The United Auto Workers union's late-2023 Gaza cease-fire resolution condemning both Hamas’s October 7th massacre and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, for which the union demanded a cease-fire, initiated the ancillary but very real conflict currently imperiling the union’s leadership: that between president Shawn Fain and federal monitor Neil Barofsky.

A New York–based attorney with the firm of Jenner & Block, Barofsky served as the special inspector general overseeing the federal bailouts following the financial collapse of 2008, during which time he tangled with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the government’s unwillingness to assist homeowners with foreclosures even as it was tending to the needs of big banks. He was also hired by Credit Suisse to oversee its investigation into its own history of assistance to Nazi Germany.

Barofsky was in Switzerland working the Credit Suisse case when he learned of the UAW’s resolution. He almost immediately put in a call to Fain, which he began by noting that he was not calling in his capacity as the union’s monitor. To Fain’s astonishment, he said he was calling about the resolution, and that he happened right then to be with Barack Obama’s former special envoy on antisemitism, who could provide another perspective on issues that the resolution raised. (Barofsky added that he didn’t ask for any particular action to be taken, and apologized if it was perceived otherwise.)

At least, that’s how Barofsky characterized the call when he spoke to the union's international executive board (IEB) on the second day of its February 2024 meeting. Fain said he remembered the call differently: “The first thing you said to me was that you were calling me because you had concerns about my comments and they could be, you knew what I meant, but my comments could be misconstrued as being antisemitic. That’s what you said to me. And when I started explaining to you what I meant by my comment, then your comment was, well, I guess it is antisemitic.” Fain concluded, “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”

Barofsky denied calling Fain antisemitic and added that he had “no reason to think that.” But pressed by Fain to reveal more about their phone call, Barofsky told the IEB that “I shared the anecdote about the fact that my kids have been harassed since October 7th with antisemitic language. And, yes, it described that protest with people holding UAW signs chanting hateful comments.”

The whole issue was before the board because Barofsky had passed along a letter to the IEB that he’d received from the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that a resolution on Israel and Palestine from a UAW local of New York–based public defenders was antisemitic. Ben Dictor, the UAW’s attorney, had responded with a letter to Barofsky noting that the UAW had a history of resolutions and actions that many, including UAW members, had found offensive, such as calling for U.S. divestment from apartheid South Africa—and he certainly could have added such UAW efforts as providing crucial support for both the 1963 March on Washington and the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.

Barofsky insisted he wasn’t demanding that the UAW do something about the letter; he said he had forwarded it because “we took it very seriously, in part because who it was that was making the allegation: the Anti-Defamation League … it is an important civil rights organization in this country.” He added, “Just because I described the allegation as serious, of course, doesn’t mean that I agree with it.” (In recent years, previous ADL leaders such as Abe Foxman have criticized the organization for becoming a mouthpiece for Israel’s right-wing nationalist government; a number of longtime ADL employees have quit for that reason.)

Fain’s response—the gist of which was “I couldn’t give a damn what the ADL says”—underlined his belief that Barofsky’s interventions were about union policies with which he disagreed, and coming as they did from a federal monitor with the power to investigate and recommend prosecution of UAW officials for criminal offenses, was a boundary-crossing extension of the monitor’s mission and power.

JUST ONE WEEK AFTER THE IEB MEETING, Barofsky began an investigation of Fain’s staff for its role in curtailing Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock’s responsibilities and instilling fear into some of the union’s officials and staff. In a report issued in July of 2024, he wrote that Mock’s reassignments “risk diluting the role of the Secretary-Treasurer as a potential independent check on actions that pertain to financial approvals and oversight of expenditures.” In a subsequent report, he wrote that “the Monitor’s investigation found that Mock consistently and strictly applied Union policy, guided by a commitment to accountability in the wake of the UAW’s past financial scandals. Her removal was not the result of dereliction of duty or dishonesty, but rather a consequence of her refusal to grant exceptions to the strict policy restrictions governing the expenditure of Union resources, including to those within Fain’s inner circle.”

The crucial intervention that Mock had made was to delay authorization for the production of picket signs at the outset of the Stand Up Strike, in the belief that there were usable signs in many a local’s basement, even if such signs weren’t emblazoned with the message specific to this strike. For the first week of the strike, accordingly, pickets marched without signs.

The remedy available to Fain was to have the IEB reverse these denials at the February 2024 meeting. The board duly reversed them, and members expressed incredulity that such questions even had to come before them.

Barofsky has the power to recommend that the Justice Department start an investigation of the UAW, something that Donald Trump’s administration would dearly love to do. To forestall that threat, the UAW agreed last December to give back to Mock and Vice President Rich Boyer the authority they had lost over particular departments of the union, and Chris Brooks announced he was resigning as Fain's chief of staff.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/politics/bernie-sanders-graham-platner-maine.html

The collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate bid in Maine after a rape allegation renewed attention to a movement built by Senator Bernie Sanders that some say is too forgiving of male misconduct.

Last month, as accusations that Graham Platner of Maine had demeaned and threatened women consumed his Senate campaign, his left-wing allies closed ranks around him.

“There are no saints in the United States Senate,” Mr. Sanders said at the time.

This week, after one of those women accused Mr. Platner of rape, a wave of those same big-name Democrats quickly withdrew their support, including the progressives Ms. Warren, Mr. Khanna and Mr. Sanders — though Mr. Sanders waited more than 20 hours before doing so. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, an heir to Mr. Sanders’s movement, had never endorsed Mr. Platner.) Mr. Platner, who denied the accusation, announced Wednesday that he was suspending his campaign. The collapse of his meteoric candidacy has turned what had been a triumph for progressives into a moment of political crisis.

It has also set off a broader debate among Democrats around the country about the movement that Mr. Sanders leads: Is its embrace of a blunt and brawny populism too dismissive of women — and too forgiving of male misconduct? The question is not new, but it has grown more urgent this year, when the party has elevated inexperienced and authentic candidates, such as the flannel-clad Mr. Platner, to stir average Americans.

“What I have an issue with is not the policies,” said Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group, who was castigated online for not backing Mr. Platner. “It’s the lack of character. It’s being bombastic. It’s that you’re polarizing and alienating and, frankly, it’s also being denigrating toward women.”

Former Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York posted a video on social media this week saying that the left was due for “some honest conversations” about their defense of Mr. Platner. Mr. Bowman, who is Black, suggested that the fact that Mr. Platner is white had allowed him to remain in the Senate contest as long as he did.

Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women, said political strategists have at times rushed to create “magical” candidates — “the mythical bearded man that is the one that’s going to connect with working class voters”— at the expense of experienced women who know their communities and can win elections.

Paige Loud, who worked on the Platner campaign before running unsuccessfully for Congress, said she raised concerns while on his team about the potential for allegations against the candidate and what she described as a dismissive attitude toward women.

Mr. Sanders’s movement has weathered criticism over the years for fostering a culture that has at times seemed intolerant of women. When he first sought the presidential nomination in 2016, his army of online supporters, known widely as “Bernie bros,” were condemned for bullying those supporting his main adversary, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Sanders said he did not condone the behavior.

Then, as he geared up for his 2020 run, some female staffers from Mr. Sanders’s 2016 campaign said that they had faced mistreatment and pay disparities and that their supervisors had ignored their concerns. He did not face similar complaints after 2020.

Also that year, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, his progressive rival in the primary, confirmed a report that Mr. Sanders had privately questioned in 2018 whether a woman could win the presidency. Mr. Sanders denied making such a comment, calling the suggestion “ludicrous.”

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html

A Gallup poll in May found that 71 percent of Americans were somewhat or strongly opposed to having a data center built near them, almost 20 percentage points higher than those who opposed construction of a nearby nuclear power plant. Many have broad concerns about the effects of A.I. on jobs and the climate, while people who live near data centers complain they are eyesores and emit annoying sounds. Some cities and counties have enacted temporary or permanent moratoriums on new construction.

China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into “a domestic fracture point,” according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year.

These campaigns, whose impact on public opinion remains to be seen, have raised alarms in Washington, where A.I. is seen as a top issue heading into this year’s midterm elections.

OpenAI, though, found “little to no authentic engagement” with the campaigns, and the accounts at issue were ultimately removed from X. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment about Chinese or other foreign efforts.

The foreign efforts appear intended to stoke the debate over data centers that has united political figures across the political spectrum — from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a progressive, to Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to President Trump.

The foreign campaigns follow a familiar playbook that dates back at least a decade. They often try to leverage official news organizations and social media to fuel domestic discord around hot-button issues like guns, race and vaccines, or even natural disasters like the wildfires in and around Los Angeles last year.

Between January and June, state media in China, Russia and Iran mentioned data centers roughly 700 times, according to Alethea’s analysis. That was an average of nearly four times a day, though it remained a small fraction of overall published content about A.I. development.

The outlets have featured articles and posts aimed at an American audience, as well as content highlighting criticism of data centers by prominent Americans, like Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator. In Iran, state media has also highlighted links between American A.I. companies and Israel and criticized the race to develop the technology as reckless.

A state-owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Va., writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans’ physical and financial well-being.

A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet — created with OpenAI’s ChatGPT by people in China, the tech company said — circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills. It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash.

A video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation questioned the viability of a data center that an American company, Firebird, is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been a focus of Kremlin pressure. “The country’s electrical grid instability may render it useless,” the video’s narrator says.

Alethea tracked a network of inauthentic accounts on Facebook that has been posting images appearing to highlight Americans’ opposition to data centers. They include images generated by artificial intelligence showing, for example, a field of crops carved into a massive obscene hand gesture, each tailored to users in different American states. “This is what Oklahoma thinks of data centers,” one says.

McKenzie Sadeghi, a principal analyst at Alethea, called the posts “rural rage bait.”

“Data centers are likely the ideal topic for engagement-maximizing operators,” she said. “It is locally salient in all 50 states, fresh, and it maps onto pre-existing anti-China, anti-tax, ‘selling America’ grievance.”

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/dining/las-vegas-buffets.html

My plate: a tiny blini with a mush of caviar, a piece of slightly overcooked cod on celery purée; thick, bubbled chicharron; a single, now dessicating shrimp dumpling I’d pulled from a steam basket then taken on a 10-minute walk; Boursin mashed potatoes pooling with a little fat; a slice of very pink prime rib; a mini birria taco soaking in a bowl of dark broth; a piece of sauced and grilled pineapple; a seeded cracker.

Who did this?

Distracted by the crowds, the warm lights of the carving station and a large mermaid made of fondant that looked a lot like Jennifer Aniston, I’d slipped into a kind of culinary fugue state. Back at the table, I was confused by my choices, but there was no denying that some part of me, revealed by the emotional mechanisms of this extravagant buffet, had made them. The buffet always shows you who you are.

When the server asked how I was doing, I told her I’d panicked and made a mistake (I think it started with the seeded cracker). That mistake had led to me making another and another, and everything I’d brought back to my seat now seemed peaky and pallid. On top of the embarrassment of not being able to make a decently proportioned, cohesive plate, of not strategizing as I’d been advised to do by several buffet aficionados, of thinking it would be chill to walk through the room and wing it — a totally amateur move! — I was full of regret.

The server told me not to worry (though she also said that she personally stuck to the crab and saw everything else as a distraction). “Try what you want, leave the rest, go back,” she said. “You always get a fresh plate, that’s the fun of the buffet!”

She gestured to the bussers all over the room, and if there was music playing, I couldn’t hear it anymore. This was the real soundtrack of the buffet — the constant and resounding clatter of plates cleared into plastic tubs. It was the sweet racket of endless do overs.

Go for the most expensive foods first. Avoid bread and pasta entirely. Make sure to put in a drink order before you get up from the table, every time. Everyone has a strategy so particular to their concerns that following someone else’s might not always work for you. In the end, the challenge and the reward of the buffet are exactly the same: In a limited time, with endless distractions, you must figure out what you really want.

A torched-to-order s’more? At the Buffet, the s’more was built as an open-faced tartine with a small marshmallow, and as a result, both the ratio and temperatures were off. The crème brûlée was set in a metallic fluted cup that recalled an empty espresso pod, but it was smooth, not overly sweet, not overcooked, with the sugar caramelized in a very thin layer. Still, I wasn’t interested in having another — by now I was dangerously close to full — and I was unmoved by the ice cream display or the waves of tiny layered cakes and cookies.

I wandered past a cute off-brand cartoon mouse made of fondant, dressed in stars and stripes, waving the American flag. This was the crepe station. Immediately, I wanted one with lemon juice and sugar inside, my favorite special breakfast when I was growing up. (If the buffet shows you who you are, then I guess I’m still 9 years old.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/us/politics/jenny-racicot-cnn-interview-graham-platner.html

Jenny Racicot, who accused Graham Platner of sexual assault in an interview published in Politico on Monday, detailed her recollection of the alleged attack in an extended interview with the CNN host Jake Tapper that aired on Monday evening.

Ms. Racicot had described some of what happened that night to The New York Times this spring, saying that he had arrived at her house drunk after she had asked him not to come over. At the time, she declined to share further details of the encounter on the record, but she said she had found his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling” and had cut off contact with him soon after that episode.

She said on CNN that at the time she “felt really protective of my own privacy.” But after the article came out and she was named in it, she said, “I kind of just made the decision that I’m going to say my piece and get it out there.”

“I understand why people want someone like him in office, and I felt like me coming forward would essentially potentially take that away,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/us/politics/graham-platner-maine-assault.html

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/us/politics/graham-platner-maine-assault.html

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Platner intended to continue his campaign against Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. He has until July 13 to withdraw from the race, and if he does the state Democratic Party has until July 27 to replace him on the ticket, according to Maine state law. The leadership of the state party urged him to withdraw.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-patriot-air-defense.html

These tactics — described in interviews with Ukrainian air defense commanders and experts — were once viewed as the last resort of a scrappy military with limited resources. But such adaptation is increasingly important as Ukrainian cities face an onslaught of barrages from Russia, as they did with an attack on Monday.

The evolution of tactics is also becoming an essential battlefield model as the war in Iran and the attacks in the Gulf have drained global supplies of the most advanced Patriot interceptors. Ukrainian soldiers have already deployed to the Gulf to train local troops on cheaper and more effective tactics to intercept drones.

“We initially used the tactics and the knowledge that we had been taught in America,” said Viacheslav Aheiev, the commander of a Patriot unit in Ukraine who trained on the system at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.

Once combat use began, he said, Ukrainians realized they had “to introduce some of our own experience and skills, and slightly change the tactics of employment, moving away from the templates that we had been taught in the United States.”

For example, the Ukrainians learned to often fire just one interceptor at incoming ballistic missiles instead of the usual two or more because of shortages of the expensive American-made weapons.

Russia regularly launches barrages of various types of missiles and drones that overwhelm Ukraine’s exhausted, overworked and dangerously undersupplied air defense operators. In particular, Moscow has ramped up production of ballistic missiles.

Ballistic missiles move much faster than cruise missiles and Patriots are the only air defense system in Ukraine’s arsenal that can shoot them down. Ukraine has other air defense systems that can intercept cruise missiles.

Ukrainian forces largely reserve the Patriots for trying to stop only the fastest-moving ballistic missiles.

They also set the Patriots to manual mode to avoid automatic firing on targets like slow-moving, inexpensive drones that could be taken down by other means. They learned to shoot down drones with machine guns operated from rooftops, truck beds and helicopters and, more recently, with interceptor drones that can take down the Russian drones midflight.

Other tactics the Ukrainians have adopted include learning to “shoot and scoot,” quickly moving the batteries after firing to prevent Russia from targeting the batteries in counterstrikes. They also employ deception to lure Russian fire away, hiding their real Patriot batteries under camouflage while producing realistic decoys that run just $30,000 apiece. A fully loaded Patriot system is worth roughly $1 billion.

Several countries have also reached out to Ukraine requesting exports of Patriot decoys, according to a leading manufacturer of the devices who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his factories are top Russian targets.

Despite the innovation, the Ukrainian approach is far from enough to keep the country from being hammered by Russian missiles and drones.

So far this year, Russia has launched 521 ballistic missiles at Ukraine, more than twice as many as in the same period in 2025. Ukraine has knocked down 164 of them, according to a New York Times data set based on numbers from Ukraine’s Air Force.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/europe/iran-us-strait-of-hormuz-peace-talks.html

During a visit to several Gulf Arab states last week, Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, repeatedly asserted that free navigation would return to the strait.

Then came the move by Oman and the International Maritime Organization to establish a new route that bypasses Iranian waters.

Iran’s rulers see the newly devised routes through Omani waters as directly contradicting the fifth article of what Washington signed onto in its memorandum of understanding with Tehran, which laid the foundation for a cease-fire.

In their reading of the vaguely worded document, this article granted Iran oversight of the waterway because it charges Iran with ensuring safe passage through the strait.

It also says that Iran is to conduct dialogue with Oman, the other nation bordering the strait, “to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.”

From Iran’s perspective, analysts said, the route Oman organized with the U.N. maritime organization — and without consulting Tehran — violated that, and had to be challenged.

That is why Iran’s response to the newly announced route was so swift, experts say, in the shape of a strike on Thursday against a Singapore-flagged container ship that used it.

Tehran never claimed responsibility for that attack, nor for a second strike on a vessel on Saturday, both of which elicited U.S. military strikes in return and subsequent Iranian retaliation on U.S. military targets in the Gulf.

The four-day cycle of attacks that Iran set off with the United States over the Strait of Hormuz has risked derailing the newly reached cease-fire in a war both sides are eager to end.

On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, appeared to deliver a veiled warning to expect more instability if attempts to bypass Iranian control over the waterway persisted.

Iran’s willingness to provoke conflict amid the peace process aligns with the approach of the country’s new rulers, who want to show they are as willing to strike a deal with Washington as they are to go to war with it, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran analyst who oversees the European Council of Foreign Relations’ Iran Nuclear Monitor.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/25/russia-ukraine-war-putin-escalation-nato-europe/

These are tricky times for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The “special military operation” he launched against Ukraine in 2022, intended to last a few days until a puppet regime in Kyiv could be installed, has now gone on longer than both the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany and all of World War I. His forces have long ceased making significant gains on the battlefield; some data even suggest that Russian forces lost territory in April and May. What gains the Russians have made have come at enormous cost: Last month, Anna Keast-Butler, the director of British intelligence agency GCHQ, cited new intelligence indicating that Russian war deaths had likely reached almost half a million; various Western sources put total Russian casualties at significantly more than 1 million.

In relative terms, the attrition losses are even more staggering. By some accounts, Russia is now incurring eight men killed or seriously wounded for every one lost by Ukraine. With average monthly casualties running at more than 30,000 this year, the Russian army is struggling to replace them with fresh recruits. It is offering sign-up bonuses as high as $80,000, and up to $140,000 in debt relief to encourage more men to enlist.

Those who do have little to look forward to. According to Russian military bloggers, the average life expectancy of a new recruit—from arrival at a training ground to death in a combat zone—lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks. Once they are sent onto the battlefield, Russian fighters survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes. Much of the reason for this is the extraordinary shift in battlefield technology and tactics—in particular, the ways that drones have become the primary killing machines in this war, with stark implications for the future of combat in other parts of the world.

More ominously for Putin, the mood in Russia is changing. For years, most Russians supported the invasion of Ukraine because of the relentless patriotic news they’ve been subjected to by Kremlin-controlled media and the limited impact that the war had on most Russians’ daily lives. Now, however, Ukraine has brought the war home to Russia. Kyiv’s new, domestically produced long-range drones, such as the FP-1, FP-2, and Hornet, are proving extremely effective in hurting Russia economically, strategically, and psychologically. Ukraine now regularly strikes targets deep inside Russia, including a massive attack on Moscow in mid-June that has apparently disabled the Russian capital’s largest oil refinery until 2027.

Rattling sabers is often a sign of limited leverage. But while few Russia watchers take the Kremlin’s threats of nuclear escalation seriously, the fact that Putin formally revised the country’s official nuclear doctrine at the end of 2024—significantly lowering the threshold for the use of such weapons while also declaring that aggression by a non-nuclear state against Russia could set off nuclear retaliation if that state is supported by a nuclear power—was clearly intended to send a warning. Russia has also long dropped hints that it has stationed nuclear weapons in Belarus, although some commentators have treated these hints with skepticism.

Playing up fears of a NATO plot to attack Russia has been a hallmark of the Kremlin playbook since Putin came to power more than 25 years ago. But it is being articulated ever more forcefully as Russia’s war in Ukraine goes from bad to worse. At the end of May, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin claimed that “hypocritical and treacherous Albion” was behind a plan for NATO to attack Russia—a claim that is out of kilter with the current capabilities of the British armed forces.

Although Putin regularly says he is willing to negotiate, he shows no sign of readiness to compromise. He has repeatedly rejected peace proposals from U.S. President Donald Trump, even though those proposals were more favorable to Russia than Ukraine. Putin’s goal remains to subjugate all of Ukraine in one way or another, denying it the ability to act as a sovereign state.

A US fighter jet pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran in April described a shocking sight before ejecting from his aircraft: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

The account, which has not been previously reported, was shared by the F-15 pilot with intelligence officials during a debriefing after the incident. It immediately set off a firestorm of debate within the US intelligence community that has yet to be resolved.

US intelligence officials disagreed on how to interpret what the F-15 pilot described, and whether the pilot could recount the incident clearly.

For one thing, he was concussed in the crash. It was his second time being shot out of the sky during the Iran war: he had also been among the pilots downed in a friendly fire incident by Kuwaiti forces early in the conflict, according to two of the sources.

The pilot was rescued hours after ejecting from the aircraft, while the weapons systems officer evaded Iranian capture in the mountains for more than a day before also being rescued. It is not clear if the weapons systems officer also saw the drone formation.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/world/europe/uk-russia-shadow-fleet-oil-tanker-channel.html

Britain’s armed forces have for the first time intercepted and seized control of a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker sailing in the English Channel, the British Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

Royal Marine Commandos and specially trained law enforcement officers boarded the vessel early Sunday in a military operation that lasted six hours and that was supported by British military ships and aircraft, the ministry said in a statement.

The intercepted tanker, the Smyrtos, will be held and monitored off the southern coast of England, the ministry added.

The interception of the Smyrtos was the first time that British forces had acted alone to stop a ship in the shadow fleet and the first such operation in the English Channel, the Defense Ministry said.

This year, the British military assisted the United States in seizing an oil tanker, the Marinera, in the waters between Iceland and Scotland. American officials said the ship had violated sanctions by carrying oil for Venezuela, Russia and Iran.

After that operation, the British government had said it was exploring how British forces could take similar action against sanctioned vessels traveling through its waters. In March, Mr. Starmer decided British armed forces and law enforcement officers could board shadow fleet vessels in accordance with international law, the Defense Ministry said.

This month, President Emmanuel Macron of France said his country had intercepted an oil tanker thought to be part of the Russian shadow fleet. That vessel, the Tagor, was detained with British support in the Atlantic Ocean, around 400 nautical miles west of Brittany. It was the fourth suspected shadow fleet vessel that France has boarded since September 2025, according to the French authorities.

In a statement issued this year, the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that European countries had come up “with the notion of a ‘shadow fleet,’ which does not exist in international maritime law and is being used as a cover for acts of piracy on maritime routes.”

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/world/middleeast/oman-iran-trump-threat.html

As the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran inflames tensions across the Middle East, the sleepy sultanate of Oman has found itself in the cross hairs of the Trump administration and at odds with its Gulf Arab neighbors — perceived by some as too sympathetic to Iran, according to analysts.

“Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up,” Mr. Trump told reporters on in late May. “They understand that. They’ll be fine.”

Oman has facilitated talks between the United States and Iran for years and maintains that it is still playing its traditional role as a neutral mediator, advocating regional stability.

In the lead-up to the current war, Oman was mediating between the United States and Iran.

It became clear that Oman had a different view of those talks from Mr. Trump in late February, when Oman’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, gave an unusually frank interview to CBS. He argued that a peace deal was “within our reach, if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”

The Omani foreign minister’s remarks ruffled feathers, said Marc Sievers, who was the American ambassador from 2016 until 2019.

“He depicted the Iranian position as quite reasonable — and I think that made a lot of people in Washington angry,” he said.

Soon after, Mr. al-Busaidi held a meeting with Omani journalists in which he told them that the war lacked legal legitimacy, the Oman Daily newspaper reported.

In March, while other Gulf states that host American military bases were getting pummeled by Iranian missiles and drones, Oman’s leader, Sultan Haitham, sent a message of congratulations to Iran’s newly selected supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.

“There is the questioning, has Oman gone rogue?” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University.

The Strait of Hormuz, a crucial global waterway, has been effectively blocked during the war, impeding the ability of fossil fuel-rich Gulf countries to export oil and gas and sending global energy prices skyrocketing. But because Oman has ports on the Arabian Sea, hundreds of miles outside the strait, it can still export oil without impediment.

Then last month, it emerged that Oman had discussed partnering with Iran to charge service fees for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz — ignoring the Trump administration’s warnings against this.

After a fatal strike on Kuwait’s international airport last week, Oman condemned the attack, though it did not name Iran. Instead, the government expressed its “rejection of all military acts that undermine the region’s security” — a veiled reference to not only Iran, but also to Israel and the United States.

Oman’s experience is just one example of how the conflict has often widened fractures between countries.

On Jun. 12, 2026, 11 A-10C Thunderbolt II aircraft, belonging to the 75th Fighter Squadron of the 23rd Wing, from Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, arrived at RAF Lakenheath, UK, from Aviano Air Base, Italy, on their way back to the U.S. following their deployment to the CENTCOM AOR (Area Of Responsibility). During the deployment, they took part in Operation Epic Fury and also carried out missions over Iraq and Syria.

As per tradition, during their stay at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, the Warthogs received nose art along with bomb markings. For what deals the nicknames, based on the photos taken by our contributor and friend Stewart Jack, most appear to follow a Nintendo/Super Smash Bros. theme we had already identified from photos released by CENTCOM, with references including King Dedede, Fox, Diddy Kong, Samus, Sephiroth, Little Mac, Kirby and Ridley. Macho Man, Reaper” and Doc Holiday seem to be possible outliers from the video-games theme.

One notable missing A-10C is the one nicknamed “Toad” (#78-0614), that was depicted in the official Operation Epic Fury imagery in March. Its fate is currently unknown so we can’t rule out it is the Thunderbolt II aircraft lost during the air war in Iran..

https://removepaywalls.com/4/https://www.reuters.com/world/armenia-arrests-six-candidates-pro-russian-opposition-day-before-vote-2026-06-06/

Armenian authorities arrested six candidates ​for a pro-Russian opposition party on Saturday, a day before they were due to stand ‌in general elections, state media reported, without giving any reason for the detentions.

The report said they were from the Strong Armenia party, led by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, who is under house arrest on charges of calling for the overthrow ​of the government - accusations he rejects as politically motivated.

Polls suggest Strong Armenia has the support of between 6% and 11% of the electorate, putting it in second place behind Pashinyan's ruling Civil Contract party, which has a substantial lead ​with between 24% and 32%.

Armenia's Interior Ministry said earlier this week it had identified at least 78 cases of pre-election crimes and had ​detained 44 people, according to figures cited by Armenian media.

Pressure against Strong Armenia has been mounting ahead of Sunday's vote.

At an extraordinary session held late on Friday, the Central Election Commission rejected a lawsuit filed by another opposition group ⁠to ban ​Strong Armenia from participating in the elections over accusations it ​was bribing voters and financing its campaign illegally, among other issues.

The Trump administration has announced it will dismantle a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring system that provides critical data on the world’s oceans. The decision is sparking alarm among experts that US is taking eyes off the oceans at a dangerous time of record-breaking sea temperatures, an imminent super El Niño and fears a critical system of ocean currents could collapse, ushering in global chaos.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative, or OOI, was set up in 2016 and is made up of around 900 instruments in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans specially designed to withstand the immense pressure and corrosive saltiness of the ocean depths. Moored equipment and underwater gliders continuously collect real-time data allowing scientists to monitor the heath of the ocean, including shifts in ocean chemistry and changes to the powerful currents that shape global weather and climate.

The initiative was supposed to operate for three decades, but on May 21, the National Science Foundation, which funds the system, announced it would be “descoping” the network. Over the next 15 months, “in-water infrastructure” will be removed from arrays off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina and from the North Atlantic off southeast Greenland, the NSF said in a statement.

The decision “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio,” Mike England, head of media affairs at NSF, told CNN.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration undoes climate protections and attempts to dismantle and defund climate science, at the same time as it pushes to start mining the deep sea for critical minerals. Scientists have expressed deep concerns that dismantling this ocean monitoring system undermines ocean science at a critical time, reduces US scientific leadership and is abandoning taxpayer-funded equipment already paid for and installed.

A huge area of concern is what the loss of monitoring will mean for our understanding of a crucial network of Atlantic Ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have used data from the OOI to help try to map the AMOC’s fate.

A growing body of research suggest the AMOC could be on course to collapse, potentially as early as this century, which would bring catastrophic consequences, including accelerated sea level rise along the US East Coast, a winter deep freeze in Europe and prolonged droughts across a swath of Africa.

At another array set to be dismantled, the Ocean Station Papa in the Gulf of Alaska, autonomous buoys and gliders track aspects of ocean health, including acidity in an area that’s vital for the fishing industry but highly vulnerable to ocean acidification

Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, the dismantling of ocean arrays will have more-immediate impacts to commercial fishing and maritime industries. That’s because the Coastal Endurance Array off the coasts of Washington and Oregon are integrated into other ocean instrumentation in the area, helping to monitor temperature and water oxygen levels.

The Endurance array helps tribal fisherman from the Quinault Indian Nation figure out if there are enough Dungeness crab to catch off the coast, or if the oxygen levels are low enough to cause the crabs to die off or move to other waters, said Jan Newton, an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, who helps maintain the array.

https://archive.ph/20260606195302/https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/06/05/cia-officer-accused-stealing-gold-bars-created-fake-black-box-spy-program/

The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation.

David J. Rush, who was arrested last month and charged with one count of theft of public money, constructed what is known as a “special access program,” a sort of black box for the most secret intelligence operations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Even intelligence personnel with the highest security clearance cannot access an individual SAP, as they are known, without specific authorization.

The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said the criminal probe found that Rush “read in,” or initiated, two colleagues into the highly secretive sham program, effectively cultivating them as perhaps unwitting accomplices and preventing them from talking to others about it. He persuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the program via a government contract that was also fraudulent, they said.

Rush was arrested following a May 18 FBI raid on his house, where agents seized 303 gold bars worth roughly $40 million, $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches, according to a government affidavit.

The government affidavit, filed May 20 in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, alleges that Rush lied to the CIA about his college degrees and Navy record, and fraudulently obtained $77,000 in military leave pay despite having been discharged from the Navy in 2015.

The government affidavit says that Rush claimed to have a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University and a master’s from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. An FBI investigation found no record of Rush ever attending either institution, nor any evidence to support his claim that he had been a Navy pilot.

Former U.S. intelligence officials said they were stunned that Rush’s alleged misrepresentations were not flagged in what are normally lengthy and rigorous background checks for would-be CIA employees.

Rush, who worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, has not pleaded to the charges against him. At a detention hearing in federal court in Alexandria on Friday, a judge ruled that Rush posed a significant flight risk and ordered him to remain detained at the local jail pending trial.

The account of those familiar with the criminal probe appears to raise serious questions about secrecy guardrails and vetting at the CIA.

It remains unclear, for example, how Rush could single-handedly create a “black box” for a fictional spy program without sign-off from his superiors. It is also unclear whether the two colleagues Rush brought into the fake program knew it was fraudulent.

One of the people familiar with the probe said Rush’s fake program involved “continuity of government” operations, or programs to keep the U.S. federal government running in the event of nuclear war, natural disasters or other catastrophes.

Rush apparently used the fake government continuity program and the contract to persuade a government defense contractor to purchase large amounts of gold, this person said.

Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Details of that program — separate from the fake project Rush allegedly created — remain highly classified. The Washington Post is withholding details about the program after U.S. officials warned that disclosure could jeopardize ongoing intelligence-gathering operations.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/us/politics/pentagon-sees-growing-espionage-threat-from-israel.html

Recent U.S. intelligence reports have raised concerns about Israeli spy agencies eavesdropping on American negotiators working on a peace deal with Iran, amid rising concern over a more general counterintelligence threat by Israel.

Israel and the United States have long known, and tolerated, that each was spying on the other. But an intensified Israeli effort to learn about U.S. positions in talks with Iran has crossed a line, according to some American officials.

The reports include concerns that Israel has stepped up its efforts to eavesdrop on senior American officials, including Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s top negotiator, Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, and one of his main deputies, Michael P. DiMino IV.

It is not entirely clear why Mr. Colby, who is in charge of Pentagon policy, would be a target. But he is one of the most prominent proponents inside the U.S. government of a restrained foreign policy. Mr. DiMino is in charge of Pentagon policy for the Middle East, making him a person of natural interest to Israel.

Another report, written by the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military intelligence offices and focused on earlier events going back several years, said that the counterintelligence threat level posed by Israel had been increased in recent weeks to the top level, from high to critical. The report, to which the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency contributed, outlines various efforts by Israel to spy on American military personnel and government officials.

The Defense Intelligence Agency report was drafted after incidents in which American defense personnel in Israel detected that software to tap their communications had been surreptitiously installed on their phones.

The report says counterintelligence incidents began increasing in late 2024, as the Biden administration pressed Israel to curb its attacks on Gaza, and continued into 2025, as the Trump administration weighed options to attack Iran.

The report, which incorporated contributions from a number of military intelligence agencies, also details several episodes in recent years. In 2021, Israeli military intelligence officers were caught planting listening devices at D.I.A. headquarters. Last year, officers from Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, were discovered to have tried to plant a listening device in a Secret Service vehicle.

The Defense Department declined to comment. A White House official, speaking on the condition their name not be used, said the account was false.

A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington also disputed claims that Israel poses a counterintelligence threat, saying that Israel does not spy on American officials or entities.

Israel’s counterintelligence threat level is now higher than any other ally and higher than some adversarial countries. Of American allies, only South Korea, which is rated at high in certain situations, approaches the concern with Israel’s espionage efforts, the officials said.

The aggressiveness of the Israeli intelligence collection on top U.S. officials during the second Trump administration has been “unhinged,” one senior official said.

The tendency of some senior Trump administration officials to fly on private aircraft, to conduct national security business on their personal phones and to reject staffing from U.S. embassies abroad made them especially vulnerable targets for the spy services of allies and adversaries alike, said a former senior U.S. official who has dealt extensively with Israel.

Other current officials also acknowledged the use of personal cellphones by top American officials have made them easy targets for eavesdropping.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/business/ohio-tech-manufacturing-hub.html

When Mark Kvamme, a former partner at Sequoia Capital, left Silicon Valley for Columbus, Ohio, in 2011, colleagues told him that he was making a career-ending mistake.

“Ohio is where venture capitalists go to die,” he recalled one of them saying.

Fifteen years later, Columbus, the state capital known as the headquarters for insurance companies and retail brands like Victoria’s Secret, has been transformed. The metropolitan area has become a critical hub for advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

Mr. Kvamme now runs The O.H.I.O. Fund, a private fund that has raised $647 million to invest in businesses in the state. His portfolio includes Connect Housing Blocks and Eagle Wireless, a Cleveland-area manufacturer of cellular modules, tiny electronic components that had previously been mostly produced in China.

Some of the most ambitious tech projects in the United States are rising from the farmlands outside the city. Mark Zuckerberg recently stopped by to check on the development of a Meta facility that will train advanced artificial intelligence models. Intel is constructing a $28 billion fabrication facility that will build some of its most advanced chips.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of the defense tech start-up Anduril, said he planned to buy a house here, to be close to the company’s $1 billion factory that will build autonomous drones for the U.S. military.

In a 200,000-square-foot factory on the west side of Columbus, Andy Lonsberry, chief executive of Path Robotics, demonstrated an autonomous robotic dog with a welding torch for a head. Using sensors invented by Path, the robot was able to identify the seam on a metal wall that it was supposed to weld. It aimed its torch, and sent sparks flying.

Path Robotics has raised $370 million from investors since 2018, and entered into a partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries, the military shipbuilder, to tackle a shortage of welders, often a bottleneck in American manufacturing.

“Columbus is booming,” said Dennis DeMeyere, a former technical director at Google Cloud, who plans to open an A.I.-powered manufacturing company, Autonomous Production, near Columbus. “It’s wild. Everything is under construction. It feels like the Bay Area felt 13 or 14 years ago.”

The Columbus metro area, home to more than 2.2 million people, grew by 21,312 people between 2024 and 2025, according to census data.

The Columbus metro area ranks 46th out of 100 metro areas for manufacturing job growth, according to an analysis by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings program.

Federal investment — most notably the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act — has helped propel construction in the Columbus area by providing billions in subsidies for domestic semiconductor production, Mr. Muro said.

“In a short period the Columbus metro has climbed substantially,” he said, adding that the region previously ranked 70th.

For years, Ohio officials have aggressively courted companies by offering grants, low taxes and light regulation. Many businesses that set up shop here get a high level of cooperation from local government officials and educational institutions, a tradition that is often referred to as the “Columbus Way.”

However, the very things that attracted large companies to the area — the speed of construction and relationships with government officials — has raised concern from ordinary people who said they didn’t have much input about what was being built in their communities.

In December, state lawmakers passed a bill that forbids the release of information submitted by companies seeking tax breaks or other economic development incentives. That has made it more difficult for the public to weigh in.

A bill that would bar certain officials from signing such nondisclosure agreements was filed in February by two Republican state representatives, including Brian Stewart of Ashville, who represents Pickaway County, where Anduril has built its factory.

Pari Sabety, a former budget director for Ted Strickland, Ohio’s last Democratic governor, said economic development in Columbus often served big business but not the community itself.

“They have used the ‘Columbus Way’ as their moniker to extract unending subsidies from the city and the state for highly profitable companies,” she said.

But Mr. Kvamme said it would be foolish to change a winning formula.

“They are killing the golden goose,” he said.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/politics/platner-maine-senate-girlfriends-relationships.html

By Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer

Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer, two veteran political reporters, have been covering the Platner campaign. They spoke to more than two dozen people for this article.

The disclosures last week that Mr. Platner, now married, was exchanging sexual messages with women as recently as last year have complicated that narrative and unnerved Democrats, who see the Maine seat as key to their efforts to regain control of the Senate.

In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women described Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.

But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.

Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”

Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

The third woman, a Democrat from Maine who spoke on the condition of anonymity, had a long-distance relationship with Mr. Platner on and off for years, as recently as 2016.

The three described him in similar terms. Spending time with him could be exhilarating, they said. But they also recounted patterns of heavy drinking and womanizing. Asked to sum up how he treated her, the third woman said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”

When Ms. Fifield first met Mr. Platner in 2013, he was a student at George Washington University, and she was working on veterans’ issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and beginning to make a name for herself as a conservative activist online. Their roughly two-year, on-again, off-again relationship, as Ms. Fifield described it, was heady and passionate.

Mr. Platner “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, his campaign said. The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations.

Ms. Fifield, who is affiliated with Independent Women, a conservative group, insisted that her political beliefs had nothing to do with her choice to come forward. She worked briefly on Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign and before that for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Ms. Fifield said she had not been paid by any campaign or political entity since Ms. Haley’s campaign.

Ms. Fifield said she had no connection to the campaign of Senator Susan Collins, Mr. Platner’s likely Republican opponent. She acknowledged that Independent Women had been supportive of Ms. Collins but said she had not been active with the organization recently.

“I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat — it has nothing to do with that,” Ms. Fifield said. “If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing.”

“I will personally go campaign for Collins,” Ms. Fifield wrote in a private chat group last summer. Two of her friends reacted with a crying laughing emoji. The comment was a joke, Ms. Fifield told The Times.

Records show no evidence of any relationship between Ms. Fifield and the Collins campaign.

Mr. Platner, who had overlapping relationships with other women while he and Ms. Fifield dated, also referred to women as “hatchet wounds,” Ms. Fifield said, a crude term for female anatomy.

Asked about those remarks, a Platner campaign official did not dispute them. A friend who knew Mr. Platner and Ms. Fifield during that period said the comments sounded out of character.

The Times reviewed texts between Ms. Fifield and Mr. Platner, along with Google Chat exchanges, texts and Facebook messages between Ms. Fifield and her friends during and after the relationship. The Times also reviewed some of Ms. Fifield’s diary entries from after the relationship had ended, and spoke with two of her friends who confirmed that the pair had an emotionally volatile relationship but could not corroborate the physical altercations or the most controversial comments she described.

Ms. Racicot, who said she agreed with many of Mr. Platner’s policies, said she had an off-and-on relationship with Mr. Platner and had positive memories.

But she was not shocked, she said, when she saw the incendiary comments he had made about women that have surfaced during the campaign. “I was like, that makes sense,” she said. “This person does not respect women.”

Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling.”

Caroline Lemp, who dated Mr. Platner for several months in 2013, described him as a “gentle giant.” She said he never made her feel unsafe or showed any signs that he was struggling with the physical or mental effects of his military service.

“He was a great boyfriend,” said Ms. Lemp, 36, who now lives in St. Louis. “He was super kind, very nice, fun.”

The others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Platner was never physically threatening. One, a nurse from Belfast, Maine, who dated him for a couple months after he returned home to Maine, described him as responsible, intelligent and supportive. Another, who dated him in Washington between roughly 2011 and 2013, said she witnessed some “potentially problematic behavior,” referring to his heavy drinking. But she “felt really safe with him,” she said.

Throughout his campaign, Mr. Platner has presented his life as a story of recovery and personal growth.

Still, he stayed active on Reddit, offering a glimpse into his unvarnished thinking in more than 1,400 messages between 2016 and 2021, when he says he stopped posting.

Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.

"I cover American politics with an emphasis on the Democratic Party. I work to illuminate the personalities, debates and coalitions that define this moment. I believe deeply in on-the-ground reporting."

"I was a campaign road warrior twice: as the reporter covering Ted Cruz for Politico in 2016, and as the Biden beat reporter for The Times during the 2020 presidential campaign. After graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, I worked in Washington at Politico and in McClatchy’s D.C. bureau before moving to New York and later joining The Times."

"I go through an intense fact-checking process to help meet those goals. In a volatile political environment, I believe it is all the more important to seek a diverse range of perspectives, interrogate conventional wisdom and let the reporting drive the story. I protect my sources."

Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.

"I cover the intersection of campaigns, elections and political power. I examine the big personalities, ideas and emotions that drive American politics. I see politics as an expression of the country’s values, so I am particularly interested in examining how those are shifting in this moment of technological, cultural and economic change."

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-strikes.html

The display of force that Russia rained on Ukraine early Tuesday, with hundreds of drones and missiles, cannot mask the increasing signs of Moscow’s weakness in the four-year war.

Russia’s advance in Ukraine has slowed almost to a halt. It has stepped up coerced mobilization in occupied eastern Ukraine as its domestic recruitment efforts fall short. Domestic discontent is growing, and Europe is providing new support to Ukraine. Peace talks brokered by the United States have all but ended.

The war has not been going the Kremlin’s way, with battleground losses and mounting casualties. With fiercer strikes, Moscow hopes to gain a better position for negotiations.

“Ukraine’s position is much, much more formidable now than just a year ago,” Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst, said in an interview on Tuesday.

Ukraine’s battlefield gains have turned the tide in the war, wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London, this week.

“In Kyiv, there is a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire,” Mr. Watling wrote in an analysis for Foreign Affairs. He said that while “drone strikes and shelling remain constant, Russian combat performance is waning.”

In Moscow on Tuesday, Mr. Putin’s chief spokesman said the war could end as soon as Ukraine withdraws from the Donbas region, where Russia has claimed territory.

That is a stark turnabout from last summer, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was so confident of victory that he flew to Alaska for a meeting of minds with President Trump on how to end the war. These days, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is the one pushing for a quick end to the hostilities.

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Zelensky called the latest assault “a large-scale attack and a completely transparent statement from Russia: If Ukraine is not protected from ballistic and other missile strikes, these attacks will continue.”

Ukraine’s battlefield position has improved with additional military aid from Europe, including an arms package worth about $149 million from Finland and 16 Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, both announced this past week.

At the same time, analysts with DeepState UA, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence tracker, reported this week that the Russian military appeared to have lost more territory in May than it had gained, its first month with such a loss since Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.

That was despite a 37.5 percent increase in the number of Russian attacks. Analysts said Russian battlefield forces had likely degraded to the point that, at times, attacks were left to only one or two soldiers to launch.

Recent estimates from Western officials suggest that Russia is suffering staggering battlefield casualties. Last week, the British spy chief Anne Keast-Butler said nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the war began in February 2022.

“As we remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine, Putin is going backwards on the battlefield,” Ms. Keast-Butler said in a speech in London.

In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Russia was losing 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers every month. “Not injured — dead,” Mr. Rubio said on Fox News. “It’s a bad war.”

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/europe/ukraine-melnyk-nationalist-collaborator.html

With a Ukrainian military honor guard standing ramrod straight beside his coffin, Andriy Melnyk, a leader of a Ukrainian nationalist movement who died six decades ago — and who has been no less divisive after death than in life — lay in state in Kyiv before his reburial on Sunday.

President Volodymyr Zelensky provided full state honors for the ritual, signaling a deep shift in Ukrainian politics after Russia’s invasion in 2022. Before then, Mr. Zelensky had kept nationalist politics at arm’s length; in the reburial, he embraced them.

The remains of the long-dead World War II-era Ukrainian leader were exhumed in Luxembourg, where he had been buried after dying in exile in 1964, and returned to Ukraine. There was none of the raw grief of today’s war funerals.

Melnyk led one of two factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, including through a period of alignment with the Nazi army during its occupation of Ukraine, which was one of the bloodiest chapters of World War II.

Before Russia’s all-out invasion the ceremony would have been a risky move by any Ukrainian politician who wanted to win votes from Russian speakers. But during the war, Ukrainians have embraced more tightly all symbols of Ukrainian independence, and Mr. Zelensky moved with them.

The president had campaigned in 2019 on a promise of negotiating a peace agreement with Russia, and had studiously avoided the memory politics of World War II. He declined to state his personal views of midcentury Ukrainian independence leaders like Melnyk.

After the invasion, Mr. Zelensky warmed to the World War II history of partisan resistance against the Soviets. That year, he awarded a 99-year-old veteran of the Ukrainian Partisan Army the country’s highest military honor, Hero of Ukraine.

This month, Mr. Zelensky went a step further by repatriating Melnyk’s remains for burial in the new military cemetery, elevating him to the country’s pantheon of heroes.

“Something that Ukrainians and Ukraine have long hoped” for was underway, he said as the cremated remains were en route back to Ukraine. He described Melnyk and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, who was reburied beside her husband, as “iconic Ukrainians of the 20th century who are deeply respected.”

To be sure, right-wing parties have had historically low support in Ukraine, and none cleared the threshold to enter Parliament in the last election before the invasion, in 2019. But Mr. Zelensky’s embrace of Melnyk, a figure previously revered most fervently by the right, is telling of a wartime shift, an unintended consequence of the war for Russia.

The move is also a significant step for Mr. Zelensky, Ukraine’s first Jewish president, in formalizing the national commemoration of a figure criticized as a Nazi collaborator while also honored in Ukraine as an independence fighter.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/world/middleeast/israel-strikes-lebanon-medics.html

Dozens of Israeli airstrikes pounded Lebanon late Friday and early Saturday, killing and injuring several people, Lebanon’s national news agency said, exposing the mounting strain on a truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The strikes mostly hit towns and villages in southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold where Israel is occupying large swaths of territory and where tens of thousands of residents remain displaced. The Israeli military also issued new evacuation warnings on Saturday afternoon for several towns across southern Lebanon.

Many of Saturday’s strikes focused on areas in and around the coastal district of Tyre, emergency workers and doctors at a hospital in the area said. Shortly after midnight, an airstrike leveled a house in the town of Deir Qanoun an-Nahr in Tyre, killing four people, according to Lebanon’s state news agency. An Israeli drone also targeted a citrus grove in the town of Bazourieh, wounding several Syrian laborers who were working there, the agency said.

Another strike hit a building near Hiram Hospital, which the Israeli military had ordered evacuated, shattering windows and damaging parts of the hospital, including operating rooms, doctors at the hospital said in interviews. Hiram is one of the main functioning medical centers in Tyre. At least four newborns were evacuated safely from the hospital, according to the nursing supervisor, Mohammad Salem.

Saturday’s attacks come just a day after Israeli strikes killed six paramedics in two episodes in southern Lebanon within 24 hours, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Over 120 medics have been killed in the latest conflict, according to the ministry.

Another Israeli airstrike on Thursday damaged the three-story Tibnin hospital, a key medical facility operating near the region that Israel is occupying.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/opinion/iran-war-history.html

Most Americans probably don’t look back at March 2012 — if they remember it at all — and think of terrifyingly high gas prices. In the month when “The Hunger Games” ruled the box office and President Barack Obama was on his way to a comfortable re-election, the price of Brent crude closed the month around $123 a barrel. That would be about $175 a barrel in today’s dollars.

As of Tuesday, despite Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors’ energy facilities, it’s hovering around $100, slightly higher than the average inflation-adjusted price since January 2001, roughly $95.

That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East. To hear the critics’ version of events, an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest, is already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame. As Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told NBC’s Kristen Welker over the weekend, “We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”

Really? Let’s take a tour of some of the recent history.

• During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, a campaign that is widely considered a brilliant military success, the U.S.-led coalition lost 75 aircraft, 42 of them in combat. In this conflict, four manned aircraft have been destroyed, three to friendly fire and one in an accident. Not a single manned plane has yet been lost over Iran.

• The U.S. air and land campaign in that operation lasted a full six weeks. Today it’s remembered as a lightning-fast war. The current conflict with Iran is less than four weeks old.

• In the 1989-90 invasion of Panama, whose military phase lasted a few days, the United States lost 23 soldiers, with 325 more wounded. So far in this war, U.S. losses are 13 dead. Among the more than 230 wounded, most have swiftly returned to duty.

• During the Persian Gulf crisis that began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the U.S. economy went into recession and the Dow fell by about 13 percent before the allied air war began. Since conflict with Iran began last June with Operation Midnight Hammer, the Dow is up by 9 percent as of Tuesday morning.

• Between 1987 and 1988, in the final stages of the so-called tanker war, the Reagan administration reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and had the U.S. Navy escort them out of the Strait of Hormuz. An Iranian mine nearly sank an American frigate. The conflict wound down after the United States sank a handful of Iranian navy ships. This time around, we have destroyed almost all of Iran’s navy with no naval losses of our own.

• In 1991, Iraq fired roughly 40 missiles toward Israel. Hardly any were intercepted despite the deployment of Patriot batteries there. In this war, Israel is registering an interception rate of 92 percent against more than 400 missiles. Iran’s overall rate of fire has dropped from 438 ballistic missiles on the first day of the war to 21 on Monday. Drone fire has also declined from 345 to 75 for the same dates.

• In the months leading up to the second Iraq war, the George W. Bush administration made a case based on erroneous information that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In the current war, there is no question that some 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium lie stashed and buried in Iran — possibly enough, with further enrichment and conversion into uranium metal, for 11 nuclear bombs. If the outrage of the Iraq war is that Hussein didn’t have W.M.D. capabilities, is it now supposed to be somehow more outrageous that Iran does?

In hindsight, the single biggest error of the gulf war was to end it too soon, before Saddam Hussein’s forces were thoroughly routed. President Trump should not make the same mistake.

I am not blind to the Trump administration’s failures in planning, particularly its unwillingness to make a stronger public case for war and get more allies on our side before the campaign began. I am also purposely comparing the war with Iran to past wars of similar scale, rather than our true military fiascoes in Vietnam, Korea and the two world wars — in which tens of thousands of Americans died due to poor tactical planning and bad strategy.

Still, if past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/us/politics/iran-israel-us-leader-ahmadinejad.html

Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials in the opening salvos of the war, President Trump mused publicly that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country.

It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hard-line, anti-Israel and anti-American views.

Mr. Trump was enjoying the success of the raid by U.S. forces to capture Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement to work with the White House — a model that Mr. Trump appeared to think could be replicated elsewhere.

To say that Mr. Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement. While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to “wipe Israel off the map.” He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.

How Mr. Ahmadinejad was recruited to take part remains unknown.

But the audacious plan, developed by the Israelis and which Mr. Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it.

http://archive.today/2025.08.22-160803/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/us/politics/trump-bolton-search-analysis.html

When federal agents armed with a search warrant showed up at John R. Bolton’s home outside Washington at dawn on Friday, it was a display of one of the government’s most intimidating powers, in this case deployed against a fierce and high-profile critic of President Trump.

It is not yet clear what evidence the Justice Department cited in convincing a federal judge to sign off on the search warrant, or what culpability Mr. Bolton might have in an on-and-off investigation into whether he mishandled classified information dating back to when he served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser during the president’s first term.

But the episode illustrated how Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution has undercut the principle that law enforcement should keep a substantial distance from politics, stoking questions about whether even legitimate investigations are colored by the president’s insistence on putting his perceived enemies through the same treatment he faced as a target of multiple inquiries.

During the time Mr. Bolton worked in the first Trump administration, he helped put together plans that led to Mr. Trump ordering the killing of a top Iranian general. Because of Mr. Bolton’s role in those plans, there was intelligence showing that the Iranians wanted to kill him. To protect Mr. Bolton, the federal government provided him with a security detail throughout the Biden administration.

But just a day after being sworn in, Mr. Trump stripped Mr. Bolton of his security detail.

Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign has long focused on putting his perceived enemies through what he believes he unfairly endured as he was investigated, first by a special counsel during his first term and later by federal and state prosecutors during the Biden administration. In some ways, the search of Mr. Bolton’s home mirrors the F.B.I.’s 2022 search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home and private club, Mar-a-Lago, to retrieve classified documents he had kept and refused to return after leaving office.

https://archive.ph/NaTuM

Every year when January 1 comes around, the needlessness of setting goals is shouted from the rooftops. But I, in a clandestine corner of my apartment, earnestly fill out a spreadsheet, organizing my resolutions for the year ahead. I’m not particularly affectionate toward spreadsheets, but the one benefit of jotting all this down digitally is that reappraising these ambitions is as simple as opening Google Drive. Glancing back at my objectives—which I make a habit of doing—can be a humorous exercise. Eat more fiber; read Middlemarch; take self-defense classes. Very achievable, highly specific. Alas, there is one same goal threading through every spreadsheet that remains unattended to, taunting me with its perennial neglect: Write a screenplay.

You may need context here—we’ll keep it brief. I have happily plied my trade as a journalist for many years, but a couple of rousing screenwriting classes in college (and a love for television and film) left me with an itch for cinematic stories. Despite taking an online screenwriting course with NYU Tisch a couple of years ago (which in my humble opinion was a waste of $2,283) and multiple failed attempts to jumpstart a script idea, I’m left all these years later with nary a logline. That’s the thing about creative pursuits—you have to pursue them. Ceaselessly. And there comes a certain point when it’s made obvious that no one is going to force you to chase your dreams or achieve your goals; when the delusion of finding “the right time” is replaced with the dread of not having enough of it.

I reached that certain point a couple of months ago when revisiting my 2025 goals. Once again confronted by that lonesome spreadsheet cell, it became clearer than ever: either live in regret or goad myself into action. I’d prefer to say my next steps entailed a revelatory conversation with an esteemed mentor, but in actuality I careened down a rabbit hole that led me to a series of YouTube videos proselytizing Ernest Hemingway’s writing routine. (Oh internet, you work in mysterious ways.) My initial thoughts? First: Hemingway would have detested this. Second: I’m doing it.

What began as a foray into the peculiar rituals and routines of one iconic writer rapidly expanded into several rituals and routines of multiple iconic writers. Would my potential for writing something of note increase by channeling these literary titans? No doubt, the prospect of coming out on the other end of this experiment with nothing to show for it but mild embarrassment loomed large, but my shortcomings (more on that ahead) can be subsumed into one not-so-cringey category: growth! And so, if you also find yourself stuck in the mud of an artistic endeavor, might I suggest giving one of the ideas below a whirl? Pencils and pads at the ready.

Truman Capote: Horizontal Writing

Picking up a fresh copy of Answered Prayers in anticipation of last year’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans reminded me what a treat it is to read Truman Capote’s prose. His piquant style of writing in the unfinished tell-all feels like dropping into a gossip circle in the most glamorous (and cutting) powder room on the planet. In a 1957 interview with The Paris Review that took place in Capote’s Brooklyn Heights home, he muses on his writing habits: “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch with a cigarette and coffee handy.” Puffing and sipping, as he put it, from coffee and mint tea to sherry and martinis; with everything written by hand and in pencil.

As an overture for each day’s routine, I would read a few words or watch an interview of my subject, if available. I am a sucker for Capote’s high-pitched southern drawl and devoured a clip of him telling Dick Cavett about taking intelligence tests in his youth. After that, it was off to the sofa.

My writing apparatus for the day would be a large notepad, Mono Graph mechanical pencil, coffee, mint tea, fino sherry, and later on, a martini (gin, with one olive). I skipped the cigarettes because I was staying in a rental in Paris at the time, and smoking in strangers’ homes is gauche. Despite suffering from a mild case of sciatica in the past and wary of potential back spasms, I was more or less thrilled to lie on a sofa writing all day while enjoying various beverages. The words flowed freely for the first couple of hours, with quick coffee re-ups helping to keep the blood circulating. Looking back in my notebook at the reflections from the day (10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.), I spot a “my left foot is numb” scribbled on the side of the page. Aside from that, it was productive. I enjoyed writing longhand—and even more so, I enjoyed adopting the persona of someone else as a way of maneuvering through a creative block. The day’s experiment engendered enthusiasm, setting me up nicely for my next character study the following morning (or so I thought).

Ernest Hemingway: One True Sentence

I am not someone who idolizes Ernest Hemingway, but who can resist the siren call of reading A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises while on a two-month sojourn in Paris? (Not I!) At the time of this experiment, I was living a couple blocks away from his favored haunts (Brasserie Lipp, Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore) and determined that because of this he was a fine inclusion for the experiment.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Hemingway’s writing knows he was fixated on the trueness of one’s work. In his Lost Generation memoir, he describes struggling to get a story going: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” He also stressed the importance of rising early (just after first light) and of never emptying one’s metaphorical well. “…stop when there [is] still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” As a bonus, I’d cap off the afternoon with a few hours at a nearby cafe à la Hemingway (and James Baldwin, and Simone de Beauvoir) to soak in the creative spirit of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—even if there are more tourists taking selfies with €8 coffees nowadays than intellectually stimulating salons.

The result of staying up late binging Adolescence was a foregone conclusion, however. My first true sentence recorded at pre-dawn: “My eye sockets are sore.” After strong-arming myself into jotting down a couple of lackluster pages, I drift off to sleep on the couch, only to be woken by the floor squeak caused by my husband walking into the room two hours later. Frailty, thy name is Nicole!

I start anew the next day, better rested, and with much better output. As expected, practicing Hemingway’s creative routine in its Parisian provenance was an absolute delight.

Joan Didion: Needlework

I was sanguine about the prospects of adopting Joan Didion’s writing rituals. She is among my favorite writers (original, I know) and stepping into her shoes held massive appeal. (As an aside: I did almost step onto Didion’s needlework footstool, but was outbid at her estate sale a few years ago. If the winner of said footstool is reading this, it’s not too late to send it my way.)

We all know Didion’s rituals have long been obsessed over (packing lists will never be the same). If you’ve ever looked up her writing rituals, you’ve probably seen the quote about needing an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over the day’s pages. Spoiler alert: I do that. But I am a freak and know YouTube’s assortment of Didion interviews forwards and backwards, and in one of them, she mentions needlework as a means of working through a block. “It’s sort of mindless. You do it at a moment when you’re panicking and you can trick yourself into thinking you’re doing something useful.”

So I track down my local Parisian craft store and purchase one kit point de croix featuring a dainty lavender bouquet. I set it on the chair next to me and begin working around 10 a.m. The storyline I’ve been hammering away at is falling flat; I write: “Is it too early to stitch?” in my notebook. I pick up the embroidery hoop and poke the pale purple thread through the fabric. There's a distinct pleasure that comes with crafting something by hand. My mind starts to wander, and then a sensation of all my thoughts filing back into place takes over. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, it was pretty revelatory.

Charles Dickens: Three-Hour Stroll

Charles Dickens, the Victorian-era novelist who turned out the hits like A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations, is not someone whose work I revisit often. But I came across the prolific writer’s routine and couldn’t resist. Rise at 7 a.m., breakfast around 8 a.m., then begin to write at 9 a.m. completely alone in the study. Work without intermission until 2 p.m., break for lunch, and then set off for a three-hour walk around London—every single day. How civilized!

Most regrettably, however, precisely as I am wrapping up my fifth hour of work, a downpour begins. I grab an umbrella and beat on. And shocking to no one: tasking yourself with walking in the rain throughout Paris with no agenda except to look for inspiration is not so bad after all. I end up taking 21,219 steps that afternoon, popping into a hidden church on Île Saint-Louis, along the bouquinistes and their riverside stalls, and down numerous atmospheric streets. By the end of it all, I am fatigued, but fulfilled. Dickens was on to something.

Haruki Murakami: 4:00 a.m. Wake-Up Call

Reading Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 during the Covid-19 lockdown is blissfully etched into my memory. The Japanese writer’s magical realism delivered a dreamlike reprieve from the confines of my tiny, depressing apartment. But how does he conjure such surreal stories capable of rescuing us from the mundane?

“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation.” The salient detail here, he explained in this 2004 interview, is the repetition. “It’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength.” (As an aside: Murakami’s chronicling of training for the New York marathon is worth a read for those interested.)

We’re all adults here and don’t need to pretend I ran six miles and swam 1500 meters in the summer afternoon heat. While I am committed to this experiment, I am not run-in-94-degree-humidity kind of committed, so I did a challenging workout video in my air-conditioned home instead. I did, however, wake-up at 4 a.m., work for five hours, and get to bed by 9 p.m., which was a far more fruitful experience than anticipated. The accuracy of my experiment is marred by a lack of time, though. I cannot take a month off of (paying) work to practice Murakami’s routine every day, and therefore couldn’t reap the benefits of repetition. But I accept my shortcomings with equanimity. After all, the be-all and end-all of this experiment was to see what resonated. To reveal the rituals and routines that might harness creativity in the long run. Below, a snapshot of just that.

The 10 Commandments of Creative Rituals

• Begin before the world wakes.
• Choose an environment that's conducive to long bouts of work.
• Start simple, and stop before the 'well' is empty.
• Get something to occupy your hands with.
• Protect your focus, work alone.
• Venture out into the world for ideas.
• Physical exercise helps a lot.
• Take time for evening reflection, perhaps with a drink.
• Get enough sleep.
• Repetition goes a long way.