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      The Politics and Perils of Pornography

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      More from our inbox:Investing in War K YoungTo the Editor:Re “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness,” by Christine Emba (Opinion guest essay, May 25):Thanks to Ms. Emba for writing about pornography and its negative effect on society.I try to teach my daughter and 8-year-old granddaughter that they bring more to the table than their looks, that they are more than the sum total of their body parts. I’m breathing a slight sigh of relief that maybe this next generation will realize that.Jenny MottierCincinnatiTo the Editor:In her essay, Christine Emba writes: “As a society, we are allowing our desires to continue to be molded in experimental ways, for profit, by an industry that does not have our best interests at heart.” But I’m left wondering, what industry does?The food industry floods us with ultraprocessed products that are literally killing us. The fossil fuel industry drives us toward climate catastrophe. The health care industry leaves thousands uninsured and allows people to die if they can’t pay.Surely, Ms. Emba must see that the real problem is the current state of capitalism, where profit is the only true priority. The porn industry is just one more expression of that system.Karaca MestciLondonTo the Editor:As long as we, as a society, continue to withhold age-appropriate sex education from our young people, they will continue to seek out answers to their questions and context for their feelings anywhere they can find them. The internet has, unfortunately, become the primary source of this for many children and young adults.Withholding reliable and useful information about sex does not make the normal and appropriate curiosity that young people have about bodies, behavior and sex go away. It just encourages the naturally curious to seek out answers in other places.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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      Trump Praises Military Service and Personal Achievements in Arlington Memorial Day Speech

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      In a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, President Trump highlighted the sacrifices of soldiers and their families but also his own achievements. President Trump memorialized the nation’s fallen soldiers in a speech at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, recognizing the families of servicemen and servicewomen who died fighting for their country hours after airing grievances and attacking his political opponents on social media.In remarks commemorating Memorial Day, Mr. Trump thanked those who had fought in some of the nation’s defining battles, and cited specific stories of sacrifice by soldiers and their families.“We certainly know what we owe to them,” Mr. Trump said. “Their valor gave us the freest, greatest and most noble republic ever to exist on the face of the earth — a republic that I am fixing after a long and hard four years.”He also used the occasion, traditionally a solemn day of tributes, to indirectly criticize his predecessor, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for his border policies while valorizing his own return to office. “We’re doing so very well right now, considering the circumstances,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’ll do record-setting better with time. We will do better than we’ve ever done as a nation, better than ever before. I promise you that.”Mr. Trump delivered the speech after taking part in the presidential tradition of laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns to honor America’s war dead. He was joined by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance, both of whom served in the military. 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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      Trump Gives Commencement Address at West Point, Stressing a New Era

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      The president said the graduating cadets would enter a service no longer subject to “absurd ideological experiments” or “nation-building crusades.”President Trump told cadets in a commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Saturday that they were the first graduates to serve in a “golden age” of the nation that was a result of his efforts to rebuild the military and reshape American society.Gone were the “nation-building crusades” in countries that “wanted nothing to do with us” and leadership that subjected servicemembers to “absurd ideological experiments here and at home,” Mr. Trump told the group of about 1,000 cadets.Wearing his red “Make America Great Again” hat, Mr. Trump leaned into his aggressive agenda to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the government, military and virtually every facet of American life, in making his pitch that the nation was worth fighting for again.He took credit for building the military “better than ever before,” saying it had bolstered its recruitment numbers, morale and commitment to protecting America first. He drew applause from guests at times, such as when he discussed the issue of transgender athletes playing in female sports and hiring on merit over diversity.At the outset of his second term, he issued a spate of executive orders targeting programs and policies that aimed to help address systemic racism, which he deemed divisive and unpatriotic.He claimed that his predecessors had “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars.”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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      My Father Was a Nazi Hunter. Then He Died in the Lockerbie Bombing.

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      On an early summer day in 1986 in a federal building in Newark, my father, Michael Bernstein, sat across a conference table from an elderly man named Stefan Leili. Then a young prosecutor at the Department of Justice, my father spent the previous day and a half deposing Leili, who emigrated to the United States from Germany three decades earlier. While applying for an entry visa, the U.S. government claimed, Leili concealed his service in the Totenkopfverbände — the infamous Death’s Head units of the SS, which ran the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that such an omission was sufficient grounds for denaturalization and deportation. If my father could prove that Leili lied, the United States could strip him of his citizenship and kick him out of the country.Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffIn an earlier interview, Leili repeatedly denied guarding prisoners at Mauthausen, one of a cluster of work camps in Austria, notorious for a stone quarry where slave laborers spent 11-hour days hauling slabs of granite up a steep rock staircase. But my father and a colleague sensed that this time around, the weight of hundreds of detailed queries might finally be causing Leili to buckle. Leili had begun to concede, bit by grudging bit, that he was more involved than he first said. My father had been waiting for such a moment, because he had a piece of evidence he was holding back. Now he decided that it was finally time to use it.Leili sat next to his college-age granddaughter and a German interpreter. Earlier in the deposition, the young woman said her grandfather was a sweet man, who couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. Indeed, it would have been hard to look at this unremarkable 77-year-old — bald, with a sagging paunch — and perceive a villain.Certainly, the story Leili first told my father was far from villainous. Born in a small town in 1909 in Austria-Hungary, present-day Romania, Leili was an ethnic German peasant, who like millions of others had been tossed from place to place by the forces convulsing Europe. In 1944, Leili said, the Red Army was advancing toward his village. He had to choose whether to join the Hungarian Army or, like many ethnic Germans from his region, the SS. The Schutzstaffel promised better pay and German citizenship, plus money for his family if he was killed. And besides, if he hadn’t gone along with what the SS wanted, Leili said, he would “have been put against the wall and shot.”Leili told my father he spent much of his time in the SS pretending to be ill so he wouldn’t have to serve. Then he guarded some prisoners working in a Daimler munitions factory. These were soldiers, not civilians. They had friendly relations, he told my father. They worked short days. They were well fed, even “plump.”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 Trump’s Search for a New Air Force One Led to Qatar’s Jet

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      President Trump wanted a quick solution to his Air Force One problem.The United States signed a $3.9 billion contract with Boeing in 2018 for two jets to be used as Air Force One, but a series of delays had slowed the work far past the 2024 delivery deadline, possibly beyond Mr. Trump’s second term.Now Mr. Trump had to fly around in the same old planes that transported President George H.W. Bush 35 years ago. It wasn’t just a vanity project. Those planes, which are no longer in production, require extensive servicing and frequent repairs, and officials from both parties, reaching back a decade or more, had been pressing for replacements.Mr. Trump, though, wanted a new plane while he was still in office. But how?“We’re the United States of America,” Mr. Trump said this month. “I believe that we should have the most impressive plane.”The story of how the Trump administration decided that it would accept a free luxury Boeing 747-8 from Qatar to serve as Air Force One involved weeks of secret coordination between Washington and Doha. The Pentagon and the White House’s military office swung into action, and Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, played a key role.Soon after Mr. Trump took office, military officials started to discuss how the United States could buy a temporary plane for Mr. Trump to use while Boeing’s work creaked along, an investigation by The New York Times found. But by May 11, when the president announced on social media that Qatar would be providing the plane to the United States, he characterized it as “a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.”There are lingering questions about how much financial sense the still-unsigned deal would make, given the costs of refitting the plane for presidential use and operating it over the long run — or even whether the plane could be ready for Mr. Trump to use before the end of his second term.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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      Trump’s Military Parade in D.C. Could Cost $45 Million, Officials Say

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      The parade is scheduled for June 14, the date of the Army’s 250th anniversary, and is billed as the “Army’s birthday celebration.” President Trump turns 79 that day.A military parade planned for next month could cost up to $45 million and is expected to include up to two dozen M1 Abrams tanks rolling through the streets of Washington, two defense officials said Thursday.The parade, according to the Army’s website, will be held on June 14, which is both the date of the Army’s 250th anniversary and President Trump’s 79th birthday.The officials who spoke about the costs said that the estimate, previously reported by Reuters, did not include the cleanup or repairs from damage to Washington’s roads from the tank traffic. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planningThe Army has said the parade will include 150 vehicles, 50 warplanes and the participation of more than 6,600 soldiers.The thousands of visiting soldiers in Washington for the parade will stay in unused government buildings and sleep on cots, according to the Army. They will be provided three daily meals and a stipend, the Pentagon has said.A Bradley Fighting Vehicle on display for a Fourth of July event in Washington in 2019.Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe anniversary celebration is expected to include a daylong festival with musical performances and displays of equipment. Mr. Trump also proposed a military parade for Veterans Day in November during his first term, but the notion was derailed by members of his administration over cost concerns.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the parade is intended to honor the sacrifice of American troops who helped secure the country’s independence.“There are a lot of vapid things to celebrate, plenty of reality shows and garbage music and stuff on Netflix,” he said in a speech this month. “How about we hold up our special operations community? How about we recognize the Army and the Marine Corps?”But some Democratic lawmakers have cast the planned parade as wasteful and over-the-top. Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, introduced a bill last month that would bar spending federal money on a military parade in Washington “primarily intended to celebrate the birthday, personal milestone, or private interest of any individual, including President Donald J. Trump.”Mr. Cohen suggested in a statement that Mr. Trump planned to “waste taxpayer dollars burnishing his insatiable ego.”Protests of the parade are planned in Washington and other American cities.Many countries — including France, China and North Korea — put on regular military parades, but such displays are rare in the United States. More

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      Trump Says He Asked Mexico to Let U.S. Military In to Fight Cartels

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      President Trump confirmed on Sunday that he had raised the idea with his Mexican counterpart, Claudia Sheinbaum, who rejected it. President Trump confirmed on Sunday that he had pressed Mexico’s president to let U.S. troops into the country to help fight drug cartels, an idea she summarily rejected.Mr. Trump told reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force One from Palm Beach, Fla., to Washington that it was “true” he had made the push with President Claudia Sheinbaum. The proposal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last week, came at the end of a lengthy phone call between the two leaders on April 16, The Journal said.Ms. Sheinbaum has also confirmed that Mr. Trump made the suggestion, and that she rejected it. Mexico and the United States can “collaborate,” she recalled telling him, but “with you in your territory and us in ours.”Mr. Trump said he proposed the idea because the cartels “are horrible people that have been killing people left and right and have been — they’ve made a fortune on selling drugs and destroying our people.”He said, “If Mexico wanted help with the cartels, we would be honored to go in and do it. I told her that. I would be honored to go in and do it. The cartels are trying to destroy our country. They’re evil.”He said, “The president of Mexico is a lovely woman, but she is so afraid of the cartels that she can’t even think straight.”Mr. Trump has had a better working relationship with Ms. Sheinbaum than with Canada’s leaders. But the relationships with both neighboring countries have been strained over trade and immigration. More

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      2 Planes Abort Landings as Army Helicopter Flies Near D.C. Airport

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      The episode followed a fatal collision between a military helicopter and a commercial jet in January, and prompted concern and outrage among officials.Federal transportation safety officials were investigating on Friday after two commercial flights aborted landings because an Army helicopter had entered the airspace around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where helicopter traffic has been restricted since a fatal collision in January.Air traffic controllers instructed Delta Air Lines Flight 1671 and Republic Airways Flight 5825 to abort their landings around 2:30 p.m. Thursday because of the helicopter’s presence, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which has begun an investigation along with the National Transportation Safety Board.The helicopter was a Black Hawk headed to the nearby Pentagon, the safety board said.Both planes later landed safely, but the episode prompted outrage among officials in Washington.“Our helicopter restrictions around DCA are crystal clear,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a social media post, using the airport’s code. He said he would speak to the Defense Department about “why the hell our rules were disregarded.”The Army said in a brief statement that the helicopter had been “directed by Pentagon air traffic control to conduct a ‘go-around,’ overflying the Pentagon helipad in accordance with approved flight procedures,” as it headed to the Pentagon.“The incident is currently under investigation,” the Army said. “The United States Army remains committed to aviation safety and conducting flight operations within all approved guidelines and procedures.”The F.A.A. had restricted nonessential helicopter traffic around the airport, which is just miles from the Capitol and the White House, after a Jan. 29 midair collision between an American Airlines flight and Army Black Hawk helicopter killed 67 people.The episode on Thursday also renewed concerns by lawmakers, many of whom use the airport.Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who leads the Senate’s committee that handles transportation, said the incident underscored continuing risks posed by military flights near the airport and called for legislation to improve civilian air safety.“Just days after military flights resumed in the National Capital Region, the Army is once again putting the traveling public at risk,” Mr. Cruz said on social media. “Thank God there was a decisive response from air traffic controllers and pilots, or else these two close calls could have resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives.”Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, the committee’s top Democrat, criticized the military flight’s proximity to commercial traffic.She called it “far past time” for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the F.A.A. “to give our airspace the security and safety attention it deserves.” More