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      Recount Confirms Democrat’s Victory in Arizona’s Attorney General Race

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      Kris Mayes defeated Abraham Hamadeh, a Republican election denier, by 280 votes out of 2.5 million ballots cast, a court announced.Kris Mayes, the Democratic candidate for attorney general in Arizona, prevailed on Thursday in a recount by a razor-thin margin over Abraham Hamadeh, a Republican, bringing clarity to one of the last undecided races of the midterms.The margin of victory for Ms. Mayes was 280 votes out of about 2.5 million ballots cast in the November election, said Judge Timothy J. Thomason of the Maricopa County Superior Court, who announced the recount’s results in a brief judicial hearing. The recount reduced the margin between the two candidates by about half, with the Election Day results showing Mr. Hamadeh trailing Ms. Mayes by 511 votes.Mr. Hamadeh, whose legal effort to have himself declared the winner was dismissed by a judge on Friday, continued to sow doubt in the election results, saying in a post on Twitter that “we must get to the bottom of this election” and calling for ballots to be inspected.But during closing arguments in last week’s trial, Mr. Hamadeh’s lawyer, Timothy La Sota, acknowledged that he did not have any evidence of intentional misconduct or any vote discrepancies that would make up the gap between the candidates.On Thursday, Ms. Mayes shared a photo of her certificate of election on Twitter and issued a statement about the recount results, saying that “democracy is truly a team sport” and that she was ready to get to work as attorney general.The recount was conducted by county election officials, who reported their results to the secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. She won the governor’s race last month against the Kari Lake, a Republican election denier who continues to dispute her defeat.The outcome of the attorney general’s contest dealt another blow to Republicans in a state where the party entered the midterms with heightened expectations of creating a red wave by seizing on high inflation and the flagging job approval numbers of President Biden.That perceived advantage turned out to be a mirage, with Democrats winning most of the marquee statewide offices.Election deniers pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims. Mr. Hamadeh and Ms. Lake contended that the election had been compromised.But election officials in Maricopa County, which is led by Republicans, have defended the voting process and said that there was no evidence that voters were turned away from casting ballots.Alexandra Berzon More

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      George Santos Is In a Class of His Own. But Other Politicians Have Embellished Their Resumes, Too.

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More

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      The Sad Tales of George Santos

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      What would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one?Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes — and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. But for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.A reasonably accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative is one of the most important things a person can have. If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.George Santos, on the other hand, is a young man who apparently felt compelled to jettison much of his actual life and replace it with fantasy. As Grace Ashford and Michael Gold of The Times have been reporting, in his successful run for Congress this year he claimed he had a college degree that he does not have. He claimed he held jobs that he did not hold. He claimed he owned properties he apparently does not own. He claims he never committed check fraud, though The Times unearthed court records suggesting he did. He claims he never described himself as Jewish, merely as adjacently “Jew-ish.” A self-described gay man, he hid a yearslong heterosexual marriage that ended in 2019.All politicians — perhaps all human beings — embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble.I can’t feel much anger toward Santos for his deceptiveness, just a bit of sorrow. Cutting yourself off to that degree from the bedrock of the truth renders your whole life unstable. Santos made his own past unreliable, perpetually up for grabs. But when you do that you also eliminate any coherent vision of your future. People may wonder how Santos could have been so dumb. In political life, his fabrications were bound to be discovered. Perhaps it’s because dissemblers often have trouble anticipating the future; they’re stuck in the right now.In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived — estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary — in what is now Santos’s district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.This week Santos tried to do a bit of damage control in a series of interviews, including with WABC radio in New York. The whole conversation had an air of unreality. Santos was rambling, evasive and haphazard, readjusting his stories in a vague, fluid way. The host, John Catsimatidis, wasn’t questioning him the way a journalist might. He was practically coaching Santos on what to say. The troubling question of personal integrity was not on anybody’s radar screen. And then the conversation reached a Tom Wolfe-ian crescendo when former Congressman Anthony Weiner suddenly appeared — and turned out to be the only semi-competent interviewer in the room.Karl Marx famously said that under the influence of capitalism, all that’s solid melts into air. I wonder if some elixir of Trumpian influence and online modernity can have the same effect on individual personalities.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Race for G.O.P. Chair Obscures the Party’s Bigger Problems

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      Ronna McDaniel’s quest for a fourth term atop the Republican National Committee has triggered an ugly intraparty fight between the right and the farther right. Figuring out how to win back swing voters is not a top priority.Since former President Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory in 2016, the Republican Party has suffered at the ballot box every two years, from the loss of the House in 2018 to the loss of the White House and Senate in 2020 to this year’s history-defying midterm disappointments.Many in the party have now found a scapegoat for the G.O.P.’s struggles who is not named Trump: the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel.But as Ms. McDaniel struggles for a fourth term at the party’s helm, her re-election fight before the clubby 168 members of the Republican National Committee next month may be diverting G.O.P. leaders from any serious consideration of the thornier problems facing the party heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.Ms. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump in late 2016 to run the party and whom he enlisted in a scheme to draft fake electors to perpetuate his presidency, could be considered a Trump proxy by Republicans eager to begin to eradicate what many consider to be the party’s pre-eminent problem: the former president’s influence over the G.O.P.Those Republicans, whose voices have grown louder in the wake of the party’s weak November showing, see any hopes of wooing swing voters and moderates back to the G.O.P. as imperiled by Mr. Trump’s endless harping on his own grievances, the taint surrounding his efforts to remain in power after his 2020 defeat, and the continuing dramas around purloined classified documents, his company’s tax fraud conviction and his insistence on trying to make a political comeback.But Ms. McDaniels is not facing moderation-minded challengers. Her rivals are from the Trumpist right. They include the pillow salesman Mike Lindell, who continues to spin out fanciful election conspiracies, and — more worrying for Ms. McDaniel — a Trump loyalist from California, Harmeet Dhillon, who is backed by some of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a youthful group of pro-Trump rightists.Ms. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump in late 2016 to chair the party, is running for a fourth term.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMs. McDaniel has accused Ms. Dhillon, who was co-chair of the election denying group Lawyers for Trump in 2020, of conducting “a scorched-earth campaign” against her by rallying outside activists “to put maximum pressure on the R.N.C. members” who will choose the party leader for the next two years in late January in Dana Point, Calif.“It’s been a very vitriolic campaign,” Ms. McDaniel said in an interview, adding: “I’m all for scorched earth against Democrats. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do against other Republicans.”The candidacy of Mr. Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who exemplifies the conspiracy-driven fringe, has put still more right-wing pressure on Ms. McDaniel, who refuses to say Joseph R. Biden Jr. was fairly elected in 2020. (Mr. Lindell’s latest conspiracy theory is that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s biggest rival so far for the 2024 presidential nomination, unfairly won re-election in November.)The circus brewing ahead of the R.N.C.’s Jan. 25 gathering does not bode well for members who believe the party’s troubles stem from Mr. Trump.“The former president has done so much damage to this country and to this party,” said Bill Palatucci, a committee member from New Jersey, who described the R.N.C. chair election as shaping up to be “a Hobson’s choice.”“We have to acknowledge that 2022 was a disaster, and we need to do things differently,” he said, adding, “I would prefer and still hope there would be a different option.”The R.N.C. has undertaken what it says is a serious analysis of the 2022 results, led by Henry Barbour of Mississippi, the nephew of the state’s former governor, Haley Barbour, and a co-author of the so-called autopsy that the party ordered up after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. That report counseled a more inclusive attitude toward voters of color and moderate swing voters, and a more open stand on overhauling immigration laws — the opposite tack taken by the party during the Trump era.The 2022 review committee includes Jane Brady, a former attorney general of Delaware, and Kim Borchers, a committee member from Kansas, but it is also being co-chaired by Ms. Dhillon, who, at least for now, has spent the past weeks rallying the hard right, not courting the center.Ms. Dhillon, in an interview, suggested replacing Ms. McDaniel was a prerequisite for change.“There may be many reasons for the various losses over the last several years, but what they all have in common is that they occurred under the current leadership, which has promised to change exactly nothing in the next two years,” she said. “The most unifying thing that Ronna could do would be to move on to new challenges, and allow us to unite around a vision that includes much-needed reforms, improvements, and investments in a winning future.”Ms. Dhillon has rallied the hard right rather than court the center.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesAnd the forces gathering against Ms. McDaniel are multiplying. The Republican Party of Florida scheduled a no-confidence vote on Ms. McDaniel in the second half of January. The chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party withdrew his support of Ms. McDaniel, citing an “ever growing divide” among both R.N.C. members and “now, even more so, Republicans across the nation.” The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party unanimously passed a nonbinding vote of no-confidence in Ms. McDaniel, and the Arizona G.O.P. publicly called on her to resign. Still, the Republican National Committee chair’s race is the ultimate inside game; only members get a vote. And Michael Kuckelman, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and an R.N.C. member, said he still thinks Ms. McDaniel will easily win another term.Ms. Dhillon’s pressure campaign is likely bolstering Ms. McDaniel’s support among committee members she has befriended over the past six years, he said, and potentially damaging Ms. Dhillon’s chances of leading the party in the future. Around two-thirds of the committee’s members have already said they will back Ms. McDaniel’s re-election.Ms. McDaniel with Mehmet Oz, who lost the Senate race in Pennsylvania to Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat.Laurence Kesterson/Associated PressMr. Kuckelman also said Ms. McDaniel was being unfairly blamed for losses in key Senate and House contests. “Everybody needs to bring the temperature down a little bit,” he said. “Ronna McDaniel does not pick candidates. Republicans do that in the primaries. Her job is to get the vote out, and she does get the vote out.”Moreover, Ms. Dillon’s tactics have antagonized some committee members.At Turning Point USA’s conference last week in Phoenix — where recriminations and sniping at fellow Republicans seemed to be a theme — Ms. Dhillon appeared on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” show and took her own shots at the committee she seeks to lead.“Consultants are running the building at the R.N.C.,” she told Mr. Bannon before a cheering crowd. “Those consultants get paid whether we win or lose.”Her accusations are rankling her colleagues. On an internal committee listserv, Jeff Kent, a committee member from Washington, wrote that Ms. Dhillon “does not have the right to go on national television and defame the character of the R.N.C. members who have chosen not to support her.”Audience members at a conference in Phoenix hosted by Turning Point USA. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThe Turning Point conference concluded with a straw poll in which only 2 percent of the 1,150 conference attendees chose Ms. McDaniel as their preferred party chairwoman going forward. Mr. Kirk then emailed all 168 voting members of the committee to tell them the group would challenge any member who did not heed the call of the party’s activists.Given the circumstances, Mr. Palatucci said Ms. McDaniel remains favored for re-election, but anything could happen over the next month.“A lot of her support is soft, and some could be convinced to vote for somebody else,” he said. “R.N.C. members are very experienced politicians. They’re experts at looking you in the eye and saying, ‘I love you,’ and in a secret ballot slitting your throat.”All of this fighting is over a position whose salary topped $358,000 in 2022 but whose responsibilities are tangential to midterm elections at best.In the interview, Ms. McDaniel boasted of investments the party has made — in community centers to engage voters of color, especially Latinos; in voter registration drives; and in get-out-the-vote efforts. She cited a New York Times analysis that showed that Republican voter turnout in November was robust. The problem: Many of those Republicans appeared to vote for Democrats.“We don’t pick the candidate,” she said. “We do not do the messaging for the candidates, right? They pick consultants, and their own pollsters. So what does the R.N.C. do? We build the infrastructure. We do the voter registration.”The committee’s role becomes more pivotal during the presidential campaign, raising money for the party’s nominee and staging the convention, which is set for mid-July 2024 in Milwaukee. It will also try to unify the party during what may be an exceptionally contentious primary season.Party chairs usually take a back seat to the president, who commonly calls the shots from the White House. And Ms. McDaniel said she had really only begun to put her imprimatur on the R.N.C. since Mr. Trump left the White House. “These last few years, in my mind, have been the first few years I’ve been able to really innovate,” she said.She cited efforts like those on Republican community centers, voter registration and legal actions around voting as important to continue. “We have to keep that going heading into a presidential year,” she said. “After that, I will happily step aside.”But Ms. McDaniel’s keep-it-going attitude may be her biggest liability. Some committee members who do not like Ms. Dhillon’s tactics or solutions nevertheless worry about the current chairwoman’s insistence that all is well.“We need a leadership change; the bottom line is the status quo is unacceptable,” Mr. Palatucci said. “This election is a month and a half away. A lot can happen. I’m expecting some movement. And certainly the storm that Harmeet is instigating is causing a very good debate within the committee, and that’s worth having.” More

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      The Pocket Chinese Almanac Sees Some Hope for 2023

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      A little book bases its forecasts on a geomancer in Hong Kong, and says next year will be “nowhere near as bad” as 2022.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. It’s time to venture into predictions for 2023. We’ll also look at how progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans are clashing on what may be the most ideologically diverse City Council ever.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThis time last year, I asked Joanna Lee about predictions for 2022. She said, “My heart sank.”She had her husband, Ken Smith, have compiled and annotated the “Pocket Chinese Almanac” annually since 2010. So — after a year with a war in Ukraine, stubborn inflation in this country and a chronic housing shortage in New York — what do they see ahead?“It’s nowhere near as bad,” Smith said.Financial businesses and the travel industry will have “particularly rocky periods coming up,” Lee said — and it is not clear what will do well in 2023.They base the forecasts in their little book on the calculations of a geomancer, a Hong Kong architect named Warwick Wong. He said 2023 would be dominated by “wood and fire,” a shift away from “metal,” which had been dominant in recent years.Smith said “fire” includes energy — oil, natural gas and electricity — as well as what he called “high-energy fields” like public relations, marketing and the law.“At every turn, you have people who are trying to grab and control the narrative in some way that will offer some kind of clarity” as the pandemic fades, Smith said. He said the arts provided an example: “The initial story was going to be people are going to flock back to entertainment and into theaters, that two years of isolation would be over,” he said. Lee finished the thought: “Now that is not the case, or it is in some areas and not others. People are going out, but they’re more judicious.”Lee said it was less clear how to translate “wood” to modern life. It could be taken to refer to construction, but when I asked if there would be a construction boom, she said not necessarily. “When one place builds a lot, another place sees a lot of destruction,” she said. “We just don’t know where there will be the boom.”“The Pocket Chinese Diary” is an ultra-Reader’s Digest version of predictions in larger Chinese almanacs. Each page in their 128-page book measures a mere 4⅛ inches by 2½ inches. It is faithful to the original Chinese and, in turn, to the agrarian society that China once was. So, for each day of the year, there is an entry with two headings: “good” and “bad.”Some days are good for rituals, weddings, breaking ground or other pursuits like “building stoves,” “raising pillars and beams,” “placing doors,” “digging ditches” or “the maiden voyage of a boat.” Some days are bad for those things. Next Tuesday — Jan. 3, the first workday of 2023 — will be good for such things as “cleaning house” and “pest control.”It is not the day to make wine or distill alcohol. It’s also a bad day for “breaking ground.”All of those terms are metaphors. Lee said that “cleaning house” was about “paring down to the essentials, or at least what is useful.” As for “pest control,” the almanac notes that “pests today are hardly limited to insects and rodents.”Lee also said Jan. 3 was not the day to look to. It’s still in the Year of the Tiger. The Lunar New Year, ushering in the Year of the Rabbit, does not begin until Jan. 23, a day that has an unusually long list of “good” pursuits, including some that do not sound metaphorical: meeting friends, moving, starting new jobs, starting a business and “renovating warehouses.”WeatherThe sun will be shining and temps will be in the low 40s. At night, it will be mostly clear with low temps around the high 30s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Sunday (New Year’s Day).The latest New York newsLaylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesTeen shootings: Since Jan. 1, 149 people under 18 have been shot, according to Police Department data. Roughly one in every 10 New Yorkers struck by a bullet was a child.Blizzard deaths: The death toll from the storm in western New York continued to climb, with the mayor’s office in Buffalo reporting eight more fatalities.Santos comes clean: For a week, Representative-elect George Santos avoided answering questions from the media. Now, Santos is taking a new approach: creating the appearance of coming clean.On an ideologically diverse City Council, the G.O.P. gainsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesAri Kagan used to be 1 of 46 on the New York City Council. Now, after doing the politically unthinkable, he is one of only six.Kagan was a Democrat, and Democrats have an overwhelming majority on the 51-person Council. But he switched parties, joining the Council’s five other Republicans.My colleague Jeffery C. Mays writes that the switch might help when Kagan runs for re-election next year, even if it means a loss of power and influence on the Council between now and Election Day. Kagan’s district in South Brooklyn is becoming more conservative. But Kagan said that was not the main reason he crossed the aisle. He said he believed that the Democratic Party, especially in New York, had drifted too far to the left.“It’s not me leaving the Democratic Party,” Kagan said. “The Democratic Party started to leave me.”There are other signs that Republicans are making inroads in New York City, where Democrats outnumber them seven to one. Every borough voted more Republican in last month’s elections than in the 2020 presidential year. Three Democrats in the State Assembly lost to Republicans in South Brooklyn.Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor, won Staten Island by 19 points more than Republicans won the borough by in the 2020 presidential election. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, defeated Zeldin by the smallest margin in a governor’s race in more than 30 years, in part because of how well Zeldin did in parts of New York City.Some on the far left have accused Mayor Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat who is a former registered Republican, of serving as an unspoken ally to Republicans. Adams regularly criticizes left-leaning Democrats, including members of the Council, and has a working relationship with Joseph Borelli, a Republican who is the Council’s minority leader.On the Council, policy disagreements have underscored the gulf between liberals and the handful of Republicans.Tiffany Cabán, a Queens councilwoman who is on the progressive caucus and leads the Committee on Women and Gender Equity, received threatening emails and calls from the public, along with derogatory and vulgar comments about her Latina heritage and sexual orientation earlier this fall.The threats closely followed an appearance on Fox News by Joann Ariola, a Republican councilwoman, who called Cabán a “chaos inciter” for suggesting ways that small-business owners could deal with homeless or mentally ill people without calling the police.“What they’re doing is part and parcel of that far-right playbook,” Cabán said of Republicans on the Council. “You whip up fear and hatred of people of color, queer people, and you foment political violence. It’s what Tucker Carlson does every day. It’s what Marjorie Taylor Greene does.”METROPOLITAN diaryOwenEvery week since 1976, Metropolitan Diary has published stories by, and for, New Yorkers. Readers helped us pick the best Diary entry of the year, and Owen was a finalist in this year’s voting.Dear Diary:My mother died earlier this year. It was sudden and unexpected. In the weeks that followed, I was taking care of my father in addition to my children. I was so busy that I barely had a chance to cry.After about a month, I took a day off work to go to the Fotografiska Museum and then to meet my husband for lunch nearby.After viewing an exhibition of nude photography, I walked directly into one that was a chronicle of the life and death of the artist’s mother.The weight of the previous month and the unexpected connection to the artist hit me hard. I sat down in the mostly empty museum and sobbed.I tried to be quiet and inconspicuous there in the dark room, but before long a man approached me and asked if I was OK.I told him that my mother had died recently and that I just missed her so much.He sat down next to me, rubbed my back after politely seeking my consent and told me he would sit with me as long as I needed.I asked his name.Owen, he said.He asked mine.Suzie, I replied.And my mother’s?Stephanie.He said he would hold us in his heart and he asked if I needed a hug.I did. Even in heels, I stood on tiptoes to embrace a total stranger and sob into his shoulder. I thanked him with every fiber of my being.I skipped the final exhibition and ran to meet my husband. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t bear to see Owen’s face in the light.— Suzanna Publicker MetthamIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Morgan Malget and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      Republican Jewish Coalition Says Santos ‘Deceived Us’ About His Heritage

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      The group said that Representative-elect George Santos would be barred from its events, but it stopped short of calling for him not to serve in Congress.The country’s most prominent group of Jewish Republican political donors said Tuesday that it was “disappointed” that Representative-elect George Santos had misrepresented himself as Jewish, and that it would bar him from its events. But the group, the Republican Jewish Coalition, stopped short of calling him unfit to serve in Congress or demanding his ouster.Mr. Santos, a Republican who was elected last month to represent a New York district that includes much of Long Island’s North Shore, has been embroiled in a widening scandal over misstatements and lies he told about his education, employment and finances.He also claimed repeatedly to be a descendant of European Jews who fled to Brazil to escape the Holocaust and said that while he was religiously Catholic, he also identified as a nonobservant Jew. He described himself as a Jew on the campaign trail in a heavily Jewish district and regularly attended events with rabbis and other leaders of the religious community.But in an interview with The New York Post published Monday, he said that he “never claimed to be Jewish” and was instead “Jew-ish.” He also denounced reporting that said he misled voters about his Jewish ancestry.Matt Brooks, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement that Mr. Santos had “deceived us and misrepresented his heritage” and that he “will not be welcome at any future R.J.C. event.”Mr. Santos, 34, was a featured speaker at the coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas last month. On Dec. 18, he was a featured guest, along with Representative Lee Zeldin, at a Hanukkah party thrown by the group on Long Island. The New York Times investigation into his background was published the next day.A spokesman for the R.J.C. said that no one at the coalition could recall a previous instance of an elected official falsely claiming to be Jewish.The coalition, which spent at least $3 million to help G.O.P. candidates in the midterm election through its political arm, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, did not make any contributions to Mr. Santos before his victory. But a spokesman confirmed that the group sent Mr. Santos $5,000 earmarked for “debt retirement” after his election.Norm Coleman, the former Minnesota senator who now serves as the R.J.C.’s chairman, called Mr. Santos’s statements “shameful” in an email. “I anticipate he will have a very short tenure in the United States Congress,” he added.The group’s Democratic counterpart, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, took a harder line, calling on Mr. Santos “to not take the oath of office” in a post on Twitter and challenging the R.J.C.’s integrity for not doing the same.The R.J.C. has taken a tougher stance on perceived affronts to the Jewish community before.It repeatedly demanded that Congress remove Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee for remarks about Israel and Israeli politics that the group termed “antisemitic tropes.”The coalition also condemned Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in 2021 for making antisemitic comments on social media, and called her out a second time — along with Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona — for speaking at a white nationalist conference.Gabriel Groisman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Fla., and a member of the coalition’s board of directors, said he had met Mr. Santos at the Las Vegas event and had been excited that a Jewish Republican was elected to the New York delegation in Congress, but called the recent revelations “extremely offensive.”He went beyond the R.J.C. statement, saying that “the Republican leadership should condemn Santos publicly, and he should not be given any committee assignments.”“Thankfully, terms in Congress are only two years,” Mr. Groisman added. “Hopefully we can get him out as soon as possible.”But one of the group’s new board members, Josh Katzen, the president of a Massachusetts commercial real estate firm, pointed to multiple examples of Democrats who were accused of embellishing their records in the past, including Hillary Clinton, who claimed in 2008 that she had to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire during a 1996 trip in Bosnia, and President Biden, who said he finished in the top half of his law school class and attended on a full academic scholarship.Mr. Katzen, in an email, added: “And I’m supposed to care if, in an age of rabid antisemitism, a politician wants to join my tribe? Not at the forefront of my concerns.” More

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      George Santos: What We Know and Don’t Know About the Representative-Elect

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      Mr. Santos admitted that the information in his résumé about where he worked and went to school was not true. Other discrepancies in his biography remain a mystery.For a week, Representative-elect George Santos avoided answering questions from the media, after The New York Times reported several notable fabrications on his résumé.Now, Mr. Santos has swapped out silence for a new tactic: creating the appearance of coming clean.In three separate interviews — two of them with conservative media, none with The Times — Mr. Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé, even as he has denounced “elitist” institutions seeking to hold him to account and suggested that he is no more duplicitous than your average member of Congress.‘Did I embellish my résumé? Yes, I did,” he told City & State, a New York political publication. “And I’m sorry, and it shouldn’t be done. And words can’t express 100 percent how I feel, but I’m still the same guy. I’m not a fraud. I’m not a cartoon character. I’m not some mythical creature that was invented.”Voters from New York’s Third Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Nassau County and Queens, elected Mr. Santos, 34, a Republican, in November. When he enters Congress in 2023, several important unanswered questions will still hang over him.Here is what we do and do not know about the representative-elect.Mr. Santos did not work where he said he did.Over the course of his two campaigns for Congress, the first of which was unsuccessful, Mr. Santos cast himself as an accomplished veteran of Wall Street, with work experience at both Citigroup, where he said he was “an associate asset manager,” and at Goldman Sachs. Both firms told The Times that they had no record of Mr. Santos’s ever working for them.In recent interviews, Mr. Santos has claimed that he did not actually work for those companies, but rather with them, when he was employed at a company called LinkBridge Investors, which says it connects fund managers with investors.Mr. Santos told The New York Post that he had merely used a “poor choice of words.”Mr. Santos did not graduate from the schools he said he had.Mr. Santos has said he graduated from Baruch College in Manhattan with a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. A biography on the website of the House Republicans’ campaign committee said he had also studied at N.Y.U. But neither college could find records verifying those claims, and in his interview with The Post, Mr. Santos admitted that he had lied about his education.“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.” he told the newspaper. “I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé.”Mr. Santos says he is not Jewish, so much as “Jew-ish.”Mr. Santos has said that his mother was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium and again fled persecution during WW II.” And he has identified as both Catholic and as a nonobservant Jew.But citing genealogy records and Brazilian records, both The Forward, a Jewish publication, and CNN have reported that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents appear to have been born in Brazil before World War II. Mr. Santos has responded to those revelations by modifying his story ever so slightly.“I always joke, I’m Catholic, but I’m also Jew-ish — as in ‘ish,’” he told City & State. “I grew up fully aware that my grandparents were Jewish, came from a Jewish family, and they were refugees to Brazil. And that was always the story I grew up with, and I’ve always known it very well.”Mr. Santos amends story on Pulse nightclub shooting.After he won election, Mr. Santos, who says he is gay, claimed to have “lost four employees” at the 2016 shooting at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, a claim for which The Times could find no evidence.During an interview on WABC radio, Mr. Santos said that those “four employees” did not actually work for his Florida company. Rather, those four individuals were in the process of being hired, he said.“We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando,” he said.Mr. Santos denied committing any crimes.Contrary to records unearthed by The Times, Mr. Santos has seemed to insist that he was never charged with fraud for writing checks with a stolen checkbook in Brazil.“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”In the radio interview with WABC, Mr. Santos offered to provide documents to corroborate his assertion. But he declined to provide any documentation to The Times.Mr. Santos does not own 13 properties.During his most recent congressional campaign, Mr. Santos cast himself and his family as the owners of 13 properties. He also suggested he was a beleaguered landlord whose tenants were unjustly withholding rent.On Monday, he said his family owns property, but he does not.“George Santos does not own any properties,” he told The Post.The sources of Mr. Santos’s $700,000 campaign loan remain unclear.Though Mr. Santos’s adulthood has been marked by a trail of unpaid debts to landlords and creditors, in 2021 and 2022, he lent $700,000 to his congressional campaign, according to federal campaign finance documents. It remains unclear where that money came from.Mr. Santos continues to claim it originated with his work at The Devolder Organization, which he described as a consulting firm to City & State.Mr. Santos has disclosed little about the operations of his company, and The Times could find no property or public-facing assets linked to the firm. More

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      George Santos Admits to Lying About College and Work History

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      The congressman-elect confirmed The New York Times’s findings that he had not graduated from college or worked at two major Wall Street companies, as he had claimed.Ending a weeklong silence, Representative-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to a sizable list of misrepresentations about his professional background, educational history, business experience and property ownership. But he said he was determined to take the oath of office on Jan. 3 and join the House majority.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican who was elected in November to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeast Queens, confirmed some of the key findings of a New York Times investigation into his background, but sought to minimize the falsehoods.“My sins here are embellishing my résumé,” Mr. Santos told The New York Post in one of two interviews he granted on Monday.Mr. Santos admitted to lying about graduating from college and making misleading claims that he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He once said he had a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties; on Monday, he admitted he was not a landlord.Mr. Santos, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, also acknowledged owing thousands in unpaid rent and a yearslong marriage he had never disclosed.“I dated women in the past. I married a woman. It’s personal stuff,” he said to The Post, adding that he was “OK with my sexuality. People change.”In the interviews, Mr. Santos also firmly rejected having committed a crime anywhere in the world, despite the existence of Brazilian court records that show he admitted to committing check fraud there.“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”The admissions by Mr. Santos added a new wrinkle to one of the more astonishing examples of an incoming congressman falsifying key biographical elements of his background — with Mr. Santos maintaining the falsehoods through two consecutive bids for Congress, the first of which he lost.In both interviews, Mr. Santos also denounced reporting by both CNN and The Forward, a Jewish publication, that he may have misled voters about his account of his Jewish ancestry, including that his maternal grandparents were born in Europe and emigrated to Brazil during the Holocaust.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More