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      Russia Claims to Have Retaken Final Village in Its Kursk Region

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      Ukraine denied that it had been pushed out of the region and said that its military operations inside Russia were continuing. Russia’s top military commander said on Saturday that Moscow’s forces had retaken the last village that Ukraine was holding in the Kursk region of western Russia, though Ukrainian officials denied that their brazen campaign in the area had finally come to an end.The Russian claim was made by Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, who has managed the invasion of Ukraine and defense of Russia as chief of the general staff. His statement came six weeks after his forces retook all but a tiny sliver of the Russian territory that Ukraine had been holding since a surprise offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region last summer.In a televised video, General Gerasimov reported to President Vladimir V. Putin that Russian forces had on Saturday recaptured the village of Gornal, on the border with Ukraine. Speaking to Mr. Putin via a video link, General Gerasimov said that the advance had “completed the defeat of the Ukrainian armed forces that attacked the Kursk region.”The Ukrainian General Staff denied that its forces had withdrawn fully from the region, saying the country’s military operation there was ongoing.“The operational situation is difficult, but our units continue to hold their positions,” the General Staff said in a statement.The expulsion of Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk region could remove one of the major complications vexing the peace talks pushed by President Trump, whose special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Mr. Putin for more than three hours in Moscow on Friday to discuss a deal that could end the conflict.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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      This Is Not the America My Immigrant Father Was Determined to Reach

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      As the Trump administration disappears immigrants into foreign prisons and sees this as a source of American strength, I think back to when my dad was disappeared, why he came to America and, indeed, why I exist.My dad’s journey through war and concentration camps teaches me that authoritarianism does not strengthen a nation and that, notwithstanding Elon Musk’s warning that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” it has been one of our national strengths — and that because of our president, it is now in peril.My father’s family was Armenian. During World War II, my family members were living throughout Eastern Europe and were secretly involved in a network that was spying on the Nazis and transmitting information to the West. The Gestapo uncovered the network, and my dad’s heroic cousin Izabela was arrested in Poland in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, along with her daughter, Teresa. Izabela died in Auschwitz, and Teresa was subjected to medical experiments by the Nazis.My father and other immediate family members were arrested as well for being part of the spy network. But they were detained in Romania, where officials and the police — the “deep state” — shielded them from the Gestapo, so they were imprisoned for a time but survived and were eventually released. (Bribery helped.)Izabela’s son-in-law, Boguslaw Horodynski, a Pole, oversaw the spy network and survived the war. But the Soviets, seeing a freedom fighter as a potential threat to the emerging Communist bloc, arrested him and dispatched him to a labor camp in the Siberian gulag. We believe Boguslaw was enslaved in a mine in Kolyma — which the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as the “pole of cold and cruelty.”Romania’s prime minister personally asked Stalin to show mercy. But Stalin wouldn’t budge.Perhaps this is the prism through which Stalin saw Boguslaw: He’s an immigrant in Romania, he’s potentially a risk to national security, and due process is a silly concept that would slow us down, so we’re sending him to a prison in another country.

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      Ukrainian Peace Plan Hints at Concessions, but Major Obstacles Remain

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      Officials in Kyiv plan to deliver their proposal to President Trump’s team, after rejecting a White House plan that would have given the Kremlin much of what it wants.Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counterproposal to a Trump administration plan that has drawn criticism for conceding too much to Russia. While the counteroffer digs in on some of Kyiv’s earlier demands, it hints at possible concessions on issues that have long been seen as intractable.Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for common ground. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.Mr. Trump flew to Rome on Friday to attend the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday; Mr. Zelensky had planned to as well, but his spokesman said on Friday that this would depend on the situation in Ukraine, where Russian attacks this week on the capital, Kyiv, and elsewhere have left dozens dead and wounded.In a social media post after landing in Rome, Mr. Trump said Russia and Ukraine were “very close to a deal” and urged the two sides to meet directly to “finish it off.” Earlier in the day, he said it was possible he and Mr. Zelensky could meet on the sidelines of the funeral. A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if Mr. Zelensky goes to Rome, he might try to present Mr. Trump with Ukraine’s counterproposal personally.“In the coming days, very significant meetings may take place — meetings that should bring us closer to silence for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said on Friday in remarks that were uncharacteristically optimistic when compared with the tone of previous statements this week.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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      China Rejects Trump Claim of Tariff Talks With Xi

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      President Trump said “we’re meeting with China” on tariffs, comments aimed at soothing jittery financial markets. But Chinese officials say no talks have taken place.President Trump, whose trade war with China has rattled financial markets and threatened to disrupt huge swaths of trade, suggested on Friday that he has been in touch with Xi Jinping, China’s president, even as officials in China insist that no negotiations are occurring.In an interview with Time, Mr. Trump said Mr. Xi had called him and asserted that his team was in active talks with the Chinese on a trade deal. Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Friday morning, the president reiterated that he had spoken with the Chinese president “numerous times,” but he refused to answer when pressed on whether any call had happened after he imposed the tariffs earlier this month.Mr. Trump’s comments appeared aimed at creating the impression of progress with China to soothe jittery financial markets, which have fallen amid signs that the world’s largest economies are not negotiating. The S&P 500 is down 10 percent since Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.But his claims of talks have been rejected by Chinese officials, who have repeatedly denied this week that they are actively negotiating with the United States.“China and the U.S. have not held consultations or negotiations on the issue of tariffs,” Guo Jiakun, the spokesman for the foreign ministry, said in a news conference on Friday. “The United States should not confuse the public.”On Thursday, He Yadong, a spokesman for China’s commerce ministry, had said that there were “no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States.”“Any claims about progress in China-U.S. economic and trade negotiations are baseless rumors without factual evidence,” he said.Asked in the Time interview if he would call Mr. Xi if the Chinese leader did not call first, Mr. Trump said no.“We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody,” the president said.Mr. Trump also said, without evidence, that he had “made 200 deals.” He added that he would finish and announce them in the next three to four weeks.With the two governments at an impasse, businesses that rely on sourcing products from China — varying from hardware stores to toymakers — have been thrown into turmoil. The triple-digit tariff rates have forced many to halt shipments entirely.Trump officials have argued that the status quo with China on trade is not sustainable. Mr. Trump has rapidly ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese products, from 54 percent on April 2 to 145 percent just one week later. The Chinese government has argued that the actions are unfair and closely matched his moves, raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 percent. More

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      Tariffs on China Aren’t Likely to Rescue Battered U.S. P.P.E. Industry

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      The few domestic companies that still make protective gear for health care workers have clamored for federal intervention. But they worry President Trump’s trade war with China won’t help.Few domestic industries have been as devastated by the flood of cheap Chinese imports as manufacturers of face masks, exam gloves and other disposable medical gear that protects health care workers from infectious pathogens.The industry’s demise had calamitous consequences during the Covid pandemic, when Beijing halted exports and American hospital workers found themselves at the mercy of a deadly airborne virus that quickly filled the nation’s emergency rooms and morgues.But as President Trump unveiled his tariff regimen earlier this month, and Beijing retaliated with an 84 percent tax on American imports, the few remaining companies that make protective gear in the United States felt mostly unease.“I’m pretty freaked out,” said Lloyd Armbrust, the chief executive of Armbrust American, a pandemic-era startup that produces N95 respirator masks at a factory in Texas. “On one hand, this is the kind of medicine we need if we really are going to become independent of China. On the other hand, this is not responsible industrial policy.”The United States once dominated the field of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E. The virus-filtering N95 mask and the disposable nitrile glove are American inventions, but China now produces more than 90 percent of the medical gear worn by American health care workers.Despite bipartisan vows to end the nation’s dependency on foreign medical products — and to shore up the dozens of domestic manufacturers that sprung up during the pandemic — federal agencies and state governments have resumed their reliance on inexpensive Chinese imports. Earlier this year, when California purchased millions of N95 masks for those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires, it chose masks made in China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Critics Call Rubio’s Overhaul Plan a Blow to U.S. Values

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      Human rights, democracy, refugees, war crimes.Those are some of the key responsibilities of a State Department office that Secretary of State Marco Rubio intends to shutter as part of a larger reorganization plan for his agency that he unveiled on Tuesday.The official goal of the office — the under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights — is to help countries “build more democratic, secure, stable, and just societies.”In a post on Substack on Tuesday, Mr. Rubio called the change a blow against rogue liberal bureaucrats, saying the office had become “a fertile environment for activists to redefine ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ and to pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense” even when they conflict with the president’s goals.The office’s nine bureaus will be pared down and in most cases merged into other parts of the department under Mr. Rubio’s plan. Bureaus slated for elimination include those focused on conflict, global criminal justice and combating antisemitism.Two of the bureaus, including a smaller democracy and human rights bureau, will continue to exist under a new Office of the Coordinator for Foreign Assistance and Humanitarian Affairs. But that office will no longer be led by an under secretary.On Tuesday, a State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, cautioned that the changes did not mean the end of values-based initiatives in U.S. foreign policy, arguing that the goal was a “nimbler” department.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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      In Trump’s America, There Are No Rules, Only Access

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      Daniel JurmanOne of the most dramatic policy reversals in U.S. economic history happened this month. In the span of just a few days, President Trump announced sweeping tariff increases, panicking global markets, and then partially backed down — all without meaningful consultation with Congress or much evidence his administration used a rational process to arrive at the numbers.Economists, who don’t often agree on much, greeted the plan with near unanimous criticism and a fair degree of derision. Few if any political analysts could articulate a coherent rationale for why threatening to launch a trade war on most nations on earth would make strategic sense.Yet in a way it does, because the real story may not be about trade. Looked at in a different way, it’s about power.In principle, it is not up to the president to decide unilaterally whether to impose tariffs, or on which countries to impose them. The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution clearly vests this authority in Congress. However, Mr. Trump made use of his powers to restrict trade under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to regulate trade during economic emergencies. The president effectively declared that the executive branch could bypass Congress’s constitutional authority.Financial markets seemed to grasp this. Unlike past global crises, this episode did not send investors fleeing into the dollar’s safety. Quite the opposite: The dollar dropped sharply when the tariffs were announced and continued to fall even after the administration reversed course. This suggests that investors are anxious about much more than just the economic damage from protectionist policies. They’re worried about the United States no longer being a safe place to hold their assets. They have good reason to be concerned.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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

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      Why Saudi Arabia Supports Trump’s Nuclear Talks With Its Rival, Iran

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      The agreements are shaping up to be very similar. But Gulf support for a nuclear deal shows how much the region has changed.Ten years ago, when former President Barack Obama and other leaders reached a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program, Saudi Arabia was dismayed.Saudi officials called it a “weak deal” that had only emboldened the kingdom’s regional rival, Iran. They cheered when President Trump withdrew from the agreement a few years later.Now, as a second Trump administration negotiates with Iran on a deal that might have very similar contours to the previous one, the view from Saudi Arabia looks quite different.The kingdom’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement recently saying that it hoped the talks, mediated by neighboring Oman, would enhance “peace in the region and the world.”Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even dispatched his brother, the defense minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, to Tehran, where he was received warmly by Iranian officials dressed in military regalia. He then hand-delivered a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a man whom Prince Mohammed once derided as making “Hitler look good.”What changed? Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran have warmed over the past decade. As important, Saudi Arabia is in the middle of an economic diversification program intended to transform the kingdom from being overly dependent on oil into a business, technology and tourism hub. The prospect of Iranian drones and missiles flying over Saudi Arabia because of regional tensions poses a serious threat to that plan.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