Category: News

The recession America was expecting never showed up.

Many economists spent early 2023 predicting a painful downturn, a view so widely held that some commentators started to treat it as a given. Inflation had spiked to the highest level in decades, and a range of forecasters thought that it would take a drop in demand and a prolonged jump in unemployment to wrestle it down.

Instead, the economy grew 3.1 percent last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2022 and faster than the average for the five years leading up to the pandemic. Inflation has retreated substantially. Unemployment remains at historic lows and consumers continue to spend even with Federal Reserve interest rates at a 22-year high.

The divide between doomsday predictions and the heyday reality is forcing a reckoning on Wall Street and in academia. Why did economists get so much wrong, and what can policymakers learn from those mistakes as they try to anticipate what might come next?

It’s early days to draw firm conclusions. The economy could still slow down as two years of Fed rate increases start to add up. But what is clear is that old models of how growth and inflation relate did not serve as accurate guides. Bad luck drove more of the initial burst of inflation than some economists appreciated. Good luck helped to lower it again, and other surprises have hit along the way.

“It’s not like we understood the macro economy perfectly before, and this was a pretty unique time,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Obama administration economic official who thought that lowering inflation would require higher unemployment. “Economists can learn a huge, healthy dose of humility.”

Economists, of course, have a long history of getting their predictions wrong. Few saw the global financial crisis coming earlier this century, even once the mortgage meltdown that set it off was well underway.

Still, the recent misses were particularly big. First, many economists dismissed the possibility of rapid inflation. When prices took off, Fed economists and professional forecasters widely expected at least a brief period of contraction and an uptick in unemployment. Neither has materialized, at least so far.

“It was always going to be difficult to forecast what an economy was going to look like emerging from a mostly unprecedented pandemic,” said Matthew Luzzetti, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, whose team’s recession forecast last year proved too pessimistic.

Not all economists expected a recession last year. Some correctly expected inflation to fall as pandemic disruptions faded. But even most of them were surprised by how little damage the Fed’s campaign of rate increases appears to have caused.

“The unemployment rate hasn’t even gone up since the Fed started tightening,” said Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton economist who served as vice chairman of the Fed during the last successful soft landing and was a prominent voice arguing another one was possible. “I don’t know how many people expected that. I know I didn’t.”

The series of forecasting mistakes started in early 2021.

Back then, a handful of prominent economists, including Harvard’s Lawrence H. Summers, a former Treasury secretary, began to warn that America could experience a pop in inflation as the newly elected Biden administration enacted a large stimulus package — including one-time checks and state and local aid — on top of previous Trump administration coronavirus relief. They worried that the money would fuel so much demand that it would push prices up.

Many government officials and economists vociferously doubted that inflation would jump, but the price pop arrived. Some of it was about demand, and some of it owed to bad luck and pandemic disruptions.

Stimulus money and lifestyle changes tied to the pandemic had helped to stoke goods shopping at a moment when the supply chains set up to deliver those products were under strain. Ocean shipping routes weren’t prepared to handle the deluge of demand for couches and gym equipment. At the same time, manufacturers faced rolling closures amid virus outbreaks.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine further fueled the jump in prices by disrupting global food and fuel supplies.

By that summer, America’s Consumer Price Index peaked at a 9.1 percent yearly increase and the Fed had started to respond in a way that made economists think that a recession was imminent.

Fed policymakers in March 2022 began what quickly became a rapid series of rate increases. The goal was to make it sharply more expensive to buy a house or car or to expand a business, which would in turn slow the economy, weigh on consumer demand and force companies to stop raising prices so much.

Such dramatic rate adjustments meant to cool inflation have typically spurred recessions, so forecasters began to predict a downturn.

“History has shown that those two things combined usually ended up in recession,” said Beth Ann Bovino, chief economist for U.S. Bank, referring to the combination of high inflation and rate increases.

But the economy — while a challenging one for some families, between high prices and expensive mortgages — never fell off that cliff. Hiring slowed gradually. Consumer spending cooled, but in fits and starts and never dramatically. Even the interest-rate-sensitive housing market settled down without tanking.

Robust government support helps to explain some of the resilience. Households were flush with savings amassed during the pandemic, and state and local authorities were only slowly spending down their own government pandemic money.

At the same time, a strong job market helped to push up wages, allowing many households to weather price increases without having to cut back much. Years of ultralow interest rates had also given households and businesses the chance to refinance their debts, making them less sensitive to the Fed’s campaign.

And part of the persistent strength owed to the fact that with inflation cooling, Fed officials could back off before they crushed the economy. They paused rate increases after July 2023, leaving them at a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent.

That raises a question: Why has inflation cooled even as the Fed stopped short of tanking growth?

Many economists had previously thought that a more marked slowdown was likely to be necessary to fully stamp out rapid inflation. Mr. Summers, for instance, predicted that it would take years of joblessness above 5 percent to wrestle price increases back under control.

“I was of the view that soft landings” were “the triumph of hope over experience,” Mr. Summers said. “This is looking like a case where hope has triumphed over experience.”

He pointed to several factors behind the surprise: among them, supply problems have eased more than he expected.

A big chunk of the disinflation did come from a reversal of previous bad luck. Gas prices dropped in 2023, and those softer prices trickled through other industries. Healing supply chains allowed good prices to stop climbing so quickly and, in some cases, fall.

And some economic cooling did take place. Though unemployment held fairly steady, the labor market rebalanced in other ways: There were about two job openings for every available worker back in 2022. That’s down to 1.4 now, and wage growth has cooled as employers compete less fiercely to hire.

But that labor market adjustment was gentler than many had expected. Prominent economists had doubted it would be possible to cool conditions by cutting job openings without also causing a spike in unemployment.

“I would have thought that it was an iron law that disinflation is painful,” said Laurence M. Ball, a Johns Hopkins economist who was an author of an influential 2022 paper that argued bringing down inflation would probably require driving up unemployment. “The broad lesson, which we never seem to completely learn, is that it’s very hard to forecast things and we shouldn’t be too confident, and especially when there’s a very weird, historic event like Covid.”

Now, the question is what that means for the months ahead. Could economists be caught wrong-footed again? They expect moderating inflation, continued growth and several Fed rate cuts this year.

“We’ve landed softly; we just need to make it to the gate,” Mr. Furman said.

Fed officials could offer insight into their own thinking at their meeting next week, which concludes Jan. 31. Investors expect policymakers to hold interest rates steady, but will watch a news conference with Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, for any hint at the future.

The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.

“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”

The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month. That will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space in the storied museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.

“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”

Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.

The changes are the result of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to speed up the repatriation of Native American remains, funerary objects and other sacred items. The process started in 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, funerary objects and other holdings to tribes. But as those efforts have dragged on for decades, the law was criticized by tribal representatives as being too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.

This month, new federal regulations went into effect that were designed to hasten returns, giving institutions five years to prepare all human remains and related funerary objects for repatriation and giving more authority to tribes throughout the process.

“We’re finally being heard — and it’s not a fight, it’s a conversation,” said Myra Masiel-Zamora, an archaeologist and curator with the Pechanga Band of Indians.

Even in the two weeks since the new regulations took effect, she said, she has felt the tenor of talks shift. In the past, institutions often viewed Native oral histories as less persuasive than academic studies when determining which modern-day tribes to repatriate objects to, she said. But the new regulations require institutions to “defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.”

“We can say, ‘This needs to come home,’ and I’m hoping there will not be pushback,” Masiel-Zamora said.

Museum leaders have been preparing for the new regulations for months, consulting lawyers and curators and holding lengthy meetings to discuss what might need to be covered up or removed. Many institutions are planning to hire staff to comply with the new rules, which can involve extensive consultations with tribal representatives.

The result has been a major shift in practices around Native American exhibitions at some of the country’s leading museums — one that will be noticeable to visitors.

At the American Museum of Natural History, segments of the collection once used to teach students about the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other groups will be temporarily inaccessible. That includes large objects, like the birchbark canoe of Menominee origin in the Hall of Eastern Woodlands, and smaller ones, including darts that date as far back as 10,000 B.C. and a Hopi Katsina doll from what is now Arizona. Field trips for students to the Hall of Eastern Woodlands are being rethought now that they will not have access to those galleries.

“What might seem out of alignment for some people is because of a notion that museums affix in amber descriptions of the world,” Decatur said. “But museums are at their best when they reflect changing ideas.”

Exhibiting Native American human remains is generally prohibited at museums, so the collections being reassessed include sacred objects, burial belongings and other items of cultural patrimony. As the new regulations have been discussed and debated over the past year or so, some professional organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, have expressed concern that the rules were reaching too far into museums’ collection management practices. But since the regulations went into effect on Jan. 12, there has been little public pushback from museums.

Much of the holdings of human remains and Native cultural items were collected through practices that are now considered antiquated and even odious, including through donations by grave robbers and archaeological digs that cleared out Indigenous burial grounds.

“This is human rights work, and we need to think about it as that and not as science,” said Candace Sall, the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of Missouri, which is still working to repatriate the remains of more than 2,400 Native American individuals. Sall said she added five staff members to work on repatriation in anticipation of the regulations and hopes to add more.

Criticism of the pace of repatriation had put institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History under public pressure. In more than 30 years, the museum has repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 individuals to tribal groups; it still holds the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects. (Last year, the museum said it would overhaul practices that extended to its larger collection of some 12,000 skeletons by removing human bones from public display and improving the storage facilities where they are kept.)

A top priority of the new regulations, which are administered by the Interior Department, is to finish the work of repatriating the Native human remains in institutional holdings, which amount to more than 96,000 individuals, according to federal data published in the fall.

The government has given institutions a deadline, giving them until 2029 to prepare human remains and their burial belongings for repatriation.

In many cases, human remains and cultural objects have little information attached to them, which has slowed repatriation in the past, especially for institutions that have sought exacting anthropological and ethnographic evidence of links to a modern Native group.

Now the government is urging institutions to push forward with the information they have, in some cases relying solely on geographical information — such as what county the remains were discovered in.

There have been concerns among some tribal officials that the new rules will result in a deluge of requests from museums that may be beyond their capacities and could create a financial burden.

Speaking in June to a committee that reviews the implementation of the law, Scott Willard, who works on repatriation issues for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, expressed concern that the rhetoric around the new regulations sometimes made it sound as if Native ancestors were “throwaway items.”

“This garage sale mentality of ‘give it all away right now’ is very offensive to us,” Willard said.

The officials who drew up the new regulations have said that institutions can get extensions to their deadlines as long as the tribes that they are consulting with agree, emphasizing the need to hold institutions accountable without overburdening tribes. If museums are found to have violated the regulations, they could be subject to fines.

Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs and a former tribal president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the rules were drawn up in consultation with tribal representatives, who wanted their ancestors to recover dignity in death.

“Repatriation isn’t just a rule on paper,” Newland said, “but it brings real meaningful healing and closure to people.”

King Charles III has been admitted to a London hospital for a procedure to treat an enlarged prostate, Buckingham Palace confirmed on Friday.

News images showed Charles arriving around 9 a.m. at the London Clinic, a private hospital, where his daughter-in-law Catherine, Princess of Wales, is recovering from abdominal surgery.

The palace announced the king’s pending treatment last week shortly after the news that Catherine, Prince William’s wife, had undergone surgery in London. Her office in Kensington Palace said she would remain in the hospital for 10 to 14 days to recover.

The king’s recovery is expected to be much swifter, though the palace did not say how long he was expected to stay in the hospital. By announcing his elective prostate procedure in advance, the palace said, Charles, 75, hoped to encourage other men with similar symptoms to get checked.

“The king was this morning admitted to a London hospital for scheduled treatment,” the palace said in a statement. “His Majesty would like to thank all those who sent their good wishes over the past week, and is delighted to learn the diagnosis is having a positive impact on public health awareness.”

Benign prostate enlargement is common in men over age 50, according to Britain’s National Health Service. It can be found in up to 90 percent of men over 70. Symptoms include difficulty urinating and urgency to urinate. It is not cancerous and it does not usually pose a serious health threat.

Treatment includes medication and changes to diet and lifestyle, as well as surgical procedures in more severe cases to remove excess tissue from the prostate gland. Buckingham Palace did not describe the procedure that Charles would undergo.

Medical experts said that the most common treatment was a transurethral resection of the prostate, in which a surgeon scrapes out the inside of the prostate gland, giving the urethra more space.

Charles’s planned treatment follows a period of troubling health news for the British royal family. In addition to Catherine, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York and ex-wife of the king’s younger brother, Prince Andrew, said on Monday that she had been diagnosed with melanoma, a serious type of skin cancer.

It was her second cancer diagnosis within a year. Ms. Ferguson, 64, had spoken publicly about her decision to undergo a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery last year after a breast cancer diagnosis in the summer.

The London Clinic, an elite private institution in the Marylebone neighborhood of London, has treated other members of the royal family, as well as celebrities like the actress Elizabeth Taylor and foreign leaders like the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. John F. Kennedy, the future president, was told by doctors he had Addison’s disease while a patient at the hospital in 1947.

Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images.

One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended on Thursday. X suspended several accounts that posted the faked images of Ms. Swift, but the images were shared on other social media platforms and continued to spread despite those companies’ efforts to remove them.

While X said it was working to remove the images, fans of the pop superstar flooded the platform in protest. They posted related keywords, along with the sentence “Protect Taylor Swift,” in an effort to drown out the explicit images and make them more difficult to find.

Reality Defender, a cybersecurity company focused on detecting A.I., determined with 90 percent confidence that the images were created using a diffusion model, an A.I.-driven technology accessible through more than 100,000 apps and publicly available models, said Ben Colman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.

As the A.I. industry has boomed, companies have raced to release tools that enable users to create images, videos, text and audio recordings with simple prompts. The A.I. tools are wildly popular but have made it easier and cheaper than ever to create so-called deepfakes, which portray people doing or saying things they have never done.

Researchers now fear that deepfakes are becoming a powerful disinformation force, enabling everyday internet users to create nonconsensual nude images or embarrassing portrayals of political candidates. Artificial intelligence was used to create fake robocalls of President Biden during the New Hampshire primary, and Ms. Swift was featured this month in deepfake ads hawking cookware.

“It’s always been a dark undercurrent of the internet, nonconsensual pornography of various sorts,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who works on deepfake detection. “Now it’s a new strain of it that’s particularly noxious.”

“We are going to see a tsunami of these A.I.-generated explicit images. The people who generated this see this as a success,” Mr. Etzioni said.

X said it had a zero-tolerance policy toward the content. “Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,” a representative said in a statement. “We’re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed.”

X has seen an increase in problematic content including harassment, disinformation and hate speech since Elon Musk bought the service in 2022. He has loosened the website’s content rules and fired, laid off or accepted the resignations of staff members who worked to remove such content. The platform also reinstated accounts that had been previously banned for violating rules.

Although many of the companies that produce generative A.I. tools ban their users from creating explicit imagery, people find ways to break the rules. “It’s an arms race, and it seems that whenever somebody comes up with a guardrail, someone else figures out how to jailbreak,” Mr. Etzioni said.

The images originated in a channel on the messaging app Telegram that is dedicated to producing such images, according to 404 Media, a technology news site. But the deepfakes garnered broad attention after being posted on X and other social media services, where they spread rapidly.

Some states have restricted pornographic and political deepfakes. But the restrictions have not had a strong impact, and there are no federal regulations of such deepfakes, Mr. Colman said. Platforms have tried to address deepfakes by asking users to report them, but that method has not worked, he added. By the time they are flagged, millions of users have already seen them.

“The toothpaste is already out of the tube,” he said.

Ms. Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Thursday.

The deepfakes of Ms. Swift prompted renewed calls for action from lawmakers. Representative Joe Morelle, a Democrat from New York who introduced a bill last year that would make sharing such images a federal crime, said on X that the spread of the images was “appalling,” adding: “It’s happening to women everywhere, every day.”

“I’ve repeatedly warned that AI could be used to generate non-consensual intimate imagery,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the images on X. “This is a deplorable situation.”

Representative Yvette D. Clarke, a Democrat from New York, said that advancements in artificial intelligence had made creating deepfakes easier and cheaper.

“What’s happened to Taylor Swift is nothing new,” she said.

There’s a shift underway in Asia that’s reverberating through global financial markets.

Japan’s stock market, overlooked by investors for decades, is making a furious comeback. The benchmark Nikkei 225 index is edging closer to the record it set on Dec. 29, 1989, which effectively marked the peak of Japan’s economic ascendancy before a collapse that led to decades of low growth.

China, long an impossible-to-ignore market, has been spiraling downward. Stocks in China recently touched lows not seen since a rout in 2015, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was the worst-performing major market in the world last year. Stocks stemmed their slide only when Beijing recently signaled its intention to intervene but remain far below previous highs.

This year was set to be a tumultuous one for global markets, with unpredictable swings as economic fortunes diverge and voters in more than 50 countries go to the polls. But there’s one unforeseen reversal already underway: a change in perception among investors about China and Japan.

Seizing on this shift, Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, addressed more than 3,000 global financiers gathered in Hong Kong this week for a conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs. It was the first time a Japanese prime minister had given a keynote address at the event.

“Now Japan has a golden opportunity to completely overcome low economic growth and a deflationary environment that have persisted for a quarter of a century,” Mr. Kishida said in a video recording. His government, he said, would “demonstrate to all of you Japan’s transition to a new economic stage by mobilizing all the policy tools.”

It’s the kind of message that Japan has been honing for a decade, and now investors want to hear more of it. Foreign investors pumped $2.6 billion into the Japanese stock market last week, adding to $6.5 billion the week before, according to data from Japan Exchange Group. That is a stark shift from the roughly $3.6 billion that was yanked out in December.

All that money has sent Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 surging about 8 percent this month. The market is up over 30 percent over the past 12 months. This week, Toyota rose to a record market value for a Japanese company, about $330 billion, surpassing the mark set in 1987 by the telecom conglomerate NTT.

A combination of factors has contributed to Japan’s recent success. A weak yen has made stocks look cheap to foreign investors, and it has been a boon to exporters and multinationals based in Japan that make their profits overseas. Important reforms to the corporate sector have given shareholders more rights, enabling them to call for changes in strategy and management. Unlike inflation in other parts of the world, rising inflation in Japan has been a sign that things are headed in the right direction, after decades of falling prices and sluggish economic growth dampened appetite among consumers and companies to spend.

And there is one additional factor: geopolitics. The longer-term prospects for Japan, the third-largest economy, are looking good when parts of the world are souring on the second-largest economy, China.

“One of the best things to happen to Japan is China,” said Seth Fischer, the founder and chief investment officer at Oasis Management, a hedge fund based in Hong Kong.

“Japan has for 10 years been working on creating a more productive corporate environment and a better place to be an equity investor through consistently trying to improve value,” Mr. Fischer said. “People don’t believe the same about China.”

In a recent survey of global fund managers by Bank of America, selling Chinese stocks and buying Japanese stocks were two of the three most popular trade ideas. (The other was to load up on high-flying U.S. tech stocks.)

China’s ruling Communist Party has sought to insert itself into the business sector in recent years, leaving investors worried that politics often trumps the bottom line for many of China’s corporate titans. The blurring of politics and business has also raised concerns in Washington and in European capitals, leading to regulations that have prevented foreign investments into certain sectors and companies.

China has not struggled for economic growth like Japan, but a protracted property market collapse has shredded consumer and investor confidence. Lingering issues with China’s economy have exacerbated weakness in the country’s currency, the yuan.

Much of the negative sentiment has played out in Hong Kong, an open market where global investors traditionally place their bets on China and its companies. The market was pummeled last year, and it slipped further over the first three weeks of this year.

Beijing intervened this week to try to reverse the sell-off. On Monday, the country’s No. 2 official, Premier Li Qiang, called on the authorities to be more “forceful” and take more measures to “improve market confidence.” His speech lifted stocks, as did a report from Bloomberg, citing unnamed officials, that the authorities were contemplating a $278 billion market rescue.

Then on Wednesday, the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, freed commercial banks to do more lending, essentially pumping $139 billion into the market by lowering the amount of money banks are required to keep in reserve. Regulators also loosened rules for how indebted property developers could pay back loans.

The words and actions propelled the market higher this week, with the Hang Seng Index posting three of its best days this year. China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen markets also bounced, though not by as much.

But many investors say the measures have failed to address a much bigger problem: China’s economic trajectory. They remain disappointed with China’s response to its broader economic slump and its perceived reluctance to pull off a showstopping stimulus, as it did in previous periods of economic stress.

“We hope it will still happen,” said Daniel Morris, an analyst at BNP Paribas, referring to a more substantial effort to prop up markets. “But we don’t have confidence that it will. I honestly would have thought that at the end of last year all the bad news had to be priced in, and yet we have fallen further again this year.”

Economists, financiers and corporate executives around the world looked to China last year for an economic rebound after its government scrapped its “zero Covid” policy, punishing lockdowns that at times put the country into an economic freeze. But Chinese consumers didn’t participate in the kind of “revenge spending” seen elsewhere after reopenings, and a property crisis has weighed on families, many of whom have nearly three-quarters of their savings tied up in real estate.

“There is not much confidence domestically, and then you have a government that isn’t very interested in supporting the economy,” said Louis Kuijs, chief Asia economist at S&P Global Ratings. “Markets somehow had expected much more and are becoming increasingly disappointed and disillusioned.”

And the ranks of the disillusioned include some Chinese investors, who have been moving money into exchange-traded funds that track Japanese stocks. At times these funds’ prices have traded far above the value of their underlying assets, a sign of investors’ enthusiasm to invest.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken wrapped up a four-nation tour through Africa on Thursday with a visit to Angola, an oil-rich former Cold War battleground that has become the site of a struggle for 21st-century economic influence.

During his visit to the coastal capital, Luanda, Mr. Blinken spotlighted major American investments in Angola, including more than $900 million for solar energy projects and $250 million to upgrade a rail corridor that carries critical minerals, including cobalt and copper, from central Africa to Angola’s Atlantic port of Lobito.

Those solar investments help to advance President Biden’s climate agenda while the transportation improvements further his goal of diversifying American supply chains — in part to reduce U.S. dependence on Chinese control of the vital ingredients for a modern economy.

Just over 20 years since the end of Angola’s civil war, which left perhaps as many as one million people dead, the country has rebuilt, modernized and developed friendly relations with Washington, which once funded rebels against a government backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Speaking at a news conference alongside Téte António, Angola’s foreign minister, Mr. Blinken proclaimed that U.S.-Angola relations were at their “strongest” point in their history.

Unspoken was Angola’s economic links to China, which has lent Angola nearly $43 billion.

Those financial ties between Beijing and Luanda are one of several relationships that have alarmed U.S. military officials, who warn that China is seeking to establish a naval base with Atlantic Ocean access.

In March 2022, the top U.S. commander for Africa, Stephen J. Townsend, said he worried most that Equatorial Guinea would grant China such a base, but that Beijing had made progress toward that goal in other African nations. Some analysts place Angola on that list.

U.S. officials have been quietly lobbying western African nations to deny China an Atlantic-facing military presence, said Cameron Hudson, who served as National Security Council director of African affairs in the Bush administration. He noted that all four of Mr. Blinken’s stops this week — which also included Cape Verde, Ivory Coast and Nigeria — have Atlantic coasts.

Chinese bases were not a specific subject of Mr. Blinken’s discussions this week, but the generally closer ties with Africa that the Biden administration has been developing, including through the new Angola investments, make it easier for other officials to make a case against worrisome Chinese military influence.

Rather than overt talk of China, there was much emphasis during Mr. Blinken’s trip on what officials called an effort to treat African nations as partners and not as pieces on a global chessboard, reflecting a view among Biden officials that Africans resent being treated like pawns in a new Cold War of sorts with Beijing, or with Russia, which has recently expanded its interests in Africa through the Wagner mercenary group.

But Africans themselves brought up the issue of geopolitical competition more than once during Mr. Blinken’s visit. In the Ivory Coast capital, Abidjan, a local television reporter said to Mr. Blinken: “Africa in recent years seems to have become a battleground for influence among major powers. At what point do we think about the future of Africans?”

“It’s not for us to say they have to choose,” Mr. Blinken replied. “On the contrary, for us, the question is to present a good choice. And then people will decide.”

Without mentioning China by name, Mr. Blinken noted that “some countries” might lend African nations money that creates unsustainable debt and that these other countries might import workers rather than hire locals. The U.S. investments, by contrast, can “bring everyone upward,” he said.

In Angola, Biden administration officials seemed especially proud of U.S. backing for the Lobito Corridor rail project, which they consider a model for a planned wave of American investment in the continent. The corridor will contribute to Mr. Biden’s agenda of “de-risking” American reliance on critical minerals controlled by China. The Democratic Republic of Congo provides more than half the world’s supply of cobalt, which is used to make lithium-ion batteries; about three-quarters of that country’s supply is mined by China.

U.S. officials say the rail corridor, also funded by the European Union and African entities, will stimulate long-term African economic growth by attracting related investments. And they expect it to be profitable, unlike some major Chinese infrastructure investments spawned by Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative over the past decade.

The project, they say, will also create jobs at home, furthering Mr. Biden’s goal of “a foreign policy for the middle class.” Work on the more-than-800-mile corridor’s 186 bridges will use American steel and create 600 direct jobs, according to a fact sheet from Acrow, an American bridge-building company participating in the project.

Speaking in Luanda, a port city where oil tankers steam in and out of the harbor, Mr. Blinken said that the rail project has “genuinely transformative potential” for Angola and the region.

Another question that came up more than once during the trip was whether Mr. Biden would make good on a 2022 promise to visit Africa himself.

Asked on Thursday whether the president may yet visit, Mr. Blinken said his boss would “welcome the opportunity” to visit. “Of course, we have an election this year in the United States, so there are challenges to schedules,” he added.

Ingenuity, the little Mars helicopter that could, can’t anymore.

At least one rotor broke during the robotic flying machine’s most recent flight last week, NASA officials announced on Thursday. Ingenuity remains in contact with its companion, the Perseverance rover, which has been exploring a dried-up riverbed for signs of extinct Martian life.

Ingenuity will now be left behind.

“It is bittersweet that I must announce that Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could — and it kept saying, ‘I think I can, I think I can’ — well, it has now taken its last flight on Mars,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced in a video message posted on X.

Ingenuity arrived on Mars in the undercarriage of the Perseverance rover in February 2021. The helicopter was a late addition to the mission, a low-cost, high-risk, high-reward technology demonstration using many off-the-shelf components, providing important lessons for future mission designers during its 72 flights through the planet’s thin atmosphere.

“They can rely on what we’ve accomplished,” Theodore Tzanetos, the Ingenuity project manager, said in a news conference on Thursday evening. “They can point to the fact that a cellphone processor from 2015 can survive the radiation environment on Mars for two and a half years. Lithium-ion battery cells that are commercial, off the shelf, can survive for two and a half years, Those are massive victories for engineers around NASA.”

On April 19, 2021, Ingenuity became the first plane or helicopter to take off on another planet, the aircraft’s rotors spinning 2,400 times a minute to generate sufficient lift in an atmosphere that is only one one-hundredth as dense as Earth’s. NASA officials called the flight a “Wright brothers moment” for planetary exploration.

The plan then was to conduct a demonstration of the novel technology: five flights in 30 days.

Perseverance was then to leave Ingenuity behind and begin studying ancient sedimentary rocks along the rim of Jezero crater, which held a lake of water several billion years ago.

Ingenuity aced the five flights, and it worked so well that mission managers decided to bring the helicopter along to scout the terrain ahead of the rover. Over the next thousand days, Ingenuity continued to go up and down, up and down, up and down. It experienced glitches along the way, making three emergency landings. It survived dust storms and the cold Martian winter, which the aircraft was not designed for. Engineers upgraded its software so that Ingenuity could choose its own landing sites.

“It’s almost an understatement to say that it has surpassed expectations,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s associate administrator for the science directorate.

In an interview, MiMi Aung, who shepherded the helicopter project from early out-of-control experiments on Earth through Ingenuity’s first flights on Mars, said she felt “A little sad, but, I must say, mostly super proud of the whole team.” She recalled how Ingenuity’s first flight was delayed by a software glitch. Back then, she and her colleagues took meticulous care to ensure that a fix did not cause more serious problems.

“Ingenuity could die any day,” she said. “Before or right after the first flight.”

The helicopter team had prepared for what they described as a 30-day sprint. “Seventy-two flights was not in our imagination,” said Ms. Aung, who left NASA in mid-2021 to work on Project Kuiper, Amazon’s effort to beam internet from space.

The mission instead turned into an open-ended marathon. Mr. Tzanetos said that in the back of their minds, team members knew that each passing day could be the last day for Ingenuity. But the helicopter seemed to always bounce back from any challenge.

Other than one nonessential sensor that had failed, “The rest of the subsystems, from the solar panels to the battery, have been aging remarkably well,” Mr. Tzanetos said. “Our electronics, avionics, processor all seem to be doing just fine.”

On Jan. 18, during its 72nd flight, Ingenuity fell out of touch with Perseverance while descending. Communications were re-established the next day, but then a shadow in a photo sent back a few days later revealed that about one-quarter of one of the rotor blades had broken off.

“There was the initial moment, obviously, of sadness seeing that photo come down and pop onscreen, which gives a certainty of what occurred,” Mr. Tzanetos said. “But that’s very quickly replaced with happiness and pride and a feeling of celebration for what we pulled off.”

Mr. Tzanetos noted that on Thursday evening, it would be 1,000 Martian days, known also as sols, since Ingenuity had been dropped onto the surface of Mars by Perseverance.

“She picked a very fitting time to come to the end of the mission here,” he said.

Ingenuity had been flying over terrain that Mr. Tzanetos described as “some of the most challenging” — not because of obstacles but because it was so bland, with few rocks or other features. The previous flight had ended with an emergency landing because the navigation system was having trouble tracking its position.

The 72nd flight was intended as a 30-second up-and-down to check that everything was working, but again the bland terrain caused problems. “Because of the navigation challenges, we had a rotor strike with the surface,” Mr. Tzanetos said. “That would have resulted in a power brownout, which caused the communications loss.”

With at least part of one blade broken off, the helicopter would not be able to generate enough lift, and the rotor would be unbalanced, meaning that the helicopter would be likely to shake itself apart if it tried to take off again.

“There are some lessons in that for us,” said Havard Grip, the chief pilot for Ingenuity. “We now know that kind of terrain can be a trap for a system like this.”

Dr. Grip said that a higher-resolution camera, able to pick out more details in even a bland landscape, would likely have helped.

The Ingenuity team will conduct a few final tests on Ingenuity’s systems and download images and data remaining in the helicopter’s memory.

NASA engineers are investigating what caused the dropout in communication and whether the rotor blade hit the ground when Ingenuity landed.

Future Mars helicopters are in the planning stages, including a couple that could accompany a mission to bring back to Earth rock and soil samples that Perseverance has been collecting. But that Mars sample mission, which has encountered technological and budgetary challenges, is being reconsidered, and the helicopters may be dropped.

“Ingenuity was based off of theories,” Mr. Tzanetos said. “We now have facts, and future aircraft designs are going to rely on all the data we’ve collected from ingenuity.”