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      9 Pandemic Narratives We’re Getting Wrong

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      We are entering the fourth year of the pandemic, believe it or not: Freshmen are now seniors, toddlers now kindergartners and medical students now doctors. We’ve completed two American election cycles and one World Cup cycle. Army volunteers are nearing the end of their active-duty commitment. It’s been a long haul but in other ways a short jump: Three years is not so much time that it should be hard to clearly remember what happened. And yet it seems to me, on many important points our conventional pandemic history is already quite smudged.You could write columns about any number of misleading pandemic fables. (For my sins, I have: about America’s Covid-19 exceptionalism, about “red Covid,” about pandemic learning loss.) And some misunderstandings have been etched into our collective memory: over aerosol spread or the value of masking, ventilators and ivermectin (to name a few). But as time rolls on, the bigger point feels even more important to me. Though the fog-of-war phase of the pandemic is over, we are still struggling to see clearly many of its major features, captive instead to narrative formulations we’ve imposed on even messier realities, perhaps as a way of avoiding the harder questions they might raise.Which do I mean? Below are a few examples that sketch that bigger phenomenon. This is not at all a comprehensive list, nor is it meant to be. But I hope it is an illustrative one, itemizing several ways in which huge swaths of the country see the experience of the past few years through prisms of anxiety and partisanship, self-justification and self-interest.This is bad for future preparedness, of course. If we’re hoping to draw lessons from the past few years, it may be worth knowing that we might pay relatively more attention to the pandemic’s second year, for instance, and perhaps relatively less to its first. If we are trying to assess China’s “zero Covid” policy, we should have a clear picture of its vaccination failures rather than attributing the brutality of its current wave to decisions made three years ago. If we’re hoping to adjudicate what seems like a forever war between lockdowners and let-it-rippers, it probably helps to recall what first-year pandemic policy looked like — and how much of what we might remember as policy was really just pandemic.It matters for present-tense level setting, too. If you’ve spent the past month worrying over pediatric hospital wards overwhelmed by the country’s tripledemic, you may have gone hunting for a narrative explanation — that masking and other pandemic restrictions had produced an immunity debt among children or that immune damage from Covid-19 itself had created worse outcomes across the population. But flu diagnoses have already peaked nationally — quite early, by historical standards, but no higher than in average seasons — and respiratory syncytial virus diagnoses have been falling for weeks. (And there were fewer pediatric deaths from flu so far this year than just before the pandemic.)There is also a distressing historiographic lesson, which preoccupies me more. We need to learn from our failures if we hope to get future pandemics right, experts have warned for several years now. But policy questions aside, it doesn’t even seem to me we’re getting the history of this one right, though we just lived through it. You might think time would bring more clarity, but it seems that just as often, a more distant perspective allows misunderstandings to calcify.First, the United States never had lockdowns. (Not like elsewhere in the world, at least.)China sealed residents inside apartments in 2020; two years later it sealed workers inside factories. For much of the early pandemic, Peru permitted only one member of each household to leave the home one day each week for groceries or medical care. It wasn’t until this March that travelers to New Zealand could enter the country without first spending 10 full days locked in a hotel room.In contrast, the United States had state-by-state shelter-in-place guidance that lasted, on average, a month or two, and that was not policed in a very draconian way. Roads were open without checkpoints, streets were free to walk, and stores that remained open were, well, open, for anyone to visit.The disruptions were significant, of course. Many millions quickly lost their jobs, though much of that blow was softened by pandemic relief, and many public-facing businesses closed, as did schools and parts of hospitals. White-collar offices adopted work-from-home policies, large gatherings were canceled, and there were some accounts of people being ticketed in particular localities for gathering in parks or on beaches.But in the global context, if anything, American restrictions were remarkably light. Consider a tool developed by the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, and published by The Financial Times, to compare the stringency of pandemic policy over time. For a brief period in March 2020, the United States appeared to have imposed restrictions roughly at the global average, with many nations stricter and many looser. But almost immediately, the rest of the world’s lockdown measures became stricter, while the United States’ remained the same. And by May, just two months after restrictions began, the United States was among the least strict places in the world. Mitigation policies were, of course, imposed here, but the U.S. response was not an outlying extreme then or at any point later in the pandemic.So when Elon Musk, shortly before declaring that his pronouns were “Prosecute/Fauci,” shared a meme showing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the now-former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whispering to President Biden, “One more lockdown, my king,” Musk may well have been giving voice to a widespread American frustration with the length of the pandemic. But it’s unclear what policy or even policy guidance he was referring to. Sure, there were long school closures in many places, as well as mask mandates or recommendations, widespread testing and, in some venues in some parts of the country, vaccine mandates, too. But in retrospect, to the extent that the country as a whole was ever governed by shelter-in-place orders, it was under the previous president, not this one, and they were lifted almost everywhere by early summer of 2020. (The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, even called masks “the scarlet letter” of the pandemic.) To call the mitigation measures of the past two years lockdowns is to equate any policy intrusion or reminder of ongoing spread with a curfew or stay-at-home-order — which is to say it is a striking form of American pandemic narcissism.Most governors during the pandemic seemed to benefit politically.The year 2020 was one of pandemic lionization. By that April, the average approval rating for American governors was 64 percent. The following election season featured a couple of high-profile races that have shaped the narrative about pandemic politics and the costs of mitigation, with Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeating the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe, for the Virginia governorship in part by channeling public frustration with Covid restrictions, and New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, a Democrat, barely hanging on against a little-known Republican challenger yelling about lockdowns. But a report from the Brookings Institution suggested that of the 10 governors with the biggest popularity declines from mid-2020 to mid-2021, eight were Republicans. (The other two were Democrats in red states.)And by this November, the political fallout seems to have very clearly settled down, at least at the state level. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, famously won re-election in Florida in part by campaigning against Covid mitigations. But the Democrats J.B. Pritzker in Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Tony Evers in Wisconsin won, too, each having deployed aggressive statewide mitigation efforts and each winning larger shares of the vote than they secured in their previous races. In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis positioned himself as a reopening Democrat and won, and in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine positioned himself as a cautious, Covid-conscious Republican and won, too. In fact, in only one state, Nevada, did an incumbent governor lose re-election in 2022 — and that race pitted the incumbent, a Democrat who didn’t win a majority in his previous race, against a Republican challenger who didn’t win a majority in this one.There are a number of possible ways to read these results, including that the pandemic simply retreated as an issue over time. But it is hard to look at a slate of 36 elections in which only four governorships changed party hands and conclude that pandemic backlash remains a dominant force in electoral politics.The most consequential year of the pandemic in the United States was probably not 2020 but 2021.Works of serious retrospective history lag works of journalism, inevitably, but one risk of real-time reporting is that we never get around to reckoning with turbulent events with anything like proper hindsight. Instead we are left with accounts focused almost exclusively on the story’s first act. That is where we are now: The list of books devoted to the American pandemic response in 2020 is quite long, and the list of books — or even authoritative long-form reporting — devoted to the following years is minuscule.This is especially problematic because — judging both by total mortality and by America’s relative performance against its peers — 2021 was far more telling in its failures. In the first year of the pandemic, the United States performed somewhat worse than some of its peers in the wealthy West but not that much worse. We failed to stop the virus at the border, but so did most other countries in the world, and by the end of 2020, the country’s Covid-19 per capita death toll was near the European Union average. The country spent that first year obsessing over mitigation measures and the partisan gaps that governed them: school closures and indoor dining, mask wearing and social distancing. But it was in the pandemic’s second year, in which mortality was defined much less by mitigation policies than by vaccination uptake, that the country really faltered.Mass vaccination, though miraculously effective, didn’t usher in a lower overall death toll.To judge by cumulative deaths, the midpoint of the American pandemic so far is April 2021, when 550,000 Americans had died and more than 100 million Americans had been fully vaccinated. We’ve had more deaths since the end of the initial Omicron surge, this past winter, than the country had experienced by late May 2020, when The New York Times proclaimed the death toll of 100,000 “an incalculable loss.”This is not because vaccines don’t work, of course. But especially with the initial Omicron wave, infections became so widespread that they effectively canceled out the population-scale impact of vaccination. If you get a vaccine that cuts your risk of dying from Covid by 90 percent, for instance, but infections grow five times as common, you are only twice as safe as you were before — and the same math applies to the country as a whole.Of course, without vaccination, current infection rates would have produced a much higher toll. But overall, though the death rate has decreased, year over year it hasn’t decreased all that significantly. There were about 350,000 Covid deaths in 2020, about 475,000 in 2021 and about 265,000 in 2022.One word for this pattern is “normalization,” and it is undeniably the case that as a whole, the country is less disturbed by those last 265,000 deaths than it was by the first 350,000. But we did quite a lot to keep the toll as low as 350,000 in that first year and have chosen to do successively less in the year of vaccines and then the year of Omicron that followed. We have effectively recalibrated our mitigation measures roughly around the mortality level of 2020 — as though that death toll was not an anomaly but a target.Barring a major new variant, 2023 should be less brutal. But to this point, even widespread vaccination (two-thirds of the country as a whole and over 90 percent of American seniors) hasn’t been enough to substantially change the trajectory of pandemic death in this country. And if we are building our understanding of social risk simply from the infection-fatality rate, which tells us the risk of death given an infection, we’re missing half of the critical information — how likely that infection is to begin with.China’s vaccines are probably not much worse than ours; it just did a poorer job vaccinating the elderly.Especially as “zero Covid” protests began in China this fall, Western commentators emphasized that the Chinese vaccines offered considerably less protection than the mRNA versions developed in and preferred by countries like the United States. These days, it’s much harder to measure vaccine effectiveness, in part because of growing immunity from vaccine doses and infections.Most of our best data shows that, especially after one dose but also after two, the mRNA vaccines do more to protect against severe hospitalization and death than do the Sinovac and Sinopharm varieties developed and manufactured in China. But most Americans who are up-to-date with vaccinations are already past three shots to four. And after three doses, the difference may be quite negligible, with some studies showing only a somewhat modest mRNA advantage. According to one high-profile study published in The Lancet: Infectious Disease, among the most vulnerable — those over 80 — three doses of the Chinese vaccines may offer slightly better protection.But an alarmingly high number of China’s oldest citizens, perhaps one-third, have not been vaccinated. This means the relative share of China’s older population that remains entirely unprotected is as much as six times as large as that of the United States, and of course, in absolute numbers, the vulnerability is even larger. Which makes that vaccine gap, though quite significant, less a matter of science and technology than of political and social factors — chiefly the matter of why China has done so poorly to protect its most vulnerable citizens.Many hypotheses have been offered to explain this shortcoming, from worries about side effects to troubling history with past vaccination campaigns and confidence that “zero Covid” would eliminate disease spread in perpetuity. But among the less-talked-about possibilities is that the vaccination program may have been designed less to save lives by protecting the most vulnerable than to preserve the work force by focusing on the young and middle-aged. In theory, this could also explain what seems to outsiders like a whiplashing policy reversal, from “zero Covid” to zero surveillance. Even limited testing and mitigation measures, which would slow the spread of the disease, could cause more economic disruption than was considered acceptable (or medically necessary, given the age of the work force).The world’s worst pandemic was probably not in the United States or Britain, Italy or Spain, China or India but in Eastern Europe — notably in Russia.Because medical record keeping varies so much from country to country, official Covid death tolls are a misleading measure of pandemic impact. In wealthy countries, where more testing has been done and causes of death are recorded somewhat more systematically, the numbers appear relatively higher, and in poorer countries, with less testing and somewhat less scrupulous death certificates, they are lower.Excess mortality statistics tell a more reliable story, though because they essentially compare total deaths against recent historical averages for a country, they rely on statistical modeling and the availability of older data. The Economist maintains the best running excess mortality database, and the story it tells about the global toll of the pandemic is very clear. Of the 106 countries included in its data set, the 12 hardest hit were in Eastern Europe, as were 17 of the worst 20. Many of these are small countries; The Economist estimates the two most brutal pandemics in the world were in Serbia and Bulgaria, each with populations under seven million. The third-worst pandemic was in Russia, where there were more than one million excess deaths in a population of more than 140 million, an excess per capita death toll two and a half times as heavy as the American one. (Interesting time to launch a war of choice.)Long Covid is definitely real, but it’s also becoming less common.In 2020 the United States treated reports of long Covid almost as a ghost story — anecdotes at the spooky margins of our collective nightmare and ones we didn’t know how much to trust. Three years later, thanks in part to the tireless work of patients and advocates, the phenomenon is a much more central part of the pandemic story told by public health officials, politicians and the media. But just as we’ve grown slowly to accept long Covid, it is also becoming less and less common. Growing research shows that risks are declining. Vaccination and previous infection, though imperfect, appear to reduce vulnerability for long-term consequences, and the severity of early cases of long Covid, like the severity of early cases of acute Covid, appears to reflect the immunological naïveté of the population as a whole, which has been steadily declining ever since.We’ve moved past interventions like masks as a country, but that doesn’t mean the Great Barrington Declaration advocates were right.Arguments against pandemic restrictions were made almost as soon as the first schools and offices were closed, typically by conservatives (though many liberals came around to the cause when vaccines arrived). But the case for relaxing restrictions was made most famously in a 2020 document called the Great Barrington Declaration. Written chiefly by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, it proposed that pandemic policy was doing more harm than good, that most people should live normal lives to build up immunity through infections and that the most vulnerable members of society could be protected in much more targeted ways than the one-size-fits-all approach that had been deployed to that point.It was a bundle of scientific claims and policy proposals, in other words, which itself is telling. Today you might be inclined to think about the question of mitigation simply at the level of policy, asking what restrictions were necessary or helpful, given a shared base of knowledge about Covid-19. But the debates early on were not just debates over policy trade-offs. They also concerned basic science. And on many of those critical points, those pushing against mitigation measures were wrong.Dr. Bhattacharya, for instance, proclaimed in The Wall Street Journal in March 2020 that Covid-19 was only one-tenth as deadly as the flu. In January 2021 he wrote an opinion essay for the Indian publication The Print suggesting that the majority of the country had acquired natural immunity from infection already and warning that a mass vaccination program would do more harm than good for people already infected. Shortly thereafter, the country’s brutal Delta wave killed perhaps several million Indians. In May 2020, Dr. Gupta suggested that the virus might kill around five in 10,000 people it infected, when the true figure in a naïve population was about one in 100 or 200, and that Covid was “on its way out” in Britain. At that point, it had killed about 45,000 Britons, and it would go on to kill about 170,000 more. The following year, Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Kulldorff together made the same point about the disease in the United States — that the pandemic was “on its way out” — on a day when the American death toll was approaching 600,000. Today it is 1.1 million and growing.This is not to say that these voices should have been silenced or driven from public debate. Some questions they raised were important matters of ongoing contestation, especially in the pandemic’s earliest days. As should be obvious three years in, pandemic policy did involve unmistakable trade-offs; the large, ongoing mortality under Mr. Biden is one reminder that mitigation was never as simple as just hitting the science button. But making arguments about those trade-offs using bad data or inaccurate timelines distorts the picture of the trade-off, of course. And to treat these arguments as merely political debates is to forget how much of the argument for reopening was based on bad science — and how much harder it would have been, at the time, to persuade many people using what turned out to be accurate data.As for the policy advice of the Great Barrington Declaration? The economist Tyler Cowen recently revisited the case for focused protection — the idea, emphasized in the declaration, that the most vulnerable members of society could have been shielded more aggressively while life continued mostly as normal for everyone else. (A study by his colleague Alex Tabarrok suggested this policy would have been hard to achieve, given that the death rates in the country’s best-resourced and best-run nursing homes were not better than the rates experienced in much more negligent settings. Mr. Tabarrok estimates there were larger missed opportunities in vaccinating nursing homes more quickly.)Mr. Cowen argued that actions that would have genuinely qualified, in retrospect, as protecting the vulnerable would have included preparing hospitals for patients in January 2020, accelerating vaccine rollout and uptake, and pushing for development of new treatments and promoting widespread testing. “If you were not out promoting those ideas, but instead talked about ‘protecting the vulnerable’ in a highly abstract manner, you were not doing much to protect the vulnerable,” he wrote.“Publishing papers suggesting a very, very low Covid-19 mortality rate, and then sticking with those results in media appearances after said results appeared extremely unlikely to be true,” he added, “endangered the vulnerable rather than protecting them.”The great success of the pandemic was Operation Warp Speed, but we’re learning the wrong lessons from it, emphasizing deregulation rather than public funding and demand.The rush to develop, produce and deliver vaccines is the signal American achievement of the pandemic — so consequential, it is a pretty persuasive rebuttal to anyone decrying the country’s failure to stem the pandemic or pinning that failure on some narrative of national disarray. The vaccines were designed in just days, produced in just months and delivered within a year of the country’s first confirmed case, saving at least many hundreds of thousands of American lives and probably many millions globally.But in the public narrative of the pandemic, Operation Warp Speed plays a remarkably small role, likely because of the partisan complications. The accelerated development was overseen by Donald Trump and shepherded by Jared Kushner, so even very pro-vaccine liberals are not all that likely to credit the program. But liberals embracing the vaccines have made it somewhat harder for conservatives to claim it as a policy victory. (One wonders how differently this dynamic might have played out if the vaccines had been approved before the 2020 elections, as was originally expected.)In the public square, then, the job of celebrating the success of Warp Speed has fallen to a somewhat motley alliance of progress-minded technocrats, making the argument that reviving and extending the program may well be the most important public health imperative to emerge from the pandemic. And last summer the White House began an initiative to try to recreate the program’s success — announcing another Operation Warp Speed to develop new vaccines and treatments that could protect the country against future waves of the virus.But the immediate aftermath of that announcement is telling, with the project sputtering without real funding and no new vaccines or treatments available and few being developed. The White House team had done what it could to learn a certain set of lessons from Operation Warp Speed, including coordinating the development of promising vaccine candidates and accelerating the timelines of clinical trials. But it hasn’t secured money to support the project, nor did it give any concrete reason to believe that there would be significant demand for the new drugs when, if ever, they came online. (The declining American interest in Covid booster shots seems to suggest that demand could be very small.)On balance, then, we are seeing a test play out in real time. How much additional innovation can be unlocked simply through cutting red tape, and how much requires something more? That is: guaranteed money or guaranteed demand or both. And while it’s certainly true that bureaucratic streamlining played a role in the rapid development of vaccines, it seems to me that the giant size of the market was almost certainly a more important driver — billions of people here and abroad desperate for vaccine protection and deliverance from the pandemic and a world of governments willing to cover the full cost of the shots and their distribution.It is worth remembering the supply-side lessons of Operation Warp Speed — that public-private enterprise can be streamlined and that legacy regulations may well slow new drug innovation and production (with tragic consequences). But let’s not forget the demand side or what that tells us about future R. and D.: While bureaucracy may well slow development and rollout, removing those obstacles is not nearly as productive as conjuring up a market. In the absence of a new pandemic, it may be that government guarantees are the only tool that might create comparable ones.*How surprising is all this? Early in the pandemic, we were treated to a raft of meditations on the 1918 flu epidemic, each invariably mentioning how little tribute was paid in the years that followed, despite a global death toll in the hundreds of millions, many times larger than the world war it punctuated.That does not seem all that likely to be our fate this time. Much of the country is happy to move on, of course. But people on both sides of the pandemic aisle seem still invested in prosecuting arguments about mismanagement, so it is hard to imagine the death and disruption of the past few years losing political and social salience anytime soon.But salience is not the same thing as lucidity, and in the years ahead, as the world begins revising its histories of the pandemic, as it always does in the aftermath of great disruption and trauma, we may find ourselves polishing these simplistic just-so stories into talismans so smooth, they’ve lost all shape.Perhaps this is inevitable. And yet I’m surprised by it. The country has just passed through the most brutally tumultuous experience in at least a generation, in which more than one million Americans died and everyone else’s lives were deeply disrupted. The whole time, the shape and near future of the pandemic seemed of absolutely central cultural interest and paramount importance, a top-shelf preoccupation of the news media and a running conversation subject on social channels. Three years ago, that sort of experience might have seemed to be too large for anyone to misperceive. Perhaps that was pandemic narcissism, too.David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), a writer for Opinion and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.” More

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      in Elections

      Israel’s Hard-Line Government Takes Office, Testing Bonds With Allies

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      Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition will likely test ties with the United States and Europe, amid fears that it will undermine the country’s democracy and stability.Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as prime minister of Israel for a sixth time.Amir Levy/Getty ImagesJERUSALEM — Israel’s new government was sworn in on Thursday, returning Benjamin Netanyahu to power at the head of a right-wing and religiously conservative administration that represents a significant challenge for the country on the world stage.Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition will likely test Israel’s ties with the United States and Europe, amid fears that his coalition partners will undermine the country’s liberal democracy and its stability. Mr. Netanyahu dismissed those concerns in a speech in Parliament before a vote of confidence and the swearing-in of his ministers.“There is a broad consensus among us about most of the challenges we face, though certainly not about all of them,” he said. “I hear the constant lamentations of the opposition about ‘the country being over’ and ‘the end of democracy.’ Members of the opposition, losing in elections is not the end of democracy — it is the essence of democracy.”The makeup of Mr. Netanyahu’s government and the policies it has pledged to pursue have raised concerns about increased tensions with Palestinians, the undermining of the country’s judicial independence and the rolling back of protections for the L.G.B.T.Q. community and other sectors of society.Mr. Netanyahu’s return as prime minister for a sixth time comes at a critical moment for Israel as it faces fundamental challenges: Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons; growing international criticism of its handling of the occupied West Bank; and a global tide of antisemitism.The coalition has been clear in its manifesto — hammered out in agreements with various parties as ministries were handed out — about what it intends to do.It has declared the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and pledged to bolster Jewish settlement in the West Bank — explicitly abandoning the internationally recognized formula for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Peace talks have been on hiatus for years.Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its manifesto have raised concerns about increased tensions with Palestinians and protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people.Abir Sultan/EPA, via ShutterstockThe new government is also pressing for an overhaul of the judiciary that Mr. Netanyahu — currently on trial on corruption charges — and his supporters insist will restore the proper balance between the branches of government. Critics say the move would curb the power of the independent judiciary, damaging Israel’s democratic system and leaving minorities more vulnerable.Mr. Netanyahu’s past coalitions have been balanced by more moderate parties, but this time, he had to rely more heavily on far-right parties to form a government. That could complicate Israel’s relations with perhaps its most important ally, the United States, and with American Jews, who have been among Israel’s strongest supporters abroad.What to Know About Israel’s New GovernmentNetanyahu’s Return: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is set to return to power at the helm of the most right-wing administration in Israeli history.The Far Right’s Rise: To win election, Mr. Netanyahu and his far-right allies harnessed perceived threats to Israel’s Jewish identity after ethnic unrest and the subsequent inclusion of Arab lawmakers in the government.Arab Allies: Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right allies have a history of making anti-Arab statements. Three Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel in 2020 appear unconcerned.Worries Among Palestinians: To some Palestinians, the rise of Israel’s far right can scarcely make things worse. But many fear a surge of violence.President Biden on Thursday said in a statement that he looked forward to working with a prime minister “who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region, including threats from Iran.”But Mr. Biden also hinted at possible sources of tension with the new government, like L.G.B.T.Q. rights and conflicts with Palestinians. He said “the United States will continue to support the two state solution and to oppose policies that endanger its viability.”Thomas R. Nides, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said the administration would respond to the Israeli government’s actions rather than coalition deals that may not materialize.“We’ve been told over and over by Prime Minister Netanyahu that he has his hands on the wheel and wants to be the prime minister of everyone,” he said in an interview. “He’s a very talented and very experienced prime minister. We want to work closely with him on mutual values we share, and at this point not get distracted by everyone else. So the focus is on the prime minister and the prime minister’s office.”Another concern for many Jews in the United States who identify with more liberal streams of Judaism is the new government’s policies on religion, which give more weight to strict Orthodox demands. Particularly distressing to many Jews outside Israel, the coalition has promised to restrict the Law of Return, which currently grants refuge and automatic citizenship to foreign Jews, their spouses and descendants who have at least one Jewish grandparent, even though they may not qualify as Jewish according to strict religious law.“We are profoundly concerned about the intentions of this government and we are taking their promises and agenda very seriously,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish denomination in the United States.The coalition partners, he said, also want to narrow who is counted as a legitimate Jew in the Jewish homeland. The “Who is a Jew” debate has surfaced before, but this time, Rabbi Jacobs said, Israelis whose extreme views excluded them from the establishment in the past hold key positions in the government.An ultra-Orthodox man voting in Bnei Brak, Israel, last month. The government’s platform reflects numerous Orthodox demands that liberal Jews in the United States have objected to.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times“Israel doesn’t get to decide alone,” he said of Jewish identity. “In some ways, these policies are meant to push us away. But the result is that we are going to lean in harder because of the importance of the state of Israel in all our lives.”Hundreds of American rabbis have signed an open letter protesting the government proposals.The policies of the new government could also have repercussions with Arab states, even as Israel has in recent years forged diplomatic ties with countries like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.King Abdullah II of Jordan said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday that he was “prepared to get into a conflict” if Israel tries — as some coalition members hope — to change the status of a Jerusalem holy site revered by Muslims and Jews, over which Jordan has custodianship. Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994.Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party has emphasized the parts of the government’s policies aimed at deepening and expanding Israel’s peace and normalization deals with Arab countries, and he has spoken of Saudi Arabia as his next goal.But other clauses of the coalition’s platform talk of promoting Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and further entrenching Jewish settlement in the heart of the land Palestinians have envisaged as their state.Bezalel Smotrich, the ultranationalist new finance minister who ultimately wants to annex the West Bank, will also serve as a minister within the defense ministry responsible for agencies dealing with the construction of Jewish settlements and civilian life in the occupied territories. That is likely to increase tensions with Israel’s allies abroad who place a premium on keeping the two-state option alive.Bezalel Smotrich, right, the new ultranationalist finance minister with Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, in Parliament on Thursday. Pool photo by Amir CohenThe Biden administration “is going to do everything possible to minimize friction and focus on areas of agreement,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and now a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “But friction will be impossible to completely avoid over issues related to the Palestinians, the future of two states and possibly the holy sites and the status of the Arab citizens of Israel.”European allies have so far taken a wait-and-see stance similar to the Biden administration’s. Christofer Burger, the spokesman of the German Foreign Office in Berlin, said Wednesday that bilateral relations with Israel “remain unchanged.”But he noted the Israeli plan to retroactively authorize West Bank settlements built without government permission, saying, “We expect the new Israeli government to refrain from such unilateral moves that would undermine the basis of a negotiated two-state solution.”Some Israeli diplomats have taken a stand against the new government. Israel’s ambassador to France, Yael German, resigned on Thursday, stating in a letter that she could “no longer continue to represent policies so radically different from all that I believe in.”And more than a hundred retired Israeli ambassadors and senior Foreign Ministry officials took the extraordinary step of signing a letter to Mr. Netanyahu this week expressing their “profound concern” at the potential harm to Israel’s strategic relations.“The letter was not politically motivated but was written out of pragmatic concern for how you prevent weakening Israel’s standing in the international arena,” said Jeremy Issacharoff, a signatory and former ambassador to Germany.For many Palestinians, the hard-line government is merely exposing what they have said all along about Israel’s true intentions.“Its annexationist agenda of Jewish supremacy is now very blunt and clear,” Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, said by phone. “The two-state solution was never a Palestinian demand,” he said, “but an international requirement that we have accepted. Now, publicly, this government does not endorse the idea of partition. That’s the heart of it.”Israel’s new national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in the past of inciting racism and support for a terrorist group, has been given expanded powers over the police and additional forces to fight crime in Arab communities.The coalition has also vowed to amend the current anti-discrimination law, which applies to businesses and service providers, allowing them to refuse to provide a service contrary to their religious beliefs in a way that critics say could lead to discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community or others.Mr. Netanyahu seemed to address that fear through Amir Ohana, a Likud member who on Thursday became the first openly gay speaker of the Parliament, and thanked his life partner and their two children from the podium during the inauguration ceremony. Mr. Netanyahu made a point of being photographed sitting next to Mr. Ohana and his family at a toast afterward.Yet an ultraconservative, anti-gay minister has been given wide powers over some programs taught in public schools and the ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition have secured copious funding for adults who choose full-time Torah study over work.“This is unlike anything we have seen before,” Mr. Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador, said. “The majority of the coalition and many of its dominant members with a lot of leverage over the prime minister subscribe to a worldview that defines issues of national and Jewish identity, religion and state and democracy unlike any previous Israeli right-wing government.”Jim Tankersley More

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      What Can the 2022 Elections Tell Us About Violence Against Women

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      How the Worst Fears for Democracy Were Averted in 2022

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      A precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates — at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system.Not long ago, Joe Mohler would have seemed an unlikely person to help bury the political legacy of Donald J. Trump.Mr. Mohler, a 24-year-old Republican committeeman and law student in Lancaster Township, Pa., voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. He voted for him again in 2020 — but this time with some misgivings. And when Mr. Trump began spouting lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 loss, Mr. Mohler, who grew up in a solidly conservative area of southeastern Pennsylvania, was troubled to hear many people he knew repeat them.Last January, after county Republican leaders aligned with a group known for spreading misinformation about the 2020 election and Covid-19 vaccines, Mr. Mohler spoke out against them — a move that he said cost him his post as chairman of the township G.O.P. committee.“I just realized how much of a sham the whole movement was,” he said. “The moment the veil is pulled from your face, you realize how ugly the face is that you are looking at.”Mr. Mohler was part of a precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate that went against its own voting history this year in order to reject Republican candidates who sought control over elections, at least in part out of concern for the health of the political system and the future of democracy.After deciding that preserving the integrity of elections was his single most important issue in 2022, he voted last month for the party’s nominee for Senate, Mehmet Oz, who hedged carefully on the question of who won the 2020 election but eventually said he would have voted to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory had he been in office. But in the governor’s race, Mr. Mohler decided he could not vote for Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate, who as a state senator was central to efforts to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results. Mr. Mastriano had pledged to decertify voting machines in counties where he suspected the results were fraudulent and to appoint as secretary of the commonwealth, the office overseeing elections in Pennsylvania, someone who shared his views.“It was just so reprehensible,” Mr. Mohler said. “I didn’t want anybody like that in the governor’s office.”Doug Mastriano, a leader in the movement to investigate and overturn the 2020 election, was defeated in the Pennsylvania governor’s race.Mark Makela for The New York TimesThe decisions of voters like Mr. Mohler, discernible in surveys and voiced in interviews, did not necessarily lay to rest concerns about the ability of the election system to withstand the new pressures unleashed upon it by Mr. Trump. But they did suggest a possible ceiling on the appeal of extreme partisanship — one that prevented, in this cycle, the worst fears for the health of democracy from being realized. Mr. Mastriano lost by nearly 15 percentage points to the Democratic candidate, Josh Shapiro — part of a midterm election that saw voters reject every election denier running to oversee elections in a battleground state. In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republican primary voters nominated candidates campaigning on Mr. Trump’s election lies for secretary of state, the office that in 40 states oversees the election system. In all three, those candidates lost. The rout eased the immediate concern that strident partisans who embraced conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, foreign meddling and smuggled ballots might soon be empowered to wreak havoc on election systems.The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states.Republican candidates in statewide contests who embraced Mr. Trump’s election lies also significantly underperformed compared with Republicans who did not. This was true even in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2020, suggesting that the defection of ticket-splitters like Mr. Mohler likely played a role.In a survey of voters in five battleground states conducted by the research firm Citizen Data for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, a third who cast ballots for a mix of Democrats and Republicans in November cited a concern that G.O.P. candidates held views or promoted policies “that are dangerous to democracy.” The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      Adam Schiff: Don’t Forget That Many Republicans in Congress Enabled Trump’s Big Lie

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      On Dec. 27, 2020, more than six weeks after losing re-election, an infuriated President Donald Trump telephoned his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, had announced his resignation less than two weeks earlier, after telling the president that the claims of election fraud Mr. Trump had been trumpeting were — as Mr. Barr later bluntly put it in testimony — “bullshit” and publicly affirming that there was no fraud on a scale that would affect the outcome of the election.With Mr. Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, also on the line, Mr. Trump launched into the same tired, disproved and discredited allegations he had propagated so often at rallies, during news conferences and on social media. None of it was true, and Mr. Donoghue told him so. According to Mr. Donoghue, Mr. Trump, exasperated that his own handpicked top appointees at the Justice Department would not affirm his baseless allegations, responded: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”It was a remarkable statement, even for a president who had serially abused the powers of his office. Having been told by the very department that had investigated his claims of fraud that they were untrue, Mr. Trump told the acting attorney general and his deputy to lie about it and said he would take it from there.That Mr. Trump was willing to lie so baldly about a matter at the heart of our democracy — whether the American people can rely on elections to ensure the peaceful transfer of power — now seems self-evident, even unremarkable, when we consider the violent attack on the Capitol he incited days later. But Americans shouldn’t lose sight of how this behavior indicts the former president, and not just the former president but the Republican members of Congress whom he knew would go along with his big lie.The report released Thursday from the Jan. 6 committee, on which I served, makes abundantly clear that there were multiple lines of effort to overturn the 2020 election. Some involved attempts to pressure state legislatures to declare the loser to be the winner. Others involved a fake electors plot, pressure on the vice president to violate his constitutional duty and efforts to force an elections official to “find” thousands of votes that didn’t exist. It was only when all of these other efforts failed that the president resorted to inciting mob violence to try to stop the transfer of power.But one line of effort to overturn the election is given scant attention, and that involved the willingness of so many members of Congress to vote to overturn it. Even after Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police put down the insurrection at great cost to themselves, the majority of Republicans in the House picked up right where they left off, still voting to overturn the results in important states.At one of our Jan. 6 committee hearings, the committee vice chair Liz Cheney, a Republican, called out her colleagues in Congress for their duplicity in the most searing terms: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”With our work on the committee largely concluded, it will now fall to the Justice Department to ensure a form of accountability that Congress is not empowered to provide, and to vindicate the rule of law in a manner beyond our reach: through prosecution. Multiple laws were violated in the course of a broad attempt to overturn the election, and not just by the foot soldiers who broke into the Capitol building that day and brutally assaulted police officers, but also by those who incited them, encouraged them and, when it was all over, gave them aid and comfort. Bringing a former president to justice who even now calls for the “termination” of our Constitution is a perilous endeavor. Not doing so is far more dangerous.There is a growing disdain for the law and for our country’s institutions, and a frightening acceptance of the use of violence to resolve political disputes. Mr. Trump’s big lie has been one of the most powerful instigators of political violence, since it persuaded millions of people that the election they lost must have been rigged or fraudulent. If people can be convinced of that, what is left but violence to decide who should govern? The attack on the Capitol was an all too foreseeable consequence of Mr. Trump’s relentless effort to alienate the people from their government and from the most important foundation of governance: their right to vote.Even the Constitution cannot protect us if the people sworn to uphold it do not give meaning to their oath of office, if that oath is not informed by ideas of right and wrong, and if people are unwilling to accept the basic truth of things. None of it will be enough.But if we allow ourselves to be guided by facts — not factions — and if we choose our representatives based on their allegiance to the law and to the Constitution, then we should have every confidence that our proud legacy of self-government will go on. It is our hope that this report will make a small contribution to that effort. Our country has never before faced the kind of threat we documented. May it never again.Adam B. Schiff is a Democratic member of Congress from California and the author, most recently, of “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Gen Z Problems: Maxwell Frost Is Struggling to Rent an Apartment

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      Other young adults, who have poor credit history and are frustrated with expensive rental application fees, can relate to the housing troubles of the first Gen Zer elected to Congress.WASHINGTON — At 25, Representative-elect Maxwell Frost will be youngest member of Congress. He’s also in debt, after maxing out credit cards to win Florida’s 10th Congressional District seat.He said he was upfront about his bad credit when he applied for a one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., where he now has to live part-time for at least the next two years. A broker, he said, told him that was fine. He paid a $50 application fee and then was denied the apartment because of his poor credit history.Mr. Frost, the first Gen Zer elected to Congress and a Democrat, took to Twitter in early December to voice his frustration: “This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.”While most other Gen Zers haven’t accrued campaign debt, Mr. Frost’s housing woes have generated a wide range of commiserating among Gen Z Twitter users who have short credit histories and less capital to afford expensive deposits and application fees.Mr. Frost said he also lost hundreds of dollars last year when he was searching for housing in his home district in Orlando.“Application fees are becoming a source of revenue for management companies,” Mr. Frost said in an interview. “We live in a world right now where you can run an extensive background check for $15, why are fees up to $200? Why do we use a credit score to determine if an applicant can pay rent when there’s so many things that hurt someone’s credit score?”The fees are the sour cherry on top of a brutal housing market: Last month, the typical asking rent in the United States was over $2,000, up from $1,850 in November 2021 and $1,600 in November 2020, according to data from Zillow. For Washington D.C., the typical asking rent was over $2,200 last month, a figure that’s been following the national trajectory.Some Gen Zers see no feasible way to get a place of their own: Nearly a third of people between the ages of 18 and 25 are living at home permanently, one recent report found.Raegan Loheide, 25, started looking for a new apartment with their partner and their current roommate last May. Mx. Loheide, a barista, was living in an apartment in Queens, but said their mental and physical health was deteriorating from a series of maintenance issues that their landlord refused to fix, including a roach infestation, holes in the ceiling, a lack of heat and a broken toilet.“We didn’t feel safe,” Mx. Loheide said.But in the months following, Mx. Loheide, their roommate and their partner applied to five apartments — spending hundreds of dollars on application fees — all of which they were rejected from.“The first rejection was because we didn’t have a third guarantor,” Mx. Loheide said. “I kept asking the brokers ‘why?’ but I barely ever got a real answer.”Eventually, Mx. Loheide felt they had no choice but to stay in their current apartment, even if it meant an emotional toll and more landlord troubles.“We couldn’t move,” Mx. Loheide said. “We kept expanding our budgets and scraping together more to afford to relocate, but what good is that if we can’t even get approved?”Why Landlords Care About Your CreditCredit is one of the tools property owners have to utilize to tell upfront if a tenant will be able to make their rent payments, said Jay Martin, the executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a trade association for 4,000 property managers and owners in New York.“Property owners have a fiduciary duty to figure out that the applicants that they’re screening are going to be able to pay the rent that they are applying for, because they have mortgages that they’ll have to pay with the rent money that they are collecting,” Mr. Martin said.Mr. Martin added that the money from application fees “is not in any way a form of revenue for management companies, brokers or property owners.” The fee, Mr. Martin said, goes toward covering the cost of running the background checks, credit checks and other screening processes.Still, some tactics and motives have drawn criticism.Brokers also may encourage people who will likely get denied from an apartment application to apply anyway, for financial incentives or in hopes of raising their statistics on how many applicants they can bring in, said Felipe Ernst, a faculty member in Georgetown’s masters of real estate program and founder of a D.C.-based real estate development firm.While it can create more competition for an apartment and give a landlord more options to choose from, it can negatively impact potential renters who are already struggling since application fees, which can add up to hundreds of dollars, are almost always nonrefundable, he said.“It’s borderline unethical to put someone in the wringer, knowing that they won’t get approved,” Mr. Ernst said. “But at the same time, you need to have a realistic look on your finances. I don’t go to a Ferrari dealership if I can only buy a Honda.”Vipassana Vijayarangan could not live with her boyfriend as planned because her lack of credit disqualified her from renting an apartment with him.Todd Midler for The New York TimesSettling for a Room or a CouchFor people desperate to rent apartments, they are just searching high and low for somewhere to live.In 2018, Vipassana Vijayarangan had to move to D.C. on short notice for a new job. She stayed in an Airbnb until she had pay stubs for a rental application, and with her partner, she found a suitable two-bedroom apartment to apply to in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.“I told the agent in an email, ‘I’m very interested in this apartment, but I do not have any credit,’” Ms. Vijayarangan, 31, said. “When I lived in the U.S. on a student visa, I didn’t have — and was not allowed — to get a social security card. So it was impossible for me to even apply for the secured version of a credit card until I had work authorization.”Similar to Mr. Frost’s situation, the broker assured Ms. Vijayarangan that her lack of credit wouldn’t be a problem, but in the end, her application was denied.Ms. Vijayarangan, who now works as a data scientist in New York, eventually rented a room in a rowhouse from an immigrant landlord who understood her situation, she said. But, Ms. Vijayarangan and her partner, an American citizen who had a more established credit history, ended up living apart because he could get approved but she could not. “That could have been the first time that we were living together and building a life together,” she said. “We didn’t get to do that.”Mr. Frost is now the proxy for discouraged Gen Zers, but he is just the latest in the storied tradition of members of congress lamenting the process of finding a secondary residence in D.C. after being elected. Through the years, representatives and senators have opted to split a place with one another or even sleep in their offices to save money.In an interview last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said that she has previously “dealt with very similar issues.”In 2018, just after she was first elected and was set to be the youngest woman to serve in Congress, she told The Times, “I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real.”Similarly, Representative Mondaire Jones, Democrat of New York, said he also ran up debt when he first ran for office.“This place is not set up for people who are not independently wealthy,” Mr. Jones said. “People here don’t understand wealth inequality because they’ve not experienced it.”Mr. Frost has a budget of less than $2,000 a month. He’s looking for a studio apartment within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol since he does not intend to have a car or a driver to chauffeur him. His geographic hopes have restricted his apartment hunt to a few gentrifying neighborhoods.Unsure when he’ll finally secure a place to live, he plans to continue couch surfing for a few months to save money and find an apartment in one of his desired neighborhoods.“I was very close to taking out a loan, which would mean spending a lot of personal money to pay back the loan,” Mr. Frost said. “Rent problems are not just mine. There are millions of Americans that have these same problems.” More

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      Your Friday Briefing: The U.S. Will Train More Ukraine Troops

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      Plus: Chinese companies are hit by U.S. trade restrictions.The U.S. said it would more than double the training provided to Ukraine’s military next year.Brendan Hoffman for The New York TimesThe U.S. will train more Ukrainian troopsThe Pentagon plans to train 600 to 800 Ukrainian troops — one battalion — each month in advanced battlefield tactics at a base in Germany, starting next year. That’s a major increase: Right now, the U.S. trains about 300 people each month.President Biden approved the broader training effort this week, according to two U.S. officials. The Pentagon has already trained 610 Ukrainians to operate an advanced rocket launcher. The troops have used the system to devastating effect, hitting targets far behind Russian lines.Next year, the U.S. will train bigger groups of Ukrainians on various strategies, such as coordinating ground infantry troops with artillery support. The decision to step up training comes as the administration is poised to send a Patriot antimissile battery, America’s most advanced ground-based air defense system, in response to urgent demands from Kyiv.Other updates:The U.S. announced new sanctions on prominent Russians.A Ukrainian Army surveillance team is using infrared technology to try to locate and strike Russian positions.Moscow’s propagandists are broadcasting clips from American cable news and Chinese media to spin a narrative that Russia is winning.Limiting the flow of technology to global rivals has become a key part of U.S. foreign policy.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesChinese companies hit by U.S. trade restrictionsThe U.S. restricted 36 companies and organizations from accessing American technology that could be used for military purposes, in its latest effort to impede China’s development of advanced semiconductors.In October, the U.S. announced sweeping limits on semiconductor exports to China, both from American companies and those in other countries that use U.S. technology.U.S. officials say that China has increasingly blurred the lines between its military and civilian industries. In response, Chinese diplomats said that the U.S. “has been stretching the concept of national security” and “abusing export control measures.”Details: Yangtze Memory Technology Corporation, which was said to be in talks with Apple to potentially supply components for the iPhone 14, is on the list.Related: Years of Covid restrictions have left behind a collective trauma, Li Yuan writes. Some now want the government to apologize for its hard-line approach, a quixotic hope.Britain’s free health care has long been a national point of pride.Henry Nicholls/ReutersU.K. nurses strike for the first timeBritish nurses went on strike yesterday for the first time in the 74-year history of the National Health Service.The walkout is one of a series of labor actions taking place across Britain this month as sky-high inflation, rising interest rates and a recession put pressure on workers. Rail employees, airport baggage handlers and ambulance workers are also scheduled to stage walkouts over the next several weeks. The nurses are planning a second 12-hour strike next Tuesday.The labor actions come at a time when the health service is in crisis: There have been record delays for ambulance responses and a major backlog for medical procedures, among many other problems.Demands: The nurses are calling for a 19 percent pay increase and better working conditions, which they say will make the profession more attractive and help address staffing shortages. The government has said the pay demands are “unaffordable.”Quotable: “We were out supposedly clapping for our nurses and all of our N.H.S. workers during the pandemic, and here we are treating them like trash,” one supporter said. THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificFiji’s incumbent surged ahead after the app went down. The opposition leader had a lead beforehand.Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFour political leaders in Fiji said the country should stop vote counting after the results app experienced a glitch, The Associated Press reports.India has successfully tested a long-range ballistic missile that could carry nuclear weapons, Al Jazeera reports.Around the WorldTedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the leader of the W.H.O., said that Eritrean forces had killed his uncle and 50 others in Tigray, despite a cease-fire.The European Central Bank and the Bank of England both raised interest rates by half a percentage point, in an effort to fight stubborn inflation.A U.N. peacekeeper from Ireland was shot and killed in southern Lebanon.Boris Becker, the former German tennis champion, returned home after he was freed from a British prison. He hid his assets in a bankruptcy case.U.S. NewsThe House passed a bill that would allow Puerto Ricans to vote on whether the island should be an independent country or a U.S. state. Elon Musk said he had sold another $3.6 billion of Tesla’s stock, perhaps in an effort to prop up Twitter. He’s now sold $23 billion this year.New York City will ban sales of dogs, cats and rabbits starting in 2024 in an effort to crack down on commercial breeders.Claudine Gay will be the first Black person to lead Harvard.The Week in CultureHarry spoke about his strained relationship with Prince William, the heir to the throne.Ben Birchhall/Associated PressIn the latest episodes of “Harry & Meghan,” Harry blames a tabloid for Meghan’s miscarriage.Adriano Pedrosa, who turned around São Paulo’s leading art museum, will oversee the 2024 Venice Biennale.The famously private author Thomas Pynchon sold his archive. But there are no photographs of him in it.Inmates in France picked a winner in an offshoot of the Goncourt, the country’s top literary prize.“The Little Mermaid” will be added to the National Film Registry, along with two dozen other films.Our Styles desk picked their best photos of 2022.A Morning Read“It’s a better hobby than playing video games,” said Talil al-Humaidi’s father.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFalconry — one of Qatar’s oldest traditions — now involves modern training methods. Drones drag pigeons high into the sky, to teach the falcons to hunt.SPORTSIn the only other World Cup final of his career, Lionel Messi lost to Germany in 2014. Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesThe World Cup finalFrance will play Argentina at 6 p.m. local time on Sunday in Qatar. (That’s 8:30 p.m. in Delhi, midnight in Seoul and 2 a.m. on Monday in Sydney.)Argentina will rally behind Lionel Messi, who has never won a World Cup. Now, he has a final, glorious chance at soccer immortality. At 35, Messi is arguably the finest player of all time.France, though, has his heir apparent: Kylian Mbappé, 23, who is the tournament’s leading scorer. France won the last World Cup, in 2018, and is now the first country in over 20 years to qualify for consecutive finals.What else: Croatia and Morocco will play on Saturday for third place.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookAndrew Scrivani for The New York TimesMake pancakes for breakfast this weekend.What to Read“Eccentric Lives,” a collection of cheeky obituaries from Britain’s Daily Telegraph, includes one about a viscount who shot at a hot-air balloon.What to Watch“The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari” recounts an eruption off the coast of New Zealand that left several groups of tourists struggling to survive.ExerciseDo you really need to stretch?TravelIn just a weekend in Seoul, you can hike fortress walls, bike along the Han River and taste mung bean pancakes at a covered market.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Space between (three letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. Have a lovely weekend! I’ll be back on Monday. — AmeliaP.S. Sam Stejskal of The Athletic joined CNN to debate who’s the greatest soccer player ever.“The Daily” is about Russia’s draft. You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      In Fiji’s Closely Observed Election, a Former Coup Leader Is Ahead

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      In a region where China and the United States fight for influence, observers await results from the vote to choose the island nation’s prime minister — and to see if the outcome will be respected.It was a clash between two former coup leaders, set against the backdrop of a remote and palm-fringed vacation destination that has, of late, taken on outsized importance in a battle for primacy in the Pacific between the United States and China.And with the military constitutionally permitted to intervene if it saw fit, that contest was one with the potential to become extremely volatile.So, as voters went to the polls for the general election on Wednesday, focus turned to Fiji, an island nation known regionally for its stormy politics and which experienced four coups between 1987 and 2006. This was the country’s third general election since they were reintroduced to the Constitution in 2013.In preliminary results, Sitiveni Rabuka, the leader of the People’s Alliance party — who led Fiji’s first coup in 1987 — appeared to have secured a narrow victory against the strongman incumbent, Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama. Mr. Bainimarama, widely known by the first name Frank, himself seized power with the help of the military in 2006, before winning democratic elections in 2014 and 2018.The vote count is expected to take as long as two days, with ballots trickling in from outer islands and remote villages. The first set of results was delayed by a matter of hours, as the country’s election results app worked only intermittently. Late on Wednesday night, the release of provisional results was placed on hold as the Fijian Election Office contended with operational difficulties.But as of Wednesday night, Mr. Rabuka’s party, the People’s Alliance, had taken a convincing lead over Mr. Bainimarama’s party, Fiji First.Whether Mr. Bainimarama intends to honor the results remains unclear. Speaking to foreign reporters before the results were released, the former leader said he would “of course” respect the outcome of the election, even if they were not in his favor. He added: “Haven’t they got any intelligent reporters from Australia to come ask me a better question than that?”But experts have warned that Mr. Bainimarama may yet seek to intervene with the support of the military, with which he maintains a close relationship. The country’s Constitution gives final control over citizens’ “security, defense and well-being” to the military, a clause that is widely understood to mean that it has the right to intervene if it sees fit.Election officials preparing to open ballot boxes for counting in Suva on Wednesday.Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“It will come down to how the military leadership sees it,” said Dominic O’Sullivan, a professor of political science at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Though the head of the military had in recent days encouraged people to vote and vowed not to interfere, he added, “You can’t take that as an absolute, unbreakable commitment, because it does have the constitutional power.”Before results were counted, Mr. Rabuka suggested that Mr. Bainimarama might appeal to the court system in the event that his party was not the victor. “I’m hoping for a flood of votes in our favor,” he said, “so that if he makes any attempt at going through that system, that course, it will be futile.”Fiji, with a population of about a million people and by far the largest economy of its region, grew closer to China in 2006 after an initial burst of investment from Beijing. The funding was particularly timely as Fiji faced damaging sanctions from Australia and New Zealand related to the coup in which Mr. Bainimarama came to power.The relationship with China could enter a new, more distant phase under Mr. Rabuka, who earlier this year indicated that he would prefer closer ties to Australia, a longtime ally of Fiji, instead of signing a mooted security pact with Beijing.The early election results come after a bitter contest and amid a government clampdown on supporters of opposition parties and the press. In one high-profile example, a pro-opposition lawyer who had made light of an error in a legal document was convicted of contempt of court, a sign of Fiji’s eroding civil liberties.With little pre-election polling, analysts have struggled to predict an outcome. For 48 hours until the election ended, Fiji underwent a media blackout, in which all political parties were forbidden from campaigning. Citizens were prohibited from making political posts on social media, displaying banners and wearing colors or logos of parties. Those who break the rules could be subject to stiff penalties, including prison.Even with little coverage from the news media in Fiji itself, there were early signs that Mr. Bainimarama’s support might be declining, including a dwindling voter share over the last two elections. There is also a sense of disgruntlement among voters about some of the economic challenges the country faces in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which devastated its all-important tourism industry.“The government’s been in office for a while, and people tend to tire of long-term governments,” said Professor O’Sullivan.Even Mr. Bainimarama’s government had sought to appeal to calls for a fresh face, running on a platform of reform, with the slogan “We are the change.”Frank Bainimarama leaving a polling station in Suva on Wednesday.Mick Tsikas/EPA, via ShutterstockTurnout in the election was also exceptionally low: Late in the day, Mohammed Saneem, the Fijian election supervisor, called on voters to come to the polls, with 51 percent of voters having cast a ballot as of an hour before polls closed. In the 2006 election, voter turnout was at 64 percent.The situation was concerning, Mr. Saneem told reporters after the polls had closed. He added: “Every Fijian had sufficient time to vote. We have significant numbers of people who did not come to vote.”The Fijian electoral base skews young, with more than 50 percent of registered voters being younger than 40, while 86 percent of candidates on the ballot are over 40. Mr. Bainimarama, 68, is a 16-year veteran of Fijian politics, while Mr. Rabuka, 74, has been a fixture of Fijian political life since 1987.The reluctance to come to the polls may communicate a wider sense of cynicism about the freedom and fairness of the election, said Professor O’Sullivan. “With the two likely contenders for prime minister being former coup leaders, it may be that people think, ‘Is it really democracy?’” More