Category: Latest News

A Haitian judge has indicted 51 people for their roles in the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, including his wife, Martine Moïse, who is accused of being an accomplice, despite being seriously wounded in the attack.

A 122-page copy of the indictment by Judge Walther Voltaire that was provided to The New York Times does not accuse her of planning the killing nor does it offer any direct evidence of her involvement.

Instead, it says that she and other accomplices gave statements that were contradicted by other witnesses, suggesting that they were complicit in the killing. The indictment also cites one of the main defendants in the case in custody in Haiti, who claimed that Mrs. Moïse was plotting with others to take over the presidency.

The accusations echo those contained in a criminal complaint filed by a Haitian prosecutor and submitted to Mr. Voltaire. The official charge against Mrs. Moïse is conspiracy to murder.

A lawyer for Mrs. Moïse, Paul Turner, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But Mr. Turner, who is based in South Florida, had earlier denied the accusations in the criminal complaint.

“She was a victim, just like her children that were there, and her husband,” he told The Times. Mr. Turner said his client is in hiding and her current location is unknown to all but a few people.

Mrs. Moïse has long criticized the Haitian investigation, saying officials have shown little interest in unmasking the masterminds of the crime.

Mr. Moïse, 53, was killed in the early hours of July 7, 2021, when a team of Colombian commandos, hired by a Miami-area security company, stormed the president’s home in a wealthy suburb of the Haitian capital, according to the Haitian investigation.

The president and his wife were shot after the gunmen entered the couple’s bedroom and ransacked the home, apparently in search of documents and cash.

In statements immediately after the assassination, Mrs. Moïse said she hid under the couple’s bed to protect herself from the attackers, according to the indictment, which is dated Jan. 25. It was obtained by AyiboPost, an online Haitian news website.

However, the indictment says that the gap between the bed and the floor was 14 to 18 inches, raising questions about her credibility.

In an interview with The Times several weeks after her husband’s killing, Mrs. Moïse recalled being shot in her hand and elbow and hearing their attackers looking for something in Mr. Moïse’s files.

The accusation against Mr. Moïse’s widow is also based on the testimony of a key witness, Joseph Badio, a former official in the Justice Ministry who is accused of being one of the orchestrators of the assassination. Mr. Badio was arrested last October after spending two years in hiding.

According to the indictment, Mr. Badio said Mrs. Moïse was plotting with others, including Claude Joseph, who was the prime minister at the time of the assassination, to get rid of her husband “to monopolize power.”

Despite a two-and-a-half-year investigation, the indictment leaves many questions unanswered. While it goes into some detail about the night of the assassination, it does not explain the motive for the crime nor how it was financed.

A separate U.S. investigation in Miami has resulted in federal charges against 11 men accused of conspiring to kill Mr. Moïse. Six men have pleaded guilty, while the other five are scheduled to go on trial in May. Mrs. Moïse is expected to be a witness.

Some critics have said they believe the indictment in Haiti is tainted by politics, accusing the government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry of using the investigation to attack its critics, including Mrs. Moïse and Mr. Joseph.

“They are using the Haitian justice system to advance their Machiavellian agenda,” Mr. Joseph said.

Mr. Henry’s office said there had been no interference in the investigation.

“The Prime Minister has no direct relationship with the examining magistrate, nor does he control him,” said Jean-Junior Joseph, a spokesman for Mr. Henry. “The judge remains free to issue his order in accordance with the law and his conscience.”

Under Haiti’s legal system, the initial complaint was prepared by a public prosecutor, Edler Guillaume, a political appointee of the current government.

The charges cited by Mr. Voltaire can be appealed within 10 days of the accused receiving a copy of the indictment.

Since the death of Mr. Moïse, gangs have seized control of much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, killing and kidnapping thousands of people. Haiti has no president, nor any other elected national officials, after the terms expired for members of the country’s legislature.

The United Nations has approved a security force led by Kenya to be deployed to Haiti to help quell the violence, but it was blocked last month by a Kenyan court, though the Kenyan government, which is appealing the decision, has said it still plans to send police officers to Haiti.

Capital One is in talks to acquire Discover Financial Services, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said Monday, 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 not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg News reported earlier on the potential deal.

“A space that is already dominated by a relatively small number of megaplayers is about to get a little smaller,” said Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree.

With $479 billion in assets, Capital One is one of the nation’s largest banks, and it issues credit cards on networks run by Visa and Mastercard. Acquiring Discover would give it access to a new credit card network of 305 million cardholders, adding to its base of more than 100 million customers. The country’s four major networks are American Express, Mastercard, Visa and Discover, which has far fewer cardholders than its competitors.

In June, Capital One acquired Velocity Black, a digital concierge company that brings together travel, entertainment, shopping and dining offerings for consumers.

Discover is emerging from a period of turbulence. The company’s former chief executive, Roger Hochschild, stepped down in August amid a regulatory review of incorrectly classified credit accounts. In October, the company said it was taking steps to improve its corporate governance, and in December, it announced its new chief executive, Michael G. Rhodes. The company’s profit in the fourth quarter of 2023 fell 62 percent from the same period the year before.

The once-giant retailer Sears introduced the Discover card in 1985. Discover later became a part of Morgan Stanley before the investment bank spun it out through an initial public offering of stock in 2007.

The acquisition by Capital One will be one of the first tests of regulatory scrutiny on bank deals since the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said last month that it intended to slow down approvals for mergers and acquisitions.

“It’s hard to know which way it would go, but there will certainly be a lot of attention paid to this deal because of the money and magnitude of the companies involved,” said Mr. Schulz, who is the author of the forthcoming book “Ask Questions, Save Money, Make More: How to Take Control of Your Financial Life.”

Given Discover’s recent challenges, the question is whether “regulators view this as a white knight coming in to help fix a troubled player in the market or whether they view this as a limitation of competition — and therefore something to avoid,” said David Schiff, a senior partner at West Monroe, a digital services firm.

Complicating the landscape is the fact that other deals in the financial industry have come under renewed scrutiny, Mr. Schiff said. These include New York Community bank’s acquisition of billions of assets from Signature Bank during the regional banking crisis. Much of New York Community Bank’s trouble stems from the weakening commercial real estate market, but Mr. Schiff said that politicians could point to the deal as an example of one that regulators were too quick to approve.

Consumer advocates pushed back on the possible deal, saying it posed antitrust concerns. “It is very difficult to imagine how federal regulators could allow Capital One to buy Discover given the requirement that mergers benefit the public as well as insiders,” Jesse Van Tol, the chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said in a statement.

Rob Copeland contributed reporting.

Naturalists have been trying for centuries to catalog all of the species on Earth, and the effort remains one of the great unfinished jobs in science. So far, researchers have named about 2.3 million species, but there are millions — perhaps even billions — left to be discovered.

As if this quest isn’t hard enough, biologists cannot agree on what a species is. A 2021 survey found that practicing biologists used 16 different approaches to categorizing species. Any two of the scientists picked at random were overwhelmingly likely to use different ones.

“Everyone uses the term, but no one knows what it is,” said Michal Grabowski, a biologist at the University of Lodz in Poland.

The debate over species is more than an academic pastime. In the current extinction crisis, scientists urgently need to take stock of the world’s biological diversity. But even some of the best known species on Earth may not be what they seem.

Take the giraffe.

In 1758, the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus described a single species of giraffe: Giraffa camelopardalis. Although the species has declined in recent decades, 117,000 giraffes still survive across Africa, prompting an international conservation group to designate the species as vulnerable, rather than endangered.

But some conservation biologists argue that giraffes are in great peril, because what looks like one species is actually four. Genetic studies have found that giraffe DNA falls into four distinct clusters: the Northern giraffe, the reticulated giraffe, the Masai giraffe and the Southern giraffe.

The Northern giraffe, which lives in pockets from Niger to Ethiopia, has suffered catastrophic losses from civil wars, poaching and the destruction of its wild habitat. If the Northern giraffe were considered a separate species, it would be “one of the most threatened large mammals in the world,” said Stephanie Fennessy, the executive director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, a nongovernmental conservation organization.

For Linnaeus, species were divinely created forms of life, each with its own distinctive traits. A century later, Charles Darwin recognized that living species had evolved, like young branches sprouting off from the tree of life. That realization made it harder to say exactly when a new group became a species of its own, instead of just a subspecies of an old one.

In the 1940s, Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, tried solving this problem with a new definition of species based on how animals breed. If two animals couldn’t breed with each other, Mayr argued, then they were separate species.

The biological species concept, as it came to be known, had a huge influence on later generations of researchers.

In recent years, Christophe Dufresnes, a herpetologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China, has used this concept to classify different species of frogs in Europe.

Some of the groups of frogs interbred a lot, whereas others had no hybrids at all. By analyzing their DNA, Dr. Dufresnes found that groups with a recent ancestor — that is, those that were more closely related — readily produced hybrids. He estimates that it takes about six million years of diverging evolution for two groups of frogs to become unable to interbreed — in other words, to become two distinct species.

“This is very cool,” Dr. Dufresnes said. “Now we know what the threshold is to deem them species or not.”

Dr. Dufresnes’s method for finding new species takes a lot of work in the field. Other researchers have looked for more efficient ways to identify species. One popular method is to sequence DNA from organisms and observe the differences in their genetic code.

This search can yield a lot of surprises, as illustrated by the giraffes in Africa. Dr. Grabowski’s team has discovered an even more dramatic diversity hiding among European crustaceans, a group of aquatic creatures that includes lobsters, shrimp and crabs. The researchers have shown that animals that look identical to each other and appear to belong to a single species may actually be dozens of new species.

For example, a species of common freshwater shrimp called Gammarus fossarum split 25 million years ago into separate lineages that are still alive today. Depending on how researchers classify their DNA differences, the single species of Gammarus fossarum might in fact be 32 species — or as many as 152.

“For us, it’s mind-blowing,” Dr. Grabowski said.

As scientists gather more genetic data, fresh questions are emerging about what seem, on the surface, to be obviously separate species.

You don’t have to be a mammalogist to understand that polar bears and brown bears are different. Just one look at their white and brown coats will do.

The difference in their colors is the result of their ecological adaptations. White polar bears blend into their Arctic habitats, where they hunt for seals and other prey. Brown bears adapted for life on land further south. The differences are so distinct that paleontologists can distinguish fossils of the two species going back hundreds of thousands of years.

And yet the DNA inside those ancient bones is revealing an astonishing history of interbreeding between polar bears and brown bears. After the two lineages split about half a million years ago, they exchanged DNA for thousands of years. They then became more distinct, but about 120,000 years ago they underwent another extraordinary exchange of genes.

Between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, the bears interbred in several parts of their range. The exchanges have left a significant imprint on bears today: About 10 percent of the DNA in brown bears comes from polar bears.

Beth Shapiro, a paleogeneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that the interbreeding most likely occurred when swings in the climate forced polar bears down from the Arctic and into brown bear territory.

But the exchange of DNA did not blur the bears into one species. Some of the traits that benefit polar bears in their own environment can become a burden for brown bears, and vice versa.

“They clearly demand separate strategies for conservation management,” Dr. Shapiro said. “It makes sense to me to consider them distinct species.”

The uncertainties about what makes a species have left taxonomists with countless conflicts. Separate groups of ornithologists have created their own lists of all the bird species on Earth, for example, and those lists often clash.

Even a common species like the barn owl — found on every continent except Antarctica, as well as remote islands — is a source of disagreement.

The conservation group BirdLife International recognizes barn owls as a species, Tyto alba, that lives across the world. But another influential inventory, called the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, carves off the barn owls that live on an Indian Ocean island chain as their own species, Tyto deroepstorffi. Yet another recognizes the barn owls in Australia and New Guinea as Tyto delicatula. And a fourth splits Tyto alba into four species, each covering its own broad swath of the planet.

Some ornithologists are trying to resolve these conflicts with a low-tech approach: voting.

In 2021, the International Ornithologists’ Union formed a working group to replace the four leading bird checklists with a single catalog. Nine experts are working their way through the lists and voting on more than 11,000 potential species.

“The discussions can get very heated,” said Leslie Christidis, the group’s chair. Some of the experts tend to lump species together, while others split them. “We’re just trying to negotiate a peaceful system.”

Thomas Wells, a botanist at the University of Oxford, is concerned that debates about the nature of species are slowing down the work of discovering new ones. Taxonomy is traditionally a slow process, especially for plants. It can take decades for a new species of plant to be formally named in a scientific publication after it is first discovered. That sluggish pace is unacceptable, he said, when three out of four undescribed species of plants are already threatened with extinction.

Dr. Wells and his colleagues are developing a new method to speed up the process. They are taking photographs of plants both in the wild and in museum collections and using computer programs to spot samples that seem to cluster together because they have similar shapes. They’re also rapidly sequencing DNA from the samples to see if they cluster together genetically.

If they get clear clusters from approaches such as these, they call the plants a new species. The method — which Dr. Wells calls a “rough and ready” triage in our age of extinctions — may make it possible for his team to describe more than 100 new species of plants each year.

“We don’t really have the luxury of agonizing over, ‘Is this a species, or is this a subspecies?’” he said. “We need to make decisions quickly and as accurately as possible, based on the evidence we have at hand.”

Schools across the country have faced no shortage of challenges since the pandemic. Students are behind academically. Cases of misbehavior are up. Students are absent far more frequently than before.

But there is another problem that has left some school districts scrambling. Teachers are also missing more school.

Teachers typically receive paid sick days and a small number of personal days. Over the 2022-23 school year in New York City, nearly one in five public schoolteachers was absent 11 days or more, an increase from the previous year and from before the pandemic. In Michigan, roughly 15 percent of teachers were absent in any given week last school year, compared with about 10 percent in 2019, researchers found.

More recently, teacher absences forced a school in Ohio to close for a day, and left high school students in Massachusetts to gather in the cafeteria during class time with little supervision.

“The proof in the pudding is how many people have exhausted their leave and are asking to take days off that are unpaid,” said Jim Fry, the superintendent in College Place, a small district in southern Washington State. “That used to be a really rare occurrence. Now it is weekly.”

Making matters more difficult is a national shortage of substitute teachers, which many educators say has worsened since the pandemic. Schools serving low-income areas are the least likely to be able to find enough substitutes, research has shown.

Not all districts have experienced a rise in teacher absences, but those that have point to trends that reflect the broader American work force.

Employees in many occupations are taking more sick days since the pandemic. Women — who make up the vast majority of the teaching work force — may also be juggling more child care, as children stay home from school or from day care more frequently. (Mothers are 10 times as likely as fathers to take time off work to care for a sick child.)

Employees are also putting more focus on mental health. That is especially relevant for teachers, who have faced increased demands and political pressures over the last four years, while being paid less than similarly educated professionals and having less flexibility to work remotely.

“Exhaustion is hitting them,” said Ian Roberts, the superintendent in Des Moines, which has recorded about 300 daily teacher absences this school year, up from about 250 last year.

Teachers, who get built-in breaks throughout the year and during the summer, have at times faced scrutiny from parents for missing school. For example, parents in Newton, Mass., are seeking damages for a teachers’ strike that led to 11 days off school this winter, and teachers’ unions were criticized for their role in prolonging school closures during the pandemic. Research shows that a large number of teacher absences can have a negative impact on student learning.

Yet many teachers say they do not like to miss school, in part because it takes significant work to prepare for and catch up from any absence.

“It’s easier just to go in, push through it,” said Tracey Bolton, a second-grade teacher in the Houston area, who said she reluctantly missed school in November with an extreme case of congestion and fatigue.

When teachers do miss work, there often are not enough substitutes available to fill in. In Des Moines, officials can typically find substitutes for a little over half of the 300 daily absences.

The shortage of substitutes has grown more acute since the pandemic, experts say, because fewer people are entering the teaching profession compared with a decade ago, and there has been more teacher turnover in recent years.

As schools turn to long-term substitutes for unfilled positions, that leaves fewer substitutes available for days when teachers take off, said Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at Kansas State University, who has studied teacher shortages nationally.

The pool of substitutes has also changed, educators say.

Some substitutes were reluctant to return after the pandemic closures; others took different jobs and never came back. The pay for substitutes, which averages around $20 an hour, is less competitive in a strong economy.

When no substitute is available, remaining teachers often have to do double duty — taking extra students in their classroom, or covering another class on their break — which can lead them to request days off in the future. Sometimes reading tutors or other specialists fill in, which means that extra support sessions — a priority to make up for pandemic learning losses — are canceled that day.

“I think this is having a huge impact on our ability to rebound” from the pandemic, said Amanda von Moos, executive director of Substantial Classrooms, a nonprofit that has sought to improve training and support for substitute teachers.

To reduce the daily scramble, the Sacramento school district recently raised its substitute teacher pay to $355 a day, or about $54 an hour, one of the highest rates in the country.

But that hasn’t solved another challenge: filling substitute spots in schools serving some of the lowest-income areas. A study out of Chicago found that paying substitutes up to 50 percent more to work at hard-to-staff schools can be an effective incentive.

The school district in Columbus, Ohio, has tried something else: assigning at least one permanent substitute to every school building.

Jacquelyn Golden, a full-time substitute at a west Columbus elementary school, has formed relationships with students, who confide in her and give her hugs in the hallway. When substituting, she wastes little time establishing order because students know her expectations.

“I’ve been in every room — there is not a kid in the building that don’t know Ms. Golden,” she said.

The district, though, will soon have to cut back the program, because it was paid for with pandemic relief funding that is expiring. Going forward, permanent substitutes will be assigned only at the buildings with the highest needs.

To Ms. Golden, the bigger question is: Which schools aren’t in need? Rarely does a day go by, she said, when her services as a substitute are not required.

Last week, Tom Suozzi won handily in the special election in New York’s Third Congressional District to fill the seat vacated by serial fraudster George Santos — reclaiming the seat that Suozzi previously held. This was the latest in a series of Democratic victories in special elections, victories that seem on their face to run counter to polls showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in the presidential race.

As Nate Cohn, the Times’s lead polling analyst, has been at pains to point out, there isn’t necessarily a contradiction here. Those who vote in special elections aren’t representative of those who will vote in November, and they may be especially motivated by hot-button issues, especially abortion, that have favored Democrats lately. Furthermore, Long Island, on which NY-03 lies, is an unusual place — something I, who mostly grew up there, can personally confirm.

Yet while I make no pretense of expertise in poll analysis, I, like some others, suspect that this election may be more significant than pure number-crunching suggests — it may be an early indication that Republicans’ strategy of victory through sabotage won’t work.

The starting point here is that our political system may be unique among democracies in its vulnerability to sabotage by a ruthless opposition party. For voters often judge presidents based on factors over which they have little control.

In some cases, this lack of control reflects the limits of American power in general. For example, the price of gasoline is highly salient politically, yet it mainly reflects crude oil prices, which are set in world markets over which U.S. policy has limited influence.

Beyond this, when voters think about our government, they usually think about the executive branch, sometimes skipping over the fact that there are many things a president can’t do without approval from Congress. Further, we have a bicameral system in which a president can be hamstrung even if the other party controls only one congressional chamber, a problem compounded by the peculiar institution of the Senate filibuster, which often allows a party to block action even if it’s in the minority.

But voters often don’t focus on that. When things are going well, they give the president credit; when they feel that they’re going badly, they blame him.

For the record, this disconnect between public perceptions and the reality of presidential power has at times favored both parties. Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory in 1984 thanks largely to a boom engineered by an independent Federal Reserve rather than anything he did; Bill Clinton won in 1992 thanks to a weak labor market (“It’s the economy, stupid”) that really wasn’t George H.W. Bush’s fault.

Still, while stubbornly high unemployment helped Democrats in 1992, they didn’t deliberately use their control of the House and Senate to make things worse.

But that was a different country.

With the economy improving and persuadable voters beginning to recognize that improvement, the focus of the 2024 campaign — to the extent that it’s focused on policy at all — has shifted to immigration, with Republicans demanding harsh restrictions and greatly strengthened border security. And here’s the thing: Democrats have gone along, negotiating a bipartisan bill that would have given the G.O.P. most of what it said it wanted.

But Republicans, following instructions from Trump, then killed their own bill. They didn’t even really try to hide the cynicism: They’d rather have the American public see a border in crisis than help fix the problem, because they believe this will benefit them politically.

Will this cynicism pay off? Initial polling suggests, depressingly, that it might. As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has noted, a recent ABC News-Ipsos survey found more Americans blaming Biden for the failure to pass immigration legislation than blaming Trump, even though Biden supported the deal and Trump deliberately (and very publicly) sank it.

But this polling reflects an electorate that for the most part hasn’t been following the legislative maneuvering. In general, as I’ve already suggested, most voters, most of the time, pay far less attention to politics than those of us in the chattering classes.

The key question is whether the G.O.P.’s cynical sabotage on immigration will continue to work as voters’ minds are focused by the prospect of an election in the near future, with Democrats hammering home the point that they are supporting border security measures while Republicans are blocking them.

Which brings us back to NY-03. The Republican candidate, Mazi Pilip, ran as a hawk on immigration. Suozzi ran in part on abortion rights, but also aimed to neutralize the border issue by staking out a tough position — basically the same position now held by Biden — while attacking Republicans for their obstructionism.

And while some reporting predicted a nail-biter, Suozzi won a comfortable victory, exceeding his margin in pre-election polls.

Again, you should never read too much into one special election, just as you shouldn’t read too much into one month’s economic data. But Suozzi may have provided a template for how to overcome Republican sabotage.

Days after the death of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was first reported, Donald J. Trump broke his silence in a social media post on Monday that barely mentioned Mr. Navalny and that did not condemn President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Instead, he used Mr. Navalny’s death to suggest that his own legal battles amounted to political persecution.

It was a note he hit first on Sunday, when he shared screenshots of an opinion essay that compared his relationship with President Biden to the one between Mr. Navalny and Mr. Putin.

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” the former president wrote on Truth Social on Monday, using an alternative spelling of Mr. Navalny’s given name. He pointed to what he called “CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”

But the winding social media post contained no reference to Mr. Putin, who has drawn widespread condemnation from politicians in the United States and abroad amid speculation that he or the Russian government had a hand in Mr. Navalny’s death. Instead, Mr. Trump cited “Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions” in casting the U.S., in all capital letters, as a “nation in decline, a failing nation.”

Mr. Trump, who has been indicted in four criminal cases and is facing 91 felony counts, was ordered on Friday to pay about $450 million, after a New York judge found in his civil fraud case that he had conspired to manipulate his net worth. He has repeatedly tried to blame Mr. Biden for his legal problems, though Mr. Biden has no purview over the cases.

Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s rival in the Republican presidential primary and his former ambassador to the United Nations, attacked him over his response.

“Donald Trump could have condemned Vladimir Putin for being a murderous thug,” she wrote on Monday on the social media platform X. “Trump could have praised Navalny’s courage. Instead, he stole a page from liberals’ playbook, denouncing America and comparing our country to Russia.”

Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has seized on Mr. Navalny’s death as a means to criticize Mr. Trump’s past remarks that praised Mr. Putin. She has called Mr. Navalny a “hero,” echoed claims that Mr. Putin had a hand in his death and said that Mr. Trump needed to “answer to that.”

The former president has a long history of complimenting Mr. Putin, calling him “pretty smart” even as Russia prepared to invade Ukraine. And he has at times favored the country over traditional U.S. allies, which Ms. Haley has sought to highlight. Shortly before Mr. Navalny died, Mr. Trump told voters in South Carolina that he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies that failed to pay what they owed to the security alliance.

Mr. Navalny, who was one of Mr. Putin’s most vocal critics, was confirmed dead by his political allies on Saturday, after Russian officials said on Friday that he had died in a prison inside the Arctic Circle. Mr. Biden, addressing the news on Friday, said that while U.S. officials did not know the specifics surrounding Mr. Navalny’s death, he had “no doubt” that it “was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.”

Until Monday, Mr. Trump had not commented explicitly on Mr. Navalny’s death, instead issuing posts that cast the world as more dangerous during Mr. Biden’s time in office.

Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin signed into law on Monday new legislative maps that could drastically alter the state’s balance of power, giving Democrats a chance to win control of the state’s legislature for the first time in more than a decade.

“When I promised I wanted fair maps — not maps that are better for one party or another — I damn well meant it,” Mr. Evers, who drew the maps after the state’s Supreme Court ordered new ones, said in a statement.

Despite the state being a battleground in national races, Republicans, aided by heavily gerrymandered maps, have controlled both of the state’s legislative chambers since 2011. They now hold about two-thirds of the seats in both the Senate and the Assembly.

But Democrats look likely to pick up seats under the new maps, which will be used during the November election. The maps outline an almost even split between Democratic- and Republican-leaning districts: 45 are Democratic-leaning, 46 are Republican-leaning, and eight are likely to be a tossup, according to an analysis from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Several incumbents are being drawn into each other’s districts, The Associated Press reported.

“Wisconsin is not a red state or a blue state — we’re a purple state, and I believe our maps should reflect that basic fact,” Mr. Evers said. “Today is a victory not for me or any political party but for our state and for the people of Wisconsin who’ve spent a decade demanding more and demanding better of us as elected officials.

While Democrats have long sought to overturn the previous maps, their hopes were renewed when the state’s Supreme Court flipped to a 4-to-3 liberal majority in August after Justice Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal former Milwaukee County judge, was sworn in. Justice Protasiewicz won the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history in April, during which she was openly critical of the Republican-drawn maps and argued that they were “rigged.”

Progressive groups filed a lawsuit challenging those maps one day after she was sworn in. In December, the court ruled 4-to-3 that the legislative maps favoring Republicans were unconstitutional and ordered new maps before the 2024 election. The court said that if the governor and legislature did not produce new maps, it would determine the new maps itself.

“This is a shift in the plate tectonics of Wisconsin politics, and that’s going to have national implications because Wisconsin is the tipping-point state for the country,” said Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

Mr. Wikler said that he believed the map changes would help drive up turnout in the state’s elections in the fall, with districts that were previously noncompetitive suddenly becoming so.

“It’s going to flood new energy in our politics in a way that I think will help the pro-democracy candidates, which in 2024 means Democrats, from the presidential campaign to the Senate campaign to House races and anything else,” he said.

Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, issued a statement on Monday in which he seemed to frame the new maps as a limited win for Republicans, saying that Mr. Evers “signed the most Republican-leaning maps out of all the Democrat-gerrymandered maps being considered by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

“This legislation brings to end this sham of a litigation designed to deliver judicially gerrymandered Democrat maps to the liberal special interest groups funding said litigation,” Mr. Vos said. He added that Republicans in the fall would “prove that we can win on any maps because we have the better policy ideas.”

The new maps were passed in both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature last week, largely aided by Republicans who did not want the liberal-controlled court to determine them instead. Mr. Evers in January vetoed a different set of maps favored by Republicans.

Democrats in the state have also sued to challenge the state’s congressional maps and, shortly after the court called for new statewide maps, they asked it to take up the matter. Six of the state’s eight congressional seats are held by Republicans. The lawsuit challenging those maps remains outstanding, and the Supreme Court has not said if it will weigh in.

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 the heart of his bid for re-election, and who recently gained the endorsement of her union, the United Automobile Workers.

The Biden administration has embraced electric vehicles as a means of generating high-paying jobs while cutting emissions. It has dispensed tax credits to encourage consumers to buy electric cars, while limiting the benefits to models that use American-made parts.

But autoworkers fixate on the assumption that electric cars — simpler machines than their gas-powered forebears — will require fewer hands to build. They accuse Mr. Biden of jeopardizing their livelihoods.

“I was disappointed,” Ms. Simmons said of the president. “We trust you to make sure that Americans are employed.”

Michigan is one of six battleground states that could determine the winner of the presidential election. The auto industry has long been at the center of the state’s economic prospects, propelling the middle class through much of the 20th century, before shedding jobs and pushing down living standards in more recent decades.

Today, the fortunes of Michigan’s auto industry revolve around a key variable: Is the shift to electric vehicles a fresh source of dynamism and paychecks, or the latest reason to fret about the fate of American factory workers?

“It’s still early days,” said Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at the University of Michigan. “There’s a widespread but not universal feeling that electric vehicles will require less labor to produce. In the long run, we do expect labor demand to decline in auto manufacturing.”

Indignation over the prospect of job losses among autoworkers — a crucial voting bloc — has reportedly prompted the Biden administration to consider relaxing its stringent auto emissions standards, slowing the transition toward electric vehicles. Tighter limits on emissions had been a central plank of the administration’s efforts to force carmakers to manufacture more electric models.

In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has bolstered training programs to help workers get jobs in emerging areas of manufacturing, and especially electric vehicles.

“This is where the world is going to go,” said Jonathan Smith, senior chief deputy director of Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, who is overseeing the creation of a state office to aid workers in forging careers in the electric vehicle industry. “The question is, do we prepare Michigan?”

Former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden’s presumptive opponent, has made inroads with autoworkers by accusing the White House of pursuing a “job-killing E.V. mandate.” Many of them dismiss electric vehicles as unwanted, unaffordable and impractical given the need to charge them. They nurse a sense of grievance that their jobs are being risked for the goal of limiting carbon emissions, while many question the scientific consensus behind climate change.

“It’s scary right now with the whole electric push,” said Nelson Westrick, 48, who works at a Ford plant in Sterling Heights, an industrial suburb north of Detroit. “This electric stuff is going to kill, just kill, thousands and thousands of jobs.”

A father of four, he belongs to a group called Autoworkers for Trump. His plant makes the mechanical works that link the transmission and the wheels of a gas-powered car. If electric vehicles take over, “my entire plant would be nonexistent,” he said.

Ms. Simmons, despite feeling betrayed by Mr. Biden, said she would not vote for Mr. Trump, whom she dismisses as an “entertainer.” But she also views electric vehicles as antithetical to the interests of blue-collar workers.

When Henry Ford pioneered the modern assembly line, he was intent on building huge numbers of cars to push down their prices, allowing his employees to drive them home. Today’s autoworkers scoff at E.V.s as luxury items for people with three-car garages.

“There are weeks that I see my daughter two days out of seven days, and I go in there to build something that helps somebody else take their daughter or their son to soccer practice,” Ms. Simmons said. “It sucks to build something that you can’t even afford to buy.”

Michigan’s Seminal Industry

Detroit has been a hub of industry since the late 19th century, owing to its proximity to the Great Lakes, a natural transportation system that allowed raw materials to be brought in from everywhere. Local factories made rail cars, ovens and stoves. Much like Silicon Valley decades later, the city was full of tinkerers and entrepreneurs wielding creative powers in the hunt for wealth.

Henry Ford turned his Model T into the world’s first mass-produced car, and mastered the intricacies of the assembly line at his enormous Highland Park factory.

Michigan was transformed from an agrarian state into one where virtually anyone willing to hoist a wrench could earn enough in a factory to buy a home and take the family on vacation — often, behind the wheel of a Ford. By 1950, Michigan was the 10th-richest state in per-capita personal income, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

But over the following decades, Michigan devolved into an emblem of the forces assailing American middle-class security. International trade and container shipping allowed companies to shift factory production to Asia and Latin America. Union power was decimated, especially as American manufacturers moved work to nonunion plants in the South. With more automation, factories produced more goods with fewer hands.

By 2009, a financial crisis and flagging sales had pushed major automakers to the brink of bankruptcy. Michigan’s manufacturing jobs had dropped roughly in half from a decade earlier.

And by 2021, Michigan had slipped to 37th among all states in per-capita personal income. Detroit became synonymous with the consequences of deindustrialization, its urban core pockmarked by abandonment.

Ford’s Highland Park factory today sits vacant, its broken windows looking out on cracked pavement. A nearby shopping mall, the Model T Plaza, includes a payday lender and an outlet where people sell their plasma.

But across the street from the lifeless factory, a job center refers those seeking work to community colleges offering training for positions in electric vehicle and battery plants.

“There’s a lot of opportunities out there,” said Malik Broadnax, 27, who was beginning a four-month technical program at Macomb Community College on how to program robots. Tuition was almost entirely covered by a state grant.

Mr. Broadnax had worked low-wage jobs — cleaning hotel rooms, changing tires. After he finishes the program, he figures to start in a factory for at least $25 an hour.

In downtown Detroit, Ford has invested nearly $1 billion in the redevelopment of a district known as Michigan Central, including the restoration of a magnificent yet derelict old train station. A former post office has been refashioned into a start-up incubator where some 80 companies — most of them in the electric vehicle industry — share manufacturing space.

Marcus Glenn was preparing to graduate from a course convened inside the building that had trained him for a job installing or maintaining E.V. charging stations. The Biden administration has dedicated $7.5 billion for public stations.

Mr. Glenn, 35, saw the training program as his portal to the future, expressing confidence that he would quickly find a job for at least $35 an hour.

“It puts me in the door to this field,” he said. “The sky’s the limit.”

An Uncertain Future

But how quickly will the promised electric future materialize? And how long will the gas-powered automobile industry remain?

Over the next few years, Michigan is likely to see an increase in jobs, because automakers will continue to make gas-powered vehicles even as they add plants to produce electric models and batteries, said Dr. Ehrlich, the University of Michigan economist.

Then, the picture gets murky.

In one possible outcome, where electric vehicles advance gradually and make up 100 percent of new car sales by 2050, Dr. Ehrlich forecasts, Michigan’s total auto manufacturing jobs will increase slightly, to 180,000, and then dip to 150,000.

But if the transition proceeds faster, and if Michigan loses investments to states where unions hold less sway, the job losses could be steeper, leaving perhaps 90,000 positions by 2050. That could eliminate another 330,000 jobs in supporting services like insurance and trucking.

Dr. Ehrlich hastens to add that, for now, the trend lines look good.

Union leaders echo that stance while vowing to organize workers at more factories. They note that their new contracts with the Big Three automakers bar the shifting of production of emerging technologies to subsidiaries where employees are not unionized.

Under the new contracts, the top rate of pay will exceed $40 an hour, up from about $32 under the previous deals. Starting pay will exceed $30 an hour as compared to $18 under previous contracts.

“Everyone is going to be in this transition,” said Laura Dickerson, a regional director of the United Automobile Workers representing a section of southeastern Michigan. “We have to embrace it because it’s coming.”

But recent months have illustrated the volatility at play.

A Ford electric battery plant under construction in the town of Marshall was initially expected to create 2,500 jobs. The company recently lowered the projection to 1,700.

A Michigan start-up, Our Next Energy, known as ONE, is completing a battery plant in Van Buren Township, a bedroom community between Detroit and Ann Arbor. Technicians oversee a series of machines that unspool rolls of metal foil and press it into battery cells.

Dan Pilarz, 46, had worked for General Motors for nearly two decades when he started at the ONE plant last June as a senior manager for maintenance.

“My kids came to me, and they said, ‘You’re destroying this environment,’” Mr. Pilarz said. “‘When are you going to do something about that?’”

He is excited to participate in the next phase of Michigan’s history of innovation. He is also aware of the risks.

Our Next Energy recently laid off 137 people, or about one-fourth of the company, including a handful at the Van Buren plant, citing pressure from investors to cut costs.

“It’s definitely a roller coaster right now,” Mr. Pilarz said. “But somebody’s going to survive, and somebody’s going to make these vehicles. Why not me?”

The Pentagon is investigating the cause of a crash of an American military surveillance drone off the coast of Yemen on Monday morning, two U.S. officials said.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, confirmed that the drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, fell out of the sky. Iranian-backed Houthi militants said on Monday that they had downed the drone near the port city of Al Hudaydah, in western Yemen.

“Yemeni air defenses were able to shoot down an American plane (MQ-9) with a suitable missile while it was carrying out hostile missions against our country on behalf of the Zionist entity,” a Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said in a statement.

“Yemeni armed forces will not hesitate to take more military measures and carry out more qualitative operations against all hostile targets in defense of beloved Yemen,” the statement said.

If the Houthis’ claims are confirmed, this will have been the second time the group has shot down an American drone since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel’s response, plunged the region into crisis.

The downing of a Reaper drone, the mainstay of the American military’s aerial surveillance fleet, is another escalation of violence between the United States and Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The episodes have intensified over the past two months, underscoring the risk that the conflict between Israel and Hamas could spiral into a wider war.

The United States struck five Houthi military targets, including an undersea drone, in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on Saturday, according to a statement from the military’s Central Command.

The use of the underwater drone is believed to have been the first time that the Houthis have employed such a weapon since they began their campaign against ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden on Oct. 23, the statement said.

The Houthis say the attacks are in solidarity with Palestinians who have been living under Israel’s retaliatory attacks in Gaza.

The stepped-up attacks have prompted an American-led international maritime response, including a series of strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.

The United States has accused Iran of supplying the Houthis. But American officials also acknowledge that Tehran does not have direct control over the Houthis or a number of other Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.