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      Climate is on the Ballot Around the World

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      About half of the world’s population will be electing leaders this year.More than 40 countries that are home to about half of the world’s population — including the United States, India and South Africa — will be electing their leaders this year.My colleagues at The Times report that it’s “one of the largest and most consequential democratic exercises in living memory,” which “will affect how the world is run for decades to come.”Climate is front and center on many of the ballots. The leaders chosen in this year’s elections will face daunting challenges laid out in global climate commitments for the end of the decade, such as ending deforestation, tripling renewable energy capacity and sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Here are the issues and races to watch closely:Major climate policies at stakeClimate change is one of the issues on which Republicans and Democrats are farthest apart.President Biden signed what many called the most powerful climate legislation in the country’s history. Former President Trump, who is likely to be the Republican presidential candidate — especially after his victory in the Iowa caucuses — withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, the 2015 treaty that guided much of the world’s progress in curbing climate change.Republicans have also prepared a sweeping strategy called Project 2025 if Trump wins back the White House. As my colleague Lisa Friedman wrote last year, “the plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.”Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, is expected to seek re-election.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockEuropean Union incumbents will also be defending their climate policies, known as the Green Deal, in elections for the European Parliament in June. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president who is expected to seek re-election by the European Parliament, kicked off a series of policies designed to ensure the bloc achieves carbon neutrality by 2050. But opposition to these policies is growing. Farmers in several countries have tried to block measures to restore natural ecosystems, while homeowners have grown increasingly worried about the cost of the green energy transition.Opinion polls analyzed by Reuters in a commentary piece suggest far-right lawmakers, who oppose Green Deal policies, will grow in number but remain a minority. Climate may also play a role in elections in Britain, which may happen in the second half of the year. They became a key point of disagreement between the Labour Party and the governing Conservative Party, which are trailing in the polls, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rolled back some of the country’s most ambitious climate policies.The future of coalCountries that rely heavily on coal as a source of energy, such as India, Indonesia and South Africa, are also going to the polls this year. In South Africa, elections could influence how fast the country is able to switch to renewables. Any shake up to the ruling African National Congress’ hold on power could boost the shift to renewables, my colleague Lynsey Chutel, who covers South Africa, told me.Environmental activists demonstrated outside of Standard Bank South Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September.Kim Ludbrook/EPA, via ShutterstockRight now, one of the party’s most powerful leaders is an energy minister who has fiercely defended the country’s continued use of coal. Many voters are angry at the A.N.C. for its inability to address an energy crisis partially created by aging coal plants.There seems to be less room for a shift in the elections in Indonesia and India. My colleague Suhasini Raj, who is based in India, told me that, despite high rates of pollution and the pressure on India to let go of coal, the current prime minister Narendra Modi is likely to be re-elected and continue his pro-coal policies.In Indonesia none of the candidates running for president have put forward a concrete plan to transition to clean energy, Mongabay, an environmental news service, reported. The country is by far the world’s biggest exporter of coal. Oil on the ballotFor leaders in oil producing nations around the world, balancing climate policies and drilling has been a delicate act that will be tested on the ballot.President Biden risked losing the support of many climate-conscious voters when he approved Willow, an $8 billion oil drilling project on pristine federal land in Alaska. But Biden’s support for more drilling has been, at least in part, an effort to curb inflation, which angers many more voters.Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidential campaign in Mexico is also balancing climate proposals with her country’s dependence on oil. A climate scientist who is now the mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum is a protégé of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose administration has tried to boost the oil sector’s role in the country’s economy.Claudia Sheinbaum, running for president in Mexico.Carlos Lopez/EPA, via ShutterstockSheinbaum, a favorite to win in June, has vowed to act to protect the climate. But it’s unclear how much Obrador’s oil legacy will color her policies. “We are going to keep advancing with renewable energies and with the protection of the environment, but without betraying the people of Mexico,” she told voters, according to Bloomberg.The oil industry is also on the ballot in Venezuela and Russia, where it lends strength to authoritarian leaders.Vladimir Putin’s re-election — and his disregard for the climate — seems to be a foregone conclusion. But, in Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, there is tiny window for change, though it seems to be closing fast.Venezuela freed five political prisoners in October after the United States vowed to lift some sanctions to its oil industry if it holds free and fair elections. But the main opposition candidate is still banned from running.It may sound contradictory, but some investment in Venezuela’s oil sector could help clean it up. As my colleagues reported last year, government dysfunction has left the industry unable to maintain minimum safeguards, with devastating consequences to the environment.We will report back with key developments on these races throughout the year. When it comes to the climate crisis, even far-off elections have implications for us all. Plaintiffs in the Loper Bright Enterprises case, from left, William Bright, Wayne Reichle and Stefan Axelsson, in Cape May, N.J.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesA Supreme Court case could dismantle federal regulationThe Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday for a case that could severely curb the federal government’s regulatory power, with potentially drastic repercussions for the climate.The case is about a group of commercial fishermen who oppose a government fee designed to help prevent overfishing. But a victory for the fishermen could achieve a long-sought goal of the conservative legal movement: undermining a longstanding legal doctrine known as the Chevron deference.That could have implications for the environment, but also health care, finance, telecommunications and other sectors, legal experts told my colleague Hiroko Tabuchi.“It might all sound very innocuous,” said Jody Freeman, founder and director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “But it’s connected to a much larger agenda, which is essentially to disable and dismantle federal regulation.”The Chevron deference was created by a 1984 Supreme Court ruling involving the oil and gas giant. It empowers federal agencies to interpret ambiguities in laws passed by Congress. Weakening or eliminating the Chevron deference would limit the agencies’s ability to interpret the laws they administer. A victory for the fishermen would also shift power from agencies to judges, my colleague Adam Liptak wrote.The lawyers who have helped to propel the case to the nation’s highest court have a powerful backer: the petrochemicals billionaire Charles Koch. Court records show that the lawyers who represent the New Jersey-based fishermen also work for Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by Koch, who is a champion of anti-regulatory causes.In their briefs, the groups supporting the fishermen pointed out that the Chevron deference has fallen out of favor at the Supreme Court in recent years, and several justices have criticized it.Justice Clarence Thomas was initially a backer of the Chevron deference, writing the concurring opinion in 2005 that expanded its protections. But Thomas, who has close ties to the Koch’s political network, has since renounced his earlier ruling. Other climate newsNearly a quarter of humanity were living under drought in 2022 and 2023, the United Nations estimates.The Biden administration announced a plan to charge oil and gas companies a steep fee for emitting methane.John Kerry, President Biden’s special envoy for climate, plans to step down in the spring.A U.S. government map that show extreme weather threats now frequently covers almost the whole country.Chevron, the oil giant, and other companies are building an underground hydrogen battery in Utah.Denial about climate change is on the rise, according to an analysis of 12,000 disinformation videos by U.K. researchers, Grist reports.Colombia created its newest national park by befriending the traditional ranches that surround it.The Crochet Coral Reef, a long-running craft-science collaborative artwork, is the environmental version of the AIDS quilt. More

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      Should Trump Be on the Ballot? And Other 2024 Sticky Wickets

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIs Donald Trump an insurrectionist who should be barred from the ballot? On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss who should get to decide if the former president can try to return to the White House. Plus, the hosts lay out what other stories are on their 2024 political bingo cards.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Hill Street Studios/Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:“The Antidemocratic Quest to Save Democracy From Trump,” by Ross Douthat in The New York TimesDecember 2023 Times/Siena poll“The 2023 High School Yearbook of American Politics,” by Michelle Cottle in The Times“Trump’s 2024 Playbook,” episode of “The Daily” from The Times“The World Should Fear 2024,” by Aris Roussinos in UnHerdThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

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      With Big State Victories, Modi Expands His Dominance in India

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      Results of voting for the governments of four Indian states showed gains for Mr. Modi’s ruling party, putting him in a strong position ahead of general elections in the spring.The ruling party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tightened its grip over India’s populous northern belt, results of state elections showed Sunday, expanding its dominance of a key region ahead of general elections in which Mr. Modi is seeking a third term.The results of voting for the governments of four states, with a cumulative population of more than 240 million people, was another blow to the dwindling fortunes of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. The party, which ruled for a majority of India’s history as a republic, has struggled to claw its way back after Mr. Modi rose to national power in 2014.The Congress party was hoping to use the state elections to build momentum for national elections next spring, but instead lost all three states in which it was pitted against Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.The B.J.P. managed to re-elect its government in Madhya Pradesh, with a bigger margin, and topple Congress in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. The only victory for Congress came against a smaller regional party in Telangana, in India’s south, where Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics has faced resistance. The results of elections in a smaller fifth state, Mizoram, are expected on Monday, but the race there is between two smaller regional parties.“When the Congress goes up against the formidable organizational and electoral machinery of the B.J.P., burnished by Prime Minister Modi’s charisma, it collapses,” Arati Jerath, a New Delhi-based political analyst, said about the opposition’s performance in the north. “This is the B.J.P.’s big advantage in 2024.”While Indian elections trends could easily fluctuate in coming months, Ms. Jerath said the B.J.P.’s further consolidation of its support base, where its Hindu nationalist politics have taken strong root, puts it in a comfortable position ahead of the elections in the spring.Mr. Modi already has a big plan for further galvanizing his base of support: the inauguration in January of a massive Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, that is being constructed on the site of a destroyed mosque. Demands for the construction of the temple helped turn Hindu nationalism into a major political movement in the 1990s and make the B.J.P. a national power.Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the media in New Delhi, in September. The B.J.P.’s victories in the state elections put it in a comfortable position ahead of the elections in the spring.Adnan Abidi/ReutersThe state elections this month, while usually not a direct indication of how people vote in the general elections, were important in their timing. For the Congress party, it was seen as chance to show that it was getting its house in order, and regaining a winning touch.In the months before the elections, the Congress had scored a victory against the B.J.P. by winning the southern state of Karnataka, the cash-rich hub of the Indian tech industry. It also formed a national alliance, called INDIA, that included smaller and regional parties — an indication of its acceptance of an evident truth: that Congress cannot win a fight alone against Mr. Modi’s formidable B.J.P. and its considerable resources.Going into the state elections this month, however, the Congress decided to fight alone in states where it saw a good chance of victory against the B.J.P.The refusal of Congress to join together in these elections with the same parties it hopes to ally with in the national fight against Mr. Modi will diminish its standing in the eyes of those partners, analysts said.“It is going to be very difficult for them to put up a credible challenge against the B.J.P. in 2024,” said Rahul Verma, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “Now I am not sure how the INDIA alliance is going to pan out.”In the three states where the B.J.P. and Congress went head to head, there was little to differentiate the parties, with both mainly focusing on handouts — from subsidized gas cylinders, to deposits for farmers and married women, to payments for books and school bags for students. Both parties faced voter fatigue, allegations of corruption and infighting in their state ranks.But to cover for its weakness, the B.J.P. had what the Congress has struggled to find, analysts said: ideological clarity and charismatic national leadership.The B.J.P stands clearly for Hindu nationalism and its divisive vision for turning India into a Hindu-first state. Mr. Modi, projecting himself as an ambitious champion of development as well as Hindu interests, also has a strong pull with voters across the country. His government has used the resources of the top-heavy and unequal Indian economy for well-targeted welfare schemes, handed out often in his name. In states where local B.J.P. leaders were struggling in the elections, it was Mr. Modi’s face on the posters; the handouts for voters were presented as “Modi’s guarantee.”In comparison, the Congress has struggled to present a leadership that can put up a fight against Mr. Modi, or a clear vision for its secular ideology. Mr. Modi’s effort to harness grassroots Hindu networks over the past decade and his firm grip over the national media have significantly shifted India’s secular mainstream, particularly in the country’s north.A rally for India’s Congress party in Hyderabad, India, on Tuesday. The Congress party was hoping to use the state elections to build momentum for next spring’s big national race, but instead lost all the three states where it was pitted against the Bharatiya Janata Party.Mahesh Kumar A./Associated PressRahul Gandhi, the Congress leader who would likely be its candidate for prime minister if the party wins in the spring, is often caricatured by Mr. Modi and his aides as entitled and a lightweight.While Mr. Gandhi has presented the Congress as standing for harmony and secularism against the divisive Hindu-first politics of Mr. Modi, that difference has not been projected clearly by officials at the state level.In the elections this month, Madhya Pradesh, with a population of more than 80 million, and which the B.J.P. had ruled for most of the past two decades, was seen as a major test of whether the Congress could use the B.J.P.’s weaknesses to score a victory.The B.J.P. government of the state had been accused by critics of widespread corruption, political infighting and causing communal tensions and riots with its Hindu-first policies.The Congress also accused the B.J.P. of using underhanded methods when in 2020 it toppled the Congress government that had come to power two years earlier with the help of smaller parties. The B.J.P. managed to take power that year by getting a number of Congress deputies to change sides.Despite the criticism, the B.J.P. still held on to Madhya Pradesh — and won about 50 more seats, according to the results on Sunday.“As a political party, as an organization, the B.J.P are much more agile and adaptive,” said Mr. Verma, the analyst. “They are ready to take bold moves, to experiment for winning at any cost.” More

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      Elizabeth Moynihan, Engine of the Senator’s Success, Dies at 94

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      She not only had an outsize role in New York and Washington politics as the wife of Daniel Patrick Moynihan; she also made a significant archaeological discovery in India.Elizabeth Moynihan, who was a vital political partner to her husband, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, during his four terms as a U.S. Senator from New York; played a consequential role in Washington herself; and, as an architectural historian, made a signal discovery in India, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Maura Moynihan. Reticent in public but spirited, irreverent and combustible in private, Mrs. Moynihan was a formidable political strategist. “I don’t choose to be a public person,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “You know, the more public Pat has become, the more adamantly private I have felt.”But she was Senator Moynihan’s full partner on the legislation and policy they debated with his staff members and other advisers at the couple’s kitchen table in Washington, and she was his surrogate in overseeing his Senate staff and maintaining its loyalty.Mrs. Moynihan managed all four of her husband’s successful, no-frills campaigns, beginning in 1976, when she was photographed here.Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York TimesWhile her role was never publicly acknowledged, Mrs. Moynihan deserved credit for helping to enact what in 1993 was considered the most important legislative issue of Bill Clinton’s presidency: the budget and tax increases that undergirded the White House’s five-year economic program.It was her browbeating of Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, that provided what turned out to be the one-vote margin needed to pass the legislation, after her husband and the president, fellow Democrats, had failed to convince him. The bill was viewed at the White House as essential to Mr. Clinton’s ultimate success as president.On the morning of Aug. 6, Senator Kerrey met for an hour with Mr. Clinton but was apparently unpersuaded until Mrs. Moynihan telephoned hours later, around 6 p.m.As Mr. Moynihan later recalled the conversation in a memo, his wife emphatically told Mr. Kerrey, “I want to live to see you president,” but by voting against the bill, she said, “your future as a national Democrat is at risk.” To be sure, it was a bad bill, she said, agreeing with the senator, but her husband “feels we cannot have another president fail.”At 8:30 p.m., Mr. Kerrey, the last to announce which way he would vote, declared on the Senate floor that he would support Mr. Clinton. Vice President Al Gore went on to cast the tiebreaking vote.“She turned him around from a hard no to yes,” Tony Bullock, Mr. Moynihan’s last chief of staff, said of Senator Kerrey.Mr. Kerrey said in an email on Tuesday that while he did not remember the specific conversation, “I know for certain that she would have been disappointed with a ‘no’ vote, and I know for certain it would have been easier to disappoint the president than to disappoint Liz.”Mrs. Moynihan, here with Senator Moynihan, persuaded Senator Bob Kerrey to vote yes on a bill central to President Bill Clinton’s economic agenda. “She turned him around from a hard no to yes,” a former Moynihan aide said.Barry Thumma/Associated PressMrs. Moynihan managed all four of her husband’s successful, no-frills Senate campaigns, beginning in 1976. She called them “mom-and-pop” operations, but they were thoroughly professional.She also bolstered his commitment to improving the architecture of proposed federal public works, the rehabilitation of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and historic preservation in New York and elsewhere.“Every night over dinner the Senator told her everything — and I mean everything — that took place in the office that day,” said Richard Eaton, a former chief of staff to the senator. “Many mornings Liz would call me and tell me something that could have been handled better, or about some personnel concern that I was not aware of so that it could be fixed.”Mrs. Moynihan was especially effective in dissuading potential Democratic challengers to her husband’s re-election (like H. Carl McCall, the New York State comptroller) and those from the Republican Party (including Rudolph W. Giuliani, when he was a U.S. attorney), in part by supporting a TV advertising blitz lauding Mr. Moynihan early in the campaign.In the late 1970s, when her husband was the ambassador to India, Mrs. Moynihan developed an interest in Babur, the emperor who founded the Mughal dynasty almost 500 years ago.Analyzing a 1921 translation of Babur’s journal, she became convinced that the elegant pleasure garden he built 150 miles south of New Delhi still existed, even though most scholars believed it had probably vanished. She unearthed the garden in 1978 in what The Times called “an important archaeological discovery.”Babur’s garden became an integral part of her book, “Paradise as a Garden: In Persia and Mughal India” (1979). She also edited the volume “The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj Mahal” (2000), which documented a study of the Mehtab Bagh, a forgotten garden near the Taj Mahal. She led an American team that collaborated with Indian scholars on the project, work that spurred the garden’s restoration and that provided a new and spectacular view of the Taj Mahal.Mrs. Moynihan continued to support the preservation of ancient sites as a founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation in New York.Elizabeth Therese Brennan was born on Sept. 19, 1929, in Norfolk County, Mass., on the outskirts of Boston. Her mother, Therese (Russell) Brennan, edited a local newspaper. Her father, Francis Brennan, was a chemical factory foreman who left the family during the Depression, when Liz was 5, a growing pain she shared with her future husband, whose father deserted his wife and children in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan when Pat Moynihan was 9.She attended Boston College but never finished because she ran out of money. After volunteering in the first Senate campaign of John F. Kennedy in 1952 and in Adlai Stevenson’s presidential race that year, she moved to New York, where she worked for Gov. W. Averell Harriman’s 1954 campaign and met Mr. Moynihan, who was writing speeches for the governor. They married in 1955.Elizabeth Brennan met Mr. Moynihan while they were both working on Gov. W. Averell Harriman’s 1954 campaign. They married in 1955.via Moynihan familyMr. Moynihan died in 2003. Their son Tim died in 2015, and another son, John, died in 2004. In addition to their daughter, Maura, Mrs. Moynihan is survived by two grandchildren.The family moved more than 16 times during Mr. Moynihan’s career, as he went from Harvard professor to presidential adviser to ambassador to India and the United Nations before reaching the Senate. But they found sanctuary in a 500-acre dairy farm near Oneonta, N.Y., which they bought in 1964. (It was the setting for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s announcement in 1999 that she would run for the Senate from New York.)If Mr. Moynihan played a singular role in public life, retiring from the Senate in 2001, Mrs. Moynihan’s province was also exceptional, in particular among Senate wives, for her hands-on involvement in politics. In “Irish Americans: The History and Culture of a People” (2015), Eugene J. Halus Jr. wrote that Mr. Moynihan was successful in government “in part because of his personality and efforts, but also because of his lifelong partner in politics.”Of his 1998 re-election victory, Mr. Moynihan wrote to a friend: “It is simply that when things got tough we were ready. Liz was ready.”Michael Geissinger, via Library of CongressPeter Galbraith, a former ambassador to Croatia and Senate staff member under Mr. Moynihan, described Mrs. Moynihan as “the architect” of the senator’s 1988 landslide re-election victory, in which he won by a record-breaking plurality of 2.2 million votes.Savoring his victory, Mr. Moynihan wrote to a friend: “It is simply that when things got tough we were ready. Liz was ready.”But he might never have joined the political fray in the first place had it not been for the encouragement and political instincts of Mrs. Moynihan, said Lawrence O’Donnell, another former Moynihan legislative aide and now an MSNBC host.“I don’t think Professor Moynihan could have become Senator Moynihan without Liz,” he said in an interview. “So Pat’s legacy is Liz’s legacy.” More

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      Maldives Votes in Presidential Runoff Overshadowed by India and China

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      The election has become a referendum on the two Asian giants’ influence on the small nation’s direction.As voting began on Saturday in the presidential runoff in the Maldives, the race was proving to be as much a referendum on the competition between India and China for influence as it was a chance to determine the small island nation’s next leader.The pro-India incumbent, President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, has trailed Mohamed Muizzu, the mayor of the capital, Malé City, who has pushed for stronger ties with China. When neither managed a first-round victory with half of the vote early this month, the race was pushed into a runoff.The campaign season has focused on a range of issues, including a housing crisis in the overcrowded capital, which is scarce on land, and the country’s dwindling dollar reserves. That problem has prompted parties to offer competing “de-dollarization” proposals relating to trade.But none of the issues have hung as heavily as the influence of the two Asian giants over the future of the Maldives, a nation of about a half-million people that lies 450 miles south of India. The Maldives is particularly important because it sits along busy shipping routes in the Indian Ocean.“The fact is, either of them will try to control the Maldives — it is inevitable,” Mohamed Rauhan Ahmed, 27, a political science student, said of China and India on Saturday outside a polling station in Malé City. “But I think Solih can do a better job of managing them both and keeping them at an arm’s length.”While his preferred candidate was not in the runoff, he said, “For a change, we experienced peace and freedom in the last five years” under Mr. Solih.For China and India, the jostling for influence among their neighbors is nothing new. China enjoyed an early advantage because of its deep pockets and the development loans it brought as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, but India has asserted itself more in the region in recent years.New Delhi stepped in to assist Sri Lanka with billions of dollars when the country’s economy crashed last year. It has also expanded its presence and projects in the Maldives since Mr. Solih won the presidency in 2018, ending the five-year tenure of the pro-Beijing Abdulla Yameen, who is now in prison for corruption.Outside a voting site in the Hulhumalé district of the capital, Ahmed Rassam, 36, complained Saturday of government graft and a lack of a promised judicial overhaul. “But mostly, we sensed the unpleasant feeling of losing our nation’s sovereignty to India,” he said in explaining his support for Mr. Muizzu. “He can bring progressive change.”As the election race heated up, the main opposition coalition, which includes Mr. Muizzu’s People’s National Congress, made maligning the current government’s growing relations with India a main focus. Using slogans like “India Out,” it has denounced Mr. Solih’s government for bringing a small contingent of Indian military personnel to the island.While Mr. Solih has embraced his ties to India, inviting investment from its companies and development aid from its government, he has denied that it has been at the cost of relationships with other countries. During one election debate, Mr. Solih also rejected the opposition’s assertion about the nature of foreign troops’ activity, saying, “There is no Indian military personnel conducting military work in the Maldives.”In the initial round of voting, which featured eight candidates, Mr. Solih got 39 percent, trailing Mr. Muizzu’s 46 percent.The president has been undermined by a messy public split in his Maldivian Democratic Party, with Mr. Solih’s childhood friend Mohamed Nasheed, a former president, parting ways before the election to create his own party. Mr. Nasheed, who helped Mr. Solih become president, had felt increasingly marginalized.The candidate put forward by Mr. Nasheed’s new party received 7 percent of the vote, making it a potential kingmaker in the runoff. But Mr. Nasheed, now the speaker of Parliament, has found himself in a difficult spot, torn between his longtime closeness to India and the breakdown of his relationship with the president, which he has said cannot be surmounted.Mr. Nasheed’s party announced that it would “refrain from supporting either candidate” in the runoff, results of which were expected on Saturday evening. More

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      Joe Biden calls for stable US-China relationship during south-east Asia tour

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      Joe Biden’s national security tour of south-east Asia reached Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, where the president called for stability in the US-China relationship against an increasingly complex diplomatic picture in the region for his country.“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden said. “I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”Biden also said that China’s recent economic downturn may limit any inclination to invade Taiwan.“I don’t think it’s going to cause China to invade Taiwan – matter of fact the opposite, probably doesn’t have the same capacity as it had before,” he said on Sunday during a press conference in Hanoi.He added that the country’s economic woes had left President Xi Jinping with “his hands full right now”.The president’s remarks came after a meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist party, in the nation’s capital designed to secure global supply chains of semiconductors and critical minerals, which would offer a strategic alternative to China.“I think we have an enormous opportunity,” Biden said of the visit. “Vietnam and the United States are critical partners at what I would argue is a very critical time.”The meeting came during a multi-front diplomatic push to shore up international support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and enunciate a policy toward China that both encourages trade and reduces the potential for US-Chinese conflict.The complexities of the administration’s approach were illustrated on Saturday, a day before Biden landed in Hanoi, when the New York Times reported that Vietnam is in talks with Russia over a new arms supply deal that could trigger US sanctions.Reuters said it had seen – but could not authenticate – documents describing talks for a credit facility that Russia would extend to Vietnam to buy heavy weaponry, including anti-ship missiles, anti-submarine aircraft and helicopters, anti-aircraft missile systems and fighter jets.Earlier, at the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, western leaders failed to reiterate an explicit condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The summit declaration referred only to the “war in Ukraine” and lamented the “suffering” of the Ukrainian people – an equivocation that indicates a growing lack of international consensus.Less than a year ago, G20 leaders still issued a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion and called on Moscow to withdraw its forces.Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, attempted to smooth over the disparity, telling ABC’s This Week that world leaders meeting in New Delhi had “stood up very clearly, including in the statement, for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.Blinken said that virtually every meeting participant “is intent on making sure there is a just and durable end to this Russian aggression”.It was clear in the room, he said, that “countries are feeling the consequences and want the Russian aggression to stop”.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “The vast majority of G20 countries have supported multiple UN resolutions that call out Russia’s illegal aggression.”Jean-Pierre said the New Delhi communique “builds on that, to send an unprecedented, unified statement on the imperative that Russia refrain from using force for territorial acquisition, abide by its obligations in the UN charter, and cease attacks on civilians and infrastructure”.The comments came as a CBS News poll found only 1 in 4 Americans think Biden is improving the US’s global position. According to the survey, 24% thought Biden was making the US stronger, 50% said weaker and 26% that he was not having much effect.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust 29% said they were optimistic for the prospects of world peace and stability in the world, and 71% said they were increasingly pessimistic. Asked if the Biden administration was being “too easy” on China, 57% agreed.On CNN, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley slammed the Biden administration’s policy toward China, describing the country as an “enemy”.“China has practically been preparing for war with us for years,” Haley said. “Yes, I view China as an enemy.”Haley said China had bought 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) of US soil and the largest pork producer in the country, and continues to steal $600bn a year in intellectual property while spreading propaganda. She pointed to Chinese drones used by US law enforcement and to the crisis caused by Chinese-sourced fentanyl that “had killed more Americans than the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam war combined”.“How much more has to happen for Biden to realize you don’t send cabinet members over to China to appease them?” she said, referring to the recent visit of the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, to Beijing.The administration’s effort to present a coherent picture of US foreign policy toward its two most vexing issues – China and Russia – continued Sunday with vice-president Kamala Harris telling CBS News that a planned meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “would be a huge mistake”.“When you look at Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, and the idea that they would supply ammunition to Russia – well, it’s predictable where that ends up,” Harris said. “I also believe very strongly that for both Russia and North Korea, this will further isolate them.”Harris also spoke to an emerging concern that China’s president, Xi Jinping, who skipped the G20, may decline to attend the Asia-Pacific economic cooperation leaders’ meeting in San Francisco, California, in November.Last week, China’s security agency hinted that a meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in San Francisco will depend on the US “showing sufficient sincerity”.China’s ministry of state security said that the country “will never let its guard down”.The comments came after Raimondo said the US did not want to decouple from China but that American companies had complained to her that China had become “uninvestible”.Asked how important it is for Xi Jinping to come to America, Harris remarked that “it is important to the … stability of things that we keep open lines of communication”. 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      in Elections

      Georgia special grand jury recommended charges against Lindsey Graham and former senators – live

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      From 1h agoThe special grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results recommended bringing charges against the state’s former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as well as the current South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.None of the three were named in the indictment Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis unveiled last month, which targeted Donald Trump and 18 others with racketeering charges related to their attempt to stop Joe Biden from collecting Georgia’s electoral votes despite his victory there.According to the report, the jurors recommended the three senators be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”.All told, the special grand jurors in Georgia recommended charges against 39 people for trying to overturn the state’s elections, but Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s indictment only targeted 19 people, Donald Trump among them.Among those who were named in the report, but not charged:David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were Georgia’s Republican senators, until both were ousted from office by the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in elections held the day before the January 6 insurrection.The special grand jury in Fulton county recommended that Perdue be charged “over the persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees between November of 2020 and January of 2021” – the period when Donald Trump was trying to overturn his election loss. The vote was 16 jurors in favor, one against, and one abstention.The jurors also recommended charges against both Loeffler and Perdue for “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”. However there was more dissent on this count. For Perdue, the vote was 17 in favor and four against, while for Loeffler, the vote was 14 in favor, 6 against, and one abstention.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis ultimately did not indict either of the former lawmakers.Lindsey Graham’s name appeared early as Donald Trump’s attempts to stay in the White House began shortly after his re-election defeat in November 2020.Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger told the press that the South Carolina senator had called him to ask if it was possible to throw away mail-in ballots in counties crucial to Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. From the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino’s report at the time:
      Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.
      In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.
      Raffensperger was reportedly “stunned” by the question, in which Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.
      “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
      Graham confirmed the conversation to reporters on Capitol Hill but said it was “ridiculous” to suggest that he pressured Raffensperger to throw out legally cast absentee ballots. According to Graham, he only wanted to learn more about the process for verifying signatures, because what happens in Georgia “affects the whole nation”.
      “I thought it was a good conversation,” Graham said on Monday after the interview was published. “I’m surprised to hear he characterized it that way.”
      Trump has refused to accept results showing Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, falsely blaming rampant fraud and irregularities that election officials in both parties have dismissed as meritless.
      The special grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results recommended bringing charges against the state’s former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as well as the current South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.None of the three were named in the indictment Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis unveiled last month, which targeted Donald Trump and 18 others with racketeering charges related to their attempt to stop Joe Biden from collecting Georgia’s electoral votes despite his victory there.According to the report, the jurors recommended the three senators be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”.The full report of the special grand jury whose investigation led to the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result has been released.We’re digging into it and will let you know what it says.The special grand jury report that was used in the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others in Georgia for trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results is expected to be released any minute now.While parts of it have already been unsealed, we will finally be getting a look at the full report by the jurors empaneled by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis. There are two main pieces of news expected from the report:
      Whether the grand jurors recommended charges be brought against people who Willis ultimately opted not to pursue.
      The vote counts for each person the jurors said should be indicted, and whether there were any significant splits within the panel.
      Yesterday, Ron DeSantis had a testy exchange with an audience member who accused the Republican governor of backing policies in Florida that enabled violence against Black people – such as last month’s shooting by a racist gunman in Jacksonville:Clearly smarting over the exchange, DeSantis later went on Fox News to call the questioner a “nutjob”:While Joe Biden is in India for a meeting of G20 leaders, Republicans angling to replace him next year are continuing their campaigns, including Ron DeSantis – who may have done himself more harm than good by skipping a meeting with the president after a hurricane struck Florida. Here’s the story, from the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe:One reality of Florida politics is that a bad hurricane for the state traditionally blows good fortune for its governor. It was true for Rick Scott, elected a senator in November 2018, one month after guiding Florida through Category 5 Hurricane Michael; and again for Ron DeSantis, whose landslide re-election last year followed his much-praised handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.This year, however, DeSantis is struggling to shake the dark clouds of Hurricane Idalia, as his return to the national stage to try to rescue his flailing presidential campaign after an 11-day break has been further scarred by his “petty and small” snub of Joe Biden’s visit to Florida last weekend to survey the storm’s damage.Opponents seized on it as a partisan politicization of a climate disaster, contrasting the Republican Florida governor’s approach to a year ago after Ian, when DeSantis and Biden put their differences aside to praise each other and tour the worst-affected areas with their respective first ladies.“Your job as governor is to be the tour guide for the president, to make sure the president sees your people, sees the damage, sees the suffering, what’s going on and what needs to be done to rebuild it,” Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade.“You’re doing your job. And unfortunately, he put politics ahead of his job,” added Christie, who was applauded by Democrats and savaged by Republicans for working closely with Barack Obama after superstorm Sandy mauled his state in 2012.The Twitter/X account of Joe Biden, who is currently flying on Air Force One to New Delhi for a summit of G20 nations, just released video showing him touring the renovated situation room.That’s the space in the White House where the president goes to handle emergencies or highly sensitive operations:Perhaps the most famous appearance of a president in the situation room is Barack Obama’s from 1 May 2011, as he watched US soldiers kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. His photographer Pete Souza captured the scene:Yesterday, Donald Trump indicated he may ask that his trial in the Georgia election subversion case be moved to federal court, which the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported could have a number of advantages for the former president:Donald Trump’s lead defense lawyer notified a judge in Fulton county on Thursday that he could soon seek to remove to federal court the racketeering prosecution charging him with attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.The unusual filing, submitted to the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, said only that the former president “may seek removal of his prosecution”, stopping short of submitting a formal motion to transfer the trial venue.Trump has been weighing for weeks whether to seek removal to federal court and, according to two people familiar with deliberations, is expected to make a decision based on whether his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is successful in his own effort.The idea with waiting on a decision in the Meadows case, the people said, is to use him as a test. If Meadows is successful in transferring to federal court, the Trump legal team is intending to repurpose the same arguments and follow a similar strategy.To have the case moved to the US district court for the northern district of Georgia, Trump would have to show that the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment involved his official duties as president – he was acting “under color of office” – and cannot be prosecuted at the state level.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.The Georgia special grand jury report that is expected to be released at 10am ET today could reveal whether the investigative panel thought anyone else besides Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants should face charges for meddling in the state’s election result three years ago.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis convened the panel and used its subpoena power to compel witness testimony, and portions of its final report have already been released. The special grand jury did not indict Trump – that was done by one of the regular grand juries she convened in August.Good morning, US politics live blog readers. It’s going to be another big Friday in one of the criminal cases against Donald Trump, while US president Joe Biden is in India for G20 and a crucial bilateral with the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Here’s some of what’s ahead:
      The report of the special grand jury in Georgia that investigated Trump in the election subversion case – where the now-former president attempted to overturn the 2020 election in the swing state – is expected to be unsealed today.
      Biden is due to touch down in New Delhi, India, in under two hours, a day before the start of the G20 summit there. He and Modi will hold a bilateral meeting shortly after the US president arrives. The specter of Russia’s war in Ukraine looms over the event.
      Speaking of criminal cases against former US presidents, on this day 49 years ago Republican president Gerald Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon” to former president Richard Nixon covering his entire term in office, the AP notes.
      Trump will attend a rally tonight in South Dakota and the state’s rightwing governor Kristi Noem is expected to endorse his run for the 2024 Republican nomination for the White House. Noem is considered a vice-presidential hopeful. More

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      in US Politics

      The US should not normalize Modi’s autocratic and illiberal India at the G20 | Jason Stanley

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      In December 2021, President Joe Biden hosted an event billed as a “Summit for Democracy”. Biden opened his address to the summit by describing his motivation for holding it: “in the face of sustained and alarming challenges … democracy needs champions”.Since that time Biden has embraced, as allies, autocrats and would-be autocrats all over the world, including the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who US intelligence has said was responsible for the brutal murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. More recently, Biden invited Benjamin Netanyahu, who is presiding over the destruction of Israel’s democracy by targeting its judicial system, for an official visit to the United States.Biden is right that there is an ever-larger club of backsliding democracies, with the US among them. And the American president is not the only openly hypocritical leader in this club. In fact, he is not even close to the worst offender.This September, India is hosting G20 leaders under the banner of “One Earth, One Family, One Future”. As a part of the transition to India’s assumption of this position, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has leaned heavily on these themes in promoting India as an inclusive, emerging global power.Yet behind these lofty ideals lies a very different, and dangerous, reality.Those in Modi’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), are hardline Hindu nationalists. Their ideology holds that India was originally a pure Hindu state, with minorities, such as India’s large Muslim population, the supposed result of colonization by outside forces.The hallmarks of fascism are everywhere. School textbooks are being rewritten to reinforce the fake history behind BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda. Topics like the theory of evolution and the periodic table have been replaced with traditional Hindu theories, and academics have been silenced for calling out the BJP’s election malpractices. The government has weaponized education in the manner typical of fascist regimes such as Russia. There are other clear indications of India’s slide towards fascism. On press freedom, India ranks 161st out of 180 countries, sandwiched between Venezuela (at 159) and Russia (at 164).Modi and the BJP have proven themselves to be fluent hypocrites on the world stage. Under the banner of anticolonialism, the party is replicating Britain’s colonial practices.In 2005 Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, was denied entry to the US because of his role in ethnic violence that left over 1,000 people dead, the vast majority of them Muslims. According to a recently declassified report from the British Foreign Office, the Hindu mobs’ “systematic campaign of violence has all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and “Narendra Modi is directly responsible.”He’s much more powerful now, but the playbook remains the same. India’s minorities face lynchings and the bulldozing of their homes, among other abuses. Ten percent of the world’s Muslims live in India, over 200 million in all; as Gregory Stanton, the founder and director of Genocide Watch, has warned in a US congressional briefing, we are seeing in India the beginning of what would be by far the largest genocide in history.And it’s not just Muslims who are at risk. In Manipur, over 150 people have been killed since May 2023 in a vicious ethnic conflict pitting Hindus against Christians. More broadly, since Modi took over in 2014, hate crimes against minorities have increased by 300%.History tells us that this is how it works. Fascism grants the dominant majority special status, targeting national minorities by threatening their equal citizenship. In 2019, India passed a Citizenship Amendment Act that granted a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslims who lack documentation as citizens. The National Registry Act, already implemented in the Indian state of Assam, is a seemingly contradictory effort to expel illegal immigrants. It demands that residents provide proof of their citizenship in India, essentially a birth certificate, or face expulsion. Yet 38% of Indian children under five lack a birth certificate.This tangle of laws exemplifies the blatant hypocrisy of India’s ruling party, leaving India poised to disenfranchise much of its Muslim population.Nor is the problem only domestic. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India has become one of the world’s largest importers of Russian oil – essentially propping up Russia’s occupation and genocide of its peaceful neighbor. Genocidal regimes support one another, in an alliance of evil, and the rest of the world must stand against them.So, has the US been listening? The answer is clearly no. In June, Biden gave Modi’s visit a red-carpet treatment. Jack Kirby, a US national security official, has made light of objections to Modi, declaring that “India is a vibrant democracy. Anybody that, you know, happens to go to New Delhi can see that for themselves.” With America’s help, the G20 platforms BJP’s transparently hypocritical embrace of humanitarian and liberal ideals.The US public and their leaders are paying attention, at least somewhat, to Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. But the collective shrug at a potentially vast genocide in India (as well as the ongoing genocide in Sudan) raises an obvious concern: is the US public’s standard for this crime much higher when black and brown people face the threat?
      Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and the author, most recently, of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them More