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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

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      How a Columbia Student Fled to Canada After ICE Came Looking for Her

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      Ranjani Srinivasan’s student visa was revoked by U.S. immigration authorities. That was just the start of her odyssey.The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”Ms. Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient who was pursuing a doctoral degree in urban planning, was caught in the dragnet of President Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators through the use of federal immigration powers. She is one of a handful of noncitizens that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has targeted at Columbia in recent days.In the week since that first knock at the door, Ms. Srinivasan says she has struggled to understand why the State Department abruptly revoked her student visa without explanation, leading Columbia to withdraw her enrollment from the university because her legal status had been terminated.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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      Home Sellers and Buyers Accuse Realtors of Blocking Lower Fees

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      A year after a landmark settlement called for a disruption in how real estate agents are paid, people say they still feel forced to pay them excessive commissions.When Mike Chambers was ready to sell his house in Boulder, Colo., last month, he interviewed a handful of real estate agents who promised he could fetch $2.75 million or more if he listed with them. But the promise would come at a cost: Each agent wanted him to pay a commission of at least 5 percent, or $137,500. Frustrated that not a single agent was willing to budge on the rate, Mr. Chambers, 39, decided to sell his house on his own, and he took to social media with the handle @realtorshateme to chronicle the process. His reels drew 50,000 views or more.Within days, local agents were making their own social media posts that countered his points — an action that Mr. Chambers described as an aggressive campaign aimed at preventing him from making a sale on his own. Realtors told Mr. Chamber he could get at least $2.75 million for his house. But he didn’t want to pay 5 percent commission, and none of the agents he met would negotiate.Chet Strange for The New York TimesCall it the Realtor recoil. One year after the National Association of Realtors agreed, as part of a legal settlement, to change a key rule on real estate commissions — a rule that had long upheld a tradition of commissions between 5 and 6 percent, little has changed.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 Thom Tillis’s Surrender to Trump Says About the Trump G.O.P.

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      Few Republican senators give a better floor speech than Thom Tillis of North Carolina does. He’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of moral outrage. He delivered a doozy last month, challenging President Trump’s revisionist history of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling Vladimir Putin “a liar, a murderer” and “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”But Tulsi Gabbard is apparently no threat at all. Although she has been something of a Putin apologist, Tillis fell in line with 51 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate and voted to confirm her as director of national intelligence. Afterward, on Facebook, he proclaimed his pride in supporting her.He made impassioned remarks in the Senate about his disagreement with Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters who bloodied law enforcement officers.But the following month, he voted to confirm Kash Patel, who has peddled the kinds of fictions that fueled that violence, as director of the F.B.I.Courage, capitulation — Tillis pinballs dizzyingly between the two. As he gears up for a 2026 campaign for a third term in the Senate, he seems to be at war with himself. And perhaps more poignantly than any other Republican on Capitol Hill, Tillis, 64, illustrates how hard it is to be principled, independent or any of those other bygone adjectives in Trump’s Republican Party.That’s a compliment. For most Republicans in Congress, there’s no battle between conscience and supplication. They dropped to their knees years ago. There’s no tension between what they say and what they do. They praise Trump with their every word, including the conjunctions.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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      Arlington Cemetery Website Loses Pages on Black Soldiers, Women in Military and Civil War

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      Materials on the Arlington National Cemetery website highlighting the graves of Black and female service members have vanished as the Trump administration purges government websites of references to diversity and inclusion.Among the obscured pages are cemetery guides focused on Black soldiers, women’s military service and Civil War veterans. Some of the materials were still online Friday, but they were no longer easily accessible through the cemetery’s website.A part of the site devoted to segregation and civil rights was largely scrubbed. That section once included a walking tour focused on Black soldiers and a lesson plan on reconstruction.The cemetery, which is operated by the Army, said in a statement on Friday that it remained committed to “sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism” and that it was working to restore links to the content.“We are hopeful to begin republishing content next week,” Kerry Meeker, a cemetery spokeswoman, said in an email on Friday.On Friday, the cemetery’s website still had an active page describing Section 27, which includes the graves of thousands of African Americans freed from slavery. Another active page listed prominent African Americans — including Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall and Colin L. Powell — buried on the grounds.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 Tariffs Leave No Country Room for Exemptions, U.S. Tells Canada

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      In talks aimed at finding common ground on tariffs, Canadian officials were told April 2 will be a crucial day in setting the Trump tariff doctrine, and any relief could come later.Top U.S. representatives told a Canadian delegation on Thursday that there was no way Canada, or any other country in President Trump’s cross hairs, could avoid a new round of sweeping tariffs on April 2, according to two people with direct knowledge of their conversation.Any negotiations to remove some tariffs or even strike a more comprehensive trade deal would come after that date, American officials told their Canadian counterparts at a meeting in Washington, D.C. Mr. Trump, through an executive order, has ordered an in-depth examination of trade between the United States and several partners, including Canada, and the imposition of “reciprocal” tariffs beginning on April 2, to match surcharges other countries impose on U.S. goods.The United States was represented in the meeting by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Canada was represented by Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman.The Canadian officials left the meeting, which lasted more than an hour, with a clearer — but not necessarily more optimistic — sense of what lies ahead, according to two of them with direct knowledge of what transpired, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press about it.While the Trump officials made clear their pledge on reciprocal tariffs, Mr. Trump has shown a repeated penchant for vowing to press ahead with tariffs only to decide at the last minute to back down or grant a reprieve.The meeting was a an effort to inject a calmer approach to the relationship between the two countries, even as Mr. Trump on Thursday continued to level threats against Canada’s sovereignty.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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      Postal Service Reaches Deal With Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency

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      The leader of the U.S. Postal Service said in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday that he had reached an agreement with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team allowing it to help in “identifying and achieving further efficiencies.”The Postal Service has long struggled with its finances, and Mr. Musk and President Trump have both suggested it should be privatized. But Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting group, the Department of Government Efficiency, has not targeted the Postal Service’s roughly 635,000 workers.Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who took his position during the first Trump presidency and moved to shrink the agency’s ranks during the Biden administration, said he had signed an agreement with Mr. Musk’s group on Wednesday.Mr. DeJoy, a Republican megadonor, wrote in the letter that Mr. Musk’s initiative was “an effort aligned” with his efforts.He said that the Postal Service’s work force had shrunk by 30,000 since the 2021 fiscal year, and that the agency planned to complete a “further reduction of another 10,000 people in the next 30 days” through a previously established voluntary-retirement program.Last week, Mr. Musk said at a tech conference organized by the bank Morgan Stanley that the Postal Service should be privatized, declaring, “We should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized.”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