Category: News

It is beyond obvious at this point that abortion is the Achilles’ heel of the Republican Party. The prospect of a national abortion ban almost certainly helped Democrats stave off a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, and assisted them the following year in both statewide and state legislative races in Virginia and Kentucky. The prospect of abortion bans has also pushed voters in states such as Ohio and Michigan to approve sweeping affirmations of reproductive freedom in their respective state constitutions. And abortion looms over the 2024 race, as well; Democrats will spend countless millions to tell Americans that a vote for Trump, or any Republican on the ballot, is a vote for a national abortion ban.

Republican strategists are well aware that abortion is an albatross around the party’s neck. Their advice? Find new language.

“If it took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade, it’s going to take more than 50 minutes, 50 hours or 50 weeks to explain to people what that means, and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean, and to move hearts and minds,” said Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to Donald Trump, at Politico’s Health Care Summit on Wednesday. During the conversation, she advised Republican candidates to focus on “concession” and “consensus” and to turn the conversation toward exceptions. She also urged Republicans to avoid ballot initiatives on abortion, for fear that they could mobilize voters against them.

I have no doubt that Republicans will take this advice; they are desperate to neutralize the issue. But the Republican abortion problem isn’t an issue of language, it’s an issue of material reality. The reason voters are turned off by the Republican position on abortion has less to do with language and more to do with the actual consequences of putting tight restrictions on reproductive rights. Countless Americans have direct experience with difficult and complicated pregnancies; countless Americans have direct experience with abortion care; and countless Americans are rightfully horrified by the stories of injury and cruelty coming out of anti-abortion states.

No amount of rhetorical moderation on abortion will diminish the impact of stories like that of K Monica Kelly, who had to travel from Tennessee to Florida to end a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, thanks to Tennessee’s strict post-Dobbs abortion ban. Nor will it obscure the extent to which the most conservative Republicans are gunning for other reproductive health services, from hormonal birth control to in vitro fertilization.

It is too much to say that Republicans cannot save themselves from the political consequences of their assault on abortion rights, but if they do, it won’t be because they find another way to try to put lipstick on a pig.

What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was on the ignominious legacy of Mitch McConnell:

There’s no question that McConnell is one of the most consequential politicians of his generation. This isn’t a compliment. McConnell is not consequential for what he accomplished as a legislator or legislative leader — he’s no Robert F. Wagner or Everett Dirksen. He’s consequential for what he’s done to degrade and diminish American democracy.

My Friday column was on the stakes of the 2024 election now that both Trump and Biden have secured the presidential nominations of their respective parties:

Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.

The latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz is on Michael Bay’s action thriller “The Rock.”

Not long after we moved to Charlottesville, my wife and I made an impromptu stop at the S.P.C.A. We were interested in adopting a dog and wanted to see if there was anyone available at the shelter. We met several animals, but we didn’t really connect with any of them.

As we were leaving, one of the volunteers asked us if we had met Rose. She was an older hound dog, about 7, who had been abandoned and brought to the shelter. She was set to go to an adoption event but it was canceled. We could meet her if we were interested. We were, and we took her for a walk. The next thing we both knew, we were on our way home with a new dog.

Rose was, for the next six and a half years, our constant companion. She was sweet, friendly and incredibly gentle with us and, in time, our children. She wasn’t much for playing, but she loved long, meandering walks where she could explore. She loved to swim. She loved to lay on the couch with me as I worked or read or watched a movie. She slowed with age, as all dogs do, but she was in good health for nearly all of the time we had her.

That is, until the last few months. And when it became clear that she was very ill and would not recover, my wife and I took her to say our goodbyes. We put Rose to sleep last week. We were with her the entire time. She was an important part of my life — a much-loved member of our family — and I thought I would share a little bit of her life with all of you. Thank you for reading.

Now Eating: Cashew, Cauliflower, Pea and Coconut Curry

I liked this recipe because it was an opportunity to empty the fridge and freezer of leftover vegetables and other items. I had some cashews leftover from making cashew cream; half a bag of frozen peas, three-quarters of a can of coconut milk, and some cilantro that was on its last legs. The only thing I actually had to buy was a head of cauliflower. The resulting meal (recipe from New York Times Cooking) was incredibly filling and surprisingly popular with the kids. I don’t think I would make any modifications but would say that you can’t go wrong with a nice carrot raita on the side.

Ingredients

• 1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped

• 4 garlic cloves, chopped

• 1 green chile, roughly chopped (seeded if you prefer less heat)

• Kosher salt

• 4 tablespoons canola oil

• 2 large onions, finely chopped

• 1 tablespoon tomato paste

• 1½ teaspoons ground coriander

• 1¼ teaspoons ground cumin

• ½ teaspoon chile powder

• 1 large head cauliflower (about 1¼ pounds), broken into bite-size florets

• 1 (14-ounce) can unsweetened coconut milk

• 4 ounces unsalted cashews (about ¾ cup)

• ½ cup frozen peas

• ½ teaspoon garam masala

• 1 small bunch cilantro, leaves chopped, for serving

• 1 lemon wedge, for serving

• Cooked basmati rice, for serving

Directions

Place the ginger, garlic and green chile in a mortar and pestle with a pinch of salt. Mash until a paste forms and set aside. Alternately, finely chop the ginger, garlic and green chile together, sprinkle with a pinch of salt, then mash into a coarse paste using the flat portion of your chef’s knife.

In a large skillet with a lid, heat 3 tablespoons oil over medium. Cook the onions until golden, about 10 minutes. Add the ginger paste and cook, stirring, until fragrant, 3 to 4 minutes.

Stir in the tomato paste, coriander, cumin, chile powder and 1¼ teaspoons salt. Stir in the cauliflower and coconut milk and bring to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook until the cauliflower is tender, 10 to 12 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining 1 tablespoon oil in a small skillet over medium. Fry the cashews, stirring occasionally, 2 minutes. Transfer to a plate to cool.

Add the peas and garam masala to the cauliflower mixture and cook, stirring, 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt.

Top the curry with the cashews, cilantro and a squeeze of lemon just before serving. Serve with a big steaming bowl of basmati rice.

On This Week’s Episode:

Stories of people waking up to the fact that the world has suddenly changed.

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Our new audio app is home to “This American Life,” the award-winning program hosted by Ira Glass. New episodes debut in our app a day earlier than in the regular podcast feed, and we also have an archive of the show. The app includes a “Best of ‘This American Life’” section with some of our favorite bite-size clips, so you can enjoy the show even if you don’t have a lot of time.

President Biden is sounding tougher toward Israel these days and showing more compassion for people starving in Gaza. “There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying,” Biden said. “And it’s got to stop.”

But it’s not going to stop on its own — indeed, it may get worse if Israel invades Rafah, or if hunger tips into famine. And Biden’s concern for Palestinians rings hollow to me because he has been unwilling to lean hard on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make it stop.

So we’re now in a bizarre situation: American bombs and American aid are both falling from Gaza’s skies.

In 1948, the United States and its allies undertook the famous Berlin Airlift to rescue West Berlin from a Soviet blockade. Now we are engaged in another humanitarian airlift — this time because of the actions not of an enemy but of our partner. Israel is insisting on painstaking inspections of every aid truck going into Gaza. A senior administration official told me that Israel was turning back entire truckloads if they contained emergency birthing kits, apparently because these include a small scalpel for cutting umbilical cords. UNICEF tells me that Israel is refusing to allow it to bring in portable toilets. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley visited the Gaza border and found that Israel has blocked water purifiers. A British member of Parliament said that Israel had blocked 2,560 solar lights.

Because Biden couldn’t persuade Israel to ease up on this nonsense and allow in enough aid to avert starvation, he moved to airdrops and a sea corridor — better than nothing and also woefully inadequate. Cindy McCain, head of the United Nations World Food Program, warns that road access to Gaza is essential, and that “if we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas, famine is imminent.”

Diplomacy is about arm-twisting as much as persuasion, but Biden seems unwilling to act in ways that give force to his words. Simply put, Netanyahu ignores the White House because there is no cost to doing so.

That’s not entirely new. “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice,” the Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan told a visiting American Zionist leader in 1967. “We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”

Avi Shlaim, the historian, recounts that the visitor asked what would happen if America said that Israel would get aid only if it took the advice. Dayan replied: “Then we would have to take the advice, too.”

Under tough-minded presidents, that has occasionally happened. My first visit to the Middle East involved backpacking through a battered Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion, which left many Palestinians dead but hasn’t improved Israel’s security. I didn’t know that behind the scenes President Ronald Reagan called up Prime Minister Menachem Begin after one particularly horrific artillery barrage and, instead of pleading for a halt, commanded it.

“I was angry,” Reagan wrote in his diary, as The New York Review of Books noted. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”

“Twenty mins. later,” Reagan added, “he called to tell me he’d ordered an end to the barrage and pled for our continued friendship.”

I wish Biden would show similar mettle. He could attach end-use restrictions to shipments of offensive arms, limiting how they can be used (as he does with Ukraine). He could simply adhere, as eight senators have urged, to American law that ends military support to any country when the president finds that it “restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

Under congressional pressure, Biden last month issued National Security Memorandum 20, which amplifies the law and will require Israel to confirm by late March that it is allowing humanitarian aid delivery; otherwise, it risks its supply of offensive weapons. That is leverage, but only if Biden is willing to use it.

The president can also publicly urge Egypt to let aid trucks now stalled at the border while awaiting Israeli inspections to pass into Gaza even without Israeli approval. (It could do its own inspections if necessary.) Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation is important, but not if it keeps food from Gaza.

The U.S. can also abstain on humanitarian resolutions at the U.N. instead of vetoing them. Biden can bypass Netanyahu and speak directly to Israelis — maybe at the Knesset — and make the case for humanitarian aid, a cease-fire and a path to a two-state solution.

Biden might deny that he actually has much leverage. It’s a fair point: Israelis were shattered by the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and aren’t in the mood to hear outsiders who are sitting safely in distant lands call for restraint. One depressing poll last month found that 68 percent of Israeli Jews oppose allowing food and medicine into Gaza.

On the other hand, Israel has responded — albeit inadequately so far — to public pressure and criticism. Just in the last few days, officials have signaled that they want to see more humanitarian assistance, with a military spokesman saying it was trying to “flood” Gaza with aid. A convoy of six aid trucks was allowed to enter northern Gaza directly from Israel, which was encouraging.

The truth is that we don’t know how much leverage Biden has because he hasn’t truly tested his power. When Biden seemed to suggest this month that invading Rafah would cross a red line and might have repercussions, the White House immediately walked his statement back.

Perhaps Biden believes he is projecting friendship and loyalty to a beleaguered ally. To Netanyahu and most of the world, it looks like weakness.

Meanwhile, Gazans starve unnecessarily, and this may become part of Biden’s legacy.

To explain how the present policy is failing, I’ll give the last word to the Gaza linguistics scholar Mohammed Alshannat, whose texts I quoted in my column last week. In a new message, Alshannat told how he tried to collect food from an airdrop to avert starvation:

“Me and my wife decided to go to the beach hoping that we get something to feed our children. There were dozens of thousands of people waiting. Around 2:20 three planes started to drop their parachutes across the beach. People started chasing them. We chased one of these parachutes. However, when it was opened, we found water bottles and vinegar bottles. Two children died of stampede. Because we are so malnourished and have not eaten anything, it took us three hours to get back home, as we had to take a rest every 10 minutes. We wept all the way back.”

A new sign went up a few miles from the front line recently on the main billboard of an occupied town in Ukraine’s Luhansk region.

“Vote for our president. Together we’re strong,” read the sign in the white, blue and red colors of the Russian flag, according to Anastasiia, a resident.

The message was clear to her: That the president was Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, not Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and that Mr. Putin was the only choice in the Russian presidential vote taking place in the occupied parts of Ukraine over the past three weeks.

Mr. Putin long ago transformed Russian elections into a predictable ritual meant to convey legitimacy to his rule. In the occupied territories, this practice has the additional goals of presenting the occupation as a fait accompli and identifying dissenters, said political analysts and Ukrainian officials.

“Elections in these regions fix the idea that they have the same laws and procedures as the rest of the country,” said Ilya Grashchenkov, a Russian political scientist who is advising a long-shot candidate running against Mr. Putin. That has the effect, he said, of weaving them into the fabric of Russian statehood.

For many in the occupied territories, the electoral ritual is unfolding under the watchful eyes of armed soldiers.

Wearing face coverings, the soldiers have accompanied poll workers door-to-door throughout the occupied parts of the four Ukrainian regions that Russia has annexed after invading the country two years ago, according to local residents, statements by Russian officials and videos posted on social media.

Occupation officials say the show of force is necessary to protect those collecting votes.

The poll workers are soliciting votes that are set to give Mr. Putin, who has no serious challenger on the ballot, his fifth term as president and another six years in office.

Ukrainian officials, Western allies and rights groups have called the elections an illegal sham. They say the vote is marred by widespread intimidation and coercion and is part of a wider campaign of repression against the residents of the occupied regions.

“They promote it, even though it’s not a real election,” said Anastasiia, the Luhansk region resident. “Everybody knows who will win.”

Anastasiia, 19, left the occupied territories earlier this month to build her life away from the war zone. Citing fear of retribution, she asked to be identified by her first name only and to omit the name of her town to protect relatives who remained behind.

Few countries, if any, are expected to recognize the election results in the occupied regions, which include the Crimea peninsula, annexed in 2014 after Russia’s earlier aggression in southeastern Ukraine. The United Nations considers all of the territory to be part of Ukraine.

Analysts say the coercion, the numerous electoral machinations and the exodus of pro-Ukrainian residents mean that Mr. Putin is almost certain to obtain an even larger landslide in the occupied regions than in the rest of Russia.

For the Kremlin, it is the electoral process itself, rather than the margin of victory, that furthers its cause.

Conducting elections, no matter how orchestrated and unfair, in the occupied regions allows Mr. Putin to solidify his claim to them. It also allows him to portray himself as a champion of democracy and draw contrast with Ukraine, which suspended its presidential voting this year because of the war, said Mr. Grashchenkov, the political analyst.

Russia has already conducted two previous elections in the four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine that it has partially occupied since invading the country. The Kremlin claimed that 99 percent of the residents of Donetsk, the most populous of the occupied regions, chose to join Russia in 2022. Mr. Putin’s party candidates won a landslide victory in local voting held across the occupied territories last year.

Ukraine and Western nations have called those elections shams.

Apart from such votes, Russia has stamped out Ukrainian identity and language with Russian curriculums in schools, required Russian passports for employment and cracked down on people with pro-Ukrainian political views.

Russia’s attempts to replicate a normal election process often clash with the realities of war, sometimes in farcical ways.

For starters, Russia does not completely control the regions where it is purporting to conduct voting. And just months after it held a sham referendum as a way of proclaiming that the city of Kherson was part of Russia, its forces had to abandon the city to the Ukrainian army. (Russia remains in control of the southern portion of Kherson province).

A similar dissonance emerged as this month’s rubber-stamp presidential balloting approached.

Little is known, for example, about how many voters there are. The constant shifting of the front lines, the flight of the local residents and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and workers have dramatically transformed the demographics of the occupied regions. The full effect of this transformation remains largely unknown, because of strict Russian censorship and the ongoing fighting.

But the few available estimates point to a drastic decrease in the occupied population. Figures from Russia’s electoral commission show that the occupied part of the Kherson region, for example, lost 13 percent of its registered voters, or 75,000 adults, in the last three months of last year.

Overall, Russia’s electoral body claims the four Ukrainian regions that were annexed in 2022 have 4.5 million voters. This would represent a 33 percent drop from the last voter roll published by the Ukrainian government before the full-scale invasion. Ukrainian officials say the real number today is likely to be even lower.

The picture is complicated further by the Russian government’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed in the occupied territories to vote there. Russian propaganda videos published on social media have shown electoral workers dodging shells and diving into ditches to deliver ballot boxes to stoic soldiers in the trenches.

Russian authorities have not published the locations of the polling stations or the names of the members of the local electoral commissions. It has also leveraged the system to the state’s advantage.

Occupation officials have designated the occupied territories as “remote,” a label previously reserved for places like the reindeer herder communities in the Arctic. This has allowed Russia to extend the voting period there for three weeks, making the process even harder to monitor. Polls in two of the occupied regions, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, opened on Feb. 25 and will close on March. 17, when voting ends in Russia.

The “remote” designation has also allowed pro-Russian electoral officials to go door-to-door soliciting votes from residents of the occupied regions. And because voting there is taking place under martial law, these officials are accompanied by armed soldiers.

“Dear voters, we care about your safety!,” the electoral commission for the occupied Zaporizhzhia wrote in a Telegram post earlier this month, which showed camouflaged voters with blurred faces casting ballots. “You don’t need to go anywhere to vote — we will come with the ballots and the ballot boxes to your home.”

Russia’s electoral commission claimed that nearly 1.4 million votes had been cast in remote regions by March 11. In the last Russian presidential election, held in 2018, remote regions in Russia’s far north and east accounted for just 180,000 votes.

Ukrainian officials say this turnout is achieved by intimidation.

“‘Voting’ is conducted at gunpoint,” Dmytro Lubinets, the human rights ombudsman in Ukraine’s Parliament, said in a statement this month. “Participation in such ‘elections’ is a matter of survival.”

The actual wishes of the majority of the residents are impossible to decipher. No independent opinion polls have been published in the occupied territories since the invasion. And the exodus of pro-Ukrainian residents mean that many of those who remain often support, or have at least resigned themselves, to the occupation.

Russian officials have justified extraordinary voting procedures in the occupied territories as a security necessity. Ukrainian forces and partisans have frequently targeted Russian collaborators and occupation officials, including electoral workers.

Most recently, a deputy mayor of Berdiansk, on the Azov Sea coast, died in a car explosion on March 6. Ukraine’s military intelligence took responsibility, saying the official, Svetlana Samoilenko, was assassinated for forcing residents to “participate in illegal, fake voting.”

Ukrainian officials say Russia is also using elections to identify residents who are unhappy with its rule. The government in Kyiv says Ukrainians are routinely jailed, tortured or summarily executed by invading forces under a campaign of forced “Russification” of the occupied territories.

“If you vote, you are loyal to Russia, you have opportunities,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a Kyiv-based political analyst. “If not, well, then you will be under pressure. You will be investigated.”

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from London.

Not long after we first met, the man said that if Australia was looking for Chinese spies, he was just the type of person they would be looking at — but the authorities would never “dare say I’m Chinese intelligence.”

Given the anti-China fervor in Australia, he acknowledged he could come off as suspicious. So why would he not get into trouble with the authorities? He believed that it would be embarrassing for Australia to accuse of him of spying because he had been an active member of a major political party.

His confidence was absolute, and utterly misplaced. Less than two years later, in 2020, he became the first person to be charged under Australia’s broad foreign interference laws. He was accused of acting on behalf of Beijing.

Who was the suspect?

Di Sanh “Sunny” Duong, 68, was born and raised in Vietnam. He was among the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese who fled that country in the 1970s. He settled in Australia and grew a business making tombstones, secured a middle-class life and got enmeshed in local Chinese community groups.

I first interviewed him in 2019 and quickly realized that Mr. Duong was prone to boasting — about his travels, about his family and about his status in society, so much so that it was difficult to take him seriously.

What did he do?

The case against Mr. Duong was not about what he did, but what he was planning to do. Mr. Duong had ties with the Chinese Communist Party, prosecutors said. He had invited an Australian government minister to a charity event, they added, with the intention of someday trying to influence him on behalf of Beijing.

During the trial, the jury was presented with two versions of Mr. Duong: Was he a savvy operator pushing China’s agenda in Australia, as the prosecution would have it, or was he, as the defense claimed, a bombastic braggart?

What was the verdict?

Mr. Duong did not testify in court. But while the trial was underway, he met me, at a pub a stone’s throw from the courthouse, to share his story.

He gave outlandish and convoluted reasons for the actions that prosecutors built their case around. One head-spinning episode involved how Mr. Duong thought he was interacting with a Chinese intelligence officer but later concluded, thanks to a TV show, that the official was not a spy. One thing was clear: Mr. Duong remained adamant that he never did anything against Australian interests.

The jury disagreed. In December, he was found guilty of preparing for or planning an act of foreign interference. Late last month, a judge sentenced him to two years and nine months in prison. Mr. Duong is expected to serve a year behind bars.

The police officers asked the man what he meant when he said that involving an Australian government minister in a charity event could benefit “us Chinese.” Was he talking about mainland China and the Chinese Communist Party, or the local Australian Chinese community? Depending on the answer, he faced up to 10 years in prison.

“You are understanding the Chinese is China. We always say, ‘I’m Chinese,’ that not mean, ‘I’m mainland China,’” said the man, Di Sanh “Sunny” Duong, who was brought in for questioning.

The officer pressed on, according to a tape played for a jury. Was Mr. Duong effectively building a relationship with the minister, “who you thought would be the future prime minister, to support the views of the Chinese?” Another officer asked, “Mainland China?”

When Australia’s broad-stroke foreign interference laws were passed nearly six years ago amid rising concerns about covert Chinese government meddling in Western democracies, they were heralded as trailblazing by the United States and other countries. Blockbuster prosecutions revealing sophisticated tactics seemed to be just around the corner.

But the first case, Mr. Duong’s, came to trial only in November, and it was, by all accounts, a low-stakes affair. It involved throwing the weight of the Australian government against a suburban tombstone maker over diverging interpretations of two words (“us Chinese”), and a $25,000 donation to a community hospital that — prosecutors said — would at some point have become the basis for a pro-China pitch to a local member of Parliament.

In December, a jury found Mr. Duong, 68, guilty of preparing for or planning an act of foreign interference. Late last month, a judge sentenced him to two years and nine months in prison. He is expected to serve a year behind bars.

While the case received far less attention from Australian media than the passage of the interference laws, it has become a cautionary tale for the country’s large diaspora communities — nearly a third of its population was born overseas. In theory, the new laws were an effort to defend democracy against foreign influence. In practice, they have raised tough questions about when such intentions might drift into xenophobia or wasteful effort.

Mr. Duong did not testify at the trial and his lawyers did not call any witnesses. But in his only in-depth interview since his arrest, with The New York Times, he said that his patriotism toward China never conflicted with his loyalty to Australia and its interests. He saw himself as a scapegoat of geopolitical tensions, saying his prosecution was intended to send a message: “Don’t walk too close to China.”

For some experts, Mr. Duong’s case, which started amid a diplomatic deep freeze between China and Australia and concluded as relations thawed, raised concerns that he had been effectively found guilty by association. To others, his interactions with Chinese officials were undeniable proof that he was working for Beijing.

Mr. Duong had a tendency to talk himself up. He bragged about the mundane, like his travels, and boasted of the ties he had built with officials in both Australia and China.

Born and raised in Vietnam, he fled in 1979, one of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese who left the country. After cobbling together a middle-class life in Australia, he often sought to portray himself as a man on the rise. He ran unsuccessfully as a candidate in the conservative Liberal Party in a state election in 1996. He worked his way up through the ranks of local Chinese community groups, eventually becoming the No. 2 of the Global Federation of Chinese Organizations from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, an umbrella organization with chapters around the world, as well as the president of its Oceania branch.

The groups, he said, allowed him to connect with officials in China, and to mingle with local Australian politicians and officials at the Chinese consulate in Melbourne, which did not respond to a request for comment on the case.

More than a year before his arrest, in another interview, Mr. Duong said that he often said to other Chinese-Australian community leaders, “If they talk about spies, they should put me, Di Sanh Duong, in the category of spies.”

He spoke about his ties to China, including his overseas adviser positions for four provincial Chinese bodies. So, he said, “Does that make me China’s lackey?”

Unbeknown to Mr. Duong, he was already being investigated by the Australian authorities. They regarded some groups he was involved in as organizations linked to China’s foreign influence operation. They wanted to know why he often traveled to China, made comments that echoed Beijing’s policies, and boasted about his friendship with a Chinese intelligence officer. His interactions with Chinese officials in Australia, including when he sent photos of Falun Gong protesters to a consulate official, also came under scrutiny.

In 2020, Mr. Duong was charged under the foreign interference law, which criminalized any deceptive or covert behavior that is intended to influence Australian politics or policy on behalf of a foreign government.

Mr. Duong’s community group had raised about $25,000 and was donating the money to a Melbourne hospital to help treat Covid patients, at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was high in Australia. Mr. Duong had invited Alan Tudge, the immigration minister at the time, to be present when he handed over the money.

During the trial, which ran for three weeks last year and was partly closed to the public, prosecutors did not dispute that Mr. Duong had good intentions. But they argued — in light of his connections to Beijing and what prosecutors said was his association with China’s foreign influence operation — his ultimate motive was nefarious. He was, a prosecutor said, thinking about how he could, in the future, influence Mr. Tudge to the benefit of “us Chinese.”

Mr. Tudge’s offices said that a background check it ordered on Mr. Duong did not raise any alarms. But prosecutors argued that Mr. Duong hid his connections to Chinese officials, even though his business card listed his provincial adviser positions.

Before donating the money, prosecutors said that Mr. Duong had been in regular contact with Chinese officials. He had been trying to enlist their help to source surgical masks from China, which he wanted to give to the hospital. These interactions, according to the lead prosecutor, Patrick Doyle, meant Mr. Duong had “a secret connection to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Not that those connections did any good: Mr. Duong never managed to get the masks from China.

As evidence of Mr. Duong’s intentions toward Mr. Tudge, prosecutors presented a years-old letter he wrote to a state-level Liberal Party official containing policy suggestions that the judge later described as “vague, impracticable and unlikely to be taken seriously.” His main thrust was that Australia should consider China as its primary strategic partner, not the United States. Prosecutors argued it was the kind of approach he might try again.

This was all proof, the Australian government argued, that Mr. Duong had been co-opted by a section of China’s influence-peddling operation known as the United Front Work Department.

“The way the United Front system works — and Mr. Duong’s role reflects this — is that it’s a lot more subtle,” Mr. Doyle said. “It’s a lot more nuanced than you’re either a spy or not a spy.”

The case, he said, was not in the realm of “spy novels, of James Bond films.”

The United Front system, Mr. Doyle told the jury, targets all ethnically Chinese people living overseas, not only to sway their beliefs, but also to turn them into agents to influence others. For the latter, specific types of overseas Chinese are prioritized: those who “have a strong allegiance to China as the motherland,” and those with influence and power.

Mr. Duong had both, especially the former, Mr. Doyle said. The United Front system ensured that Mr. Duong had “become exactly the sort of patriot” capable of and willing to act in ways, even without explicit instructions, that helped the Chinese government achieve its goals, he said.

Mr. Duong’s lawyer, Peter Chadwick, argued that his client simply liked to exaggerate his connections to rich and powerful people. Relationships with Chinese government officials were a necessity for someone who did business in China, like Mr. Duong, he argued. This “doesn’t mean that a person or an organization are forever co-opted to do what the Chinese government says,” he said.

Mr. Duong seemed to draw more scrutiny because of his Chinese heritage, Mr. Chadwick said. He added, “I can’t help but wonder whether we’d be here if Mr. Duong was a person of Italian descent who repeatedly traveled back to the Italian motherland.”

Mr. Chadwick was reprimanded by the judge for “hinting that there’s a racial motivation.”

During the trial, Mr. Duong said in the interview that he believed that it was in both China and Australia’s best interests to be strategic partners. For someone who saw himself and his community as a bridge between the two countries, there was no such thing as being “too close” to China.

“We hope China and Australia’s relationship is always good,” he said.

With China aggressively asserting its claims on the South China Sea, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines spent his first year on the job beefing up Manila’s alliance with its oldest ally, the United States. Now he is shoring up support from a wider and new network of partners.

Mr. Marcos is adding a new intensity to his muscular foreign policy at a critical moment in his country’s territorial dispute with Beijing. Maritime clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels have become more frequent in recent months.

In January, Mr. Marcos and the leaders of Vietnam, another country fighting off Chinese claims to the crucial waterway, pledged closer cooperation between their coast guards. This month, Mr. Marcos clinched a maritime cooperation deal with Australia. And this past week, he took his pitch to Europe.

“It has to be recognized that the South China Sea handles 60 percent of the trade of the entire world. So, it’s not solely the interest of the Philippines, or of ASEAN, or of the Indo-Pacific region, but the entire world,” Mr. Marcos said on Tuesday in Berlin, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Standing alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Mr. Marcos, the first Philippine president to visit Germany in a decade, added, “That is why it’s in all our interest to keep it as a safe passage for all international commerce that goes on in the South China Sea.”

This flurry of diplomacy, analysts said, might ultimately help to deter China. But they also acknowledged that Beijing was going to continue doubling down on its territorial claims, increasing the risks of a conflict that could ultimately draw in the United States, the Philippines’ oldest treaty ally. Washington has repeatedly condemned Beijing’s actions and has vowed to come to the aid of Manila in the event of an armed conflict.

The foreign policy strategy adopted by Mr. Marcos, who took office in June 2022, is almost the opposite of the approach of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. While Mr. Duterte spurned the West and courted China, Mr. Marcos has revived and cemented ties with traditional security partners like the United States and Japan. He has also cultivated new relations with the likes of Sweden and France, and his government has pushed for arms deals and military drills.

Tensions flared again this month when Chinese boats blocked the Philippine vessels off the Second Thomas Shoal, a contested reef 120 miles off the coast of the western province of Palawan. The confrontation culminated in Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels colliding.

Mr. Marcos told reporters then there was no reason yet to invoke the mutual defense treaty with the United States.

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, some of it hundreds of miles from the mainland and in waters surrounding Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines. In the past decade or so, China has asserted ever greater control over these waters, using two island chains called the Paracels and the Spratlys to expand its military footprint by building and fortifying outposts and airstrips.

The militarization of the Spratly Islands allowed China to maintain a round-the-clock presence in waters about 500 miles from the coast of China. Chinese boats stationed there then repeatedly harassed Filipino fishing boats in an area that an international tribunal in The Hague had ruled was a traditional fishing ground of the Philippines, Vietnam and other nations. The Chinese presence also prevented Manila from fully exploring oil and gas deposits in the surrounding water.

China has blamed the Philippines for the frequent clashes in the South China Sea.

Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, in December admonished the Philippines for “changing its policy stance, reneging on its commitments and continuing to provoke and cause trouble at sea.”

Mr. Wang also issued a warning: “If the Philippines misjudges the situation, insists on going its own way, or even colludes with malicious external forces to continue causing trouble and chaos, China will definitely safeguard its rights in accordance with the law and respond resolutely.”

Two weeks later, the Philippines announced that it had signed agreements with Britain and Canada to increase defense cooperation. They were part of 10 security agreements that Mr. Marcos has signed with seven countries since last year, according to a tally of public statements.

“China is basically pushing us closer to the United States and to the other countries that have already indicated their support, as far as Germany and as far as the Czech Republic,” said Renato Cruz De Castro, a professor of international studies at De La Salle University in Manila.

On Thursday, Petr Pavel, the president of the Czech Republic, said he was willing to cooperate with the Philippines in defense and cybersecurity, adding that his country “fully” supports Manila in the South China Sea.

“To us, South China Sea may seem to be far, far away, but if you take into account the percentage of share of world or global trade that passes through this area, any disruption of theses routes would have an adverse impact on Europe, not only in the form of shortage of goods but also soaring prices,” Mr. Pavel told reporters at a joint news conference with Mr. Marcos. “Which is why we have to pay attention to this topic.”

New allies, Mr. De Castro said, are welcome because the Philippines cannot rely on the United States alone, especially if former President Donald J. Trump returns to power next year.

“The U.S. is simply — even Americans would say — so unstable right now, the political system is so volatile, look at what’s happening with the U.S. military assistance to Ukraine,” he said. “And I’m not saying that Trump would win, but there’s always uncertainty because of how unstable American domestic politics is.”

Another important calculus for Mr. Marcos, analysts said, is securing investments for the Philippines.

“That means that we can really be assertive, we can really protect the South China Sea interests without thinking of the economic backlash that China might impose on us,” said Aries A. Arugay, the chairman of the political science department of the University of the Philippines Diliman.

Even India, which has been silent on the South China Sea dispute for years, announced last June that it would provide loans with preferential rates to the Philippines for its military modernization. In August, both countries signed agreements to cooperate in the coast guard sectors.

Last week, when he was in Australia, Mr. Marcos warned that the constant clashes between Filipino and Chinese vessels have increased the risks of miscalculation.

“The potential for outright conflict is much higher now than it was before,” he said. “We worry in the Philippines because it could come from not a strategic decision by anyone saying, ‘OK, we’re going to war,’ but just by some servicemen making a mistake, or some action that’s misunderstood.”

A United Airlines flight that took off on Friday morning from San Francisco International Airport landed in Oregon missing an external panel, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The panel was found to be missing after the plane, a Boeing 737-800, landed safely at its scheduled destination at Rogue Valley International Medford Airport in Oregon and parked at a gate, United Airlines said in a statement. It was unclear when or how the panel went missing.

According to the airline, there was no indication of any damage to the plane during the flight, and the aircraft did not declare an emergency on its way to the Medford airport.

“We’ll conduct a thorough examination of the plane and perform all the needed repairs before it returns to service,” the airline said. “We’ll also conduct an investigation to better understand how this damage occurred.”

The plane was carrying 139 passengers and a crew of six, according to United Airlines. No injuries were reported.

The plane has been in service for more than 25 years, and it was from a previous generation of 737 aircraft, according to Airfleets.net, a website that tracks aircraft information.

The airport briefly paused operations to inspect the runway, and resumed flights after no debris was found on the airfield, Amber Judd, the director of the Medford airport, said in an email.

Boeing referred questions about the flight to United Airlines. The F.A.A. said it planned to investigate the episode.

The discovery of the missing panel on Friday came as Boeing has faced heavy scrutiny in recent weeks after a door-sized section blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 Alaska Airlines flight in January just minutes after it had taken off from Portland, Ore. There were no major injuries during the flight, but the frightening episode, which was recorded on video, prompted government officials to look into quality control at Boeing.

After the January flight, the F.A.A. began a six-week audit of Boeing, which found “multiple instances” in which the plane maker had failed to follow through with quality-control requirements.

Since then, there have been a number of issues with flights on Boeing aircraft.

On March 8, a United Airlines flight that had landed at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston rolled into the grass as the plane, a Boeing 737, exited onto the taxiway, according to the F.A.A.

In February, a Madrid-bound American Airlines flight, a Boeing 777, diverted to Boston Logan International Airport with a cracked windshield shortly after it had departed from Kennedy International Airport in New York.