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      There Is Still a Biden Scandal

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      One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is, when there was a push to force an aging president toward the exits: Then and only then we got a drip-drip-drip of fascinating inside information.For instance, we learned that Biden hadn’t held a full cabinet meeting since last October and that his handlers expected scripted questions from his cabinet officials. We learned that his capacities peak between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and diminish outside that six-hour window. We learned that congressional Democrats, liberal donors and some journalists all had exposure to Biden’s decline that they didn’t discuss publicly until the debacle of the June debate. We learned that none other than Hunter Biden was acting as a close adviser to his father in the crucial days after that debate.We even learned that from early in his presidency, the first lady’s closest aides worked to shield her husband from the staff that serves the first family in its living quarters, even as the aides themselves were given unusual access to the residence — as though it were essential to create a cocoon of loyalty and silence around the nation’s chief executive even when he isn’t on the job.These are all interesting and pertinent facts about the man who officially leads the United States in a time of global danger — and they have not ceased to be pertinent because that president is no longer running for re-election.For a few weeks the media coverage of the Biden White House built up the idea that there was a major scandal here, implicating the inner circle that encouraged the president to run for re-election and practiced deception amid his obvious decline.The potential scale of that scandal has diminished now that the country is no longer being asked to entrust the Oval Office to Biden for another four years. And concerns about the capacities of Donald Trump, the aging candidate actually running for the White House, are naturally going to claim more attention now that they’re contrasted with a younger rival.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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      Sheriff Resigns After Backlash Over Sonya Massey’s Shooting Death

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      Jack Campbell, the sheriff of Sangamon County, was criticized for hiring the deputy, who has now been charged with murdering Sonya Massey in her home last month.Jack Campbell, the Illinois sheriff whose deputy was charged with murder after fatally shooting a Black woman in her home last month, said Friday that he would leave his position by the end of the month amid calls from the public and the governor that he do so.The sheriff said in a statement obtained by WAND, a local television news station, that the “current political climate” made it impossible for him to continue in his role leading the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office and that he would retire no later than Aug. 31.Sheriff Campbell had previously said he would not resign as he faced criticism for having hired Sean Grayson, the white deputy who shot Sonya Massey, 36, despite knowing that Mr. Grayson, 30, had two convictions for driving under the influence on his record, including one that had led to Mr. Grayson’s premature discharge from the Army in February 2016.Mr. Grayson fatally shot Ms. Massey at her home in Springfield, Ill., on July 6 after she had called the emergency services because she believed an intruder was in her home.The day before, Ms. Massey’s mother, Donna Massey, had called 911 to alert the authorities that her daughter had been having a mental breakdown and was in a vulnerable state.“I don’t want you guys to hurt her, please,” she told a dispatcher on the morning of July 5.Sheriff Campbell, who was elected in 2018, fired Mr. Grayson on July 17 after an investigation into the deputy’s shooting of Ms. Massey by the state police resulted in a murder charge. On July 22, his department released footage of the shooting from Mr. Grayson’s body-worn camera.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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      Fed Rate Cuts Are Expected Soon, as Inflation Cools. But Will They Be Early Enough to Avoid a Recession?

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      The Federal Reserve was about to cut interest rates, turning the corner after a long fight with inflation. But now, its soft landing is in question.The Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation was going almost unbelievably well. Price increases were coming down. Growth was holding up. Consumers continued to spend. The labor market was chugging along.Policymakers appeared poised to lower interest rates — just a little — at their meeting on Sept. 18. Officials did not need to keep hitting the brakes on growth so much, as the economy settled into a comfortable balance. It seemed like central bankers were about to pull off a rare economic soft landing, cooling inflation without tanking the economy.But just as that sunny outcome came into view, clouds gathered on the horizon.The unemployment rate has moved up meaningfully over the past year, and a weak employment report released last week has stoked concern that the job market may be on the brink of a serious cool-down. That’s concerning, because a weakening labor market is usually the first sign that the economy is careening toward a recession.The Fed could still get the soft landing it has been hoping for — weekly jobless claims fell more than expected in fresh data released on Thursday, a minor but positive development. Given the possibility that everything will turn out fine, central bank officials are not yet ready to panic. During an event on Monday, Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, suggested that officials were closely watching the job market to try to figure out whether it was cooling too much or simply returning to normal after a few roller-coaster years.“We’re at the point of — is the labor market slowing a lot, or slowing a little?” Ms. Daly said, as she pointed to one-off factors that could have muddled the latest report, like Hurricane Beryl and a recent inflow of new immigrant workers that left more people searching for jobs.“It’s clear inflation is coming down closer to our target, it’s clear that the labor market is slowing, and it’s to a point where we have to balance those goals,” she 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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      In Prisoner Swap, Echoes of Putin’s K.G.B. Past

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      A sprawling exchange with the West underscored the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. It also showed his continued interest in making deals.As he sat in a Russian jail for five months, the human rights champion Oleg Orlov sometimes grew wistful: What if he walked free someday as part of a deal between Russia and the West?The chances that President Vladimir V. Putin would make a prisoner swap like that seemed as remote as a “star twinkling far, far, far away on the horizon,” Mr. Orlov, 71, said this week. The dire state of the relationship between Moscow and the West, and their diverging interests, appeared to rule out the kind of detailed negotiation necessary for such a complicated deal.But last week, it happened, in the most far-reaching prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War: Mr. Putin and his ally Belarus freed Mr. Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians released by the West. It was a moment when Mr. Orlov saw anew how core Mr. Putin’s past with the K.G.B., the Soviet spy agency, was to the Russian president’s identity — and to the sort of country he’s trying to shape Russia into.The swap happened because “Putin is a K.G.B. man, an F.S.B. man,” Mr. Orlov said in a phone interview four days after two private jets carrying him and other released prisoners landed in Cologne, Germany. Espionage is a subject Mr. Orlov knows well, having spent decades studying the crimes of the Soviet secret police as a co-founder of the Memorial human rights group, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.The Russian human rights champion Oleg Orlov, shown in court in Moscow in February, was freed in the exchange last week.Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Putin served as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and ran the F.S.B., its domestic intelligence successor agency, in the 1990s. To the Russian leader, Mr. Orlov said, showing loyalty to the F.S.B. and other Russian intelligence services by winning their agents’ freedom trumped the political risk of releasing opposition figures whom the Kremlin had branded as traitors.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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      Japan’s Nikkei Rises as Asian Stocks Rebound from Sell-Off

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      The Nikkei 225, the benchmark index in Japan, rose on Tuesday after a record decline.Investors in Asia reclaimed a measure of calm on Tuesday, after a day of frenzied selling around the world over concerns about a potential U.S. recession.In Japan, where the losses Monday were largest, stocks bounced higher. The Nikkei 225 index rose 11 percent after plunging 12.4 percent the day before. That was the benchmark index’s biggest one-day point decline, larger than the plummet during the Black Monday crash in October 1987.Stocks in South Korea, which were also down more than 10 percent at one point on Monday, regained about 4 percent.The jolt to stock markets started last week in Japan, where worries about the state of the U.S. economy were compounded by concerns about the effects a rapidly strengthening yen would have on corporate profits.On Friday, a report on American jobs showed a considerable slowdown in hiring, prompting a sell-off in U.S. markets. More widespread panic took hold on Monday over fears that the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to start cutting interest rates, threatening the strength of the U.S. economy. On Wall Street, the S&P 500 fell 3 percent, its sharpest daily decline since September 2022.The Fed is expected to start cutting rates, which are at a more-than-two-decade high, later this year.Conditions in Japan have been complicated by a policy shift in the opposite direction. The Bank of Japan last Wednesday increased its key rate to a quarter point. It was only the central bank’s second rate increase since 2007. After years in which policymakers kept interest rates low to try to boost prices and consumption, inflation has risen to levels at which they felt they could begin raising rates.The prospect of higher rates caused the yen to strengthen, a trend that could be good for Japan’s economy over the longer term but will be a drag on corporate profits, especially for big companies that rely on selling abroad. The currency’s rise spooked investors, some of whom feared a stronger yen would spell the end of a more-than-yearlong rally in Japanese stocks that had been driven by a weakened currency.A stronger yen also undercut some global investments made when the currency was cheaper, acting as a catalyst to wider selling across markets already nervous that stock prices had risen too high, too quickly. A popular trade among some investors involved borrowing in yen, and then investing it in markets like the U.S. But as the strength of the dollar this year began to ebb, profits from that trade also started to reverse course.The yen weakened on Tuesday, trading at around 145 to the dollar, compared with 141 the previous day.While the chain reaction of a strengthening Japanese currency and declining stocks seems to have calmed, analysts expect large market fluctuations to carry forward until there is more clarity about the direction of the economy in the United States.Joe Rennison More

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      How Julien Alfred Beat Sha’Carri Richardson for Gold

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      Richardson’s slow start put her behind, a position she had been able to overcome in the past. But not on Saturday, as she rarely matched Alfred’s speed during any part of the race. Women’s 100-meter final results 1 Alfred 10.72s 23.15mph 25.50mph 2 Richardson 10.87s 22.84mph 25.18mph 3 Jefferson 10.92s 22.64mph 25.03mph 4 Neita 10.96s […] More