Author: NY TIMES

Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, said on Sunday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a “murderous dictator” responsible for the death of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, and that “we need strong leadership coming from America that actually pushes back against Russia and other dictators.”Then Mr. Scott followed up with the leap of logic that many ambitious Republicans have employed in trying to toe a tough line on Russia while pledging fealty to a former president who has done the opposite. He said the one man for that job was Donald J. Trump.“Unfortunately, Joe Biden…

European Union regulators on Monday opened an investigation into TikTok over potential breaches of online content rules aimed at protecting children, saying the popular social media platform’s “addictive design” risked exposing young people to harmful content.The move widens a preliminary investigation conducted in recent months into whether TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, violated a new European law, the Digital Services Act, which requires large social media companies to stop the spread of harmful material. Under the law, companies can be penalized up to 6 percent of their global revenues.TikTok has been under the scrutiny of E.U. regulators for…

Navalny’s widow vowed to continue his workIn a video released yesterday, Yulia Navalnaya said she would carry on her husband’s work to challenge President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule and called on his followers to rally alongside her.“I ask you to share my rage,” she told Navalny’s followers in the video posted to his YouTube feed, “to share my rage, anger and hatred of those who have dared to kill our future.”She blamed Putin for her husband’s death and suggested that Navalny’s team was investigating the circumstances of his death in prison, which was announced by Russian authorities on Friday.Analysis: Navalnaya,…

The New York Times on Monday won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The prizes were among the five that honored journalism on that conflict and the war in Ukraine.Long Island University, the home of the journalism awards, announced the winners in 13 categories, which were selected from 497 submissions of work done in 2023.“As horrific as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine were, they provided us with no shortage of magnificent reporting, done at great peril, from which to choose,” John Darnton, the longtime…

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil recalled his ambassador to Israel on Monday, as tensions escalated between the countries over the Brazilian leader’s sharp remarks against Israel’s war on Hamas.Mr. Lula summoned the ambassador, Frederico Meyer, back to Brazil “for consultations,” according to a statement from the country’s foreign ministry.Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, reprimanded Mr. Meyer on Monday about comments in which Mr. Lula compared Israel’s actions in the war to the Holocaust. “What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments,” Mr. Lula told reporters during the…

Hungary, the last holdout blocking Sweden’s entry into NATO, thumbed its nose over the weekend at the United States, declining to meet with a bipartisan delegation of senators who had come to press the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban to swiftly approve the Nordic nation’s entry into the military alliance.The snub, which Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, described on Sunday as “strange and concerning,” represented the latest effort by Mr. Orban, a stalwart champion of national sovereignty, to show he will not submit to outside pressure over NATO’s long-stalled expansion.Despite having only 10 million people and accounting for…

The lender Capital One is in talks to acquire Discover Financial Services, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said, in a deal that would combine two of the largest credit card companies in the United States.The deal, which is not yet final, could be announced as soon as this week, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were confidential. A price could not be immediately confirmed, but Discover Financial Services was valued at about $28 billion when the market closed on Friday. Capital One was valued at about $52 billion.Capital One and Discover did…

A senior Pakistani official confessed on Saturday to helping manipulate results in the country’s elections — a startling claim strengthening a sense that the vote was among the least credible in Pakistan’s history, and deepening the turmoil that has seized the country ever since people went to the polls this month.The official, Liaquat Ali Chatha, is a top administrative official in Punjab Province overseeing Rawalpindi, a garrison city where the military has its headquarters, and three adjacent districts. He said he would resign from his position and turn himself in to the police.“We converted losers into winners, reversing margins of…

Last fall, Tiffanie Simmons, a second-generation autoworker, endured a six-week strike at the Ford Motor factory just west of Detroit where she builds Bronco S.U.V.s. That yielded a pay raise of 25 percent over the next four years, easing the pain of reductions that she and other union workers swallowed more than a decade ago.But as Ms. Simmons, 38, contemplates prospects for the American auto industry in the state that invented it, she worries about a new force: the shift toward electric vehicles. She is dismayed that the transition has been championed by President Biden, whose pro-labor credentials are at…

As the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they’ve done so far — sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment — would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.Russia made its first major gain in Ukraine in nearly a year, taking the ruined city of Avdiivka, at huge human cost to both sides, the bodies littered along the roads a warning, perhaps, of a new course in the two-year-old war. Aleksei A. Navalny’s suspicious death in a remote Arctic prison made ever clearer that Mr.…