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      U.N. Shelter in Gaza’s Khan Younis Is Struck, Killing at Least 9

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      United Nations officials said a building hit in Khan Younis that was being used as a shelter by about 800 people had been “clearly marked” as one of their facilities. Israel denied responsibility.Israeli forces pushed deeper into southern Gaza’s largest city on Wednesday, surrounding two major hospitals where thousands of people were seeking safety as a strike on a United Nations shelter killed at least nine people, according to U.N. officials and local health officials.The Israeli military said it had “currently ruled out” that its aerial or artillery fire had been responsible for the strike on the shelter in Khan Younis, where the U.N. was housing about 800 people. In addition to the nine dead, 75 other people were injured, according to Thomas White, who helps oversee U.N. aid operations in Gaza. U.N. officials did not directly blame Israel, but said the shelter, in a vocational training center, had been hit by two tank rounds. Israel is the only combatant in Gaza with tanks.Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. Palestinian aid agency, said that the shelter was “clearly marked” as a U.N. facility and that its coordinates had been shared with the Israeli authorities. “Once again a blatant disregard of basic rules of war,” Mr. Lazzarini wrote on social media.At a news conference in Washington, Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, called the strike “incredibly concerning” and added: “Civilians must be protected, and the protected nature of U.N. facilities must be respected.” He declined to say whether U.S. officials had spoken to the Israelis about the shelter strike.The Israeli military said that it was conducting a review of its operations in the area of the shelter.The Israeli military, which has described Khan Younis as a bastion of Hamas, the militant group that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, says its forces have encircled the city after weeks of heavy bombardment and gunfights. On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers were surrounding two major hospitals where thousands of Gazans were seeking safety.Khan Younis was a scene of intense fighting on Wednesday.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn a statement, the Israeli military accused Hamas of exploiting the civilian population and said that its operation in Khan Younis would continue until it had finished “dismantling Hamas’s military framework and Hamas strongholds.”Thousands of the civilians now in danger in Khan Younis had fled there to escape airstrikes and shelling in northern Gaza earlier in the war, packing into shelters and tents on the streets. No place in the city is safe, some say.“Our last night in Khan Younis felt like doomsday,” one Gazan, Yafa Abu Aker, said on Wednesday morning after walking about five miles from a refugee camp in the city to Rafah, near the Egyptian border. That city, too, is packed with people who have been forced from their homes.In Khan Younis, Ms. Abu Aker said, she and others sought refuge in areas that the Israeli military had designated as safe zones, only to witness violent clashes, military planes flying overhead, bombs falling, shelling from tanks and gunfire.“If we had stayed,” she said, “we would have been buried under the rubble.”On Tuesday, the Israeli military ordered evacuations from parts of the city that include two hospitals, Nasser, the largest in southern Gaza, and Al-Amal. They are among the last hospitals in Gaza still providing limited medical care.Palestinians inspecting the site of an Israeli strike on a mosque in Rafah on Wednesday.Fadi Shana/ReutersAid organizations and local officials said both hospitals were under siege. The Palestine Red Crescent Society, which runs Al-Amal, reported “intense shelling” nearby and said that a strike had killed three people outside its offices and in a nearby building. Israeli troops were “surrounding” Red Crescent workers and “enforcing restrictions on movement” around the group’s offices and the hospital, it said.The Gaza Health Ministry said that Nasser Hospital had for all practical purposes been cut off by “continuous bombing,” preventing injured people from getting there and blocking the transfer of patients to a nearby Jordanian field hospital. The field hospital, too, was included in an evacuation area, the United Nations’ humanitarian affairs office said on Tuesday.The three hospitals, with a total of more than 600 beds, account for a fifth of the remaining functional hospital capacity in Gaza, according to the U.N. It said the evacuation area held 88,000 residents and an estimated 425,000 displaced people, packed into about 1.5 square miles.Doctors Without Borders, the aid group, said late Tuesday that its staff members at Nasser could hear bombs and heavy gunfire, and that 850 patients and thousands of people sheltering there were unable to leave because roads from the hospital were either inaccessible or too dangerous. The group said that it was “deeply concerned” for people’s safety.Palestinians wounded during the Israeli offensive in Khan Younis at a hospital in Rafah on Tuesday.Hatem Ali/Associated PressThe Israeli military has said that mortar fire was launched at its troops from the hospital. The claim could not be independently verified.The strike on the shelter was only the latest to hit a U.N. facility. The organization says that 237 of its buildings have been hit in the war, including 150 belonging to its aid agency for Palestinians.U.N. officials said the death toll from the strike on Wednesday was likely to rise.Hanan Al-Reifi, who had been staying at the shelter, said that “many people” had been killed and wounded. She said that emergency services had not responded to calls for help and that people at the shelter did not have fire extinguishers.The strike was likely to further stoke accusations that, despite pressure from the Biden administration and others, the Israeli military has not done enough to protect civilians in its campaign to crush Hamas.Israel launched its offensive after Hamas led the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and seizing about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials. Since then, more than 25,000 people have been killed in Gaza, local health officials say, and most of the territory’s 2.2 million people have been forced from their homes.People killed in Khan Younis outside a morgue in Rafah on Wednesday.Fatima Shbair/Associated PressReporting was contributed by More

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      Orban Urges Hungary’s Parliament to Back Sweden’s NATO Bid

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      In a post on social media, the Hungarian leader said he would urge Parliament, as he has done in the past, to vote in favor of Sweden’s admission to the security alliance.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary said on Wednesday that he would “continue to urge” Hungarian legislators to vote in favor of accepting Sweden as a member of NATO, a day after Turkey, the only other holdout, endorsed the Nordic nation’s entry to the military alliance. The Turkish decision left Hungary isolated as the last country that has not yet approved NATO’s expansion. The Hungarian Parliament, which voted to accept Finland into the alliance last spring but left Sweden in limbo, is in winter recess and not currently scheduled to reconvene until Feb. 15.It was unclear whether Mr. Orban’s remarks, posted on the social media platform X after a conversation with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, meant that the Parliament would swiftly vote on Sweden’s membership. He has often said in the past that he wanted Sweden to join NATO but that legislators were “not enthusiastic,” blaming Hungary’s repeated delays in accepting Sweden on the right of legislators to make their own decisions. Most analysts questioned that explanation, noting that Mr. Orban has a tight grip on the governing Fidesz party and that its members, who constitute a large majority in Parliament, invariably follows the prime minister’s instructions. He said on Wednesday that he wanted Parliament to vote in favor of Sweden’s membership “at the first possible opportunity,” but gave no indication of when that might be.Mr. Orban stood alone last month against other European leaders to torpedo an aid package for Ukraine worth $52 billion. Leaders will take another run at convincing Mr. Orban to fall into line when they reconvene on Feb. 1 for an extraordinary summit in Brussels. More

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      Is North Korea Planning a War?

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      An intensification of nuclear threats from North Korea while the world is preoccupied with other wars has ignited an urgent debate over Mr. Kim’s motives.North Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells in waters near South Korean border islands on Jan. 5. Last week, it said it no longer regarded the South as inhabited by “fellow countrymen” but as a “hostile state” it would subjugate through a nuclear war. On Friday, it said it had tested an underwater nuclear drone to help repel U.S. Navy fleets.That new drumbeat of threats, while the United States and its allies have been preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has set foreign officials and analysts wondering whether the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has moved beyond posturing and is planning to assert more military force.For decades, a central part of the North Korean playbook has been to stage carefully measured and timed military provocations — some aimed at tightening internal discipline, others at demanding attention from its neighbors and the United States, or all of that at once.But to several close watchers of North Korea, the latest round of signals from Mr. Kim feels different. Some are taking it as a clue that the North has become disillusioned with seeking diplomatic engagement with the West, and a few are raising the possibility that the country could be planning a sudden assault on South Korea.A New Year’s celebration in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, on Dec. 31, 2023.Kim Won Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTwo veteran analysts of North Korea — the former State Department official Robert L. Carlin and the nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker — sounded an alarm this past week in an article for the U.S.-based website 38 North, asserting that Mr. Kim was done with mere threats. “Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” they wrote.Analysts broadly agree that North Korea has been shifting its posture in recent years, compelled by an accumulation of both internal problems, including a moribund economy and food and oil shortages, and frustrations in its external diplomacy, like Mr. Kim’s failure to win an end to international sanctions through direct diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump. And most agree that the North’s recent closeness with Russia, including supplying artillery shells and missiles for use in Russia’s war in Ukraine, will be a game-changer in some way.But there is still stark disagreement over where Mr. Kim’s new tack might be leading.Many say that Mr. Kim’s ultimate goal remains not a war with South Korea, a treaty ally of the United States, but Washington’s acceptance of his country as a nuclear power by prompting arms-reduction talks.“The North Koreans won’t start a war unless they decide to become suicidal; they know too well that they cannot win the war,” said Park Won-gon, a North Korea expert at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But they would love their enemies to believe that they could, because that could lead to engagement and possible concessions, like the easing of sanctions.”Posters in Pyongyang remind citizens of North Korea’s need to remain on a war footing.Cha Song Ho/Associated PressAnalysts in China, North Korea’s most vital ally, were also deeply skeptical that Mr. Kim would go to war unless the North were attacked. Prof. Shi Yinhong, at Renmin University in Beijing, asserted that the North’s leadership, not being irrational, ultimately acted out of self-preservation — and that starting a war would work against that goal.Others noted that the North could assert itself militarily, including through smaller conventional strikes and bolder weapons testing, without necessarily triggering a deadly response.“There are many rungs of the escalation ladder that North Korea can climb short of all-out war,” said Victor Cha, a Korea expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Kim is not that confident in his capabilities to deter U.S. reaction if he were to do something rash.”If Mr. Kim wants to climb that ladder, recent history suggests that this might be the time.North Korea has liked to unsettle its enemies at their most sensitive political moments, and both the United States and South Korea are holding elections this year. The North launched a long-range rocket in late 2012, between the United States and South Korean presidential elections. It conducted a nuclear test shortly before the inauguration of a South Korean leader in 2013. In 2016, it conducted another nuclear test two months before the American presidential election.North Korea could also attempt provocations in the coming weeks to try to help liberals who favor inter-Korean negotiations win parliamentary elections in South Korea in April, said the analyst Ko Jae-hong at the Seoul-based Institute for National Security Strategy. Through provocations, North Korea hopes to spread fears among South Korean voters that increasing pressure on the North, as the current administration of President Yoon Suk Yeol has tried to do, might “lead to a nuclear war,” he said.South Korean military exercises this month near the border with North Korea.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressNorth Korea “will continue to increase tensions until after the U.S. elections,” said Thomas Schäfer, a former German diplomat who served twice as ambassador to North Korea. But “at the height of tensions, it will finally be willing to re-engage with a Republican administration in the hope to get sanctions relief, some sort of acceptance of their nuclear program, and — as main objective — a reduction or even complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Schäfer said in a rebuttal to Mr. Carlin’s and Mr. Hecker’s analysis.Since Mr. Kim came to power in 2011, he has committed to building North Korea’s nuclear capability, using it both as a deterrent and as a negotiating tool to try to win concessions from Washington, like the removal of U.N. sanctions, to achieve economic growth.He tried it when he met Mr. Trump in 2018 and again in 2019. It failed spectacularly, and Mr. Kim returned home empty-handed and in humiliation.President Donald J. Trump and Kim Jung-un in 2019 in the Demilitarized Zone. In talks that year, the two failed to reach a deal on North Korea abandoning its nuclear ambitions in return for concessionsErin Schaff/The New York TimesHe then vowed to find a “new way” for his country.Since then, the North has rejected repeated calls from Washington for talks. It has also rejected South Korea as a dialogue partner, indicating from 2022 that it would use nuclear weapons against South Korea in a war and abandoning its long-held insistence that the weapons would keep the Korean Peninsula peaceful as a deterrent. It has tested more diverse, and harder-to-intercept, means of delivering its nuclear warheads.There is doubt that the North has yet built a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile that could target the United States. But two of the North’s main enemies, South Korea and Japan, are much closer.On the diplomatic front, Mr. Kim has taken pains to signal that he no longer views the United States as a critical negotiating partner, instead envisioning a “neo-Cold War” in which the United States is in retreat globally. He has aggressively improved military ties with Russia, and in return has most likely secured Russian promises of food aid and technological help for his weapons programs, officials say.South Korean troops patrol the entrance to a beach on an island near the sea boundary with North Korea.Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I worry that his confidence might lead him to misjudge with a small act, regardless of his intention, escalating to war amid a tense ‘power-for-power’ confrontation with the United States and its allies,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a former head of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.Despite its own increasingly aggressive military posture in recent years, China may prove to be a damper on any North Korean military adventurism.China and North Korea are bound by a treaty signed in 1961 that requires each country to provide military assistance if the other is attacked. But China has little incentive to be drawn into a war in Korea right now.“A war on the Korean Peninsula would be disastrous for Beijing. An entire half-century of peace in East Asia, a period of unprecedented growth for the P.R.C., would come to a crashing halt,” said John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, referring to the People’s Republic of China.The United States has long leaned on Beijing to rein in North Korea. By drawing close to Moscow, Mr. Kim has been putting his own pressure on China’s leader, Xi Jinping.“It is notable that Kim made his first post-pandemic trip to the Russian Far East, skipping China, and he just sent his foreign minister to Moscow, not Beijing,” Mr. Delury said. By raising tensions, Mr. Kim “can see what Xi is willing to do to placate him,” he added.David Pierson More

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      The Volodymyr Zelensky-Donald Trump Divide Looms at Davos

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      Ukraine’s leader and the potential re-election of Donald Trump as president are dominating discussion at the World Economic Forum. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, tried to tamp down worries about Donald Trump, and whether his potential re-election would lead to a drop in support for his country.Radek Pietruszka/EPA, via ShutterstockZelensky and Trump loom over Davos Two people are having an outsize impact at the World Economic Forum, and one of them isn’t even there.One is Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, who put on a full-court press of business and global leaders at the forum in Davos, Switzerland. The other is Donald Trump, whose potential re-election is dominating the discussion among attendees.Zelensky used an expletive to describe a Trump claim about containing Vladimir Putin. At a Q. and A. with journalists that Andrew moderated, Zelensky dismissed the idea that Trump could stop the Russian president from going after other parts of Europe. Putin, he added, “will not stop — but the question is what will the U.S. and Trump do after this point, because in this case it will mean that Europe lost the most useful and most strong army in Europe because we lost Ukraine.”Zelensky initially sought to tamp down worries about Trump, and whether his potential re-election would lead to a drop in support for Ukraine. But he also appeared somewhat fearful about the prospect. “One man cannot change the whole nation,” Zelensky said in the Q. and A., adding that deciding on the next president is “a choice for the American nation and only the American nation.”The Ukrainian leader acknowledged that a win for Trump, who has opposed U.S. aid to Ukraine, could affect his country’s military campaign or settlement talks. “Radical voices from the Republican Party” have created tension and pain for the Ukrainian people, he said.Zelensky isn’t the only leader at Davos worried about Trump. Multiple attendees have told DealBook that the outcome of the election is a potential risk for business, particularly after the former president thumped his Republican rivals in the Iowa caucuses.The Ukrainian leader has sought to shore up global business support. He spoke at a private gathering of executives organized by JPMorgan Chase, which is advising Ukraine on its reconstruction efforts.In the audience at the Congress Center for the talk were Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Ray Dalio of Bridgewater, David Rubenstein of Carlyle and Michael Dell of Dell, DealBook hears.Zelensky also spoke about how U.S.-China tensions are affecting Ukraine. Bringing Beijing on board with the country’s reconstruction is important, given China’s size and influence on Russia, he told the C.E.O.s. But Ukraine is seen as an American concern, not a global one.Seen and heard around town: The traffic on the main street was so bad that John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, hoofed it to a meeting. And the annual wine tasting hosted by Anthony Scaramucci, the financier and former Trump official, well, ran out of wine.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Rate-cut concerns rattle the markets. European stocks and bonds are down this morning, after Christine Lagarde, the European Central Bank president, warned that interest rates may not fall until the summer, and inflation in Britain rose unexpectedly. U.S. futures are also down after Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, signaled yesterday that it was premature to consider a rate cut in the first quarter.Disney formally rejected Nelson Peltz’s board nominees. The entertainment giant has submitted a slate of directors — including James Gorman of Morgan Stanley and Mary Barra of General Motors — and snubbed the activist investor, who has criticized Disney over strategy and succession planning. Separately, compensation for Bob Iger, Disney’s C.E.O., for fiscal 2023 topped $31 million.BP appoints a new C.E.O. The energy giant today named as its new chief Murray Auchincloss. The former C.F.O. stepped in as interim chief four months ago after his predecessor, Bernard Looney resigned for failing to disclose relationships with employees. Auchincloss has indicated that he will follow Looney’s strategy to build up the company’s renewables business and cut back its oil and gas production by the end of the decade.China’s conundrum China delivered a double dose of bad news this morning, pushing down markets in Asia. Official data shows that the economy grew last year at its slowest pace in decades and that the country’s population declined again.The readings are another sign of deeper problems in the world’s second-largest economy, as it grapples with a property crisis, weak consumer confidence, falling exports, deflationary pressures and big demographic challenges.The economy grew 5.2 percent last year, up from 3 percent in 2022 when strict coronavirus restrictions were in place. That was better than the official target of about 5 percent but 2024 is expected to be tougher, with a Reuters poll of analysts forecasting growth that will probably slow to 4.6 percent.The population decline points to bigger challenges. The country recorded more deaths than births for a second straight year. Beijing is worried because fewer people means fewer consumers, and it needs working-age people to fuel growth. Retail sales in December were lower than expectations, too, while industrial output barely surpassed them.A post-Covid boost hasn’t materialized. “Chinese authorities and some international economists believed that China’s economic downturn in the past few years was caused by the “zero Covid” policy,” Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an expert on Chinese demographics, told DealBook. “But China’s economic recovery was much weaker than expected last year, as the core drivers of the downturn were aging and a declining work force.”Structural reforms are needed to address these new realities. But for the short term, China will continue to rely on export-led growth at a time when many Western companies are already looking to move parts of their supply chains elsewhere.A federal judge has struck down JetBlue’s proposed $3.8 billion deal to buy Spirit Airlines, which would have been the biggest such tie-up in a decade.Allison Dinner/EPA, via ShutterstockAn airline deal hits turbulence The Biden administration scored a major victory yesterday after a federal judge struck down JetBlue’s proposed $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines, a low-cost rival, ruling that the merger would harm competition.The decision blocks the airline sector’s biggest attempted tie-up in the U.S. in over a decade, and throws into question the industry’s efforts to consolidate. President Biden hailed the ruling as “a victory for consumers everywhere who want lower prices and more choices.”The Biden administration says airline mergers have made travel more costly. Last year, the Justice Department won a lawsuit that forced JetBlue and American Airlines to end a regional code-sharing alliance.The Justice Department argued that a JetBlue-Spirit combination would remove a low-cost competitor from the market, messing with the economics of airfares. The judge, William Young, agreed, saying that combining forces would “likely incentivize JetBlue further to abandon its roots as a maverick, low-cost carrier.”Shares in Spirit plunged after the decision. Stock in the budget airline, which received bailout funding during the coronavirus pandemic’s early days and is known for its yellow planes and no-frills service, sank 47 percent yesterday. The companies have not yet said whether they will appeal.What next? Alaska Airlines’s $1.9 billion deal to acquire Hawaiian Airlines could also face tough scrutiny.Big fish to fry at the Supreme Court The Supreme Court justices will hear a case today that started with commercial herring fishermen challenging a rule about paying the regulators who oversaw them. The legal fight is hugely consequential, and could ultimately limit the powers of federal agencies.The case challenges the power of administrative law. Courts today must defer to the hundreds of agencies that interpret a mountain of federal rules in regulating industry. Critics say this doctrine — known as Chevron deference — handcuffs judges, robbing them of the power to review and reverse agency actions.Lawyers for the fishermen are expected to argue that the principle should be overruled, or at least simplified. The arguments won’t fall on deaf ears. Justice Neil Gorsuch has written that the Chevron deference doctrine “deserves a tombstone.”The death of the principle could hobble regulators because their decisions could be overturned in court. Such a prospect is key to conservatives seeking a weaker administrative state. Court records show that the fishermen’s lawyers have links to Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by the petrochemicals billionaire Charles Koch, The Times’s Hiroko Tabuchi reports. Koch, the chairman of Koch Industries, is a longtime supporter of anti-regulatory causes.This case is part of a larger conservative campaign. A 2022 Supreme Court decision that constrained the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority on emissions regulation bolstered right-leaning activists. That case has helped opened the door to further legal challenges to regulators’ powers, including one this term involving the S.E.C.What to watch for in 2024 The Atlantic Council, an international affairs research organization, gave DealBook a first look at its annual list of the top risks, opportunities and under-the-radar phenomena to watch this year.Geopolitical conflict is a big focus. There is a “medium to high” probability that the Israel-Hamas war widens, according to the analysis, and that is underscored by intensifying U.S.-led strikes on Iran-backed Houthi rebels who are attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea corridor.Other hot spots include Ukraine and Taiwan. The West could pull back funding for Ukraine, the report’s authors write, making a Russian victory more likely. Meanwhile, China could choke off Taiwanese ports with a naval blockade rather than risking an invasion of the self-governed island nation.“Smartifacts” may be an opportunity. Cars, appliances and personal electronics will increasingly be equipped with artificial intelligence to better interact with the physical world, the analysts write. They predict that “2024 will be the year when A.I. goes mainstream, and not just on our screens,” potentially yielding an “entirely new class of devices.”Could white paint be an under-the-radar opportunity? The Atlantic Council also compiles an annual list of underappreciated risks and opportunities that it calls “snow leopards,” named for the well-camouflaged mountain cats.This year, the list includes super reflective white paint that can help reduce emissions and reliance on energy by reflecting 98 percent of the sun’s rays. “It’s one of those things that seems pretty simple, but it could have an outsize impact,” said Imran Bayoumi, an associate director at the organization.THE SPEED READ DealsUber is shutting Drizly, the alcohol-delivery business it bought in 2021 for $1.1 billion. (WSJ)Investors are raising billions to buy discounted stakes in venture capital-backed tech start-ups. (FT)Synopsys, a supplier to the chips sector, has agreed to buy Ansys, a software firm, for $35 billion. (NYT)PolicyThe Supreme Court denied a request to hear an antitrust case between Epic Games and Apple, leaving a lower-court ruling that was seen as a win for Apple in place. (Axios)Congressional leaders agreed a $78 billion deal to expand the child tax credit and other popular expired business tax breaks. (NYT)Best of the restHarvard is trying to smooth relations with Silicon Valley after turmoil over antisemitism on campus. (WSJ)“Airbus Is Pulling Ahead as Boeing’s Troubles Mount” (NYT)Hockey die-hards are building snazzy new rinks in their backyards. (WSJ)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      ¿Quién es Lai Ching-te, el próximo presidente de Taiwán?

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      Lai tiene la reputación de ser un político hábil y trabajador que empatiza con las necesidades de la gente común y corriente en Taiwán.En 2014, cuando era una estrella política en ascenso en Taiwán, Lai Ching-te visitó China y fue interrogado en público sobre el tema más incendiario para los líderes en Pekín: la postura de su partido sobre la independencia de la isla.Las personas que lo conocen afirman que su respuesta, cortés pero firme, fue característica del hombre que fue elegido presidente el sábado y que liderará Taiwán durante los próximos cuatro años.Lai se dirigía a profesores de la prestigiosa Universidad de Fudan en Shanghái, un público cuyos miembros, como muchos chinos continentales, creían casi con toda certeza que la isla de Taiwán le pertenecía a China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Weather in Iowa Is Not the Only Thing That Is Bitterly Cold

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, we are conversing on the eve of the Iowa caucuses — not yet knowing who came in second, but not in much doubt about who’ll come in first. I’m trying to remember the last time the Republican winner went on to win the nomination: Ted Cruz in 2016? Rick Santorum in 2012? Mike Huckabee in 2008?Losers all. Assuming Donald Trump wins, that might even be a good omen.Gail Collins: And remember, Trump won Iowa in 2020, when he was an incumbent president looking for a second term; that didn’t turn out all that well for him, either.Bret: Not that I’m rooting for him to win in Iowa. Or anywhere else for that matter.Gail: I like the way we’re starting out! Now tell me how you think the other Republicans are doing. Especially your fave, Nikki Haley.Bret: Her zinger in the debate with Ron DeSantis — “You’re so desperate, you’re just so desperate” — could be turned into a country music hit by Miranda Lambert. Or maybe Carly Simon: You’re so desperate, you probably think this race is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you?Gail: Hehehehehe.Bret: I just fear that, in the battle between Haley and DeSantis, they’re canceling each other out, like matter and antimatter. As our colleague Frank Bruni pointed out in his terrific column last week, that just clears the path for The Donald.Gail: Whenever a candidate boasts, like DeSantis, that he’s visited all 99 counties in Iowa, you hear a shriek of desperation mixed in with the bragging. But I’m not gonna totally give up hope for Haley until we see what happens in New Hampshire.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Taiwan Loses Ally Nauru After Electing President Beijing Loathes

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      The tiny Pacific island of Nauru severed relations with Taiwan, a move that boosts China’s regional sway and was seemingly timed to Taiwan’s contentious recent election.Just two days after Taiwan elected as its next leader Lai Ching-te, whom Beijing sees as a staunch separatist, it lost a diplomatic ally in its rivalry with China. Nauru, a tiny freckle of land in the Pacific Ocean, announced that it would be severing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, effective immediately.The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it welcomed the decision by Nauru and is ready to establish relations with it. Taiwan’s foreign ministry indicated that it had no doubt that Beijing had orchestrated the Pacific island’s shift, stating that “China has been actively courting Nauru’s political leaders for a long time, and using economic inducements to bring about a change of direction in the country’s diplomacy.”A Taiwanese deputy foreign minister, Tien Chung-kwang, told a briefing in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, that China had orchestrated Nauru’s severing of relations to happen in the immediate wake of Taiwan’s election on the weekend.“The intent is to strike a blow against the democracy and freedom of which the Taiwanese people are so proud,” Mr. Tien said. He said Taiwan had pre-emptively severed relations with Nauru after learning of its impending shift in loyalties.Such moves from Beijing have been widely expected in Taiwan in the wake of the victory for Mr. Lai, whose Democratic Progressive Party has campaigned on policies to distance the self-governing island democracy from China. Beijing claims Taiwan is its territory, and Chinese officials harbor a particular dislike for Mr. Lai, whom they call a pro-independence threat. Mr. Lai has said he wants to protect Taiwan’s current status as a de facto independent democracy.Nauru is the latest small nations to abruptly break relations with Taiwan, joining such countries as Honduras and Nicaragua in switching diplomatic allegiance to China. And it is one of a growing number of Pacific island nations that China has aggressively courted in its bid to dominate the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Who Is Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s Next President?

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      A former doctor with a humble background, Mr. Lai is seen as more attuned to the mood of Taiwan’s people than to the perilous nuances of dealing with Beijing.In 2014, when Lai Ching-te was a rising political star in Taiwan, he visited China and was quizzed in public about the most incendiary issue for leaders in Beijing: his party’s stance on the island’s independence.His polite but firm response, people who know him say, was characteristic of the man who was on Saturday elected president and is now set to lead Taiwan for the next four years.Mr. Lai was addressing professors at the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, an audience whose members, like many mainland Chinese, almost certainly believed that the island of Taiwan belongs to China.Mr. Lai said that while his Democratic Progressive Party had historically argued for Taiwan’s independence — a position that China opposes — the party also believed that any change in the island’s status had to be decided by all its people. His party was merely reflecting, not dictating, opinion, he said. The party’s position “had been arrived at through a consensus in Taiwanese society,” Mr. Lai said.To both his supporters and his opponents, the episode revealed Mr. Lai’s blunt, sometimes indignant sense of conviction, a key quality of this doctor-turned-politician who will take office in May, succeeding President Tsai Ing-wen.“He makes clear-cut distinctions between good and evil,” said Pan Hsin-chuan, a Democratic Progressive Party official in Tainan, the southern city where Mr. Lai was mayor at the time of his 2014 visit to Fudan University. “He insists that right is right, and wrong is wrong.”The son of a coal miner, Mr. Lai, 64, has a reputation for being a skilled, hard-working politician who sees his humble background as attuning him to the needs of ordinary people in Taiwan. When it comes to navigating the hazardous nuances of dealing with Beijing, however, he may be less adept.Supporters of Mr. Lai at a campaign event in Taipei on Saturday.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesMr. Lai may have to watch his tendency for occasional off-the-cuff remarks, which Beijing could exploit and turn into crises.“I don’t think that Lai is actually going to pursue de jure independence,” said David Sacks, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies Taiwan. “But what I do worry about is that Lai doesn’t have that much experience in foreign policy and cross-strait relations — which is incredibly complex — and he is prone to a slip of the tongue, that Beijing pounces on.”In interviews with those who know Mr. Lai, “stubborn” or “firm” are words often used to describe him. But as Taiwan’s president, Mr. Lai may have to show some flexibility as he deals with a legislature that is dominated by opposition parties that have vowed to scrutinize his policies.As the leader taking the Democratic Progressive Party into power for a third term, Mr. Lai would have to be very attentive to the public mood in Taiwan, Wang Ting-yu, an influential lawmaker from the Democratic Progressive Party, said an interview before the election.“How to keep the trust of the people, how to keep politics clean and above board: that’s what a mature political party has to face up to,” Mr. Wang said. “You must always keep in mind that the public won’t allow much room for mistakes.”During the election campaign, one of Mr. Lai’s most successful ads showed him and President Tsai on a country drive together, chatting amicably about their time working together. The message made clear when Ms. Tsai handed over the car keys to Mr. Lai, who has been her vice president since 2020, was that there would be reassuring continuity if he won.Whatever continuity may unite the two in policy, Ms. Tsai and Mr. Lai are quite different leaders with very different backgrounds. President Tsai, who has led Taiwan for eight years, remains liked and respected by many. But she also governed with a kind of technocratic reserve, rarely giving news conferences.Ms. Tsai rose as an official negotiating trade deals and crafting policy toward China. Mr. Lai’s background as a city mayor, by contrast, has made him more sensitive to problems like rising housing costs and a shortage of job opportunities, his supporters say.“Lai Ching-te has come all the way from the grass roots — as a congress delegate, legislator, mayor, premier — climbing up step by step,” said Tseng Chun-jen, a longtime activist for the D.P.P. in Tainan. “He’s suffered through cold and poverty, so he understands very well the hardships that we people went through at the grass roots in those times.”Ms. Tsai and Mr. Lai have not always been allies. Ms. Tsai brought the D.P.P. back to power in 2016 after it had earlier suffered a devastating loss at the polls. Mr. Lai was her premier — until he quit after poor election results and boldly challenged her in a primary before the 2020 election.Mr. Lai, left, with President Tsai Ing-wen, center, at a rally in Taipei this month.Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times“Tsai Ing-wen joined the D.P.P. as an outsider, when the D.P.P. needed an outsider,” said Jou Yi-cheng, a former senior official with the party who got to know Mr. Lai when he was starting out in politics. “But Lai Ching-te is different. He’s grown up within the D.P.P.”Mr. Lai spent his early years in Wanli, a northern Taiwanese township. His father died from carbon monoxide poisoning while down a mine when Mr. Lai was a baby, leaving Mr. Lai’s mother to raise six children herself.In his campaigning, Mr. Lai has cited the hardships of his past as part of his political makeup.He said in a video that his family used to live at a miner’s lodge in the township, which would leak when it rained, prompting them to cover the roof with lead sheets — which were not always reliable. “When a typhoon came, the things covering the roof would be blown away,” he said. Mr. Lai kept at his studies and went to medical school. After doing military service, he worked as a doctor in Tainan. It was a time when Taiwan was throwing off decades of authoritarian rule under the Nationalist Party, whose leaders had fled to the island from China after defeat by Mao Zedong and his Communist forces.Mr. Lai joined what was at the time a scrappy new opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, and he later recalled that his mother was disappointed when he decided to set aside medicine to go into politics full time.“He got his mother’s reluctant support,” wrote Yuhkow Chou, a Taiwanese journalist, in her recent biography of Mr. Lai. When he first decided to run for a seat in the National Assembly in 1996, Ms. Chou wrote, Mr. Lai’s mother told her son, “If you fail to get elected, go back to being a doctor.”However, Mr. Lai turned out to be a gifted politician. He rose quickly, helped by his appetite for hard work as well as his youthful good looks and eloquence as a speaker, especially in Taiwanese, the first language of many of the island’s people, especially in southern areas like Tainan, said Mr. Jou, the former party official.Voters lining up in Taipei on Saturday.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesMr. Lai became a member of Taiwan’s legislature and then, in 2010, the mayor of Tainan. Later he served as premier and vice president to Ms. Tsai. Along the way, he revealed a combative streak that gave his critics ammunition, but also won him fans in his party.D.P.P. supporters cite a clip of him in 2005, lashing out at opposing Nationalist Party members in the legislature for blocking a budget proposal to buy U.S. submarines, jets and missiles. “The country has been destroyed by you!” he said, cursing at one point. “You guys have blocked everything.”As premier in 2017, Mr. Lai made the comment most often cited by his critics. Facing questions from Taiwanese lawmakers, Mr. Lai described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence.”At the time, China’s government office for Taiwan affairs condemned the comment; ever since, Beijing and Mr. Lai’s Taiwanese critics have held it up as proof of his reckless pursuit of independence. But Mr. Lai’s words were in line with his party’s broader effort to rein in tensions over the issue of Taiwan’s status by arguing that the island had already achieved practical independence, because it was a self-ruled democracy.Still, Mr. Lai will be under great pressure to avoid such remarks as president. China has grown stronger militarily and, under Xi Jinping, increasingly willing to use that force to pressure Taiwan. In his election night victory speech, Mr. Lai emphasized his hope of opening dialogue with Beijing.“He kept it vague and, to my ear, he didn’t say any of the phrases that Beijing finds intolerable,” said Kharis Templeman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who studies Taiwan and monitored the election. “He gave himself a fighting chance to avoid, or at least delay, the harshest reaction from Beijing.” More