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      FAA Audit of Boeing’s 737 Max Production Found Dozens of Issues

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      The company failed 33 of 89 audits during an examination conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines jet in January.A six-week audit by the Federal Aviation Administration of Boeing’s production of the 737 Max jet found dozens of problems throughout the manufacturing process at the plane maker and one of its key suppliers, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times.The air-safety regulator initiated the examination after a door panel blew off a 737 Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Last week, the agency announced that the audit had found “multiple instances” in which Boeing and the supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, failed to comply with quality-control requirements, though it did not provide specifics about the findings.The presentation reviewed by The Times, though highly technical, offers a more detailed picture of what the audit turned up. Since the Alaska Airlines episode, Boeing has come under intense scrutiny over its quality-control practices, and the findings add to the body of evidence about manufacturing lapses at the company.For the portion of the examination focused on Boeing, the F.A.A. conducted 89 product audits, a type of review that looks at aspects of the production process. The plane maker passed 56 of the audits and failed 33 of them, with a total of 97 instances of alleged noncompliance, according to the presentation.The F.A.A. also conducted 13 product audits for the part of the inquiry that focused on Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselage, or body, of the 737 Max. Six of those audits resulted in passing grades, and seven resulted in failing ones, the presentation said.At one point during the examination, the air-safety agency observed mechanics at Spirit using a hotel key card to check a door seal, according to a document that describes some of the findings. That action was “not identified/documented/called-out in the production order,” the document said.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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      Biden Effigy Attacked at Kansas GOP Event

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      Kansas Republicans are coming under fire for holding a fund-raiser on Friday evening at which attendees physically assaulted an effigy resembling President Biden, according to video footage shared on social media over the weekend.The event, which took place on Friday in Overland Park, Kan., the state’s second-largest city, was hosted by the Johnson County Republican Party and billed as “A Grand Ol’ Party: Johnson County Road to Red Event.”The Kansas City Star was first to report on the footage. A video of the event shows attendees hitting and kicking what appears to be a body opponent bag — a lifelike mannequin with a head and torso often used for self-defense training — with a mask resembling Mr. Biden’s face. The mannequin was dressed in a T-shirt that said “Let’s Go Brandon,” a phrase understood to be code for swearing at Mr. Biden. Attendees also appeared to hit karate breaking boards that had the same derogatory phrase.That footage, originally posted on the online video platform Rumble, according to The Star, has been taken down, but clips have been shared by accounts like “Republicans against Trump” on X.Maria Holiday, the chair of the Johnson County Republican Party, said that the event had featured an “interactive self-defense” exhibit, which is why the training bag was there.“The Johnson County Republican Party’s successful series of events last weekend was tarnished by a brief incident where a mask depicting President Biden was added to an interactive self-defense display,” Ms. Holiday said in a statement. “The mask was regrettable and removed. No one collected or solicited any funds or donations in exchange for hitting the training device.”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 Aides, Taking Over RNC, Order Mass Layoffs

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      Days after allies took over the Republican National Committee, Donald J. Trump’s advisers are imposing mass layoffs on the party, with more than 60 officials, including senior staff members, laid off or asked to resign and then reapply for their jobs, according to two people familiar with the matter.The swift changes amount to a gutting of the party apparatus eight months before the November election, with one person familiar with the operations estimating that the R.N.C. had only about 200 people on payroll at the end of February, and about 120 at its headquarters near Capitol Hill. The heads of the communications, data and political departments were among those let go.On Friday, Michael Whatley, a close ally to Mr. Trump, and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, were unanimously elected as the committee’s chair and co-chair. Mr. Trump had pushed out Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s leader since 2017, and endorsed Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump to take the reins of the national party.Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers, was tapped to serve as the chief operating officer, and he was at the party headquarters meeting with senior staff on Monday.The purge of R.N.C. staff members was first reported by Politico. It is not clear that Mr. Trump is done clearing house.One person with direct knowledge of the changes said the party’s full finance and digital teams were now planned to be moved to Palm Beach, Fla., where the Trump campaign is based. Another person described the party and Trump operations as being functionally fused into one.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 CNBC a Rambling Answer on Why He Backtracked on TikTok Ban

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      Donald Trump told CNBC that banning TikTok would make young people “go crazy” and could benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”Former President Donald J. Trump offered a rambling and confusing explanation on Monday of why he had reversed himself on whether the United States should ban TikTok over concerns that its Chinese ownership poses a threat to national security.In a CNBC interview, Mr. Trump said that he still considered the social media app a national security threat but that banning it would make young people “go crazy.” He added that any action harming TikTok would benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” he added, “but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”Mr. Trump tried to ban TikTok while in office, pushing its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform to a new owner or face being blocked from American app stores. A House committee advanced legislation last week that would similarly force TikTok to cut ties with ByteDance.In a powerful display of bipartisanship — rare these days in Washington — the top Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party used nearly identical language to describe the risks of TikTok.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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      Fine, Call It a Comeback

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      If the Joe Biden who showed up to deliver the State of the Union address last week is the Joe Biden who shows up for the rest of the campaign, you’re not going to have any more of those weak-kneed pundits suggesting he’s not up to running for re-election. Here’s hoping he does.But that’s not the only thing from Thursday night that I hope Biden holds onto. So far, the Biden team has been more sure-footed attacking Donald Trump’s threat to democracy than it has been defending Biden’s incumbency. That reflects a strange problem they face. By virtually any measure save food prices, Biden is presiding over a strong economy — stronger, by far, than most peer countries. As Noah Smith has noted, the Biden economy looks far better than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”: Unemployment is lower, inflation is lower, interest rates are lower, stock market returns are better.But Americans feel otherwise. The most recent Times/Siena poll found that 74 percent of registered voters rated the economy either “poor” or “fair.” By a 15-point margin, voters said Trump’s policies helped them personally. By a 25-point margin, they said Biden’s policies hurt them personally.Voters seem to remember the tail end of Trump’s third year, when the economy was strong, and not the utter calamity of his fourth year, when his Covid response was chaos and the economy was frozen. In November of 2020, unemployment was 6.7 percent and Trump had just turned a White House celebration into a superspreader event. Republicans who say Americans should ask whether they’re better off than they were four years ago should be careful what they wish for.But Biden is in a tough spot. You don’t want to run for re-election telling voters they’re wrong and the economy is actually great. Nor can you run for re-election telling voters that they’re right and the economy is bad. Biden has often seemed a little unsure what to say about his own record. Thursday night, he figured it out.“I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history,” Biden said. “We have. It doesn’t make news, news — in a thousand cities and towns, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.”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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      If There’s One Thing Trump Is Right About, It’s Republicans

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      For the thousandth time, the Republican Party refused an off-ramp that would free itself from Donald Trump. As long as he’s around, it never will.In this year’s presidential primary campaign, the party had the chance to nominate Nikki Haley, a successful, conservative former two-term governor of South Carolina. Unlike Mr. Trump’s, her public career hasn’t been characterized by a lifetime of moral squalor. And many polls show she would be a more formidable candidate against President Biden than Mr. Trump. No matter. Mr. Trump decimated Ms. Haley, most recently on Super Tuesday. She suspended her campaign the next day. But she never had a chance.The Republican Party has grown more radical, unhinged and cultlike every year since Mr. Trump took control of it. In 2016, there was outrage among Republicans after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. On the tape, in words that shocked the nation, Mr. Trump said that when you’re a star, “You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”In 2023, Mr. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. His “locker room talk” turned out to be more than just talk. Yet no Republican of significance said a critical word about it.The same was true earlier this year when Mr. Trump was found liable for civil fraud. The judge in the case, Arthur F. Engoron, said that the former president’s “complete lack of contrition” bordered on “pathological.” Yet Republicans were united in their outrage, not in response to Mr. Trump’s actions but at the judge for the size of the penalty.Today, many Republicans not only profess to believe that the election was stolen; prominent members of Congress like Representative Elise Stefanik and Senator J.D. Vance say they would not have certified the 2020 election results, as Vice President Mike Pence, to his credit, did. Mike Johnson, who played a leading role in trying to overturn the election, is speaker of the House.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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      New Biden Ad Pokes Fun at His Age: ‘I’m Not a Young Guy. That’s No Secret.’

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      The ad, which will target a youthful demographic, represents a shift in tone, trying to turn one of the president’s greatest perceived liabilities into an asset.In a new advertisement for his re-election campaign, President Biden tries to take one of his greatest perceived liabilities as a candidate, his age, and turn it into an advantage.“Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret,” says a smiling Mr. Biden, talking directly to the camera. “But here’s the deal: I understand how to get things done for the American people.”The president, 81, goes on to list the accomplishments of his first term, including his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, capping insulin prices for older consumers and passing infrastructure legislation — while contrasting his record with that of former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee, whom he accuses of taking away “the freedom of women to choose” in reproductive matters.With a fiery State of the Union address under his belt, Mr. Biden is entering full campaign mode. The new ad is the first in a $30 million blitz that will target key battleground states over the next six weeks. Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their spouses are crisscrossing the country to host political events. And on Saturday, three Democratic groups representing people of color — the AAPI Victory Fund, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund — are endorsing Mr. Biden and pledging to spend another $30 million to turn their voters out.Mr. Biden often jokes about his age in small settings. But Americans are more likely to be familiar with his angry remarks over a recent special counsel’s report, which referred to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”The new ad, titled “For You,” represents a shift in tone. Its joking familiarity may appeal to younger voters, whose support Mr. Biden needs to shore up, and it will play on channels popular with a youthful demographic, including ESPN, Adult Swim and Comedy Central.The spot even includes an outtake. After the standard announcement that Mr. Biden has approved the message, a voice off-camera asks him to do one more take.“Look, I’m very young, energetic and handsome. What the hell am I doing this for?” Mr. Biden replies, flashing a mischievous grin before the screen goes black. More

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      Why It’s Hard to Explain Joe Biden’s Unpopularity

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      Joe Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history. In Gallup polling, his approval ratings are lower than those of any president embarking on a re-election campaign, from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump.Yet an air of mystery hangs around his lousy polling numbers. As The Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Simonson noted recently, just surfing around most American media and pop culture, you probably wouldn’t realize that Biden’s job approval ratings are quite so historically terrible, worse by far than Trump’s at the same point in his first term.Apart from anxiety about his age, there isn’t a chattering-class consensus or common shorthand for why his presidency is such a political flop. Which is why, perhaps, there was a rush to declare his State of the Union address a rip-roaring success, as though all Biden needs to do to right things is to talk loudly through more than an hour of prepared remarks.When things went south for other recent chief executives, there was usually a clearer theory of what was happening. Trump’s unpopularity was understood to reflect his chaos and craziness and authoritarian forays. The story of George W. Bush’s descending polls was all about Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. When Barack Obama was at his polling nadir, most observers blamed the unemployment rate and the Obamacare backlash, and when Bill Clinton struggled through his first two years, there was a clear media narrative about his lack of discipline and White House scandals.With Biden, it has been different. Attempts to reduce his struggles to the inflation rate are usually met with vehement rebuttals, there’s a strong market for “bad vibes” explanations of his troubles, a lot of blame gets placed on partisan polarization even though Biden won a clear popular majority not so long ago, and even the age issue has taken center stage only in the past few months.Some of this mystification reflects liberal media bias accentuated by contemporary conditions — an unwillingness to look closely at issues like immigration and the border, a hesitation to speak ill of a president who’s the only bulwark against Trumpism.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