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      Were the Kennedy Files a Bust? Not So Fast, Historians Say.

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      The thousands of documents posted online this week disappointed assassination buffs. But historians are finding many newly revealed secrets.In June 1973, a C.I.A. employee wrote a memo at the request of William E. Colby, the agency’s director, listing various ways the C.I.A. had, to put it delicately, “exceeded” its charter over the years.The seven pages matter-of-factly described break-ins at the French Consulate in Washington, planned paramilitary attacks on Chinese nuclear facilities and injections of a “contaminating agent” in Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union. The memo ended with an offhand aside about John A. McCone, the agency’s former director.“Finally, and this will reflect my Middle Western Protestant upbringing, McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, would and could raise eyebrows in certain quarters,” the author wrote.It was just one paragraph in the roughly 64,000 pages the National Archives posted online this week as part of the latest — and supposedly final — release of its vast collection of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.But for some of the scholars who immediately started combing through the documents, the brief passage, seen unredacted for the first time, raised eyebrows for sure.“This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the C.I.A., which, boy, would be explosive if we could get documents about,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University.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 Tariffs Have Sown Uncertainty. That Might Be the Point.

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      Since taking office, President Trump and his advisers have explained the president’s aggressive economic approach to tariffs with a litany of conflicting ideas. Other countries are “ripping off” America and need to be stopped. The United States is fighting a drug war with Canada, Mexico and China. Tariffs will help pay down the nation’s $36 trillion debt load.The messaging hodgepodge comes as the U.S. economy shows signs of strain in response to Mr. Trump’s steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and as he prepares to enact “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from around the world on April 2.The tariffs have sowed uncertainty and dampened business investment and consumer sentiment while sending markets gyrating daily. They are also likely to prevent the Federal Reserve from cutting rates as policymakers wait to see exactly what measures Mr. Trump follows through with and how they affect the economy.But rather than trying to provide more coherence about their economic strategy, Mr. Trump and his advisers seem to be embracing the uncertainty of his approach as a feature, not a bug.“Absolutely, between now and April 2, there’ll be some uncertainty,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on CNBC this week amid questions about what investors are to make of Mr. Trump’s trade agenda.Mr. Trump, when asked whether he would give the business community more clarity about his overall approach, largely dismissed concerns that corporations needed predictability.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 Officials Say Deportees Were Gang Members. So Far, Few Details.

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      Families and immigration lawyers argue not all of the deportees sent to a prison in El Salvador over the weekend had ties to gangs.In the days since the federal government sent hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, Washington has been debating whether the White House did indeed defy a federal judge who ordered the deportation flights to turn around and head back to the United States.But beyond the Trump administration’s evident animus for the judge and the court, more basic questions remain unsettled and largely unanswered: Were the men who were expelled to El Salvador in fact all gang members, as the United States asserts, and how did the authorities make that determination about each of the roughly 200 people who were spirited out of the country even as a federal judge was weighing their fate?The Trump White House has said that most of the immigrants deported were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, like many transnational criminal organizations, has a presence in the United States. Amid the record numbers of migrants arriving at the southern border in recent years, the gang’s presence in some American cities became a rallying cry for Donald J. Trump as he campaigned to return to the White House, claiming immigrants were invading the country.After Mr. Trump returned to power in January, Tren de Aragua remained a regular talking point for him and his immigration advisers, and the deportation flights last week were the administration’s most significant move yet to make good on its promise to go after the gang. But officials have disclosed little about how the men were identified as gang members and what due process, if any, they were accorded before being placed on flights to El Salvador, where the authoritarian government, allied with Mr. Trump, has agreed to hold the prisoners in exchange for a multimillion-dollar payment.The Justice Department refused to answer basic inquiries on Monday about the deportations from the federal judge in Washington, D.C., who had ordered the deportation flight to return to the United States. On Tuesday afternoon, he ordered the Justice Department to submit a sealed filing by noon on Wednesday detailing the times at which the planes had taken off, left American airspace and ultimately landed in El Salvador.More than half of the immigrants deported over the weekend were removed using an obscure authority known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Trump administration says it has invoked to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members age 14 or older with little to no due process. The rarely invoked law grants the president broad authority to remove from the United States citizens of foreign countries whom he defines as “alien enemies,” in cases of war or invasion.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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      With Deportations, Trump Steps Closer to Showdown With Judicial Branch

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      The Trump administration moved one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government when airplane-loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.The right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, bragged that the 238 detainees who had been aboard the aircraft were transferred to a Salvadoran “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where they would be held for at least a year.“Oopsie … Too late,” Mr. Bukele wrote in a social media post on Sunday morning that was recirculated by the White House communications director, Steven Cheung.Around the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in another social media post, thanked Mr. Bukele for a lengthy post detailing the migrants’ incarceration.“This sure looks like contempt of court to me,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. “You can turn around a plane if you want to.”Some details of the government’s actions remained unclear, including the exact time the planes landed. In a Sunday afternoon filing, the Trump administration said the State Department and Homeland Security Department were “promptly notified” of the judge’s written order when it was posted to the electronic docket at 7:26 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. The filing implied that the government had a different legal authority for deporting the Venezuelans besides the one blocked by the judge, which could provide a basis for them to remain in El Salvador while the order is appealed.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 Sends Hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador in Face of Judge’s Order

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      The Trump administration has sent hundreds of Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador, pushing the limits of U.S. immigration law seemingly after a federal judge ordered that the deportation flights not proceed.President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted a three-minute video on social media on Sunday of men in handcuffs being led off a plane during the night and marched into prison. The video also shows prison officials shaving the prisoners’ heads.“Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, arrived in our country,” Mr. Bukele wrote, adding that “The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us.”The Trump administration hopes that the unusual prisoner transfer deal — not a swap but an agreement for El Salvador to take suspected gang members — will be the beginning of a larger effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rapidly arrest and deport those it identifies as members of Tren de Aragua without many of the legal processes common in immigration cases.The Alien Enemies Act allows for summary deportations of people from countries at war with the United States. The law, best known for its role in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked three times in U.S. history — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II — according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization.On Saturday, Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law after President Trump issued an executive order invoking it.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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      Mixed Messages on Masculinity

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      More from our inbox:Path of DisruptionA Constitutional TestA New World OrderTo the Editor:Re “Republicans Really Do Care More About Masculinity,” by Michael Tesler, John Sides and Colette Marcellin (Opinion guest essay, March 3):Without disparaging women in any way, it is essential that we appreciate the importance of male energy. When young men’s energies are channeled successfully, they launch into vital and honorable actions — fighting our wars, building nations, creating industries, taking responsibility for families and communities, generating new ideas. When those energies are left to stagnate, they find their way into criminality, meanness and self-destruction.An ideal incubator for those energies would be a period of national service, military or civilian, attending to the needs of the community and the country. This would provide opportunities that young men need in order to realize the potential of their intense energy: opportunities for practical training, for purposeful work, for leadership and camaraderie, for pride and self-worth.A national service program could provide hands for millions of tasks that our society needs done. And it could bring people together from all regions and backgrounds, to foster unity across our nation’s great diversity. It would be a great way to cultivate the immense resource of male energy.Ron MeyersNew YorkTo the Editor:Masculinity has its virtues, but its avatar these days is not Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. It is the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.Admirable men control their emotions when the occasion demands self-control. They keep their promises, even when it’s not in their self-interest to do so. They stand up for themselves when treated with disrespect, even if they might suffer consequences. They put their lives and honor on the line to care for those who are weaker and more vulnerable.We saw President Zelensky do all of these in the recent contentious White House meeting with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The Ukrainian president is a man of honor. In contrast, Mr. Trump displayed all the vices that traditional masculinity is prone to: bullying, childish loss of self-control, a weak reliance on others (Elon Musk’s money, Mr. Vance’s co-bullying) to prop themselves up.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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      Protest Against Serbian Leader Draws Over 100,000 in Biggest Crowd Yet

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      The rally on Saturday in the capital, Belgrade, came as protests have spread to towns around the country and have drawn increasingly insistent calls that President Aleksandar Vucic step aside.A student-led protest movement in Serbia rallied more than 100,000 people for a huge peaceful street demonstration on Saturday in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, defying warnings from the country’s embattled strongman leader that months of unrest were careening out of control into violence.Saturday’s rally, the biggest outpouring of public discontent in Serbia in decades, was preceded by a drumbeat of warnings from President Aleksandar Vucic and his expansive media apparatus that protesters were planning violent attacks to provoke “civil war” and seize power.Opposition politicians added to a foreboding mood by claiming that they had received information from inside Serbia’s security service of secret plans to arrest Mr. Vucic’s political rivals.But Saturday’s rally, which began outside the Parliament building in Belgrade and soon engulfed the city center, passed without major incident. Supporters of President Vucic gathered in a park near Parliament and threw stones at students. But fears that the government would deploy war veterans and soccer hooligans linked to organized crime gangs to beat protesters — as it has in the past — did not materialize.Farmers on tractors, students and anti-government demonstrators taking part in a protest, in front of the parliament building, in Belgrade on Saturday.Mitar Mitrovic/ReutersThe Belgrade police said the protesters numbered 107,000 while students at Belgrade University’s faculty of dramatic arts, which helped organize the rally, put the turnout at 800,000.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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      What Is Tren de Aragua?

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      A gang with roots in a Venezuelan prison, the criminal group was at the center of President Trump’s order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.President Trump’s executive order on Saturday invoking the Alien Enemies Act targeted Venezuelan citizens 14 years and older with ties to the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, saying they “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”Mr. Trump’s order was quickly challenged in court, but the gang has been a growing source of concern for U.S. officials over the last year. The Biden administration labeled Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization in 2024, the New York Police Department has highlighted its activity on the East Coast, and the Trump White House began the process of designating it a foreign terrorist organization in January.Here is what we know about the gang:A rising force out of VenezuelaTren de Aragua (Train of Aragua, or Aragua Train) has roots in Tocorón prison in Venezuela’s northern Aragua state, which the group’s leaders had transformed into a mini-city with a pool, restaurants and a zoo. They reportedly recorded executions and torture there to maintain control over other prisoners.As Venezuela’s economy collapsed and its government under President Nicolás Maduro became more repressive, the group began exploiting vulnerable migrants. Tren de Aragua’s influence soon stretched into other parts of Latin America, and it developed into one of the region’s most violent and notorious criminal organizations, focusing on sex trafficking, human smuggling and drugs.Colombian officials in 2022 accused the gang of at least 23 murders after the police began to find body parts in bags. Alleged members have also been apprehended in Chile and in Brazil, where the gang aligned itself with Primeiro Comando da Capital, one of that country’s biggest organized crime rings.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