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    Gaza War Strains Europe’s Efforts at Social Cohesion

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    Institutions meant to promote civility, from soccer to song, have come under severe stress from rising antisemitism and anti-immigrant politics.The various institutions of postwar Europe were intended to keep the peace, bring warring peoples together and build a sense of continental attachment and even loyalty. From the growth of the European Union itself to other, softer organizations, dealing with culture or sports, the hope has always been to keep national passions within safe, larger limits.But growing antisemitism, increased migration and more extremist, anti-immigrant parties have led to backlash and divisions rather than comity. The long war in Gaza has only exacerbated these conflicts and their intensity, especially among young Muslims and others who feel outraged by Israeli bombings and by the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, a large proportion of them women and children.Those tensions were on full display in the recent violence surrounding a soccer match between an Israeli and a Dutch team in Amsterdam, where the authorities are investigating what they call antisemitic attacks on Israeli fans, as well as incendiary actions by both sides. Amsterdam is far from the only example of the divisions in Europe over the Gaza war and of the challenges they present to European governments.The normally amusing Eurovision Song Contest, which was held this year in Malmo, Sweden, a city with a significant Muslim population, was marred by pro-Palestinian protests against Eden Golan, a contestant from Israel, which participates as a full member.The original lyrics to her song, “October Rain,” in commemoration of the 1,200 Israelis who died from the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, which prompted Israel’s response in Gaza, were rejected by organizers for their political nature, so were altered to be less specific. Her performance was met with booing and jeering from some in the audience, but she did receive a wave of votes from online spectators, pushing her to fifth place.It was hardly the demonstration of togetherness in art and silliness that organizers have always intended.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Norway Apologizes for Forced Assimilation of Sami and Other Minorities

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      A policy of “Norwegianization” silenced the languages of Indigenous people and forced their children into boarding schools. The long-awaited apology avoided the issue of land rights.For more than a century, Norway forcibly suppressed the language and culture of Indigenous people and other minority groups, including removing children from their parents, in a system of “Norwegianization” whose devastation continues to be felt.This week, the country’s Parliament issued a formal apology to the Sami, Kven and Forest Finn peoples, and outlined 17 resolutions to address the discrimination they still face, including protecting minority languages and ensuring that children are taught those languages.The move, which Parliament approved on Tuesday, was welcomed by Silje Karine Muotka, a Sami leader, who described the moment as “a day with many emotions.” But she also said it needed to be followed up with concrete and significant action.“Going forward, we expect an active policy of reconciliation,” she said in a written statement. “The decision from today ensures long-term follow-up, and it has both financial and legal repercussions. But unfortunately, no settlement is made with ongoing injustice and conflicts over land and water.”Norway has some legislation on the Samis’ right to grazing land, but the Sami have long been at odds with the government over land use in relation to their culture and way of life.The apology and resolutions stem from a report by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published last year, that outlines how Norway could begin to reckon with its oppressive past. King Harald V has previously apologized to the Sami people, but this is the first time that the Kvens and Forest Finns have received such a public acknowledgment of the harm they endured.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      There Were Two Huge Problems Harris Could Not Escape

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      Sarah Isgur, a longtime Republican campaign operative — and my friend and a senior editor at The Dispatch — has a brilliant sports analogy for the process of campaigning. She compares it to … curling.For those unfamiliar with the sport (which enjoys 15 minutes of fame every Winter Olympics), it involves sliding a very large, heavy “rock” toward a target on the ice. One person “throws” a 44-pound disc-shaped stone by sliding it along the ice, sweepers come in and frantically try to marginally change the speed and direction of the rock by brushing the ice with “brooms” that can melt just enough of the ice to make the rock travel farther or perhaps a little bit straighter.The sweepers are important, no doubt, but they cannot control the rock enough to save a bad throw. It’s a matter of physics. The rock simply has too much momentum.What does this have to do with politics? As Isgur writes, “The underlying dynamics of an election cycle (the economy, the popularity of the president, national events driving the news cycle) are like the 44-pound ‘stone.’ ” The candidates and the campaign team are the sweepers. They work frantically — and they can influence the stone — but they don’t control it.One of the frustrating elements of political commentary is that we spend far too much time talking about the sweeping and far too little time talking about the stone. Political hobbyists in particular (and that includes journalists!) are very interested in ad campaigns, ground games and messaging.Those things do matter, but when facing an election defeat this comprehensive, you know it was the stone that made the difference.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Need Working-Class Voters. Maybe Now They’ll Act Like It.

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      The other day I was supposed to visit a friend who had been released from prison. He had to cancel to rescue his sister, who is using drugs again.Another old friend needed a ride: It turned out that his car had broken down again, and until his next paycheck came, he couldn’t afford a $2 bolt to fix it.I think of friends like these here in rural Oregon, in an area that mostly supports Donald Trump, when people ask me why America’s working class rejected the Democrats on Tuesday. My neighbors, struggling to pay the rent and buying gas five dollars at a time, often perceive national Democrats as remote elites more eager to find them pronouns than housing. Election postmortems have been dissecting Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but the challenge for Democrats goes far beyond any of that.For several decades, voters have identified more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. But in some polls this year, more people have affiliated with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party. Looking ahead at the specific Senate seats that will be in contention in 2026 and 2028, it’s not easy to see when the Democrats will have a chance to recover the chamber.I see the disenchantment with Democrats in my hometown, Yamhill, which traditionally was dependent on timber, agriculture and light manufacturing. But then good union jobs left, meth arrived and everything changed. Today more than a third of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus are dead from drugs, alcohol, suicide and reckless accidents.Here’s an astonishing statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics data: Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are now in 2024. So today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents were 52 years ago.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ¿Por qué a Trump le va tan bien con los votantes negros e hispanos?

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      Cinco posibles explicaciones sobre el aumento de apoyo al expresidente, sobre todo entre los hombres jóvenes.Un acto de Trump en el Bronx en mayo mostró el apoyo de negros y latinos.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesEn 2016, Donald Trump se convirtió en el candidato republicano y finalmente ganó la presidencia tras llamar violadores a muchos inmigrantes mexicanos y afirmar falsamente que Barack Obama no había nacido en Estados Unidos.Ocho años después, las encuestas sugieren que bien podría volver a la Casa Blanca al obtener mejores resultados entre los votantes negros e hispanos combinados que cualquier candidato presidencial republicano desde la promulgación de la Ley de Derechos Civiles en 1964.¿Cómo es posible? Es una pregunta que me hacen a menudo, y las últimas encuestas del New York Times/Siena College entre votantes negros e hispanos de todo el país representan nuestro mejor esfuerzo por responderla.Al igual que nuestras otras encuestas de este ciclo, los sondeos revelan que a Trump le va inusualmente bien para un republicano entre los votantes negros e hispanos. En general, Kamala Harris va a la cabeza, 78 por ciento a 15 por ciento, entre los votantes negros, y va a la cabeza, 56-37, entre los votantes hispanos.Casi de cualquier manera que podamos medirlo, Trump está funcionando tan bien o mejor entre los votantes negros e hispanos que cualquier republicano en la memoria reciente. En 2020, el apoyo de las personas negras a Joe Biden era del 92 por ciento entre los votantes de los principales partidos; su apoyo hispano era del 63 por ciento, según cálculos del Times.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harvard’s Black Student Enrollment Declines After Affirmative Action

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      Defying expectations, a Supreme Court decision curtailing race-based admissions still had a relatively small impact at some highly selective schools like Harvard, even as other schools saw big changes.The predictions were dire. In the course of a bitterly contested trial six years ago, Harvard University said that if it were forced to stop considering race in admissions, the diversity of its undergraduate classes would be badly compromised.Now, a year after the Supreme Court struck down the school’s admissions system, effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions everywhere, the numbers are in for the first class to be admitted, and the picture is more nuanced and complex than predicted.The proportion of Black first-year students enrolled at Harvard this fall has declined to 14 percent from 18 percent last year, according to data released by the institution on Wednesday — a dip smaller than the school had predicted, but still significant.Asian American representation in the class of 1,647 students remained the same as last year, at 37 percent. Hispanic enrollment has gone up, to 16 percent from 14 percent. Harvard did not report the share of white students in the class, consistent with past practice, and it is hard to make inferences because the percentage of students not disclosing race or ethnicity on their applications doubled to 8 percent this year from 4 percent last year.The post-affirmative-action demographic breakdowns have been trickling out over the last three weeks, and overall Black students appear to have been most affected. The percentages of Black students declined sharply at some elite schools, although surprisingly, they held steady at others. The suit against Harvard had accused it of discriminating against Asian Americans to depress their numbers, while giving preferences to members of other minority groups. Admissions experts suggested even before the new numbers came out that the most coveted schools, like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, would be best positioned to maintain their Black enrollment because the students who were admitted to them were very likely to accept. So in that view, they are unicorns, part of a highly selective ring of schools that scooped up the top students and remained relatively unaffected by the ban on race-conscious admissions.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Time to Say Goodbye to the B.M.I.?

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      The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.Move over, body mass index. Make room for roundness — to be precise, the body roundness index.The body mass index, or B.M.I., is a ratio of height to weight that has long been used as a medical screening tool. It is one of the most widely used health metrics but also one of the most reviled, because it is used to label people overweight, obese or extremely obese.The classifications have been questioned by athletes like the American Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher, whose B.M.I. of 30 technically puts her on the cusp of obesity. “But alas,” she said on Instagram, addressing online trolls who tried to shame her about her weight, “I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not.”Advocates for overweight individuals and people of color note that the formula was developed nearly 200 years ago and based exclusively on data from men, most of them white, and that it was never intended for medical screening. Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.“But as soon as you measured his waist, you’d see, ‘Oh, it’s 32 inches.’”So welcome a new metric: the body roundness index. B.R.I. is just what it sounds like — a measure of how round or circlelike you are, using a formula that takes into account height and waist, but not weight.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Kamala Harris Is Already Changing the Face of Presidential Power

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      I have not been the biggest fan of Kamala Harris, but to my surprise, the candidate who underwhelmed in 2020 is gone. I have watched all of candidate Harris’s public appearances since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for a sense of how she intends to run and possibly govern. The audiences have been vastly different, among them: the annual conclave of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, a National Federation of Teachers convention and the Philadelphia rally where the Harris-Walz ticket made its first official appearance.What I took away: Kamala Harris is a different candidate than we saw four years ago. She is even a different rhetorician than we saw six months ago.Nominee Harris lands her applause lines. The former prosecutor is comfortable going on the attack. Her most consistent message is that Donald Trump wants to send America back to the Dark Ages. Unlike her predecessor, she relishes calling Trump out by name. Even her wacky humor, which has been mocked on social media, suddenly works. She sounds authentic. That’s the holy grail of electoral politics. Every wide-jawed cackle she offers the audience, every twinkle in her eye as she pokes at Trump — it all comes off as someone who is in on the joke. That is hard for any candidate but it is an almost impossible tightrope for a Black female candidate to walk.Authenticity is a mirage. Americans crave the performance of authenticity as a sign that our values are in safe hands — hands just like ours. Of course, people who study this stuff for a living don’t quite agree on what authenticity is. It’s a “you know it when you see it” situation. Political candidates have to negotiate ideas about identity with an audience’s expectations of who should be in power. A tall white guy with a healthy head of hair simply looks presidential.That’s where gender tripped up Hillary Clinton, the first, most viable female candidate for president. Americans were used to looking at her — as first lady, as a congresswoman, as secretary of state and as a national obsession. But for many reasons, a lot of voters (although not a majority of voters) did not think she was authentic enough to be president. She never figured out how to communicate presidential power during her campaign. She couldn’t make the idea of a president look like a woman.Kamala Harris has an even more difficult task: She has to make the presidency look like a Black woman.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Appeals Court Further Narrows Voting Rights Act’s Scope

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      Reversing decades of precedent, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in a Texas case that different minority groups cannot jointly claim that their votes have been diluted.A federal appeals court further narrowed the scope of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ruling that members of separate minority groups cannot join together to claim that a political map has been drawn to dilute their voting power.The 12-to-6 ruling on Thursday by the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned almost four decades of legal precedent, as well as an earlier ruling by a three-judge panel of the same appeals court. It applies only in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the three states where the court has jurisdiction, but the decision has national implications and may be appealed to the Supreme Court.The case involved districts for county commissioners in Galveston County, Texas, a community of about 350,000 people, where the last round of redistricting redrew a district in which Black and Hispanic voters together made up a majority of voters. The redrawn boundaries reduced their combined share of the district’s electorate to 38 percent, and a lawsuit claimed that doing so violated Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits drawing maps that dilute minority voting power.A lower court and the three-judge appellate panel both ruled that the new map was a clear violation of the law. But the full Fifth Circuit disagreed, saying that the law does not explicitly allow voters from more than one minority group to “combine forces” to claim their votes were diluted.The 12 judges in the majority were all appointed by Republican presidents. Five of the six dissenters were named by Democratic presidents. More