Category: News

Presidential elections traditionally speak to future aspirations, offering a vision of a better tomorrow, the hope and change of Barack Obama or the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush. Yet this year, even before a single vote has been cast, a far darker sentiment has taken hold.

Across Iowa, as the first nominating contest approaches on Monday, voters plow through snowy streets to hear from candidates, mingle at campaign events and casually talk of the prospect of World War III, civil unrest and a nation coming apart at the seams.

Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment.

“You get the feeling in Iowa right now that we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Doug Gross, a Republican lawyer who has been involved in Iowa politics for nearly four decades, ran for governor in 2002 and plans to support Nikki Haley in the state’s caucuses on Monday. “In Iowa, life isn’t lived in extremes, except the weather, and yet they still feel this dramatic sense of inevitable doom.”

Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primary race, bounces from courtroom to campaign trail, lacing his rhetoric with ominous threats of retribution and suggestions of dictatorial tendencies. President Biden condemns political violence and argues that if he loses, democracy itself could falter.

Bill Bradley, 80, who served for 18 years as a New Jersey senator, remembered when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, spending more than 75 days in Iowa during his bid. “We debated health care and taxes, which is reasonable,” he said, adding, “Civil war? No. World War III? No, no, no.”

This presidential race, he said, is “a moment that is different than any election in my lifetime.”

He added that the race for the White House in 1968 “was a pretty tough election, but Humphrey versus Nixon was not exactly Trump versus Biden. The difference is just so stark in terms of American values and in terms of what is the future going to be.”

On Thursday, with the snow piled up in the parking lot, farmers and cattlemen in a ballroom in the Des Moines suburb of Altoona took part in a timeworn political tradition: listening to pitches from Republican presidential contenders eager to woo them.

But between the stump speeches and the campaign promises, there was a once-unimaginable undercurrent in a state that prides itself on being a heartland of American civics.

“There’s civil war coming — I’m convinced of it,” said Mark Binns, who had heard from two Republican candidates, Ms. Haley and Ron DeSantis, earlier that morning.

Mr. Binns was hardly the image of a radical: He’s a 65-year-old chemical engineer who lives in Kentucky and was in town for the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but isn’t sure whom he will vote for this year.

In fact, he’s considering avoiding the electoral season altogether. Fearful of the possibility of political violence, Mr. Binns is weighing going to Brazil in November 2024.

“Quite literally, I may leave the country for that week,” Mr. Binns said. “The division is too wide.”

The fear Mr. Binns and other voters express is bipartisan, though each side blames the other for causing it.

Democrats worry that a second Trump administration could plunge the country into chaos, trample constitutional rights and destroy the legitimacy of elections. Mr. Trump and his supporters make false claims that the previous election was stolen, that the riot on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection and that the Biden administration has been using the legal system to prosecute its political opponents. In the years since the attack at the Capitol, Mr. Trump and both mainstream and fringe elements of the conservative media have pushed a steady drumbeat of those lies, an effort to turn upside down the narrative of Jan. 6 and undercut the legitimacy of the Biden administration.

The result is a disorienting frenzy of facts and falsehoods swirling around issues once considered sacrosanct in public life. Recent polling shows Americans have a gloomier view of the future and express a new openness to political violence.

Just a little more than a third of voters in a Wall Street Journal/NORC survey in November said the American dream still holds true, substantially fewer than the 53 percent who said so in 2012. In an October survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, nearly a quarter of Americans agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” — a record high in the poll. In the early weeks of 2024, a host of officials — politicians, judges, election administrators — have withstood threats and harassment, including bomb threats at state capitols, fake calls to the police and a barrage of violent calls, mail and emails.

“What’s going to happen in this next election?” Michelle Obama, the former first lady, said on a recent podcast. “I’m terrified about what could possibly happen. We cannot take this democracy for granted. And I worry sometimes that we do. Those are the things that keep me up.”

As politicians, commentators and voters grasp for historical analogies, one of the darkest chapters of American history keeps being evoked: the period leading to the Civil War. Some see a parallel in the clash of two Americas — not North and South now, but Red and Blue.

Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, mentioned the Civil War during his speech as he dropped out of the presidential race on Wednesday and questioned whether Americans would support democratic values. He recounted the story of Benjamin Franklin being asked by a woman in Philadelphia what kind of government the founding fathers had given the country.

“He said to the woman, ‘A republic, if you can keep it,’” Mr. Christie told voters in New Hampshire. “Benjamin Franklin’s words were never more relevant in America than they are right now.”

David Blight, a historian at Yale University, has been surprised at how his once-obscure academic specialty in the Civil War has become a matter of current debate: In recent months, he has been repeatedly asked to speak and write about whether that period of strife has lessons for today.

Mr. Blight does see the comparisons. “It’s not the 1850s but there are many similarities,” he said. “When are the times when the divisions are so terrible that we feel on the brink of losing the whole? When are the parts tearing us asunder in ways that we fear for the whole enterprise of this ideal? And we’re in one of those, there’s no question.”

The fears come despite what on paper looks like national stability. Inflation has fallen, unemployment has returned to a prepandemic level, and layoffs remain near record lows. The Federal Reserve plans to cut interest rates several times in the coming year.

The incumbent president and his Republican challengers do also speak optimistically about the future. Mr. Biden promotes the economic progress under his administration. Ms. Haley promises to cut federal spending, expand mental health services and rebuild America’s image abroad. And Mr. DeSantis says he will cut taxes, curb illegal immigration and crack down on China.

Yet, at events across Iowa in the week before the caucuses, voters talked about issues far beyond the standard political debates over the economy, foreign policy, health care and education. Politicians, strategists and voters from both parties described an inescapable sense of foreboding, a feeling that something might go dangerously awry.

When Vivek Ramaswamy called on voters at an event in Waukee on Wednesday afternoon, one of the first comments praised the candidate’s anti-interventionist approach to foreign policy and raised the potential of World War III — “that’s a threat to all of us normal people,” the questioner said.

To Maria Maher, who was listening in the back of the restaurant with her youngest son, that kind of catastrophic thinking didn’t sound shocking. Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020 convinced her that the country’s democratic system was broken and government was a “criminal operation.” Ms. Maher, who has a small farm, had been raising and home-schooling her nine children on her own after her husband died following a difficult battle with cancer about a dozen years ago.

“Voting is a joke, and it’s — what’s the word — fraud because of the machines,” said Ms. Maher, 62, who was deciding whether to vote for Mr. Trump or Mr. Ramaswamy. “If we’re going to get a sham president like Biden again, we’re coming in the back door. We’re going to bypass the president’s power.”

Dave Loeback, a former congressman and political science professor, said he was worried about political violence, even in places like Iowa. He was shocked by how divisive school-board elections had become in his small town of Mount Vernon, Iowa.

“The fear is driving both sides, and that can drive both sides to extremes as well,” Mr. Loeback said. “This is not a good situation.”

For some voters, some of the hopelessness stems from the candidates themselves. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump appear to be heading toward a rematch election, despite polling showing that both men remain deeply unpopular among large swaths of Americans.

Standing by the bar in an Irish pub on a snowy Tuesday morning in Iowa, Terry Snyder, a photographer, said she was more worried about the results of this election than any other in her lifetime. Ms. Snyder, 70, had driven through the storm to hear Ms. Haley but doubted that the former South Carolina governor could win the Republican nomination.

Mr. Trump wasn’t an option, she said: “He’s a dictator. And I don’t like that aspect.”

But Ms. Snyder said she was no less worried about an America led by Mr. Biden for another four years.

Her three grandchildren are now teenagers, and if Biden is re-elected, she said, she worries about their future and a liberal culture that she fears would police what they could say. “I’m afraid they are going to have so many of their rights taken away that we have always enjoyed,” she said.

After years of delays and safety and design disputes, Amtrak is one step closer to bringing new high-speed trains to the busy Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak officials said late Friday that the new trains, which had failed an extended series of computer modeling tests, had passed on the 14th try and had been cleared by the Federal Railroad Administration to begin testing on the tracks that run from Washington, D.C., to Boston.

The faster, more spacious trains — sets of locomotives plus passenger cars — come with a price tag of about $1.6 billion and are to replace those in the Acela fleet, which should have been decommissioned at the end of their life cycle in 2016.

The sleek new red, white and blue Avelia Liberty trains are to travel at a maximum speed of about 160 miles per hour because of a limit imposed by the Northeast Corridor’s aging tracks, 10 miles faster than the current Acela trains, and are expected to tilt for a faster and smoother ride around curves. They accommodate up to 386 passengers, an increase of 25 percent.

The testing on the tracks will be “the next step in the safety certification process that leads toward launching revenue service,” Amtrak said in a statement.

Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Alstom, the French manufacturer of the new trains, hailed the move to on-track testing as progress for passengers “who will soon discover a brand-new travel experience on the busiest rail corridor in America.”

But the project, three years behind schedule, has been plagued by major setbacks, and Amtrak has not said when the trains will be ready for passengers. Last fall, the passenger rail service was targeting October 2024 for the new trains to be put into service, according to an inspector general report. Alstom, which is building the trains in Hornell, N.Y., has delivered only 10 out of 28 that were contracted to be ready in 2021. For now, those 10 sit idle in a Pennsylvania trainyard, visible to Amtrak passengers going in and out of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.

In the meantime, Amtrak has spent more than $48 million on maintenance to keep the outdated Acela trains running.

There were big hopes back in 2016, when then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Anthony R. Coscia, Amtrak’s chairman at the time, stood outside a Wilmington, Del., train station and announced a $2.45 billion federal loan for Amtrak to bring high-speed train travel to the Northeast. That year, Amtrak selected Alstom, which had built the original Acela fleet in 2000, to manufacture the new trains.

Under the terms of the contract, Alstom was required to create a computer model to predict the performance of the trains before even starting to build them — a crucial stipulation, since the Federal Railroad Administration, which enforces rail safety regulations, must approve a model that demonstrates a train is safe before it can be tested on the Northeast Corridor tracks.

The corridor’s curves, bridges and tunnels presented a particular challenge for Alstom. The region’s tracks are estimated to need more than $100 billion in repairs and upgrades for the new trains to reach maximum speeds through the entire corridor.

By 2019, the company had run into trouble. According to Amtrak officials and Alstom representatives, the train manufacturer told Amtrak that computer modeling showed the new trains could not run safely on the Northeast Corridor tracks. Nonetheless, Alstom said the company could work out the problems and wanted to move ahead.

Amtrak gave Alstom the go-ahead to build the trains despite the computer modeling problems because, Amtrak officials said, they felt they had no other choice. More recently, Amtrak officials acknowledged that they failed to put safeguards into the contract with Alstom to protect themselves in the event the company struggled to develop working trains.

“I think there’s some debate now after the fact whether or not that should be a contractual mechanism,” said Laura Mason, Amtrak’s executive vice president for capital delivery.

By January 2020, an Amtrak inspector general’s report warned of continuing delays and safety problems with the trains, as did another inspector general’s report in September 2023. In an unredacted version of that more recent report obtained by The New York Times, inspectors found that the trains were still failing the modeling tests and that those that had been built so far had defects. Although the defects could be fixed, the report said, some trains required “structural and design modifications” while others needed “sealant, drainage or corrosion corrections.”

Jim Mathews, chief executive of the Rail Passenger Association, an advocacy group, said that as both Amtrak and Alstom move forward with testing the trains on the tracks, they will be paying close attention to tilting technology and how well it helps the trains make curves at high speeds.

“I would expect a pretty smooth testing regime from here on out because most of the problems have been identified,” Mr. Mathews said. “We will see how they run now that they will be on the Northeast Corridor.”

The United States-led airstrikes on Thursday and Friday against sites in Yemen controlled by the Houthi militia damaged or destroyed about 90 percent of the targets struck, but the group retained about three-quarters of its ability to fire missiles and drones at ships transiting the Red Sea, two U.S. officials said on Saturday.

The damage estimates are the first detailed assessments of the strikes by American and British attack planes and warships against nearly 30 locations in Yemen, and they reveal the serious challenges facing the Biden administration and its allies as they seek to deter the Iran-backed Houthis from retaliating, secure critical shipping routes between Europe and Asia, and contain the spread of regional conflict.

A top U.S. military officer, Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, the director of the military’s Joint Staff, said on Friday that the strikes had achieved their objective of damaging the Houthis’ ability to launch the kind of complex drone and missile attack they had conducted on Tuesday.

But the two U.S. officials cautioned on Saturday that even after hitting more than 60 missile and drone targets with more than 150 precision-guided munitions, the strikes had damaged or destroyed only about 20 to 30 percent of the Houthis’ offensive capability, much of which is mounted on mobile platforms and can be readily moved or hidden.

The two U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal military assessments.

Finding Houthi targets is proving to be more challenging than anticipated. American and other Western intelligence agencies have not spent significant time or resources in recent years collecting data on the location of Houthi air defenses, command hubs, munitions depots and storage and production facilities for drones and missiles, the officials said.

That all changed after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, and the Israeli military’s responding ground campaign in the Gaza Strip. The Houthis have been attacking commercial ships transiting the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and have said they will continue until Israel withdraws. U.S. analysts have been rushing to catch up and catalog more potential Houthi targets every day, the officials said.

Thursday night’s air and naval barrage illustrated this approach, military officials said. The first wave of U.S.-led strikes hit 60 preplanned targets in 16 locations with more than 100 precision-guided bombs and missiles. About 30 to 60 minutes after that, a second wave of strikes was carried out against 12 more targets that analysts had identified as posing threats to aircraft and ships.

Hitting pop-up targets on short notice, a practice the military calls dynamic targeting, would likely be an important part of any additional strikes that President Biden might order, one of the U.S. officials said.

A senior Defense Department official said on Saturday that a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile strike on a radar facility in Yemen on Friday was a “reattack” of a target originally hit in Thursday’s barrage that had not been adequately degraded or destroyed.

Other U.S. military officials said that as analysts review the damage from Thursday night’s airstrikes, there may be additional reattacks.

Despite their fiery rhetoric and vows of retaliation, the Houthis’ military response to Thursday night’s attack so far has been muted: just a single anti-ship missile lobbed harmlessly into the Red Sea, far from any passing vessel, General Sims said on Friday.

But the general and the two U.S. officials on Saturday said they were bracing for the Houthis to lash out once they determined how much firepower they had left and settled on an attack plan.

One of the two U.S. officials said the Houthis appeared to be divided internally over how to respond.

“I would expect that they will attempt some sort of retaliation,” General Sims said on Friday, adding that that would be a mistake. “We simply are not going to be messed with here.”

With temperatures threatening to dip below zero in Iowa on Monday, some of the voters preparing to caucus for Nikki Haley have already overcome a different hurdle: a long history of voting for Democrats.

At recent campaign events across Iowa, a number of Democrats and left-leaning independents said they saw Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, as a reasonable Republican who could move the country away from bitter partisanship and restore civility in national discourse. Many were drawn to her pledges to unite the country, and to work across the aisle on thorny issues such as abortion. Others are simply motivated by a fear of former President Donald J. Trump’s candidacy and the possibility that he will beat President Biden and regain the White House.

Joseph E. Brown Sr., who served two terms as an Iowa state senator in the 1970s and ’80s, said he was a registered Democrat for 50 years until he switched parties last month so that he could caucus for Ms. Haley.

“Now that I have my Republican card, I have to go visit my father’s gravesite here in town and apologize,” said Mr. Brown, who lives in Clinton, Iowa. He added that his father, a staunch Democrat and World War II veteran, always voted a straight party ticket.

Mr. Brown’s one complaint about Ms. Haley is that she tends to echo misleading claims from Republican lawmakers on the number of agents from the Internal Revenue Service auditing middle-class families. But he said he appreciated her stalwart support for aiding both Ukraine and Israel, and her promises to lower the national debt and make the federal government more efficient. He praised her measured approach toward Mr. Trump — calling out the “chaos” that trails him without attacking him on specifics — and even agreed with her support for pardoning the former president if he is found guilty of crimes.

“I’m not opposed to Joe Biden,” he said. “But out of all the Republican candidates, she is the one that strikes me as someone who can rebuild the office of the presidency.”

On the stump, Ms. Haley can sound the notes of a traditional conservative with appeal to voters left of center. She has said she believes in climate change, pledges to tangle with both Democrats and Republicans in Washington and has criticized members of her own party over their embrace of strict isolationism. She frequently takes her fellow Republicans to task for the high national debt and spending.

Heather Wilcoxson, 47, a Des Moines resident who works in the hotel industry, has been a registered Democrat for nearly her entire adult life — until December, when she switched her party affiliation to Republican. She plans to caucus for Ms. Haley on Monday, and said she had convinced several friends and members of her family to do the same.

She said she was drawn to Ms. Haley because of similarities in their upbringings and her stance on mental health.

To be sure, the number of non-Republicans who will show up for Ms. Haley on Monday night is most likely small. (Unlike past years, there is no Democratic presidential caucus on Monday — Mr. Biden moved his party’s first primary contest to South Carolina, where he is more popular.)

Iowa residents can switch their party registrations in advance or in person on the night of the caucus, but caucusing takes time and deliberate effort. Those interested have to go to their local voter precinct and discuss the candidates before casting a vote, and the foreboding weather forecast has prompted concerns about turnout more broadly.

And then there’s the political forecast: Mr. Trump has a commanding lead in most polls, with Ms. Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida vying for second place.

Still, the existence of a Haley-curious left illustrates the concern, disaffection and estrangement that polls suggest Americans across the political spectrum feel about the two most likely presidential nominees, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.

While some independents and Democrats have gravitated to third-party and unaffiliated candidates, others appear to be drawn to Ms. Haley because they see her as a more moderate Republican candidate. In Iowa, some Democratic voters said they preferred her even over Mr. Biden.

Regina Alt, a 68-year-old from northwest Iowa, says she has always voted for the Democratic ticket in presidential elections with two exceptions: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. She decided to switch her party registration and caucus for Ms. Haley after seeing her in person.

“After I heard her rally, I was 110 percent it would be her,” Ms. Alt said, adding, “Biden is too old for me.”

It is not unusual for Iowa caucusgoers to switch parties. And the move — crossing the aisle in the name of a cause — is a familiar strategy for Democrats in Republican-controlled states like Texas. It has become part of a broader trend in recent cycles to beat back what some voters see as the extremes of the Republican Party in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Utah and elsewhere.

An NBC News analysis of Iowa voter registration statistics found that up to 11 percent of Iowans who participated in the 2012 Republican caucuses were independents or Democrats who changed their party affiliation on Caucus Day. The 2012 election cycle was the last time that only a Republican caucus, and not a Democratic one, was held in Iowa.

“We need new Republican blood,” said Nancy Wauters, 67, a retired medical office assistant and registered Democrat from Grundy County who plans to back Ms. Haley on caucus night because she admires her “proactive ideas” and scrappiness.

In 2020, Kent Nichols, 21, caucused for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In late December, he protested Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at an appearance in Davenport, Iowa, holding handwritten signs that said “Go home, Ron!” and “No fascist. No hate. Get out of our state!” up to the window of the veterans’ outreach center where Mr. DeSantis was speaking.

Although he might sound like a progressive, Mr. Nichols is an independent who describes himself as politically moderate and an evangelical Christian. He dislikes Mr. DeSantis’s policies targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people and called Mr. Trump “not good for our country,” but he also believes in tightening security at the border, worries about the “outrageous” cost of groceries and thinks the United States is spending too much money on the war in Ukraine.

On Jan. 15, he plans to caucus for Ms. Haley.

“I think it’s important that people unite in our country,” he said outside the DeSantis event. “She doesn’t tear people down.”

The support that Ms. Haley is receiving from outside the conservative spectrum has prompted criticism from her Republican rivals. Mr. DeSantis has tried to paint Ms. Haley as a liberal, pointing to support she has received from at least one major Democratic donor and Wall Street executives. “She may be more liberal than Gavin Newsom is,” he said at a CNN debate in Des Moines this week, referring to the Democratic governor of California.

Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Haley campaign, said Ms. Haley was drawing in Democrats and independents not because her campaign was actively courting them, but because she was “working to earn every vote” and her message for “new generational leadership” and stability over “drama and chaos” had broad appeal.

“We need the Republican Party to be a story of addition not subtraction,” Ms. Perez-Cubas said, adding that surveys clearly show that voters in both parties do not want to see another Trump-Biden matchup.

Will Rogers, a Republican strategist and lobbyist based in Des Moines, said he had spoken with more than 30 Democrats and independents who were planning to switch parties and vote in the Republican caucus. One of them intended to support Mr. DeSantis. One planned to support Asa Hutchinson. The rest, he said, were going to Ms. Haley.

Ms. Wilcoxson, the voter from Des Moines, plans to switch her affiliation back to the Democratic ticket before the November election. “I most likely will vote for Joe, assuming he can keep it together during the political process,” Ms. Wilcoxson said.

She has heard concerns from Democrats that Ms. Haley would beat Mr. Biden in a general election, and says she would be just fine with that outcome.

“I’d much rather have that than Donald Trump as president again,” Ms. Wilcoxson said. “I just have to vote my conscience.”

Nicholas Nehamas and Kellen Browning contributed reporting.

Just weeks before Ecuador descended into chaos, with prison riots, two escaped criminal kingpins and the brief siege of a television station, the country’s top prosecutor launched a major operation aimed at rooting out narco-corruption at the highest levels of government.

The investigation, called “Caso Metastasis,” led to raids across Ecuador and more than 30 arrests.

Among those charged were judges accused of granting gang leaders favorable rulings, police officials who were said to have altered evidence and delivered weapons to prisons, and the former director of the prison authority himself, who was accused of giving special treatment to a powerful drug trafficker.

They had been implicated by text chats and call logs retrieved from cellphones belonging to the drug trafficker, who was murdered while imprisoned.

When the attorney general, Diana Salazar, announced the charges last month, she said the investigation had revealed the spread of criminal groups through Ecuador’s institutions. She also warned of a possible “escalation in violence” in the days to come, and said that the executive branch had been put on alert.

This week, her prediction came true.

Interviews with security experts and intelligence sources reveal what might have set off the violence in Ecuador this week, which was so intense that it prompted the president, Daniel Noboa, to declare war on the gangs and impose a state of emergency.

According to the interviews, the attorney general’s investigation played a pivotal role.

“Metastasis is where everything starts,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of intelligence for the Ecuadorean Army who is an independent analyst on security matters.

The raids put pressure on Mr. Noboa, who took office in November and had promised to crack down on gangs and clean up the prison system, to take concrete steps, Mr. Pazmiño said.

The president assured that major changes were coming. Though he did not publicly say what they were, officials said the changes included transferring several powerful gang leaders to a maximum-security facility known as La Roca, or The Rock, in Guayaquil, a major coastal city.

Gang leaders learned of the plan before the transfer could take place, however, most likely through a government leak, the officials said. And on Sunday, Adolfo Macías — who runs a gang called the Choneros and is widely considered the most powerful gang leader in Ecuador — went missing from his cell.

As inmates clashed with guards at prisons across the country, another gang leader, Fabricio Colón Pico, who heads Los Lobos, escaped on early Tuesday from a prison near the city of Riobamba.

Experts said the gang leaders wanted to avoid La Roca because security would be tighter and they were likely to lose access to electronics like cellphones. The leaders also feared that if they were housed with their rivals in La Roca, they might be killed.

“Every one of their lives would be in danger,” Mr. Pazmiño said. “That was the breaking point.”

In response to the planned transfer, experts say leaders probably ordered gang members — from within the prisons that serve as their command centers — to fight back.

And so, on Tuesday, Ecuadoreans experienced violence like nothing they had seen in years — even as intergang warfare has roiled the once-peaceful country. In several prisons, inmates took guards and staff members hostage. One social media video showed guards held at knife-point.

In cities and towns, police officers were kidnapped, cars were set on fire and explosives were detonated.

Guayaquil experienced the most violence, with armed men descending not only on the TC Televisión network’s studio during a broadcast, but also on several hospitals and opening fire near at least one school.

In the mayhem, at least 11 people died, the authorities said, most of them in Guayaquil, and nearly 200 prison staff members were taken hostage.

The attorney general’s revelations — and Mr. Noboa’s subsequent plan to transfer gang leaders — had provoked intense anger.

“The Metastasis operation is like kicking the hornet’s nest,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University who specializes in Latin America.

Before the operation, gang leaders appeared to have reached a state of “equilibrium,” he said, in which they felt they could operate their lucrative criminal rings, even from behind bars, with the cooperation of the authorities.

“Let’s say the gangs are operating under a level of impunity, and let’s say they are fairly happy with it,” Mr. Flores-Macías said. “What Metastasis is doing is it’s disrupting this equilibrium that exists that allows them to do business as usual. So there’s a reaction in this criminal underworld, and it takes the shape of these fairly violent, spectacular actions.”

Ms. Salazar’s office responded saying they were not granting interviews because of the ongoing security situation.

The violence set off by the gangs was met with force. On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Noboa took the extraordinary step of declaring an internal armed conflict, unleashing the military on the country’s two dozen gangs.

In the days after the declaration, the authorities said that the police and armed forces had killed five people involved in the gang-related violence and had arrested more than 850.

The U.S. State Department released a statement on Thursday saying that American law enforcement, military and government officials would visit Ecuador to assist its fight against what the department called “appalling levels of violence and terrorism at the hands of narco-criminal elements.”

A person who works in Ecuadorean intelligence and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said on Thursday that gang leaders appeared to have been chastised by the fierce response to this week’s violence and had ordered calm in the streets and prisons.

The two gang leaders, Mr. Macías and Mr. Colón, remained at large.

Mr. Colón, who had been arrested a week before he escaped and whom Ms. Salazar accused of plotting to kill her, posted a video on Thursday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Appearing in a parka and a skullcap, he said he had only escaped because he believed he would be killed if he had remained in custody.

He told the president that he would turn himself in if his safety could be guaranteed. In a radio interview, Mr. Noboa said that he would offer him no such deal.

Ms. Salazar, Ecuador’s first Black attorney general, was appointed in 2019. She prosecuted a former president, Rafael Correa, on corruption charges the next year, recommending an eight-year sentence, the maximum penalty, after he was convicted.

Her latest investigation began after the death of Leandro Norero, a gang leader, in 2022.

Mr. Norero was the founder of the Chone Killers and had become one of the country’s most powerful drug lords and financiers, forging ties with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel in Mexico, the attorney general said.

He was serving time for drug trafficking and money laundering when he was killed in a prison massacre.

At the time of his death, prison officials and experts say, he was trying to unite rival gangs into a cartel.

Ms. Salazar said that he had also been rewarding judges, police officials, guards and others who helped him and his associates with apartments, cars, cash and prostitutes.

Among those exposed by Mr. Norero’s cellphone records was Pablo Ramírez, the former head of the prison authority, who is accused of giving Mr. Norero preferential treatment. Mr. Ramirez has denied having any contact with Mr. Norero.

Wilman Terán, the head of the country’s Judiciary Council and a former magistrate in the country’s top court, was also charged. Mr. Terán, whose council oversees and disciplines judges and prosectors, has denied that he was part of Mr. Norero’s sprawling network of favors. The council has stood by him, calling Ms. Salazar’s operation a smear campaign.

The day before the operation was carried out, lawmakers believed to be sympathetic to Mr. Correa, the former president, announced a plan to investigate Ms. Salazar, claiming she had been selective in the cases she pursued.

Around the same time, Mr. Correa posted a message on the X platform warning of an imminent operation, a message that Ms. Salazar later said had tipped off several targeted officials, who evaded capture in the raids.

“Narco-politics has been revealed in Ecuador,” Ms. Salazar said as she announced the arrests that were made.

In a hearing that lasted several hours, she described how drug traffickers penetrated Ecuador’s political system and its prisons.

The transcripts of the cellphone evidence ran to 15,000 pages.

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia; José María León Cabrera from Quito, Ecuador; and Thalíe Ponce from Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Residents in Billings, Mont., woke up to a temperature of minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit. In Des Moines, homeowners were digging out snow from a blizzard and facing wind gusts of 45 miles per hour. Towns and cities along the East Coast were bracing for possible flooding from yet more rain. And communities near the Gulf Coast are preparing for a deep freeze.

More than 30 million Americans were under winter weather advisories on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service, from rain to high winds to heavy snow, and a large portion of the United States is expected to face the coldest conditions of winter so far.

Here is a look at some of what’s going on, region by region.

Midwest

As of Saturday morning, blizzard warnings were in effect for most of Iowa, as well as for North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska.

Parts of Nebraska, Michigan, Indiana and Minnesota were under winter storm warnings, with snow expected in many areas. In the Great Lakes region on Saturday morning, more than 300,000 households were without power, according to PowerOutage.us. And bitter wind chills were expected in Illinois and Missouri.

In Kansas City, where the defending Super Bowl champion, the Chiefs, will host the Miami Dolphins in a wild-card playoff game on Saturday night, temperatures will be “well below zero” at kickoff, forecasters said.

Northeast

Parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have experienced nearly two inches of rainfall since Friday, according to the Weather Service, and more rain is expected on Saturday in some areas. Upton, N.Y., on Long Island, recorded 1.82 inches of rain, Newark recorded 0.91 inches and Central Park, in Manhattan, received 0.89 inches.

After the storm, hundreds of people were without power on Long Island, while thousands of outages were reported in parts of New Jersey.

The rainfall on Friday — which lasted overnight — caused flooding in parts of New Jersey and led to evacuations of residents living near the Passaic River in Paterson and Little Falls.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Friday that with the weekend’s heavy rain, the river was expected to rise another one to two feet by Sunday afternoon.

Thousands of people in New England were also without power on Saturday as a third major storm this week passed through the area. Most of the outages were in Vermont, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, where high wind gusts of 30 m.p.h. or more had been predicted overnight.

Already saturated with heavy precipitation from snow and rain, the area was also expected to experience flooding. Coastal flood advisories and warnings were issued from Connecticut to Maine. Several rivers in Rhode Island, which already flooded this week, were expected to experience more moderate flooding again because of Saturday’s storm.

In Erie County, N.Y., which includes Buffalo, heavy snow and “very strong winds” were expected, Weather Service forecasters said, adding that the snow totals could reach up to two feet and that blizzard conditions were possible on Saturday night and Sunday.

West

Parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Northern California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Alaska were under winter storm warnings on Saturday morning, with snow expected in some areas.

The cold air moving through the United States is leading to plummeting temperatures in Montana, and readings of minus 40 or minus 50 were possible on Saturday. The cold air will be on the move and is expected to affect the Central Plains by Sunday. Flood advisories also remained in effect in areas of Montana on Saturday.

Another issue is ice. As another winter storm wallops the West, the mountains will receive much-needed snow, but states including Oregon will also see significant freezing rain on Saturday.

South

A winter storm watch is in effect for many counties in Tennessee from Sunday to Tuesday morning, with temperatures expected to plummet on Saturday night. Snow is expected on Sunday evening through Tuesday, the Weather Service said.

In Texas, officials are bracing for temperatures well below freezing starting on Saturday night. As the cold air moves south through the remainder of the Martin Luther King’s Birthday weekend, freezing temperatures will plunge near the Gulf Coast. Along this leading edge will be a chance for a wintry mix of freezing rain, sleet and snow in eastern Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana from Sunday to Monday.

In Oklahoma, the Weather Service said that “dangerously cold wind chills” — as low as minus 25 degrees — were to be expected at times, especially at night and in the morning. Officials are urging residents to avoid outdoor activities.

The governors of Louisiana and Arkansas declared states of emergency ahead of worsening conditions expected this weekend. “This will be dangerous cold, so the time to prepare is now!” the Weather Service in Little Rock warned.

Ann Hinga Klein, Colleen Cronin, Lauryn Higgins and Joel Wolfram contributed reporting.

The twin specters of a widening regional war and intensified suffering of civilians loomed over the Middle East on Saturday, as the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen threatened to respond to American airstrikes, and a day after a senior U.N. official warned of a “horrific” humanitarian crisis in Gaza that he said was hurtling toward famine.

An American missile strike, launched from a warship in the Red Sea, hit a radar station outside the Yemeni capital, Sana, early Saturday. The solitary strike came about 24 hours after a much wider barrage of U.S.-led strikes against nearly 30 sites in northern and western Yemen that were intended to deter Houthi attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

Houthi officials tried to brush off the latest assault, saying it would have little impact on their ability to continue those attacks. Their stated goal is to punish Israel for blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza — though Yemeni analysts say the crisis also presents the Houthis with a welcome distraction from rising criticism at home.

The greater risk is likely borne by ordinary Yemenis, whose impoverished nation has been crushed by years of civil war, and who now face a high-stakes confrontation that imperils a fragile 20-month truce.

In northern Gaza, where a crippling three-month Israeli siege has hit hardest, corpses are left in the road and starving residents stop aid trucks “in search of anything they can get to survive,” Martin Griffiths, the top U.N. aid official, told the United Nations Security Council on Friday. Saying that the risk of famine in Gaza was “growing by the day,” he blamed Israel for repeated delays and denials of permission to humanitarian convoys bringing aid to the area.

Since Jan. 1, just three of 21 planned convoys intended for northern Gaza, carrying food, medicine and other essential supplies, have received Israeli permission to enter the area, a U.N. spokesman said on Thursday. More supplies have been distributed in southern Gaza, near the two border crossings that are open during limited hours, but aid workers say vastly more than that is needed to meaningfully help Gazan civilians.

Qatar is mediating talks over a proposal for Israel to allow more medicines into Gaza in exchange for prescription medicines being sent to Israeli hostages held by Hamas, officials have said.

Famine experts say the proportion of Gaza residents at risk of famine is greater than anywhere since a United Nations-affiliated body began measuring extreme hunger 20 years ago. Scholars say it has been generations since the world has seen food deprivation on such a scale in war.

The arrival of bitterly cold winter weather has exacerbated the struggle to survive, Mr. Griffiths said. Much of Gaza’s population has jammed into overcrowded, deteriorating shelters in the south, with limited access to clean water and where aid workers warn that disease is spreading fast.

In response to questions, Israel’s government on Friday denied it was obstructing aid, saying its permission was contingent on the security situation, the security of its troops and its efforts to prevent supplies from “falling into the hands” of Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza. Israel launched its assault on Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack in which Israeli officials say at least 1,200 people were killed and another 240 were taken back to Gaza as hostages.

Since then, Israeli attacks, often using American-supplied bombs, have killed more than 23,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza health authorities. At least 1.9 million people, or 85 percent of the population, have been forced from their homes, according to the U.N.

Despite growing global criticism, and calls from the Biden administration to take greater care, the pace of Israeli strikes has not relented.

The Israeli bombardment is intensifying even in areas where Palestinians had been ordered to flee for their own safety, Mr. Griffiths said.

One strike on Friday on a home in Rafah, near the southernmost tip of Gaza, killed 10 people including several children, Palestinian media reported. At least 700,000 Palestinians have fled to the area around Rafah, along the border with Egypt, hoping for safety. Even there it is elusive.

“There is no safe place in Gaza,” Mr. Griffiths said. “Dignified human life is a near impossibility.”

Large protests calling for an end to the Israeli assault on Gaza, tied to the 100th day of the war, were expected across the globe on Saturday in cities including London, Dublin, Washington, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta.

In Israel, though, the focus was on the 136 hostages believed to still be held in Gaza. Families and supporters of the people taken captive on Oct. 7 planned to hold an overnight vigil in Tel Aviv on Saturday night. Among the hostages are about a dozen people in their 70s and 80s and a 1-year-old baby. Frustrated relatives have become increasingly vocal in their criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to free them.

Like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis have been supported, funded and armed by Iran for many years. American officials say Iran provided the intelligence used by the Houthis to target ships 28 times in the Red Sea since mid-November, causing more than 2,000 other ships to divert onto a much longer route around Africa.

The Houthi response so far to the American and British airstrikes on Friday, which were supported by Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands, has been minimal: a single missile that dropped into the Red Sea about 500 yards from a passing ship on Friday. The maritime security firm Ambrey identified the ship as a Panama-flagged tanker carrying Russian oil — an apparent mistake, as Russia, an ally of Iran, had denounced the American-led strikes against the Houthis.

Still, the impact of the crisis on global trade is already being felt. In a Friday podcast after the Western strikes, Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a shipping data company, said it was seeing an increasing number of container ships diverting to an alternate route around the Cape of Good Hope, which typically adds 10 days and about 3,300 nautical miles to the trip.

Tesla and Volvo said they would be forced to pause production at some car plants in Europe, while Ikea warned that some supplies may run low.

Many Yemen experts were skeptical that this round of U.S. strikes would force the Houthis to back down, and said the group could even be strengthened. Since 2014 the Houthis have endured heavy bombardment by Saudi warplanes armed by the United States, only to emerge as the de facto government in northern Yemen.

A confrontation with the United States strengthens the Houthis’ ties to Iran, plays to popular sympathies with Palestinians and could help to quell dissent, experts say: As a shaky peace has taken root in Yemen in the past 18 months, their economic failures have become more evident, and internal opposition has grown.

The Houthis, for their part, warned that more assaults on Red Sea shipping were coming, as well as a more forceful response to the United States.

“Washington will deeply regret its provocative practices in the Red and Arabian Seas, as will everyone who gets involved with them,” Hezam al-Asad, a member of the Houthi political bureau, said in a phone interview after the latest American strike.

The only way for the United States to stop Houthi attacks on shipping, he said, was “an end to the war in Gaza.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York, Roni Caryn Rabin and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem, and Anushka Patil from London.

Winslow Dumaine was heading to a store on Chicago’s North Side when he saw it: a hole in the sidewalk on Roscoe Street with an uncanny resemblance to a rodent.

Mr. Dumaine, who is an artist and comedian, said the hole represented two themes often present in his work: morbidity and whimsy.

“Had to make a pilgrimage to the Chicago Rat Hole,” he wrote in a social media post this month, including a close-up photo of the concrete cutout.

The post, which has since been viewed five million times, inspired an untold number of Chicagoans to make their own excursions to a quiet residential area of Roscoe Village, a neighborhood known for its cozy taverns, independent boutiques and old-fashioned bakeries.

People have started making offerings to the mysterious, fat-rat-size crevice: candles, coins, flowers, a small tomb with a photo of a rat, and a bag of cinnamon rolls from Ann Sather, the beloved Chicago restaurant chain.

Both online and off, the “Chicago rat hole” became a shared joke in a city that prides itself on its sense of humor; passers-by giggle at the miniature memorial, pausing to talk to other visitors and take pictures of themselves at the hole. And in the city that was recently declared the “rattiest” in the United States — deemed to have the worst rat infestation by the pest control company Orkin — for the ninth consecutive year, Chicagoans have reveled in the symbolism.

Even a local politician, State Representative Ann Williams, got in on the joke.

In a video posted to social media on Wednesday, she touted the attractions of the district she represents, including the many bars and restaurants, Wrigley Field, “and, of course, the Chicago rat hole,” she said, as the camera panned down to the sidewalk.

At the rat hole on Thursday, a toddler in a pink fleece jacket gleefully prodded a small toy mouse that had been placed in its center — the latest offering.

As Mr. Dumaine pointed out the tiny claw marks in the concrete, Jenny Morales and her daughter, Janelle, approached, laughing.

“It’s not every day you get to see a rat hole,” Jenny Morales said. “It’s a cold winter day so I just figured we’d just come see something.”

“Just see the rat hole!” Lora Bothwell, the owner of a nearby day care, interjected in the style of a carnival barker. “I walk kids past here all day every day, and we always talk about ‘Is it a rat? Is it a squirrel?’”

Personally, Ms. Bothwell thinks it’s a squirrel: “I don’t think a rat would jump and splat like that,” she said.

Mr. Dumaine agreed that the shape of the imprint was not, in fact, so rat-like.

“It has the big hips of a squirrel,” he said, “but ‘Chicago Rat Hole’ is just a great band name.”

The hole’s origins are unknown but have been debated online, in local media and at the site itself.

However it happened, and whichever animal species may have been involved, it is at least 20 years old, said Ms. Bothwell, who has lived near the spot for 27 years. She said former clients were texting her with delight at the appearance of the hole on social media and local news.

Since moving to Chicago from his hometown, Omaha, in 2017, Mr. Dumaine has often posted pictures of signs and other symbols of urban arcana that he finds interesting or funny, but the rat hole post has blown them all away.

The widely viewed post has given Mr. Dumaine’s art — including hand-drawn tarot decks and irreverent T-shirts and makeup bags — a huge boost, he said. But while he quickly claimed a local Fox News affiliate’s description of him as the “rat hole guy” in a recent TV story, he said he had turned down offers to develop merchandise and profit directly from it.

“I refuse to take any authority over it. I want it to be for everybody, I’m not colonizing a rat hole.”

The rat hole is a public good as far as Mr. Dumaine is concerned, just another example of animals leaving their mark on human civilization, like the cat paw prints found on a 2,000-year-old Roman roof tile, or the inky paw prints found on a 15th-century manuscript.

In his artwork and comedy, Mr. Dumaine tries to play off the zeitgeist and make something funnier or more extreme. But, he said, the rat hole eludes such treatment.

“I can’t gild the lily,” he said. “I can’t make this funnier than it is.”

The soldiers’ mission was as dangerous as it was audacious: a trek of more than 500 miles through mountainous jungle in northern Burma to seize a Japanese-held airfield in World War II.

The threats were constant: fierce attacks by superior numbers of enemy troops, monsoon rains, tropical diseases and malnutrition.

When the airfield was finally taken, three months later, only 130 able-bodied soldiers remained of the 2,600 who had crossed into Burma in 1944 with Merrill’s Marauders, a fabled unit that was one of the forerunners of the Army’s Special Operations elite, the 75th Ranger Regiment.

On Dec. 29, Russell Hamler, the last survivor of Merrill’s Marauders, died at a veterans’ hospital in Pittsburgh, his son Jeffrey said. He was 99.

Mr. Hamler left high school to enlist in the Army on his 18th birthday, in June 1942. Originally sent to Puerto Rico, he volunteered, like all of the men in Merrill’s Marauders, for a secretive mission with anticipated casualties of up to 85 percent.

“In essence, they didn’t think any of us would pull through,” Mr. Hamler recalled several years ago.

Mr. Hamler, a private first class, was not a leader of the unit. But he experienced the full brunt of jungle combat behind enemy lines as much as any member. He fought in three of its five major battles, as well as in many lesser engagements, armed with a Thompson submachine gun.

“The jungles were full of Japanese,” he recalled. “We did a lot of shooting because they kept coming.”

After Pearl Harbor, Japan’s forces overran Southeast Asia, capturing Hong Kong, Singapore and Indochina. An American general, Joseph Stilwell, was forced into a humiliating retreat from Burma (now Myanmar). Allied leaders agreed in 1943 to send a force back into Burma, into what Winston Churchill called the “most forbidding fighting country imaginable.” It would be a long-range penetration unit, challenging Japanese control of the northern half of the country. The men would have only the weapons and supplies they could carry on mules or on their backs, with additional supplies occasionally dropped from planes by parachute.

General Stilwell named Gen. Frank Merrill to command the unit, officially the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional).

The dense bamboo, tangled vines and banyan trees of the jungle, where men marched single file in stifling tropical heat and humidity, were as much an enemy as the Japanese. Dysentery and malaria were endemic.

Mr. Hamler trekked until he wore holes in his boots, then walked on bare feet before receiving new footwear in one of the parachute drops, he recalled in 2022 in a published interview with Carole Ortenzo, a retired Army colonel and a member of Mr. Hamler’s extended family. Leeches sucked blood from his limbs and bugs “bored into your arms,” he said.

The Army supplied mostly K-rations, providing just 2,830 calories a day to men who were burning far more energy. Famished soldiers dropped grenades into rivers, skimmed the dead fish that floated to the surface and cooked them in their helmets.

“There had to be absolute silence at night in the jungle because any noise invited shelling from the Japanese,” Mr. Hamler said. Pairs of men dug foxholes so that one could sleep while his buddy stood sentry. When it was time to switch roles, the sentry tugged a rope attached to the sleeping man to wake him without uttering a sound.

In one of the Marauders’ fiercest battles, beginning in late March, Mr. Hamler’s Second Battalion was dug into a ridge-top village named Nhpum Ga, which was surrounded.

In a siege that lasted 10 days, the Japanese fired mortars and large artillery ahead of banzai charges by fearless soldiers willing to run into fusillades from the Americans’ Browning machine guns. The Japanese advanced close enough to taunt the batallion’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. George McGee, by name, according to a 2013 history, “Merrill’s Marauders,” by Gavin Mortimer. A Japanese American interpreter with the Marauders, Roy Matsumoto, crept close enough to enemy lines to overhear talk of a planned dawn attack, then alerted his comrades.

Mules killed in the assault putrefied and attracted swarms of maggots. As they ran out of drinking water, the men suffered dehydration and delirium and tried chopping apart bamboo to suck water from the joints.

Early in the fighting at Nhpum Ga, Mr. Hamler was hit in the hip by a mortar fragment and lay immobilized in his foxhole for more than 10 days, until Americans from the Third Batallion broke through to the village — by that point christened “Maggot Hill” by the Americans — and the Japanese retreated.

The Marauders lost 57 men, with 302 wounded, and counted 400 enemy corpses. General Merrill himself suffered a heart attack just before the siege and was evacuated.

Command of the Marauders passed to Col. Charles N. Hunter, who later wrote a critical report accusing General Stilwell of sending men still recovering from jungle sicknesses back into combat. The report drew a congressional investigation.

A 1962 movie, “Merrill’s Marauders,” directed by Samuel Fuller, made General Merrill the hero, but it appalled many veterans of the unit, including some who considered Colonel Hunter their true leader, according to Mr. Mortimer’s book.

In May 1944, three months after the Marauders entered Burma, the airstrip in the heavily fortified town of Myitkyina, the mission’s key objective, fell to the Americans and Chinese troops who had reinforced them. In August, the town itself was captured. The Marauders were disbanded one week later.

All told, the unit suffered 93 combat fatalities in Burma and 30 deaths from disease; 293 more men were wounded; eight were missing. An additional 1,970 men were hospitalized at one point with sicknesses, including 72 with what was described as “psychoneurosis.”

After the battle of Nhpum Ga, Mr. Hamler was evacuated, in April, to northern India, where he spent five weeks in a hospital. He was transferred back home to Pennsylvania and served as a military policeman until he was discharged in December 1945. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

He became a mechanic for Trans World Airlines, retiring in 1985.

Russell Hamler was born on June 24, 1924, in Mt. Lebanon, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, to Robert Hamler, part owner of a bus company, and Margaret (Schweig) Hamler. He attended Mt. Lebanon High School.

Besides his son Jeffrey, Mr. Hamler is survived by another son, James. His wife of 71 years, Imelda Hamler, known as Jean, died in 2018.

In 2022, Merrill’s Marauders were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, after a lobbying drive by the handful of surviving veterans and family members.

Mr. Hamler was presented with his medal at a ceremony near his home. He said that “people that haven’t been around killing” don’t realize the horror of war. Speaking of children dying in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, “I would like to see them outlaw wars.”

He proposed a body of international leaders to solve the world’s problems. “This group would get together and iron it out in words instead of bullets,” he said. “I would like to see a peaceful world.”

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