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http://archive.today/2025.04.26-092803/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/politics/trump-putin-russia-ukraine.html

If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term.

Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.

The promise of sanctions relief? Check.

Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.

Indeed, as Mr. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Friday for more negotiations, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.

The notion that Russia would get to keep the territory it has taken as part of a balanced peace deal is broadly acknowledged as inevitable. But Mr. Trump is taking it further by offering official U.S. recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014 in violation of international law, an extra step of legitimacy that stunned many in Ukraine as well as its friends in Washington and Europe.

Such a move would reverse the policy of the first Trump administration. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s State Department issued a Crimea Declaration affirming its “refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force,” likening it to the U.S. refusal to recognize Soviet control of the Baltic States for five decades.

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” he said in the interview, which was released on Friday. He again blamed Ukraine for Russia’s decision to invade it, saying that “what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO.”

But that is not all that Mr. Putin has gotten out of Mr. Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of the president’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.

Mr. Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by halting cyber offensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.

“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands,” said Ivo Daalder, the chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”

But what has been so striking about Mr. Trump’s return to office is how many of his other actions over the past three months have been seen as benefiting Russia, either directly or indirectly — so much so that Russian officials in Moscow have cheered the American president on and publicly celebrated some of his moves.

After he moved to dismantle Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, two U.S.-funded news organizations that have transmitted independent reporting to the Soviet Union and later Russia, Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian state broadcaster RT, called it “an awesome decision by Trump.” She added, “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”

Those are just a couple of the U.S. government organizations that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have targeted to the delight of Russia. Moscow has long resented the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, all of which fund democracy promotion programs that the Kremlin considers part of a campaign of regime change, and all of which now face the ax.

At the same time, Mr. Charap said that the Ukraine peace plan offered by Mr. Trump, even though tilted in Moscow’s direction, did not actually address important points that Russia insisted on including in any settlement, like barring the presence of any foreign military forces in Ukraine.

The net effect of Mr. Trump’s tilt toward Russia and dismantlement of U.S. institutions that have irritated Moscow is to undercut America’s position against a major adversary, argued David Shimer, a former Russia adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Just last month, Mr. Shimer noted, the intelligence community declared that Russia remains an “enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”

“The current approach,” Mr. Shimer said, “favors Russia across the board — making concession after concession on Ukraine, dismantling our key soft power tools and weakening our alliance network across Europe, which historically has helped the United States deal with Russian aggression from a position of strength.”

http://archive.today/2025.04.25-234108/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/world/europe/ukraine-peace-counterproposal.html

In response to a White House proposal to end the war in Ukraine that critics say would grant the Kremlin much of what it wants, Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counteroffer — one that in some ways contradicts what President Trump has demanded, but also leaves room for possible compromises on issues that have long seemed intractable.

Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.

Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for compromise. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.

In their proposal, the Ukrainians say their country should be “fully restored,” without specifying what that would mean. Though Mr. Zelensky has long said his administration’s ultimate goal is the return of all territories that made up Ukraine when it declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, including Crimea, Kyiv’s latest proposal seems to be intentionally vague on this point.

U.S. officials later explained that although the total amount of territory controlled by Russia was unlikely to change in any future negotiations, Ukrainian officials have made clear that they intended to propose territorial swaps to improve the country’s defensive positions. Trump administration officials have privately assured the Ukrainians that they would fight for the swaps, but said they could not guarantee that Russia would go along with them.

And the White House has taken Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s, when it comes to the future shape of Ukraine’s military. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine’s military, now the largest and most battle-hardened in Europe besides Russia’s own, be subject to strict limitations on its size and capabilities. Trump administration officials have told the Ukrainians that they would not support such limitations.

After firing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees and gutting funding to programs across dozens of countries, this week Secretary of State and USAID administrator Marco Rubio set his sights on dismantling the State Department with the same hatchet-wielding fervor. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported on a plan to scale back U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, and eliminate programs related to human rights, war crimes, and democracy-building. “Non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” Rubio tweeted on Tuesday.

But a review of USAID programs shows that, while following the DOGE playbook in public, the secretary of state has quietly safeguarded Cuban regime change programs aligned with the island’s exile base that has long powered his rise.

One of these programs is the anti-communist publication CubaNet, based out of Miami, which saw its nearly $2 million grant cut, then restored. “Our goal has always been to counteract the propaganda of the Castro regime. Without this funding, the government in Havana will have greater freedom to intensify its propaganda and repression,” the news site’s director Roberto Hechavarría Pilia said before the cash was turned back on.

A grant to the Pan American Development Foundation for “independent media and free flow of information” in Cuba was also listed as reinstated on federal contracting sites. Two people familiar with the program cuts told the Prospect that exceptions were made after Cuban exile groups lobbied the State Department to reverse their grant determinations.

http://archive.today/2025.04.21-151945/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/google-search-remedies-hearing.html

The Justice Department said on Monday that the best way to address Google’s monopoly in internet search was to break up the $1.81 trillion company, kicking off a three-week hearing that could reshape the technology giant and alter the power players in Silicon Valley.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. He is now hearing arguments from the government and the company over how to best fix Google’s monopoly and is expected to order those measures, referred to as “remedies,” by the end of the summer.

In an opening statement in the hearing on Monday, the government said Judge Mehta should force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser, which drives users to its search engine. Government lawyers also said the company should take steps to give competitors a leg up if the court wants to restore competition to the moribund market for online search.

The outcome in the case, U.S. v. Google, could drastically change the Silicon Valley behemoth. Google faces mounting challenges, including a breakup of its ad technology business after a different federal judge ruled last week that the company held a monopoly over some of the tools that websites use to sell open ad space. In 2023, Google also lost an antitrust suit brought by the maker of the video game Fortnite, which accused the tech giant of violating competition laws with its Play app store.

The Justice Department’s actions signal that the Trump administration plans to maintain government scrutiny of the tech industry. Apple, Meta and Amazon also face antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. government, with Meta in the second week of a trial over whether it illegally stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they were young companies.

The case over Google search was filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration. In 2023, Judge Mehta oversaw an eight-week trial in which the government argued that Google had subverted competition by striking deals to be the preselected search engine in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. The company paid $26.3 billion to companies like Apple and Samsung as part of those deals in 2021.

The government said those deals locked in Google’s control, putting its search engine in front of consumers looking for information, which gave the company more data to improve its search engine. That then attracted more consumers, entrenching the company’s dominance, the government said.

http://archive.today/2025.04.03-150445/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/europe/russia-envoy-us-visit-trump-dmitriev.html

A Kremlin envoy said on Thursday that he was meeting with the Trump administration in Washington this week, the first time in years that a senior Russian official was known to have traveled to the United States for talks with American counterparts.

The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation.

He said on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday that he had met with “representatives of the administration of President Donald Trump” on Wednesday and would do so again on Thursday.

There was no immediate comment from the Trump administration about Mr. Dmitriev’s post.

Mr. Dmitriev’s visit came despite sanctions imposed by the Biden administration that described him as “a known Putin ally.” It also came as President Trump excluded Russia from the roster of countries hit by the steep tariffs unveiled on Wednesday.

Mr. Dmitriev did not specify whom he was meeting with, but his main known American counterpart in recent weeks has been Steve Witkoff, the close friend of Mr. Trump who is the White House envoy for the Middle East and Russia.

Mr. Dmitriev, a 49-year-old former banker who studied at Stanford and Harvard and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a key emissary for Mr. Putin in the Kremlin’s efforts to build a close relationship with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Dmitriev’s message, tailored to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set, has been that the United States stands to profit from closer ties with Russia.

In February, Mr. Dmitriev worked with Mr. Witkoff to help broker a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Moscow.

In talks with Mr. Witkoff and other American officials in Saudi Arabia days later, Mr. Dmitriev claimed that U.S. companies had incurred $324 billion in losses by pulling out of Russia after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Dmitriev said in his social media post on Thursday that his meetings were about restoring the U.S.-Russian dialogue. The relationship had been “completely destroyed under the Biden administration,” he wrote, and the United States could benefit from cooperation “in international affairs and in the economy.”

“A real understanding of the Russian position opens up new opportunities for constructive interaction, including in the investment and economic sphere,” Mr. Dmitriev said.

He made no mention of the negotiations over the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Those talks appear to have run aground in recent days, with Mr. Putin having rebuffed the proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day cease-fire.

Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” over some of Mr. Putin’s comments about Ukraine, raising the possibility that the American president could drop his efforts to rebuild ties with Russia.

But Mr. Dmitriev’s visit indicated that the Trump administration was continuing to reverse the Biden administration’s isolation of Russia on the diplomatic stage.

In another sign of continuing engagement between Washington and Moscow, Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said this week that preparations were underway for a second round of talks aimed at easing the work of American and Russian diplomats operating in each other’s countries.

U.S. and Russian officials first met in Istanbul on Feb. 27 for talks on unwinding years of tit-for-tat restrictions that reduced the American mission in Russia and the Russian mission in the United States to skeleton staffs.

“We can see signs of progress and our U.S. partners’ willingness to lift these obstacles to the normal work of diplomats in our respective capitals,” Mr. Lavrov said.

http://archive.today/2025.04.18-233234/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/us/politics/trump-rubio-putin-ukraine.html

“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on.”

Whatever Mr. Rubio’s meaning, his words were the latest American gift to Mr. Putin’s cause. At every turn since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, he or his top national security aides have issued statements that played to Russia’s advantage: taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table, repeatedly declaring that Ukraine would have to give up territory and even blaming Ukraine for the invasion itself.

On Friday, Mr. Trump himself suggested that the United States could walk away from the conflict, much as it did when frustrated in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indeed, in an interview with The New York Times in the spring of 2016, when he was first running for president, Mr. Trump described Ukraine as Europe’s problem. “I’m all for Ukraine; I have friends that live in Ukraine,” he said.

But Mr. Trump added: “When the Ukrainian problem arose, you know, not so long ago, and we were, and Russia was getting very confrontational, it didn’t seem to me like anyone else cared other than us. And we are the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we’re the farthest away.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth struck a similar tone in February, when he declared on his first official trip to Europe that Ukraine would not enter NATO for the foreseeable future, that Russia would likely keep the 20 percent or so of Ukraine it had seized, and that any peacekeeping or “tripwire” force in Ukraine to monitor a cease-fire would not include Americans.

Mr. Trump’s distrust of Mr. Zelensky remains as strong as ever. “I’m not a fan,” he told Ms. Meloni in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday.

There is virtually no serious discussion underway at the White House or on Capitol Hill about the next package of arms for Ukraine when the current support, which was pushed through in the last months of the Biden administration, runs its course, according to congressional supporters of Ukraine.

European officials say they have not even received assurances that the United States will continue its extensive intelligence sharing for Ukraine, which has been key to its ability to target Russian troops and infrastructure.

In fact, when the White House talks about its relationship with Ukraine these days, it is usually in terms of what it is getting, not what it plans to give. Since the Oval Office blowup, the United States and Ukraine have been renegotiating a deal for American investment and access to Ukrainian minerals, rare earths and other mining projects.

It has taken the better part of six weeks to rewrite the deal that was left unsigned at the White House that day. But Mr. Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week that they would sign a substitute agreement next Thursday.

The deal Mr. Trump really covets is one with Russia. But getting there requires getting past Ukraine — either by declaring a cease-fire, or just setting the problem aside.

Some experts argue that even if Mr. Trump makes that huge shift, it likely will not work. They doubt Mr. Putin is ready to limit his ties to China, Iran and North Korea — countries that fuel the war effort with technology, drones and, in North Korea’s case, troops.

In several interviews, including one with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Witkoff described the benefits of a broader relationship with Russia, one that would essentially normalize relations. When Mr. Carlson asked about Mr. Putin’s broader ambitions to take all of Ukraine and perhaps seek to reabsorb some of the former Soviet republics, Mr. Witkoff dismissed the idea. He said he was “100 percent” certain that Mr. Putin has no desire to overrun Europe, or even to control Ukraine.

“Why would they want to absorb Ukraine?” he asked. “That would be like occupying Gaza.”

http://archive.today/2025.04.18-123341/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/politics/trump-israel-iran-nuclear.html

Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month but was waved off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program, according to administration officials and others briefed on the discussions.

Mr. Trump made his decision after months of internal debate over whether to pursue diplomacy or support Israel in seeking to set back Iran’s ability to build a bomb, at a time when Iran has been weakened militarily and economically.

The debate highlighted fault lines between historically hawkish American cabinet officials and other aides more skeptical that a military assault on Iran could destroy the country’s nuclear ambitions and avoid a larger war. It resulted in a rough consensus, for now, against military action, with Iran signaling a willingness to negotiate.

In a meeting this month — one of several discussions about the Israeli plan — Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, presented a new intelligence assessment that said the buildup of American weaponry could potentially spark a wider conflict with Iran that the United States did not want.

A range of officials echoed Ms. Gabbard’s concerns in the various meetings. Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; and Vice President JD Vance all voiced doubts about the attack.

Even Mr. Waltz, frequently one of the most hawkish voices on Iran, was skeptical that Israel’s plan could succeed without substantial American assistance.

http://archive.today/2025.04.18-150937/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/us/politics/trump-national-security.html

This month, a network of pro-Russian websites began a campaign aimed at undermining confidence in the U.S. defense industry, according to disinformation analysts.

The F-35 fighter jet was one target. The effort, coordinated by a Russian group known as Portal Kombat, spread rumors that American allies purchasing the warplanes would not have complete control over them, the analysts said.

A study by analysts at Alethea, an anti-disinformation company that has tracked the F-35 campaign, indicates that pro-Russian outlets are already stepping up their propaganda efforts.

“The U.S. government at least publicly seems to be taking a more hands-off approach or prioritizing defense against other threats,” said Lisa Kaplan, Alethea’s chief executive. “So foreign governments are currently targeting government and military programs like the F-35 program — if they can’t beat it on the battlefield, beat it through influencing political discourse and disinformation.”

Alethea found that Russian-controlled websites began pushing narratives after China restricted the export of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs. The messages claimed that the United States faced a strategic vulnerability that could affect its ability to manufacture the F-35 and other weapons systems.

The Russian postings said that America’s willingness to allow manufacturing to move overseas had made its military edge unsustainable. The websites also amplified the message that U.S. allies no longer trusted that American defense companies would be reliable suppliers.

In the past, U.S. cybersecurity agencies would counter such campaigns by calling them out to raise public awareness. The F.B.I. would warn social media companies of inauthentic accounts so they could be removed. And, at times, U.S. Cyber Command would try to take Russian troll farms that create disinformation offline, at least temporarily.

But President Trump has fired General Timothy D. Haugh, a four-star general with years of experience countering Russian online propaganda, from his posts leading U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.

The F.B.I. has shut down its foreign influence task force. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ended its efforts to expose disinformation. And this week the State Department put employees who tracked global disinformation on leave, shutting down the effort that had publicized the spread of Chinese and Russian propaganda.

Almost three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, the guardrails intended to prevent national security missteps have come down as the new team races to anticipate and amplify the wishes of an unpredictable president. The result has been a diminished role for national security expertise, even in the most consequential foreign policy decisions.

“Right now, the N.S.C. is at the absolute nadir of its influence in modern times,” said David Rothkopf, the author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”

Mr. Trump is skeptical of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so the Pentagon is considering plans to hand over U.S. command of NATO troops. The president is close to the tech billionaire Elon Musk, so the Pentagon invited him to view plans in the event of a war with China in the Pentagon “tank,” a meeting space reserved for secure classified meetings (the White House stopped Mr. Musk from getting the China briefing).

Mr. Trump fired the director of the National Security Agency and six National Security Council officials on the advice of Laura Loomer, a far-right activist. Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, appeared to have little influence over the dismissals.

“When somebody with no knowledge can come in and level accusations at the N.S.C. senior directors, and Waltz can’t defend them, what does that say?” asked John R. Bolton, one of those who had Mr. Waltz’s job in Mr. Trump’s first term.

Last Tuesday afternoon, just six days after Mark Zuckerberg’s third meeting with Donald Trump this year, the Meta CEO’s key antagonists in the federal government arrived in the Oval Office.

The visitors were Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Meta in a trial that begins today; and Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general who is responsible for the Justice Department’s anti-trust enforcement.

Ferguson and Slater were there, a person familiar with the meeting said, to stiffen Trump’s spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta. The social media giant has pushed the president to settle a lawsuit that began in his first term, and continued through the Biden years, which seeks to force the company to divest Instagram and Whatsapp. (The FTC is an independent agency, but both Meta and many of its foes have prepared for Trump to shape the handling of the lawsuit.)

On Monday, during an election campaign-style rally in Nampa, Idaho Senator Bernie Sanders had two anti-genocide protesters ejected from the event by police for unfurling a banner depicting the Palestinian flag with the phrase “Free Palestine.” As the protesters were dragged away by police, thousands in the arena erupted into cheers of “Free Palestine,” drowning out Sanders’ attempts to quell their anger.

For nearly two months, tens of thousands of people across the United States have been attending rallies held under the banner of “Fighting Oligarchy” and headlined by Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

However, it is necessary to take stock of the political tendencies claiming to be “fighting oligarchy.” What role—if any—should Sanders, his protégé Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Party play in this struggle?

The episode in Nampa, Idaho, helps answer this question. Under conditions in which Israel is systematically exterminating, starving and ethnically cleansing the entire population of Gaza, Sanders declared at the rally that Israel “has the right to defend itself.”

As Sanders said these words, two rally attendees dropped a Palestinian flag banner over the giant American flag that was positioned behind the stage.

At the sight of the banner, the packed auditorium roared in approval, with many standing and cheering in extended applause.

An order was quickly given by Sanders’ campaign to have the banner removed. Local police ripped down the banner and detained those who unfurled it. Sanders did not tell the cops to leave the anti-genocide protesters alone, doing nothing to protect them even as the crowd continued to protest the police assault.

Amid growing boos and chants from the crowd, Sanders raised his hands and said, “Shhhhhh!” This had the opposite effect; thousands began chanting, “Free Palestine! Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” with many raising their fists in solidarity.

For the last 18 months, the Democratic Party, in alliance with the Republicans, has armed, funded and politically backed the genocide in Gaza. In the opening months of the genocide, both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez vocally opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, with Sanders declaring in November 2023, “I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, [a] permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas.”

Ocasio-Cortez publicly backed US arms sales to Israel, declaring, “on the sole principle of Iron Dome and defense, I absolutely think there’s an openness, for sure.” Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Biden in 2020 and, after he had orchestrated the Gaza genocide, in 2024.

http://archive.today/2025.04.16-160823/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-protesters.html

A town hall for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia outside of Atlanta on Tuesday quickly deteriorated into chaos, as police officers forcibly removed several protesters.

Ms. Greene, a Republican firebrand and loyal ally of President Trump, had barely reached the podium to speak when a man in the crowd at the Acworth Community Center stood up and started yelling, booing and jeering at her. As her supporters stood and clapped, several police officers grabbed the man, later identified by the police as Andrew Russell Nelms of Atlanta, and dragged him out of the room.

“I can’t breathe!” Mr. Nelms shouted, interjecting with expletives as he was told to put his arms behind his back. The police then used a stun gun on him twice.

Back inside the room, Ms. Greene was unfazed as she greeted attendees at the event, in Acworth, Ga., northwest of Atlanta. She thanked the officers, drawing applause from the crowd of about 150 people.

“If you want to shout and chant, we will have you removed just like that man was thrown out,” she said. “We will not tolerate it!”

Minutes later, as Ms. Greene started to play a video of former President Barack Obama discussing the national debt, police forcibly removed and used a stun gun on a second man, identified later as Johnny Keith Williams of Dallas, Ga., who had stood up and started to heckle.

Over the next hour, as Ms. Greene trumpeted the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government and played clips of herself railing against witnesses in committee hearings, police officers escorted at least six people from the room, according to a spokesman for the Acworth Police Department. Three people, including the two who were subdued with stun guns, were arrested.

http://archive.today/2025.04.15-201702/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/richard-l-armitage-dead.html

Richard L. Armitage, who served as the No. 2 official at the State Department from 2001 to 2005, during the turbulent era of the 9/11 attacks and the start of America’s retaliatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Sunday. He was 79.

Mr. Armitage was the unnamed source of a 2003 news account disclosing the identity of a secret Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. The George W. Bush administration had made the case for war based on exaggerated claims that the country was tied to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and harbored weapons of mass destruction.

Ms. Wilson was publicly named a week after her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion column in The New York Times accusing President Bush of misleadingly claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.

Mr. Wilson, a former state department official, accused the Bush administration of outing his wife in retaliation for his criticism.

Mr. Armitage, a 1967 graduate of the United States Naval Academy who saw action in Vietnam, served in senior roles in the State and Defense Departments during the Reagan administration. In the 2000 election, he advised the inexperienced Mr. Bush as part of a group that called itself “the Vulcans” — hawkish foreign policy insiders from earlier Republican administrations.

Condoleezza Rice, a leader of the group, became Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. Mr. Armitage was confirmed by the Senate as the deputy secretary of state under Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the Vulcans, who also included Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, led the aggressive American response, Mr. Armitage spoke with a Pakistani general, seeking support in what would become an American-led war on terror.

The president of Pakistani*, Pervez Musharraf, later told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” that Mr. Armitage had threatened to bomb his country “back to the Stone Age” if it didn’t support the United States. Mr. Armitage denied that he had threatened military action against Pakistan.

Following his graduation from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, he served on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. He then volunteered to serve as an adviser to Vietnamese forces, and he became conversant in Vietnamese during three tours with Vietnamese troops. He earned a Bronze Star.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Mr. Armitage led a flotilla of 30,000 Vietnamese evacuees to safe harbor in the Philippines, according to a Naval Academy biography.

He was a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan and then served as an assistant secretary for defense for East Asia and the Pacific. In 1983, he became assistant secretary of defense for security policy.

Under President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Armitage served as an ambassador to East European states after the fall of the Soviet Union. He founded Armitage International after leaving government in 2005 and ran it until his death.

In the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Armitage endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump. Four years later, he was one of more than 130 former Republican national security officials who signed a statement calling Mr. Trump “dangerously unfit” to serve a second term. He endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 race.

* Sic.

http://archive.today/2025.04.15-002855/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/china-critical-minerals-risk-military-programs.html

On Air Force fighter jets, magnets made of rare earth minerals that are mined or processed in China are needed to start the engines and provide emergency power.

On precision-guided ballistic missiles favored by the Army, magnets containing Chinese rare earth materials rotate the tail fins that allow missiles to home in on small or moving targets. And on new electric and battery-powered drones being adapted by Marines, rare earth magnets are irreplaceable in the compact electric motors.

China’s decision to retaliate against President Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs by ordering restrictions on the exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets is a warning shot across the bow of American national security, industry and defense experts said.

In announcing that it will now require special export licenses for six heavy rare earth metals, which are refined entirely in China, as well as rare earth magnets, 90 percent of which are produced in China, Beijing has reminded the Pentagon — if, indeed, it needed reminding — that a wide swath of American weaponry is dependent on China.

They are present in almost every form of American defense technology. They can form very powerful magnets, for use in fighter jets, warships, missiles, tanks and lasers. Yttrium is required for high-temperature jet engine coatings; it allows thermal barrier coatings on turbine blades to stop aircraft engines from melting midflight.

According to the Defense Department, every F-35 fighter contains around 900 pounds of rare earth materials. Some submarines need more than 9,200 pounds of the materials.

Across the American defense industry, aerospace and weapons companies have small stockpiles of the rare earths — the industry term for the 17 elements. That is enough, defense industry analysts say, to meet their needs for months rather than years.

The Pentagon also has stockpiles of some rare earths, but those reserves are not enough to sustain defense companies indefinitely, one official said.

China has flexed its muscle over the rare earth supply chain in the past. In 2010, Beijing halted rare earths trade with Japan following Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain. The Chinese move caught the attention of the United States, alerting it to the threat posed by China’s control over the minerals’ supply chain.

In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting U.S. domestic production, and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. followed suit during his administration, allocating even more money for rare earth extraction and refinement facilities.

http://archive.today/2025.04.14-031733/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/world/americas/ecuador-election.html

Ecuador’s president, who unexpectedly surged in the polls to secure a shortened term in 2023, was declared the victor of the presidential election with a decisive lead on Sunday in a race that showed voters’ faith in his vows to tackle the security crisis with an iron fist.

Daniel Noboa, 37, defeated Luisa González, 47, the handpicked successor of former President Rafael Correa.

The day before the election, Mr. Noboa declared a state of emergency in seven states, most of them González strongholds, raising fears that he was trying to suppress the vote among her supporters. The declaration restricts social activities and allows police and military to enter homes without permission.

The president said the measure was in response to violence in certain parts of Ecuador. Ms. González described it as an attempt to curb political participation.

“Declaring a state of emergency in the middle of an electoral process due to alleged serious internal unrest is very questionable,” said Mauricio Alarcón Salvador, the director of Transparency International’s chapter in Ecuador, who added that the decision should be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

But he said that any claims of electoral fraud “must be substantiated,” something he saw as less likely given Mr. Noboa’s large margin of victory. “It cannot and should not be simply an assertion thrown into the air.”

Mr. Noboa received 56 percent of the vote, compared with Ms. González’s 44 percent, with more than 97 percent of votes counted on Sunday evening, according to official figures.

Mr. Noboa, a Harvard-educated heir to a multibillion-dollar banana empire, took office in 2023 after his predecessor called for early elections amid impeachment proceedings.

http://archive.today/2025.04.13-091244/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/world/europe/ukraine-petro-poroshenko-zelensky-politics.html

On the first day of Russia’s all-out invasion, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his main political opponent at home shook hands, setting aside their ferocious rivalry to focus on the enemy. The country’s typically raucous politics went largely dormant for the three years that followed.

Now, as peace talks led by the Trump administration have stirred prospects for a cease-fire and eventual elections, the political jockeying has returned.

Petro O. Poroshenko, a former Ukrainian president and the leader of a rival party, says that the best way to smooth the peace talks is to bring opposition figures into the government.

Mr. Zelensky has shown no interest in forming a coalition of ministers that would include opposition figures. Instead, his government has ratcheted up pressure on opponents by law enforcement and security agencies.

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, has said Mr. Zelensky abused martial law powers to overrule the city council. In January, Ukraine’s national security council froze Mr. Poroshenko’s bank accounts while leveling no specific accusations.

Mr. Zelensky’s five-year term, which was set to expire last year, was extended under martial law. Elections are legally banned under martial law and impractical as long as Ukraine remains at war.

http://archive.today/2025.04.11-155258/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/us-china-tariffs-trump-xi.html

President Trump didn’t seem to mind as his worldwide tariffs set off stock market sell-offs and wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth. “Be cool,” he told Americans.

Then he blinked on Wednesday afternoon in the face of financial turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields that could shake the dominant position of the dollar and the foundation of the U.S. economy.

By pausing some tariffs for dozens of countries for 90 days, he also gave away something to his main rival, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with whom he’s engaged in a game of chicken that risks decoupling the world’s two biggest economies and turning the global economic order upside down.

Mr. Xi learned that his adversary has a pain point.

As the world learned this week, Mr. Trump cannot completely ignore the financial markets or the Wall Street and tech billionaires who supported his campaign. They reached out to his cabinet members to convey their concerns. Even loyalists like Elon Musk and William A. Ackman, the hedge fund manager, expressed their disagreement with the president’s tariff policies.

It’s hard to imagine that any Chinese entrepreneur would dare to do the same, or like Mr. Musk, have the channel to convey their concerns to Mr. Xi, who has pushed aside his political opponents and cracked down on private companies. If Mr. Trump aspires for absolute power like Mr. Xi, he has a long way to go.

“Tariffs and even economic sanctions are not Xi Jinping’s pressure points,” Hao Qun, an exiled Chinese novelist who writes under the name Murong Xuecun, wrote on X. “He is not particularly concerned about the hardships tariffs may cause for ordinary people.”

Some commentators online evoked the Great Leap Forward to show the Communist Party’s ability to enforce austerity at times of difficulty. The party waged the campaign between 1958 and 1962 to rapidly industrialize China. Its policies defied science and the laws of nature, resulting in a famine and tens of millions of deaths.

While starving people in the countryside were resorting to cannibalism, Chairman Mao instructed the farmers to eat grain bran and edible wild plants. “Endure hardship for one year, two years, even three years, and we’ll turn things around,” he said.

Mr. Xi, whom some Chinese view as Mao’s successor to the mantle, likes talking about the benefits of withstanding hardship.

In a state media article about Mr. Xi’s expectations for the young generation, the word “hardship” was mentioned 37 times.

http://archive.today/2025.04.11-094029/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/world/europe/ukraine-trump-witkoff-talks.html

President Trump’s senior aide on Russia negotiations, Steve Witkoff, arrived in Russia on Friday, the Kremlin said, as American and Russian officials are trying to reignite talks over the war in Ukraine that have appeared stalled in recent weeks.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters that Mr. Witkoff had flown into Russia but refused to say whether the envoy would meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Earlier, the Kremlin said that Mr. Putin would be working away from Moscow on Friday.

If a meeting takes place, it would be Mr. Witkoff’s third with Mr. Putin since Moscow and Washington began working to reset the relationship and find ways to end the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Witkoff recently became the first senior American official to travel to Moscow to meet with Mr. Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. The Biden administration cut off contact with Mr. Putin and accused him of committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

Delegated by Mr. Trump as his trusted envoy, Mr. Witkoff has seemed to pursue a different approach. After his first meeting in the Kremlin, Mr. Witkoff said that he had tried to develop “a friendship, a relationship” with Mr. Putin.

http://archive.today/2025.04.10-213539/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/technology/personaltech/iphone-16e-pixel-9a-cheaper-phone-models.html

With all the talk about tariffs driving up costs, the word “cheaper” should bring comfort to just about anyone. That’s why I’m delighted to share that the cheaper smartphone from Google has arrived, a few months after Apple released a somewhat cheaper entry-level iPhone — and that both products are very good.

Google this week released the Pixel 9a, the $500 sibling of its $800 flagship smartphone, the Pixel 9. It competes directly with the $600 iPhone 16e released in February, the cheaper version of Apple’s $800 iPhone 16.

Is it a wise idea to save some bucks, or better to spend more on the fancier phones? To find out, I strapped on a fanny pack and carried all four phones with me for the last week to run tests.

http://archive.today/2025.04.08-114113/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/world/middleeast/trump-netanyahu-israel-gaza.html

There was a time, not long ago, when Israel’s resumption of the war in the Gaza Strip three weeks ago — a renewed offensive that has already claimed more than a thousand casualties — would have unleashed fierce Western pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister.

The condemnations would have been swift, in public and in backroom conversations. The demands for restraint would have come from Europe and the White House, where during four years, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. sometimes tried, and often failed, to contain Mr. Netanyahu’s impulses.

Now Mr. Biden is gone, and President Trump has made it clear that he has no intention of continuing the finger-wagging of his predecessor. Europe is distracted by Mr. Trump’s trade war, and Mr. Netanyahu has consolidated his coalition’s majority in Israel’s Parliament, giving him more political space to act.

http://archive.today/2025.04.08-164425/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/world/europe/iran-nuclear-sanctions-trump.html

Talks between the United States and Iran, which President Trump said on Monday would begin on Saturday in Oman, face considerable problems of substance and well-earned mistrust.

While Mr. Trump has recently threatened Iran with “bombing the likes of which they have never seen before,” he has also made it clear that he prefers a diplomatic deal. That reassurance — made in the Oval Office sitting next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who has pressed for military action — will be welcomed widely in the Arab world.

Even if the target is the Islamic Republic of Iran, with all of its ambitions for regional hegemony, Arab countries from Egypt through the Gulf fear the economic and social consequences of an American and Israeli war, especially as the killing in Gaza continues.

A bombing campaign would most likely prompt serious Iranian counterattacks on American and Israeli targets and Gulf infrastructure, like Saudi oil facilities, which no Arab nation in the region wants to see. It could also prompt Iran to weaponize its nuclear program and build a bomb.

Already, the United States has moved more long-range stealthy B-2 bombers into range and dispatched a second aircraft carrier, the Carl Vinson, into the region, while initiating a major bombing campaign against the Houthis, Iran’s allies, which is seen as a message from Washington.

Mr. Netanyahu said on Monday in the Oval Office that he sought a deal “the way it was done in Libya,” referring to 2003, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then the leader, agreed to eliminate all of his country’s weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear-weapons program. If Mr. Trump “seeks to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program Libya-style, in addition to closing down Iran’s missile program and Tehran’s relations with its regional partners, then diplomacy will most likely be dead on arrival,” argued Trita Parsi, an Iran expert at the Quincy Institute.

http://archive.today/2025.04.07-102818/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/usaid-foreign-aid-gay-trans.html

The Trump administration has now dismantled two key institutions of American soft power: the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. On March 28 the administration announced that it would be reducing the staff at U.S.A.I.D., the main agency for distributing foreign aid, to about 15 positions — down from the roughly 10,000 people it employed before Donald Trump returned to the White House. In January, the administration stopped $239 million in congressional appropriations for the N.E.D., a largely government-funded nonprofit with a mission of advancing democratic change.

Both programs were creations of the Cold War that long enjoyed support from leading Republicans and Democrats, embodying the adage that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” But Mr. Trump’s assault on these programs indicates that this truism no longer holds. Survey data from December suggest how politicized the issue has become: Nearly 75 percent of Republicans said foreign aid should decrease, compared to only a third of Democrats.

To understand why American soft power became so politically vulnerable, it helps to understand the damage progressives did to its broad legitimacy over the past decade and a half. They did this by implicating soft-power institutions in domestic political controversies, especially on issues of sexual politics. They conflated American interests overseas with progressive priorities, using taxpayer money to advance a set of claims over which Americans strongly disagree.

Consider how progressives discuss the war in Ukraine. When liberals like Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland celebrate support for Ukraine in part as an effort to fight “anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-trans hatred,” they imply that the reason to oppose Russia is not just its unlawful invasion of another country but also its failure to embrace a progressive understanding of sexuality. Even if one agrees with Mr. Raskin’s views on trans rights, there is something awkward about suggesting that it is worth going to war for a cause that many citizens of the United States do not support.

http://archive.today/2025.04.05-102147/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/trump-loomer-haugh-cyberattacks-elections.html

When President Trump abruptly fired the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command on Thursday, it was the latest in a series of moves that have torn away at the country’s cyberdefenses just as they are confronting the most sophisticated and sustained attacks in the nation’s history.

The commander, General Timothy D. Haugh, had sat atop the enormous infrastructure of American cyberdefenses until his removal, apparently under pressure from the far-right Trump loyalist Laura Loomer. He had been among the American officials most deeply involved in pushing back on Russia, dating to his work countering Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election.

His dismissal came after weeks in which the Trump administration swept away nearly all of the government’s election-related cyberdefenses beyond the secure N.S.A. command centers at Fort Meade, Md. At the same time, the administration has shrunk much of the nation’s complex early-warning system for cyberattacks, a web through which tech firms work with the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies to protect the power grid, pipelines and telecommunications networks.

http://archive.today/2025.04.04-061717/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/technology/eu-penalties-x-elon-musk.html

European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, for breaking a landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation, said four people with knowledge of the plans, a move that is likely to ratchet up tensions with the United States by targeting one of President Trump’s closest advisers.

The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. These are expected to be announced this summer and would be the first issued under a new E.U. law intended to force social media companies to police their services, they said.

The European Union and X could still reach a settlement if the company agrees to changes that satisfy regulators’ concerns, the officials said.

X also faces a second E.U. investigation that is broader and that could lead to further penalties. In that investigation, two people said, E.U. officials are building a case that X’s hands-off approach to policing user-generated content has made it a hub of illegal hate speech, disinformation and other material that is viewed as undercutting democracy across the 27-nation bloc.

https://archive.ph/tUY7f#selection-1425.1-1425.517

Today, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a widely anticipated—and feared—plan to downsize his massive department. Expected to begin tomorrow, the move will cut 10,000 employees across HHS agencies, in addition to the 10,000 who already left since President Donald Trump took office—a total loss of about one-quarter of the HHS workforce. It will also consolidate many administrative offices and break off some functions, which will be merged into a new HHS agency.

Recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Massachusetts, coupled with policy changes spearheaded by Democratic Governor Maura Healey, underscore the deepening collaboration of Democratic Party leaders with the Trump administration’s fascistic immigration agenda. While claiming opposition to Trump’s policies, Democrats have aligned themselves with measures that scapegoat migrants and undermine the democratic rights of the working class.

Between March 18 and March 23, ICE conducted a major enforcement operation across Massachusetts, arresting 370 individuals. The agency claimed to target “dangerous alien offenders,” including alleged members of transnational gangs like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. In fact, the operation swept up individuals with minor offenses or tenuous connections to criminal activity, further criminalizing undocumented immigrants.

Local radio station WBUR reported that civil rights activists dispute how ICE characterized its operation and quoted Neenah Estrella-Lune of East Boston, who said it was likely that many of the people apprehended have only minor criminal records.

“The overwhelming majority of the people are not criminals in that way,” she said. “They’re people who, at worst, they overstay their visa and—Oh, God forbid, they’re painting people’s homes.”