Subterms
Five years ago, Covid took hold and the world transformed almost overnight. As routines and rituals evaporated, often replaced by grief, fear and isolation, many of us wondered: When will things go back to normal? Could they ever? Today, for many, the coronavirus pandemic seems far away and foggy, while for others it’s as visceral […] More
Mark Carney, exgobernador del banco central canadiense, encabeza ahora el Partido Liberal y pronto dirigirá CanadáMark Carney, exgobernador del banco central canadiense, consiguió el liderazgo del Partido Liberal de Canadá el domingo y se convertirá en primer ministro en un momento crítico para el país, que se enfrenta a amenazas a su economía y soberanía por parte del presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump.Carney, quien nunca había sido elegido para un cargo público, fue gobernador del Banco de Canadá durante la crisis financiera mundial de 2008 y gobernador del Banco de Inglaterra durante el Brexit. También fue un banquero de éxito en el sector privado, amasando una importante fortuna personal.Dominó la carrera por el liderazgo de los liberales, asegurándose una victoria decisiva. Pero como el partido no tiene mayoría en el Parlamento, Carney pronto tendrá que convocar elecciones generales, en las que los liberales se enfrentarán al Partido Conservador, dirigido por Pierre Poilievre.La elección de Carney marca el final del mandato de una década de Justin Trudeau como primer ministro. La popularidad de Trudeau se había deteriorado, ya que muchos lo culpaban del oneroso costo de la vida en Canadá, del aumento de los precios de la vivienda, de la sobrecarga del sistema de salud y de otros problemas.Esto es lo que hay que saber:Las amenazas de Trump se ciernen sobre élCarney ve “días oscuros”Trudeau se despide emocionadoLas elecciones se han transformadoWe 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
On Jan. 1, 2015, I self-deported from the United States, my home of more than 22 years, to return to the Philippines, where I was born and lived until the age of 9. At takeoff, sorrow overtook the terror I felt at check-in. The T.S.A. agent had scanned my passport — renewed in 2002, devoid of a visa — and waved me through. I froze in place: Where were the ICE agents?That day, I found out that no one cares if an undocumented immigrant leaves America. Only my husband, waving from beyond the gate, cared. He would eventually meet me in London; I was to go to Manila first to apply for a British spouse visa, which I couldn’t do in the United States because I was an undocumented person.America is home; it raised me. I came in 1992, the daughter of Filipinos who left their homeland — an economy drained by dictatorship — in search of a better life. I left in 2015 as a broken adult of 31, still in search of that better life. When I returned last month, I found a different country.My decision to leave the United States seemed crazy, the resulting bar on returning for 10 years a self-inflicted wound. This view requires the belief that America is exceptional, the only nation capable of caring for its people and helping them achieve their potential. After a near-lifetime of being undocumented, I had stopped believing this.In my experience, America had become a place to flee from, not to. At the time I lived in New York without papers, I couldn’t secure a license to drive, afford to go to college, start a career, get health care, vote, open a bank account or travel freely. My life was a struggle with domestic and sexual violence, financial hardship and suicide attempts. By self-deporting, I ended my American life to save what remained of my actual life.In the years before I left New York City, in my 20s and early 30s, I worked, hoping to save for a bachelor’s degree I would never earn. On Craigslist, I found temp jobs that didn’t require proof of legality: street fund-raiser, receptionist, assistant, office manager. The city’s buoying energy saved me in those years. I convinced myself that hiding and surviving was enough, that I didn’t need papers.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
The country’s top leaders set an optimistic growth target but gave few hints of how to achieve it as their export-led strategy is challenged by rising tariffs on Chinese goods.For months, China has promised to help its people spend more to turn the economy around, while taking few concrete measures.On Wednesday, the country’s top leaders pledged to “vigorously” boost spending but once again offered limited details and little money to back it up.The government’s budget and annual work report, released on the most important day in China’s political calendar, during the meeting in Beijing called the National People’s Congress, set an optimistic target of 5 percent growth but gave scant indication of how the economy would get there without another surge in exports this year. China’s reliance on trade for growth faces fresh challenges as the United States and many other countries have raised tariffs on Chinese goods.“The headwinds remain very strong on growth: The property market hasn’t stabilized and consumer confidence remains low,” said Tao Wang, chief China economist at UBS. “Now we have a fresh wave of tariffs and who knows what else will come. Policy needs to do the heavy lifting.”Here are some key takeaways from China’s budget — and what it means for one of the world’s biggest economies.Beijing to consumers: Spend, spend, spend!China is one of the few places in the world with deflation, an economic condition in which many prices are falling. That might sound appealing to Americans struggling with hefty bills for groceries and other expenses, but it can be a crippling problem: Many companies and households have seen their earnings shrink in recent years. Deflation also raises the cost of debt payments and encourages consumers to put off purchases on the expectation of prices being lower in the future.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
President Trump is doing damage to America that could take a generation or more to repair. The next election cannot fix what Trump is breaking. Neither can the one after that.To understand the gravity of the harm Trump has inflicted on the United States in the first month and a half of his presidency, a comparison with the Cold War is helpful. Republicans and Democrats often had sharp differences in their approach to the Soviet Union — very sharp. The parties would differ, for example, on the amount of military spending, on the approach to arms control and on American military interventions against Soviet allies and their proxies.Deep disagreement over Vietnam helped drive American political debate, both within and between parties, for more than a decade. During the Reagan era, there were fierce arguments over the MX, a powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, and over the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe.These differences were important, but they were less important than the many points of agreement. Both parties were committed to NATO. Both parties saw the Soviet Union as the grave national security threat it was. For decades, both parties were more or less committed to a strategy of containment that sought to keep Soviet tyranny at bay.At no point did Americans go to the polls and choose between one candidate committed to NATO and another candidate sympathetic to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The very idea would have been fantastical. American elections could reset our national security strategy, but they did not change our bedrock alliances. They did not change our fundamental identity.Until now.Consider what happened in the Oval Office on Friday. Trump and Vice President JD Vance ambushed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on live television. Vance accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful,” and Trump attacked him directly:You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country — this country — that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should.Trump’s attack on Zelensky is just the latest salvo against our allies. Back in office, Trump has taught our most important strategic partners a lesson they will not soon forget: America can — and will — change sides. Its voters may indeed choose a leader who will abandon our traditional alliances and actively support one of the world’s most dangerous and oppressive regimes.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
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, fresh from announcing a boost to military spending, is flying to Washington for a high-stakes visit.Now it’s Keir Starmer’s turn.After President Emmanuel Macron of France navigated his meeting with President Trump on Monday, skirting the rockiest shoals but making little headway, Mr. Starmer, the British prime minister, will meet Mr. Trump on Thursday to plead for the United States not to abandon Ukraine.Mr. Starmer will face the same balancing act as Mr. Macron did, without the benefit of years of interactions dating to 2017, when Mr. Trump greeted the newly elected French president with a white-knuckle handshake that was the first of several memorable grip-and-grin moments.Unlike Mr. Macron, Mr. Starmer will arrive in the Oval Office armed with a pledge to increase his country’s military spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2027, and to 3 percent within a decade. That addresses one of Mr. Trump’s core grievances: his contention that Europeans are free riders, sheltering under an American security umbrella.To finance the rearming, Mr. Starmer will pare back Britain’s overseas development aid, a move that echoes, on a more modest scale, Mr. Trump’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. Mr. Starmer’s motive is budgetary not ideological — he says the cuts are regrettable — but Mr. Trump might approve.British officials said Mr. Starmer would combine his confidence-building gestures on defense with a strong show of support for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and a warning not to rush into a peace deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that fails to establish security guarantees for Ukraine.“The key thing is, we don’t want to repeat the previous mistakes in dealing with Putin, in going for a truce or cease-fire that doesn’t convert into a durable peace,” said Peter Mandelson, who became Britain’s ambassador to Washington three weeks ago and has helped arrange the visit.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
As of this writing, the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has spread to 99 people; 95 percent of those diagnosed with measles this year are unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccine status, and the vast majority of those affected are under 19. The outbreak is concentrated in Gaines County, Texas, a rural area in West Texas with a disproportionately high level of religious or philosophical exemptions to vaccines — a whopping 47.95 percent of students from one of only three public school districts in the county claimed exemptions in the 2023-24 school year. The percentage of exemptions in all of Gaines County is nearly 14 percent, and that doesn’t include home-schooled children.Earlier this month, the Texas Department of State Health Services spokesperson Lara Anton said that the outbreak in Gaines County was mostly among the “close-knit, undervaccinated” Mennonite community, whose members don’t get regular health care and don’t attend public school. “The church isn’t the reason that they’re not vaccinated,” Anton said in a news release. “It’s all personal choice and you can do whatever you want.”“Do whatever you want” might be good advice for choosing a fun new wallpaper, but it’s terrible advice for encouraging vaccine uptake.You might assume that many religious groups are doctrinally opposed to vaccination. Why else would the majority of states allow for religious or philosophical exemptions to school vaccine mandates? But that is not accurate. The Mennonite leadership, as Anton points out, is not against vaccines — and neither are most other major religious groups. The U.S. Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches made a statement in 2021 regarding the Covid vaccine that “our confession of faith and our current and historical practice do not provide the necessary rationale for granting a religious exemption based on the theological convictions of the denomination” (italics theirs).This isn’t the first time that undervaccinated religious groups have been at the epicenter of measles outbreaks. In 1991, a Philadelphia measles outbreak that killed nine people spread in two church communities that did not believe in any medical intervention. In 2018-19, an outbreak in Brooklyn took root among undervaccinated Orthodox Jews.As Caitlin Rivers points out in a recent guest essay for Times Opinion, routine childhood vaccines are still very, very popular in the United States. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is already going back on promises he made about vaccines during his confirmation hearing. Earlier he said he wouldn’t mess with the childhood vaccination schedule, and now he’s saying “Nothing is going to be off limits.”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
Workers at East and Gulf Coast ports who went on strike briefly in October ratified a deal that includes a 62 percent raise over six years.Dockworkers on the East and Gulf Coasts voted in favor of a new contract on Tuesday, ending labor turbulence at ports that handle a large share of U.S. trade with the rest of the world.The dockworkers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, said nearly 99 percent of its members had supported the contract, which raises wages 62 percent over six years and guarantees jobs when employers introduce technology that can move cargo autonomously.The deal was reached after a short strike in October, the first full-scale walkout since 1977, and the intervention of two U.S. presidents.Officials from the Biden administration pushed the United States Maritime Alliance, the group representing employers, to increase its wage offer, which ended the strike and brought the I.LA. back to the bargaining table. After his election victory, Donald J. Trump backed the union, saying he supported their fight against automation.“This is an incredible contract package,” Harold J. Daggett, the president of the I.L.A., said in a statement.Dockworkers have significant leverage in contract talks because they can shut down ports, throwing supply chains into chaos. But labor experts said Mr. Daggett had bolstered the union’s cause by calling a strike and by establishing strong ties with Mr. Trump.“The only way they would have gotten a deal like this was through striking, showing that they had the economic power and, it turns out, the political power,” said William Brucher, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.All 41 members of the Maritime Alliance, a group that includes port operating companies and shipping lines, voted for the contract, which covers the roughly 25,000 longshoremen who move containers on the East and Gulf Coasts.Under the contact, hourly wages will rise to $63 in 2029, from the current $39. That is comparable to the pay for dockworkers on the West Coast, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose wages will rise to nearly $61 in 2027.With overtime and higher rates for working at night, longshoremen can earn well over $200,000 a year.The I.L.A. has long opposed the introduction of automated cranes and other machines.Like the old contract, the new one bars employers from deploying machinery that can operate at all times without a person directing its moves. The West Coast longshoremen’s union has allowed such technology — like driverless container-moving vehicles — at its ports for years.But the I.L.A.’s new contract does not stop employers from adding cranes that can at times perform tasks — like stacking containers — without direction from a human. And the new contract makes it easier for employers to introduce such cranes.Still, the union got a job guarantee that management would assign at least one worker for each additional crane. (Now, one union worker might remotely oversee and operate several cranes at once.) More
