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  • Robert Coles, Pulitzer-winning child psychiatrist, is dead at 97

    Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist by training and a storyteller by inclination whose scores of books and articles transported readers into the minds of children, opening new vistas on issues as varied as race relations and moral reasoning, died Thursday in Lincoln, Mass. He was 97.

    The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by his son Robert.

    A longtime professor at Harvard University, Dr. Coles eschewed ideologies and psychiatric orthodoxies, visiting the homes of children — first in the American South and then around the world — to listen intently to what they, their parents, and others had to say. He returned again and again, sometimes for months or even years, building the trust that underpinned his work.

    He told searing accounts illustrating illusive truths of a fast-changing society, beginning with the tale of Ruby Bridges, who as a 6-year-old walked through a screaming mob in 1960 as part of an effort to integrate a public school in New Orleans. From the households of poor Black families to those of rich white ones, from Appalachia to the Arctic, Dr. Coles visited children whose voices were not often heard. He once rode a bus for a whole year with Black youngsters being transported to schools in white neighborhoods.

    Dr. Coles then wrote it all down, distilling the tape recordings of conversations, the children’s crayon drawings ,and his voluminous notes into compelling verbal snapshots of how children grapple with challenge. His five-volume book series Children of Crisis was published between 1967 and 1977; Volumes 2 and 3 won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

    Some criticized his approach as scattershot and unscientific, and Dr. Coles readily admitted he veered from exact transcriptions to tell what he considered greater truths.

    But eminent sociologist David Riesman said in an interview with Time magazine in 1972 that the effect of Dr. Cole’s work was to obliterate stereotypes, to demonstrate that “policemen are not pigs, white Southerners are not rednecks, and Blacks are not all suffering in exotic misery.”

    “What he is saying is ‘People are more complicated, more varied, more interesting, have more resiliency and more survivability than you might think,’” Reisman said. “‘I listen to them! You listen to them! Please listen! Again and again!’”

    Dr. Coles offered proof “that hope is alive,” Kenneth Clark, a psychologist whose insights contributed to the Supreme Court outlawing the racial segregation of schools in 1954, said in an interview with the New York Times Magazine in 1978. “I don’t know if he’s one of the 10 just men required to keep this world spinning around,” Clark said, adding: “You can’t judge him by normal standards any more than you could Martin Luther King; they are men possessed.”

    Dr. Coles acknowledged a sense of “moral anxiety” as a white man writing about those with a less privileged existence.

    “I work with very vulnerable people, and yet I’m not very vulnerable myself,” he said in an interview with the New York Times in 1997. “It makes me uncomfortable, seeing the disparities between the world I document and the world I inhabit.”

    Dr. Coles was an exceedingly popular professor at Harvard, using great literature to stimulate debate in courses in its undergraduate college, as well as its schools of medicine, law, business, and government. He wrote books on personalities as diverse as Bruce Springsteen and the novelist Walker Percy, and also found time to write novels, children’s books, and poetry.

    He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and the National Humanities Medal in 2001.

    So what was he? Dr. Coles variously described himself as a doctor, child psychiatrist, wanderer, oral historian, social anthropologist, teacher, friend, storyteller, busybody, nuisance, and “idiosyncratic oddball.”

    His friend Percy, himself a physician, once judged that the doctor designation, if broadly applied, might be most apt.

    “He treads a narrow path between theorizing and novelizing and emerges as what in fact he is: physician, and a wise and gentle one,” Percy said. “He is doctor to the worst of our life.”

    Robert Martin Coles was born Oct. 12, 1928, in Boston, to Philip Coles, an engineer who immigrated from England, and Sandra (Young) Coles, the daughter of an Iowa Episcopal minister. A deeply affecting memory of his youth in the suburb of Milton was how his parents read Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and other novelists aloud to each other.

    He went to Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard in 1950. An essay he wrote on William Carlos Williams, the poet and pediatrician, led to him meeting Williams. After reading the essay, Williams replied on a prescription slip: “Not bad — for a Harvard student.”

    Dr. Coles was inspired to become a doctor himself, and earned a medical degree from Columbia University and interned at University of Chicago clinics.

    He said in an interview with the journal Christianity and Literature in 2005 that he worked with polio patients as a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, and became interested in addressing the psychological impacts of the disease. This, as well as a reluctance to inflict pain on children by giving them shots, persuaded him to switch his specialty from pediatrics to child psychiatry.

    In 1958, he was drafted into the Air Force, given the rank of captain and sent to a psychiatric hospital in Biloxi, Miss. He became angered over the treatment of Black Southerners after he saw a “vicious” fight erupt when Black people tried to integrate a beach.

    He began his study of children with Bridges, whose poise in the face of racism moved him deeply. The girl was threatened daily on her way to class. She was told her food was poisoned and was kept isolated in a classroom without other students for a year.

    Dr. Coles noticed that she seemed to be talking to the hostile white people, and asked her why. She said she was praying for them.

    But why? “They need praying for,” the little girl said.

    Bridges would be a central theme running through Dr. Coles’ career. She inspired him to write about children’s moral and spiritual lives, and the two wrote a children’s book together.

    And when Bridges grew up, she told him that it was time for him to write Women of Crisis to accompany his earlier series.

    Dr. Coles teamed up with his wife, Jane, to write that two-volume women’s study, which was published in 1978 and 1980. But that was hardly the greatest of her contributions to his work: It was she who had urged him to stop asking questions during an interview with children in New Orleans when they were responding with a long series of monosyllabic replies.

    “Why don’t you just shut up and watch television with them?” she said, according to an oral history interview with Dr. Coles by the Southern Oral History Program in 1974.

    In Volume 4 of Children of Crisis, Dr. Cole described the approach he finally developed. No questions — or at least, not many.

    “I would tell the children I wasn’t interested in finding out anything in particular,” he said, “merely knowing, to a degree, how they lived and what they thought about — insofar as it was their inclination to tell me.”

    One thing Dr. Coles learned about children was that they were absorbed in their daily environment, not focused on concerns like nuclear war. Even when they did talk about such issues, they grounded them in their daily lives. A Black child in Mississippi once told him that, “If the Ku Klux Klan ever get that bomb, it would be real bad for us.”

    He noted that children of migrant workers saw everything as temporary. Or, rather, he let a migrant child make the point for himself: “I love the yo-yo, because it keeps going, up and down, and that’s what I do.”

    Pictures often told more than words. A deprived child of a migrant worker depicted himself without arms and gave the boss an ogre’s ugly teeth.

    As Dr. Coles moved around the country to study groups as diverse as Alaska Natives, wealthy suburbanites, and Hopi Indians, his wife and three sons moved with him.

    Jane Hallowell, whom Dr. Coles married in 1960, died in 1993. In addition to Robert, he is survived by two more sons, Daniel and Michael, and four grandsons. He lived in Concord, Massachusetts.

  • Progressive challenger overtakes Spencer Pratt in race for LA mayor

    Progressive challenger overtakes Spencer Pratt in race for LA mayor

    Nithya Raman, a progressive member of the Los Angeles City Council, pulled ahead of reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral primary Sunday, as a surge in the vote count signaled a potential shift in the race for second place.

    Five days after the election deadline, it remained officially undetermined who will face Mayor Karen Bass, the incumbent, in the November contest to decide who will lead the nation’s second most populous city. The primary race has yet to be called by the Associated Press, which estimates that about 80% of the vote has been counted.

    But late returns have trended heavily in favor of the liberals who make up an overwhelming majority of the city’s electorate.

    Bass, 72, a former Democratic member of Congress who has already advanced to the November runoff, remained in the lead with 34.68% of the vote, according to the updated tally released by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.

    Raman, 44, who has steadily gained ground as the count has progressed, had 27.12%, enough to overtake Pratt by a little more than 3,000 votes. He had been running in second place since election night.

    A resident of Pacific Palisades who lost his home in the fire and channeled the fury of his neighbors, Pratt, 42, a Republican, dropped to third place with 26.69% of the vote.

    A Los Angeles mayoral candidate can win outright by receiving a majority of votes in the primary. Otherwise, the top two finishers regardless of party advance to the general election. But Los Angeles residents vote by mail in large numbers, and ballot counting is a slow process, with leads often shifting as the tally drags on for days or even weeks. Mail-in ballots with an Election Day postmark are accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

    On Sunday, Raman said in a statement that “we are encouraged by the latest vote count and remain grateful to the thousands of Angelenos who have powered this campaign.”

    Pratt did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Alex Stack, a campaign spokesperson for Bass, signaled the likely points of contention between the two if Raman ultimately takes the second slot on the ballot. Though her support has been eroded by the wildfires and general voter angst in the city, Bass has largely maintained the support of the center-left establishment in the city while Raman has been backed by a younger and more progressive base.

    “We look forward to winning a contest against an opponent who allows encampments near schools and fights against hiring more cops,” Stack said in a statement, “yet is MIA on saving Hollywood jobs and fighting back when ICE invades LA.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • European leaders voice ‘urgent need’ to bolster Ukraine’s defenses against ballistic missiles

    LONDON — The leaders of the U.K., Ukraine, France, and Germany discussed the “urgent need” to ramp up production of weapons to combat Russia’s powerful hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missiles in a meeting in London on Sunday.

    British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at 10 Downing Street.

    In a statement released by Starmer’s office following their evening meeting, the leaders condemned Russia’s “large-scale missile and drone attacks — including the repeated use of the Oreshnik missiles — on Ukrainian cities with a tragic toll on civilians.” They also condemned Russia’s “irresponsible and dangerous Russian drone incursions” into NATO territory, including last month’s in Romania.

    Russia has stepped up its aerial campaign against Ukraine recently, most notably with the launch of the Oreshnik missiles.

    “The leaders underlined the urgent need to scale up the production of interceptors and co-develop anti-ballistic missile and deep strike capabilities,” the leaders said.

    No details, financial or otherwise, on how this would be done were provided.

    Ukraine’s shortage of air defense systems, in part because of the depletion of U.S. stocks during the Iran war, has left civilians especially vulnerable to ballistic missiles, even as Kyiv’s defenses stop most of Moscow’s drones and its forces have made advances elsewhere on the battlefield.

    The worry for Ukrainians is that the Iran war, which has been in abeyance for weeks, may now reignite after Iran launched missiles on Sunday at Israel in the first such bombardment since a fragile ceasefire took effect in early April, complicating mediation efforts for a deal to end the war.

    Following their meeting in London, the European leaders called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to “an immediate and complete ceasefire” with the current line of contact as a starting point for any negotiations.

    The U.K., France, and Germany, the so-called E3 group of European nations, have been prominent backers of Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The U.K. and France lead the “coalition of the willing” initiative to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a peace process.

    The meeting comes in the wake of a Russian drone strike that killed three people waiting at a bus stop in southeastern Ukraine. A separate drone strike damaged a storage center for spent nuclear fuel in the Kyiv region, just 9 miles from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukraine’s General Staff said. The attack sparked a fire that was extinguished within an hour. Radiation remains within safe levels, officials said.

    The International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said the incident was “deeply concerning” due to the large amounts of nuclear material held at the facility. He said in a statement that the agency would visit the site of the attack soon.

    The Russian attacks follow a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack on Saturday that targeted Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, underscoring Kyiv’s growing ability to hit deep inside Russia.

    With the front line barely moving as swarms of drones hinder advances, both sides have sought an edge by launching long-range strikes.

  • Trump allies wanted to ‘delete’ this consumer watchdog. Now it’s a political weapon.

    Trump allies wanted to ‘delete’ this consumer watchdog. Now it’s a political weapon.

    The Trump administration came to Washington last year seeking to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency that had survived industry anger, Republican opposition, and years of legal challenges.

    A year in, a much smaller bureau is still standing and has been remade to advance the president’s political goals.

    The bureau has begun to probe a class of smaller, mostly nonprofit lenders that Russell Vought, the acting director of the bureau, has characterized as unduly “woke.”

    On Friday, the bureau issued guidance that could make it harder for immigrants in the country illegally to obtain mortgages and credit cards. Meanwhile, the bureau’s public website invites consumers to complain if they have been refused service — or “de-banked” — for political or religious reasons, reflecting a priority of the administration and its allies in the conservative movement and the crypto industry.

    The moves represent a reorientation of an agency that had previously focused on aggressively policing larger financial institutions on behalf of ordinary consumers. Republicans and much of the financial services industry had long accused the bureau of its own brand of politicization under Democratic leadership, charging that it targeted industries and practices liberals hated.

    The Trump administration says it is correcting overreach during the Biden administration. They say the CFPB, under former director Rohit Chopra, bullied businesses and individuals it viewed as political enemies, pursued questionable legal theories, and imposed costs that ultimately fell on ordinary Americans.

    “We are fixing that, bringing the agency back to operating within statute and away from breaking the law, and making cases right to help small businesses and Americans who were victims of this thuggery,” a spokesperson for Vought said in a statement.

    Critics say the result is a bureau that has gone easy on the powerful while training its firepower on smaller targets.

    “Their first attempt was to kill the agency,” said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. But courts blocked the administration’s attempts to lay off almost all of its staff. Now, Klein and other critics say, Vought has found a different use for the agency.

    “Rather than hold themselves to a higher standard, they seem to be committing the same political persecutions they allege happened to them,” said Klein, who served in the Obama Treasury Department.

    The pivot is visible in the bureau’s recent scrutiny of community lenders — smaller banks and firms that operate in low-income rural and urban communities that are typically underserved by large Wall Street banks. In late April, the bureau’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, sent questionnaires to at least four such lenders, according to people familiar with the probe. One of the questionnaires, reviewed by the Washington Post, demanded a broad swath of financial records, compliance documents, and business details.

    The bureau has legal authority to send such requests for market-monitoring purposes, but the lenders are typically far too small to be subject to CFPB supervision, falling beneath a $10 billion asset threshold.

    Among those targeted was Self-Help Ventures Fund, an arm of a Durham, N.C., lender with roughly $5 billion in assets. Self-Help, which traces its origins to a $77 bake sale in the early 1980s, is affiliated with the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer advocacy group that has been a vocal opponent of the administration’s efforts to dismantle the CFPB.

    Self-Help and CRL declined to comment for this article. The bureau’s interest in Self-Help has not been previously reported.

    Vought — who simultaneously runs the CFPB and the White House budget office — has made no secret that he holds negative views of the community lenders in question. At a House Budget Committee hearing in April, he said they “continue to be pushing an ideology that is very harmful.”

    The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to eliminate or drastically cut a federal program that funds and certifies community lenders. Bipartisan congressional majorities have rejected those efforts, but Vought has nevertheless withheld hundreds of millions of dollars Congress directed toward the program.

    When asked about the community lenders probe, administration officials sought to minimize the review, saying it represents only a tiny fraction of the bureau’s overall work, and declined to discuss any of the individual targets. A spokesperson for Vought attacked the lenders, saying they had directed money to LGBTQ health clinics, a transgender-themed fashion show, and a group that, she said, had threatened violence against federal immigration officials.

    The scrutiny of smaller community lenders contrasts with what the bureau has done, or stopped doing, elsewhere. Since taking office, the administration has dropped litigation and unwound settlements against some of the largest financial institutions in the country. In some cases, it halted checks that were set to go out to consumers. In other cases, it permanently gave up the right to reopen the claims against some companies in the future.

    In one such case, the watchdog dropped a lawsuit, filed in the waning days of the Biden administration, against the operator of the Zelle payment-transfer network and three of its owner banks — Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase — over allegations that customers lost nearly $1 billion to fraud on the platform.

    The banks called the suit politically motivated, arguing the CFPB was stretching existing law to hold them responsible for payments customers had authorized themselves.

    The Consumer Bankers Association, which represents large retail banks, said it is encouraged by the bureau’s new direction, praising its focus on “identifiable victims, measurable harm, and clear legal standards” over what it called novel legal theories.

    Even if the community lenders currently under investigation had engaged in misconduct, the scale of the wrongdoing would look like a rounding error in comparison with potential misconduct by the largest financial institutions that are currently getting a pass, said Mike Pierce, who worked at the CFPB from 2011 to 2018 and is now the executive director of Protect Borrowers, a nonprofit advocacy group.

    “Some of the biggest corporate bad actors in America have gotten a pass from this agency,” Pierce said. “And now it’s focused on little guys that are doing things the Trump administration finds politically unpalatable.”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who conceived of the bureau, called the bureau’s pivot a betrayal of Trump’s own promises. “Donald Trump promised to lower costs ‘on day one,’” she said in a statement. “Instead, he’s co-opting the financial cop on the beat to rip away billions in relief for Americans scammed by giant banks and corporations and execute his extreme agenda.”

    Solveig Singleton, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said the administration appeared to have discovered that the bureau could be “retargeted against its political opponents,” with broad discretion that makes it easy to frame such targeting as legitimate “policy spin.”

    She also warned that cutting staff could backfire because career employees facing performance pressure might well gravitate toward investigating smaller, easier targets that lack the resources to fight back.

    The longer-term solution, she said, requires Congress to curb the bureau’s unchecked discretion and ensure greater accountability over federal programs.

  • Why are birthrates down? You might be looking at the answer

    Why are birthrates down? You might be looking at the answer

    The enduring mystery of the fertility decline has a new culprit: the smartphone.

    Experts have long wondered if phones played a role in the birthrate decline — which began in 2007, the same year that Apple introduced the iPhone — but until now there had not been hard evidence to prove it.

    Two new papers, one published Monday and the other in May, are the first academic endeavors that test whether the smartphone was a cause.

    They are the most recent efforts to explain the sweeping fertility rate decline in the United States and other countries over the past 20 years. Researchers have already looked at contraception use, abortion rates, rising levels of female education, and even the popular television show 16 and Pregnant.

    Proving phones caused the decline is a tricky endeavor. There were a number of major events in those years, including the Great Recession, and isolating smartphone use is difficult.

    The gold standard for scientific evidence is known as random assignment. It compares outcomes for people randomly chosen to receive a treatment (like getting a smartphone) with people who are not.

    But that is not possible when it comes to ferreting out reasons for declining fertility.

    So researchers sought out data about smartphones that introduced randomness.

    Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and Ezekiel Hooper, her student, used the spotty early rollout of the iPhone as a way to isolate the effects of the phone on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.

    Their paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline between 2007 and 2011. The most pronounced effects were among young people aged 15 to 24.

    What happened in the counties with iPhones? One theory, Myers said, is that young people began to socialize more on their phones and less in person, and consequently were less likely to have sex and become pregnant.

    Myers said iPhones may also have made pornography more accessible, which led young people to substitute it for sex, or young people may have used them to obtain better information on avoiding pregnancy, including contraception and abortion.

    Researchers not involved in the study said the results were persuasive.

    Phillip B. Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, said he was “a little jealous” of the Middlebury data, which he said provided a real insight into a potential driver of a major social change.

    He said some variation in the AT&T data could throw off the final finding. For example, the company may have set up in counties that were wealthier, or more densely populated, introducing a pattern “that’s not likely to be random anymore,” he said.

    He said Myers tried to account for those variations, and that her findings made sense.

    But, he cautioned: “You shouldn’t take the result so literally and say: Oh, it’s the iPhone’s fault. It’s an example of the kinds of social influences that have led to the decline in birth rate.”

    Dropping birthrates, once a feature of rich societies, are now a near-global phenomenon. The sweep of the decline has researchers looking for common drivers. The authors of the second study also decided to look at smartphones.

    “Countries with very different healthcare systems, welfare regimes, abortion laws, religious traditions, recessions and demographic trends all saw similar breaks in the same window,” wrote the authors, Hernan Moscoso Boedo, an economics professor at the University of Cincinnati, and Nathan Hudson, a doctoral student.

    “Whatever caused it was something global — something that arrived in roughly the same form in all of these places at roughly the same time,” they wrote.

    They analyzed World Bank data measuring smartphone penetration and teenage fertility rates in 128 countries. In countries as varied as Iran, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey, they found that teenage fertility declines accelerated once smartphones became a mass phenomenon.

    They tested their technology theory in the United States using data on wired broadband and 4G high-speed mobile networks. They looked at where access was better and worse and found a substantial effect: that fertility rates for teenagers declined fastest in counties with more high-speed access.

    Theodore Joyce, an economist at Baruch College, said he was skeptical of both studies. Teenage births have been falling since the 1990s, he said, long before smartphone technology came on the scene. Myers’ paper, he said, examined a short period before smartphones had fully penetrated.

    The hypothesis, he said, could be correct but “remains speculative.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Republican senators warn surveillance program may lapse after Trump intel pick backlash

    WASHINGTON — Republicans are warning the White House that a critical surveillance authority is likely to lapse this week amid bipartisan backlash over President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s intelligence community.

    Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairperson of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sounded the alarm over the weekend after a failed procedural vote to extend the program.

    The senators in a letter urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to prepare “for a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection” if the authority expires. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set to lapse June 12, allows agencies including the CIA, National Security Agency, and FBI to collect communications from foreign targets overseas without a warrant.

    “We have a deadline ahead of us. We need Democrat votes,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday.

    Efforts to secure a long-term extension of the program already faced hurdles because of bipartisan concerns that the program can incidentally collect Americans’ communications. Privacy advocates and some lawmakers have been pushing to create a new warrant requirement before those communications can be searched.

    Senate leaders from both parties appeared to be nearing agreement on a long-term extension. But the effort collapsed after Trump selected federal housing finance regulator Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence.

    “Why the president would throw this live hand grenade of Bill Pulte in 10 days before this is due to expire, I’m not sure,” Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on ABC’s This Week.

    Pulte pick upends bipartisan deal

    Early Friday morning, after senators spent the night debating separate immigration legislation, seven Republicans joined nearly all Democrats in blocking a long-term extension of the surveillance authority.

    Democrats and several Republicans registered their opposition to Trump’s selection of Pulte, arguing the federal housing finance regulator lacks the experience needed to oversee the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies.

    “The naming of Pulte to that position, although the timing arguably wasn’t the best, I still don’t think it ought to derail something that’s this important,” Thune said Friday.

    Thune has expressed concern over Pulte’s pick, saying the nation’s top intelligence post should not be “weaponized” and that the job should be filled by “professionals.” Cotton, who rarely strays from supporting Trump and is a leading advocate for the surveillance authority, declined to endorse Pulte, saying only that he had “no observations on the matter.”

    “He’s not qualified for the long-term position,” Republican Sen. James Lankford, another member of the Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Sunday. “That’s been clear on this. He has no national security background.”

    Both Republican and Democratic senators skeptical of Pulte pointed to his record at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In the role, he’s been linked with criminal referrals over allegations of mortgage fraud by public officials Trump sought to punish, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat; Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.); and Lisa Cook, a board member of the Federal Reserve.

    Republicans will need to garner some Democratic support to pass any extension of the surveillance authority in the Senate, and likely the House as well. But a breakthrough appears difficult so long as Pulte remains in the position, which Trump said last week would only be temporary.

    “Clearly to get to good-faith negotiations the effort to elevate Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence should be reversed. Immediately,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said.

    A key surveillance tool

    The current reauthorization debate is hardly the first time that lawmakers have grappled with the fate of the surveillance program, particularly after a flurry of revelations about government misuse of the vast trove of intelligence it collects.

    The topic in recent years has scrambled predictable partisan alliances, with Democratic critics of the Trump administration uniting with skeptics of government power on the right in voicing concerns about Section 702’s renewal.

    In 2024, for instance, those divisions nearly caused the program to lapse. The Senate barely missed its midnight deadline that year before approving by a 60-34 margin legislation to reauthorize Section 702 that was subsequently signed by then-President Joe Biden.

    A spokesperson at the Justice Department did not immediately return messages seeking comment Monday about the national security concerns that would be created if the program lapses. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred inquiries to the White House, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    “America faces real threats from foreign adversaries, terrorists, cyber actors, and hostile intelligence services,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media Sunday. “Section 702 remains one of our nation’s most effective tools for identifying and disrupting those threats before they reach our shores.”

    Cotton and Grassley said they believed Democratic leaders would not support another short-term extension of the surveillance authority and urged Rubio to prepare contingency plans. They said Trump should consider an executive order to prevent a disruption in intelligence collection.

    Cotton and Warner had said they were close on a bipartisan deal on a long-term extension and could still move quickly should a change occur before Friday. Still, the bill would likely need to go through the House — and the two chambers so far have disagreed on a separate issue regarding central banking digital currency.

    Republicans leaders are already warning of the consequences if Congress fails to act.

    “If it goes dark, then it would be a calamitous situation for the country,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.

  • China reasserts itself, to contain North Korea’s tilt toward Russia

    China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, arrived in North Korea on Monday and delivered what analysts said was a subtle reminder to the country’s newly emboldened dictator, Kim Jong Un, that China is his most important benefactor, economic partner, and bulwark against the United States.

    According to an official summary of the leaders’ talks released by Chinese state media, Xi called for “close strategic communication” with Kim and for strengthening exchanges “at all levels and in all fields.” He said he was willing to deepen relations with Kim in “the new era,” a phrase Xi has used to project China’s growing strength on the world stage.

    In many ways, Xi’s two-day trip to Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, is an effort to balance influence from Russia, which signed a mutual defense pact with North Korea two years ago. That deal has helped revive North Korea’s economy, by allowing Kim to trade weapons and troops with Russia for badly needed oil, food, and weapons technology, and given him a stronger hand in talks with Xi.

    Xi was received by Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, when he landed in Pyongyang, his first trip there in seven years. His motorcade was greeted by a military honor guard and throngs of citizens waving both national flags, with children dancing and clutching bright balloons. North Korea gave Xi a similar welcome the last time he visited Pyongyang.

    At a meeting at the Kumsusan Guest House, Xi pledged to cooperate with Kim in trade, agriculture, science, tourism, and healthcare.

    North Korea had not released a statement about the meeting by late Monday. Kim was expected to press Xi for more economic support and possibly a greater acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

    China’s summary made no mention of the nuclear program, instead stressing that the two countries should “jointly safeguard regional peace and development.”

    China’s long held position is that it opposes a nuclear North Korean state, largely over concerns about driving U.S. allies like South Korea to seek nuclear weapons. Statements about working toward ending the program used to be standard for the two sides during diplomatic engagements, but they have been omitted since last September, when Kim visited Beijing to attend a military parade.

    “China’s approach to North Korea has shifted markedly over the past seven years, from the role of a mediator for North Korea—U. S. denuclearization talks to that of a strong strategic partner in countering the United States,” said Hong Min, an expert on North Korea at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a research institute based in Seoul, South Korea.

    The change may reflect China’s desire to placate North Korea. But it could also suggest that the Chinese government believes that a nuclear-armed North Korea would provide leverage over the United States and South Korea, analysts said.

    Xi evoked the two countries’ history fighting the United States together in the Korean War, reminding Kim that their “traditional friendship” had been “forged in blood.”

    “The overall message that Beijing wants to project through this summit is the unity and the unbreakable bonds between the two countries,” said William Yang, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group.

    In a letter published Monday in North Korea’s main state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, Xi declared that relations between China and North Korea were at a “new historical starting point.”

    He called on the two countries to “oppose hegemonism and power politics,” an oblique reference to the United States. In a veiled swipe at Japan, with whom China has been in a monthslong feud, Xi wrote that they should also oppose “any scheme or action aimed at reviving militarism and undermining regional security and stability.”

    As with Russia and Iran, Xi has cast North Korea as a close partner in a new world order free of what China sees as U.S. dominance and meddling.

    Kim has said North Korea should boost trade with China to further stimulate its economy and generate hard currency. Yet all its top exports — coal, iron ore, fish, and textiles — remain prohibited under United Nations sanctions, creating a huge trade deficit with China that has threatened to drain its foreign currency reserves.

    Xi’s offers on trade and tourism could change that, but it is not clear whether it is possible to do so without violating U.N. sanctions.

    Both China and Russia have grown increasingly reluctant to enforce those sanctions in recent years, as tensions with the United States have worsened. In a joint statement issued last month, Xi and President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared their opposition to “the use of diplomatic isolation, economic sanctions, force, and pressure” against North Korea.

    Such backing has emboldened Kim to hold on to his nuclear arsenal and insist on being​ treated as a nuclear-armed state. In the days preceding Xi’s arrival, he visited a missile factory and a newly operational weapons-grade uranium enrichment facility, vowing to “beef up our state’s nuclear forces at an exponential rate.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • After Mormon lawmakers object, Pentagon revises Christian religious categories

    After Mormon lawmakers object, Pentagon revises Christian religious categories

    The Defense Department on Monday edited its new list of religious “codes” for service members so that no group is labeled “Christian” — drawing praise from Mormon lawmakers who were angered last week when their faith was categorized as outside of Christianity.

    On Friday, the Pentagon released a new, dramatically pared-down list of religious groups. It classified groups including Catholic, evangelical, and Methodist, among others, with the tag: “Christian.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was listed without the tag.

    After the outcry from several leaders who are members of the Mormon Church, the revised list simply states religious groups, without adding the tag “Christian” to any.

    U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), who is Mormon and had spoken out multiple times over the weekend on social media against the list, posted on X on Monday that he was “grateful” to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the change.

    A spokesperson for Lee said he had spoken to President Donald Trump and Hegseth about the issue “and they assured him that the classification will be fixed.”

    The Defense Department on Monday declined to comment on whether it changed the list because of Lee’s campaign. The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

    The Defense Department said last week that it removed 180 faith groups from its coding list — going from 211 to 31 — because the list was too large and “unmanageable.”

    “This decrease in religious affiliation codes is not designed to make any claims on the legitimacy of any faith or religious belief, nor is it intended to provide a list of ‘officially approved’ religions,” the statement said. “Rather, it is designed to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups.”

    In speaking earlier this year about his plan to trim down the code list, and to scrap the Army’s spiritual fitness guide, Hegseth has talked about his own view of faith, saying military religious services should be more focused on “truth” and less on self-care.

    The former Fox News host‘s handling of religion within the Defense Department has repeatedly been questioned. He has urged chaplains to speak more about scripture than psychology, and hosts monthly evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented. His social media profile and public comments routinely espouse his understanding of Christianity, which says that the faith is a defining aspect of American life, and casts those who disagree with him as God’s enemies. Hegseth has brought clergy from his small Christian denomination to preach at the Pentagon, including a prominent pastor who says women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

    The military has made many changes over time in how it recognizes different faiths, but experts say it had shifted in a more inclusive direction in recent decades. When the list of religious codes was expanded under the first Trump Administration, in 2017, the Defense Department said the broader list was needed to understand the military’s religious demographics and to “enable better planning for religious support.”

    The Defense Department press office Monday declined to comment on who was consulted as the department built its latest coding list.

    Among the dozens of faith groups no longer named in the codes are Wicca, atheists, and humanists. Also removed were Unitarian Universalists, the faith group with which multiple Founding Fathers were associated, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

    Retired Maj. Gen William D. Razz Waff, the executive director of the Military Chaplains Association, predicted that the removal of religious and spiritual specifics will significantly complicate chaplains’ ability to do their job.

    Within the broad groupings of, for example, “Baptist” or “Jewish,” he said, are major differences — for the enlisted and for the chaplains themselves. For example, he wondered how marriage retreats that chaplains organize will work if it’s not clear how the participating soldiers or the chaplains themselves feel about topics like same-sex marriage.

    “As we used to say, ‘this breathes well,’ it looks good on paper, but wow, is the execution is going to be a mess,” Waff said.

    Lee, in his social media posts, mostly focused on arguing that his own denomination should be recognized as Christian, but also addressed the role of the government in making such decisions.

    “I’m not talking about what individual Christians might think. I’m talking about the U.S. government,” he wrote on X on Sunday. “I can say confidently that the U.S. government has no business recognizing the Christianity of literally every other religious sect that worships Jesus Christ — with one exception.”

    Whether Mormons are considered Christian has come up often in recent years, especially with the high-profile presidential campaigns of church member Mitt Romney. Concern about the issue prompted the group a few years ago to formally change all its marketing material to remove the word “Mormon” and replace it with the full name, which includes the words “Jesus Christ.”

    In a 2022 Pew Research poll, Mormons received the lowest favorability rate among Americans of the seven religious groups included. Among Christian denominations, evangelicals — a group that includes Hegseth and a large part of Trump’s base — are particularly skeptical of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    Sen, John Curtis (R., Utah), who also is a member of the church, on Monday on X thanked the Pentagon for “engaging thoughtfully” with his office and “delivering a swift correction.”

    He had previously written in a Saturday post that it is “unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the religion’s own foundational tenets.”

    “Latter-day Saints are among the most patriotic, service-oriented individuals in our country. They are also unequivocally Christian — just look at who is in the name of the Church,” he wrote.

    In a statement, the Unitarian Universalist Association said that it is working on a “strategic response” to the pared-down list.

    “This may make it more difficult for our uniformed UUs to access the spiritual care that they need,” the statement said. “No government action can erase our faith nor lessen the powerful and necessary grounding it provides for those who serve.”

  • A flesh-eating cattle parasite spreads beyond Texas as new screwworm cases are found

    Two more cases of the New World screwworm have been confirmed, including one outside the main cluster in Texas, demonstrating the difficulty of stopping a pest that could potentially devastate the nation’s cattle industry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday.

    The screwworm is actually a fly larva that eats living flesh instead of dead material. Females lay their eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals like cattle, but wildlife, pets, and occasionally even humans can be infested. A government program to breed sterile male flies and drop swarms of them from planes to mate with wild females had kept screwworm contained at the southern end of Panama for decades.

    So far, there are four confirmed cases: three calves in Texas and a dog from neighboring Lea County, New Mexico. The dog, which the USDA initially reported as a Texas case, lives in New Mexico and was reclassified as the first in that state. The animal’s travel history is being investigated.

    The first two screwworm cases were discovered last week in calves a few miles apart in south Texas. The third was announced Monday in La Salle County, southwest of San Antonio.

    Scientists expect a handful of new cases could pop up in the coming days and weeks, but it doesn’t mean screwworm is spreading rapidly, said Edward Burgess, a University of Florida entomologist who studies the fly.

    “When that first case is seen, everyone is being vigilant and their eyes are on it more intensely,” Burgess said. “And when you are looking for something, you are more likely to see it.”

    The USDA and the U.S. cattle industry have been racing to prevent an infestation since screwworm was detected in Mexico late in 2024. The annual warm-weather scourge of cattle ranchers had been eliminated in the U.S. in the 1960s.

    So far, its reappearance hasn’t greatly affected beef prices, which are already near record levels because there are fewer cows in the U.S. Although the parasite attacks live cattle, it does not infest meat or fruit. There are also a dozen government-approved medications to treat livestock.

    Canada temporarily stopped importing cattle, horses, or other livestock from Texas on Friday. The parasites prefer humid areas where temperatures are at least 77 F, making them more of a summer problem up north.

    USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins was scheduled tol hold a news conference about the infestation Monday afternoon following a briefing at the U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, Texas.

    Burgess said the long-term solution — breeding sterile male flies — is months away. Since wild female flies mate just once, if that encounter is with a sterile male, outbreaks can eventually be halted as the flies die out.

    The USDA is working to both increase sterile fly production in plants outside the U.S. and build a massive fly factory in Texas.

    However, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said the federal response will take too long and risks crippling the cattle industry. Instead, he says, a poison bait could eliminate the screwworm problem in a few months, even if USDA and other experts say the bait hasn’t been proven to work and could poison other flies, animals, and even humans.

    “What the hell is a good fly?” Miller said in an interview Monday.

  • Houthis threaten to widen Iran war by blocking Israeli shipping in Red Sea

    Houthis threaten to widen Iran war by blocking Israeli shipping in Red Sea

    SANAA, Yemen — The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen said Monday that it would stop Israeli ships from operating in the Red Sea and had fired missiles at Israel, threatening to widen the Iran war and impede navigation through a crucial global trade route.

    The Houthis have largely sat out the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, despite frequently warning that they could join the fighting. But the group’s threat Monday appeared to signal a shift that could further disrupt shipping and energy markets roiled by Iran’s effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which much of the world’s oil and gas is shipped.

    Yahya Saree, a Houthi military spokesperson, said in a statement on social media that the partial naval blockade would take effect immediately. Iran and Israel traded waves of attacks Monday as a two-month truce between the countries broke down.

    Saree also said that the Houthis had launched a “salvo of missiles” against Israel in response to “aggression” against Iran, Lebanon, the Palestinians, and other targets.

    “We will meet escalation with escalation,” he said.

    It was unclear what the Houthi threat to Israeli ships would mean in practice. The territory controlled by the Houthis in Yemen sits alongside Bab al-Mandab, a narrow waterway that enters the southern end of the Red Sea. Cargo ships that cannot pass through the area must sail around the southern tip of Africa to transit between Asia and markets in Europe and the Americas, significantly lengthening travel times. Many shipping groups had already been avoiding the area.

    During Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis regularly attacked ships in the Red Sea in what they described as an effort to try to force Israel to end its bombardment of the Palestinian enclave.

    Since the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, the Red Sea has become a key outlet for Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, to reach international markets by avoiding the Strait of Hormuz.

    Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi political official, said that the group would target only vessels linked to Israel, but he cautioned other states, such as Saudi Arabia, not to intervene.

    “Any state that becomes involved will be targeted,” he said in a phone interview.

    It would not take much for the Houthis to hinder shipping by increasing the risks for vessels transiting the Red Sea, a move that would also raise insurance premiums for shipping companies, said Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow focused on Yemen at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

    “They can just send a signal and only one attack has to happen — and that will send a shock across insurance companies,” Al-Muslimi said. “I won’t be surprised now if you have a joint lockdown of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab.”

    Rashid al-Haddad, an economic analyst based in Yemen, said that if the U.S. military or other countries’ armed forces were deployed to the Red Sea to counter the Houthis, it could turn the entire waterway “into a theater of military confrontation.”

    “This would also drive up maritime insurance costs and divert a significant portion of global trade,” he said. “If hostilities escalate, the Houthis will resort to a complete closure of the Bab al-Mandab strait.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.