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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.

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