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Is It Wrong to Tell Kids to Apologize?

Some parents argue that forcing children to say they’re sorry is useless or even harmful. The reality is more nuanced.
Read full article on: theatlantic.com
Singer-songwriter Huey Lewis on seeing his songs come to life on stage
Singer-songwriter Huey Lewis joins "CBS Mornings" to talk about his new Broadway musical, "The Heart of Rock and Roll," and working through hearing loss.
1m
cbsnews.com
Man shot and wounded on 4 train near 86th Street, gunman at large
The 31-year-old victim was shot in his left hand while on a the train train at East 86th Street and Lexington Avenue around 2:30 a.m. Sunday, police told The Post.
nypost.com
Catholic bishop delves into problems of liberalism, 'society of little tyrants,' with politics professor
Bishop Robert Barron described problems of the modern understanding of freedom as a "society of little tyrants" in an interview with Patrick Deneen.
foxnews.com
Solution to Evan Birnholz’s June 2 crossword, ‘Let Me Give You a Hand’
What’s the deal with this puzzle?
washingtonpost.com
Trump's Plan to Supercharge Inflation
Among prominent economists, no one was more explicit than former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in warning that President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve Board risked igniting inflation by overstimulating the economy in 2021. Soaring prices over the next few years proved Summers correct.Now Summers sees the risk of another price shock in the economic plans of former President Donald Trump. “There has never been a presidential platform so self-evidently inflationary as the one put forward by President Trump,” Summers told me in an interview this week. “I have little doubt that with the Trump program, we will see a substantial acceleration in inflation, unless somehow we get a major recession first.”Summers is far from alone in raising that alarm. Trump’s greatest asset in the 2024 campaign may be the widespread belief among voters that the cost of living was more affordable when he was president and would be so again if he’s reelected to a second term. But a growing number of economists and policy analysts are warning that Trump’s second-term agenda of sweeping tariffs, mass deportation of undocumented migrants, and enormous tax cuts would accelerate, rather than alleviate, inflation.[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]In an upcoming analysis shared exclusively with The Atlantic, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, forecasts that compared with current policies, Trump’s economic plans would increase the inflation rate and force the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates higher than they would be otherwise. “If he got what he wanted,” Zandi told me, “you add it all up and it feels highly inflationary to me.”In a study released last month, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that the tariffs Trump says he will impose on imports would dramatically raise costs for consumers. “Trump is promising a no-holds-barred, all-out protectionist spree that will affect every single thing that people buy that is either an import or in competition with imports,” Kimberly Clausing, a co-author of the study and a professor of tax policy at the UCLA Law School, told me.Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, is sympathetic to many elements of Trump’s agenda and critical of Biden’s. But Holtz-Eakin agrees that Trump’s economic plan “doesn’t bode well” for “the cost of living,” as he told me.Summers, who served as Treasury secretary for Bill Clinton and the top White House economic adviser for Barack Obama, took substantial flak from fellow Democrats when he repeatedly warned that Biden was risking high inflation by pushing through Congress another massive COVID-relief package in 2021, while the Federal Reserve Board was still maintaining interest rates at historically low levels. “The Biden administration and the Fed both did make … consequential errors of failing to do macroeconomic arithmetic for which the economy is still paying,” he told me.Summers told me he remains unsure that the policies Biden and the Fed are pursuing will push inflation all the way down to the Fed’s 2 percent target. But he said he is confident that Trump’s blueprint would make inflation worse.Summers identified multiple pillars of Trump’s economic agenda that could accelerate inflation. These included compromising the independence of the Federal Reserve Board, enlarging the federal budget deficit by extending his 2017 tax cuts, raising tariffs, rescinding Biden policies designed to promote competition and reduce “junk fees,” and squeezing the labor supply by restricting new immigration and deporting undocumented migrants already here. Others note that top Trump advisers have also hinted that in a second term, he would seek to devalue the dollar, which would boost exports but further raise the cost of imported goods.For many economists, Trump’s plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on imported products from all countries and 60 percent tariffs on imports from China are the most concerning entries on that list.These new levies go far beyond any of the tariffs Trump raised while in office, several of which Biden maintained, said Clausing, who served as the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis for Biden’s first two years. Trump’s proposed tariffs also dwarf the levies Biden recently imposed on electric vehicles and assorted other products from China: Biden’s new measures affect about $18 billion in Chinese imports, she said, whereas Trump proposes to raise tariffs on $3.1 trillion in imported goods, more than 150 times as much. Trump “has been quite clear that he is envisioning something quite a bit larger than he did last time,” Clausing told me.In the Peterson study, Clausing and her co-author, Mary Lovely, calculated that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices for consumers on the goods they purchase by at least $500 billion a year, or about $1,700 annually for a middle-income family. The cost for consumers, she told me, could be about twice as high if domestic manufacturers increase their own prices on the goods that compete with imports.“When you make foreign wine more expensive, domestic manufacturers can sell their wine at a higher price,” Clausing told me. “The same with washing machines and solar panels and chairs. Anything that is in competition with an import will also get more expensive.”While Trump’s proposed tariffs would increase the cost of goods, his pledge to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants would put pressure on the cost of both goods and services. Undocumented migrants are central to the workforce in an array of service industries, such as hospitality, child care, and elder care. But they also fill many jobs in construction, agricultural harvesting, and food production. Removing millions of undocumented workers from the economy at once “would create massive labor shortages in lots of different industries,” Zandi told me. That would force employers to either raise wages to find replacements or, more likely, disrupt production and distribution; both options would raise the prices consumers pay. “If you are talking about kicking 50 percent of the farm labor force out, that is not going to do wonders for agricultural food prices,” David Bier, director of immigration-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me.Removing so many workers simultaneously would be disruptive under any circumstances, many economists agree. But it could be especially tumultuous for the U.S. now because the native-born population has grown so slowly in recent years. Bier pointed out that immigrants and their children already account for almost all the growth in the population of working-age adults ages 18 to 64. If Trump in fact extracts millions of undocumented migrants from the workforce, “there is no replacement [available] even at a theoretical level,” Bier said.More difficult to quantify but potentially equally significant are the frequent indications from Trump that, as with all other federal agencies, he wants to tighten his personal control over the Federal Reserve Board. During his first term, Trump complained that the Fed was slowing economic growth by keeping interest rates too high, and any second-term move to erode the Fed’s independence—for instance, by seeking to fire or demote the board’s chair, Jay Powell—would be aimed at pressuring the board into prematurely cutting interest rates, predicts Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chair who is advising Biden’s reelection campaign. That would become another source of inflationary pressure, he says, likely spooking financial markets. In the upcoming Moody’s analysis, Zandi estimates the cumulative impact of all these possible changes. He compares a scenario in which Trump can implement his entire agenda with one in which power remains divided between Biden in the White House and Republicans controlling at least one congressional chamber. Inflation, Zandi projects, would be nearly a full percentage point higher (0.8 percent, to be exact) under the scenario of Trump and Republicans in control than in the alternative of Biden presiding over a divided government. Inflation would be about that much higher under Trump even compared with the less likely scenario of Democrats winning the White House and both congressional chambers, Zandi projects.Zandi said the only reason he does not anticipate prices rising even faster under Trump is that the Federal Reserve Board would inevitably raise interest rates to offset the inflationary impact of Trump’s proposals.But those higher interest rates would come with their own cost: Zandi projects they would depress the growth in total economic output and personal income below current policy, and raise the unemployment rate over the next few years by as much as a full percentage point—even as inflation rises. Raising the specter of the slow-growth, high-inflation pattern that hobbled the American economy through much of the 1970s, Zandi told me, “It is really a stagflation scenario.”Summers sees the same danger. “It is difficult to predict the timing and the precise dynamics,” he told me, “but it is hard to imagine a policy package more likely to create stagflation” than measures that directly raise prices (through tariffs), undermine competition, enlarge deficits, and excessively expand the money supply. “There is a real risk during a Trump presidency that we would again see mortgage rates above 10 percent as inflation expectations rose and long-term interest rates increased,” he predicted.Holtz-Eakin, the former CBO director, also worries that Trump’s agenda would make it much tougher for the Federal Reserve Board to moderate prices without precipitating a recession. Unlike Zandi and Summers, though, Holtz-Eakin believes that a second-term Biden agenda would also increase upward pressure on prices. That’s partly because of the cost of environmental and other regulations that the administration would impose, but also because he believes a reelected Biden would face enormous pressure to restore new spending programs that the Senate blocked from his Build Back Better agenda in 2021. He also believes that Trump’s plans to increase domestic energy production could eventually offset some of the inflationary impact of his other agenda elements.Kevin Hassett, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, has argued that any inflationary impact from Trump’s tariff and immigration agenda would be offset by other elements of his plan—including cutting government spending and taxes, increasing energy production, and slashing regulation. “Those four effects would dwarf the effects of any other policy proposals,” Hassett maintained in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year.Holtz-Eakin isn’t convinced. He told me that any moderating impact from Trump’s energy and deregulatory agenda would take time to develop, while the inflationary effect of his tariffs and deportation plans would be felt immediately. “Tariffs happen fast,” Holtz-Eakin said. “Deportations happen fast.”[Rogé Karma: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]Zandi is even more skeptical. He told me that with domestic oil and gas production already at record levels, Trump has little room to open the spigot even further, or to affect prices much if he does. On regulation, Zandi said he is “hard-pressed” to see how Trump’s plans “would translate through to less inflation, at least in a meaningful way.”As with many issues, the potential impact of Trump’s second-term plans for inflation has drawn little attention in the presidential race. Instead, the former president so far is benefiting from voters’ awareness that prices increased much faster under Biden, as the American and global economies emerged from the pandemic’s disruptions, than they did while Trump was in office.Apart from concerns about Biden’s age, that discontent over inflation appears to be the greatest threat to his reelection. In a recent survey across the seven most closely contested swing states published by the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, a majority of voters said they considered their cost of living the most important measure of the economy’s performance. But a daunting three-fifths of voters in the poll, conducted by a bipartisan team of Republican and Democratic pollsters, said inflation is unlikely to be brought under control if Biden is reelected. In contrast, nearly three-fifths of voters said they believed that the cost of living would improve under Trump.Even though experts such as Summers and Zandi are warning that Trump’s economic agenda would have precisely the opposite effect, it won’t be easy for Biden to convince voters to weigh those prospective risks more heavily than their retrospective judgments about prices under each man’s tenure. But Biden may have no choice but to try. Raising awareness of the inflationary dangers in Trump’s agenda may be Biden’s best chance of winning a second look from the voters who are now moving toward the former president primarily because they remember gas, groceries, and other necessities costing less while he sat in the Oval Office.
theatlantic.com
How Biden Can Win the Debate
Until Thursday’s verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, whose effect on the presidential campaign remains to be seen, virtually nothing had changed in the race for months: Poll after poll has shown President Joe Biden behind—down slightly in the “blue wall” states of the industrial Midwest, and more substantially in the Sun Belt. His approval rating has been stuck not at just under 50 percent—the historic marker of whether incumbents get reelected—but at about 40 percent, occasionally even less. It’s been that way for nearly a year and a half. And the age issue is still very real.Trump is not meaningfully more popular, nor are Americans unaware of his failings. But believing that Trump’s problems alone will bail out Biden is a fantasy. “Voters clearly recognize the huge steps backward a Trump presidency might bring—they are pessimistic about what he could do to abortion rights, progress on climate change, and even failing to protect Medicare and Social Security,” Lindsay Vermeyen, a pollster involved in the independent polling-research Swing State Project, told the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter. “And yet, their economic frustrations are enough to override all that.”Voters’ negativity is overwhelmingly about high costs: about the price of gas and groceries, but also about house payments, car payments, the ability to save for the future and provide a nest egg for their kids.Until the conclusion of the Manhattan trial, the only material movement in May was Biden’s decision to do a June debate, the earliest general-election face-off in American history. This is a gamble for Biden—but absolutely the right choice. He must try to redefine the race and encourage voters to take a second look. His age isn’t changing, but he can change some of the arguments he makes. And to influence voters who are still persuadable, he will have no better platform.[David Frum: Why Biden should not debate Trump]Ever since televised presidential debates began, they have had the capacity to move voters like few other events. Nothing comes close to the audience and attention these 90-minute matchups receive. They not only are watched by astounding numbers of viewers—even in this fragmented media landscape, the lower-rated 2020 debate drew 63 million viewers—but also dominate headlines for days after, influencing even more voters.In 1960, Richard Nixon narrowly led John F. Kennedy until Nixon withered under the studio lights—appearing sweaty and tentative compared with the cool, confident Democrat. In 1976, Gerald Ford’s momentum stalled after he insisted in a debate with Jimmy Carter that there was “no Soviet domination” of manifestly Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.Ronald Reagan used his mastery of the medium to lay to rest voter concerns about his conservatism in 1980, and about his age in 1984. In 1988, Michael Dukakis, the Democratic challenger to George H. W. Bush, buried his chances by bloodlessly responding to a hypothetical about his wife being raped and murdered. And in 1992, Bush himself fell short when he reinforced the idea that he was out of touch by repeatedly checking his watch.In 2000, Al Gore’s lead in the polls melted away after a debate performance that his opponent, George W. Bush, sold to the press as “sighs and lies.” In 2012, Barack Obama, then the incumbent president, blew his first debate, throwing his challenger a lifeline. In 2020, Trump’s overheated, COVID-infected performance expanded Biden’s lead—which he held throughout that campaign.This time is different: Biden is now the incumbent who’s behind. And to turn things around onstage, he has to address the economy as voters experience it. Barely more than one-fifth of those surveyed in a recent New York Times poll rated the economy as excellent or good; a majority said it is poor. In a Guardian/Harris poll, more than half (56 percent) believed we are in a recession, and nearly three in five (58 percent) said Biden is responsible. The economic data may show that they’re mistaken—but good luck winning votes by telling Americans that they’re wrong.In this context, Biden’s current message is a disaster. When he was asked in a TV interview last month about voters’ greater trust in Trump on the economy, Biden responded by saying, “We’ve already turned it around.” He cited a survey about people’s personal finances and went on to claim, as he typically does, “We have the strongest economy in the world.” That may be technically true, but for a politician whose superpower is supposed to be empathy, Biden didn’t show much understanding of the gap between the official statistics and people’s day-to-day experience. He failed to provide a compelling story about his administration’s efforts that would resonate with middle-class families struggling to afford the basics.“It is concerning to me when I keep seeing press come out of the White House where they keep saying the economy is good,” one former Biden voter told the Times. “That’s really weird because I’m paying more on taxes and more on groceries and more on housing and more on fuel. So that doesn’t feel good.”[David A. Graham: The most irresponsible thing ever said in a presidential debate]Biden’s first move at the debate podium should be to deliver his economic message with empathy—and a frank admission that inflation is still too high and prices on everyday goods are hurting millions of Americans. He should talk about his own family’s past hard times. That would give him more credibility to offer a narrative about the economic mess he inherited from Trump, the millions of good jobs he’s helped create, and the programs he’s put in place—such as the CHIPS Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law—to create an even better economy in the years ahead.That brings us to the second debate imperative for Biden: He needs to talk about the future more than the past. As Gore has said, elections are “not an award for past performance.” This campaign has to be about the next four years. Currently, only one of dozens of Biden campaign ads outlines a second-term agenda. The platform it laid out is popular and compelling—making child care and elder care affordable, protecting Social Security and Medicare, passing a “minimum tax for billionaires,” establishing Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, banning assault weapons, and preserving the right to vote—but that ad is more than a year old, and I haven’t seen anything comparable since.At a time when high costs are squeezing Americans’ budgets, Biden’s budget seems to get it. When it was released earlier this year, the accompanying White House report said “lowering costs” for consumers—reducing prices for health care, housing, groceries—is the president’s “top domestic priority.” But few Americans have received that message. Much of the president’s first-term accomplishments, and second-term agenda, should be framed as a fight to lower costs against Republicans who oppose both what he’s done and what he hopes to do.The third piece of Biden’s message that must change is his attack on Trump. Sounding the alarm against authoritarian threats to be a “dictator on day one,” cancel the Constitution, and take revenge on his “deep state” enemies is a vital, valid mission. Those hits are one reason Biden’s support among college-educated white voters is still about where it was four years ago. But the democracy agenda is either insufficient or ineffective to stanch Biden’s bleeding among working-class voters, including Latinos and Blacks.Part of that failure goes back to the economy. These voters are simply more sensitive to higher prices than upscale suburbanites. Crucially, they are also overrepresented in swing states. This Republican advantage in the Electoral College is a relatively new phenomenon: As recently as 2012, Obama polled about two points better in the swing states than he did nationally. A dozen years later, the reverse is true: Biden is underperforming his national numbers by about two points in the seven states that will decide the election.To win working-class Americans back to his coalition, Biden cannot simply tout his administration’s achievements in reducing crime and bringing down prices. That will just make him seem out of touch, as the longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg has argued. The metaphorical sign behind Biden should say A Good Beginning, not Mission Accomplished. He should explicitly acknowledge that he isn’t satisfied and has more work to do—but then Biden should go on the offensive against Trump.In attack mode, Biden will look more vigorous. And he can win arguments about the way Trump’s budgets defund the police as well as environmental protection; how Trump’s policies undo gun-safety laws, caps on insulin prices, and protections for preexisting conditions; and why a Trump presidency would reward big companies and billionaires at the expense of working families.Biden should remind the debate audience that the only major legislation Trump passed was a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy—a measure that remains highly unpopular. And Biden can warn viewers that Trump is proposing more of those benefits for his buddies—tax cuts that will raise prices still higher. The threat isn’t just Trump’s vindictive personality or his antidemocratic instincts; it is his actual policies.[Ronald Brownstein: Can Biden begin a reset tonight?]This election will be a fundamental test of American democracy. It will also be the greatest electoral challenge the Democratic Party has faced this century. Four years ago, Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, but if some 45,000 votes in three swing states had gone in the other direction, Trump would have tied him the Electoral College—and then won the election in the House of Representatives. And that election took place after the economy had crashed, the pandemic had been mismanaged, and Biden—whose favorability rating never fell below 50 percent—had heavily outspent Trump.In the same interview in which Biden argued that he’d turned the economy around, he said something equally perilous: “The polling data has been wrong all along.” Loyal Democrats who want to wishcast a better electoral environment, and who dismiss the scale of Biden’s challenge, should know that today’s grim polling cannot be excused or dismissed. The truth is, as 538 has reported, polls were “more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.” Ominously, in 2016 and 2020, Trump actually overperformed his polling.Biden’s challenge is real. His campaign clearly sees it—why else take the risk on such an early debate? But if the first step in dealing with a problem is acknowledging it, his next step must be directly addressing it. Biden should use this extraordinary platform to make new arguments to voters: that he gets what they’re going through, that his plans will produce a better future, and that Trump isn’t just a risk for American institutions—he’s a threat to American families.
theatlantic.com
NYPD on high alert ahead of Israel Day Parade Sunday
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officials said the Israel Day parade will have heightened security this year amid the Israel-Hamas war.
foxnews.com
Confusion swirls as NYC pool with Keith Haring mural unexpectedly closed for another summer
New Yorkers are heartbroken and frustrated as the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center outdoor pool remains closed for construction for yet another summer after it was shut down in 2019.
nypost.com
Why investors are doubling down on Truth Social despite Trump's historic conviction
Despite former President Trump's historic conviction, shareholders of his social media company are vowing to stay with him no matter what.
npr.org
Five ways to respond to Alito’s contemptuous letter
The latest Supreme Court controversy makes clear that it’s past time to rein in this institution.
washingtonpost.com
Atlanta Boil Water Map Shows Area Impacted as State of Emergency Declared
Residents and property owners of areas affected by water main breaks in the city remain under boil water advisories as crews work to repair a pipe.
newsweek.com
Book excerpt: "The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley
A delightful mix of historical fact and science fiction, this debut novel mixes historical fact and science fiction in the story of a secret British agency that plucks doomed people from the past.
cbsnews.com
What does the death of a jailed Jesuit priest say about India's democracy under Modi?
Indian police accused Stan Swamy of terrorism. His supporters say he was framed and evidence planted on his computer. Some call it Narendra Modi's Watergate. Six years on, no one has resigned.
npr.org
Southern US city ranked as worst for deadly car accidents in the country, study says
A southern U.S. city was ranked where the most car accidents happen, and many of the top 10 were also in the southeast, according to ConsumerAffairs.
foxnews.com
Book excerpt: "Challenger" by Adam Higginbotham
The British journalist and author of "Midnight in Chernobyl" returns with his exhaustively-researched new book about the 1986 space shuttle disaster.
cbsnews.com
Trump’s Purposeless Fury
After losing in court, he seems at a loss for what to do next.
theatlantic.com
Book excerpt: "This Strange Eventful History" by Claire Messud
The bestselling author of "The Emperor's Children" returns with a multi-generational story of family secrets spanning World War II to the 21st century.
cbsnews.com
Man Cheered for Why He Refused To Let Passenger Take Empty Seat on Flight
One Reddit user insisted the woman's "reaction was uncalled for" after reading the argument, though another said both parties were in the wrong.
newsweek.com
‘3 Body Problem’ Renewed By Netflix For Two More Seasons
The streamer had previously announced "all-new episodes" but didn't specify how many until now.
nypost.com
California Firefighters Battle Wind-Driven Wildfire East of San Francisco
California firefighters aided by aircraft battled a wind-driven wildfire that began Saturday and continued burning early Sunday morning.
1 h
time.com
Israel begrudgingly accepts Biden’s Gaza deal: ‘Not a good plan’
Israel begrudgingly accepted President Biden's Gaza cease-fire plan on Sunday, but Benjamin Netanyahu's office says there are "details to be worked out."
1 h
foxnews.com
A Portrait of an Obsolete Man
Culture and entertainment musts from Caleb Madison
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theatlantic.com
Democrats weaponing flags to intimidate Alito is an embarrassment
Martha-Ann Alito isn’t out of control. She’s just exercising her freedom.
1 h
washingtonpost.com
USWNT's Korbin Albert hears boos in Colorado entering match after controversial LGBTQ posts
U.S. women's soccer star Korbin Albert heard boos from a crowd in Colorado as she subbed into Saturday's match. She came under fire over critical posts about the LGBTQ+ community.
1 h
foxnews.com
Woman Hit With $6K Vet Bill for Dog in Disbelief Over Cause of Problem
The vet originally thought the cough he developed was linked to his heart condition.
1 h
newsweek.com
How Meghan Markle Paid Fashion Tribute to Princess Lilibet
Meghan wore a very special dress during her visit to Nigeria in May with links to her daughter.
1 h
newsweek.com
What to know about Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s likely next president
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO - MAY 29: A man sells latex masks with the faces of the President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum of 'Sigamos Haciendo Historia' coalition during the closing event of the campaign at the Zócalo on May 29, 2024 in Mexico City, Mexico. According to the Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE) over 100 million people are allowed to vote on the 2024 Presidential Election in Mexico. Claudia Sheinbaum of the Sigamos Haciendo Historia coalition, Xochitl Galvez of Fuerza y Corazón por México coalition and Jorge Alvarez Maynez of Movimiento Ciudadano will participate as the candidates for the presidency. (Photo by Jeannette Flores/ObturadorMX/Getty Images) Mexico is poised to elect its first woman president today, likely climate scientist and former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.  But as the protégée of current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, she hasn’t significantly differentiated herself from the populist leader, especially in the areas where AMLO, as the current president is nicknamed, has failed to deliver — including Mexico’s astronomical homicide rate, crime due to narco-trafficking, and government corruption. Now the question is to what extent Sheinbaum will be able to make progress on these concerns while operating under the shadow of her mentor. Sheinbaum’s early career was as an environmental engineer and climate scientist; she was part of a Nobel Prize-winning team behind a report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. She started her political career as AMLO’s environmental minister during his time as Mexico City’s mayor in the early 2000s and later served as the capital’s mayor herself. But during AMLO’s tenure, she’s been in her mentor’s shadow in terms of policy, especially as the current administration’s investments in fossil fuel contradict the urgent need to switch to renewable energy — and drain the administration’s coffers. Sheinbaum is outpolling her closest competitor, businesswoman and former Senator Xóchitl Gálvez, by around 20 points leading up to Sunday’s election. Gálvez is backed by a three-party coalition that includes El Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and El Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), which controlled Mexico for seven decades before AMLO was elected in 2018. If polls bear out, once Sheinbaum is in office she’ll have plenty to tackle. She’s promised at times to pursue a more market-friendly approach than AMLO, and at others to take his policy to the “second floor.” The question will be: While riding on AMLO’s popularity and likely juggling his ongoing influence, how will she lead Mexico if and when she, not her mentor, is the president? Sheinbaum has campaigned on AMLO’s popularity Sheinbaum isn’t the first hand-picked successor in Mexican politics; it’s a common feature at the national level for presidents, who serve one term, to have a protégé selected, Joy Kathryn Langston, a political science professor at the College of Mexico’s Center for International Studies, told Vox.  Mexico’s economy is performing well by some metrics, and AMLO has expanded the welfare state, which has helped Sheinbaum and the Morena party she represents — while also stymieing her ability or desire to come out of AMLO’s shadow, at least while on the campaign trail.  AMLO’s policies have been significantly focused on the economy, as Juan David Rojas wrote in the journal American Affairs in 2022. Investing in domestic oil production, curbing government spending, and cracking down on petrochemical theft have helped shore up foreign investment in the form of national bonds. The peso is at a 20-year peak, the best-performing major currency so far this year according to Bloomberg, due to high interest rates, extremely high remittances from the US, and the possibility that companies could build factories in Mexico to be closer to their US consumer base. None of that is likely to change too much under Sheinbaum. “It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Sheinbaum will be a continuation of the status quo,” Christian Lawrence, a strategist at Rabobank, told Bloomberg in March. While that’s important on the world stage, AMLO’s social welfare policies have more direct impact on Mexicans’ everyday lives.  Social welfare spending tripled during AMLO’s first five years in office, reaching $24 billion last year. That has boosted his popularity among the working class, particularly when combined with his enmity toward Mexico’s political and corporate classes. Sheinbaum polls especially high among voters who receive or have family members who receive welfare benefits, beating Gálvez by some 40 points, an April poll in the newspaper El Financiero found.  The impact of social welfare spending has been significant, at least politically speaking. Though not as far-reaching as past welfare programs, the pension for Mexico’s elderly population — Indigenous people over 65 and non-Indigenous people over 68 — has been extremely popular, even winning over people in states like Oaxaca, long the domain of the PRI. AMLO has also increased the minimum wage and proposed a universal pension program, which would be the first in the world to pay people equal to their full salaries after they retire.  AMLO has also increased infrastructure spending, including a new airport in Oaxaca, a state-run airline, a tourist train called the Tren Maya, and many other civilian and military infrastructure projects. In some ways, it’s been a boon, providing better jobs for people in Mexico’s poorer southern states in particular. But there are also complaints that the projects are rushed and shoddy, incomplete, over budget, environmentally destructive, and overused military and security resources, which prevent them from fighting violent crime. His policy of pouring money into PEMEX, Mexico’s state-run petroleum agency, will also likely be a major debt burden for Sheinbaum to deal with. Still, many aspects of the spending push have been politically popular — so much so that if Mexico’s constitution would let him run again, AMLO would likely win. Sheinbaum will be the next best thing, many voters seem to have decided. But without AMLO’s signature populist charisma, she will have to focus on delivering real results, especially in the places where AMLO has failed, like crime and corruption.  “Whether [Sheinbaum] will change is obviously impossible to say,” Langston said. “You can only base your predictions or my predictions on what she has stated publicly, which is that she will not radically change the major money-guzzling budget-busting policies of the last six years.” But eventually, that will hamper the state’s ability to continue the social welfare spending that is AMLO’s calling card. Sheinbaum may need to introduce some unpopular policies, such as increasing taxes, in order to keep those popular programs afloat. But Sheinbaum faces many major hurdles Sheinbaum — or whoever wins today — will face major challenges once she gets into office, including environmental issues exacerbated by climate change, high homicide rates, and eventually, the economic burden of AMLO’s welfare spending. And some of those challenges will be hard to face from a policy perspective, thanks to her predecessor. “[AMLO] determined the political agenda for the next two years, even before he left office,” Langston said. “He did that in roughly between January and March, by placing all of these incredibly complex policies and reforms, many of which can damage democracy, putting them in under a new legislative bill.” That fact, combined with the likelihood that Morena will not achieve a majority in the congress following today’s election, could also make it difficult for Sheinbaum to enact her own policy priorities. Mexico is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in Latin America and the Caribbean, and is vulnerable to extreme weather events and coastal flooding, which affects the coastal tourist industry. The overall tourist industry accounted for 8 percent of Mexico’s GDP before the Covid-19 pandemic, and nearly 6 percent of the workforce was engaged in the tourism industry, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  One primary question outside observers have about Sheinbaum is whether she’ll follow her scientific training when it comes to climate change policies. She’s been fairly mum on the topic throughout the campaign, and her record on climate change policy as mayor of Mexico City is somewhat mixed. During her tenure, the capital city’s buses went electric, and she started work on the world’s largest urban solar panel factory. But she also fast-tracked construction of a highway bridge through Mexico City’s protected wetlands before an environmental impact report was completed.  As president, Sheinbaum has pledged to invest in other green energy initiatives and electrify bus services across the nation. And supporters say that science will lead her climate change initiatives — not her mentor’s construction projects or petrochemical development.   The cartel crisis has also continued under AMLO, and in some ways has gotten more entrenched, as Associated Press reporter Megan Janetsky told Vox’s Sean Rameswaram.  “Under AMLO, cartels and other criminal groups have expanded in power,” Janetsky said. “Extortion has expanded. These groups have grown more complex to the point where oftentimes they’re compared more to giant illegal companies that are constantly ahead of authorities in this cat-and-mouse game, because they’re warring with each other.” While AMLO did put an end to Mexico’s drug war, which started under former President Felipe Calderón and arguably exacerbated the violence associated with with the cartels, his “hugs, not bullets” policy (meant to target systemic issues fueling the violence) has not resulted in a significant drop in homicides; Mexico still sees about 30,000 crime-related deaths each year. An average of one journalist is killed each week, and in the embattled southern state of Chiapas, 14 political candidates have been killed by the cartels during this election season. Sheinbaum has said that she will coordinate closely with the US to reduce narco-trafficking, human trafficking, arms flows, and money laundering. But there’s a lack of clarity around exactly how she plans to stanch the immense violence, which includes forced disappearances and extortion. Like AMLO, she has pledged to continue to address the systemic issues like poverty and lack of education and job opportunities that make criminal enterprises appealing. “We are going to rescue young people from the clutches of criminal gangs, and we’re going to give them support,” she said in a May 19 debate. She has also promised to bolster the National Guard, giving it more officers and surveillance capabilities. But that could also increase the militarization of policing and fighting crime, a significant human rights concern. For Sheinbaum, actually governing the country will likely be much more difficult than winning the election, as AMLO leaves behind a complex governing legacy.  And without AMLO’s personal appeal, she will likely have to deliver — and sacrifice — in ways he couldn’t or wouldn’t.
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