese state disinformation campaigns.Canada recently expelled a Chinese diplomat accused of conspiring to intimidate a lawmaker from the Toronto area, Michael Chong, after he successfully led efforts in Parliament to label China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim community a genocide. Canada’s intelligence agency has warned at least a half-dozen current and former elected officials that they have been targeted by Beijing, including Jenny Kwan, a lawmaker from Vancouver and a critic of Beijing’s policies in Hong Kong.After Jenny Kwan, a member of Parliament, began speaking out against Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong and its treatment of the Uyghurs, invitations from some organizations dried up.Alana Paterson for The New York TimesThe Chinese government, employing a global playbook, disproportionately focused on Chinese Canadian elected officials representing districts in and around Vancouver and Toronto, experts say. It has leveraged large diaspora populations with family and business ties to China and ensuring that the levers of power in those communities are on its side, according to elected officials, Canadian intelligence officials and experts on Chinese disinformation.“Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has doubled down on this assertive nationalist policy toward the diaspora,” said Feng Chongyi, a historian and an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney. China’s role in Canada mirrored what has happened in Australia, he added.Chinese state interference and its threat to Canada’s democracy have become national issues after an extraordinary series of leaks in recent months of intelligence reports to The Globe and Mail newspaper by a national security official who said that government officials were not taking the threat seriously enough.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been criticized for not doing enough to combat reported interference by China, is under increasing pressure to call for a public inquiry.Current and former elected officials interviewed by national security agents said some of the intelligence appeared to stem from wiretaps of Chinese diplomats based in Canada. The Globe has said that it has based its reporting on secret and top-secret intelligence reports it has viewed.In Vancouver and two surrounding cities — Richmond and Burnaby — that are home to Canada’s largest concentration of ethnic Chinese, the reach of the Chinese Consulate and its allies has grown along with waves of immigrants from China, said longtime Chinese Canadian activists and politicians.Richmond, a city south of Vancouver, has one of Canada’s highest populations of ethnic Chinese and is believed to be a focus of China’s interference in Canadian politics.Alana Paterson for The New York TimesThe Chinese Benevolent Association, or C.B.A. — one of Vancouver’s oldest and most influential civic organizations — was a longtime supporter of Taiwan until it turned pro-Beijing in the 1980s. But it has recently become a cheerleader of some of Beijing’s most controversial policies, placing ads in Chinese-language newspapers to support the 2020 imposition of a sweeping national security law that cracked down on basic freedoms in Hong Kong.The association and the Chinese Consulate publicize close ties on their websites.A former president of the C.B.A., Hilbert Yiu, denied that the organization had any official ties to Chinese authorities, but acknowledged that the association tended to support China’s policies, arguing that Beijing’s human rights record was “a lot better” than in the past.Mr. Yiu, who remains on the C.B.A.’s board, said stories of Chinese state interference in Canadian politics were spread by losing candidates.“I think it doesn’t exist,” Mr. Yiu said, adding instead that Western nations were afraid of “China being strong.”Mr. Yiu, who as a host on a local Chinese-language radio station also pushes pro-Beijing views, was an overseas delegate in 2017 to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the Chinese government that Beijing uses to win over and reward supporters who are not members of the Communist Party.The leaders of the C.B.A. — whose opinions hold sway, especially among immigrants not fully comfortable in English — say their organization is politically neutral.But in recent years, it and other ethnic Chinese organizations have excluded politicians critical of Beijing from events, including Ms. Kwan, the Vancouver lawmaker. A member of the left-leaning New Democratic Party, Ms. Kwan has represented, first as a provincial legislator and then at the federal level, a Vancouver district that includes Chinatown since 1996.But after Ms. Kwan began speaking out in 2019 against Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong and its treatment of the Uyghurs, invitations dried up — including to events in her district, like a Lunar New Year celebration.“Inviting the local member of Parliament is standard protocol,” Ms. Kwan said. “But in instances where I’ve not been invited to attend — whether or not that’s related to foreign interference are questions that I have.”Fred Kwok, another former C.B.A. president, said Ms. Kwan was not invited to the Lunar New Year celebration because the coronavirus pandemic forced organizers to hold the event virtually and there was “limited time.”Later that year, a couple of months before the federal election, Mr. Kwok held a luncheon for 100 people at a well-known seafood restaurant in Chinatown to support Ms. Kwan’s rival. Mr. Kwok said he was acting on his own behalf and not as the C.B.A.’s leader.Richard Lee, a councilor in Burnaby and a former provincial legislator, faced far worse.Mr. Lee, who immigrated to Canada from China in 1997, and was elected in 2001 to the provincial legislature, became known for supporting local businesses and never missing ribbon-cutting events. He also faithfully attended an annual commemoration of the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.Richard Lee, a city councilor in British Columbia, said he was asked by a former Chinese consul general why he attended an event marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Alana Paterson for The New York TimesIt was once a low-key event, but with Mr. Xi in power, many participants started wearing masks to hide their identities, fearing reprisals from Beijing.Mr. Lee’s attendance became an issue at a barbecue party in the summer of 2015 when he said that the consul general at the time, Liu Fei, asked him, “Why do you keep attending those events?”Later, in November, Mr. Lee and his wife, Anne, flew to Shanghai. At the airport, he said he was separated from his wife and detained for seven hours while the authorities searched his personal cellphone and a government-issued Blackberry.He asked why and said he was told: “‘You know what you have done. We believe you could endanger our national security.’”He and his wife were put on a plane back to Canada.In Burnaby, the political climate shifted. He was no longer invited to some events because organizers told him that the consul general did not want to attend if Mr. Lee was also present. Longtime supporters started keeping their distance. Mr. Lee said he believed the icy treatment contributed to the loss of his seat in 2017, after 16 years in office.A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa did not reply to questions about the consulate’s alleged actions in Vancouver, saying only that “China never interferes in other countries’ internal affairs” and that accusations of interference were an “out-and-out smear of China.”But China’s former consul general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, boasted in 2021, according to The Globe, about helping defeat two Conservative lawmakers, including one she described as a “vocal distractor” of the Chinese government: Kenny Chiu.After arriving from Hong Kong in 1992, Mr. Chiu settled in Richmond, where more than half of the population of 208,000 is made up of ethnic Chinese. He was elected to Parliament in 2019 as a Conservative.Mr. Chiu, 58, quickly touched on two issues that appeared to put him in the cross hairs of Beijing and its local supporters: criticizing Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong and proposing a bill to create a registry of foreign agents, inspired by one established by Australia in 2018.Mr. Chiu proposed a bill to create a registry of foreign agents, among the issues that put him in the cross hairs of China and its supporters.Alana Paterson for The New York TimesThe anonymous attacks against him on Chinese social media amplified criticism of the bill among some Canadians that it would unfairly single out Chinese Canadians.A month before the federal election in September 2021, the polls instilled confidence in Mr. Chiu’s campaign staff.But in the final 10 days, Mr. Chiu relayed growing concerns to his campaign manager, Jordon Wood: cooling response from ethnic Chinese voters and increasingly hostile and personal anonymous attacks. The attacks, which were going viral on WeChat, painted his bill as a racist assault on Chinese Canadians and Mr. Chiu as a traitor to his community.Mr. Wood recalled a frantic late-night call from Mr. Chiu after a searing meeting with Chinese Canadian voters.“‘Our community is more polite than this,’” Mr. Wood recalled Mr. Chiu telling him. “Even if you don’t like someone, you don’t go after them in this way. This was a level of rudeness and attack beyond what we would expect.”The attacks on WeChat drew the attention of experts on disinformation campaigns by China and its proxies.The attacks were driven by countless, untraceable human and artificial intelligence bots, said Benjamin Fung, a cybersecurity expert and a professor at McGill University in Montreal.Their proliferation made them especially effective because ethnic Chinese voters depend on WeChat to communicate, said Mr. Fung, who assessed Mr. Chiu’s case shortly after the vote.Less than a week before the vote, a Canadian internet watchdog, DisinfoWatch, noted the attacks against Mr. Chiu on WeChat.“My assumption was that this was a coordinated campaign,” said Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing and senior fellow at an Ottawa-based research group behind DisinfoWatch.Mr. Chiu made last-ditch efforts to save his campaign, including meeting a group of older people who echoed the attacks against him and his bill on WeChat.“Why would I subjugate my grandchildren to generations of persecution and discrimination?” Mr. Chiu recalled being asked.The next day, he saw social media photographs of the same people publicly backing his main rival from the Liberal Party, Parm Bains, the eventual winner. Mr. Bains declined to comment.Mr. Chiu asked allies to reach out to local leaders who had suddenly dropped him, including prominent members of a Richmond-based umbrella group, the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations. Its leader, Kady Xue, did not respond to messages seeking comment.Chak Au, a veteran city councilor nicknamed the “Chinese Mayor of Richmond” and a longtime ally of Mr. Chiu, pressed ethnic Chinese leaders about the sudden erosion of support.“There was a kind of silence,” Mr. Au said. “Nobody wanted to talk about it.”He added, “They didn’t want to create trouble.” More

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      Britain’s Tories Expected to Face Election Losses

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      Almost the first thing I saw when I arrived in the London suburb of Uxbridge was two teenage girls in school uniforms getting into a fistfight in the shopping mall outside the underground station. Uxbridge is a middle-class place, stodgy but diversifying, whose voters are squeezed by a cost of living crisis and anxious about rising public disorder. Until last month, it was represented by Boris Johnson, and, as Labour lawmaker Steve Reed told me, it hasn’t sent a member of the left-leaning Labour Party to Parliament since 1966.But last month Johnson, who’d stepped down as prime minister in 2022, resigned his seat rather than face discipline for lying to Parliament regarding his shameless socializing during the pandemic lockdown. And in the election next week to replace him, Labour candidate Danny Beales is considered the favorite, a sign of just how far Tory fortunes have fallen.The contest in Uxbridge and South Ruislip — the full name of Johnson’s former constituency — is one of three elections happening next Thursday to fill seats that Conservatives have vacated. There’s also an election in Selby and Ainsty, where Johnson’s ally Nigel Adams quit shortly after Johnson did, reportedly furious about the political machinations that had thwarted his elevation to the House of Lords. And there’s one in Somerton and Frome, where the Conservative David Warburton resigned in a scandal involving cocaine and allegations of sexual misconduct.A recent poll shows the Labour candidate ahead in Selby and Ainsty, where in 2019 Adams won more than 60 percent of the vote. In Somerton and Frome, the candidate of the centrist Liberal Democrats appears to have a strong chance of prevailing. “My central expectation is that we lose all three,” a Conservative lawmaker told the BBC.Obviously, that’s not guaranteed. When I spoke to Joshua Simons, head of Labour Together, a think tank close to Labour leadership, he suggested that Conservatives were strategically exaggerating their pessimism to lower expectations. Still, there’s a broad sense that, with national elections due sometime in the next 18 months, the Conservative Party is imploding. “We Are on For a Massive Defeat,” blared a headline in the Financial Times, quoting a former Tory cabinet minister.The U.K.’s conservative collapse looks particularly stark when set against the ascendant right in much of the rest of Europe. Italy has a prime minister from a party with fascist roots. The far-right Vox could be part of the next government in Spain. There are right-wing governments in Sweden and Finland. Conservatives just won a second term in Greece. The last French election was a contest between the center-right Emmanuel Macron and the far- right Marine Le Pen, and though Le Pen lost, she appears to be gaining support in the wake of the recent riots. Even in Germany, where shame about the Holocaust once seemed to inoculate its people against right-wing extremism, the reactionary Alternative for Germany just won its first mayoral election, and in a recent poll it was the second most popular party in the country.Yet in Britain, the right appears to be approaching something like free fall, with a recent poll showing Labour with a 21-point lead nationally. It’s quite a turnaround, given that, until recently, the Tories were often called the most successful political party in the world. Less than four years ago, the party won its fourth consecutive national election by a staggering margin, leaving Labour, then led by the leftist Jeremy Corbyn, decimated. “It was catastrophic,” said Reed. “It was really in question as to whether the Labour Party could survive.” A 2021 New Republic article was subtitled, “How the Tories Became Unbeatable.”It would be nice, as someone who wants to see social democracy thrive, to report that Labour has since discovered some brilliant strategy for beating the right. In truth, though, if conservative hegemony in Britain is starting to break down, the Tories deserve most of the credit, both for their dissipation and their mismanagement.There have been so many Conservative sex and corruption scandals that the phrase “Tory sleaze” has become a cliché, and the ruling party’s decadence is matched by its incompetence. Covid created economic misery worldwide, but since the pandemic the U.K. has performed significantly worse than its peers in the rest of Europe. Among the reasons for this malaise are the fallout from Brexit, finalized in 2020, and the supply-side fantasies of Liz Truss, Johnson’s successor, who sent the economy into a tailspin during her 44 days in office.Today inflation is no longer in the double digits, but as of May, it was still at 8.7 percent, “the highest among the world’s big, rich economies,” as Reuters reported. Rent has reached record highs, and spiking interest rates are clobbering homeowners, since unlike in America, most British mortgages have their rates locked in for only two or five years. “People are seeing, you know, £500 to £600 a month increases in their mortgages, which people just can’t afford at the moment,” said Reed.Britain’s prized National Health Service is in crisis as well, with a record 7.47 million people on waiting lists for routine hospital care. On Thursday, junior doctors — postgraduate trainees who make up about half of doctors in English hospitals — went on strike over low pay. That comes after a nurses’ strike that ended late last month. Reed, who is chairing Beales’s Labour campaign in Uxbridge, points out that the hospital there is crumbling. “There is literally masonry falling out of the roofs, and parts of it are closed off because water is leaking through the roof,” he said.Simons of Labour Together told me he’s visited Uxbridge twice in the last week, and said that voters there “hate the Tories, and hate British politics at the moment.” Now, that’s very different from saying that people like or trust Labour. Scarred by the mortifying rout of the 2019 election, the Labour politicians I spoke to were decidedly humble about their own connection with voters. But they at least see things trending their way.“I think they’re going to show just how incredibly unpopular the Tories are at the moment,” Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party, said of next week’s elections. “And I think they’ll show how much work the Labour Party has done to regain the trust. We’re still on that journey, by the way. I’m not complacent about that. But I think people are starting to listen to the Labour Party now.” For that, they have the Tories to thank.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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      A Century Ago, Golf Fans Watched a ‘Do-or-Die’ Moment

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      Bobby Jones won the first of his four U.S. Opens at a course near what is now Kennedy Airport. The New York Times was there.Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a moment in the history of golf that will be recreated where it happened 100 years ago tomorrow. We’ll also get details on why there will probably be more squabbling over the maps for New York’s congressional districts.Bobby Jones in 1927, four years after he won the U.S. Open at Inwood Country Club.Fox Photos/Getty ImagesOn July 15, 1923, 100 years ago tomorrow, a 21-year-old golfer named Bobby Jones stood just off the 18th fairway at Inwood Country Club, now just across from Kennedy International Airport. My colleague Corey Kilgannon explains how Jones made history:Jones had squandered a commanding lead in a playoff for the U.S. Open the day before, but he still had a chance to salvage a victory over the Scottish star Bobby Cruickshank — if Jones made a daunting shot. The New York Times described what happened as “truly miraculous.”“Without a moment’s hesitation,” The Times said, “Jones drew his No. 1 iron out of the bag, took a momentary look at the lie, glanced at the flag and swung. The ball flew off the face of his club, rose in the air and carried squarely on the green, 190 yards away.” The ball landed within six feet of the cup.That moment will be memorialized on Saturday at Inwood, where several of Jones’s descendants are expected at a club tournament and dinner. Among them is a grandson, Dr. Bob Jones IV, who said his grandfather had been on a losing streak and was considering quitting championship golf until his “do-or-die moment” in 1923.“When he got to Inwood, he was really considering that this might be his last tournament,” Dr. Jones said. “If he had not executed that shot and won, I think he would have given up tournament golf and become an obscure sports trivia item.”Instead, Jones drilled the ball next to the hole and two-putted to win the first of his four U.S. Opens.It jump-started golf’s most successful amateur career, one that would include Jones’s 13 majors, four of them in a single calendar year (1930) — golf’s Grand Slam. He became a lawyer but later designed the Augusta National Golf Club and co-founded the Masters tournament.Bobby Jones receiving the trophy after winning the U.S. Open in 1923.Edwin LevickHis triumph at Inwood came at a time when golf had assumed a place in the debonair lives of the well-to-do in the Jazz Age, when the New York area was the cradle of golf in America. There’s a reason F. Scott Fitzgerald made the blasé Jordan Baker a golfer in “The Great Gatsby,” published two years after Jones’s Inwood victory. Babe Ruth and the Three Stooges used to frequent Van Cortlandt, a public course in the Bronx.Inwood will try to recapture the old-fashioned vibe on Saturday. On several holes, players will have to use hickory-shafted replicas of Jones’s clubs. For the putting contest, they will have to use a replica of Jones’s favorite putter, which was known as Calamity Jane, and old-fashioned golf balls. For the dinner in the clubhouse, guests are encouraged to wear Jazz Age dress.But first, during the cocktail hour, they will get a chance to replicate Jones’s storied shot from the same spot. If they can. It is still a daunting shot, even with modern high-compression golf balls and titanium-shafted clubs.“With a wooden shaft, it’s a lot harder to get the ball up in the air,” said Kyle Higgins, the club’s head pro, who added that Jones often played in a long-sleeve dress shirt and tie — something Higgins has tried himself, to get the feel of hitting the way Jones did. (“It’s definitely restrictive and makes it pretty tough to swing,” he said.)Jones had wasted a three-shot lead in the final round to let Cruickshank into a playoff. But Jones’ shot on 18 “sealed the fate of the little Scottish gamecock,” The Times reported, and “opened up the portals of fame” to Jones.The celebration, with spectators carrying Jones triumphantly toward the clubhouse as a kilted bagpiper wailed away, is known to many club members even today.“The day is less about competition and more about celebrating the anniversary,” said the club’s golf chairman, Brian Ziegler. “We try to make sure everyone who joins is aware of the club’s history, and we knew we needed to celebrate the 100th anniversary.”WeatherIt’s going to be mostly cloudy, with temperatures in the 80s. There’s a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon persisting into the evening. At night, temps will fall to the mid-70s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).The latest New York newsSeth Harrison/USA Today NetworkPolice fatally shoot man after report of stolen fruit: A 37-year-old man was shot by the police in New Rochelle, N.Y., on July 3 after he was accused of eating grapes and a banana without paying, his family’s lawyer said. The man died a week later.Mayor turns to his religious base: As signs of trouble have arisen in recent weeks, Mayor Eric Adams has leaned heavily on the religious segment of his multiethnic, outer Manhattan base for support.One man’s war on pickleball: “Paddleball Paul” is making his last stand to eradicate pickleball from the handball courts of Central Park. It’s not going very well.More squabbling over mapsCarlos Bernate for The New York TimesA New York appeals court ordered the state’s congressional map redrawn yet again. Or re-re-redrawn.Language aside, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Albany sided with Democrats in a long-running legal fight, saying that the districts drawn last year on orders from the state’s highest court had been only a temporary fix. The justices ordered the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission to restart a process that would effectively give the Democrat-dominated State Legislature final say over the contours of New York’s 26 House seats for the rest of the decade.My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that if that decision is upheld, as many as six Republican-held seats could go the Democrats’ way.The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, will have the final say, because Republican leaders immediately said they would appeal. And it was the Court of Appeals that blocked Democrats’ attempt to gerrymander the maps of the state’s congressional districts last year. The high court said then that the Democrats had violated the state Constitution and ignored the will of voters who approved a 2014 constitutional amendment intended to limit political influence in redistricting.The current district lines were drawn by a court-appointed expert last year to maximize competition. The new map helping Republicans flip four seats on the way to taking control of the House.If Thursday’s ruling stands, both parties believe that Democrats could draw maps that would pass muster legally while making re-election almost impossible for incumbent Republicans, such as Representatives Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro in the Hudson Valley, or Anthony D’Esposito and George Santos on Long Island and in Queens.New Democratic seats in New York could help offset expected Republican gains in North Carolina, where a newly conservative top court is allowing the G.O.P. to replace a more neutral map. Separately, Democrats won an unexpected victory at the U.S. Supreme Court. The court said Alabama had used a map that watered down the power of Black voters in a decision that could affect redistricting in several southern states.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top House Democrat, praised Thursday’s ruling and called the current New York congressional map undemocratic. METROPOLITAN diaryBarefoot on the FDear Diary:It was a hot summer day in the late 1990s. Dressed in a sundress and slide-style sandals, I was about to step onto an arriving F at 14th Street when one of my sandals slipped off and fell between the train and the platform and then down onto the tracks.I sheepishly entered the car and looked for a seat, praying that no one had noticed. Of course, several people had“Well, that’s a first!” said one of them, an older man.With my bare foot tucked behind my sandaled one, I spent the rest of the ride home to Brooklyn pondering what I would do once I got off.Should I walk through the station and the three blocks to my apartment with one sandal and one bare foot? Should I remove the other shoe and go fully barefoot?As we pulled into the station, a woman sitting a few seats away approached me and pulled something from her bag.“Excuse me,” she said, “but I saw what happened when you got on the train, and I wanted to offer you this pair of flip-flops.”— Megan WormanIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Johnna Margalotti and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More