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https://ghostarchive.org/archive/2tIbi

Ukraine secured a $1.7 billion military support package from Canada at the summit, but little else. Mr. Zelensky canceled a news conference scheduled for Tuesday evening. A spokesman for Mr. Zelensky did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Carney’s statement said the Group of 7 leaders had “expressed support for President Trump’s efforts to achieve a just and lasting peace in Ukraine” and were “resolute in exploring all options to maximize pressure on Russia, including financial sanctions.”

Addressing the Middle East conflict, the leaders called Iran “the principal source of regional instability and terror,” according to the statement, which added, “We urge that the resolution of the Iranian crisis leads to a broader de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, including a cease-fire in Gaza.”

Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany told a news outlet during the summit that Israel was doing Western powers’ “dirty work” by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. President Emmanuel Macron of France, by contrast, warned on Tuesday against using the conflict to force through regime change in Tehran.

“We don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Macron told reporters. “But the biggest error would be to use military strikes to change the regime because it would then be chaos.”

Mr. Carney held significant direct talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, in which they agreed to restore diplomatic relations. The two nations expelled each other’s top diplomats last year, part of the fallout from Canada’s accusation that India had sanctioned the assassination of a Sikh activist in Canada.

Many of the leaders who attended the Group of 7 talks will be together again in Brussels next week for a NATO summit, which is expected to focus on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Mr. Carney said that overall, the meeting in Kananaskis had been a useful display of cooperation at a critical time.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/SoPvR

To save its takeover of U.S. Steel, Japan’s Nippon Steel agreed to an unusual arrangement, granting the White House a “golden share” that gives the government an extraordinary amount of influence over a U.S. company.

New details of the agreement show that the structure would give President Trump and his successors a permanent stake in U.S. Steel, significant sway over its board and veto power over a wide array of company actions, an arrangement that could change the nature of foreign investment in the United States.

Under the terms of the national security pact, which the companies said they signed Friday, the U.S. government would retain a single share of preferred stock, called class G — as in gold. And U.S. Steel’s charter will list nearly a dozen activities the company cannot undertake without the approval of the American president or someone he designates in his stead.

Activities requiring the president’s permission include the company transferring production or jobs outside the United States, closing or idling plants before agreed-upon time frames and making certain changes to how it sources its raw materials.

Under the terms of the deal with the steel companies, the president could exert significant influence over U.S. Steel’s board. The president has the authority to directly appoint one of the board’s three independent directors, and approve or reject appointments for the other two, the two people familiar with the negotiations said.

The golden share in U.S. Steel cannot be transferred or sold by a future president, they said. They also described the share as “noneconomic,” meaning that it would not affect the size of other U.S. Steel shareholders’ stakes or give the U.S. government the chance to directly profit from U.S. Steel in the form of dividends.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/TXxp4

The latest round of talks between the United States and Iran on the future of Iran’s nuclear program has been canceled, officials said on Saturday.

The two countries had been scheduled to meet for a sixth round of negotiations on Sunday in Muscat, the capital of Oman. But that diplomacy has been scuttled by the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran, which began with Israeli airstrikes on Friday. Israel’s attacks have targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities, top military commanders and senior nuclear program officials.

The senior Iranian figures killed by Israel included Ali Shamkhani, a former secretary of the Supreme National Council, who was overseeing the talks as part of a committee named by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Earlier Saturday, Iran had appeared to adopt a slightly ambiguous stance on further negotiations, calling the talks “meaningless” while also suggesting that a final decision on whether to participate was still pending.

But Iran’s stance hardened as the day went on, with Ismail Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, telling reporters at a news conference in Tehran that Iranian participation would be suspended until Israel halts its attacks.

“Iran’s leadership will be wise to negotiate at this time,” McCoy Pitt, a senior State Department official, said in a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Friday focused on the crisis.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8qvpv

An aid group in Gaza backed by Israel and the United States said that on Wednesday night a bus carrying some of its Palestinian workers was attacked by Hamas, leaving at least five people dead and others injured.

At the time of the attack, the bus was carrying about two dozen of the group’s workers and was en route to an aid distribution site in southern Gaza, according to a statement from the group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Some of the workers “may have been taken hostage,” it said, adding that it was still gathering information.

“We condemn this heinous and deliberate attack in the strongest possible terms,” said the foundation, which is run by American contractors. “These were aid workers. Humanitarians. Fathers, brothers, sons, and friends, who were risking their lives every day to help others.”

The New York Times could not independently verify the attack. Hamas did not comment on the accusation that it had attacked workers from the group, and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The foundation said it held the militant group “fully responsible” for the deaths of “dedicated workers who have been distributing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.” The group called on the international community to condemn Hamas for the attack.

“Tonight, the world must see this for what it is: an attack on humanity,” it said.

http://archive.today/2025.06.11-113426/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/world/middleeast/israel-knesset-vote-orthodox-draft-law.html

Israel’s opposition parties said they would bring a motion to dissolve Parliament to a vote on Wednesday, presenting the most serious challenge yet to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and raising the specter of early elections.

If the motion passes, it is unlikely that the government will fall immediately. The parliamentary process before any final vote could take months, giving the prime minister time to shore up his increasingly fractious governing coalition or set his own agenda for a return to the ballot box. But it would deal a heavy blow to his political credibility.

The opposition parties are exploiting a crisis within the governing coalition over the contentious, decades-old policy that exempts ultra-Orthodox men who are studying religion in seminaries from compulsory military service.

http://archive.today/2025.06.11-204837/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/us/politics/iran-us-iraq-diplomats-middle-east.html

The State Department has decided to reduce its diplomatic presence in Iraq, the department said in a statement on Wednesday, as tensions across the Middle East spiked amid signs that nuclear diplomacy between the United States and Iran may be deadlocked.

Word of the U.S. decision, along with a warning from the United Kingdom about new threats to Middle East commercial shipping, came hours after President Trump said in a podcast released Wednesday that he has grown “less confident” about the prospects for a deal with Iran that would limit its ability to develop nuclear weapons. American and Iranian negotiators have been planning to meet later this week for another round of talks, although Mr. Trump told reporters on Monday that Iran had adopted an “unacceptable” negotiating position.

The British warning came from the country’s maritime trade agency, which issued a public advisory saying that it had “been made aware of increased tensions within the region which could lead to an escalation of military activity having a direct impact on mariners.” The advisory urged commercial vessels transiting the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz to use heightened caution.

The sense of alarm was heightened by comments from Iran’s defense minister, General Aziz Nasirzadeh, who warned on Wednesday that in the event of a conflict following failed nuclear talks, the United States would suffer heavy losses from Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East. His comments were reported by Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency.

The State Department did not provide details on how many personnel would be removed from Iraq, or why. The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that nonessential U.S. personnel would be withdrawn from Baghdad, and that nonessential personnel and family members of diplomats had been authorized to depart from U.S. embassies in Bahrain and Kuwait.

http://archive.today/2025.06.10-214250/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/business/media/terry-moran-abc-news.html

ABC News is cutting ties with the correspondent Terry Moran after he wrote derisive comments on social media that attacked President Trump and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, referring to both men with the term “world-class hater.”

The network suspended him on Sunday, hours after he posted a late-night message on X in which he described Mr. Miller as “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred.”

The post was later deleted, but screenshots circulated on social media. Allies of Mr. Trump immediately pounced on Mr. Moran’s remarks, with Vice President JD Vance calling the post an “absolutely vile smear.”

The network said on Tuesday that it had decided not to renew Mr. Moran’s contract. He had worked at ABC News for 28 years.

Mr. Moran’s contract had been set to expire on Friday, according to a person with knowledge of his deal who requested anonymity to disclose sensitive details.

“We are at the end of our agreement with Terry Moran, and based on his recent post — which was a clear violation of ABC News policies — we have made the decision to not renew,” a network spokesman said in a statement. “At ABC News, we hold all of our reporters to the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism, and we remain committed to delivering straightforward, trusted journalism.”

http://archive.today/2025.06.10-210801/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/magazine/romania-election-tiktok-russia-maga.html

Early last December, Adrian Thiess, a well-connected political fixer in Romania, sent an urgent text message to Brad Parscale, the digital media strategist who had been working off and on for Donald J. Trump since 2012. Thiess and Parscale bonded in 2019, Thiess told me, when Parscale was managing Trump’s re-election campaign. Thiess had paid Parscale to speak at a conference in Bucharest called “Let’s Make Political Marketing Great Again” — as it happened, the day before Robert S. Mueller III, then serving as a special counsel, submitted his report about Trump’s dealings with Russia. The pair hit it off, both feeling the Russian accusations were a hoax. In the years since, Thiess had parlayed his friendship with Parscale into an entree into Trump’s inner circle, even inviting the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to Bucharest for his own paid talk.

But it wasn’t a speaking gig that was on Thiess’s mind that night — he wanted to sound an alarm. “Have you seen what’s happening in Romania?” Thiess asked.

Thiess was referring to the Romanian presidential election, specifically to a candidate named Calin Georgescu. Georgescu was a 62-year-old agronomist who had turned to nationalist politics, starting out as a fringe candidate who claimed on television that electronic chips were planted in soft drinks. Georgescu also professed a love for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for whose manifesto attacking Dr. Anthony J. Fauci he penned an introduction in its Romanian edition. He made several promotional TikTok videos of himself that appeared to be inspired by Vladimir V. Putin’s flamboyantly macho campaign imagery — in which Georgescu was sometimes on horseback, sometimes doing judo.

The iconography was striking because Putin was extremely unpopular in Romania, a NATO member with an expanding air base on the Black Sea whose importance has grown since the war in Ukraine began. Georgescu, however, railed against NATO, which he said was dragging the country into World War III, while hailing Putin as a “patriot and a leader.” What’s more, Georgescu said he had spent no money on his campaign, and he didn’t throw a lot of big outdoor rallies like his competitors. So it came as a big surprise when, after the first round of voting in November, Georgescu won — beating all five top candidates and sending him to a runoff that would decide the election.

The next jolt came days later from Romania’s top court: It abruptly halted the second round, essentially canceling the country’s election. All ballots from the first round were thrown out, and the judges told the country to vote again. Georgescu had cheated, Romania’s intelligence agency now said — his campaign had colluded with Russia, which had run a vast disinformation campaign on, it turned out, TikTok. An army of fake accounts, some 25,000 strong, had been mobilized on the platform by the Kremlin to promote Georgescu. And authorities said a series of illegal campaign payments had been made through cryptocurrencies to support Georgescu online, leading to speculation that the candidate would soon be under criminal investigation. The accusations stunned Romanians, but the solution — to cancel an election and order a do-over — shocked the country just as much.

What follows is the story of an alliance that formed between America’s conservatives and European nationalists who saw common cause — not just in a canceled election in Romania, but across a global map where the right is on the rise. No country in the European Union has ever taken such a measure as drastic as canceling a presidential election, and it comes at a time when the political establishment across the region, facing an antidemocratic right and an increasingly anti-establishment electorate, is taking other measures once seen as unthinkable. As Thierry Breton, a former E.U. commissioner said of the canceled election: “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously do it if necessary in Germany.”

http://archive.today/2025.06.09-221437/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/world/canada/carney-canada-nato-military-spending.html

Declaring that Canada is too dependent on the United States for its defense, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Monday committed to having his country meet NATO’s spending target this year, seven years ahead of schedule.

The Canadian government said it would immediately add 9.3 billion Canadian dollars, about $6.8 billion, to its defense budget. That will raise total defense-related spending this year to 62.7 billion dollars, slightly higher than the 2 percent NATO target. To get there, the government included 2.5 billion Canadian dollars in spending related to “defense and security” for other departments, including the Canadian Coast Guard, an unarmed civilian agency which is under the department of fisheries.

President Trump and leaders of other allied nations have long criticized Canada for consistently falling well short of NATO’s goal of a military budget equal to 2 percent of each member’s gross domestic product. Canada’s previous government, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, planned to raise Canada’s spending, which is at 1.37 percent, to meet the military alliance’s target by 2032.

Mr. Carney laid out a long shopping list for the military, including “new submarines, aircraft, ships, arm vehicles and artillery.”

He also said the military would add drones and sensors to monitor the seafloor in the Arctic, a vast region of the country that is becoming a source of competition among global powers like Russia and China.

Mr. Carney also said that money would be directed toward much-needed improvements, noting that three of the Royal Canadian Navy’s four diesel submarines were not seaworthy.

Mr. Carney, speaking in Toronto, said that new geopolitical threats, advances in technology and the fraying of Canada’s alliance with the United States demanded an accelerated spending schedule.

“We stood shoulder to shoulder with the Americans throughout the Cold War and in the decades that followed, as the United States played a dominant role on the world stage,” he said. “Today, that dominance is a thing of the past.”

Mr. Carney also said the country would no longer rely as extensively on American defense contractors to supply its armed forces, underscoring Canada’s strained relations with the United States and focus on shifting away from its neighbor.

While Mr. Carney promised to increase spending by billions of Canadian dollars, he did not specify where the funds would come from. Government officials spoke mostly in broad terms about how the money would be used.

http://archive.today/2025.06.09-025229/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/world/middleeast/gaza-flotilla-greta-thunberg-israel.html

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said early on Monday morning that a Gaza-bound ship carrying a dozen pro-Palestinian activists and some aid had been diverted toward Israeli shores and that its passengers were expected to return to their home countries.

The civilian ship, called the Madleen, has been operating under the auspices of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, an international grass-roots campaign that opposes the nearly two-decade-old blockade of Gaza. The ship set sail from Sicily on June 1. The passengers included the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament.

The Madleen was carrying only a symbolic amount of humanitarian assistance — an amount the Israeli foreign ministry dismissed as “tiny” in its statement, and “less than a single truckload of aid.”

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said on Sunday that he had instructed the country’s military to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza.

In a blunt statement, he said, “To Greta the antisemite and her friends, propagandists for Hamas — I say clearly: You would do well to turn back, because you won’t get to Gaza. Israel will act against any attempt to breach the blockade or aid terrorist organizations by sea, air or land.”

Israel said at the time that its soldiers, some of whom had rappelled onto the ship from helicopters, came under ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.

“The ‘selfie yacht’ of the ‘celebrities’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel,” the Israeli foreign ministry wrote on social media on Monday. It accused “Greta and others” of attempting “to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity.” The ministry later posted video of what it said were the passengers, who were wearing life jackets and being offered sandwiches and water.

http://archive.today/2025.06.08-042608/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/world/asia/japan-military-trump-china.html

The ship-slaying missiles of the Japanese army’s Seventh Regiment are mounted aboard dark green trucks that are easy to move and conceal, but for now, the soldiers are making no effort to hide them. Created a year ago, the fledgling regiment and its roving missile batteries occupy a hilltop base on the island of Okinawa that can be seen for miles.

The visibility is intentional. The Seventh is one of two new missile regiments that the army, called the Ground Self-Defense Force, has placed along the islands on Japan’s southwestern flank in response to an increasingly robust Chinese navy that frequently sails through waters near Japan.

“Our armaments are a show of force to deter an enemy from coming,” said Col. Yohei Ito, the regiment’s commander.

Since the regiment was created, U.S. Marines have begun visiting to observe its drills and study the Japanese-made Type-12 missiles, which can hit a ship more than 100 miles away. The Americans are eager to learn as they prepare to deploy their own land-based anti-ship missiles in Okinawa, part of a shift in strategy to challenge China’s growing forces.

“Japan has capabilities that the U.S. military didn’t have before now,” said Colonel Ito, the Japanese commander. “There are things that we can teach them.”

Given the growing military strength of nearby China and also North Korea, Japan wants to upgrade the defense alliance with the United States by becoming a fuller-fledged military partner and moving further from the pacifism enshrined in its Constitution adopted after World War II.

With the war in Ukraine stirring fears of a similar Chinese move on the democratic island of Taiwan, Japan announced in 2022 it would double spending on national security to about 2 percent of gross domestic product. The resulting defense buildup is now underway.

Japan is buying expensive weapon systems from the United States like the F-35B stealth fighter and Tomahawk cruise missiles that will give Japan the ability to strike targets on enemy soil for the first time since 1945.

The spending is also revitalizing Japan’s own defense industry. At a trade show last month near Tokyo, Japanese manufacturers displayed weapons currently under development, including a hypersonic missile, a laser system for shooting down drones, and a jet fighter to be built with Italy and Britain.

As China and North Korea tilt the power balance by building up their nuclear arsenals, Japanese policymakers are also asking the United States to show its commitment. There have been growing calls for Washington to make a visible deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the region to discourage potential foes from using theirs.

If Washington proves unreliable, Japan has an ultimate fallback: tons of plutonium stockpiled from its civilian nuclear power industry, which it could use to build a nuclear arsenal of its own. So far, the national trauma from the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has kept such an option off the table.

http://archive.today/2025.06.08-025637/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/us/trump-national-guard-deploy-rare.html

President Trump took extraordinary action on Saturday by deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protesters in California, making rare use of federal powers and bypassing the authority of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But according to legal scholars, the president has the authority under Title 10 of the United States Code to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

In a presidential memo, Mr. Trump said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday night that President Trump was deploying soldiers in response to “violent mobs” that she said had attacked federal law enforcement and immigration agents. The 2,000 troops would “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester,” she said.

Protests have occurred Friday and Saturday in California to oppose federal immigration raids on workplaces in California. The latest incident was at a Home Depot in Paramount, Calif., about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, immediately rebuked the president’s action, indicating that Mr. Trump had usurped his own state authority.

Mr. Trump suggested deploying U.S. forces in the same manner during his first term to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

He opted against doing so at the time, but he has repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states.

http://archive.today/2025.06.07-203705/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/us/la-immigration-raids-ice.html

Protesters and immigration officials clashed again in Los Angeles County on Saturday as agents conducted raids at a Home Depot, local officials said, just a day after dramatic standoffs at similar workplace raids elsewhere in the area.

In Paramount, Calif., about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, protesters squared off with federal immigration agents after at least two immigration raids took place on Saturday, including one at the Home Depot and another at a nearby meatpacking facility.

Video of the protests showed agents using what appeared to be flash-bang grenades to disperse the protesters. Immigrant rights advocates said that the agents, who were wearing riot gear, had also used some type of tear gas to break up the crowds. José Luis Solache Jr., a state assembly member, said on social media that he was among those who were hit with tear gas.

The standoff followed a series of immigration raids that swept through Los Angeles on Friday, which resulted in chaos outside a federal building downtown where people detained in the raids were being processed.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, said on social media on Saturday that the protests on Friday were “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.”

“What took place in Los Angeles yesterday was appalling,” said Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE. He added that Los Angeles police officers took “over two hours” to respond to the unrest, “despite being called multiple times.” The Police Department has not responded publicly to Mr. Lyons’s remarks.

On Saturday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said that it was not involved in any of the federal operations and that its response was limited to traffic and crowd control.

http://archive.today/2025.06.07-094705/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/world/europe/russia-intelligence-documents-leak-how.html

In November, a crime group known as Ares Leaks announced on Telegram that it was selling classified Russian intelligence documents. The group claimed that the records originated from inside the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B.

How Ares Leaks acquired these documents is unclear. The group did not answer when asked. Russian agencies have been hacked before. Perhaps an F.S.B. officer mishandled them or had them stolen. Maybe an insider sold or leaked them, or Ares grabbed them from another criminal group.

The New York Times does not pay its sources or buy stolen documents. But we do accept documents that are provided without cost or strings attached. And it is common practice for sellers like Ares Leaks to share free samples.

In this case, Ares Leaks provided snapshots of Russian intelligence documents and, most important, a complete F.S.B. counterintelligence document about China. More documents were available, the group said, for a negotiable price paid in the cryptocurrency Monero.

The sample document on China appeared to come from the security agency’s Department for Counterintelligence Operations, known as the D.K.R.O. And it offered tantalizing insight into Russia’s relationship with China, one of the most important — and least understood — alliances in modern geopolitics. It described deep concerns in Moscow about Chinese espionage, and it revealed that Russia operates a secretive program to organize and analyze data from the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat.

The document looked consistent with F.S.B. records that have previously been made public. Times reporters who have studied Russian espionage for years analyzed the material and saw nothing immediately suspicious.

The Times also confirmed some details from the document. For instance, we established — independent of the Western intelligence sources we consulted — that the Russian government had in fact been conducting “precautionary briefings” with Russians who travel to China for work.

We took the document to six Western intelligence agencies. All of them confirmed that it appeared authentic, based on its format and content. A few agencies told us that the content was consistent with intelligence that they had collected independently. One went so far as to say that the content was consistent with what it knew about Russia’s views on China and its penetration of Chinese communications.

http://archive.today/2025.06.07-033117/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/us/los-angeles-immigration-raid.html

Federal agents in tactical gear armed with military-style rifles threw flash-bang grenades to disperse an angry crowd near downtown Los Angeles on Friday as they conducted an immigration raid on a clothing wholesaler, the latest sign of tensions between protesters and law enforcement over raids carried out at stores, restaurants and court buildings.

The raid at the clothing wholesaler began about 9:15 a.m. in the Fashion District, less than two miles from Los Angeles City Hall.

It was an extraordinary show of force. Dozens of federal agents wearing helmets and green camouflage arrived in two hulking armored trucks and other unmarked vehicles, and were soon approached by a crowd of immigrant activists and supporters. Some agents carried riot shields and others held rifles, as well as shotguns that appeared to be loaded with less-than-lethal ammunition.

Agents cleared a path for two white passenger vans that exited the area. A short time later, as officers boarded their vehicles to leave, a few agents lobbed flash-bang grenades at groups of people who chased alongside the slow-moving convoy. Some protesters had thrown eggs and other objects at the vehicles. At one point, the vehicles snagged and crushed at least two electric scooters that protesters had used.

Hours after the raid, a second clash between protesters and federal agents broke out outside a federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles, where those who were detained were taken. At one of the entrances, protesters chanted and approached the building as officers fired less-than-lethal projectiles and squirted what appeared to be pepper spray. Some protesters threw a chair and other objects, and appeared to spray-paint anti-ICE graffiti on the building.

Agents at the scene were wearing patches on their uniforms identifying themselves as being with the F.B.I., Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Officials did not detail any injuries. One man on the street said he was injured by a flash-bang grenade.

By 7 p.m., the Los Angeles Police Department declared an unlawful assembly, ordered demonstrators to disperse and a line of police in riot gear started to clear the area.

The Los Angeles police have had a policy in place since 1979 that bars officers from initiating police action for the sole purpose of determining someone’s immigration status. California law also prohibits state and local resources from being used to help with federal immigration enforcement.

Chief Jim McDonnell of the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement that his agency was not involved in civil immigration enforcement efforts.

“While the LAPD will continue to have a visible presence in all our communities to ensure public safety, we will not assist or participate in any sort of mass deportations,” Chief McDonnell said, adding that the department would not attempt to determine anyone’s immigration status.

http://archive.today/2025.06.05-092924/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/upshot/tax-audits-wealthy-biden-trump.html

It was a promise repeated many times by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration: The Internal Revenue Service would conduct more audits of wealthy Americans, but audit rates would not rise for households earning less than $400,000 per year.

Mr. Biden and the Democrats made that pledge as they bolstered funding for the I.R.S., hoping that more enforcement aimed at wealthy tax evaders would generate revenue to pay for climate and health care programs.

Republican lawmakers warned that more money for the I.R.S. would lead to more audits across the board, and that middle-class taxpayers would be targeted.

But [sic] new data released by the I.R.S. last week suggests that the agency upheld Mr. Biden’s promise in 2024. With an audit rate of 0.8 percent, people making over $500,000 on their latest return were more than twice as likely to be audited compared with the same point in the audit cycle in previous years.

Meanwhile, the matching audit rate for taxpayers making under $500,000 declined slightly. The figures covered 2022 tax returns that were filed in 2023 and audited during the 2024 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.

With more funding during the Biden administration, I.R.S. staffing grew to about 100,000 employees from 80,000. But President Trump has sought big cuts. More than 20,000 employees offered to resign earlier this year, while others have been fired. A recent inspector general’s report showed that the agency now has closer to 90,000 employees. And congressional Republicans have rescinded or frozen the extra I.R.S. enforcement funding.

While the number of audits opened on wealthy taxpayers did spike last year, an audit can take several years to close, especially for a high-income return. The I.R.S. closed fewer audits last year than in any year except 2020, when adjusted for the number of returns filed. Audit collections decreased to $29 billion, down 10 percent from 2023.

http://archive.today/2025.06.05-045746/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/us/politics/trump-biden-investigation.html

President Trump ordered his White House counsel and the attorney general on Wednesday to investigate former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his staff in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor.

In an executive order, Mr. Trump put the power and resources of the federal government to work examining whether some of Mr. Biden’s presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge.

The former president called such claims “ridiculous and false” in a statement on Wednesday after the order’s release.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” he said. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations.”

The order comes after disclosure in recent weeks that Mr. Biden, 82, had received a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer and in the wake of renewed scrutiny of his health during his presidency.

Since his return to office, Mr. Trump has embarked on a campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies, with Mr. Biden as a key target. He has moved to strip Mr. Biden’s security clearance and ordered investigations into the Biden administration’s handling of a range of issues.

But the ordered inquiry into a conspiracy theory about the former president himself was a startling escalation.

http://archive.today/2025.05.19-011015/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/obituaries/greg-cannom-dead.html

Greg Cannom, an Oscar-winning movie makeup artist responsible for some of the most striking acts of movie magic in recent decades — including the transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney in “Vice,” the creation of a giant expressive green head for Jim Carrey in “The Mask,” and the reverse aging of Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — died on May 3. He was 73.

http://archive.today/2025.06.03-201404/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-site-shooting-israel.html

Israeli soldiers opened fire Tuesday morning near crowds of Palestinians walking toward a new food distribution site in southern Gaza, the Israeli military said. The Red Cross and Gaza health ministry said at least 27 people had been killed.

It was the second such large-scale shooting by Israeli forces in three days near the same aid distribution site in the southern city of Rafah, where thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians are coming early each day in hopes of securing a food handout. Israeli soldiers opened fire on Sunday near an approach to the same food distribution site, and Palestinian officials said they killed at least 23 people.

In the latest violence on Tuesday, the Israeli military said the troops fired near “a few” people who had strayed from the designated route to the site and who did not respond to warning shots. The statement called them “suspects” and said they had “posed a threat” to soldiers. But a military spokeswoman declined to explain the nature of the perceived threat.

Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, a senior administrator at Nasser Hospital, a medical center in Khan Younis a few miles from the site of the shootings, said in a phone interview that many of the victims were children aged 10 to 13 with gunshot wounds to the head or chest.

He added that the hospital’s ability to treat the wounded had been hindered by critical equipment shortages [sic]

The shootings, which the military said occurred roughly about 500 yards from the food distribution site, were the latest chaos surrounding a contentious new Israeli-backed system for food distribution sites in Gaza, where American private contractors oversee the handout of cardboard boxes of aid.

The Israeli-American initiative has only announced four aid distribution points — compared with 400 under the previous U.N.-coordinated aid distribution system. And on most days, most of the four sites have not been operational.

Israel says the new aid system is needed to prevent Hamas from stealing and stockpiling food, as well as from financing its war effort by selling food to civilians at elevated prices. U.N. officials have argued there is no evidence that international aid was diverted by Hamas.

Some Israelis said that Hamas was trying to undermine the new system by instigating chaos and encouraging people to riot.

http://archive.today/2025.06.03-115501/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/world/europe/russia-ukraine-strikes.html

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Sunday that Ukrainian drones had attacked airfields in five regions stretching across five time zones. Several aircraft caught fire in the regions of Murmansk, near the border with Norway, and Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, the ministry said in a statement. It said that the other attacks were repelled, and that there were no casualties.

The attack in Irkutsk, on the Belaya air base, was the first time any place in Siberia had come under attack by Ukraine’s drones since the war began in February 2022. The Olenya base in the Murmansk region, which also came under attack, is one of Russia’s key strategic airfields, hosting nuclear-capable aircraft.

An official in Ukraine’s security services, known as the S.B.U., who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive intelligence operation, said that dozens of aircraft had been damaged in the strikes. It was not immediately possible to independently confirm that claim, or the details from Russia’s Defense Ministry.

The official said that Ukrainian officers had secretly transported drones into Russian territory on trucks and launched them from those vehicles. That also could not be confirmed, but Russia’s Defense Ministry said that drones used in the Murmansk and Irkutsk attacks had been launched from the immediate vicinity of the airfields.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on social media that planning for the operation had begun a year and a half ago, and that those involved in the attacks had been withdrawn from Russia before they took place.

http://archive.today/2025.05.22-021209/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/world/middleeast/israel-warning-shots-west-bank.html

Israeli soldiers fired warning shots on Wednesday to disperse a group of senior Western diplomats, Palestinian officials and journalists as they toured a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to statements by the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority and television footage from the scene.

No one was reported injured, but the event intensified the friction between Israel and its foreign partners amid growing international criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. The gunfire came two days after Britain, France and Canada called for Israel to end the war in Gaza, and a day after Britain suspended trade talks with Israel and criticized its support for settlements in the West Bank.

Diplomats from all three countries were among a large diplomatic delegation on Wednesday that toured the city of Jenin in the West Bank, with officials from the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous institution that administers parts of the territory, including Jenin.

The authority had organized the tour to highlight how the Israeli military, seeking to stamp out armed groups, had captured and partly demolished an area on the edge of the city. The neighborhood is known as the Jenin refugee camp because it mostly houses the descendants of Palestinians forced to flee their homes during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel.

Toward the end of the tour, Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood fired at least seven shots to disperse some of the visiting officials as they stood about 80 yards from the soldiers, on the other side of a closed gate, according to several videos verified by The New York Times. The footage showed that the shooting began as officials milled around conducting interviews with journalists, several of them with their backs turned to the soldiers.

The gunfire occurred a few hundred yards from where an Israeli soldier fired on a prominent Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, killing her, in May 2022.

http://archive.today/2025.05.16-182248/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-16/ty-article/.premium/gazas-last-hospital-for-10-000-cancer-patients-shuts-down-due-to-repeated-israeli-strikes/00000196-d85c-d048-a7d7-d87e6e700000

In an attempt to assassinate top Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar, the Israeli military on Tuesday struck the European Hospital, Gaza's last facility that could treat cancer patients, killing at least 16 people, wounding 70, and leading to the evacuation of its patients. Since then, strikes on the hospital have not ceased.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that since October 7, 2023, Israel has struck 122 health facilities in the Gaza Strip and 180 ambulances in 686 different strikes.

According to a report by The Guardian, the UN estimates that more than 12,000 people in the Gaza Strip need to travel to receive treatment they don't have access to in the enclave. Ten thousand of them are cancer patients, for whom Aseel Aburass, the director of Physicians for Human Rights' Occupied Palestinian Territory Department, says "the only treatment that can be offered to patients today is symptomatic treatment."

Even before the war, "being a cancer patient in Gaza was a death sentence," according to Aburass. "Today, it is much worse. Their only hope is to evacuate outside the Gaza Strip." She added that "in November, the stock of chemotherapy drugs ran out, and even the little that came in during the respite has already run out."

Ever since the Gaza Strip was blockaded around 18 years ago, cancer patients have suffered significant difficulties in receiving medical treatment. Even before the war, no departments provided radiotherapy, and there was a shortage of equipment and various other treatments. Gazan cancer patients, therefore, mainly relied on treatments they would receive in hospitals in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Most of the Palestinians who left Gaza before the war were, in fact, oncology patients seeking treatment.

The situation has worsened since the outbreak of the war on October 7, 2023. The two main hospitals providing radiotherapy were the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in the center of the Gaza Strip and the European Hospital in the south. The Al-Shifa Hospital and the Rantisi Hospital provided supportive treatment.

The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital was abandoned at the instruction of the IDF at the beginning of the war. Around two months ago, Division 252 commander Yehuda Wach ordered the hospital's destruction, leaving the European Hospital as the sole facility treating cancer patients – until its recent closure.

http://archive.today/2025.05.19-093134/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/health/joe-biden-diagnosis-prostate-cancer.html

Prostate cancer experts say that former President Joseph R. Biden’s diagnosis is serious. Announced on Sunday by his office, the cancer has spread to his bones. And it is Stage 4, the most deadly of stages for the illness. It cannot be cured.

But the good news, prostate cancer specialists said, is that recent advances in diagnosing and treating prostate cancer — based in large part on research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Department — have changed what was once an exceedingly grim picture for men with advanced disease.

“Life is measured in years now, not months,” said Dr. Daniel W. Lin, a prostate cancer specialist at the University of Washington.

Dr. Judd Moul, a prostate cancer expert at Duke University, said that men whose prostate cancer has spread to their bones, “can live 5, 7, 10 or more years” with current treatments. A man like Mr. Biden, in his 80s, “could hopefully pass away from natural causes and not from prostate cancer,” he said.

Mr. Biden’s office said the former president had urinary symptoms, which led him to seek medical attention.

http://archive.today/2025.05.16-020422/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/us/politics/trump-voice-of-america-firings.html

The Trump administration on Thursday fired nearly 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news network that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedoms.

The layoffs targeted contractors, most of them journalists but also some administrative employees, and amounted to over a third of Voice of America’s staff. They signaled that the Trump administration planned to continue its efforts to dismantle the broadcaster despite a court ruling last month that ordered the federal government to maintain robust news programming at the network, which President Trump has called “the voice of radical America.”

In another sign of the Trump administration’s hostility toward the broadcaster, the federal building in Washington that houses the media organization was put up for sale on Thursday.

Some of the journalists who were terminated on Thursday were from countries with repressive governments that persecute journalists for independent reporting, Mr. Abramowitz said in the email to employees on Thursday.

Those journalists now have to leave the United States by the end of June, as their immigration status is tied to employment at the news organization.

In a letter sent on Thursday to employees who had been fired, the Trump administration cited “the government’s convenience” as a reason for the terminations. The employees were under so-called personal services contracts, making them easier to let go than regular full-time employees with full civil service protections.

Mr. Trump has accused the outlet, which delivers news to countries with repressive regimes — including Russia, China and Iran — of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda.”

Voice of America, which was founded in 1942, halted operations on March 15, a day after Mr. Trump signed an executive order seeking to gut the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Its news programming has been partly restored since the April court ruling that stopped the Trump administration from dismantling the agency and other newsrooms it oversees.

The Trump administration has challenged the April ruling, claiming that the lower court had gone too far in halting other firings that took place in March.

The Trump administration did not appeal parts of the April order that mandated the resumption of Voice of America’s news programming. The lower court found that Congress had required the executive branch to keep the network as “a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news.”

Ms. Lake said last week that Voice of America would incorporate content from One America News Network, a pro-Trump television channel that has endorsed falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

http://archive.today/2025.05.13-183726/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/world/middleeast/trump-syria-president-meeting.html

President Trump said on Tuesday that he would lift sanctions on Syria, throwing an economic lifeline to a country devastated by nearly 14 years of civil war and decades of dictatorship under the Assad family.

Mr. Trump was expected to meet for the first time with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, where he is making the first major state visit of his second term. Mr. al-Shara led the rebel alliance that ousted President Bashar al-Assad in December.

The decision marks a sea change for Syria, breaking the economic stranglehold on a country seen as critical to the stability of the Middle East.

“There is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s what we want to see in Syria.”

A face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump offers Mr. al-Shara a unique opportunity to make his case to a world leader with the power to dramatically shape Syria’s future. It also marks a stunning turnaround for the man who once led a branch of Al Qaeda but broke ties with the jihadist group, seeking to moderate his image in the hope of gaining broader traction.

In the months since a rebel coalition seized control of the Syrian capital, Damascus, and toppled Mr. al-Assad, the United States has kept in place a multilayered sanctions regime that, with the war, has pushed the country to the brink of economic collapse.

Mr. al-Shara and other Syrian officials have argued that the fall of the regime should trigger an end to sanctions, many of which were put in place in response to the Assad dictatorship’s brutal crackdown on an uprising that began in 2011 and morphed into a civil war.

“The sanctions were implemented as a response to crimes committed by the previous regime against the people,” Mr. al-Shara told The New York Times in an interview last month.

And Syrian officials have told American intermediaries that they sought to avoid conflict with all neighboring countries, including Israel, and welcomed American investment.

But the Trump administration for months kept its distance from Mr. al-Shara’s fledgling administration. Some U.S. officials have expressed deep skepticism of Mr. al-Shara’s motives and his promises to protect religious minorities, pointing to his Islamist orientation and history with Al Qaeda.

The American administration had avoided high-level engagements with Mr. al-Shara’s government and issued demands related to counterterrorism and other issues that it says must be met for sanctions relief to be considered.

European leaders, eager to foster stability and prevent new waves of migration, have also pushed for more economic engagement.

Last week, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, offered a diplomatic boost to Mr. al-Shara, being the first European leader to host the Syrian president in his capital and vowing push to gradually lift European Union sanctions on Syria, provided that the country’s new leaders maintain their path toward stability.

“I told the Syrian president that if he continued to follow his path, we would continue on ours,” Mr. Macron said.