The New York Times - 04.11.2026 — 2026-11-05

The New York Times

VOL.CLXXVI .... No. 61,058

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2026

Today, patchy fog early, more sun than clouds, high 71. Tonight, partly cloudy, low 59. Tomorrow, thickening clouds early, afternoon showers, high 68. Weather map, Page A20.

© 2026 The New York Times Company

Battles Linger as Nation Decides Control of Congress

Prices in Canada may be higher

\$4.00

DEMETHUS FREEMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

VIRGINIA Voting at Main Street Station in Richmond. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, faced Bert Mizusawa, a retired general.

RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

FLORIDA Filling out ballots in Jacksonville. In a Senate race, the Republican incumbent, Ashley Moody, was facing Angie Nixon.

JAMIE KELTER DAVIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

WISCONSIN Democrats were hoping to retain the governor's seat as David Crowley tried to defeat the Republican Tom Tiffany.

No End Is in Sight to Democrats' Israel Splits

By TIM BALK and JENNIFER MEDINA

The midterm elections ended, as they began, with Democrats fighting about Israel.

The debate returned to center stage late in the pivotal Senate race in Michigan, when Representative Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic primary, pulled her endorsement from its winner, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, citing his rhetoric on Israel, among other issues. She stunned and dismayed her fellow Democrats by endorsing the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, a former congressman.

The surprising turn of events the weekend before the election suggested that the party's divisions over Israel were sure to endure after the new Congress is seated and the party lurches into a wide-open 2028 presidential primary.

Democratic lawmakers and candidates have become more critical of the Israeli government since the start of the war in Gaza, reflecting a broader shift in public opinion within the party. A New York Times/Siena poll found in May that three-quarters of Democratic voters opposed U.S. economic or military support for Israel. But the new, more critical stance has antagonized other members of the Democratic coalition, who have argued against moving too far from a close U.S. ally, and who have warned that criticisms of Israel have at times veered into antisemitism.

The party had hoped to table the debate going into Tuesday's elections. Instead, it came roaring back.

"It's an agonizing set of issues," said Brad Lander, a Jewish New York Democrat who won a House primary this year. Mr. Lander, who has accused the Israeli gov-

Continued on Page A11

Trump's Hunt for Illegal Voters Nets Little

By MADELEINE NGO

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has mounted an extraordinary campaign to hunt for illegal voters, devoting hundreds of federal agents to the task of poring over tens of thousands of voter records and knocking on the doors of people suspected of being noncitizens who unlawfully cast ballots.

But the crusade has so far resulted in the Trump administration's charging only about 240 people with voting-fraud-related offenses across the country since the president took office, according to the Justice Department.

Latest Results

House and Senate races in a handful of battleground states remained tight into Election Day. Coverage at nytimes.com.

That includes some noncitizens accused of registering to vote but not actually casting ballots.

The figure is a minuscule share of the more than 158 million ballots cast in the 2024 general election, and falls far short of the figures cited in July by Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, who claimed without evidence that more than 250,000 potential noncitizens were registered to vote in just four states alone.

The small number of charges has further undermined President Trump's specious claims that voting by noncitizens is pervasive and tilting elections for Democrats, and raises questions about why the Homeland Security Department has dedicated vast resources to the effort ahead of the midterm election.

Continued on Page A11

As Trump Skirts Court Orders, Rift Grows With the Judiciary

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Since President Trump returned to office nearly two years ago, courts have frequently ordered his administration to pause or halt aggressive actions after they drew legal challenges. But again and again, his executive branch has skirted judicial constraints through delayed, contested or incomplete compliance, all while Mr. Trump has attacked judges appointed by presidents of both parties.

An examination of confrontations across the country shows a widening breakdown in trust between the executive branch and the federal judiciary. Judges increasingly greet Justice Department representations with skepticism. Administration officials, meanwhile, have treated courts with disdain — accusing judges of bias and seeking their removal. In an extraordinary step, the administration recently filed a misconduct complaint against nearly every active district judge in Minnesota.

The result has been a poisoning of the relations between the

Continued on Page A16

U.S. Debates Israeli Claim of Iran Chemical Arms

This article is by Julian E. Barnes, Natan Odenheimer, Eric Schmitt, Adam Rasgon and Dustin Volz.

WASHINGTON — Israel has shared intelligence with the United States asserting that Iran is considering the use of chemical weapons against its adversaries, information met with alarm by some American officials and deep skepticism by others, according to U.S. and regional officials.

Some American officials see the Israeli intelligence as part of a pressure campaign by Prime Min-

Some See a Warning as a Ploy by Netanyahu; Others See a Risk

attack American interests.

ister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to persuade the Trump administration to return to major combat operations against Iran.

Other officials believe that the threats should be taken seriously, given the recent array of warnings about Iran's preparations to

Israel has shared some of the information with officials in Persian Gulf countries. Several doubted Iran was developing plans to use chemical weapons and believe Israel is trying to push the United States and its partners to return to a more intense phase of the war.

American claims about Iran's chemical weapons, or its intent to build them, go back decades. In 2003, Iran acknowledged it had developed chemical capabilities during the Iran-Iraq war in the

Continued on Page A9

By LYDIA DePILLIS

William D. Nordhaus, a Yale economist and Nobel laureate who tabulated the economic wreckage of carbon emissions and influenced climate policy across several presidential administrations, died on Friday at his home in New Haven, Conn. He was 85.

The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, according to a statement

[WILLIAM D. NORDHAUS, 1941-2026] Nobelist Put a Price on Pollution, Swaying Policy

from Yale University.

In 2018, Professor Nordhaus shared the Nobel in economic science with Paul M. Romer, an economist at New York University. The Nobel committee cited Professor Nordhaus's work in developing a method to balance climate change's long-term damage with the costs required to contain it.

The model, which Professor Nordhaus refined over decades, has underpinned dozens of regulations around the world aimed at limiting fossil fuels and seeded the ground for a new field of research that bridges the gap between economics and earth science.

"He played a crucial role in terms of bringing consideration of the natural environment into the mainstream of economics, whereas earlier, it was sort of a fringe area," said Robert Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard.

Professor Nordhaus saw cli-

Continued on Page A24

[A Notable Number] \$375

The cost of the IQ test used to admit kindergartners to Hunter College Elementary School, which is run by a branch of the City University of New York. Page A21.

[Corrections] INTERNATIONAL

An article on Tuesday about ongoing negotiations in the Middle East misstated the title of Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the prime minister of Israel, not the president.

[Corrections] INTERNATIONAL

An article on Tuesday about ongoing negotiations in the Middle East misstated the title of Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the prime minister of Israel, not the president.

NATIONAL

An article on Monday about Caleb Suh, a former West Point cadet who pleaded guilty in June to drugging and forcing abortion pills on another cadet, misstated the location of the federal court where Mr. Suh outlined the details of his plan to deceive his ex-girlfriend. It was at a court in White Plains, N.Y., not Manhattan.

SPECIAL SECTIONS: FINE ARTS & EXHIBITS

An article on Sunday about an expansion of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, using information provided by the Hispanic Society, misidentified the location where the Valencia museum will open in February. It will open at the Museo de la Ciudad de Valencia, not the Palacio de las Comunicaciones, which will house the collection at a later date.

An article on Sunday about the German artist Marianne Wex misstated how Martine Gutierrez identifies. She is trans, not trans and nonbinary.

Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions. For recently published corrections, visit nytimes.com/corrections.

[The Story Behind the Story] A Closer Look at 'Ballot-Stacking' in Alaska

The Times detailed an effort by political operatives in Alaska to recruit a spoiler candidate.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

BECKY BOHRER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Two Times journalists explain the decisions behind an investigation during a crucial Senate race.

The Newspaper and Beyond

TODAY'S PAPER

Crossword C3

Obituaries A24, B10

INTERACTIVE

TRAVEL

Opinion A22-23

Weather A20

Live from London, "Saturday Night Live U.K." is a British offshoot of the New York-based "S.N.L." Check out five notable moments from the show, which has established itself as more than an experiment, at nytimes.com/tv.

The Upshot's latest focus challenge invites you to spend uninterrupted time looking at one piece of 1960s art: "Above the Clouds I," a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. What will you notice? Try it at nytimes.com/upshot.

For her latest project, Catherine Zeta-Jones, the Oscar-winning actress, returned to Wales, where she was born and raised. Read about Ms. Zeta-Jones's go-to spots in her native country at nytimes.com/travel.

[A Headline From History] COMING SOON: HARRY POTTER AND HOLLYWOOD'S CASH COW

November 4, 2001. "We want to maximize this franchise in every way," Alan Horn, the chairman of Warner Bros., told The Times of his company's plans for turning J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books into films. To achieve that, executives were taking a "less is more" approach so as not to overcommercialize the property with the impending release of the first film, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." One media analyst predicted U.S. box office earnings between \$250 million and \$300 million. "It could be a franchise bigger than a 'Batman' or a 'Star Wars,'" another analyst said. The movie took in \$317 million domestically and \$975 million worldwide. When the series' eighth and final film came out in 2011, "Harry Potter" became the highest-grossing franchise of all time, with global box office receipts of \$7 billion; it remains in the top 10 today. A television series based on the books debuts on HBO this Christmas.

Facts of Interest

Across the Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional bloc of Arab states, the only economy expected to expand this year is Oman, the Gulf monarchy with the longest Arabian Sea coastline and thus less dependence on the Strait of Hormuz.

Economies in the Gulf Need Relief B1

McCain Foods is the biggest manufacturer of frozen potato products worldwide. One in four French fries consumed globally is made by McCain, even if they bear another brand name on the package.

It's Ruining Restaurants.

Or Maybe It's Saving Them. D1

The video game Homefront, released in 2011, was banned in South Korea for depicting a reunified Korea under the North's leadership. In This New Video Game, The Green Roofs Matter C2

Kaliningrad, Russia's westernmost territory and the headquarters of its Baltic Fleet, is formerly German land that was annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II.

Poland Adds to Security Forces Along Border With Russia A5

By the time the FIFA president Gianni Infantino's three-year American assignment is over, FIFA will have paid about \$4 million of his taxes. He earns about \$6 million per year.

FIFA Quietly Paid Millions in U.S. Government Taxes for Its Leader B8

Among Americans, cremation surpassed 60 percent of all post-death practices in 2025. That figure is projected to reach 80 percent by 2045, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.

Last Call: Grief and Solace On the Menu D2

The Mini Crossword | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11/4/2026

IY CHRISTINA IVERSON

EDITED BY JOEL FAGLIANO

ACROSS

1 One of 21 around the island of Manhattan – most famously, the Brooklyn one

7 Tony-winning play that reimagines Abraham Lincoln's wife as an aspiring cabaret star

8 Hot dog, informally

9 Put into law

10 Not a single one

DOWN

1 Yang who once played the iceberg that sank the Titanic on "S.N.L."

2 Big zoo animal

3 "Sorry, let me rephrase ..."

3. Sorry, let me rephrase ...

4. Class where you might wear a leotard

5 Courage and perseverance

6 "Keep your \_ on the ball!"

How We Got the Shot Behind the Scenes of Our Photojournalism

To understand how a "smart wall" of powerful A.I. cameras is carrying out mass surveillance along the United States' southern border, the reporter Bora Erden documented towers in several states, using a camera-equipped drone. For the Backstory newsletter, he explained what went into capturing the above shot in Amada Acres, Texas.

BORA ERDEN

I spent weeks this spring and summer traveling along the U.S.-Mexico border, from the laid-back surf towns of California to the saguaro cactus landscapes of Arizona. On one hot and humid August afternoon, my colleague Nicholas Nehamas and I found ourselves driving along the Rio Grande in South Texas, interviewing residents for an examination into the expanding network of A.I.-powered cameras in their border towns. These cameras can see for miles, and the number of towers is growing quickly as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration.

We were following a map of these towers, like bread crumbs along the border. Customs and Border Protection does not publish information on tower locations or type. We assessed the scale of the border-tower surveillance program through aerial and satellite imagery, geospatial analysis and reporting.

The previous day, Border Patrol agents had approached our car and requested that I take my drone down, claiming that we were breaking drone flight restrictions (we were not). Later that afternoon, a Laredo police officer asked us to stay put as he ran our credentials by his supervisor, checking if we were breaking any local laws (we were not).

Every time I encountered a border surveillance tower, I got to know them better, but I still felt at arm's length. This tower from Anduril, an A.I. defense firm with ties to President Trump, finally broke the ice — it looked back at me.

We pulled over to the side of the road, and I flew my drone up until it was level with the top of the tower. Something to the south caught the attention of the tower's radar, and the camera head rotated. I came face to face with this Wall-E-looking piece of cutting-edge surveillance technology. I knew this shot would show our readers the potential of the visual surveillance program — one of the largest operated by the U.S. government.

Read the article "Trump's 'Smart Wall' of A.I. Cameras Is Watching the Border, and More Than a Million People" at nytimes.com/us.

Common Medications That Can Mess With Your Sleep

Here to Help

Dr. David Neubauer, a psychiatrist and sleep specialist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, says many medications can disrupt sleep, stressing that such disruptions should be discussed with a doctor. Here are some common medications that can keep you awake — and what to do if you're taking them. CAROLINE HOPKINS LEGASPI

Watch out for A.D.H.D. drugs. There are two main categories of medication that treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: stimulants and nonstimulants. The stimulants, which include Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin and Concerta, are good at improving focus, said Julie Dopheide, a professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California. But they are notoriously disruptive to sleep, she said.

Not everyone who takes a stimulant has trouble sleeping. But if you're struggling, it's best to take it early in the day.

Understand the effect of decongestants. Over-the-counter decongestants that contain pseudoephedrine, like Sudafed, may disrupt sleep, Dr. Dopheide said. The active ingredient works by stimulating the release of norepinephrine, which binds to receptors that cause your blood vessels to shrink.

Though this can help you breathe more easily, norepinephrine can also have an adrenaline-like effect. If a decongestant keeps you up, try taking it in the morning.

Be aware of the anti-smoking paradox. When you quit smoking, sleeping may become difficult as your body adjusts to the lack of nicotine. Paradoxically, some smoking-cessation products can have a similar effect. The nicotine in them increases nor-epinephrine and dopamine in the brain, said C. Michael White, a professor of pharmacy at the UConn School of Pharmacy

SUVI SUITIALA

and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

As a stimulant, nicotine can also increase heart rate and blood pressure. Consult a doctor or a smoking-addiction coach if these products disrupt your sleep.

Don't overlook antidepressants. The side effects of popular antidepressants, including Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta and Effexor, can widely vary, said Dr. Bhanu Kolla, a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic. If an antidepressant is messing with your sleep, your doctor can adjust the dose or the time you take it, or suggest an alternative.

Take 'water pills' earlier. Diuretics, known as "water pills," are essential for managing conditions like high blood pressure, heart failure, kidney disease and liver disease. But they can indirectly disturb sleep by increasing the need to urinate at night, Dr. Dopheide said. Taking the medications earlier in the day and drinking less fluids near bedtime may help, Dr. Kolla said.

For more health advice, visit nytimes.com/well.

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Before Entering Hospital, Soldiers Are Decontaminated

By GINA KOLATA and MARC SANTORA

DNIPRO, Ukraine — The injuries to soldiers arriving at Ukrainian hospitals are horrific. Instead of bullet wounds, blast injuries from drones dominate the scene: Calf muscles are blown away, chunks of tissue are missing from thighs. Soil and debris thrown up from the blast are lodged deep in lacerations.

By the time they arrive at a hospital, which can take days, weeks or even months of travel under cover of darkness, 30 to 40 percent of soldiers are not just wounded but have severe infections. And their infections often involve microbes that are untreatable — resistant to antibiotics. When the wounded soldiers are admitted to civilian hospitals, they risk spreading the bacteria to other patients.

Now there is an effort to counter this scourge.

It started with a realization by Hailie Uren, a clinical pharmacologist and disaster medicine specialist who works in Ukraine. The situation, she reasoned, resembled nothing so much as a biological warfare attack. "If we don't have antibiotics to treat these patients," she said, "how different is that from when a patient is exposed to anthrax?"

Hospitals already have plans in place to treat victims of biological warfare, she noted. All the hospitals had to do was carry out those same urgent protocols on the battlefield. Ms. Uren proposed the idea directly to Ukraine's surgeon general and received support from the defense and health ministries.

The effort began in September, in a large tent outside a hospital in central Ukraine.

The objective, which Ms. Uren had developed with colleagues, would be to disinfect wounded soldiers before they entered a hospital: Remove their dirty clothes and bandages, wash them with an antiseptic and give them a shower.

That alone would be a big change from the status quo, with soldiers going directly into the hospital, and possibly sitting in a crowded emergency room, or going straight into surgery, wearing soiled clothing and used dressings. Those items are often rife with potentially deadly microbes.

At that point, lifesaving treatments for these severe infections can be horrendous. "If a guy has infection in his leg and it is resistant to antibiotics, you sometimes have to cut the leg off," said Dr. John Holcomb, a retired Army surgeon who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and worked with Ms. Uren.

The infection problem is a challenge not just for Ukraine, Ms. Uren said. One hospital she worked in is about only 40 miles from Poland, where some wounded soldiers are being treated. The spread of antibiotic-resistant microbes is "a huge biosecurity risk for the rest of Europe," she said.

The U.S. Army colonel serving as the command surgeon for Special Operations Command Europe, overseeing the training, explained that these bacteria are a threat to everyone.

"If they enter the general hospital system, they endanger a 70-year-old with pneumonia, or a 25-year-old with appendicitis, if we cannot control their spread," the colonel said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with military protocol.

A Potent Enemy: Time

Infections have always been a problem in warfare, Dr. Holcomb said.

In war zones, he said, "infection control procedures are not always adhered to." Basic hand washing, wearing gloves and wiping down beds between patients all can go out the door. So can standard practices around limiting the use of antibiotics.

"It's not one thing. It's all of them," he added. "They generate multidrug-resistant organisms."

But the scale of what is happening in Ukraine has no precedent, in large part because of how drones have transformed the battlefield.

The crisis begins at the point of injury. Blast munitions can tear away soft tissue, shatter bone and pack manure-rich soil deep into exposed cavities. The soil bacteria are “tough mothers” that can grow onto any surface they find, said Dr. Paul Pottinger, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Washington who was not part of the Ukraine project.

"Any breach of human skin," he said, "the germs like to crawl up."

Washing the wound with water immediately, cutting off injured tissue and applying an antiseptic could stymie infections, but that seldom happens during prolonged combat.

The "golden hour" of modern military trauma care — evacuating a wounded soldier to a site that provides surgery within 60 minutes — has been dismantled by the saturation of drones. Wounded fighters often spend days or weeks sheltering in tree lines and trenches.

Every delay compounds the risk of infection, especially because patients — who have often lost blood and are frequently malnourished — have a weakened ability to fight off infections. And within eight hours, bacteria can form slimy biofilms across the wounds, shielding the microbes from antibiotics and from being flushed away with water.

Doctors along the evacuation route do their best to prevent infections, but their tools are limited and sometimes misused. They often lack sufficient water to irrigate wounds, face shortages of antiseptics and lack diagnostic tools. They often provide the most powerful antibiotics out of desperation, encouraging the rise of microbes that resist the drugs.

By the time a casualty moves through the chain — often traversing up to eight separate handoffs and regional facilities — bacteria on the surface of a wound have time to migrate into bone and tissue and cause an infection. Rather than treating a clean trauma wound, surgeons at that point are confronted with patients with complex, extensively drug-resistant infections.

Many combatants have infections deep in their tissues, said Dr. Evhen Filonenko, who works at Pirogov Vinnytsia Regional Clinical Hospital. "These patients are very complicated," he said. "You need to remove all infected tissue. We are doing huge surgeries."

Some lose their legs or arms because amputation is the only way to control infections in their bones. Once a bone is infected and bone cells die, there is virtually no way to even deliver an antibiotic; dead bone does not have a blood supply.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Dr. P.J. Brennan, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Brennan is part of a group of specialists there that fields calls from Ukrainian doctors at 6 a.m. on Tuesdays.

"There are numerous instances in which we literally could find no drugs to treat the patient," Dr. Brennan said.

Making matters worse, it can be hard to find out what these patients are infected with. "Not every hospital has a lab, so cultures get sent to other labs," Dr. Brennan said. "It can take time before the results are sent back."

"We might be looking at cultures obtained three weeks ago," during which time different microbes may have colonized the wound, Dr. Brennan said.

A 'Carwash' for the Wounded

The experiment to stop the spread of infections ran a four-day dress rehearsal in Poland in June, led by U.S., Polish and Belgian special operations forces.

Inside what observers nicknamed "the carwash," Ukrainian doctors, nurses and medics practiced stripping blast victims of mud-caked uniforms, cutting away soiled dressings, throwing out pre-hospital IV lines and scrubbing exposed flesh and wounds, first with warm water and then with warm antiseptic solutions. Then they wheeled the wounded soldiers into a separate, sterile area known as the clean zone.

MACIEK NAIBDALIK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

'A huge biosecurity risk for the rest of Europe.'

HAILIE UREN, a clinical pharmacologist, on the spread of antibiotic-resistant microbes.

JOHANNA MARIA FRITZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A culture plate containing antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the microbiology laboratory at a hospital in Dnipro.

Now, about a month after the official effort began, medical personnel in a decontamination tent in eastern Ukraine have treated about 150 wounded soldiers, Ms. Uren said.

To see if the procedure is helping, the team swabs the soldiers when they arrive, and again on Days 2 and 5 when they are inside the hospital. The members also record heart rates and body temperatures before and after the soldiers are decontaminated. A high heart rate can indicate pain, and an inability to regulate body temperature can indicate infections. The team also does blood tests every other day, looking for evidence of sepsis, the body's life-threatening reaction to an infection.

It can take time to get the results from the swabs, Ms. Uren said, but what they have seen is encouraging.

One soldier, for example, came in with Acinetobacter baumannii in one of his wounds. That is a dreaded strain of bacteria that can be resistant to antibiotics. But the bacteria had not yet established an infection — they were still lurking on the wound's surface. The disinfectant cleared them. On Days 2 and 5, the swabs showed no evidence of that microbe.

Ms. Uren said one surprise was the psychological effect of the decontamination on the soldiers. "The casualties consistently are telling us they feel like they are a human again," she said. "It's like we are washing off the war from them."

Encouraged by their initial results, the investigators will now set up decontamination units outside two other hospitals. But they also have bigger plans.

They want to start controlling infections from the time a soldier is first wounded, interrupting a chain of events that starts when a blast shoots debris and soil into a wound.

"I think it's very smart," said Dr. Potter, the infectious diseases researcher. "We will treat you right from the get-go as though you were contaminated. I admire them for doing it."

He hopes the lessons from the experiment in Ukraine will be broadly applied.

"It seems to me," he said, "that those in leadership positions at the Pentagon should pay very close attention to this threat — and to the countermeasures."

Poland Adds to Security Forces Along Border With Russia

By ANDREW HIGGINS

WARSAW — Poland has launched a "special operation" involving counterterrorism police, intelligence officers and beefed-up border security on its northern frontier with Russia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday, calling it a response to "disturbing movement" that could be preparation for "armed incursions."

Mr. Tusk, speaking in Warsaw, said the late-night movement just across the border in Kaliningrad — a Russian region sandwiched between Poland, the Baltic Sea and Lithuania — involved unidentified people carrying flashlights, whose intentions were not clear.

He said Poland had received warnings from allied intelligence services of possible “acts of sabotage or more serious provocations on the border with the Russian Federation.” Mr. Tusk added that “more precise information,” received recently, indicated that “events could occur in the first half of November, including armed incursions” into Polish territory.

"It's not a coincidence that this tension, provoked by the Russians, is occurring today," Mr.

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.

Tusk said, citing “global uncertainty and confusion” over the midterm elections in the United States and a “sense of conflict and instability” in Poland because of a bitter political dispute over its constitutional court.

European governments have been frazzled in recent months by a spate of sabotage operations that officials have blamed on Russia, including a failed drone attack on a German airport. There have also been warnings, citing intelligence reports, that Russia could be planning some kind of military incursion or provocation along NATO's eastern flank.

An airport outside of Warsaw shut down briefly on Tuesday after a bomb threat was directed at a flight from London, one of two Warsaw-bound flights that were targeted in what appeared to be hoax threats. Several other flights in Europe were also subjected to bomb threats. All landed safely, and the threats were being investigated.

Some of Mr. Tusk's political opponents accused him of using border tensions to distract attention from an effort by government-backed judges on the Constitutional Tribunal to unseat its chief justice, a supporter of Poland's former right-wing governing party, Law and Justice. Mr. Tusk's government sent riot police to seal off the court on Friday.

President Karol Nawrocki, a foe of Mr. Tusk and a vocal supporter of the chief justice, barely mentioned Russia at a National Security Council meeting held on Tuesday to discuss defense issues, focusing instead on the standoff at the Constitutional Tribunal.

While stating that "the aggressor," a reference to Russia, "must be effectively deterred" even as it "operates below the

Reports of sabotage in European allies amplify a threat.

threshold of war," Mr. Nawrocki vowed to resist changes at the court and "stop this attempt to overturn the constitutional order of the Republic of Poland."

Kaliningrad, formerly German land that was annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II, is Russia's westernmost territory. As the headquarters of its Baltic Fleet and a major military garrison, it has long been viewed as a potential launchpad for military action.

Poland's previous right-wing government, facing a tough election in 2023, warned that Russian mercenary fighters were mobilizing to seal off the so-called Suwalki Gap, which stretches from Kaliningrad to Belarus between Poland and Lithuania.

Once, closing the gap would have separated the three Baltic states, all members of NATO, from the rest of the military alliance. But Finland's entry into NATO after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed that. The mercenaries that the government warned about in 2023 never appeared.

Far more likely than an armed incursion from Kaliningrad into Poland, according to analysts, are small-scale provocations and sabotage operations aimed at destabilizing Mr. Tusk's government, which Moscow reviles because of its strong support for Ukraine and the European Union.

Disorder on the frontier, according to this theory, could help turn Polish opinion against Ukraine and boost right-wing political forces that are hostile to the European Union, Ukrainian refugees and, in some cases, military support for Kyiv. Most of the weapons and ammunition that Ukraine receives from the West pass through Polish territory.

Instability on the border could also stoke further political tumult amid rising passions over the standoff at the Constitutional Tribunal, Mr. Tusk's opponents accused him of staging a "coup d'état" after the deployment of riot police outside the court, where five new judges appointed by Parliament had supported a move to unseat the chief justice.

The right-wing opposition insists that those judges are impostors because Mr. Nawrocki, the president, refused to preside over their swearing-in ceremonies. The president has no veto power over judicial appointments, but does have ceremonial duties, something that Mr. Nawrocki has used to try to block the new judges.

On Tuesday, Mr. Tusk tied right-wing denunciations of his actions to a campaign of similar attacks by officials and state media outlets in Moscow, apparently hoping that the deep suspicion of Russia shared by nearly all Poles would help rally public opinion behind his efforts to break the judicial deadlock.

Urging his critics not to become "useful idiots," Mr. Tusk said: "It's invaluable today that Polish politicians don't intentionally or foolishly serve the interests of Russia, which relies on destabilization, disregard for international law, deeming the European Union its main enemy, and so on."

Toll Mounts After Strike On a School In Ukraine

By SIOBHÁN O'GRADY and LIUBOV SHOLUDKO

KYIV, Ukraine — A day after a Russian glide bomb attack killed at least 31 Ukrainians at a school distributing medicine and food, emergency workers braved armed Russian drones on Tuesday as they searched for dozens of people still missing, officials said.

It could take days to determine the exact toll: The threat of continued Russian strikes limits rescuers to short bursts of activity. But the attack was the deadliest against civilians in the southern Zaporizhzhia region during nearly five years of war, and could amount to one of the deadliest of the entire conflict.

Hours after the strike on Mon-

day, the Trump administration's

peace envoy, Steve Witkoff,

announced that talks among the

United States, Russia and

Ukraine would be held early next

week in Abu Dhabi, in the United

Arab Emirates.

The meeting, the first since February involving all three countries, would address postwar security arrangements and steps toward peace, Mr. Witkoff said. The Russian and Ukrainian governments confirmed on Tuesday that they would send negotiators to Abu Dhabi.

But even as the Trump administration tries to restart peace talks, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russia had made clear its intention to continue the war by striking the humanitarian hub in the village of Komyshuvakha on Monday.

Russia hit the village with at least nine glide bombs, each loaded with around 3,000 pounds of explosives, Ukrainian officials said. The attack served as a stark reminder of the limits of a rare local cease-fire in the neighboring Kherson region, which ended a day before.

That six-day truce allowed the evacuation of hundreds of civilians facing starvation in the besieged city of Oleshky, which Russia has occupied since 2022.

The school that was hit in the village of Komyshuvakha doubled as a bomb shelter. The attack trapped civilians and rescue workers inside.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

A crater where a school once stood in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. A Russian attack killed at least 31 and left dozens missing.

At least two rescue workers and four police officers who arrived to treat the wounded after the first bomb landed were killed in the subsequent round of bombing, Ukraine's emergency response services said. Russia has long used this tactic, known as a double tap, to target emergency workers responding to attacks.

On Tuesday, Russia continued to send armed drones over the village, Ukrainian officials said. About 50 people remained missing, they said.

"Every single hour, the rescue operations are being interrupted because of F.P.V. drone threats," said Mykhailo Semikin, the acting head of Zaporizhzhia's regional military administration, referring to first-person-view drones. "It's a cynical thing to do."

Residents had visited the school each week to receive humanitarian aid, Mr. Zelensky said on social media. "This is yet another proof that Russia does not want any de-escalation or real justice," he wrote.

The temporary cease-fire in the neighboring Kherson region lasted from Tuesday through Sunday. The evacuation operation in Oleshky raised hopes for further cooperation between Kyiv and Moscow to ensure the safety of civilians near the front line. It was the first truce of its kind since Russia's 2022 invasion.

The deal, brokered in part by the American first lady, Melania Trump, offered "a moment when the next steps could have shown that a move towards peace was possible," Mr. Zelensky wrote. But after the bombing of Komyshuvakha, he added, "Russia is sending a completely opposite signal — Russia is counting on further killings."

Zaporizhzhia is one of four

Ukrainian regions that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed to have annexed in 2022, though his forces never managed to seize Zaporizhzhia's regional capital, a city of the same name. The front line stretches across the region, and fierce fighting has continued for years, including around Komyshuvakha, where Russian drones have tormented civilians who stayed behind.

The school was built after the full-scale invasion with a reinforced concrete basement that was used as a shelter. But by the time the school was ready for class, the situation in Komyshuvakha had become grim. While the front line had not significantly shifted, drones could now fly much farther, leaving Komyshuvakha trapped in the middle of what is known as the "kill zone."

Students attended the school for only a few months before officials evacuated all children from the area. Adults were urged to leave as well, but many hesitated for common reasons: They had animals to care for, or they feared being a burden in a new town away from their own land. Many of those who stayed were older or disabled.

Each Monday, they received aid from volunteers at the school. This week, when the first glide bomb struck the village, residents rushed to the school's basement for shelter. But the heavier bombs that came next were designed to cause mass destruction, officials said.

The concrete could not withstand the impact, and many people hiding from the attack were buried underground.

Mr. Semikin rushed to the scene on Monday, stopping to take cover from Russian drones along the way, he said. A video he posted showed that little of the school remained. Behind him, smoke rose over piles of debris.

31,000 Miles in 28 Years: Walker Ends Trip at Mom's

By AMANDA HOLPUCH

Where does a 31,000-mile walk end?

For Karl Bushby, it was his mother's house in Hull, a port city on the east coast of England. He had walked around the globe for 28 years.

Mr. Bushby, 57, spoke to a crowd in the city center on Monday before he strolled the final miles to see his mother, Angela Bushby, who had decorated her yard with Union Jack bunting and a banner welcoming her boy.

It had been decades since Mr. Bushby was in his hometown. He began his walk in Punta Arenas, Chile, in November 1998, heading north to the Bering Strait, which he crossed on foot in March 2006. He continued across Asia and Europe.

Along the way, he traversed some of the world's harshest landscapes, like the jungle of the Darién Gap. He was arrested and deported, and he got lost.

He had self-imposed rules for the walk, which included that he would not set foot in Britain until his journey concluded. This made it difficult to see his son, and his son's daughter. She is 12, and Mr. Bushby had not met her before Monday.

Another rule was that Mr. Bushby would not use a mode of transport, like a car, a boat or a plane, to travel. So, in order to conclude his journey, he had to swim across the English Channel in October.

He made it to England, and arrived Monday in Hull with his main companion: a modified golf trolley that he has used to haul camping supplies, clothing, toiletries, food and water.

The documentarian Werner Herzog was there to welcome Mr. Bushby and his trolley. Mr. Herzog said in an email that he had "almost finished" a documentary about Mr. Bushby. "I only still needed his return home," Mr. Her-

Karl Bushby, now 57, with his mother, Angela Bushby, at her home on Monday in Hull, England.

TEMILADE ADELAJA/REUTERS

zog wrote.

At a news conference on Mon-

day, Mr. Bushby said he would be

kept busy for the next year with the documentary and a book he is planning to write.

First, though, he had to process what it meant to be back in Hull.

"It's difficult to explain how all that felt today," Mr. Bushby said. "It's all still one great big, blurry mess at the moment in my head."

King's Speech Doesn't Offer State Apology For Slavery

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

ST. JOHN'S, Antigua — King Charles III on Tuesday expressed "profound personal sorrow" and "horror" over Britain's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, telling leaders of the country's former colonies that the consequences of that dark history still "resonate with contemporary force."

As expected, the king did not offer a formal apology for Britain's trafficking of millions of slaves from Africa in the 1700s and 1800s. As the ceremonial head of state of several Commonwealth nations, he is constitutionally unable to apologize on behalf of Britain unless directed to by the government.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week that he was open to a formal apology, in a major change of British policy, but suggested it would come after structured conversations with the countries affected.

King Charles added to his previous expressions of regret by acknowledging that slavery still casts a shadow over the nations that were once part of the British Empire.

"As I have said before, that shameful chapter of history is one that fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow," Charles said in a speech in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, at a meeting of the Commonwealth, a voluntary organization that includes 56 nations.

The king has previously said that slavery “forever stains” British history, and he asserted last week that the country should directly “acknowledge the great suffering of the past.” His remarks follow years of pressure from leaders of the Commonwealth for Britain to apologize and pay reparations.

Those calls grew louder in the last week, as the king traveled to the Bahamas and Guyana before arriving in Antigua for the Commonwealth meeting. On Thursday, just hours before Charles met with Mohammed Ifraan Ali, the president of Guyana, Mr. Ali said in an interview that an apology for slavery should be "the next step" taken.

Mr. Burnham, who attended the Commonwealth meeting in Antigua on Tuesday alongside Charles, tried to preemptively address those increasingly vocal demands last week.

In an essay in The Guardian, he wrote that his government was open to a structured conversation with countries affected by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which he called "a brutal and barbaric violation." Mr. Burnham added: "Listening to calls for a formal apology on behalf of the British state will form an important part of this process, and I am open to them."

However, he rejected calls for reparations, saying that British people should not be "held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part."

British government officials said a formal apology could emerge after what Mr. Burnham called a "structured dialogue with Commonwealth nations." The BBC reported that that could be within the next year, perhaps when Britain holds the rotating presidency of the G20 group of countries.

In Antigua, officials said Mr. Burnham would tell other leaders of Commonwealth nations that Britain is “open to discussions about the past.”

The prime minister is expected to announce an effort to help Commonwealth nations restructure their debt, allowing them to pay over a longer period of time and at lower interest rates. In his essay last week, he said that he had asked Gordon Brown, a former prime minister and a long-serving chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair's premiership, to attend the meeting on Tuesday and lead the debt talks.

Mr. Burnham will also announce a task force to encourage development of critical minerals, his office said. And he will promise that Britain will invest 40 million pounds (about \$53 million) over the next three years to accelerate critical infrastructure investment in the Caribbean.

Leaders of Commonwealth nations are likely to welcome those announcements. But they fall short of the demands from some countries that Britain make monetary compensation to the descendants of slaves.

Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, said on Saturday that Mr. Burnham's openness to an apology was welcomed. But she did not back away from demands for reparations.

"On reparations in particular, our views differ, and we will say so plainly and respectfully," she wrote in a statement.

U.S. Officials Seek Path to Long-Term Troop Presence in Venezuela

A Risky Quest For Military Ties

By EDWARD WONG

CARACAS, Venezuela — The Trump administration is negotiating an agreement with Venezuela that would lay the foundation for a potential long-term U.S. military presence in the country, U.S. officials said.

The talks could open the door to a remarkable and perhaps risky new stage in the U.S. relationship with Venezuela, as the two former adversaries try to move toward military cooperation.

Venezuela's top officials have become subservient to President Trump since U.S. troops killed scores of people in a nighttime assault on Venezuela in January and took Nicolás Maduro, the country's leader, to a prison in New York.

In a speech in Washington on Monday, Mr. Trump referred to "our conquest of Venezuela."

The negotiations are the latest manifestation of the U.S. government's increasingly militarized policies in Latin America. Mr. Trump and his top aides have ordered troops to carry out operations across the region, including joint actions with forces in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

The U.S. military has also carried out scores of lethal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that many legal experts say are extrajudicial killings.

The Trump administration has forged closer security ties with many of the region's right-wing governments and has troops and military assets at bases across Central and South America.

Venezuela's new authoritarian leader, Delcy Rodriguez, is an ally of Mr. Maduro and has a history of criticizing the United States, including its military. But since Mr. Maduro's ouster, she has worked closely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The State Department under Mr. Rubio is leading the talks on the military pact, known as a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, said the U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Any details of a long-term U.S. troop presence in Venezuela, including numbers and locations, would be worked out in future agreements.

The State Department said in a statement that it has negotiated status of forces agreements with more than 100 countries. The United States maintains tens of thousands of troops on bases in some of them but only a few advisers or units in others.

A U.S. Marine Corps aircraft over Caracas, Venezuela, in May. The country's Caribbean coast and land borders with Colombia, Brazil and Guyana offer strategic value.

LEONARDO FERNANDEZ VILDRA/REUTERS

The pacts, it said, "promote defense cooperation by providing a clear, predictable legal framework for U.S. forces to work on mutually agreed activities with our security partners, such as ship visits, train-

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

ing, exercises and humanitarian assistance."

The Embassy of Venezuela in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.

It is extraordinary for the American government to try to reach such an arrangement with Venezuela, which recently considered the United States an enemy and lost troops in the deadly U.S. assault in January.

The populist anti-American ideology in Venezuela known as Chavismo still has support among 10 to 20 percent of citizens, including people in the military and security agencies, experts say. They could become vocal opponents to the negotiations.

Even outside of those ideologues, many Venezuelans bristle at what they call a new form of Western colonialism, with Mr. Trump's boasting of taking the country's oil. The sight of American troops in the country could fuel their anger.

State Department officials gave some congressional aides a formal briefing on the imminent negotiations with Venezuela in late October.

On Monday, Mr. Rubio met with the new foreign minister of Venezuela, Oliver Blanco, in Washington. They discussed reconciliation talks among the country's political factions, the possibility of future elections and the potential release of political prisoners, the State Department said. Its summary of the meeting did not mention negotiations over a military agreement.

After the U.S. operation on Jan. 3 that seized Mr. Maduro, the Pentagon said it did not have a military presence in Venezuela. When a series of devastating earthquakes hit Venezuela in June, the U.S. Southern Command sent about 2,000 troops into and around Venezuela, said the commander in charge, Gen. Francis L. Donovan. Those who entered the country have since left.

Venezuela has a coast along the Caribbean and land borders with Colombia, Brazil and Guyana, making it well suited as a regional base of operations.

The U.S. military and other American agencies are conducting operations in Colombia to try to halt drug trafficking. Smugglers move drugs from Colombia to Venezuela and then mainly to Europe.

In June, Southern Command carried out an airstrike in Venezuela that killed Héctor Rustenford Guerrero Flores, a founder of Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization in Venezuela that the Trump administration aims to crush, officials from both countries said. The C.I.A. provided intelligence, and Venezuelan forces were involved in the operation, they said.

One question is whether the United States intends to set up and maintain American military bases in Venezuela or put troops on Venezuelan bases.

A senior State Department offi-

Cooperation is the goal in talks between former enemies.

cial said in Caracas that the United States expected to expand its security cooperation with Venezuela but asserted that any serious discussion of setting up bases was "way, way down the road." He said there were no current talks about bases with the Venezuelan government.

The U.S. Embassy in Caracas, which recently resumed operations after being shut down for seven years, has one full-time military attaché and a handful of Marines, the official said.

The Pentagon and Southern Command's efforts to bolster military ties in South America have focused on Ecuador and Colombia so far.

A former U.S. official who worked on military cooperation in Latin America said there were challenges to establishing a U.S. troop presence in Venezuela even if officials successfully negotiated an agreement.

One issue is the country's shoddy infrastructure, including at the U.S. Embassy, he said. Another is the fact that the U.S. military has not engaged with Venezuelan forces in nearly a decade, so it would take some time to forge a working relationship.

The talks with Venezuela on a military agreement come at a delicate political moment because of a debate in Washington and Caracas on a timeline for elections and discussions on who might be Venezuela's next leader.

It is the administration of Ms. Rodríguez that negotiates diplomatic agreements with the State Department. Mr. Trump has given her his full-throated support and has said Venezuela is not ready for elections.

Mr. Rubio has been nudging along political discussions within Venezuela that are supposedly aimed at making structural changes needed for fair elections. But neither he nor any Venezuelalan official has given concrete dates for local or national elections.

The two governments are under increasing pressure to set dates, though. The most prominent Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who has called for presidential elections by July, made a surprise return to her country in late October after being in exile for 10 months.

She made a risky, secret departure in December to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway but found it impossible to travel to Venezuela earlier this year because the Trump administration had made it clear to foreign officials that it did not endorse her return, U.S. officials said.

Ms. Machado, a conservative politician, is the most viable challenger to Ms. Rodriguez for the presidency. She has criticized an oil deal that Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio reached last year with Venezuela — and denounced Alejandro Betancourt, the Venezuelan oilman at the center of that deal — but has not said anything about future U.S. military involvement in Venezuela.

She had supported the U.S. military's actions in Mr. Trump's earlier pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro.

Cuban Official Says U.S. Sanctions Will Fail to Break the Government

By JACK NICAS

change you desire," he wrote.

UNITED NATIONS — Few foreign ministers are in a worse diplomatic position than Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla of Cuba.

His country is nearly out of oil. It can hardly receive other goods. The Trump administration wants to topple the government. And its allies have largely vanished.

But in an exclusive interview last week, Mr. Rodriguez projected confidence that the current Cuban government would survive President Trump. That is because, he said, its strategy is to simply endure, much as it has for six decades, in the hope that Washington moves on or shifts course.

"For as long as it takes," he said. "U.S. policy toward Cuba will change. It has to. It's inevitable."

His reasoning? A majority of Americans and foreign governments oppose the U.S. pressure on Cuba and, for decades, it has failed to cause change.

"For 60 years now, U.S. policy toward Cuba hasn't worked," he said, "while Cuba's policy of resisting and adapting to that aggression has."

Mr. Rodríguez, 68, has served as foreign minister for 17 years and has been a Cuban diplomat since 1993 — a career primarily focused on countering U.S. policy. But, he said, he has never encountered an American pressure campaign like this one.

Since January, the Trump administration has sought to make the Cuban government submit to its demands by intensifying sanctions and imposing an oil blockade on the island. The measures have spurred Cuba's worst energy and economic crisis in decades, leading to prolonged blackouts, shuttered schools and a disintegrating health care system.

The Cuban government's frustration broke through on the floor of the United Nations last week, when Mr. Rodriguez directly confronted Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Less than two minutes into a speech by Mr. Waltz in which he accused Cuban officials of corruption, members of the Cuban delegation began shouting and banging their hands on a table. Mr. Rodriguez formally objected, his third time interrupting a U.S. diplomat's speech at the U.N. in the past year.

But this time he marched up the aisle with the Cuban delegation in tow, lodging their complaints within a few feet of where Mr. Waltz was standing.

"You're a liar!" one Cuban diplomat screamed at him.

"Back up!" Mr. Waltz shouted back. "Do you understand who you're dealing with?"

The U.S. government later expelled a Cuban diplomat involved in the incident.

It was perhaps the most heated altercation between U.S. and Cuban officials in years, and it reflected Havana's growing desperation and Washington's increasingly belligerent posture.

On Oct. 26, the U.S. Embassy in Cuba posted a photo of the top American diplomat on the island meeting with the top American military general overseeing the Caribbean. "Much to discuss about Cuba," read the caption.

Mr. Trump mused about deploying a warship off the island's coast to intimidate the Cuban government. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently made an extraordinary public call to recruit spies in Cuba to aid the U.S. effort against the government. "Seize this opportunity to create the

But all the intimidation has failed to make the Cuban government yield.

"Honestly, I have no idea what the secretary of state is trying to do with those posts," Mr. Rodríguez said of Mr. Rubio's call for spies. "They come across as a bit childish."

The Cuban government has lasted longer than many expected under the oil blockade. That is partly because the government has stretched out its fuel supplies by rationing electricity and building solar parks.

The Trump administration has signaled that it is willing to be patient. Mr. Rubio has said change could take years.

In a statement, Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, blamed worsening conditions in Cuba on the Cuban government and said the United States was sending humanitarian aid. "The failing Cuban regime continues to blame the United States and everyone else for their own incompetence and corruption," he said.

Mr. Pigott added that "President Trump continues to apply pressure to drive much more substantial economic and political reforms" in Cuba.

U.S. officials have acknowledged that they are seeking a sympathetic and malleable figure in the Cuban government, much like Venezuela's new interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez. But Mr. Rubio's public plea for informants suggests that they may be struggling to find one.

"U.S. policy toward Cuba will change," said Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, the island's foreign minister. "It has to. It's inevitable."

When asked about his post, Mr. Rubio told reporters, "We think Cuba needs very dramatic change," then added that "it's a totally different case from Venezuela."

GRAHAM DICKIE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mr. Rodríguez said that talks were continuing with U.S. officials — including in-person meetings and phone calls and WhatsApp messages — but that little progress was being made. "It's very difficult for talks to progress when they're constantly accompanied by threats," he said.

Ric Herrero, director of the Cuba Study Group, which pushes for more dialogue between Washington and Havana, said that Mr. Rodríguez's stance of trying to wait out the Trump administration was shortsighted.

"It's easy for Bruno to claim that they're there resisting when the ones that are really bearing the brunt of it are the Cuban people," he said.

Cuba may also find it much harder to maintain its resilience than in years past. Its government long relied upon Russia or Venezuela to help it stand up to U.S. pressure, but those allies are now largely gone. Russia sent a large tanker of oil in March but has declined to test the U.S. blockade since. Venezuela is effectively controlled by Washington.

"The hard fact is that Cuba is alone," Mr. Herrero said. "They can resist, but it's just managed decline. Ultimately you're heading toward the abyss."

Mr. Rodríguez disputed any suggestion that Cuba was collapsing or that it had been abandoned on the world stage. He pointed to decades of U.N. resolutions that denounced U.S. trade embargoes on Cuba.

Last week, 130 countries again sided with Cuba on such a resolution, yet it was one of the island's lowest levels of support ever. Seventeen nations voted against the resolution, 10 more than last year, with Colombia, Costa Rica and Ecuador switching their votes. Another 25 abstained, 16 more than last year, including Germany, Italy, South Korea and the Dominican Republic.

Those results largely reflect the Trump administration's success in persuading and pressuring countries to support its Cuba policy, or to at least look the other away.

Mr. Rodríguez argued that the American lobbying, as well its decision to increase sanctions, showed the Cuban government's strength.

"If they really think Cuba's strategy and the Cuban state are so ineffective, why go to all this trouble?" he asked.

Despite Mr. Rodriguez's contention that Havana can simply ride out the Trump administration, the Cuban government is enacting change. Earlier this year, it announced the most sweeping economic measures since the Cuban revolution in 1959, including allowing private banks, selling shares in state companies and removing many restrictions on foreign investment and private businesses.

Mr. Rodriguez claimed that the slow economic liberalization of Cuba — one of the world's few communist countries — was being done not to appease the Trump administration but to respond to global economic challenges.

"It opens many new opportunities to private capital, foreign investors and companies from various countries," Mr. Rodríguez said. "But the Cuban economy will remain socialist."

At the same time, he said, American companies should invest.

"We wouldn't allow the United States to control sectors of the Cuban economy," he said. "But American companies are competitive, and we'd welcome them in Cuba."

'The body perishes, but the spirit continues and returns these days. That is why we are happy.'

CELSO GUEVARA, who lives in California. He says the bond with Metlatónoc endures beyond borders and beyond the grave.

Yarivi Guevara lit candles for her father at an altar on Saturday. She sees the dead as honored guests, served before others eat.

A path of marigold petals aims to guide souls homeward. In remote Metlatónoc, the bittersweet observance lasts 10 days.

Townspeople welcomed their loved ones back on Sunday. Ancestral Mixtec beliefs blend with Catholic rites in the festivities.

GUERRERO DISPATCH

High in Mexico's Mountains, a Homecoming for the Dead

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUIS ANTONIO ROJAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Abundant marigolds adorned graves on Sunday in Metlatónoc, Mexico, where people communed with their loved ones.

By PAULINA VILLEGAS

METLATÓNOC, Mexico — The dead here do not really die.

Deep in the rugged mountains of southern Mexico, the dead returned home last week to Metlatónoc, a remote Indigenous town reached by winding dirt roads where ancestral beliefs remain woven into daily life.

All weekend, firecrackers thundered across the small town of roughly 19,400 in the southern state of Guerrero. The scent of copal incense hung thick in the air, and marigolds blazed orange everywhere. The Celebration of the Dead was underway for the Indigenous people known as the Na Savi, or People of the Rain. For this Mixtec group, death is not an ending but a passage to the place where the dead dwell. And during their 10-day celebration, the departed return to visit with the living.

Inside homes, elaborate altars stand beneath arches of brilliant orange marigolds, the flower long associated with the passage between life and death. Fruit and sugared bread hang from the arches, their scents joining the flowers' to guide loved ones home. Under the arches, photographs of the departed stand among tamales, atole (a warm, thick corn drink) and other foods the dead once enjoyed. There are tiny, coin-size tortillas for children and pets who have died. Cigarettes for those who smoked.

Millions of families across Mexico gathered over the weekend to honor their loved ones. The Day of the Dead has become a major tourist draw in recent years, featured in Hollywood films and embraced by global pop culture.

But for many, the holiday remains an intimate family tradition. In a country so often scarred by violence and tragedy, the Day of the Dead offers a shared ritual of remembrance across social, cultural and ethnic divides — a collective moment of pause to honor the dead and perhaps confront the fragility of one's own existence.

In some parts of Mexico, the holiday is two days long. In Metlatónoc, it is commemorated for 10 days.

While altars and visits to cemeteries are common, Metlatónoc's observance blends ancestral Mixtec beliefs with Catholic rites. It includes dances and processions to summon the souls of the dead. Here, the belief that death is just a passage re-

mains particularly strong.

"Life does not end here; it goes on," said Celso Guevara, who emigrated to California two decades ago, joining the many residents who have left this remote mountain town in search of a better life. California is now his home, but he returns each year for the celebration. "The body perishes, but the spirit continues and returns these days. That is why we are happy."

Inside his home, perched above the town's cemetery, a brass band played funeral marches before an altar dedicated to his grandparents. A smaller shrine beside it honored his brother, who died at age 7. But there was little sorrow in the room. His mother, Aurora Solano, swayed and danced to the music.

"Metlatónoc is the only place where people are not afraid of dying because we know that next year you will come back, to hang out, to dance, to eat with your loved ones," Mr. Guevara said.

Time here stands still as the veil between the living and the dead dissolves and the town gathers to welcome its departed with tenderness and devotion. Beginning on Oct. 24, families summon the recently departed, followed on Oct. 28 by those lost for many years. On Oct. 31, the spirits of children are called home. Everyone else is summoned the next day before they all depart on Nov. 2.

Mexico's relationship with death has fascinated Mexican writers, poets, philosophers and anthropologists for generations, particularly the apparent paradox at the heart of its culture: Death is not only mourned, it is celebrated, invited to dinner and even mocked.

That idea echoes the ancestral beliefs of the Na Savi here in Metlatónoc.

The dead remain members of the community. Their stories do not end, nor are those who passed away relegated to memory. For these few days, they come back to be part of the village.

On Saturday, hundreds circled the town's church through thick clouds of incense smoke, carrying armfuls of marigolds and burning white candles to guide the spirits of children home. Girls carried a small, doll-like figure dressed in a traditional embroidered tunic, representing the children's souls.

At the cemetery, Petra García Moreno sat on her husband's gravestone, gathering blossoms into small bouquets as Rotilio de la Cruz, her son, tied them to a wooden arch above the grave.

The dead are "like gods for us, watching over the living," Mr. de la Cruz said. During these reunions, he explained, families ask them for protection, health

and guidance. Their answers, he believes, come in dreams.

Sometimes the messages come in more mischievous ways.

Yarivi Guevara, 27, said she believes her dead father, Paulino, and her grandparents express any grievance or displeasure by toppling offerings in the shrines, or leaving peculiar patterns in candle wax.

Like most families here, she treats the dead as honored guests, serving them hot coffee and breakfast before anyone else eats, then two more meals. At night, she and her siblings wish them good night.

For decades, families in Met-latónoc lived off cultivating corn, beans and squash. Yet jobs beyond farming and other basic services remain scarce. A small clinic serves a town with no hospital. Such hardships have pushed roughly 35 percent of the population to migrate to the

United States in the past decade, according to Marvin Rojas, the town's mayor, who took office last year after his brother was killed.

Money sent home has brought a measure of prosperity to what was considered Mexico's poorest municipality until 2003. Adobe houses have gradually given way to two-story cinder-block ones.

For those who have left for the United States, like Mr. Guevara, the bond with their home and its shared beliefs endures despite the separation, even beyond death.

"Everyone in this town dreams that when we die we will be buried here because we know that only here will we remain alive," he added.

Later on Saturday, in the neighboring town of Cochoapa el Grande, graves disappeared beneath a sea of incandescent orange. Marigolds formed towering arches above the tombs like floral gateways. As daylight faded, the blossoms glowed like small flames against the stormblue sky.

Families carried flowers, lit candles and arranged offerings. One woman set out popcorn for her deceased sister. Men in cowboy hats drank beer at gravesites as musicians played solemn tunes. Women with long white braids and embroidered blouses sat on tombs, talking to long-gone relatives. Others sat silently beside their dead.

There was something both intimate and communal about the rituals, each gathering marked by small acts of devotion.

By Sunday afternoon, the streets of Metlatónoc had filled with a solemn procession. Hundreds of mourners moved slowly through town, carrying white candles and flowers, calling for the souls of the departed. Above the sea of mourners rose a black-robed Virgin of Solitude, carried on the shoulders of men and women.

Families waited with flowers laid on the ground facing east, where the sun rises and, they believe, the dead return. Before joining the procession, they lit tall candles to summon their loved ones and illuminate the way home.

"Get up now, Marcelino Rojas!" Florencia Sierra Mendoza, a cultural promoter, called out to her late great-grandfather, pointing to the candle that she said represented his spirit. "Let's go back to your home!"

Judge Temporarily Halts Deportation for Dozens of People From Afghanistan

This article is by Pranav Baskar, Hamed Aleaziz, Mattathias Schwartz and Elian Peltier.

A federal court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration's plan to put dozens of Afghan immigrants on a plane and send them back to Afghanistan, where many fear they will face persecution by the Taliban.

Judge Valerie Caproni of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the United States could not send any Afghan nationals to Afghanistan this week, but she was sparse in her reasoning and did not address the dangers the deportees might face upon returning to Afghanistan.

The Trump administration has detained dozens of Afghan immigrants in recent days, the most expansive step so far to include Afghans in its wider immigration dragnet. To carry out the deportation, the United States plans to fly the Afghans to Pakistan, which would then send them across the border to Afghanistan.

The deportation flight was set leave early this month, according to officials and court filings. The judge's order now prevents any of the Afghans from being sent back until Sunday, when block expires. But it does not put an end to the deportations altogether.

U.S. law prohibits the government from deporting people to countries where courts have ruled they would most likely face persecution or torture. It isn't known whether any of the Afghans set for deportation have any individual court protections.

On Monday, 66 Congressional Democrats signed a letter calling for the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to cancel the flight. "Sending dozens of people back to one of the most dangerous countries on earth, and where they are likely to be targeted for their or their family's suspected support of U.S. government or criticism of the Taliban, is a death sentence," the letter said.

The administration has argued in court cases that some of the people fighting deportation to Afghanistan have already exhausted their legal options and that the courts' authority to intervene now is limited.

Among the more than 150 Afghans targeted for mass expulsion is at least one woman, according to court filings obtained by The New York Times and a U.S. official, as well as at least one gay man and relatives of those who helped the U.S. military. The Times reported last week. Homosexuality is punishable by death in Afghanistan, and women have faced severe restrictions on work, travel and education. Beyond that, when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, those who helped U.S. forces were sometimes singled out for retribution.

Federal judges have put some significant roadblocks in the way of administration's plan, with decisions on individual deportations. On Monday, a judge delayed the deportation of a man whose wife worked with the U.S. military, by 14 days, his lawyer said. On Tuesday, a judge ordered the immediate release of the gay man. Both said they feared for their lives if they are returned to Afghanistan.

The Afghan woman, who was detained at the southern border in 2025 after entering the United States illegally, is Christian and worked as a journalist for a radio station in Afghanistan, according to court filings and her attorney.

The woman's lawyers argued in an emergency court filing on Monday that her religious identity and work as a journalist would make her a target for persecution by the Taliban. Two of her colleagues at the station were killed in 2019 by unidentified gunmen.

The Taliban has imposed some of the harshest restrictions on women in the world, and hers would be one of the few known cases of a woman deported by the United States to Afghanistan. In September, an Afghan woman accused of supporting the Islamic State was sent back in the first successful use of an obscure court set up three decades ago to deport immigrants with ties to terrorist groups. She eventually agreed to

the removal.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said that ICE "does not comment on prospective removal operations, including flight schedules, passenger manifests, destinations or individual case details."

Some of the lawyers trying to stop the deportations argue that by transferring the Afghans to Pakistan, the United States is de-

An order does not address the potential for persecution.

porting people to a third country, one now at war with Afghanistan. That conflict, in addition to Afghanistan's repressive Taliban government, they claim, puts the migrants at risk of torture or persecution, in violation of international treaties to which the United States is a party. Judge Caproni, in her order Tuesday, did not weigh in on that question.

Pakistan has deported or forced to return more than 2.7 million Afghans since 2023. Many have faced harassment and intimidation before being forced back into Afghanistan.

The Pakistani military did not respond to a request for comment on Pakistan's exact role in the U.S. deportation plan.

In one court filing, the Trump administration disputed that deportations to Afghanistan via Pakistan amounted to third-country deportations because the immigrants would ultimately return to their country of origin after “transiting through” Pakistan.

A 2025 memo from the Homeland Security Department states that before receiving third-country deportees from the U.S., foreign governments must give credible “diplomatic assurances” that they will not be persecuted or tortured. Some of the lawyers for the detainees who are challenging their removal via Pakistan argue that there is no evidence that such assurances have been provided in their cases.

Even if the detainees' lawyers were able to establish that the unusual arrangement with Pakistan amounted to a third-country deportation, that might not be sufficient to persuade the courts to intervene. In September, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration's third-country deportation effort to continue by blocking a ruling from a lower-court judge that required more due process. Some district court judges have interpreted it as giving a green light to third-country deportations, at least for now.

Taliban officials responded to the planned deportation with social media posts expressing concern about sending Afghan citizens to Pakistan and offering to arrange for the return of Afghan citizens directly.

Over the past two years, the Trump administration has restricted immigration for Afghans who helped the American war effort, deported others to countries in Africa, and pushed some, who are stranded in a former U.S. military camp in Qatar, to return to Afghanistan voluntarily.

The woman on this month's flight had represented herself in an application for asylum after coming to the United States in 2025, according to government and court documents. The case was dismissed without a trial.

The deportation, her attorney said in a filing, would carry "grave risk of persecution, torture and death." The woman requested anonymity out of fear for her safety if she is deported.

Salehi, an Afghan man who is also scheduled for the deportation, entered America illegally in 2024, according to government documents. He requested he be identified only by his last name out of fear for his safety.

"This is the end for me," he said in an interview from prison. "I can't even imagine what is going to happen if I return because of my last experience with the Taliban."

Sailor's Jump From Carrier Prompts Tough Questions On Military Mental Health

By JAN RANSOM

Nicholas McKelvey had been aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln for 255 grueling days.

As the war with Iran raged, the 19-year-old Navy airman — an aviation mechanic in a helicopter squadron — was working 12-hour shifts in the blazing sun, checking and guiding helicopters on the flight deck. He had missed the birth of his daughter. His in-laws were battling cancer. Food on the aircraft carrier was in short supply.

Then he reached his breaking point.

At about 10 a.m. on a Monday in early August, he sprinted along the flight deck then leaped from the ship's edge and plunged 67 feet into the Arabian Sea, according to Navy records reviewed by The New York Times. He was rescued by a helicopter crew and returned to the ship 50 minutes later.

"I didn't want to be there anymore," Mr. McKelvey said in an interview, speaking publicly for the first time. "If I was going to die because of it, then that's just how it is."

On Thursday, the Navy effectively fired him — moving to discharge Mr. McKelvey after accusing him of “malingering,” or faking a mental health crisis to end his deployment, according to Mr. McKelvey’s wife, Samantha Larry. Under the terms of his removal — a general discharge under honorable conditions — he will become ineligible for education assistance under the G.I. Bill, cutting off a pathway to college that his family was counting on, Ms. Larry said.

The case offers a rare glimpse into how the Navy has handled mental health issues aboard ships under pressure from sustained deployments during the war with Iran. And it raises questions about whether officers treated Mr. McKelvey's jump overboard as misconduct without sufficiently examining what led a sailor to take such an extreme, life-threatening step.

The Lincoln, which returned to San Diego last month after a near-record 322-

GABRIELA BHASKAR/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mr. McKelvey's Navy uniform. He was rescued by a helicopter crew and returned to the ship.

day deployment, became a symbol of the food shortages and mental health challenges facing Navy ship crews after Iran destroyed a key supply hub in the region.

There were eight suicide attempts during the long deployment among sailors in the Lincoln strike group, according to a letter the Navy sent to lawmakers. The letter did not name Mr. McKelvey, but the description of a sailor who "went overboard from the ship" matches his story.

Aspects of the case were earlier reported by MS NOW, which did not identify Mr. McKelvey by name. Mr. McKelvey and his wife said they wanted to come forward publicly now to shed light on what they believed was inadequate mental health care before and after his jump and an unfair punishment.

"They don't want to take accountability for what happened to him, and to what happened to multiple sailors on the boat," said Ms. Larry, 19. "I don't think that they care. They care more about how they're pictured, how they're viewed. They don't want anyone to see the bad stuff."

The Navy did not respond directly to specific questions about Mr. McKelvey. But a Navy spokesman said that aircraft carriers have "a multidisciplinary team of mental health resources" and that specialists "coordinate and provide care tailored to a wide range of conditions."

Several former military lawyers and other experts interviewed by The Times agreed that Mr. McKelvey's case presented complicated issues for the Navy. Some said the disciplinary response was legally justified and relatively lenient because malingering is sometimes treated as a criminal offense.

Others questioned whether the Navy's response adequately addressed the distress that may have driven him to jump. The Navy, they said, could have focused on treating him, or seeking a medical discharge that would allow him to retain key benefits, rather than accusing him of wrongdoing.

"You're going to have commanders that are willing to punish people who undertake action that risks their own lives in a moment of extreme mental trauma," said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer and a professor at Southwestern Law School. "But there's so much more underneath it, and fundamentally you don't need to punish it. You need to treat it."

For Mr. McKelvey, the future beyond the Navy is uncertain.

He and his wife have been staying in

John Ismay contributed reporting.

Airbnb rentals and with relatives in San Diego as they prepare to return to their hometown, Jacksonville, Fla., with their two children, a 3-year-old boy and an 8-month-old girl.

After moving, they will try to figure out what Mr. McKelvey will do for work. They will help care for Ms. Larry's mother, who was recently treated for lymphoma. And they will see if, without the education benefits lost because of his discharge, they can afford for him to one day go to college.

"We're going to have to pull out student loans," Ms. Larry said. "It is essentially setting us up for just putting us in debt."

A Better Way of Life

Mr. McKelvey joined the Navy in 2024 as a path to a stable, good-paying job to support his family.

He and Ms. Larry met in middle school and had their first child when she was 15 and he was 16. They had dropped out of high school. The couple married last year.

In late November 2025, a week before Mr. McKelvey's 19th birthday, the Lincoln departed from its home port in San Diego for a routine Pacific deployment.

The ship made a brief overnight stop in Guam for supplies roughly three weeks later — the last port of call for several months. By mid-January, the crew was told they would be redirected to the Middle East.

Mr. McKelvey was not alarmed by the change in course, he said. He welcomed the extra pay that would come with potentially heading to a war zone.

As the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran began in February, Mr. McKelvey spent his shifts on the ship's flight deck helping to secure helicopters while also cleaning and inspecting aircraft for cracks and other damage, he said.

Clad in a long-sleeved cotton turtleneck, heavyweight flame-resistant trousers, a helmet, thick leather gloves and steel-toed leather boots, he worked in extreme heat. The conditions were intensified by the exhaust from fighter jets and the constant hunger he felt as meal portions shrank from dwindling food supplies.

His mind was back home, he said. His wife had given birth to their daughter four days before combat operations began.

Staying connected was a challenge as the ship's Wi-Fi was disconnected for a month for security reasons at the beginning of the war, according to Ms. Larry. Wi-Fi service eventually returned, but calls would not always go through, and text messages took hours to send if they were sent at all.

In late June, Mr. McKelvey visited the ship's medical unit seeking mental health care and was directed to speak with a chaplain, he said. But he declined, he said, because the chaplain was not a mental health professional.

The Lincoln, with more than 5,000 service members aboard, had five chaplains and six mental health specialists, including a psychologist and a clinical social worker, according to the letter the Navy sent lawmakers.

The Navy increased funding for mental health care after a spate of suicides in 2022. Nonetheless, a report last year by the Defense Department's inspector general flagged continued issues, such as some commanders failing to have a proper response plan for sailors who appear at risk of suicide.

Mr. McKelvey said one of his commanders had told him the Navy would try to fly him off the ship. It never happened. Instead, the Lincoln's deployment was repeatedly extended, deepening Mr. McKelvey's hopelessness, he said.

"I think the boat is finally getting to me," he wrote to Ms. Larry in a July text message, adding that he was unsure he could "finish this deployment."

Man Overboard

A report filed by the officer of the deck — the person responsible for running the Lincoln's operations from the ship's pilot-house — described in detail the elaborate response that consumed the ship and its crew for nearly an hour after Mr. McKelvey's Aug. 3 jump.

As the current carried Mr. McKelvey away, the captain ordered the massive vessel to be turned around. The ship's navigator kept his eyes on the sailor. An officer initiated a procedure known as "River City," in which Wi-Fi and other external communications were shut off.

A Navy helicopter flying nearby dropped a floating smoke flare into the water to mark his location.

Mr. McKelvey was about a mile away when a swimmer for the rescue helicopter jumped into the ocean, and 10 minutes later, they were hoisted back up into the aircraft.

In the report, the officer struck a note of skepticism about what might have led Mr. McKelvey to jump. While his "motives are undetermined," the officer wrote, "the conditions in which he jumped appear suspect."

He jumped in broad daylight when the ship was moving slowly for maintenance, the report noted. With five-foot waves, and a water temperature of 76 degrees, the ocean was relatively calm. He wore his "float coat," a special vest used by crew members on the carrier deck that can function as a flotation device.

The officer also wrote that the sailor "almost immediately waved for help" — a point that Mr. McKelvey disputes. He said that he was not waving, but swimming away from the ship.

In the report, the officer acknowledged that the stresses of life on the Lin-

GABRIELA BHASKAI/THE NEW YORK TIMES

U.S. NAVY, VIA REUTERS

GABRIELA BHASKAR/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The U.S.S. Lincoln arriving in San Diego last month after a 322-day deployment. The ship became a symbol of the food shortages and mental health challenges facing crews after Iran destroyed a supply hub in the region.

'I didn't want to be there anymore. If I was going to die because of it, then that's just how it is.'

NICHOLAS McKELVEY, in an interview, speaking publicly for the first time.

coin might have played a role. "This has been a difficult deployment," the report said, "and it is unsurprising that we might have a jumper."

Nicholas McKelvey, who was an aviation mechanic in a helicopter squadron, with his wife and children last month. Left, fighter jets launching from the U.S.S. Lincoln in March.

Mr. McKelvey was immediately taken to the medical unit, Ms. Larry said. He was given Tylenol for back pain.

He met briefly with a psychiatrist, who asked him why he had jumped from the ship, Ms. Larry said. Mr. McKelvey said simply, "I wanted to get home," Ms. Larry said her husband told her.

He was placed on suicide watch and held in an open room that included several small beds, Ms. Larry said. The next day he was ordered to clean and sweep floors, Ms. Larry said.

Mr. McKelvey was flown off the Lincoln on a cargo plane to Djibouti in East Africa on Aug. 10, where he stayed overnight in a bunker because of bombing in the area, Ms. Larry said. He was flown to Ethiopia the next day and then to Washington State before returning to San Diego on Aug. 13.

He saw his wife and children briefly at the airport before he was taken to the hospital where he was kept for four days,

Ms. Larry said.

The day after Mr. McKelvey was discharged from the hospital, he reported to work at the naval base at 8 a.m., Ms. Larry said. He was tasked with sweeping, painting and cleaning before the Lincoln returned to San Diego.

He had his first follow-up appointment several days later, and a doctor prescribed anxiety medication. He declined it, saying he did not want to be on medication.

On Aug. 25, Mr. McKelvey learned that the Navy was charging him with malingering as well as “absence without leave” for abandoning his post when he jumped, according to charging papers reviewed by The Times. As an administrative charge, the process would be handled by a commander who also determines guilt. Such charges are typically less severe than those that trigger a court-martial and potential jail time.

The next day, Mr. McKelvey met with a Navy therapist. Mr. McKelvey said he was ready to provide a fuller explanation for his actions.

"Obviously, I was trying to get home,"

he told The Times, describing what he intended to tell the therapist. "I kept my float coat on because if I wasn't supposed to die then I was going to get saved, but it didn't matter, and if I was supposed to die then I would have just been dead. It's that simple."

But before he could say that, he said, the therapist cut him off and pointed to a record showing what he had told the ship psychiatrist — that he had just wanted to go home.

“Don’t try to change anything now,” Mr. McKelvey recalled the therapist saying.

The Navy soon replaced the absence charge with a new charge — jumping from a vessel, according to Ms. Larry.

During a hearing in September, his commanding officer announced the charges against him, noting that when he jumped he endangered the entire ship, Ms. Larry said.

The officer found him guilty.

Ms. Larry said the Navy punished her husband for having a mental break.

"What they did was wrong," she said. "They'd rather blame the victim."

U.S. Officials Debate Israel's Claim of Iranian Chemical Weapons

Military personnel in Tehran at the funeral processions for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in July. The war between the United States and Iran is now in a holding pattern.

EMILE DUCKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

From Page AI

1980s but said it later dismantled them.

In recent years, the United States has publicly asserted in its annual unclassified intelligence assessments that Iran “likely aims” to continue its research and development of chemical weapons.

Iran has publicly denied having chemical weapons and previously described such allegations as psychological war waged by Israel and Mr. Netanyahu.

All of the people interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity, given the secret nature of the Israeli intelligence, the sensitivity of Iranian planning and the classified American discussions.

After eight months of war, the United States and Iran are in something of a holding pattern, exploring the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough and preparing for renewed warfare.

The debate over the new intelligence shows how tense the moment is and the potential for grave miscalculation. U.S. officials have said the Trump administration has no intention of using a nuclear weapon, but Iranian officials are not so sure.

Mr. Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival after he failed to secure a clear path to forming a government in elections last week. Some analysts believe that he may be seeking to use a security emergency as leverage to compel opposition leaders to join him in a coalition.

In recent conversations with U.S. spy agencies and other officials over the past two weeks, Israeli officials have portrayed the chemical weapon threat as more urgent than Iran's ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon.

The Home Front Command, the Israeli military unit responsible for emergency response and issuing guidance to civilians, is running drills across Israel this week but is not including chemical weapons preparation as a major part of the exercises.

The command has also not issued widespread reminders to its officers or the public regarding safety guidelines for such a possibility, according to two unit officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media. The Israeli military declined to comment.

In recent weeks, the U.S. military has built up a vast arsenal in the region, with naval ships, fighter planes and bombers ready to launch a relatively short campaign of intense strikes after the midterm elections, should President Trump authorize action.

At the same time, U.S. and other

Reporting was contributed by Vivian Nereim and Tyler Pager from Palm Beach, Fla.; Maggie Haberman from Washington; and Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv.

diplomats are trying to forge an agreement with Iran which would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, address Tehran's nuclear program and put off further military action. The buildup of forces could be intended as much to support that diplomatic push as it is to prepare for a return to war.

Iran has intensified attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, hoping to exert maximum economic pressure on the United States amid the midterm elections.

The use of chemical weapons is a particularly fraught issue for Iran, one of a few countries that have suffered the effects of them. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein deployed chemical weapons, killing thousands and leading to decades of health problems among some 100,000 Iranian veterans and civilians, according to Iranian experts.

U.S. intelligence agencies have long tracked Iran's development of chemical weapons, which are banned under international law. Israeli intelligence agencies have told U.S. counterparts that they believe Iran is moving rapidly to develop the technology to put such weapons on a missile or to sneak them into Israel or another country to use in an attack, according to American officials.

For some American officials, the talk of chemical weapons threats from Iran has evoked the flawed U.S. intelligence in 2002 about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had largely abandoned or frozen its nuclear, chemical and biological programs by then, but U.S. intelligence agencies told President George W. Bush's White House that their assessment that Iraq had such weapons was ironclad.

People briefed on the new intelligence had different views on how quickly — or effectively — Iran could deploy a chemical weapon. While mounting a chemical weapon on a ballistic missile is not difficult, ensuring that the weapon can effectively disperse a chemical agent is, according to weapons experts and U.S. officials. Smuggling a bomb across a border also poses challenges.

Using a drone to deliver a chemical weapon is also a possibility.

A regional official said Israel had presented Gulf countries with claims that Iran was working to make its chemical weapons operational. Israeli officials did not share evidence but briefed the officials on their assessments, which the official said Gulf governments found unserious.

The White House did not comment, but a U.S. official said Mr. Trump would keep America and its allies safe from any potential threat. The C.I.A. declined to comment.

A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu's office said that "Israel closely tracks every threat posed by the Iranian terror regime and is prepared to deal with it." A spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations did not return a request for comment.

While there is little debate in the U.S. intelligence community that Iran is developing chemical weapons, there is significant debate over whether its leaders would ever use those weapons, especially if not provoked by further attacks.

The U.S. director of national intelligence warned in 2024 that "Iran probably aims to continue research and development of chemical and biological agents for offensive purposes."

Dana Stroul, the Pentagon's top Middle East policy official in the Biden administration, said it had been known for over two decades that Iran stockpiled components for chemical weapons but that Tehran has never deployed them.

But Iran might feel "exist-entially pressured and potentially crossed the line to direct offensive use" of these weapons, said Ms. Stroul, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The United States has monitored a variety of threats from Iran, as intelligence collection intensified after the discovery of an Iranian plot to attack a base in Britain used by U.S. warplanes.

On Oct. 23, Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, sent Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, a memo warning of the threat of Iranian attacks. U.S. diplomats and other personnel were then put on high alert.

U.S. agencies assess that the threat against Americans in the Middle East and several other countries is at its highest level since the war started in February, U.S. officials said.

U.S. Central Command has a plan to strike Iran beginning as early as Wednesday, after the U.S. midterm elections and when three aircraft carriers are in the region, according to U.S. officials.

The ideal conditions for the type of campaign the military has laid out will last only a short time. After early November, one of the aircraft carriers will need to return to its home port. Early November is also a period of moonless nights, the kind of deep darkness the U.S. military likes to use for its attacks.

Some Trump cabinet members have argued for more time to let a campaign of economic pressure work. They say a U.S. blockade and sanctions on the country will eventually bring down the Iranian government.

But some officials point out that Iran has been able to weather the pressure campaign and that there is little indication that the Iranian government will collapse without additional military attacks.

Stephanie Walker, a senior national security and intelligence official at the F.B.I., said last week that Iran's threat to U.S. interests was "a top focus right now for the entirety of the U.S. government."

Tehran's goals, Ms. Walker said, included espionage, influence and cyberattacks. Iran-linked hackers targeted scores of water systems across the United States this summer, leading some counties to issue boil-water advisories.

Iran has also tried to impersonate people online in order to dupe their associates into sharing access to sensitive information.

The war “changed Iran’s calculus for what they were willing to do here against us,” Ms. Walker said last week at a national security conference in Sea Island, Ga.

Arab Allies Brace for War as U.S.'s Deadline Looms

FADHEL MADAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

"We are extremely worried," Badr Abdelatty, foreign minister of Egypt, said at the Manama Dialogue conference in Bahrain.

By VIVIAN NEREIM

In the marble-floored atria of a five-star hotel in Manama, Bahrain's capital, military officers in full regalia mingled with ambassadors and political analysts last weekend, swapping business cards and chatting over plates of tiramisu infused with Arabic coffee.

The smiles and the warm handshakes at the gathering — the Manama Dialogue, an annual security conference — belied the grim topic underpinning much of the conversation. The possibility that the United States might, within days, reignite its war with Iran, prompting a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones on the very city where they were meeting, hung over the event like a dark cloud.

As President Trump weighs a renewed attack on Iran sometime after the midterm elections on Tuesday, Gulf Arab officials fear that their countries — which host American military bases, Western companies and valuable oil and gas facilities — will be the hardest hit, as they were after the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February. They also fear that the fighting will be worse this time around.

The Iranian and American positions on a potential deal to stave off a crisis are still "far apart," Anwar Gargash, a senior official from the United Arab Emirates, told the conference audience. "If these positions are not bridged, then we have to worry about the worst."

The U.S. military carried out limited strikes on Iran's Qeshm Island on Monday, according to U.S. officials. Still, Mr. Trump told Fox News on the same day that "there's a very good chance we make a deal."

Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting.

American and Israeli military officials have drawn up an expanded list of targets to strike, including energy infrastructure and other sites vital to the Iranian economy. Iran has warned that it would retaliate fiercely, targeting critical infrastructure and underwater communications cables in the region.

The Gulf countries are already bruised, working to repair energy infrastructure and radar systems that were damaged in the last round of attacks and coping with major economic disruptions. And while their governments operate advanced air defense systems and have worked to harden their defenses, they are constrained in their ability to fend off attacks by a global shortage of missile interceptors.

Saudi Arabia is also preparing for the possibility of a war on several fronts, as the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen fire near-daily volleys of missiles and drones at the kingdom, targeting airports and oil facilities.

The energy-rich Gulf countries have long marketed themselves to tourists and investors as safe havens in a volatile Middle East. Now, some citizens and residents are stockpiling water and cash, or preparing “go bags” full of emergency essentials to grab if they need to flee their homes. Others have changed their travel plans to return home as soon as possible, worried that they could be stuck outside the region if missile and drone attacks force countries to close their airspace.

While a preliminary cease-fire was reached in June — followed by several months of limbo and intermittent bursts of fighting — people in the Gulf fear that it is now “just a matter of time” before their countries get dragged back into a full-blown war, said Khalid Al-Jaber, executive director of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, a research institute in Qatar.

"The scary part this time is that the war is going to be worse than before," he said. "It's going to be bigger. It's going to be much harder for everyone."

The past few days have been marked by a flurry of diplomacy and calls for de-escalation among

President Trump's closest Arab allies, including Saudi Arabia, which sent its defense minister to Iran last week to make the case for peace. Qatar has been leading an effort to reach a deal between Iranian and U.S. officials before it is too late, and in recent days Iranian officials have signaled that those negotiations have made some progress.

While Mr. Trump has said he would not attack before the midterm elections, he has hinted that all bets are off after that.

As a result, the elections have become a grim marker of time for people across the Gulf Arab states, many of whom know little about the American electoral system or the candidates running for office.

Instead, they know that before the midterms are over, they can reasonably expect their lives to continue as normal. They can drive to work and go to the mall, peruse Netflix on their phones and tend to their gardens with plentiful desalinated water.

After then, nobody knows what will happen.

"We are extremely worried," Badr Abdelatty, Egypt's foreign minister, said at the conference in Manama. "We have to push very hard in order to prevent the escalation. We are very confident that the second round will be more dangerous, more destructive, and it will lead to nowhere."

Donald Blome, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told the audience at the conference that diplomatic channels between the United States and Iran were still active, even as the United States was "prepared to go in another direction."

The event ended on Sunday, after which many of the attendees departed the region as quickly as possible.

Trump Plans to End Aid To Israel for a New Deal

By DAVID E. SANGER

President Trump said on Tuesday that the bulk of American aid to Israel would be “cut off at the end of the year,” under an agreement reached with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu months ago. He described the Election Day declaration chiefly as a political effort to take a “bad talking point” away from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

"We were giving them 4 billion," Mr. Trump told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News in a morning interview, just as polls were opening on the East Coast. "We are. But it gets cut off at the end of the year."

Instead, he described a different agreement in which Israel would pay for weaponry from the United States. The move comes as Congress was already considering phasing out the aid and instead undertaking a far more integrated defense and technology partnership built around legally mandated defense industrial cooperation between the two nations. Such a partnership could be lucrative for Israel through joint projects with the Defense Department and American military contractors.

Mr. Netanyahu has spoken in recent months about moving away from the aid from the United States, but has not laid out a timetable. But the current memorandum of understanding with Israel does not expire until 2028; Mr. Trump seemed to suggest on Tuesday canceling it two years early, with Israel's consent. Mr. Netanyahu's office did not immediately comment on the president's statement.

The timing of Mr. Trump's state-

Robert Jimison and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.

ment was remarkable: Just as polls opened in the United States, a Republican president was walking away from what has become a mainstay of American foreign policy for decades.

His comments appeared to recognize that it would be extraordinarily difficult to get new aid packages through Congress, and perhaps impossible after Tuesday's election. But he never actually mentioned Gaza or the rapid erosion of support for Israel in the United States in the three years since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks.

"They don't need it," Mr. Trump said of the American aid, "and because why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don't need it?" he said, a reference to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for an open Senate seat in Michigan, who has been among the most openly critical of Israel.

"It's a bad talking point," Mr. Trump said. He went on to add "Israel's our No. 1," but a "thriving country."

Mr. Netanyahu had his own reasons to get out of the arrangement: Control over aid to Israel has increasingly become a cudgel for those in Congress trying to compel Israeli government action. If Israel were to receive American armaments through more traditional military sales, or as part of a trade and technology agreement, the process could become less of a ritualized battle in Congress — though congressional oversight would not end.

But in Israel, his opposition pounced, and the issue quickly became a point of argument as Mr. Netanyahu struggles with Gadi Eisenkot to form a government after an inconclusive election in Israel last week.

N

National

The New York Times

Trump Is Playing Up Voter Fraud Prosecutions. Meet the Accused.

Officers from the Homeland Security Investigations task force escorting Omar Alexander Muñoz, 72, at the Federal Building in Los Angeles last month.

JAE C. HONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

State Election Officials Condemn Overreach In Crackdown Campaign

By LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA and JACEY FORTIN

LOS ANGELES — It was before dawn when Amandeep Kaur turned herself in to federal authorities in downtown Los Angeles last Monday. Wrapped in a tasseled shawl, she paced and shivered as she waited outside the courthouse.

At 6:30 a.m., two plainclothes agents rounded the corner, served Ms. Kaur her arrest warrant and walked her to an unmarked vehicle, where they lightly searched her. She would be fingerprinted and taken into custody before appearing in front of a judge that afternoon.

Ms. Kaur, a 30-year-old from India, lives with her two young children, her husband and her in-laws in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. She speaks little English and is a legal permanent resident of the United States.

The government says in court documents that Ms. Kaur registered to vote in 2022, voted in the 2024 election — unlawfully, they say, because she is not a U.S. citizen — and then made false statements about that history on her naturalization application.

She was among 240 people across the country charged in connection with voting violations during President Trump's second term — part of the administration's far-reaching, monthslong effort to find, arrest and publicize instances of voter fraud.

In the process, people like Ms. Kaur have been caught up in a disorienting and often demeaning experience: Taken by federal agents from their homes, or ordered to turn themselves in. Portrayed as criminals by the country many of them are trying to become citizens of, with their names and faces circulating online. Forced to appear before judges, in some cases in shackles. Some people have been kept in custody for days. At least one man remains in a Texas jail.

Election officials in California and other states have condemned the government's crackdown, saying its system for identifying suspected violators is severely flawed, based on incomplete information, and has been rife with mistakes, including targeting people who are citizens.

The backdrop to the latest round of charges is the fierce midterm battle in which Democrats are in position to retake the House and possibly the Senate. Mr. Trump has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims that Democrats have stolen past elections by allowing immigrants to vote illegally. He has called for national measures to prevent fraud that include voter identification, proof of citizenship and restrictions on mail balloting.

State audits and studies have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and there have been no instances in which their votes are known to have swayed an election.

The New York Times spent more than a week contacting people whom the administration charged in connection with violating election law. In interviews, some of the defendants and their family members cited language barriers, confusion about the voting process and unexpectedly receiving ballots in the mail as reasons for mistakenly registering or casting a vote.

Others denied the allegations completely. They said they were shocked when the authorities contacted them or showed up at their doors.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. It has described the arrests as part of a coordinated effort "to combat and root out fraud in U.S. elections and protect electoral integrity."

Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general, has said that "every ille-

Kirsten Noyes and Seamus Hughes contributed research. Sameen Amin contributed translation.

gal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen."

The Department of Homeland Security did not initially respond to a request for comment. After this article was published, the agency said in an email that it was “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.”

It added that the use of restraints by its agents was a longstanding practice that was meant to ensure safety and was "fully in line with established legal standards."

Ms. Kaur's husband, Kulwinder Ghotra, said that his wife, who speaks Punjabi, began receiving voter information in the mail after taking a driving test at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Believing she was eligible, he said, she voted in 2024.

"She was confused," said Mr. Ghotra, 38. "She said there was no translation there at the voting center."

Ms. Kaur was eventually charged with making false statements on her naturalization application — a felony that carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison, a fine, or both, and which can result in deportation. She declined to be interviewed about her case while it is pending.

Mr. Ghotra now fears that his wife could be deported. The couple has two children, ages 3 and 5.

Last week, a judge ruled that Ms. Kaur could return home in advance of her hearing this month. A translator relayed this to Ms. Kaur in Punjabi.

She was escorted from the courtroom in shackles and handcuffs.

'I Was Used'

Early on Oct. 19, federal agents banged on the door of Omar Alexander Muñoz, a 72-year-old from Belize, at his home in Commerce, Calif. They threatened to break down the door, Mr. Muñoz said in an interview.

He said the agents pulled his arms behind his back to handcuff him, injuring his shoulder and his neck, both of which he said he had recently had surgery on.

Several police cars, as well as members of the media, were stationed outside his home during the arrest, Mr. Muñoz said.

The San Ysidro Senior Center polling station in San Diego in 2024. Some legal residents assumed their vote would be rejected if they lacked eligibility.

ARIANA DREHSLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

"They were positioned in a way, waiting," he said of the reporters. "I was used to make a show of voter fraud."

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about whether agents had notified the news media in advance of the arrest, or whether they had used excessive force.

Voting rights experts have called arrests of individuals like Mr. Muñoz performative stunts intended to bolster the government's legal effort to disqualify California voters.

"This is to serve a political purpose, and that political purpose is to support the civil suit, as well as to support Donald Trump's claims of a big problem of non-citizen voters," said Richard Hasen, a law professor and election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"My first reaction was: These are the best cases they have?" Mr. Hasen said. "Like this guy, Omar Muñoz, like, he's the perp? Please."

A legal permanent resident of the United States for over five decades, Mr. Muñoz was charged with illegally registering to vote and making false statements on his citizenship application. He maintains his innocence. In an interview with CBS News, he said he believed someone else may have used his name.

Barriers Beyond Language

Though President Trump has made a particular example of California, charges of voter fraud have been made across more than two dozen states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Khalwinder Singh Bhengura, of Arlington, Texas, is originally from India and became a permanent legal resident in 2022.

Mr. Bhengura, 70, who speaks Punjabi, had been living in Texas with his wife, according to his brother-in-law Jay Chima. But he had an old habit of nodding along to things he did not understand in order to seem agreeable, Mr. Chima said, and "his English skills are nil."

In September, Mr. Bhengura was charged with making false statements while registering to vote, and with casting a ballot unlawfully in 2024. He took his case to trial and pleaded not guilty;

his lawyers argued that there was not enough evidence to prove that he had voted. They also worried about his ability to comprehend a fast-moving trial.

On Tuesday, a jury found Mr. Bhengura guilty of making false statements of citizenship in order to register to vote, and of voting by an alien in a federal election.

After the verdict was read, Mr. Bhen-gura was jailed. He remains in custody.

Nicole Knox, a lawyer for Mr. Bhengura, said she found the jailing appalling, and that she worried about what it could mean for other immigrants.

"It creates basically a blank check for further indictments of similarly situated people with innocent intent," she said.

Jamil Ahmad, 51, of Philadelphia, came to the U.S. from Pakistan about a decade ago and claimed asylum. He is now a United States citizen. But in November 2024, he still had his green card.

Mr. Ahmad reasoned that if he were not allowed to cast a ballot, then the government would not let him. And he considered it his duty to vote, he said. He helped his wife, Nighat Jamil, a 47-year-old permanent legal resident, to register alongside him.

"I was thinking that, if I'm eligible, then they will accept the form," he said. "If I'm not eligible, they will send me the form back."

What came in the mail was not a rejection, but a ballot. Mr. Ahmad voted for President Trump.

In September, Mr. Ahmad was charged with voting as an alien in a federal election. The authorities came to his house to question him, he said, and after a couple of weeks, Mr. Ahmad thought it made sense to take responsibility for what had happened.

"When I read all the things," he said, "now I understand that this is a crime."

He pleaded guilty last month and is scheduled to be sentenced in January.

Ms. Jamil was also charged with the voting misdemeanor. She has a hearing scheduled for this month and is nervous, she said, because she is not a citizen and could be at risk of deportation.

That makes Mr. Ahmad feel sick with guilt, and concerned for his four children.

"I'm just worried," he said. "How I can look after them if they deport my wife?"

Mamdani Threatens Legal Action to Stop ICE Use of Parking Lots Owned by City

By LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday threatened to take legal action against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency after accusing federal agents of using parking lots owned by New York City to stage operations.

In a letter to the Trump administration, Mr. Mamdani said that since July, ICE agents had gathered at city-owned parking lots in Queens and the Bronx, including one next to a preschool, in violation of a mayoral order that prohibits ICE from doing so.

"This use of city property in furtherance of federal immigration enforcement is unauthorized and is therefore illegal, endangers city residents and sows fear among those who seek to access city property," the two-page letter said.

"If your agents continue any unauthorized use of these lots, New York City will take legal action to prevent this unlawful commandeering of city property," the mayor's letter said. It was addressed to Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, and top ICE officials in Washington and New York.

The letter signaled the latest escalation in Mr. Mamdani's intensifying feud with the Trump administration over ICE activity in New York after a federal officer shot and injured a Dominican man during an ICE operation in October.

The mayor called for ICE to be abolished after the shooting, while Trump officials blamed New York's so-called sanctuary laws for hindering immigration enforcement and shielding immigrants with criminal records from deportation.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, said that "ICE's presence in public parking lots is fully authorized under federal law and is a standard practice for law enforcement agencies nationwide."

"Mayor Mamdani should be grateful to our brave law enforcement officers for cleaning up the streets of NYC since he won't," the statement said.

ICE officers in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles commonly gather in the lots to prepare for early morning raids. The presence of agents in parking lots has become a flashpoint as arrests by ICE across the United States have reached record highs this year.

The debate over the parking lots has underscored the constraints that Democratic-led cities face in their efforts to deter ICE activity.

While City Hall has sought to restrict ICE from using city-owned parking — at parks, schools and public hospitals — municipal lots are sometimes unstaffed, complicating the city's ability to monitor ICE officers.

The city has little power to restrict how ICE might use the thousands of privately run parking lots in New York.

Activists have documented ICE officers using the parking lots of banks in immigrant neighborhoods in Queens and a Target store in the Bronx, not far from where the Dominican man, Oscar Belgal, was shot on Oct. 8.

A week later, the mayor and more than 100 elected officials urged the private owners of garages and lots "not to rent, lend or otherwise make their property available to ICE for their operations."

Under an executive order Mr. Mamdani issued in February, federal officers are barred from using city-owned lots as operational bases or staging areas unless they have a judicial warrant or an agreement with the city.

In the letter sent Monday, Mr. Mamdani said that ICE agents had "reportedly parked their vehicles and conducted meetings" in a city-owned lot at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and in lots on 111th Street near Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, next to a city-run preschool and the New York Hall of Science, a museum.

City officials said that they relied on reports from elected officials and activists who have tracked the officers' movements in immigrant neighborhoods since last year.

One coalition — Hands Off NYC — shared with The New York Times a list of ICE sightings that its members documented at the two city-owned parking lots. The coalition said that it spotted ICE officers on at least five occasions at the lot near Flushing Meadows during the past three months.

One photograph, which the coalition said was taken on Aug. 21, appears to show an officer in a vest standing by his

S.U.V. Another, from Sept. 30, appears to show three officers in plain clothes talking by two S.U.V.s that the coalition said were unmarked ICE vehicles.

The coalition said that it saw ICE officers at Van Cortlandt Park on July 27. It shared a list of five license plates that activists said they had linked to unmarked ICE vehicles frequently seen during agency operations.

As a result, the city issued guidelines on Monday to employees from the Parks Department. The four-page memo tells employees to deny ICE officers entry into lots and areas that are not public unless the agents have a judicial warrant, while instructing them to notify city lawyers and not to "engage in physical or verbal altercations" with them.

Hae-Lin Choi, the co-director of Hands Off NYC, said that the city and New Yorkers "must continue pulling every lever to get ICE out of our city."

"New Yorkers have made it clear that ICE is not welcome here and that we won't be intimidated — we will stand together, be courageous and protect our neighbors," she said.

Trump's Push to Prove Rampant Illegal Voting Comes Up With Little

From Page AI

Early voting last week in Coral Gables, Fla. Immigration advocacy groups have expressed fears that federal agents could turn up at polling places during the election.

RUTH FRENSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

"This is about delegitimizing an election that they're very worried about," said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works to support election officials. "They're trying to manufacture evidence and they're failing."

The administration's campaign to scrutinize noncitizen voters has involved a close partnership between the Homeland Security Department and the Justice Department, which has led efforts to criminally charge noncitizens with illegal voting. The Homeland Security Department's investigatory work has also been core to recent attempts by the Justice Department to intervene in the election.

The Homeland Security Department has defended its focus on the issue, saying that it would root out election fraud wherever it could be found and ramp up deportations of noncitizens who illegally voted or registered.

"D.H.S. is committed to ensuring fair, honest and accurate elections," the department said in a statement. "D.H.S. is upholding the rule of law and protecting the integrity of American elections by removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens. ONLY Americans should elect American leaders."

Voting by noncitizens, who are barred by law from registering to vote or casting ballots, is exceptionally rare, according to multiple studies. Critics have said the Homeland Security Department's aggressive efforts to investigate noncitizen voters instead appear to be aimed at intimidating voters and laying the groundwork to challenge the election results.

Immigration advocacy groups have also expressed fears for months that federal agents could turn up at polling places, though as of Tuesday morning, there were no signs of immigration authorities patrolling voting sites.

Tasking hundreds of officers with scouring state voter rolls and deploying agents to interview people at their homes to root out noncitizen voters is a remarkable use of the Homeland Security Department's powers. The largest federal law enforcement agency, the department was created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to help protect the country from threats.

The Trump administration has leveraged at least four of its nine main agencies to promote investigations into noncitizen voters. That includes agencies that typically focus on deportations, border management, disaster relief, and immigration applications.

Federal agents who specialize in investigating national security threats and immigration benefit fraud have been diverted to finding noncitizens on the voter rolls.

Glenn Thrush, Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.

Homeland security agents who usually investigate crimes like child exploitation and illegal trade have also investigated more than 150 organizations that they say may be helping noncitizens illegally register to vote.

But the department's efforts have so far resulted in a small number of charges and little evidence that voter fraud is rampant. The bulk of the 236 charges have been made in the last nine weeks alone, according to the Justice Department, a sign that the administration has dramatically ramped up prosecutions ahead of the midterms. The proportion actually convicted of an offense could end up even smaller.

Investigations into noncitizen voters have historically followed a pattern. State or federal election officials first report that hundreds or thousands of noncitizens may be on the voter rolls. But the figures often shrink to dozens after further investigation. Each inquiry ends with few, if any, prosecutions.

"The massive amount of resources that have been devoted to this operation have uncovered only tiny numbers of individuals who may have voted or registered to vote," said Wendy R. Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice. "It's just reinforcing what is known and actually raises questions as to what is the purpose of this operation."

Some of the Trump administration's claims of large numbers of noncitizens on the voter rolls in certain states have also unraveled. After homeland security officials claimed that nearly 16,000 people might be noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada, they sent to the state a list of 185 names that

Charges of voter fraud are minuscule and convictions are exceptionally rare.

had "gone through a rigorous manual review process." State officials later determined that all 185 were citizens.

Some of the Homeland Security Department's efforts have faced legal setbacks. Last month, a federal judge in California restricted the department from carrying out field interviews in nine states as part of an effort to investigate noncitizen voters. In September, a federal judge ruled that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which leads the federal response to disasters, could not withhold emergency preparedness grants from states that refuse to make changes to their election processes, including verifying voters' citizenship.

But that has not deterred the department from pressing ahead with other investigations.

In late October, a group of officers with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — an agency within the Homeland Security Department — were directed to review about 15,000 cases of people suspected of illegally registering to vote in California, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The directive is a continuation of an earlier nationwide effort by the agency to examine voter records and federal databases to generate leads for ICE agents to further investigate potential cases of noncitizen voters. The agency's investigation led immigration officers to identify more than 20,000 people the agency claimed illegally registered to vote in California, according to court documents.

The new effort underscores the Trump administration's fixation on California, which the Justice Department recently sued to try to force the state to set aside ballots from the 20,000 people the administration suspects are "likely noncitizens." In a court filing, data scientists analyzing that list of voters said they found that more than 40 percent of the people on the list do not appear on California's voter rolls. The analysis also found that the list included thousands of people who appear to be citizens.

After a federal judge rejected the effort, the administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to require that California set aside the ballots. The court rejected the request just hours later.

In an October email reviewed by The Times, Paul Gleason, a homeland security official, told officials involved with the new effort that officers would be examining registered voters in California "with no evidence of actual voting." It is illegal for noncitizens to falsely certify that they are citizens when registering to vote, even if they never ultimately cast a ballot. Some immigrants, though, have said that they inadvertently registered while obtaining or renewing driver's licenses, pointing to voter laws that have made it easier for people to register to vote at motor vehicle agencies.

In a September email reviewed by the Times, Mr. Gleason said that immigration officers had already reviewed more than 150,000 cases and made over 66,000 referrals to ICE for further investigation as part of the nationwide effort to find noncitizen voters. Sev eral former homeland security officials said in interviews that the number of referrals amounted to a massive workload for ICE agents tasked with following up on the leads.

Proponents of the administration praised it for investigating a problem they believe deserves more scrutiny. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, an acting deputy homeland security secretary during the first Trump administration, said he thought it was clearly appropriate for homeland security agents to investigate noncitizen voting and help secure elections.

"I realize that the extent or scope of the problem itself is debated," Mr. Cuccinelli said in a recent interview. "But what can't be debated is that the issue exists."

But some former homeland security officials questioned why the department has devoted ample resources to the effort and tasked federal agents with investigating the rare issue of noncitizen voting.

“Should you be pulling special agents and federal criminal investigators off national security issues to focus on that? When I weigh out public safety threats, the answer is absolutely not,” said Eric Balliet, who worked at Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigations arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for more than 20 years.

Democrats' Splits on Israel Could Affect 2027 and '28

From Page AI

ernment of genocide in Gaza and campaigned for Dr. El-Sayed, added that the "conundrum is likely to continue."

Mr. Lander defeated Representative Dan Goldman, another Jewish Democrat, in a primary race consumed by the candidates' positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Goldman, who accepted the endorsement of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying organization, lost by more than 30 percentage points in a district with a considerable Jewish population.

In the Chicago area, another House primary ended with the two top contenders each declaring that the group wanted them to lose. Ultimately, Daniel Biss, a Jewish Democrat, won after opposing unconditional aid for Israel, but he had not accused Israel of genocide, as the runner-up had.

The new Democratic class in the House is poised to be far more skeptical of Israel than previous ones. It is expected to include emphatic critics of Israel's government, including Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York, a pro-Palestinian progressive who stunned a longtime incumbent in a primary, and Representative Analilla Mejia of New Jersey, who has accused Israel of genocide and is favored to hold onto the seat she won in a special election this year.

That could present a challenging dynamic for Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is seen as likely to become speaker if Democrats win the

House. Mr. Jeffries has long supported the U.S.-Israel relationship, though he has been fiercely critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. Other House Democrats who have defended the U.S.-Israel alliance, such as Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, have vowed to fight Democrats who portray Israel as a pariah.

REBECCA COOK/REUTERS

Potential 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls have a wide spectrum of views on Israel.

Those prospective candidates include Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who accuses Israel of genocide and opposes all U.S. military aid to the country, including for defensive systems; Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who is Jewish and says he has family in Israel, has opposed certain weapons transfers to the country, and has stopped short of accusing it of genocide; and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a supporter of Israel who in September suggested Dr. El-Sayed was a "fringe" candidate.

Representative Stevens withdrew her support of Dr. El-Sayed last week and backed his opponent, Mike Rogers, left.

In Michigan, Israel had long been at the core of the feud between Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens, even as their rupture had been fueled by other factors, including an uneasy personal dynamic and sensitive egos. Last week, Ms. Stevens demanded that Dr. El-Sayed disavow an ad that she described as antisemitic and called on him to apologize for comments he had made about Israel.

"We can't stand with hate," Ms. Stevens said as she stood with Mr. Rogers near a church in Detroit, pointing in part to support Dr. El-

VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who edged Haley Stevens in Michigan's Senate primary, said he was committed to "Jewish safety."

Sayed had received from the provocative streamer Hasan Piker, a fierce critic of Israel who has made incendiary statements about Jews. "We can't stand with Hasan Piker."

Intraparty disputes with accusations like 'antisemitism' and 'genocide' exchanged.

Mr. Piker said in a text message

that Ms. Stevens had pulled a "selfish stunt."

If Dr. El-Sayed wins in a swing state with a relatively large Jewish population, it could embolden progressive Democrats who argue their party has moved too slowly to shift its position after the war in Gaza.

Although polls show that U.S. policy on Israel is not the most important issue for an overwhelming majority of voters, it has become a lightning rod in the last several years among Democrats around the country. Few issues provoke such passions among Democrats, fracturing some of its most loyal constituencies.

In Congress, Democratic support for Israel has been waning, though lawmakers are split. In a July House vote, the party was almost evenly divided on a measure to end aid to Israel. Mr. Jeffries voted against the measure, while Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the minority whip, supported it.

Michigan has long been at the center of the debate: The Detroit area is home to one of the largest Arab American populations in the United States and a large Jewish community.

Many Democrats in Michigan have embraced Dr. El-Sayed's forceful criticism of Israel. Dr. El-Sayed supports ending U.S. aid to Israel, and has said Israel is "not actually our friend."

But some Jewish Democrats say they worry his rhetoric will make them less safe.

Andrew Bank, 37, of Ann Arbor, Mich., said he planned to unhappily vote for Dr. El-Sayed. "There are Jewish people who are saying: Can I trust the progressive left side of this party to protect Jews?" he said.

Rabbi Josh Whinston, a Democrat who leads a reform synagogue in Ann Arbor, declined to say how he would vote in the Senate race but said that he thought Dr. El-Sayed's rhetoric had offered a "potential permission for people with radical views to do harm to the Jewish community."

Dr. El-Sayed has said he takes Jewish safety seriously.

"To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all," he said in a speech after winning the primary, "I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters."

Mr. Lander, the House candidate in New York, defended Dr. El-

Sayed. "I just don't have any doubt he will show up for Jewish Michiganders," he said.

On Friday, four days before the election, Mr. Gottheimer, the New Jersey congressman, suggested that the feud between Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed was not about Ms. Stevens — but about bigger questions facing Democrats.

He called on Dr. El-Sayed to condemn the ad from an outside group that bothered Ms. Stevens. The video showed a grocery shopper blaming Israel for rising costs of living in America. Addressing Dr. El-Sayed, Mr. Gottheimer wrote on social media, "You can be for lower costs and stand up to hate at the same time."

Dr. El-Sayed ultimately condemned the ad, saying on Saturday that he did "not agree with" its contents. But he has stood firm in his fierce criticism of Israel, declined to disavow Mr. Piker, and cast Ms. Stevens's criticisms as distractions.

The Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus declined to endorse him.

VIRGINIA A poll worker at a fire station in Richmond that was pressed into service as a voting site, with stickers to be awarded after voters submitted their ballots.

DEMETRIUS FREEMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

DEMETRUS FREEMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

LEXI PARRA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

MAINE A polling site in Bangor on Tuesday. The race between Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, and Troy Jackson, a Democrat, was among the contests that could determine control of the Senate.

Across Nation, Voting in a Momentous Midterm

After the Blitz of TV Advertisements and Candidate Debates, the Voters Finally Have Their Say

RC MCGINNIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

IOWA Tom Wu voting while holding Rio Stevens-Wu in West Des Moines.

ADRIANA ZEBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ARIZONA Waiting in line to vote on a warm day at a polling site in Scottsdale.

JOHN TULLY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEW HAMPSHIRE Michael Stiebitz changing bulbs at a polling site in Benton.

VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

MICHIGAN Casting midterm ballots at a senior center in Dearborn Heights.

2026 Election

JONATHAN HICUERA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

BETHLEHEM FELEKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

'I don't want Arizona to become another New York or Southern California.'

PATRICIA FAY, 69, a Navy veteran in Phoenix who said she voted for all Republicans.

SEAN KEENAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘Trump really frustrated me with the tariffs and some of his

economic stuff.'

STEPHEN STROBEL, 39, a lawyer from Atlanta who considers himself a centrist with a right-leaning bias.

'I think that people are just fed up.'

JOSIE LOPEZ, 32, of Fort Worth, who said she voted for Democrats because they understood her concerns about education.

SABRINA SHANKMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

'Trump sees a struggle, so he's stepping up and he's trying to balance where he can.'

ROSALIND ERIKSON, 60, of Somersworth, N.H., who said she believed the president's business experience would lower costs.

MURRAY CARPENTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

'Politics is politics. They all play the political game. But she looks out for the state of Maine.' SHELDON McCORMICK, 68, an independent who voted for Susan Collins.

ANN HINGA KLEIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

'We don't need the war. It's not benefiting anybody right now.' GODPOWER BABAA, 57, of Des Moines, who said the economy compelled him to vote for Democrats. He said his family has cut back on meals out and vacations.

Glitches at the Polls Fuel Right-Wing Conspiracies

This article is by Richard Fausset, John Yoon and Claire Fahy.

Election officials reported a typical array of glitches at polling places across the country on Tuesday, some serving as provocative fodder for right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Local and state officials described them as the type of unfortunate but innocent hiccups — jammed scanning machines, local power outages, false fire alarms — that commonly emerge on Election Day.

Any potential issues are sure to be under a microscope after attempts by the Trump administration to exert more control over federal elections. With the president continuing to make false claims that the electoral process is rife with fraud, officials across the country have grown increasingly concerned about interference.

State and local officials entered Election Day concerned that minor problems could be seized on by the president and his allies to seek to overturn results. And as expected, false claims quickly circulated as the typical glitches emerged.

Some of the first reported problems were in Westchester County, N.Y., just north of New York City. Voting proceeded despite a malfunction that prevented some scanning machines from accepting ballots, state election officials said. A hand count might be required for some of them.

While the glitches on Tuesday appeared to worry some voters, minor snags with voting machines happen in virtually every election and are usually resolved uneventfully.

In Arizona, two voting centers in Maricopa County closed briefly for "power related issues," officials said. The news prompted James O'Keefe, the conservative activist and provocateur, to write in an online post: "Time to start investigating this."

The student union at the University of Texas at Austin, a popular student voting spot, was briefly evacuated when a fire alarm was pulled, according to local media reports. The Travis County clerk's office told KXANTV, the local NBC affiliate, that voting had resumed, and that enforcement were "reviewing the cause."

In Broward County, Fla., techni-

Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.

cal problems delayed the scheduled 7 a.m. poll opening time by 20 minutes, forcing some early arrivals to leave polling sites before casting their ballots. Joe Scott, the county election supervisor, said such problems are "to be expected" on Election Day.

As news of glitches seeped online, conspiratorial messages began bubbling up. Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, one of President Trump's most powerful aides, made note of the Westchester problems on social media, declaring, "This is how the Left steals elections."

Ms. Miller also falsely claimed that officials were turning away voters in the New York suburb.

In another post, Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and informal adviser to Mr. Trump, wrote: "How is it that so many states are all of a sudden having ballot counting issues? Broward County. Of course. Democrats love cheating."

Mr. Scott, the Broward elections official and a Democrat, lamented the trend. "If anything happens with the election, people immediately go to conspiracy theories," he said.

In New York, the state's Board of Elections said in a statement that the issue affecting voting machines in Westchester stemmed from a programming mistake. It appeared to be more widespread than typical glitches, but it was still “well within the world of possibilities that election officials plan for,” said Derek Tisler, a lawyer with the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program who specializes in election administration and security.

Some view the usual early hiccups as signs of election fraud.

Voters in Westchester were told that they could still safely fill out and submit their ballots. The note of reassurance came from a statement signed by both a Democratic and a Republican member of the county board of elections.

Instead of feeding ballots into the malfunctioning machines, voters were instructed to place them into separate, secure bags — a standard emergency protocol aimed at ensuring that voting continues without disruption.

Ken Jenkins, the Westchester County executive, said in a video statement that there was no immediate need to extend the voting hours amid the issues with voting machines, though he said that candidates and campaigns had made requests to do so.

Kathleen R. McGrath, a spokeswoman for the New York State Board of Elections, said every valid vote would be counted. "Accuracy will never be sacrificed for speed," she added.

Minor technical issues emerged in other places, including Chester County, Pa. Officials there said they were allowing for 30-minute extensions of voting hours at three polling locations to make up for delays caused by "machine set-up issues."

In Florida, a number of polling places had to be relocated because of flooding from intense autumn storms, with state elections officials posting the substitute voting sites online.

In Fulton County, Ga., officials reported malfunctions of two ballot scanners that occurred in late October, during the early voting period, forcing the county to use an alternative scanning method for roughly 1,000 ballots.

They also warned that some voters had reported receiving bogus messages "regarding polling place changes."

County officials urged voters to verify their polling place on the state's voter information page.

A poll worker in Chappaqua, N.Y., with a bag containing ballots to be hand counted after several polling sites in Westchester County reported malfunctioning scanning machines on Tuesday.

BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

Justice Dept. Issues Target Letters

ALASKA

The Justice Department is intensifying its investigation into the recruitment of an opponent with the same name as a Republican senator in Alaska, sending 20 letters to Democrats informing them they might be targets or asking them to preserve their records, two people with knowledge of the move said.

Sending such notifications in the days leading up to Election Day is highly unusual, coming in a close race between the incumbent Republican, Dan S. Sullivan, and his Democratic opponent, Mary Peltola.

Democrats have accused the administration of weaponizing the department for political purposes. They say that recruiting candidates, called ballot stacking, is a common tactic in campaigns and not clearly illegal under state law.

Recipients of the letters include Marc Elias, a prominent elections lawyer whose firm has represented Ms. Peltola and other Democratic candidates; one of his law partners; and at least one official at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, one of those people said.

The department is investigating possible donor fraud and conspiracy charges, the person added, on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing inquiry.

The letters were sent out over the past week. The department has also sent out about 100 subpoenas in its investigation, one of the people said. Some of the subpoenas were sent to phone companies and email providers.

President Trump has publicly urged the department to take forceful action in Alaska. Over the weekend, he said Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and Mr. Elias should be held "criminally responsible" in the episode.

On Tuesday, he again called out Mr. Elias by name, saying he should be locked up.

"You had the Democrat Party headed up by Elias, their lawyer, who was a bad guy, very bad guy — should go to jail, in my opinion," Mr. Trump said during a call-in interview on "Fox & Friends." "But you had the Democrat Party look all over Alaska for somebody named Sullivan."

Mr. Elias said he was only the latest of Mr. Trump's political enemies to face what he described as a bogus investigation, "despite zero evidence of wrongdoing."

"No one should be surprised that President Trump's Department of Justice is targeting me and my law firm on Election Day," he said in a statement. "We will not be intimidated by a sham investigation."

A spokesman for the Democratic committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Target letters are not proof of guilt. Many of the department's investigations into Mr. Trump's critics and adversaries have gone nowhere for lack of evidence, or been thrown out of court by judges and grand juries.

On Friday, Michael J. Heyman, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Alaska, told reporters during a news conference in Anchorage that his office had spent the past few months quietly investigating the effort to recruit a man named Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher from a fishing village, to appear alongside Dan S. Sullivan, the senator, on the November ballot.

The office intensified those efforts after the The New York Times reported that Democrats recruited the second Mr. Sullivan.

The department initially sought to intervene by suing to block the certification of the election in Alaska if Mr. Sullivan narrowly lost, the first time the Justice Department had sought to preemptively intervene in a race since the late 1960s.

A federal judge threw the case out on Sunday, saying the department had failed to show how blocking certification would "redress its alleged injury."

The department is planning to appeal. GLENN THRUSH and DEVLIN BARRETT

SOCIAL MEDIA

Deceptive Bots Coordinating Chatter

Deceptive bots have tried to manipulate the online chatter in some of the tightest races of the midterms.

Researchers at Cyabra, a social media monitoring company, said last week they found signs of coordination by inauthentic social media accounts from Aug. 31 to Oct. 19 in several major matchups in Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Michigan and Ohio. In the contests for governor in Georgia and Ohio and for Senate in Kansas and Maine, fake bots attacked both the Republican and Democratic candidates, the research showed.

Cyabra reviewed discussions about six midterm races on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. Out of 274,000 posts, researchers said roughly one in nine about each race (and around 19,300 accounts out of 168,000 total) were inauthentic. Such bots also posted one in four replies to X posts from the candidates running to be governor of Georgia — Rick Jackson, a Republican billionaire, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic former mayor of Atlanta.

Real accounts can be automated and post about certain topics, but those accounts do not mask their identity, said Keith E. Noble, a Cyabra vice president. The company, he said, uses A.I. tools to analyze hundreds of indicators of coordinated inauthentic activity, such as synchronized bursts of posts around debates and other events, multiple comments on articles, account creation date and narrative echoes.

In Kansas, Adam Hamilton, a Democrat at the head of the largest church in the state, and Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent, are facing off for a Senate seat. One online profile weighing in on that race did not exist before April and has since posted nearly 11,000 times, sometimes 50 times a day, often at the same times.

"The story is bigger than just A.I. or automated models — you have these sock puppets, these managed personas where they're pretending to be your neighbor next door," Mr. Noble said. "There are human beings behind this inauthentic activity that have an agenda."

It is unclear what — if any — effect the bots will have on the election discourse, or where they originated from. Real accounts still attracted 99.8 percent of views on X, the researchers said.

Inauthentic narratives are insidious, Mr. Noble said, spreading noise while sowing confusion and animating anger. Other researchers have also found signs of bot manipulation in California, Texas and elsewhere.

The result is a distorted sense of truth in an information environment already short on trust. TIFFANY HSU

ARIZONA

Storms Impede Navajo Nation Voters

Back-to-back storms have hammered the Navajo Nation in recent weeks, prompting concerns from officials that washed-out roads could prevent hundreds of voters from making it to the polls in the reservation.

Navajo polling sites often take on a festive atmosphere. But in Rock Point, many residents found themselves stranded on Tuesday behind impassible dirt roads or shaky bridges.

"Our community has already endured so much," said Valinda Shirley, the vice president of the Navajo Nation's Rock Point chapter. "We should not lose our voice because our roads are underwater or damaged."

She pleaded for help from the county, state and tribe, but said she had not received a response by Tuesday afternoon. An advisory from Arizona's secretary of state said the only available route to Rock Point's polling site "may require a lengthy detour."

Apache County, where Rock Point is, has been directing residents to a car pool service coordinated by the nonprofit Arizona Native Vote, which has offered rides to the polls via mud bogging, a type of off-roading on four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Rock Point is in Arizona's Second Congressional District, which has been competitive. Representative Eli Crane, a Republican incumbent, is facing a challenge from Jonathan Nez, a Democrat and former president of the Navajo Nation.

Tribal voters are also choosing their next president, and Ms. Shirley worries that residents blocked from polls could lose the chance to cast a decisive ballot. REIS THEBAULT

2026/11/01 13:51:53

Justices Appear to Back Catholic Schools Seeking Public Funds in Colorado

the nondiscrimination agreement.

By ANN E. MARIMOW

LITTLETON, Colo. — The hallways of the St. Mary Catholic Parish school are decorated with Adam-and-Eve-themed apple prints and a colorful mural depicting Jesus' life as a child. Inside the preschool classroom is a prayer table with a rosary and puzzle pieces shaped like the symbols of Catholicism.

Parents who send their 4-year-olds to the school a few miles south of Denver feel strongly about educating their children in the Catholic faith — but they also say the state of Colorado should pay for it.

And that has led to a clash that reached the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The conservative-dominated bench has issued a series of recent decisions expanding the role of religion in public life, a signature project of the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

After more than two hours of oral argument on Tuesday, the majority seemed likely to continue that trend, with several conservative justices asking skeptical questions of Colorado — and the three liberal justices appearing to side with the state.

At issue is a Colorado program that allows private preschools to get taxpayer funding, but those preschools are required to provide children an “equal opportunity” to

Can religious objections override prohibitions against discrimination?

enroll, including the children of gay and transgender parents. The Archdiocese of Denver argues that the requirement is at odds with its religious mission — and its members' First Amendment rights.

The archdiocese, parish and parents sued Colorado, setting up the latest battle at the Supreme Court testing whether religious objections can override government prohibitions against discrimination.

Religious groups almost always prevail before the current Supreme Court. In 2021, the court ruled unanimously that a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who apply to take in foster children. The next year, in a case from Maine, the court said that states that choose to subsidize private schools may not exclude or discriminate against religious ones.

In the Colorado case, however, lower courts have said the state "welcomed and actively solicited" the participation of faith-based preschools after voters approved a universal prekindergarten program in 2020. The state pays for at least 15 hours of free preschool each week at any public or private preschool, including religious ones, provided it meets the program's requirements, including

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

In 2023, the archdiocese directed its preschools not to register, arguing the requirements ran counter to its views on sexuality and gender identity. Teachers, other staff members and parents at its schools sign a “statement of community beliefs” that acknowledges that the archdiocese does not recognize same-sex relationships or transgender status. Enrolling children of gay and transgender parents, according to school officials, would “likely lead to intractable conflicts.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is often in the majority, and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch suggested on Tuesday that even if Colorado's program was technically open to Catholic schools, the state should have anticipated that the nondiscrimination requirement would preclude their participation.

What is the difference, Justice Barrett asked, between setting up a program that overtly excluded religious schools and "choosing to impose a condition that you know" certain Catholic schools "will be unable to agree to?"

Father James de Cendra, principal of St. Mary Catholic Parish preschool, which is part of a suit seeking access to money from the state.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHET STRANGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who is also often a critical vote, asked what harm it would be to grant an exemption to the Catholic schools when plenty of other schools would accept families with gay and transgender parents.

Why not "avoid the clash," he asked.

In response, Helen Norton, the state's lawyer, said Colorado had an interest in "ensuring that its public funds go to schools that ensure equal opportunity." She added that "families are harmed when they're turned away" from publicly funded schools they choose.

According to the lawsuit, Colorado is excluding hundreds of families across 34 preschools overseen by the archdiocese. As a result, the archbishop of Denver said last week that enrollment is down 20 percent and two preschools have closed, as parents have withdrawn their children and enrolled them in schools that get public funding.

One couple who joined the suit, Dan and Lisa Sheley, met as students at a Catholic college and say they now want their seven children to be steeped in their faith and values both at home and at school, where Lisa works. Because of the state's policy, the Sheleys said, they have missed out so far on at least \$18,000 in tuition assistance. They expect to lose thousands more when another child becomes eligible for the program.

Nick Reaves is senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the Archdiocese of Denver.

In an interview, Lisa Sheley said the couple voted for the program believing it would be universal. Now, she said, they've discovered "it is not universal because we're being discriminated against and not allowed to participate."

The school is being represented by lawyers from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious legal organization. They told the justices in court filings that the government cannot condition access to a public benefit on a recipient's abandoning their religious beliefs.

"Catholic schools wanted to be a

Dan and Lisa Sheley say they have missed out on \$18,000 in tuition assistance to send their children to a Catholic preschool.

part of it, and Colorado wanted them to be a part of it, but when push came to shove, we couldn't compromise what we believe," said Nick Reaves, the lawyer representing the school, parents and archdiocese before the court on Tuesday.

Jared Polis, Colorado's Democratic governor, said in a statement that state officials intentionally included faith-based groups when they created the program. At least 79 faith-based providers participated in the last school year, serving at least 2,052 students and receiving more than \$9.5 million in payments.

In court filings, Colorado's lawyers argued that the anti-discrimination requirements do not infringe on the schools' religious beliefs because those schools are free to teach whatever they would like about sex, marriage, gender and family. They need only refrain from excluding children from en-rolling "simply because their parents are gay."

The state also noted that the requirements apply equally to all participating preschools — public, private, secular and religious.

All three liberal justices seemed to embrace the state's claims and said the Catholic schools were seeking to be treated differently or better than other participating programs and in a way that would discriminate against families with gay and transgender parents.

"Your schools want to discriminate by exclusion," said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. "Nobody else is allowed to do that."

Both Justices Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor asked why the same line of reasoning would not allow schools to turn away children based on race or ethnicity because of a religious belief.

Scott Skinner-Thompson, a law professor at the University of Colorado who specializes in civil rights and constitutional law, said states have long had the power to impose conditions on recipients of taxpayer funds, such as committing to comply with nondiscrimination requirements.

"St. Mary's is saying that's not tenable with our faith position. That's fine. It's a simple choice not to take the money," he said. "The state is trying to balance protecting L.G.B.T.Q. families and preserving religious liberty."

After a three-day trial, a federal judge said in 2024 that while states may not decline to fund religious schools, states “are not obligated to subsidize discrimination using taxpayer dollars, even when that discrimination is based on religious beliefs.”

A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld that decision last year, citing an important Supreme Court precedent limiting First Amendment protections for religious practices.

The 1990 decision, Employment Division v. Smith, said laws that apply neutrally and across the board, without singling out religion, typically do not violate the First Amendment's protection of the free exercise of religion.

That decision is unpopular among many conservative Christians, who say it does not offer adequate protection to religion. Three justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Justice Gorsuch — have called for overturning that precedent, with Justice Alito writing in 2021 that it “threatens a fundamental freedom.”

Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett expressed hesitation in the same case about the implications of overruling the Smith decision and what would replace it. The court did not directly address the question of whether to overturn it in Tuesday's argument.

In the court's 2021 decision in the foster care case from Philadelphia, Chief Justice Roberts said the city's policies had not met the requirement set out in Smith that laws must be "neutral and generally applicable" because city officials were permitted to make certain exceptions.

Lawyers for the Catholic school in Colorado, backed by the Trump administration, relied on that line of reasoning and asserted that the state has granted exceptions to its requirement — but for secular reasons and not religious ones.

The appeals court was unpersuaded that the exceptions the state has so far allowed, which include letting some schools give preferences to low-income families or children with disabilities, are parallel to what the church has requested.

Critical Mechanism of Jet in Deadly Florida Crash Is Found Far From Impact Site

GREG LOVETT/USA TODAY NETWORK, VIA REUTERS

AKI KUUSITO, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Left, an image taken from a video at the scene of the crash on Sunday in Greenacres, Fla. All nine people aboard were killed. Much of the wreckage remained in a crater, still off-limits to investigators, but the part was called a "very important piece of evidence."

By KAROUN DEMIRJIAN and NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS

A crucial part of the private jet that crashed in Florida on Sunday was found in fragments far from where the aircraft slammed into the ground in Palm Beach County, federal investigators said on Tuesday.

The fiery crash killed all nine people aboard, and the part, a mechanism that controls the angle of the plane, was found in three pieces, including at a spot nearly four miles from the crash site.

The discovery of the part, known as the left tail elevator, was a "very important piece of evidence," Thomas B. Chapman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference on Tuesday.

But it was not yet clear whether the tail part broke off before the plane began to plummet or during the aircraft's plunge to the ground.

Still, the recovery of the part was a bit of progress in an investigation that has been hampered by a host of complications, including the powerful storms that investigators believe were a factor in Sunday's crash. There were severe thunderstorms in Palm Beach County on Sunday afternoon when the plane, a Learjet 60, crashed nose first on a road,

Billy Witz contributed reporting, and Georgia Gee contributed research.

erupting into a fireball that was captured in harrowing video footage.

Mr. Chapman said much of the wreckage remained in a crater, still off-limits to investigators, who hope to have access by Wednesday once public works teams finish clearing the site of water and other damage caused by the crash.

The extreme force of the impact, Mr. Chapman said, meant that most of the physical evidence the N.T.S.B. team had been able to recover was in very small pieces.

"We don't even know in most cases what we've found," he said on Tuesday, adding, "Even the elements of the aircraft that are in the crater are going to be very likely in smaller pieces."

Among the missing and potentially critical pieces of evidence is the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder, which investigators often rely on for insights into pilots' decision-making leading up to an accident. On Monday, N.T.S.B. officials told reporters that the plane had been outfitted with such a recorder, but that they could not confirm whether it was present on the aircraft when it crashed.

The pilots were Jeff Gregory, 55, and Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, who had earned her pilot's license at 17, her mother said. Ms. Filgueiras, who was talking to air traffic control during the plane's descent,

The cockpit voice recorder of the private plane is still missing.

was certified as a commercial pilot earlier this year, according to records.

Among the passengers who were killed were Adam Robinson, a technology executive; his wife, Helen Sharp, who worked in public relations; the couple's two children, Emma and Charlie; and Anita Maria Cetina, a nanny for the children.

The plane was flying from

Austin, Texas, where the family lived, to the Bahamas, when it plunged from the sky, eventually reaching a rate of 22,000 feet per minute.

According to the pilots' exchanges with air traffic controllers, they initially sought permission to fly across Florida on a course that would have led them straight through a large thunderstorm system. A controller warned them that the weather was bad in the area, and flight maps show that they subsequently changed course to fly south of the worst storms.

Several minutes later, Ms. Filgueiras reported to another controller that they were encourtering turbulence she described as "moderate," what she called "manageable" problems with icing on the plane, and precipitation. But shortly after that, the pilots appeared to lose control of the plane, prompting Ms. Filgueiras to issue a mayday call as the aircraft began to plummet to the ground.

It was not immediately clear to investigators what condition the aircraft's radar and anti-icing systems were in leading up to the accident.

In an interview, Michael McCormick, a former director of air traffic operations at the Federal Aviation Administration who now teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the Learjet 60 has three complementary de-icing mechanisms, but stressed that they work best when activated in advance of encountering bad weather.

"Any one of them could fail and you're in trouble," he said.

Investigators will also be trying to determine what caused the plane's left tail elevator to break off the airplane before impact — though Mr. Chapman cautioned that it would not likely have been able to save the aircraft from disaster, even if it had remained intact.

"The function of the elevator is to control pitch up and down," he told reporters Tuesday. "At those speeds, I don't know if it would have been effective, even if attached to the aircraft."

Former Adviser's Complaint Rebounds as Scrutiny for Her Husband

Some of Mr. Mildon's revenue came from 10 cement plants for Venezolana de Cementos, nationalized by Hugo Chávez in 2008.

AUGUSTO HERNANDEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Congress and Finance Center built by Milvest, which is a part of Mr. Mildon's Miller Holding, in Kinshasa in 2023.

JUSTIN MAKANGARA/ANADOLU AGENCY

Turhan Mildon in 2023. He married Alina Habba, President Trump's former lawyer, last summer.

White House Feud Erupts After Claim About Corruption

ARSENE MPIANA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Ms. Habba after being sworn in as the U.S. attorney general for New Jersey. She quit after her appointment was ruled illegal.

This article is by Anatoly Kurmanaev, Tyler Pager and Declan Walsh.

President Trump's former lawyer Alina Habba Mildon stormed into the White House last month and set off an explosive, deeply personal battle by accusing another Trump ally of skimming money from a philanthropic donation.

POOL PHOTO BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

The donation, she claimed, had been made by her husband, Turhan Mildon, a Turkish businessman she had met and married this year. But now it is Mr. Mildon who is coming under scrutiny in the United States and abroad.

After hearing out Mrs. Mildon's account several weeks ago, Mr. Trump directed his aides to investigate her accusations against Richard Grenell, who had served as the president's special envoy to Venezuela and president of the Kennedy Center. The result has been a soap opera-like showdown that has exposed both the intensity of behind-the-scenes feuding among Trump confidants as well as their efforts to profit from their affiliation with him.

White House officials concluded that a key element of Mr. Mildon's story, as relayed to Mr. Trump by Mrs. Mildon, did not add up.

In particular, they said they found that the money in question, \$17.6 million, came not from Mr. Mildon but instead from a government account in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Mr. Mildon has built ties to leading politicians and won business contracts.

That finding in turn cast doubt on Mrs. Mildon's accusation that Mr. Grenell had diverted millions of dollars of Mr. Mildon's money meant for the Kennedy Center, according to people briefed on the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing matter. The payment seems to have gone to a Texas company with ties to Mr. Grenell for what U.S. officials say appears to be a software contract for Congo.

Mr. Mildon has declined to comment on any aspect of the White House investigation. Mr. Grenell's role in the transaction remains unclear. He has denied the accusations and had no further comment.

Why Mrs. Mildon made such a provocative accusation remains unclear. But the ensuing scrutiny of the couple is now exposing other inconsistencies in how Mr. Mildon, a self-described billionaire who has aggressively pursued business deals in Africa and Venezuela, has portrayed his background and wealth.

A spokesman for Mr. Mildon who declined to be named denied that his client has misrepresented any part of his background, calling it an attempt to damage his client's reputation.

But an examination of his rise to prominence in Washington, Venezuela and Africa suggests that he has made misleading, exaggerated or disputed statements about his businesses, his influence with global leaders, his marriages and even his age, according to documents and interviews with government officials and other people who know Mr. Mildon or have done business with him around the world.

Mr. Mildon has previously told

The New York Times and other news organizations that he is 29, and his wife, 42, has told friends the same. Documents seen by The Times and interviews with former classmates, however, put his age at 25.

His U.S. visa, which he obtained in 2023 in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, lists his date of birth as Dec. 2, 2000, as does a photo of his Turkish passport that was shown to The Times. British corporate records also list his birthday as December 2000.

News articles and photographs show that he attended a private high school in Turkey. One student there and another in his middle school described him as a classmate. They graduated in 2020 and say they are 25. The high school, the SEV Amerikan Koleji in Istanbul, declined to comment, citing privacy protection laws.

In 2021, Mr. Mildon married into the family of a prominent Turkish magnate. That marriage ended in 2024.

Mr. Mildon's spokesman said his client's marriage to Mrs. Mildon was his second. But several of Mr. Mildon's former confidants say he celebrated a legally nonbinding religious marriage to a daughter of a Venezuelan military commander last year before he met Ms. Habba. The ceremony took place at a time when Mr. Mildon was pursuing business deals in Venezuela and building ties to the inner circle of Nicolás Maduro, who was then the country's president.

Mr. Mildon, through his spokesman, said he had only been engaged to the woman, María Ceballos, the daughter of Adm. Remigio Ceballos, the former operational head of the Venezuelan armed forces. The spokesman said they held an engagement ceremony that reflected Mr. Mildon's culture. Mr. Mildon is not known to have said publicly that he was married to Ms. Ceballos.

Ms. Ceballos, however, told friends that she became Mr. Mildon's spouse in Turkey. (Religious marriages are not legally binding under the Turkish law; Mr. Mildon ended the relationship this year, Ms. Ceballos told friends.)

In media interviews, Mr. Mildon has presented himself as a billionaire with extensive business interests in Congo and Venezuela. He told Forbes Turkey that his companies' revenues totaled \$2.6 billion in 2025, and he spoke about making hundreds of millions of dollars in combined investments in construction, mining, cement and food exports.

The extent of his wealth, which is concentrated in private companies, is hard to discern, but there are indications that his firms have come under financial strain.

A significant share of Mr. Mil- don's revenues came from opera- ing 10 Venezuelan state-run ce- ment plants, according to people familiar with his businesses.

In June, the Venezuelan government assailed Mr. Mildon's cement company for investing just 6 percent of the agreed amount of new capital into the firm in the first two years of a five-year concession, according to a copy of a document seen by The Times and confirmed by government officials. The government has canceled the contract and asked Mr. Mildon's company to vacate the premises.

In Venezuela, Mr. Mildon's businesses also accumulated debts with suppliers and wage arrears with workers, several workers and suppliers said.

At a shrimp processing plant he operates in western Venezuela, managers have been telling workers in recent weeks that they do not have funds to pay their wages.

One of his cement plants has run up \$5 million in debts this year with more than 150 suppliers and government agencies, including for invoices for as little as six dollars, a document seen by The Times shows.

Mr. Mildon's spokesman said his client remains in control of cement plants and that his company has submitted to an independent audit. The spokesman disputed The Times's description of Mr. Mildon's businesses, but did not respond to specific questions about their financial condition.

Throughout his career, Mr. Mil-

don has frequently promoted what he says are close connections to global power brokers as he has sought to win business contracts and project influence, according to multiple people who have interacted with him.

Mr. Mildon has told people that he is closely connected to Mr. Trump, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, President Félix Tshisekedi of Congo, Mr. Maduro and his successor as Venezuela's leader, Delcy Rodríguez. Interviews with people close to the governments of these countries suggest that he has exaggerated the depth of some of these relationships.

Mr. Mildon's spokesman said his client had never sought to peddle access or influence, adding that his client does not disclose private meetings.

Mrs. Mildon's history with Mr. Trump has put him in the middle of the current White House investigation. However, the only public evidence of her husband crossing paths with Mr. Trump is a photo on social media that shows the president walking into his New Jersey golf club, and Mr. and Mrs. Mildon standing at a table in the background.

A person close to Mr. Trump said the president does not know Mr. Mildon and would not recognize him.

One person described Mr. Mil-don showing the person last year on his phone a purported WhatsApp conversation in English with Mr. Maduro, when he was the leader of Venezuela. People close to Mr. Maduro, however, said he did not use WhatsApp at that time, out of fear of being hacked, and has never conversed in English.

Mr. Mildon's spokesman said Mr. Mildon had never communicated with Mr. Maduro through WhatsApp or any other platform and had never exchanged phone numbers with him.

Another person said that since U.S. forces toppled Mr. Maduro in January, Mr. Mildon has told people that he had a close relationship with his successor, Ms. Rodriguez. He has told investors that he is the person to secure a business deal in Venezuela, that person said.

Mr. Mildon met Ms. Rodriguez in February, shortly after Mr. Maduro was captured by U.S. forces. Mr. Mildon participated in a meeting secured by a Trump-allied media executive. Mr. Mildon and Ms. Rodriguez have not met or had regular contact since, people close to Ms. Rodriguez said.

Mr. Mildon holds a Congolese diplomatic passport and told The Times last month he was an adviser to the country's leader, Mr. Tshisekedi.

But although the two men have been pictured together during official events, the extent of their personal connection is unclear. Mr. Mildon has forged ties with powerful figures around the president, helping him win lucrative contracts but also drawing him into factional squabbles.

Since starting to do business in Congo in 2021, Mr. Mildon has won government contracts worth over \$500 million for projects including a financial center, a sports arena, social housing and a military camp.

But several projects are incomplete or have suffered delays, including sensitive defense projects, leading to tensions with some officials.

In a text message, one senior Congolese official said the government was in regular and constructive contact with Mr. Mildon to complete his stalled projects.

Earlier this year, Mr. Mildon signed a contract worth more than \$50 million to build a drone base in Kisangani, in eastern Congo, to help counter Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, two officials said. But there has been little progress on building the base, and the military's effort against the M23 has made little progress.

The government of Congo declined to provide comment on the record for this article.

Jury Selection Begins at Guantánamo Bay for Trial of Man Charged in Cole Attack

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has been held at Guantánamo Bay since his capture in 2002. He was charged in 2011.

By CAROL ROSENBERG

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Jury selection has begun in the case against a Saudi man who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of a U.S. Navy ship that killed 17 American sailors more than 25 years ago.

The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 61, is the first prisoner at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to face a death penalty trial in the military commission system that was set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Cole was on a refueling stop in the port of Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000, when suicide bombers in an explosives-laden boat detonated their load. The explosion, at 11:18 a.m., as some of the sailors were gathering for lunch, blew a 30-foot-wide hole in the ship.

Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bombing, which is seen as a precursor of the Sept. 11 attacks. The trial in that case is scheduled to begin in June 2028.

Both capital cases have common themes involving the torture of the defendants in C.I.A. custody in the early 2000s. Prosecutors in both cases litigated for years to try to use interrogations of the defendants at Guantánamo in 2007, and lost.

Jury selection for the Cole trial could last weeks. The first 36 military officers from a pool of 200 arrived at the base over the weekend. More could be brought to the base until a panel of 12 jurors and six alternates is chosen.

The pool is made up of officers from U.S. bases in the continental United States, Europe, Hawaii and Japan. More than 360 officers were screened through questionnaires about their opinions on several issues, including the death penalty, religious affiliation and how closely they have followed news reports about the case.

The officers were drawn from all the military branches, including Space Force, which, like the military commissions court, was created after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Nashiri has been in U.S. custody since he was captured in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, in 2002. He was charged at the court only in 2011.

Pretrial hearings focused on his first four years of detention in secret overseas prisons, where he was waterboarded, forced to stand in a cramped, pitch-black box the size of a coffin, and hung from a ceiling by his wrists to deprive him of sleep and break his will to resist during interrogation.

A U.S. interrogator also revved a power drill near Mr. Nashiri when he was blindfolded, making the prisoner believe he was about to be executed. In 2023, an Army judge excluded confessions that Mr. Nashiri later made to federal agents as contaminated by his prior cruel treatment.

The current judge, Col. Matthew Fitzgerald, had set jury selection to start on Oct. 19, then twice postponed the proceedings after lawyers for Mr. Nashiri challenged the prisoner's competency to face trial.

The first prisoner at the Navy base to face the death penalty.

In a week of hearings, two mental health experts testified that the prisoner was too incapacitated by flashbacks and other disturbances from his torture to understand the proceedings and assist in his defense.

Then an Army psychiatrist who examined Mr. Nashiri for the court diagnosed the prisoner with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, but found him cogent enough to be tried.

The judge ruled on Friday that Mr. Nashiri was competent for trial.

The Cole trial is the first contested trial at Guantánamo Bay in nearly two decades. Since 2010, eight detainees have been convicted by a military commission in previous cases by pleading guilty in exchange for promises of resettlement or repatriation.

With military execution a possibility, the stakes are higher in the case of Mr. Nashiri. In 2009, Congress gave the defense secretary the authority to decide the method of execution for wartime, foreign prisoners sentenced to death by military commission.

Secretary Pete Hegseth recently chose the firing squad for the Dec. 3 execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist who killed 13 Americans and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas.

At the court last week, Mr. Nashiri's senior military defense lawyer asked the judge to postpone the trial for another six months.

Lt. Col. Joshua B. Nettinga of the Air Force said the defense had yet to review all the evidence in the case and was still engaging prosecutors over additional evidence they believed they were entitled to see.

Cmdr. Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the lead prosecutor, replied, "The time for justice is now." Invoking the families of the 17 fallen soldiers, he added, "The Gold Star families have been waiting for justice for a long time."

As Trump Skirts Court Commands, Rift Grows With the Judiciary

From Page AI

DAVID GUTTENFELDER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

branches to such a degree that it is now straining the judiciary's ability to serve as a check on executive power, as Mr. Trump approaches the second half of his term.

Some conflicts have been relatively straightforward, involving findings by courts that the executive branch failed to comply with binding orders — though typically without clear evidence that officials understood themselves to be deliberately violating judicial commands.

Others have been more complex and less clear-cut. Judges and the administration have fought over interpretations of specific judicial commands and failures by officials to live up to assurances they made to courts without explicit written orders. Sometimes, the executive branch has gotten around the courts by coming up with a new legal rationale for a policy that a judge said was not authorized by the authority officials initially cited.

Taken as a whole, the constant friction has undercut the reach of judicial authority as a check and balance on executive power and undermined the interbranch comity and trust that have traditionally helped keep the American system of government functional.

"The word 'contempt' clearly applies to what Trump and some of his people have been saying about the courts," said Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor and retired Republican-appointed appeals court judge. "The judges have become skeptical and certainly are no longer giving the Justice Department the benefit of the doubt."

The interbranch tensions gained urgency as election-related cases reached

HADYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Friction between the Trump administration and courts has undercut the reach of judicial authority as a check and balance on executive power.

DEPLOYING AGENTS A federal judge found more than 200 government violations of court orders in immigration cases throughout the first two months of this year during a surge of more than 3,000 immigration agents into Minneapolis.

FRED RAMOS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

the courts ahead of the midterms. The cases include a court order blocking Mr. Trump's plan to bar the Postal Service from delivering certain mail ballots and multiple pending requests for judicial orders barring the administration from sending armed federal agents to polling places.

In a statement, Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, said the Trump administration "has always, and will continue to follow all court orders."

“Lower courts have engaged in an unprecedented number of lawless injunctions seeking to obstruct President Trump's agenda that the American people elected him to enact,” she continued, “but with well over 25 Supreme Court victories, President Trump's policies have been consistently upheld as lawful.”

All modern administrations have sometimes bristled at judicial setbacks. President George W. Bush said that he disagreed with a 2008 ruling about rights of detainees at Guantánamo Bay but that he would abide by it. President Barack Obama criticized a campaign-finance decision in his 2010 State of the Union address, with justices seated before him. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2023 said that he thought the court got the law wrong when it blocked his student-loan forgiveness program, and he vowed to try again under a different authority.

Part of what makes the second Trump administration different is the sheer volume of Mr. Trump's confrontations with the courts. They also come as the administration has destroyed the traditional principle that the White House should play no role in directing law enforcement investigative and charging decisions in specific cases.

In some cases, skeptical judges have dismissed high-profile indictments and quashed investigative subpoenas, including at times finding that the Justice Department had improper motivations. And judges have increasingly been concluding that the department has been misrepresenting facts in civil litigation hearings and filings.

In a recent Duke Law Journal article, two University of Michigan law professors, Daniel T. Deacon and Leah M. Litman, called the administration's pattern of using evasive tactics to deflect limits imposed by the courts "legalistic non-compliance." And that behavior inside courtrooms has been coupled with venomous personal rhetoric about judges out of court.

Compounding the stakes, other legal checks on Mr. Trump have weakened since his first term. The Supreme Court in 2024 declared that presidents have broad immunity for crimes committed with official powers.

Mr. Trump has installed in key executive branch legal positions loyalists who were vetted as being less likely to raise objections to his ideas than even very conservative and political appointed lawyers sometimes were in his first term, and he has forbidden dissent by government lawyers. With Republicans controlling both chambers, and with the departure of some Republicans who occasionally challenged Mr. Trump in his first term, Congress has so far rarely constrained him.

That has left the courts as a principal obstacle to parts of his agenda — and a recurring target of his wrath.

Failing to Obey Orders

Before becoming vice president, JD Vance repeatedly argued that presidents could and should ignore court orders they regarded as infringements on their rightful executive powers. Soon after taking office in early 2025, he declared on social media that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

To date, however, the second Trump administration has not declared that it has intentionally violated a binding order. Instead, it has disputed the meaning of orders, challenged judges' authority to issue them, or attributed failures to comply to mistakes and overwhelmed systems.

In February, for example, a Justice Department lawyer filed a report in which she identified 52 court orders in New Jersey that the government had violated after reviewing 547 immigration actions. The violations included transferring detainees out of state despite a no-removal directive and missing deadlines to present detainees for a bond hearing. The department stressed that there was no evidence that any of the failures were intentional.

The complaint singled out Judge Schultz, whom it accused of having "publicly taken sides on the political issue of immigration enforcement." In October, the department also moved to disqualify him and another district judge from immigration-related cases.

"I not only have the right to speak out when I find the rule of law threatened — whether that be by negligence, inattention, incompetence, poor planning, or by conscious violation — I have a duty to do so," Judge Schiltz said at a recent law school conference.

Similarly, when the administration flooded Minneapolis with immigration agents for a major crackdown, Patrick J. Schiltz, a Bush appointee who was then the chief judge, found that the government had violated 210 orders in 143 immigration cases in the first two months of 2026. Low-level government lawyers told courts that those failures, too, were unintentional, reflecting a system overwhelmed by the volume of arrests and litigation.

The Justice Department responded to the criticism by attacking the judges themselves. In late September, it filed a misconduct complaint against nearly every active federal district judge in Minnesota for publicly warning, in New York Times interviews, that the administration's systematic failure to obey the orders during the surge had jeopardized the rule of law.

For the judges, however, the repeated failures raised a more fundamental issue: The executive branch had dispatched more than 3,000 immigration agents to the city without ensuring that there would be adequate lawyerly resources to deal with the predictable surge of habeas cases.

DEPORTING MIGRANTS The administration ignored an oral directive from a federal judge when it refused last year to return migrants who were being sent to a prison in El Salvador without a chance to contest their removals in court.

In July, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in the Central District of California, a Biden appointee, held an array of Trump administration officials in civil contempt for failing to comply with a discovery order to provide work messages exchanged by immigration agents on personal phones. The texts were sought by plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit concerning the immigration crackdown in Los Angeles last year.

She imposed a \$500-a-day fine, which the administration — which is contesting the contempt ruling — has been paying ever since. The payments do not come out of individual officials' pockets, limiting their coercive effect.

Other failures have been short-lived, and followed by belated compliance after lawyers returned to court.

In September, Judge Timothy J. Kelly in the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee, blocked Mr. Trump from banning reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. Journalists from the outlets were nevertheless denied entry for hours, regaining access only after lawyers filed a notice of non-compliance.

Some of the sharpest disputes have concerned instances when judges have delivered oral directives instead of, or before, issuing formal written orders. Traditionally, the government routinely obeys oral commands and even expressions of judicial expectations — but the Trump administration has contested their status.

In March 2025, Mr. Trump invoked an 18th-century wartime deportation law to send planeloads of people accused of belonging to a Venezuelan gang to a notorious Salvadoran prison without an opportunity to contest their identities and removals in court.

ANDREW LEYDEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Breaching Understandings

The American Civil Liberties Union sued on their behalf, and Judge James E. Boasberg, an Obama appointee who is the chief Federal District Court judge in the District of Columbia, told the administration during a hearing that they should turn any planes around so migrants aboard could receive hearings.

He also said he would issue a formal written order so there would be no confusion and did so about an hour later. While

REMOVING TREES Workers cut down hundreds of trees at the East Potomac Golf Links in Washington on Oct. 10, after government lawyers assured a federal judge that they would give adequate notice before any major work took place.

it forbade removals from the United States, it did not mention planes already in the air.

In fact, two planes of migrants were midnight, and the administration did not return them, instead allowing them to fly on to El Salvador and complete the transfer. Administration lawyers later argued that “an oral directive is not enforceable as an injunction,” and that the narrower written order superseded the oral directive. Judge Boasberg rejected that argument.

A former Justice Department lawyer later told Congress that during planning for the deportations, Emil Bove III, a senior Trump appointee, had said that if a court enjoined the removals, the department "would need to consider telling the courts 'fuck you' and ignore any such order." Mr. Bove, whom Mr. Trump has since appointed as an appellate judge, denied it.

Judge Boasberg sought to hold contempt proceedings and establish who made the key decisions and what they knew at the time. But an appellate panel with two Trump appointees voted 2 to 1 to shut them down. The full appeals court is now weighing whether to let Judge Boasberg hold his inquiry, meaning the issue remains unresolved — about 20 months later.

During the dispute, Mr. Trump attacked Judge Boasberg as a "radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator," calling for his impeachment. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Bush appointee, rebuked Mr. Trump, writing, "Impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision."

A recent confrontation over Mr. Trump's plans to remake a century-old public golf course in Washington followed a similar cycle of seeming understandings' being breached, followed by judicial anger and accusations of bias.

A preservation group and two local golfers sued in February, arguing that the government was bypassing required reviews. Justice Department lawyers told Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee, that the redesign remained conceptual and promised adequate advance notice before major work began. Relying on those assurances, she held off on an injunction.

Then, at 4:55 p.m. on Oct. 9, the Friday before a holiday weekend, the administration filed notice that it intended to clear as many as 529 trees for what it styled as "maintenance activities." Workers began cutting the next morning, removing hundreds of trees before Judge Reyes intervened.

During a four-hour emergency hearing, she excoriated the government, saying it had lost "all of its credibility." The Justice Department sought her recusal, citing her heated remarks as intemperate. She refused to step aside, and Mr.

Trump called her a "crazed lunatic" on social media while declaring that the renovation did not need approval and that work would begin "IMMEDIATELY!"

That continuing dispute — Judge Reyes on Friday ordered a formal inquiry into whether Trump administration lawyers made material misrepresentations to the court — illustrated an escalating tension. Traditionally, courts routinely have depended on Justice Department lawyers' assurances, deferring to their factual representations, a practice known as the presumption of regularity.

But courts around the country are increasingly finding that the word of Justice Department lawyers in the second Trump administration is not reliable.

In February, for example, Judge Christine P. O'Hearn, a Biden appointee in New Jersey, required sworn affidavits from officials with firsthand knowledge about the transfer of an immigration detainee, writing that the presumption previously afforded to the executive branch "has been undeniably eroded." She added that the court would "no longer blindly accept statements of fact" from the government.

And in May, when Judge Mary S. McElroy, a Trump appointee in Rhode Island, quashed an administration subpoena for transgender children's medical records, she approvingly cited a similar rebuke by another judge in Oregon, who had said the Justice Department

How Trump Has Deflected the Courts

Violate orders, but insist that it's unintentional

■ A court orders an immigration detainee kept in state or presented for a bond hearing.

■ The administration transfers that person out of state or fails to meet the hearing deadline, but says it was a mistake rather than deliberate defiance.

Tobay Robles v. Noem On Jan. 14, a judge ordered the government to either bring a man detained in its immigration crackdown in Minnesota to a bond hearing or release him — within seven days. The government missed that deadline and many others in similar cases. The judge later identified about 200 violations of court orders over two months stemming from the crackdown. Government lawyers repeatedly cited a lack of resources to keep up with the volume of cases the operation was generating.

Delay complying

■ A court blocks an action by the administration.

■ Administration officials delay compliance.

CNN et al v. Trump On Sept. 24, 2026, a judge ordered White House personnel to let reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico back onto the grounds, blocking Mr. Trump's order barring the news organizations over their reporting. The Secret Service continued to block them for hours, not allowing them access until their lawyer filed a notice of noncompliance with the court.

Interpret orders narrowly

■ A court orders the administration to act.

■ Administration officials construe their obligations narrowly, limiting what they say they must do to comply.

Abrego Garcia v. Noem On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to "facilitate" the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant who had been deported to El Salvador despite an immigration judge's previously ordering that he not be sent there. The administration interpreted the court's order to mean that it would need to admit Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States should he reach the border

— not take steps to secure his release from a Salvadoran prison and return him.

Adopt alternative rationales

\- A court blocks an action, rejecting the administration's claimed legal authority.

• The administration keeps pursuing the same or similar policy citing a different claimed legal basis, prompting fresh litigation.

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump On Feb. 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could not invoke a 1977 emergency powers law — which did not mention tariffs — to unilaterally impose sweeping import taxes. Hours later, Mr. Trump invoked an aggressive interpre-

could no longer be taken at its word, given how the department had withheld and misrepresented salient information in the case.

"D.O.J. has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case," Judge McElroy wrote.

But the frequency with which judges of both parties are finding the Trump Justice Department to be unworthy of trust is contributing to a downward cycle. It creates pressure on judges to issue more detailed restrictions and to demand more evidence — steps the administration may then portray as unwarranted interference.

The cycle has also been exacerbated by an administration tactic of sometimes narrowly interpreting its obligations under court orders.

That tactic was central to the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the government mistakenly repatriated to El Salvador last year despite an immigration judge's order barring his removal to his home country.

After the Supreme Court directed the government to “facilitate” his return, the administration argued that it needed only to let him back in if he showed up at the border, not to seek his release from El Salvador.

A federal appeals court rejected that interpretation as “not well taken.” Writing for the court, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, warned that the branches were increasingly coming “too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.”

"The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive's respect for the courts," he added. "Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate."

Under such pressure, the administration eventually retrieved Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.

Exploiting Loopholes

In other cases, the administration has found ways around court action blocking its policies by pursuing the same policies using alternative legal rationales.

In early 2025, the White House ortation of a different law to impose a 10 percent global tariff, prompting a new legal fight.

Fail to follow through on verbal assurances

■ The administration's lawyers offer the court assurances, forestalling a formal order.

■ The administration acts in ways the court considers inconsistent with those assurances.

D.C. Preservation League v. National Park Service Portraying plans to overhaul a public golf course in Washington as preliminary, government lawyers promised to notify a judge before any major work began. Trusting that the assurance meant that she would have an adequate opportunity to examine the legality of any work before it began, the judge declined to order the administration not to start its project. The government then abruptly filed a notice at 4:55 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend that it planned to clear as many as 529 trees for what it styled as “maintenance activities,” and workers cut down hundreds of trees the next day before she weighed in and stopped it.

Argue that the court exceeded its authority or that its directive was not binding

■ A judge directs the government to act in a specific way.

■ The administration does otherwise, arguing that the directive was not binding or exceeded the court's authority.

J.G.G. v. Trump In March 2025, a judge verbally commanded the government to turn around planes carrying people accused of being Venezuelan gang members to a notorious Salvadoran prison because they had not been given due-process hearings. The judge then issued a written order barring removals under the wartime deportation law invoked by Mr. Trump. The administration nevertheless completed the transfer, later arguing that the oral order was not binding and that the planes were in international airspace beyond the court's jurisdiction.

Violate an order and absorb fines imposed as a penalty

■ A judge imposes a civil contempt fine for noncompliance.

■ The administration pays the fine with public funds, shielding individual officials from the cost.

Perdomo v. Mullin The Department of Homeland Security failed to comply with a court's discovery order to copy work messages on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents' personal phones for a class-action lawsuit challenging practices in a crackdown in Los Angeles. A judge then held officials in contempt and imposed a \$500-a-day fine. The administration, which is contesting the ruling, has been paying the fines for months using government funds.

CHARLIE SAVAGE

dered a broad spending freeze, prompting agencies to withhold foreign aid and domestic grants. Recipients sued, and judges blocked the White House's directive. But Trump political appointees at agencies invoked other legal authorities to keep withholding the funds, saying they were making independent decisions rather than carrying out the blocked directives.

Such disputes are inherently ambiguous. Presidents of both parties have tried similar moves when blocked by the courts. But the Trump administration has been particularly aggressive in pressing forward rather than acquiescing to apparent court defeats.

When the Supreme Court struck down Mr. Trump's novel use of an emergency powers law to impose tariffs in February, he attacked the justices who voted against him as "a disgrace," "incompetent" and an "embarrassment to their families." Mr. Vance called the 6-3 ruling "lawlessness from the court, plain and simple." Within hours, Mr. Trump imposed a 10 percent global tariff, citing a different legal authority, also novel. The move prompted renewed litigation over whether he could lawfully impose such import taxes.

While appeals of adverse rulings are a normal part of litigation, the second Trump administration has been unusually aggressive in appealing.

The administration has started making routine use of the Supreme Court's once-rare emergency docket, appealing district court orders before litigation has had a chance to play out at an unprecedented rate, according to data compiled by Stephen I. Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor.

Professor Vladeck, who is also the author of a forthcoming Harvard Law Review article documenting the confrontational dynamic between the judiciary and the executive branch under the second Trump administration, said the pattern was damaging both institutions — undermining the credibility of the Justice Department and the courts' neutral, above-the-fray image.

Professor Vladeck said that in the long term, the tensions risked “eroding trust in our institutions, when those institutions depend in lots of ways, big and small, on the very trust that is now in jeopardy.”

NATHAN HOWARD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Todd Blanche, the attorney general, has targeted undocumented immigrants as illegally voting.

Trump Claim That '20 Vote Was Rigged Still Looms Large Over the Justice Dept.

By GLENN THRUSH

WASHINGTON — Senior leaders of the Justice Department, many of them veterans of President Trump's legal and political wars over the last decade, share a singular, striking attribute: They have not admitted, unequivocally or plainly, that he lost the 2020 election.

Attorney General Todd Blanche; his predecessor, Pam Bondi; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department's civil rights division, have all avoided providing yes-or-no answers about the election in appearances before Congress. Instead, they have acknowledged only that President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory was legally certified.

Emil Bove III, a former Blanche aide, offered a telling non-answer during his confirmation process for a federal judgeship last year: It was inappropriate to opine on 2020 because it was an unresolved "political or policy debate," he wrote in a questionnaire.

This refusal to acknowledge the fact that Mr. Trump lost, a go-to tactic for nominees seeking to avoid contradicting the president, has become so commonplace it no longer warrants much attention. Yet it reflects the enduring legacy of a polarizing election whose reverberations are still being felt, perhaps most consequently in the department's presumption that voter fraud is so rampant that it requires a forceful federal response. That premise has been challenged by state election officials and expert analysis.

"This is a different approach than we have seen in any previous Department of Justice, whether it was run by Republicans or Democrats," said Karen Brinson Bell, the former executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Ms. Brinson Bell said the administration's current initiatives, like its attempt to curtail mail-in voting, the unsuccessful effort to obtain sensitive voter data from states and the issuance of threats against local officials, underscore themes Mr. Trump struck six years ago.

The 2020 election “seems to have been something of a catalyst” for their current actions, she added.

Mr. Trump built a powerhouse political movement by mobilizing supporters to align with his grievances, including his debunked claims of a conspiracy to steal the election and his rage over being prosecuted for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

And the president has explicitly linked his stop-the-steal message six years ago to the midterm elections this year.

He exploded after a federal court recently rejected the department's demand that officials in California stop counting 20,000 mail-in ballots over concerns the batch included noncitizens who voted illegally, even though such instances are exceedingly rare.

"Why would they reject fixing Election Fraud?" Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday as he continued to stew over the Supreme Court's refusal to consider his efforts to overturn the 2020 results.

"That's like, in the 2020 Rigged and Stolen Election, when we had a great case, but the Supreme Court would not hear it because they said I, the President of the United States of America, had NO STANDING to bring such a case."

This spring, Mr. Blanche, the president's former defense lawyer, told Fox News that "there is a ton of evidence the election was rigged." But he added that producing evidence that would hold up in court was "very difficult because they're very good at hiding misconduct and hiding what they're doing."

Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokeswoman, dismissed the idea that the department's actions in California and its effort to pre-emptively contest the results of the Alaska's Senate race were impelled by any lingering grievances over 2020, just the determination to enforce laws the Biden administration would not.

"The Justice Department is focused on 2026 and on enforcing the federal laws that protect it," Ms. Pels said. "Noncitizen voting is a federal crime. Prosecuting those cases is not 'interceding' in state elections. It is the job."

If the department is facing criticism from the left for doing far too much, some on the right believe Mr. Blanche and his team are doing far too little.

Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump aide who has long maintained that the 2020 election was stolen, said most of the department's recent actions were aimed at keeping his boss happy, not at

Clockwise from top left, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Emil Bove and Harmeet Dhillon, all current or past administration officials, avoided giving yes-or-no answers about the election in testimony before Congress.

uncovering what he has said is a vast conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump.

"Everything D.O.J. is doing is totally performative to give some patina of action," he said in an interview. "Their heart isn't in it. They slapped together a plan in the last 60 days after Trump started to really tune in."

Several figures who played central roles in the post-2020 fight have emerged as influential voices in Mr. Trump's ear. He recently met with Tina Peters, a former election official in Colorado who served prison time for breaching a county voting system. She has urged him to use the power of federal law enforcement to aggressively investigate elections without seeking court orders or the cooperation of state officials.

"He already has the authority to do all this — he doesn't have to go to Congress to ask," she told MS NOW on Monday. "If there's something that is criminal in nature, he has every right to have the administration, the attorney general's office or, you know, law enforcement go in and investigate."

The assumptions undergirding the department's two main lines of legal attack — the effort to sequester ballots based on contested assertions of illegal voting and the intervention, at Mr. Trump's request, in the Alaska race — echo the drumbeat of 2020 election denialism.

"State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America," Mr. Blanche said after suing California on Oct. 15. The move kicked off a period of litigation so intense that his tiny team of deputies has had to work around the clock to keep up with the demands of drafting the paperwork.

The effort, he added, was essential to "restore trust in American elections."

Critics say it was aimed at achieving exactly the opposite, part of a determined political effort to undermine faith in elections — and one destined to fail in court.

"We're seeing the same unsuccessful playbook as we did in 2020," said Sam Oliker-Friedland, a former trial lawyer in the voting rights section of the department's civil rights division, who is now CEO of the Institute for Responsive Government, a nonprofit group that monitors elections across the country. "It's clear they haven't learned that much."

The federal judge in the California case, David O. Carter, rejected the department's argument. He accused the administration of seeking to "disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens."

The department's appeals in the case have thus far proved unsuccessful. On Monday, it petitioned the Supreme Court to uphold the suit, only to be swiftly rejected hours later.

The lawsuit embodied the evolution of the Trump administration's strategy. It has shifted away from investigating broad-based claims of rampant voter fraud that William P. Barr, Mr. Trump's attorney general during the 2020 election, dismissed as "completely bogus."

Mr. Blanche and his team have coordinated closely with the Department of Homeland Security to target illegal voting by undocumented immigrants. That approach dovetails with the all-encompassing crackdown on immigration led by Mr. Trump's top domestic adviser, Stephen Miller.

In the last nine weeks alone, the department has charged 192 immigrants across 26 states with illegal voting and registration offenses. Since the beginning of this administration, the department has charged 236 people with voting-fraud-related offenses, Ms. Pels said.

Another approach with shades of 2020 has been the department's targeting of state and local election workers. Six years ago, Mr. Trump and his allies accused poll workers in Georgia and elsewhere of intentionally mishandling ballots. In October, the department sent warning letters and subpoenas to officials in California, accusing them of failing to comply with their demands.

On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the department not to "threaten, intimidate or coerce state or local elections officials" based on the government's suspicion a voter might be a noncitizen.

Mr. Blanche's team has said its actions are necessary to safeguard the process. The flurry of 11th-hour activity, they have claimed, represents the urgency of addressing the threat posed by illegal voting with a goal of reminding local officials of their legal obligation to preserve records for future scrutiny.

Mr. Blanche has repeatedly offered assurances that the department's recent activity was motivated by evidence, not politics. Last month, he told reporters the department would never "improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process."

In the meantime, dodging questions about the 2020 election remains the go-to tactic of those seeking positions of power in the administration.

"Who won the 2020 election?" Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, asked Jay Clayton, Mr. Trump's nominee to be director of national intelligence, during his confirmation hearing in July.

"I'm not going to do this with you," said Mr. Clayton, who was the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan before he was confirmed.

Mr. Ossoff persisted.

Mr. Clayton repeated that Mr. Biden had been certified the winner.

Inside Trump's Unfettered D.C. Makeover

By YULIYA PARSHINA-KOTTAS, KARTHIK PATANJALI, DOUG MILLS and LUKE BROADWATER

A year ago, President Trump suddenly demolished the East Wing of the White House after pledging he would not, to make way for a massive ballroom. Since then, he has shrugged off judicial and congressional restraints as he has pursued more than two dozen construction or renovation projects around the city.

A series of federal judges has insisted that Mr. Trump cannot embark on much of his Washington building spree without the approval of Congress. But the Republicans who control Congress have not sued or otherwise tried to assert their authority, giving the president free rein to remake Washington just the way he wants it.

Here are the largest or priciest projects, as seen from the top of the Washington Monument, the city's tallest point:

Garden of Heroes

The president is working to fill these sports fields with statues of 250 notable Americans. Even as the project faces a lawsuit and has yet to be approved by Congress, Mr. Trump's vision has expanded to include reflecting pools, dining facilities and an amphitheater.

Meanwhile, gazebos that were gifts from Uzbekistan have already been erected at the site and may be a part of the display, according to the country's ambassador.

Uzbek gazebo for Garden of Heroes

Eisenhower Executive Office Building

Saying that "gray is for funerals," Mr. Trump has pushed to paint the granite exterior of the Eisenhower building white. Historic preservation groups have sued to stop the effort, but a federal judge in August allowed initial paint testing to proceed.

Hundreds of trees felled for an East Potomac golf course

East Potomac Golf Links

Mr. Trump last month unveiled his latest design for converting a municipal golf course and recreational area into a championship-level course. He declared construction would begin immediately, even though the plan is stuck in legal limbo.

The administration already began cutting down hundreds of trees, saying it was implementing a 2019 maintenance plan. The move incensed a federal judge overseeing the case, who said that it was unlikely that “this just coincidentally happened at the same time.”

Triumphal arch

To ensure his plan to build a 250-foot triumphal arch encounters few obstacles, Mr. Trump has filled two federal panels overseeing the project with allies. Still, a group of veterans has sued to block the project, saying it would obstruct a symbolic sightline.

With the arch facing a legal challenge, Mr. Trump in September shifted his rationale for the project. He claimed that the arch, which was designed as a tourist attraction, would also serve as a military complex. A federal panel is expected to approve the project on Nov. 5, and the administration said construction could start immediately.

Statues clad in 23.75-karat gold leaf

7

White House

The White House and its surrounding area have been at the center of Mr. Trump's projects, which, all told, will cost over \$1 billion and be largely financed by taxpayers.

No project is as important to Mr. Trump as his new ballroom, which is being constructed at a rapid pace. Even as he faced lawsuits and court orders telling him he needed congressional approval, Mr. Trump raced ahead to effectively outrun the courts. By June, the above-

ground structures were visibly built up.

White House ballroom, under construction in October

In August, the Supreme Court allowed the project to move forward by shooting down a legal challenge to the construction on procedural grounds.

As he has remodeled the White House, Mr. Trump has said he does not need to follow zoning or code regulations. With that reasoning, he personally oversaw the construction and design of a granite helipad on the South Lawn this summer.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES; COMPOSITE BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

Reflecting Pool

Shuttered in September

With rushed work, no-bid contracts, frustrating algae blooms and quickly peeling paint, Mr. Trump's attempt to renovate the Reflecting Pool in time for America's 250th birthday faced a series of failures as its price tag ballooned.

In September, contractors hired by the administration admitted that the blue liner had peeled because of errors in their work, not because of vandalism, as Mr. Trump had claimed. The pool is now refilled, but it's unclear whether its underlying issues of leaks and algae blooms have been fully addressed.

Any redesign by Mr. Trump is sure to involve some gold. He covered two pairs of statues installed in the 1950s — Arts of Peace and Arts of War — in 23.75-karat gold leaf, paying \$5 million to a handpicked vendor.

Kennedy Center

The president's insistence on taking over the Kennedy Center, once the cultural center of Washington, while adding his name to the building, has led the institution to the edge of ruin. With Mr. Trump as its chairman, the center has experienced severe financial losses.

Unhappy that a judge blocked him from renaming the building, Mr. Trump has threatened to demolish the performing arts center, which he had previously planned to renovate for \$250 million. In September, the center abruptly closed to the public.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

METHODOLOGY To create a high-resolution panorama of Washington, The New York Times captured 69 overlapping photographs from atop the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument on Oct. 28. We then used software to stitch these photos into a single image.

Reporting and production were contributed by Jeffrey Furticella, Katherine Chui, Junho Lee, Bedel Saget and Elena Shao. | Heating Degree Days | An index of fuel consumption that tracks how far the day's mean temperature fell below 65 | Yesterday | 6 | So far this month | 30 | So far this season (since July 1) | 261 | Normal to date for the season | 312 |

'Devastating' Damage as Rain and Flash Floods Batter the Southwest

Residents of an R.V. camp in Camp Verde, Ariz., on Monday after powerful El Niño-generated rains lashed the area.

ROSS D. FRANKLIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By JACK HEALY

and NAZANEEN GHAFFAR

Torrential rains brought a new round of flooding to the Southwest on Monday, washing away roads and prompting fresh evacuations and anguish in a region still reeling from floods a week earlier.

The damage sprawled across the high desert and mountains of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, a vast area where some towns received twice as much rain in a single day as they typically get during the entire month of November.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Shawn Koss, whose house along the Animas River in Flora Vista, N.M., flooded. "The roads are cut in half. Gas stations look like a lake. It's devastating."

Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona declared a statewide emergency in response to the floods on Monday. Other officials in the Four Corners region, where much of the worst flooding occurred, said they had not even begun to grapple with the extent of the damage.

Many communities were still under evacuation orders or cut off altogether by landslides and damaged roads, and local police were struggling to navigate roads

Stephanie Gates contributed reporting from South Fork, Colo.

clogged by boulders and three feet of mud.

"We're so cut off from some of those places," said Brice Current, the police chief in Durango, Colo., where emergency workers rescued people from flooded neighborhoods and trailer parks, "It's underwater and impassible."

The timing of the floods — just before Election Day — also forced election officials in some parts of Colorado to find alternative voting locations or to offer displaced voters help in requesting emergency ballots or casting their votes from another county.

Some flooded streams in the high country began to recede on Monday as the skies cleared, making way for a drier weather forecast for the days ahead. But new dangers were emerging downstream, as billions of gallons of water coursed into lower-lying cities like Farmington, N.M.

There, officials issued new evacuation orders on Monday as the Animas River spilled over its banks and into downtown. On the Navajo Nation, where 500 homes were damaged by floods over the last month, officials were bracing for more impact to roads and residences.

The police in the mountain town of Flagstaff, Ariz., reported two deaths in the flooding: A 73-year-old man from New York who was killed after falling into the flood-waters on Sunday night, and an unidentified man whose body was found in storm water drainage on Monday morning.

Officials in southwestern Colorado said some people were still stranded in their homes and cut off because of damage to cellphone infrastructure, but they did not have reports of anyone missing in the floods.

Much of the Southwest withered under a drought all summer. But in recent weeks, a powerful El

Niño weather pattern has lashed the region with wave after wave of rain, refilling reservoirs but also saturating the ground and raising the risk of flash floods.

It has left many in the area with flood fatigue. They fled their homes a week ago to stay with friends and family on higher ground and had barely begun cleaning up when local officials warned them over the weekend to evacuate again.

"Our guards were already up because it just happened," said

Tim Ryan, 40, a construction contractor in southwestern Colorado. "It was very fresh in our memories."

Now, residents said, they were returning to homes filled with mud and infested with mold.

Jennifer Tate, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said central Arizona had been the "hot spot" for the highest rainfall totals over the last 60 days, along with southern Utah, southwestern Colorado and western New Mexico.

"It's generally been wet across the Four Corners region," she said. "And that would be consistent with the El Niño pattern that we're in."

Although drier conditions are expected, the National Water Center has warned of considerable flooding along rivers and smaller streams across parts of central Arizona, southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico through Tuesday.

"But after that, there's not much precipitation expected for much of the Southwest," said Ms. Tate. "It's definitely going to start drying out and give them a break."

Robert Rickey, a meteorologist at the Flagstaff office of the National Weather Service, said there were widespread rain totals in the area between two to six inches. The Flagstaff airport reported

3.37 inches on Sunday alone. The average rainfall for the entire month of November in Flagstaff is 1.55 inches, he said.

The heavy rain overwhelmed rivers across the region, transforming trickling creeks and tiny streams into roaring, muddy monsters. The Little Colorado River near Winslow, Ariz., along Route 66, reached a record level of more than 25 feet, or more than twice its typical height.

About 2.4 inches of rain fell in the storm-weary town of Pagosa Springs, Colo., pushing the San Juan River over its banks for the second time in a month. At least one home fell into the river, and on Monday, the town museum was perched precariously on the edge of an eroded riverbank, in danger of tumbling in.

"I do anticipate we will lose the front part of the museum," said Shari Pierce, the mayor.

Ms. Pierce, who is also the publisher of the local newspaper, The Pagosa Springs Sun, said that the downtown was still under evacuation orders on Monday and that it was still too soon to assess the extent of the damage.

She did, however, manage to save 12 tote bags' worth of family documents and written memories that people around Pagosa had given to the museum as keepsakes.

Weather Report

Highlight: Rain Finally Returns to the Northeast

It has been over two and a half weeks since many locations in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic regions have had measurable rain. That streak will come to an end tonight into Thursday as a front will bring rain to the Appalachians and showers farther to the east. By Friday and Friday night, that front will stall, which may result in a band of heavy rain over New England and Long Island.

National Forecast

As a storm moves east across the United States today, rain will spread from Minnesota to Ohio. Heavy thunderstorms will rumble from Kentucky to the Gulf Coast. Some of the downpours could produce strong wind gusts.

A small storm will bring showers and high-elevation snow to Utah and Colorado. Outside of spotty showers in Florida, the rest of the nation will have dry weather.

Temperatures will remain above average along the East Coast as cooler air filters into the Plains and Midwest behind the storm.

The Southwest will have abundant sunshine and temperatures near early-November averages. Clouds are forecast to arrive in the Northwest later in the day, ahead of a storm from the Pacific.

Metropolitan Forecast

TODAY ....Sunshine, some clouds High 71. There will be a few patches of fog early. Otherwise, the day will feature more sunshine than clouds. High temperatures will remain well above typical levels for early November.

TONIGHT ....Turning mostly cloudy Low 59. While there will be patchy clouds early, the second half of the night will be mostly cloudy. Temperatures will be nearly 15 degrees above average, around the usual daily high.

TOMORROW ...... Afternoon showers

High 68. A little fog may start the day.

Clouds will thicken during the morning.

There will also be some showers during

the afternoon, breaking an extended dry

stretch.

FRIDAY....Rain much of the time High 67. Clouds will linger throughout the day with some rain likely. The rain may be heavy at times with a chance of ponding on roads. Temperatures will be well above normal despite the rain.

SATURDAY SUNDAY ....Clouds break Saturday A shower may linger early on Saturday. Otherwise, clouds will break for some sunshine. High 65. Sunday will be dry with plenty of sunshine. High 61.

Meteorology by AccuWeather

Metropolitan Almanac | Precipitation (in inches) | Yesterday | 0.00 | Record | 2.60 | For the last 30 days | Actual | 2.07 | Normal | 4.17 | For the last 365 days | Actual | 44.31 | Normal | 49.52 | In Central Park, for the 13 hours ended at 1 p.m. yesterday.

Cities | C | Clouds | S | Sun | F | Fog | Sn | Snow | H | Haze | SS | Snow showers | I | Ice | T | Thunderstorms | PC | Partly cloudy | Tr | Trace | R | Rain | W | Windy | Sh | Showers | - | Not available | N.Y.C. region | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | New York City | 66/ 52 0 | 71/ 59 PC | 68/ 62 Sh | Bridgeport | 66/ 48 0 | 69/ 57 PC | 68/ 61 Sh | Caldwell | 69/ 41 0 | 74/ 57 PC | 71/ 60 Sh | Danbury | 68/ 40 0 | 73/ 55 PC | 68/ 62 Sh | Islp | 66/ 44 0 | 71/ 59 PC | 70/ 61 Sh | Newark | 68/ 46 0 | 75/ 61 PC | 72/ 62 Sh | Trenton | 67/ 40 0 | 74/ 57 PC | 71/ 60 Sh | White Plains | 65/ 43 0 | 71/ 58 PC | 70/ 59 Sh | High/low temperatures for the 16 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday, Eastern time, and precipitation (in inches) for the 18 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday. Expected conditions for today and tomorrow. | United States | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | Albany | 67/52 T1 | 74/56 S | 67/52 Sh | Albuquerque | 62/42 T1 | 66/41 S | 62/39 S | Atlanta | 37/30 P.O. | 71/28 P.O. | 70/28 P.O. | Atlanta | 70/65 T1 | 69/65 T | 77/62 C | Atlantic City | 65/52 O | 71/61 PC | 70/62 Sh | Baltimore | 82/58 P.O. | 77/52 P.O. | 77/52 P.O. | Baltimore | 73/47 O | 75/61 PC | 75/61 Sh | Baton Rouge | 84/69 0.05 | 81/55 T | 81/60 S | Birmingham | 75/70 O | 74/58 T | 77/54 PC | Boston | 58/57 P.O. | 68/61 PC | 65/59 C | Boston | 72/55 01 | 75/58 S | 72/61 C | Buffalo | 72/57 T1 | 77/60 PC | 64/51 R | Gulfport | 64/61 01 | 73/57 PC | 65/50 P | Calper | 54/36 P.O. | 53/28 PC | 57/32 S | Charlotte | 73/55 O | 75/66 C | 74/64 Sh | Charlottesville | 74/63 P.O. | 70/63 PC | 64/64 C | Chicago | 71/61 0.08 | 63/52 Sh | 54/46 C | Cincinnati | 77/62 O | 67/51 R | 66/48 PC | Cleveland | 77/62 O | 67/56 R | 64/50 S | Dallas-Ft. Springs | 54/64 0.01 | 60/52 P.O. | 64/50 C | Columbus | 74/60 O | 56/55 R | 67/48 C | Concord, N.Y. | 70/43 0.01 | 77/48 S | 68/54 Sh | Delaware, W. Worth | 73/45 0.01 | 74/56 PC | 77/53 P | Denver | 57/35 0.01 | 56/35 S | 59/35 S | Des Moines | 64/48 0.62 | 52/46 S | 50/41 C | Detroit | 75/60 O | 66/53 PC | 63/48 C | El Paso | 69/47 O | 76/52 S | 73/50 S | Fargo | 48/40 0.01 | 47/35 R | 42/31 PC | Hartford | 71/50 O | 76/56 PC | 70/59 Sh | Houston | 84/64 0.08 | 75/47 PC | 74/53 A | Houston | 85/58 0.25 | 80/55 S | 90/61 B | Indianapolis | 75/62 O | 68/51 R | 66/49 C | Indianapolis | 79/62 0.05 | 77/52 P.O. | 77/52 P.O. | Jacksonville | 80/68 0.10 | 64/67 PC | 80/66 S | Kansas City | 68/49 0.01 | 58/42 PC | 55/43 PC | Key West | 88/71 0.01 | 85/72 P.O. | 85/78 S | Kansas City | 67/51 O | 71/52 S | 71/53 PC | Lexington | 77/62 O | 67/53 R | 69/46 PC | New Delhi | 84/64 | 85/65 PC | 86/65 PC | Riyadh | 95/70 | 84/69 S | 84/71 PC | Seoul | 64/37 0/2 | 67/49 PC | 63/37 Sn | Shanghai | 66/66 | 66/57 PC | 68/58 PC | Singapore | 91/77 | 91/78 T | 89/77 T | Sydney | 78/64 0/31 | 77/65 Sn | 71/58 Sn | Jagari City | 74/51 0/31 | 89/60 PC | 74/51 Sn | Tokyo | 68/55 0/15 | 70/57 PC | 65/53 PC | Tokyo | 66/57 | 62/56 R | 65/61 R | Europe | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | Amsterdam | 52/45 0/32 | 50/38 PC | 48/36 S | Athens | 72/61 0/28 | 70/56 PC | 65/51 S | Berlin | 50/37 | 50/37 PC | 50/37 S | Brussels | 50/43 0/26 | 50/36 S | 49/34 S | Budapest | 50/43 0/18 | 53/31 S | 51/26 PC | Dublin | 50/41 0/1 | 48/39 PC | 40/40 S | Dublin | 54/46 T | 53/48 PC | 52/45 C | Edinburgh | 50/39 0/36 | 51/41 PC | 51/45 C | Finnishkville | 48/35 | 52/37 PC | 35/35 S | Geneva | 48/41 0/2 | 49/37 PC | 51/41 PC | Helsinki | 45/35 | 46/40 C | 46/32 S | Istanbul | 75/57 0/41 | 51/58 PC | 45/54 S | London | 47/43 | 43/33 C | 44/40 C | Lisbon | 72/52 | 69/48 S | 65/50 PC | London | 54/46 0/04 | 53/46 PC | 52/44 PC | Madrid | 51/41 0/0 | 59/51 S | 51/51 S | Moscow | 37/32 0/06 | 36/32 Sn | 42/32 Sn | Nicos | 66/50 | 63/55 C | 62/56 Sn | Paris | 47/37 | 40/34 PC | 44/34 Sn | Paris | 50/43 | 51/37 C | 52/40 PC | Prague | 43/37 | 45/31 C | 45/29 S | Rome | 68/58 | 61/57 PC | 68/58 PC | St. Petersburg | 44/38 0/11 | 42/39 PC | 46/34 S | Stockholm | 46/28 | 46/35 PC | 47/28 S | Serbia | 45/32 0/02 | 45/32 PC | 45/32 S | Warsaw | 50/36 0/0 | 47/31 PC | 48/40 S | North America | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | Acapulco | 88/77 0 | 89/76 PC | 88/77 T | Bermuda | 75/72 0.22 | 77/72 C | 78/72 C | Edmonton | 45/33 0.02 | 46/24 S | 46/27 S | Gibraltar | 79/76 0 | 85/76 PC | 85/50 PC | Havana | 87/66 0.02 | 86/69 R | 87/68 R | Kingston | 82/75 0.15 | 88/78 Sh | 88/78 T | Martinique | 90/79 0.03 | 92/73 S | 93/75 T | Mexico City | 75/75 0 | 80/72 PC | 80/52 S | Monterrey | 84/66 0 | 80/62 S | 83/63 PC | Montreal | 61/54 0.19 | 71/56 C | 66/50 R | Nassau | 86/78 0.08 | 86/76 T | 85/76 S | New York City | 96/73 0.33 | 86/78 R | 87/76 R | Quebec City | 50/39 0.28 | 59/46 R | 56/48 S | Santo Domingo | 89/74 0 | 89/75 PC | 89/73 Sh | Toronto | 72/55 0.02 | 71/58 R | 64/51 R | Washington | 51/41 0.04 | 54/50 PC | 54/48 R | Winnipeg | 46/41 Tr | 50/33 PC | 41/30 C | South America | Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow | Buenos Aires | 70/ 66 0.02 | 76/ 58 Sh | 77/ 63 S | Caracas | 92/ 79 0.16 | 92/ 80 R | 91/ 77 R | Lima | 82/ 73 0 | 80/ 73 C | 80/ 74 C | Quito | 67/ 51 0.18 | 66/ 54 R | 67/ 54 R | Racilla | 88/ 81 0 | 88/ 80 S | 89/ 81 PC | Rio de Janeiro | 90/ 77 0 | 86/ 76 PC | 87/ 73 PC | Santiago | 71/ 56 0.28 | 76/ 51 S | 78/ 50 S | Reservoir levels (New York City water supply) | Yesterday | 80% | Est. normal | 77% |

Recreational Forecast

Sun, Moon and Planets | New | First Quarter | Full | Last Quarter | Nov. 92:01 a.m. | Nov. 17 | Nov. 249:53 a.m. | Dec. 1 | Sun | RISE | 6:30 a.m. | Moon | R 1:35 a.m. | SET | 4:49 p.m. | $ 2:25 p.m. | NEXT R | 6:31 a.m. | R 2:43 a.m. | Jupiter | R | 11:57 p.m. | Mars | R 11:33 p.m. | S | 1:43 p.m. | $ 1:36 p.m. | Saturn | S | 3:47 a.m. | Venus | R 5:09 a.m. | R | 3:33 p.m. | $ 3:42 p.m. |

Boating

From Montauk Point to Sandy Hook, N.J., out to 20 nautical miles, including Long Island Sound and New York Harbor.

Winds will be out of the southwest at 5-10 knots. Waves will be 1 foot or less on New York Harbor and Long Island Sound. Waves will average around 2 feet on the open ocean. Visibility will be unrestricted.

High Tides | Atlantic City | 3:21 a.m. | 3:36 p.m. | Barnegat Inlet | 3:27 a.m. | 3:42 p.m. | The Battery | 3:59 a.m. | 4:18 p.m. | Beach Haven | 4:46 a.m. | 5:04 p.m. | Bridgeport | 7:00 a.m. | 7:26 p.m. | City Island | 7:36 a.m. | 8:04 p.m. | Fire Island Lt | 4:14 a.m. | 4:32 p.m. | Montauk Point | 4:48 a.m. | 5:11 p.m. | Northport | 7:16 a.m. | 7:47 p.m. | Port Washington | 7:37 a.m. | 8:06 p.m. | Sandy Hills | 3:28 a.m. | 3:46 p.m. | Shinnecock Inlet | 3:14 a.m. | 3:34 p.m. | Stamford | 7:10 a.m. | 7:41 p.m. | Tarrytown | 5:48 a.m. | 6:07 p.m. | Willets Point | 7:32 a.m. | 7:59 p.m. | Trends | Temperature | Precipitation | Average | Average | Below | Above | Below | Above | Last | 10 days | 30 days | 90 days | 365 days | Chart shows how recent temperature and precipitation trends compare with those of the last 30 years.

Mountain and Ocean Temperatures

The dry weather that has been in place for an extended stretch will continue across most of the Northeast. Some clouds will cross Maine throughout the day, but sunshine will emerge for the rest of New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Some rain will move into West Virginia and western Pennsylvania late in the day.

Students on Mission to Make Schools Reflect New York City's Diversity

"It can be very jarring to see there's almost no one like me in the school," said Nnamdi Umelo-James, a junior, second from right, with other students from the group HCHS4Equity.

LEXI PARRA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

By MATTHEW HAAG

Even in a city whose school system is among the most segregated in the United States, Hunter College High School stands out.

Black and Latino students make up 61 percent of public schoolchildren in New York City. At Hunter, a prestigious and highly selective school in Manhattan that includes grades seven to 12, their share is 16 percent. Roughly the same proportion comes from low-income families, the lowest representation in any of the city's more than 400 public high schools.

Despite years of efforts, schools in New York have made little progress toward reflecting the economic and racial composition of one of the most diverse cities in the world. Change has been especially halting at Hunter, which is often overlooked in the debate over stark admissions disparities at the city's elite high schools.

But now, amid renewed dialogue in the city about what Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, can and should do about integration in public schools, students at Hunter are taking matters into their own hands.

"It doesn't really make sense that we're living in this world of New York City and the students that we see around us every day aren't of the demographic makeup," said Kassidy Khuu, 17, a senior and a member of the student group leading the effort, HCHS4Equity. "There's a real social problem and social mishap when students who are from these underrepresented groups go to a place where there's barely any people who look like them."

In recent months, students with HCHS4Equity have strategized over weekend Zoom calls, consulted activists and experts, and rallied alumni, parents, fellow students and teachers behind a petition demanding immediate and systemic change. They plan to deliver a letter with their demands to school leaders on Monday.

Their core concern is an admissions policy that has left Hunter predominantly Asian, white and wealthy. Entry for most students hinges on a three-hour exam taken in the sixth grade, for which many applicants prepare with months of private tutoring, parents and students say. The remaining seats go to children from Hunter College Elementary School, which admits kindergartners based on a \$375 IQ test.

Housed on the site of a former armory on the Upper East Side, Hunter attracts driven students

Jennifer Jenkins and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

who routinely go on to top universities. Among its nearly 1,300 students, many come from affluent families who choose Hunter over top private academies, parents say, and fuel a parent-teacher association that raises roughly \$1 million a year.

In interviews, Black and Latino students described their experience at Hunter as academically rewarding but isolating. None said they had encountered overt racism. But several recalled feeling singled out, particularly during lessons on slavery or discussions of Richard Wright's memoir, "Black Boy," about growing up in the Jim Crow South.

Nnamdi Umelo-James, 16, a junior from the Bronx, said he was sometimes the only Black student in his classroom. Of the 210 students in his class last year, eight were Black, according to school records.

"It can be very jarring to see there's almost no one like me in the school," he said.

After its founding in 1869, Hunter remained almost exclusively white for decades — among both students and faculty members. A century later, a city board ordered the high school to change its admissions so that its student body reflected the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the city's children. In 1974, boys were admitted to the school, which previously was only for girls, but the diversity goal has never been achieved.

Large urban school districts have grappled for years with selective schools that diverge sharply from the communities they serve. Attempts to overhaul high-stakes admissions policies have encountered fierce pushback from opponents who argue that any change will water down academic standards.

Barred by the Supreme Court from using race in integration plans, school leaders in Boston, Chicago and other districts have turned to socioeconomic factors as a race-neutral alternative to boost diversity. After admission changes in Boston, Black enrollment at the acclaimed Boston Latin School doubled.

Such approaches are coming under legal scrutiny. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging a diversity plan at some selective middle schools in Montgomery County, Md., which plaintiffs argue discriminates against Asian Americans.

Lisa Siegmann, the director of Hunter College Campus Schools, which encompasses both the high school and the elementary school, said that the high school had tried in recent years to diversify the student body, incorporating socioeconomic factors into some admission decisions. The changes have not been widely publicized, nor mentioned on the school's admissions website.

For candidates not admitted in the initial rounds of offers, Ms. Siegmann said, Hunter now factors in the "economic need index" of an applicant's school — a city Department of Education formula measuring the poverty and homelessness levels of the students, as well as their eligibility for public assistance.

She said the index was a "significant factor" in those admissions. In their letter, the Hunter students demand that the index be used for a larger share of applicants.

Ms. Siegmann pointed to signs that the student body was shifting: The proportion of students from low-income families had nearly quadrupled over the past decade. But she cautioned that it was too early to credit the school's initiatives alone, noting that more families of enrolled students had also recently qualified for financial assistance to cover some school-related costs.

"We are pushing at the edges, and I know incremental change is not sexy," said Ms. Siegmann, adding that Hunter had also hired more teachers of color in recent years. "If there was a magic wand to wave to make it happen, people would have waved it before."

Home to the nation's largest school system, New York City essentially has a two-tier educational system. A cluster of coveted, highly selective schools serves mostly Asian and white students. The remaining schools are largely filled with Black and Latino students, many with shrinking enrollments and fewer course offerings.

Mr. Samuels and Mr. Mamdani have both vowed to make school integration a top priority. Past city leaders have made similar promises, only for their plans to stall after resistance and other obstacles.

One hurdle is the state's 1971 Hecht-Calandra Act, which dictates the entrance criteria at some of the city's specialized schools, including the prestigious Stuyvesant High School. Only three Black students were offered seats in Stuyvesant's freshman class this year. Still, about 50 percent of its students come from low-income families.

The students behind HCHS4Equity argue that Hunter administrators could overhaul the school's admissions policy with relative ease, noting that it operates outside the city's Department of Education. The school is run by Hunter College, a branch of the City University of New York.

"It is really a political-will problem at Hunter," said Paul Sonn, whose daughter graduated from Hunter in 2024.

Mr. Sonn and others have called on Hunter to reserve a percentage of seats for students from low-income families, as some other selective schools do. Bard High School Early College in Manhattan, for instance, sets aside 50 percent of its seats.

But Ms. Siegmann called a set-aside policy a nonstarter, saying that the concept had been "a point of very strong contention" among alumni, parents and school leaders. "We haven't made progress," she said.

Another major hurdle is the entrance exam: It is open only to students who score in the top 10 percent on fifth-grade standardized tests. In that qualifying pool, about 30 percent are Black and Latino, according to 2019 and 2020 testing records obtained by The New York Times.

"It's just a great shame," said Andy McCord, a parent of a Hunter graduate who started a free tutoring program for the entrance exam for students from the Bronx and Upper Manhattan.

The HCHS4Equity students at Hunter, who are also starting a tutoring program, are just the latest students at the school to demand diversity changes. In 2020, a group delivered a letter with similar demands and more than 2,000 signatures to school leaders. A decade earlier, a senior named Justin Hudson criticized the school's lack of diversity in a graduation speech that drew a standing ovation.

In his class of 2010, six students were Black. Last year's senior class had five.

"Not to be a cynic," Mr. Hudson said in a recent interview, "but I can't say that I'm that surprised."

Google Links A.I. and Search for Schools

By DANA GOLDSTEIN and NATASHA SINGER

Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available.

Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I.

But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.

A.I. features are now a standard part of Google's commercially available search engine. "Search and A.I. are deeply integrated," said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students "will not have access to search, and they'll see a message from their school that indicates it's not available."

Google is by far the dominant technology player in K-12 classrooms. Google's suite of education apps — including Gmail, Docs and an assignment platform called Classroom — is ubiquitous. Google Chromebooks, low-cost laptops, are the most widely issued student devices in U.S. schools. And Google is synonymous with internet search, a crucial tool for students.

The company's new strategy underscores Google's powerful role in American education. If school leaders want continued student access to search within the company's ecosystem, they will be forced to embrace Google's A.I.

Lina Khan, a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a statement that Google was using its "search monopoly to coerce schools" into adopting its A.I. She added that multiple courts had found the tech giant liable for violating antitrust laws.

"This latest move shows it remains unchastened," Ms. Khan said of Google's new A.I. changes for schools. "As the public increasingly pushes back against the use of AI in schools," she added, "Google is making clear it will punish those who don't fall in line."

In recent months, Google has been promoting its Gemini chatbot as a valuable educational tool, saying it can aid teachers in planning lessons and serve as a personalized tutor for students. A new student feature within Gemini, Guided Learning, is supposed to make it harder for students to use A.I. to cheat.

CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search in 2027.

"We're evolving our approach," said Mr. Phillips. He promised tools that would "support the productive struggle" of learning and tamp down on students turning to A.I. for easy answers.

In August, Google turned on A.I. features as the default option inside its Classroom app for K-12 schools that had allowed students separate access to the company's Gemini chatbot. The move upset some school leaders, who felt schools should be able to decide how and when students used Google's A.I.

Google's August change will now be reversed.

Parent activists have been pushing back against the use of A.I. in schools, and against screen time more generally. While A.I. chatbots can be useful tools for research and coding, they can also easily be used to cheat on school assignments and can provide false information. Research shows chatbots can also hinder critical thinking and ensnare adolescents in emotional dependency.

Last week, New York State passed a chatbot safety law that would prohibit companies from providing a variety of A.I. features for minors. And in September, the nation's two largest school districts, in New York City and Los Angeles — both Google clients — broadly restricted student access to generative artificial intelligence on school devices.

In response to Google's Tuesday announcement, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City wrote on social media, "No corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children. Our public schools exist to serve students, not to grow the profit margin of Big Tech."

Officials in the Los Angeles Unified School District have said that they were hoping students would be able to conduct Google searches with A.I. overviews turned off. The overviews are A.I.-generated summaries that appear at the top of searches. They can dissuade students from seeking out multiple sources of information.

On Monday, Google executives said that for districts that do allow A.I., there will be two options for search inside school-issued accounts, beginning in early 2027. One option will be search with A.I. overviews and A.I. chats turned on, similar to the current consumer experience. The other will be search using Guided Learning, the student feature within Google's Gemini chatbot.

Guided Learning is intended to guide students through a topic step-by-step without providing them with answers that could short-circuit learning. It is supposed to offer an experience modeled on one-to-one tutoring.

The consumer version of Guided Learning is already available within Gemini, and can enable cheating.

There are greater restrictions in the school version that is currently being piloted, according to Brit Mennuti, product lead for Google Classroom. She said teachers would be able to review students' chatbot transcripts, among other capabilities.

Kelly Clancy is a New York City public school parent and leader in groups calling for an A.I. moratorium in schools. She said her seventh-grade son used Google search daily to complete assignments.

"We have to go back to the drawing board on how we are teaching kids to research," she said, suggesting that students could use alternatives such as physical libraries or competing search engines that allow more control over A.I.

Child Dies From Measles in New York

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

A 7-month-old unvaccinated child in New York's North Country died after contracting measles, the first death in the state from the viral disease in 30 years, officials announced.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Mon-

day that the death was a signal

that public health protections

were eroding as a growing num-

ber of families forgo vaccinations.

The child died in Lewis County, which is northeast of Syracuse and has recorded 15 measles cases this year, all among people who were unvaccinated, according to health authorities, who shared few details about the case. New York is in the midst of a significant measles outbreak. Amish communities, where vaccination rates tend to be lower, have been hit especially hard.

"I am heartbroken to learn that a child in Lewis County has died after contracting measles," Ms. Hochul said in a statement.

The governor linked the death to Trump administration policies that she said had undermined public confidence in pediatric immunizations.

"This is New York's first measles-related death in 30 years, a devastating reminder of what's at stake when Washington deliberately erodes decades of progress in protecting Americans from preventable illnesses," Ms. Hochul said.

Jeffery Tompkins, who is the coroner and district attorney of Lewis County, said during a telephone interview on Tuesday morning that the infant had not been vaccinated against measles. Children do not typically receive a first dose of the measles vaccine until their first birthday.

The boy's family is Amish and lives in the town of Denmark in Lewis County, Mr. Tompkins said in a phone interview. The child was at home on Sunday when he died, according to Mr. Tompkins's office.

Measles, one of the most contagious diseases, was once nearly vanquished from the United States but has made a comeback in recent years. Nationwide, 4,852 measles cases have been recorded this year. That's more than twice as many as in 2025, which saw the highest number of measles cases in more than a quarter-century.

New York has logged 178 cases this year, most reported since August. The cases are concentrated in about 10 counties upstate. At an earlier point in the outbreak, a county health official in western New York had said that about three-quarters of the upstate cases were clustered within "Plain communities," a term used to describe Amish and Mennonite groups that emphasize the unadorned nature of their lives.

Concerned about the possibility of stigma, public health officials have been reluctant to say much about whether the outbreak in New York is still predominantly among Amish and Mennonite groups, or is spreading more broadly.

A number of Amish communities in New York are locked in a long-running legal battle with the State Health Department over whether children in one-room schoolhouses must be vaccinated.

The 7-month-old was the state's first fatal case in 30 years.

The U.S. Supreme Court had signaled its interest in the dispute, which has major implications for New York's strict law on school immunizations. Unlike many states, New York does not allow schoolchildren to be exempt from vaccine requirements for religious reasons.

Some Amish parents say they oppose school vaccine mandates for religious reasons, saying that they must put their faith in God, which is in conflict with them putting their faith in vaccines. Many believe that salvation requires that they live in tightknit religious communities, free of worldly influences.

The clusters of cases in Amish communities in New York appear to be linked to far larger outbreaks in Amish communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Measles poses a particular risk to children, especially infants who are unvaccinated. Known for its distinctive rash, a measles infection can cause a range of dangerous complications. Up to 5 percent of children with measles get pneumonia, and one child out of a thousand will develop dangerous swelling of the brain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

President Trump has issued executive orders calling for American children to be immunized against fewer diseases. He has said that his motivations include concerns over whether vaccines are linked to autism, though dozens of studies have found no link.

Mr. Trump's secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is waging a broad campaign against vaccines. His department has canceled contracts and grants for some vaccine research and has begun studies exploring possible connections between vaccines and various health problems.

More parents are opting out of vaccinating their children, a trend that predates the Trump administration. About 4 percent of kindergartners across the United States received a nonmedical exemption for at least one vaccine during the 2025-26 school year. That was an 18 percent increase over the previous year.

A smaller percentage of adults today believe it's “extremely important” for parents to have their children vaccinated than a generation ago, according to surveys. Public confidence in vaccines took a deep hit during the coronavirus pandemic, as some people grew suspicious of the health authorities and resentful of being forced, in some parts of the country, to get a coronavirus shot to keep their job or to be able to go to restaurants or other gathering spots.

The C.D.C. recommends that children receive their first immunization against measles at 12 to 15 months and a second dose between ages 4 and 6, but before starting school. The vaccine known as M.M.R. contains protection against measles, mumps and rubella. In Lewis County, where the child died, about 78.7 percent of children have had their first M.M.R. dose by the age of 2. That is relatively close to the state average of 80.9 percent.

The measles virus is spread through virus-laden droplets expelled when someone sneezes or coughs. The droplets can hover aloft in the air indoors for up to two hours, posing a risk to anyone who is unvaccinated.

The New York Times

Why the Pizzagate Lie Won't Die

Anna Merlan

A senior reporter at Mother Jones and the author of the 2019 book "Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power."

ABOUT two months into President Trump's first term, I attended a rally near the White House, one of the first in-person events for a nascent community that was coalescing around a conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. I had spent hours reading thousands of posts on message boards, Facebook and Twitter in support of the burgeoning movement. At the rally, it was as if those message boards had come to life. "I strongly suggest that you beg for forgiveness!" roared the rally organizer, Neil Wolfe, speaking to the pedophiles he believed would soon be forced to release their child captives. He received ecstatic applause.

The mood was an odd mix of rage and celebration. The attendees seemed sincerely concerned about child abuse and the impunity often granted to offenders in high places but believed the man who would expose these evildoers was finally in power. "This is why Trump has emerged as someone people trust," one of the women I spoke to that day told me. "He calls things out as he sees them."

I've been covering Pizzagate — and the broader world of conspiracy theories it helped catalyze — since the first social media posts about it went viral 10 years ago. The theory, which claimed that powerful Democratic Party operatives were running a sex ring out of the basement of a Washington pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, arrived at a time when social media platforms were primed to spread paranoia and encourage the "self-investigation" that has come to define so many conspiracists today. Pizzagate, as the rally made clear, was also becoming a source of meaning and community for its believers, who saw themselves as heroic crusaders against a force that many believed was literally Satan working on Earth.

Like all good conspiracy theories, Pizzagate was an accretion of highly charged, lurid and politically valuable distortions arranged around a pearl of truth: Sexual predators, especially powerful ones, are too rarely held accountable. That truth is why the theory broke into and has remained in the mainstream, minted a class of pundits and politicians and indelibly changed the rules of public discourse.

Conspiracy theories have left many Americans unable to return to consensus reality.

There were no children in the basement of Comet that Mr. Trump could have freed. But in the years since Pizzagate began, we have seen irrefutable evidence of a conspiracy to prey on vulnerable women and children, one that went to the highest levels of power and whose leader once moved in the same circles as Mr. Trump and was a longtime friend of his. Until the Trump administration — or the larger political establishment — holds Jeffrey Epstein and his associates to account, Pizzagate can never really die.

THE PIZZAGATE THEORY was born in October 2016, 10 days before the presidential election. In a Facebook post, a person using the name Carmen Katz claimed that a huge child trafficking ring was about to be exposed. According to an "N.Y.P.D. source," the poster wrote, incriminating emails on the disgraced politician Anthony Weiner's laptop would prove that he and Bill and Hillary Clinton had taken Mr. Epstein's plane. (Flight logs have never shown either Mr. Weiner or Mrs. Clinton to be on Mr. Epstein's jet, nor did the two have any documented contact with him.) "We're talking an international child enslavement and sex ring," the person wrote.

BRECHT VANDENBROUCKE

The post spread across social media, and its idea quickly gained traction with the WikiLeaks dumps of Mrs. Clinton's emails. The leaks provided a novel degree of sleuthing for anybody with access to the internet: People drawn to the conspiracy theory could read her and her campaign chairman's emails, mine social media for clues, then unite on sites like 4chan and Twitter to discuss the new objects of their suspicion. Pizzagate soon acquired its own paranoid glossary: Seemingly innocuous references to "pizza" and "pasta" in the leaked emails were understood as coded stand-ins for child pornography and abuse. Discussions about campaign meals and dinner parties became "proof" of wrongdoing, and the basement of a pizza parlor became the site of it.

Less than five weeks after that first Facebook post and after a swarm of online posters threatened and harassed Comet staff members, Edgar Maddison Welch entered Comet with an AR-15 and a revolver, stalking through the restaurant looking for trafficked children in a basement that didn't exist. He fired the rifle multiple times at a locked door and soon surrendered to the police without injuring anyone.

Mr. Welch was sentenced to a four-year prison term for the shooting. (In January 2025, after his release, he was shot and killed by the police after pulling out a gun during a traffic stop.) While reporting on Mr. Welch's sentencing, I watched exhausted Comet staff members give victim impact statements about the months of abuse they suffered.

In retrospect, this moment was only the beginning of the wave of suspicion and paranoia that would spend the next decade escaping the bounds of the internet and turning into real-world violence. In 2019 someone attempted to set a fire at Comet while it was full of diners and staff members — an act celebrated in Pizzagate-linked Facebook groups. In the years that followed, adherents of Pizzagate and QAnon, its successor movement, were arrested in connection with bizarre and dangerous behavior — blocking bridges, allegedly plotting attacks, even killing their own family members.

Conspiracy thinking has led to devastating personal consequences for the people who go down the rabbit hole. Like false theories about the Sandy Hook mass shooting before it, Pizzagate seemed to galvanize people to a special degree of action, convincing them it would be morally reprehensible not to intervene on behalf of children who needed saving. I spoke to people who had become obsessed with this pursuit and increasingly distressed when the wider world wasn't joining in.

In the still highly active QAnon Casualties subreddit, people continue to post, lamenting losing contact with family members and loved ones who fell into the grip of the conspiracy theory. The page is a testament to the ways these theories have strained and severed relationships and led to irretrievably bad personal, medical and financial decisions. More than anything, the posts speak to the devastating inability of believers to return to consensus reality.

And meanwhile, the Pizzagate theory has not gone away. It recirculated on TikTok in 2020 among younger creators who looked back on it as a prescient piece of internet lore. Among far-right influencers, the phrase “Pizzagate is real” has recently become shorthand to indicate that you understand the depths of corruption and abuse among elites, that your eyes are all the way open. The theory has thrummed beneath the surface of American life, like a radio tuned just too low to make out the words.

That is because reality has continued to give Pizzagate more material. The #MeToo movement came less than a year after the shooting at Comet, and soon stories of the elite and powerful engaging in unchecked sexual abuse were seemingly everywhere. No one exemplified this culture of impunity better than Mr. Epstein. In 2008 he pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution in a sweetheart deal that helped him avoid federal prosecution. He spent the next decade cavorting with top businessmen, academics, entertainers and politicians who shamelessly pursued his money and social clout while evidence and allegations of his sexual abuse grew.

The flight logs for Mr. Epstein's private jet — Mr. Clinton, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Kevin Spacey, Mr. Trump — seemed to confirm the "deep state" that conspiracists saw everywhere. Bill Gates flew on another of his private jets and had conversations with him from 2011 to 2014, well after Mr. Epstein's conviction. The social associations between Mr. Epstein and people in the upper echelons of power were confirmation of one piece of the Pizzagate worldview: that the elite know and protect one another.

By the time I covered the rally in Washington, many supporters had begun calling the supposed conspiracy Pedogate, broadening their concerns beyond a pizza parlor and theorizing a high-level web of sexual abuse spanning the globe. More cases supported the idea: They spoke of Jimmy Savile, the British TV presenter who was exposed as a serial predator of monstrous proportions after his death. If that is real, Pizzagate theorists reasoned, why couldn't their theories be true, too?

But the way these cases reaffirm the ideas behind Pizzagate reflects our tendency to condemn only the most lurid, extreme and public examples of sexual abuse. In my conversations with Pizzagate believers, they rarely mention the more pervasive kind of sexual abuse that happens in churches, schools and homes, the kind that hundreds of thousands of children and adults experience every year.

As the list of examples from reality grew, conspiracy-minded politics became the order of the day rather than a side note. Pizzagate was never a singular event; it became the blueprint for a way of thinking about power, secrecy, abuse and impunity that has stamped itself onto our national psyche. So many of the conspiracy theories that followed — about the cause of Covid-19, vaccines, stolen election claims — blame the same “deep state” oft cited by Mr. Trump and his allies. Being outside the “deep state” guarantees one’s place as the underdog, as the hero fighting a group of shadowy villains in pursuit of justice against just about the worst kinds of crimes imaginable.

THAT INTOXICATING WORLDVIEW gave rise to many a conspiracy theory peddler. MAGA personalities like the conspiracy theorist and now former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene built a political following through QAnon. Far-right commentators like Tucker Carlson expanded their viewerships with their willingness to traffic in these ideas. Mr. Trump's orbit is also rife with people who have promoted conspiracy theories professionally, like the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, who praised QAnon on several conspiracy-theory-themed podcasts before his appointment. Before becoming a deputy F.B.I. director under Mr. Patel, Dan Bongino devoted several of his podcast episodes to Mr. Epstein, theorizing that he'd been murdered to cover up what he knew. (Once in office, Mr. Bongino said he'd come to believe Mr. Epstein died by suicide.)

The worldview was politically expedient to Mr. Trump and his allies, too, who spent the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election presenting their candidate as the only person brave enough to expose the truth. "If Trump wins, the Epstein client list is going to become public," Elon Musk told Mr. Carlson in October 2024. Mr. Trump's statements on the matter were more circumspect. Before that election, Fox News asked him if he would declassify the Epstein files if he became president. "Yeah, I would. I guess I would," he replied. "I think that, less so, because you don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there, because it's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But

I think I would."

But once Mr. Trump was back in office, his administration bungled its handling of the case in a way that makes it difficult for even his most devoted followers to condone. The Pizzagate community — which did not turn on him for his well-documented friendship with Mr. Epstein — instead saw his handling of the Epstein files as the ultimate betrayal. In February 2025 the administration's showy release of the files, hyped as the final day of reckoning for the abuser's supporters, instead incited immediate backlash. The attorney general at the time, Pam Bondi, handed conservative influencers binders of printed documents — virtually all of which were already public. The loyal Trump backer and far-right provocateur Laura Loomer excoriated Ms. Bondi, writing on X: "I can't trust anything in the binder. Neither should you."

Ultimately, the tranches of documents released under the Trump administration proved embarrassing for some of the high-profile people who corresponded warmly with Mr. Epstein over the years, but in the United States, very little has been done to identify or bring other sexual abusers in his circles to justice. That stands in stark contrast to Europe, where the release prompted a wave of investigations and arrests. His former girlfriend and pimp Ghislaine Maxwell, the only other person to be criminally charged besides him in the case, is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually exploiting underage girls. She was recently moved to a lower-security prison after an interview with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general at the time and now No. 1 at the Justice Department, who was once a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump's anger, flippancy and impatience with the public outrage over Mr. Epstein haven't appeased those who thought he'd deliver justice. "We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD," he wrote on Truth Social in July 2025. "And 'selfish people' are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein." Today Mr. Trump and those in his orbit seem to stay very far away from anything that looks or smells like Mr. Epstein. On an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast this summer JD Vance admitted that the administration had "absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files." But gone are the thundering promises that Mr. Trump will expose the pedophiles and imprison and execute the evildoers.

Absent any real path toward holding Mr. Epstein's enablers and fellow abusers to account, Pizzagate remains as original, as alluring and just as false as ever. The conspiracy theory and its handmaiden theories have become a set of distorted mirrors, showing us an exaggerated but concerning picture of how this country works, what it cares about and what drives us to action and even violence. Ten years after it all began, no one in a position of power seems especially motivated to show us a clearer view.

Trump Is Playing a Risky Game With Xi

Craig Singleton

The senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

CLON PETERSON

PRESIDENT TRUMP'S decision to hold back a \$14 billion arms package for Taiwan makes a certain amount of diplomatic sense.

After last year's bruising trade war, Washington and Beijing are trying to preserve a fragile tariff truce while negotiating a broader set of economic agreements. Delaying the arms sale avoids adding another immediate source of friction to an already strained relationship.

But avoiding a confrontation over Taiwan today could set the stage for a far more dangerous one tomorrow.

For decades, the United States and China have managed their differences over Taiwan through carefully calibrated language that allowed each side to preserve its own interpretation of what had been agreed.

President Xi Jinping of China may now apply that same logic to President Trump's actions, reading the delay as evidence that Mr. Trump is accepting Beijing's premise that stable U.S.-China relations depend on Washington limiting its support for Taiwan. The longer the deal is held up, the greater the risk that Beijing will see future arms sales as a betrayal, triggering precisely the instability Mr. Trump is trying to avoid.

Mr. Trump has delayed the package, which reportedly includes interceptor missiles and other air-defense systems, since early this year. He has called it "a very good negotiating chip" in his dealings with Mr. Xi and said the sale's fate "depends on China." For Mr. Trump, this preserves negotiating leverage while leaving open the possibility of the package being approved later.

But the history of U.S.-China understandings over Taiwan still matters, and Beijing may assign more lasting meaning to the pause than Mr. Trump intends.

Mr. Xi has made Taiwan — which China claims as its own territory — central to his vision of relations between the United States and China. At September's summit at the White House, he signaled that steadier relations with Beijing depended on the United States distancing itself from Taiwan. He urged Washington to explicitly oppose the island's formal independence from China, a tougher formulation than the longstanding U.S. position that it simply does not support an independent Taiwan.

Ambiguity over Taiwan has helped U.S.-China relations advance. In a joint communiqué in 1972 aimed at ending decades of Cold War hostility, Washington acknowledged Beijing's claim that there was only one China and that Taiwan was a part of it, but stopped short of endorsing that view. Seven years later, when the United States established formal diplomatic relations with China, it recognized Beijing as China's sole legal government while leaving the question of Taiwan's status unresolved and maintaining unofficial ties with the island.

On arms sales, however, Washington drew clearer lines.

Seeking better relations with Beijing, the administration of President Ronald Reagan issued a communiqué with China in 1982 under which Washington said it intended to gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan. Mr.

Reagan, however, insisted that any reductions depended on Beijing maintaining a peaceful approach toward Taiwan. He also assured Taipei that there was no timetable for ending arms sales and that the United States would not consult Beijing before making future decisions on the issue. Mr. Trump has drawn no similar lines around the current pause.

The past has shown what can happen when Beijing believes an assurance has been broken.

In 1995, U.S. officials told Beijing that Taiwan's president at the time, Lee Teng-hui, would not receive a visa to visit his alma ma-

The U.S. should not use the Taiwan arms deal as a bargaining chip with China.

ter, Cornell University. Under pressure from Congress, President Bill Clinton later reversed course and approved the visit.

China recalled its ambassador and launched military exercises around Taiwan. The tension stretched into the next year, when China fired missiles into waters near the island ahead of Taiwan's presidential elections, prompting Washington to deploy two aircraft-carrier groups to the region.

A perceived breach today could carry even greater weight, given how closely Mr. Xi has tied Taiwan to his political legacy. He said in July that bringing Taiwan under Beijing's control was a "historic mission" and an "unshakable commitment" of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Xi has been more blunt in the past, warning that those who "play with fire" over

Taiwan will get burned.

Future U.S. arms sales are inevitable. If they come after a prolonged pause, Mr. Xi could look as though he misread America's intentions, raising pressure for him to respond forcefully. Mr. Xi has far more powerful tools at his disposal than Chinese leaders did in the 1990s, including the world's largest navy by ship count, thousands of military aircraft, a vast missile arsenal and formidable space, electronic and cyberwarfare capabilities.

So far, Beijing has not reciprocated Mr. Trump's restraint over the arms deal.

Since Mr. Trump returned to office, China has continued its military intimidation of Taiwan, conducting air and naval patrols near the island and holding exercises that rehearse attacks. Beijing also expanded Coast Guard patrols to Taiwan's Pacific Ocean side this year, signaling that it could sever vital supply routes in a blockade.

A confrontation over Taiwan could escalate into a sustained effort to choke off the island's energy imports, initiate cyberattacks on critical infrastructure or create broader economic coercion. Military operations could also disrupt shipping through the Taiwan Strait, which carried more than \$2.4 trillion in goods in 2024, endangering semiconductor production and global supply chains.

Mr. Trump should move quickly to separate arms sales to Taiwan from trade talks with China and approve a smaller yet meaningful package to make clear that the United States remains committed to Taiwan's defense before Beijing comes to see the pause as evidence of a new understanding.

Ambiguity has served the United States and China well so far, but some things should not be left open to interpretation.

LETTERS

When Children Are Charged With Crimes

TO THE EDITOR:

Re "In Texas, Minor Misdeeds Can Get a Young Student Arrested" (news article, Oct. 21):

Aggressive police actions like those described in Texas schools — handcuffing, restraining and detaining young children, whose behavior is reflective of their immaturity and sometimes their special needs — can occur only when states fail to set a rational minimum age for prosecution in juvenile court.

When schools are unable to refer children to court or delegate discipline to law enforcement, they develop more appropriate, more effective and safer responses to student misbehavior.

Yet contrary to international human rights standards and common sense, nearly half of all states have no minimum jurisdictional age, and 15 oth-

The Elusive Truth

TO THE EDITOR:

Re "Shadows, Mirrors and 'You Can See Everything,' by Eve Sneider (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 28):

In her essay about the documentary "You Can See Everything," Ms. Sneider suggests that "there's artifice present in any work of nonfiction," as if that is a problem only for authors or filmmakers trying to present a true story. She refers to the work of the author Janet Malcolm to support her claim.

The main point of her essay, it seems, is that art gets in the way of truth. But the problem is broader. Each of us carries around a set of beliefs that warp and shape our experience. Philosophers, most notably W.V. Quine, have called this our "web of belief."

This web shapes all of our experience. It is not the problem of not being able to see everything, as the essay suggests, but that we are human beings with experiences that help us to understand what we are currently experiencing. Art may be what shapes the artist's product, but life is what shapes everyone's accounts of experiences.

So what happens to truth? Truth is what we continue to hold on to as we communicate with others and add to our webs.

SHARON SCHWARZE, WAYNE, PA.

The writer is a professor emerita of philosophy at Cabrini University.

ers, including Texas, permit the prosecution of children as young as 10. Even in those states where prosecution of younger children is generally prohibited, carve-outs often exist for more serious offenses.

Such criminalization of childhood runs counter to developmental science, drives the school-to-prison pipeline, disrupts families, undermines public safety and needlessly traumatizes the young.

It is for these reasons that organizations as diverse as the Society for Adolescent Mental Health and Medicine, Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice and the American Bar Association have called on states to pass laws setting a minimum age of 14, while a host of others, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend a minimum age of at least 12.

Texas would do well to heed those calls.

LAURA COHEN, NEWARK

The writer is a professor at Rutgers Law School and the director of the Rutgers Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic.

TO THE EDITOR:

A 10-year-old accused of misbehaving in school should never face the possibility of arrest. Yet Texas schools are increasingly sending children as young as 10 into the juvenile legal system for nonviolent actions like vaping or "lashing out." This is what happens when schools turn to the police and use punitive measures instead of supporting students.

A police presence doesn't necessarily make schools safer; it risks criminalizing children, disproportionately harming Black, brown and Native youth, L.G.B.T.Q. students and students with disabilities. Several states have taken a different approach and experienced improved outcomes.

In California, for example, state law generally prohibits prosecuting children younger than 12 and requires counties to develop alternatives. Restorative justice and teacher training programs have effectively addressed students' needs without police involvement.

Children deserve schools that help them learn and grow. Displaying common childhood behaviors at school should never result in criminal charges.

DARYA LARIZADEH

OAKLAND, CALIF.

The writer is the director of California Policy and Capacity Building, Youth Justice at the National Center for Youth Law.

Private Equity Is Hollowing Out Main Street

JARED NANGLE

Doug Lepisto

A professor at Western Michigan University and a founder of Sleeping Giant Capital.

A GENERATION of baby boomers, aging into retirement, are starting to sell their machine shops, plumbing companies and dentistry practices to private equity firms.

Deal by deal, ownership is being extracted from the thousands of communities where businesses were built to the handful of cities where capital is already concentrated. For the new owners, the primary, and often exclusive, connection to the community is the profit they can derive from the acquired asset. Left unchecked, this historic migration will lead to a new geography of inequality.

The mass retirement of baby boomer business owners is helping accelerate this shift. The scale of this “silver tsunami” is difficult to fully appreciate. More than half of America’s small businesses have owners over the age of 55. These companies earn \$6.5 trillion in revenue each year. And many of their owners do not have a succession plan.

Private equity firms, once primarily known for leveraged buyouts of large corporations, are seizing this opportunity. The formula is straightforward: Buy a downtown dentist practice for a relative bargain, merge it with a collection of other dental practices across the country and sell control of the agglomeration for a premium. In 2024, private equity firms had completed over 1,500 acquisitions under \$25 million, an over 40 percent increase over the last decade.

Firms are now consolidating numerous niche industries. Alpine Investors, an \$18.5 billion private equity firm based in San Francisco, founded Apex Service Partners in 2019 for the purpose of buying and consolidating ownership of independent HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies. Now it owns around 75 local brands in 46 states. The same is happening in garage door repair and roofing businesses.

This migration of ownership is playing out north of where I live in Michigan, on Mackinac Island, a small community known for its sweeping coastline, fudge and lack of cars.

For decades, thousands of visitors reached its shores via three commercial ferry services. In 2016, the third route was acquired by one of the two existing lines. Then in 2022, Hoffmann Family of Companies, a Florida-based private equity and investment firm, purchased one of the two remaining ferry services. It was a family business. "They're keeping everything the same, including the name — nothing really is going to change from the guest perspective," the ferry president, Chris Shepler, 59 at the time of the sale, told The Detroit Free Press.

Hoffmann later bought the other ferry service, as well as the private boat charter service and the private dock, giving it a near monopoly on transport to the island. By 2024, the firm also owned two area newspapers as well as more than 116 parcels of land, 51 buildings and 6,500 parking spaces, making it the largest real-estate owner in the Mackinac region.

Changes quickly ensued. Ticket prices rose. Ferry users had to start paying extra to bring on a bike; parking fees increased. The result was war, with the Mackinac Island government taking Hoffmann to court. The local tourism director reported spending \$155,000 in additional advertising to counter the negative press generated by the dispute. A resort owner, Liz Ware, said groups interested in booking her place for meetings started to ask whether they would still be able to reach the island. Michigan sided with the island government, granting it authority to regulate the economics of all elements involving ferry access. As a result, Hoffmann has threatened to stop operations in 2027.

Communities are losing control of small businesses.

Situations like this are happening all over the country, and it's only going to get worse as more baby boomers retire and sell their companies to private equity.

If we do nothing, the confluence of private equity and the silver tsunami will create an even wider gap between communities that own and control their services and those that do not. Some places — New York, Miami, San Francisco — will gain more ownership, more wealth and more power. Others, like Mackinac Island, are drained of control, upside and civic influence. For Americans to have a say in their economic futures, they must make protecting local ownership a national priority.

Nonprofits can help, but they cannot, by themselves, solve a problem created by the market. We need capitalists — investors and entrepreneurs — willing to build investment models that treat place-based ownership as an advantage. I helped found an investment fund that backs aspiring business owners who want to acquire and expand West Michigan businesses. We operate with a mandate that our businesses not only be profitable but also benefit their communities. With \$150 million in investment capital, our firm is a relatively small player, but it is a start.

Local government already helps communities attract employers, support expansions and encourage new business formation. But it can do more, by helping aging business owners find local successors and encouraging investments that keep ownership in communities. Economic development officials should know which sectors and firms are most important to the local economy and who needs to be connected before a succession crisis arrives.

Higher education can also help. Colleges have long trained students to work for companies or start them. They should also prepare students for careers in which they ultimately acquire and lead existing businesses. Ownership is not only a Silicon Valley start-up story. It can also be a path to preserving the companies that hold a local economy together.

Finally, we need a culture that lionizes the steward as much as the founder. America celebrates successful founders but forgets that many celebrated business figures were not there from the start. Ray Kroc bought McDonald's. Howard Schultz bought Starbucks. Steve Jobs bought the outfit that became Pixar.

For a long time, America has treated local business ownership as a private matter. But when millions of owners reach the exit at the same time, private decisions become a national reckoning. The question is whether America will renew a culture of local empowerment or let economic control keep concentrating in the places that already have it.

William D. Nordhaus, 85, Nobelist Who Put Price on Pollution, Dies

CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZIELLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

William D. Nordhaus in 2014, and with President Bill Clinton in 2000. Professor Nordhaus saw climate change as a clear threat to humankind, but he emphasized that potential damages must be balanced with the economic cost of preventing them.

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

From Page AI

mate change as a clear threat to humankind, but he emphasized that potential damages must be balanced with the economic cost of preventing them. "Climate stabilization would appear enormously expensive," he concluded, in his initial paper describing the model.

To deal with the problem efficiently, Professor Nordhaus proposed a modest carbon tax that would escalate over time. The idea gained support in the 2000s among liberals like Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, and Republicans such as former secretaries of state James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, who championed it as a “conservative climate solution.”

Ultimately, although carbon taxes have proven politically toxic in the face of corporate opposition and have only rarely been instituted, many countries and sub-national governments like states and provinces have set up emissions-trading systems that impose carbon limits and use markets to set prices. One such proposal passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009 but died in the Senate.

Perhaps a more enduring outgrowth of Professor Nordhaus's model is a metric called the "social cost of carbon," which quantifies the benefits of combating climate change. In the Obama administration, it became a fundamental tool for regulating emissions from power plants and vehicles, until the second Trump administration banned its use in rule making last year.

The Nobel was widely seen as a rebuke to the Trump administration, which had at the time begun to dismantle the building blocks of American environmental policy; Mr. Trump often called climate change a "hoax."

Although colleagues found Professor Nordhaus to be scrupulously apolitical, he gave an interview to the Nobel committee in 2018 in which he decried what he called Mr. Trump's "ludicrous statements about climate change."

Winning the prize, he said, "gives a kind of courage and heart to the people who are on the right side of history."

William Dawbney Nordhaus, the third of four children, was born in Albuquerque on May 31, 1941. His father, Robert J. Nordhaus, was a Yale-educated lawyer for American Indian rights; he also was an outdoorsman who started a ski resort in the nearby Sandia Mountains and helped build a popular tram to bring visitors to the tourist destination. His mother, Virginia (Riggs) Nordhaus, oversaw the home.

Professor Nordhaus graduated in 1959 from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and in 1963 received a bachelor's degree in economics from Yale University.

In 1967, he completed his doctoral studies in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying under future Nobelists Robert M. Solow, Kenneth Arrow and Paul A. Samuelson, with whom Professor Nordhaus continually updated and later took over primary authorship of a widely used textbook, "Economics."

He returned to Yale in 1967 as an assistant professor just as the environmental movement was gaining steam. He became interested in accounting for planetary harms after reading an article in a Trans World Airlines in-flight magazine that criticized the traditional measure of economic output, the gross national product.

"In the words of a young radical, don't tell me about your GNP. To me, it's really Gross National Pollution," Professor Nordhaus recalled that it said. "I thought, 'Wow, that's really cute. But is it true?'"

That question launched an effort to quantify the impact of natural resource depletion. The work to reflect the environment in national economic statistics took another step forward in a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report that Professor Nordhaus led in 1999 and continues today, as governments have tried to supplement official metrics that ignore many aspects of human welfare.

In the 1970s, awareness of the impact of carbon dioxide on the earth's climate was just dawning. Professor Nordhaus hit upon the problem in 1974 during a residency at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna where he shared an office with a climatologist who encouraged him to study linkages with the economy. That led to the first known paper integrating carbon emissions into an economic model that estimated what it might cost to limit the fallout for the climate.

Soon after his return to the United States, Mr. Nordhaus went to Washington, D.C., to serve as a member of President Jimmy Carter's Council of Economic Advisers. In close communication with his brother Robert, an energy lawyer who wrote key provisions of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and later was general counsel at the Department of Energy under President Bill Clinton, he generated recommendations about how to gauge the economic costs and benefits of proposed regulations. The concept was legally mandated for federal rule-making processes in 1981, although the criteria have changed with the priorities of successive administrations.

Back at Yale, Professor Nordhaus kept working to quantify the implications of climate change for economic growth. It was a lonely project: Few others were studying the question, and when he finished a model that assessed the cost of several approaches to limiting emissions, mainstream economics journals rejected the submission.

"They didn't see why this was important. That's why it was published in Science," Lint Barrage, an associate professor of energy and climate economics at ETH Zurich, a public research university, who studied under Mr. Nordhaus and worked with him on later updates to the model, said in an interview. "You don't stick with that topic and swim against the stream if it's not something you're really convinced about."

JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Professor Nordhaus, left, received a Nobel Prize in 2018 from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in recognition of his economic model.

As Professor Nordhaus' research gained mainstream acceptance, it also came under fire. One challenge arrived in the form of a 2006 report commissioned by the British government that called for a much more aggressive approach to limiting carbon emissions than Professor Nordhaus had recommended.

The core dispute was over how much policymakers should value the welfare of future generations compared with that of people now. Professor Nordhaus wrote a withering riposte, and the question remains central to debates over how much to pay for climate mitigation.

Another disagreement arose over whether conventional economic analysis could be applied when considering the potentially infinite costs of unlikely but catastrophic climate disasters. This one came from the Harvard economics professor Martin Weitzman, to whom Professor Nordhaus respectfully responded that such scenarios were limited. He would later call Professor Weitzman, who died by suicide in 2019, the “pre-eminent environmental economist of the modern era.”

Other criticisms arose over whether the harms from climate change should be balanced with conventional metrics of economic

Saying his prize gave a lift to people 'on the right side of history.'

growth, which many see as the wrong yardstick.

"When he carried out that analysis, his view was, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' " said Professor Stavins. "As a result, the policy actions and trajectories that he was recommending early on were not as ambitious as many advocates would like."

Under the Biden administration, federal climate policy largely abandoned the idea of pricing carbon, favoring subsidies as both more politically palatable and potentially more equitable in shifting behavior. And over time, Professor Nordhaus adjusted his model to incorporate new science, pushing up his estimate of the appropriate carbon price significantly. Other economists have now constructed their own integrated models that reach different conclusions.

In 1964, he married Barbara Feise, who later became a psychoanalyst. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children, Jeff Monica and Rebecca; a brother, Richard; a sister, Elizabeth; and three granddaughters.

Another legacy of Professor Nordhaus's work may only now be taking root.

As international climate diplomacy floundered in recent years, he proposed the concept of a “climate club” of willing nations that would impose trade penalties on nonparticipants.

One such effort took effect this year: the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism, which levies tariffs on goods from outside the bloc that correspond with their impact on the climate.

A Groundbreaking Climate Proposal Blunted by Corporate Wrath

By DAVID GELLES

Long before climate change entered the vernacular, the economist William D. Nordhaus had seized on the idea of taxing pollution as the most effective way to combat man-made global warming.

Professor Nordhaus, who died Friday at 85, spent his career championing the idea of a tax on carbon dioxide. Putting a price on planet-warming pollution, he contended, would slow down climate change and could be achieved without severe harm to the economy.

His work helped inform government policies around the world, and in 2018 he shared the Nobel Prize in economics.

But Professor Nordhaus faced powerful adversaries who ultimately curtailed the influence of his ideas. The fossil fuel industry, which would have absorbed the costs that he Nordhaus proposed, vigorously opposed his work and commissioned reports that attacked carbon taxes.

“What economists did not take account for a long time was the enormous political interests that were lined up to fight any kind of climate policy,” said Gilbert E. Metcalf, emeritus professor of economics at Tufts University. “Basically, the fossil fuel industry had a lot of money and they spent it wisely to block any progress in this area."

Professor Nordhaus, who joined the faculty of Yale University in 1967, began thinking about the effects of a warming world on economic growth in the 1970s, when the subject drew comparatively little attention.

He understood that increased heat, more severe weather and rising sea levels would ultimately ripple throughout the economy, with profound effects on everything from agriculture to industry.

His work built on that of British economist Arthur Pigou, who popularized the concept of negative externalities, a term that describes when private industry imposes costs on society without paying for them. Professor Nordhaus applied this concept to climate change, and homed in on the idea of taxing polluters as a way to reduce planet-warming emissions.

"He started working in this area much before the topic became trendy," said Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, the William Nordhaus professor of economics and global affairs at Yale. "He was a pioneer."

Professor Nordhaus developed several ways of understanding the interplay between emissions, economic growth and damages from global warming. His best-known model was DICE, short for

Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy. It was intended to let researchers project how different emissions policies would affect warming and economic growth.

Climate change, he said in his Nobel banquet speech in 2018, was “a harmful unintended side effect of economic growth.” Polluters are essentially permitted to burn fossil fuels and add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere without any penalty, shifting the costs to society, he said.

"The result is too much burning of fossil fuels, too much climate change, and too many harms to humans, wildlife, ecosystems, and more," Professor Nordhaus said. "Economic theory suggests that the best remedy for such externalities is a pollution charge — a charge on carbon emissions, or what is now called a carbon tax."

His ideas were embraced by some conservative economists like Martin Feldstein and leading Republicans including Henry Paulson, James Baker III and George Shultz, all former Treasury secretaries.

But the idea that pollution could be reduced by putting a price on carbon dioxide clashed with oil and gas companies that rejected the additional costs or controls. By the early 1990s, those companies were fighting Professor Nordhaus's ideas with research

of their own.

The American Petroleum institute and Exxon Mobil commissioned work that argued that a tax on carbon would have catastrophic effects on the economy. In 1991, during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, a report from the Energy Department that came out against a carbon tax cited some of this research.

The campaign continued for decades and came to target Professor Nordhaus directly. In 2008, the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank funded by Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute and Peabody Energy, published a paper titled "Rolling the DICE: Nordhaus' Dubious Case for a Carbon Tax."

Fossil fuel companies also spent heavily to downplay the public about the risks of global warming and lobby against all manner of regulations that would have reduced harmful pollutants.

His efforts to promote a carbon tax also coincided with the arrival of a powerful anti-taxation movement in the United States.

"I think in some sense, the carbon tax idea came along at just the wrong time," Professor Metcalf said.

Congress has considered bills that would have put a price on carbon in 1993, and then in 2009 and 2010, but no laws were passed.

In 2018, the Republican-controlled House passed a resolution denouncing the idea of an American carbon tax as detrimental to the economy. Months later, Professor Nordhaus shared the Nobel Prize with the New York University economist Paul M. Romer, and acknowledged that efforts to promote a carbon tax had been stymied by industry.

"It's been caught up in the politics, and it just happens that this particular policy is one that has faced the wrath of a whole group of thinkers," he told The New York Times. "Grover Norquist, energy companies, it's the Koch brothers and their foundations, it's people using fair tactics and foul tactics—it's been caught up as one of the issues in the Great Divide. This anti-tax movement has been so powerful and so harmful in the United States. There have been a large number of conservative economists in the United States who have endorsed the idea of a carbon tax."

Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Mr. Norquist and Koch Industries did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

States including California and Washington have implemented cap-and-trade systems that attempt to limit pollution by placing a declining limit on carbon dioxide pollution and then allowing companies to pay for, and trade, credits that permit them to pollute.

Around the world, the European Union and several countries in South America and Asia have different versions of cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes.

But federal efforts to impose a tax on carbon have failed.

In 2016, after a news report suggested Donald J. Trump was considering such a move if he won the presidency, he dismissed the idea on Twitter, "I will not support or endorse a carbon tax!"

Though many environmentalists remain skeptical of their sincerity, some fossil fuel companies now say they support some version of a carbon tax. "Establishing a market price on carbon dioxide is an important element of building the business case for capturing it," Exxon Mobil says on its website.

Yet on the whole, Professor Nordhaus's signature idea has yet to gain traction worldwide.

"It feels like we're going to have to have even more in the way of climate catastrophes before we finally focus political attention on this problem," Professor Metcalf said, "which is a very sad state of affairs."

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