Author: Lance Garrison

The decision by Spain, Norway and Ireland today to recognize an independent Palestinian state marks the latest brick in the wall of rejection being built around Israel’s current far-right government, which is asking the world to let it destroy Hamas in Gaza while refusing to work on a new future with non-Hamas Palestinians.More than 140 countries and the Holy See have recognized the right of Palestinians to have a state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. What is noteworthy about this move, though, is that major Western European countries, and the U.S., had resisted going there, arguing that…

On May 14, President Biden announced a major escalation of the country’s emerging climate trade war with China, raising existing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100 percent — a unilateral quadrupling. A few days earlier, responding to reports of Biden’s plans, Donald Trump outdid him, promising tariffs of 200 percent should he win the 2024 election.It’s not just E.V.s. Five years after blasting Trump for imposing tariffs on Chinese exports, Biden raised them — on aluminum, steel, lithium batteries, solar cells and semiconductors, among other products. Trade protections of this scope would have been almost unthinkable even half a…

To the Editor:Re “We’re Suddenly Living in a ‘My Wife Did It’ Moment,” by Gail Collins and Bret Stephens (The Conversation, May 21):Mr. Stephens goes on at length about why Justice Samuel Alito’s wife has “the constitutional right” to express a “Stop the Steal” opinion by hanging a flag upside-down in the Alitos’ front yard, as well as “a moral right” to express her opinion independently of her Supreme Court justice husband.Then, when Ms. Collins challenges the propriety of a political symbol at the home of a justice who might someday have to decide on that very election’s validity, Mr.…

The intensity of the national programs — with about 400,000 workers in Pakistan and 86,000 in Afghanistan — has recently reduced 12 genetic clusters of the wild poliovirus in the region to just two, and one of the two hasn’t been seen since November. “From a medical perspective, the virus is gasping in these last corridors,” says Dr. Ananda Bandyopadhyay of the Gates Foundation.The virus could, of course, spread outside these regions, as it did in 2022, when international air travel carried polio to a handful of other countries, including the United States. But frontline workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan…

Nicholas Kristof has spent his career reporting on difficult topics: genocide, war, famine. But decades in the field have not weakened his belief in humanity. In this audio essay, Kristof reflects on his life as a reporter and makes the case for hope. “Yes, there are very real challenges ahead,” he says. And yet, he argues, the United States “has a dynamism and inner strength that will allow America to survive.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced…

In the years since, 29 members of Ms. Gutierrez’s family have been diagnosed with various types of cancer. Several have died, including her son Toby Jr., who died of leukemia when he was 56. Her daughter, Jeanne, is currently being treated for thyroid cancer. Ms. Gutierrez had her thyroid removed on the advice of her physician because, the doctor told her, a positive cancer diagnosis was all but certain. “We don’t ever ask if we’re going to get it,” she said, “We wonder when.”Around the world, thyroid disorders are among the most widespread health impacts of nuclear fallout and contamination.…

Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt and the director of the Center for the American Presidency the, argued in an email: “I consider Trump a transformative, or at least pivotal, president for his impact on the policy preferences of Republican voters, his role in supercharging polarization, and his part in the Jan. 6 insurrection.”Hemmer continued:He did not innovate on the policy front: many of his policy preferences were either longstanding Republican preferences, like budget-busting tax cuts and appointing judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, or had been prefigured by politicians like Pat Buchanan a generation earlier.Nor would I consider his…

In my mind, one limitation in interpreting these findings is that I.V.F. pregnancies are planned, while over 40 percent of pregnancies in the United States, for example, are unplanned. One could imagine that the women pursuing I.V.F. at various income levels might be better set up to weather a career interruption than women who have surprise pregnancies. But it is still a thought-provoking finding that complicates previous child gap research.In the United States, where gender norms are less progressive than in Scandinavia and the “costs for a single cycle of I.V.F. have recently been estimated to range from $15,000 to…

If you are keeping score at home, you have surely noticed that the two most important defense officials in Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the former military chief of staff Benny Gantz — warned last week that Netanyahu is leading Israel into a disastrous abyss by refusing to present any plan for non-Hamas Palestinians to govern Gaza and appears to be contemplating a long-term Israeli military occupation of Gaza instead. Gantz said he would leave the government if there was no plan by June 8.Here are the stakes for America in what these ministers are…

So which country is more vulnerable: Israel or Iran?The single most serious risk to Israel, as the former Iranian president Akbar Rafsanjani once put it, is that: “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything, however it would only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Iran’s expanding nuclear capabilities (and its opacity about them) should alarm the Western world a lot more than apparently it does.But the danger to Israel from moves at the I.C.C. — or, for that matter, from campus protests, boycott and divestment efforts or various…