Opinion | What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds

Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.

The problem isn’t government. It’s our government. Nor is the problem unions — another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States. So what has gone wrong here?

One answer worth wrestling with was offered by Brink Lindsey, director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, in a 2021 paper titled “State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back.” Lindsey’s definition is admirably terse. “State capacity is the ability to design and execute policy effectively,” he told me. When a government can’t collect the taxes it’s owed or build the sign-up portal to its new health insurance plan or construct the high-speed rail it’s already spent billions of dollars on, that’s a failure of state capacity.

But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindsey’s argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice, and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isn’t intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient. And not just by the right:

What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades, embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state, and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s, reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts, and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.

The Biden administration can’t do much about the right’s hostility to government. But it can confront the mistakes and divisions on the left.

A place to start is offered in another Niskanen paper, this one by Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. In “The Procedure Fetish,” Bagley argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that that’s because American politics in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, is dominated by lawyers. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris hold law degrees, as did Barack Obama and John Kerry and Bill and Hillary Clinton before them. And this filters down through the party. “Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States,” Bagley writes. “And if all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”

This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism,” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule-making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.”

The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagley’s ultimate, and in my view, wisest, point. “Legitimacy is not solely — not even primarily — a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” he says. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.” That is what we’ve lost — in fact, not just in perception.

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Can Paramount Compete With Netflix and Disney?

In January, the board of Paramount, including Shari Redstone, the company’s chair, met with a group of bankers to get an update on the media industry and to hear about potential deals that might help the company better compete with streaming giants like Netflix and Disney.

The bankers, from Goldman Sachs and LionTree, came with many deal ideas, according to four people with knowledge of the meeting. The most logical one, the bankers said, was combining some parts of Paramount — which owns networks like Nickelodeon and MTV, and the Paramount+ streaming service — with those owned by Comcast, the cable giant that owns NBCUniversal and the Peacock streaming service. The two companies already have a streaming joint venture in Europe.

But in the end, the board, Ms. Redstone and Bob Bakish, the company’s chief executive, did not feel compelled to pursue any of the combinations. They would continue to zig while Hollywood zagged.

That is, Paramount — with its collection of streaming services including Pluto TV and Showtime in addition to Paramount+ — would keep going it alone.

The fast rise of streaming has reshaped the media industry in just a few years as companies have felt pressure to spend billions on new TV shows and movies to attract enough subscribers to compete with the industry’s giants. MGM, the famed movie studio, sold to Amazon. And Discovery combined with WarnerMedia, the film and TV giant behind “Game of Thrones” and “Succession.”

Not Paramount. Since the company was created from the merger of Viacom and CBS three years ago, it hasn’t sought another big deal. Instead, the company has been trying to build its own profitable streaming business before the flow of cash from traditional TV, still its big moneymaker, runs dry.

In interviews, both Ms. Redstone and Mr. Bakish said that Paramount, with its global footprint, its streaming businesses and the movie studio behind the new hit film “Top Gun: Maverick,” would have success on its own terms.

“In many respects we continue to be the underdog, and that’s OK,” Mr. Bakish said. “But I think as time goes on, people will continue to increasingly see that Paramount is powerful.”

Ms. Redstone and Mr. Bakish still have to persuade much of Wall Street. In the years since Ms. Redstone championed the effort to unite the two halves of her family’s media empire — Viacom and CBS — to form Paramount, the value of the combined company has fallen significantly. The day the merger was announced, in August 2019, Wall Street valued both companies at $29.6 billion. Today, Paramount is worth $22.1 billion, a 25 percent decline. The share prices of Paramount’s competitors, including Disney and Netflix, have also declined over the same period.

Rich Greenfield, a co-founder and analyst at LightShed Partners, a research firm, is skeptical that Paramount can survive on its own. Paramount’s streaming business is growing quickly, but it’s still not profitable, Mr. Greenfield said. And much of the audience for Paramount’s signature content — think MTV and Nickelodeon — has shifted to new-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

“I don’t think there’s anybody who believes that in five years, this company won’t either have bought other things or become part of something larger,” Mr. Greenfield said. “It’s eat or be eaten time.”

In recent weeks, Wall Street has put a sharper focus on the profitability of streaming businesses. Netflix said in April that it lost streaming subscribers in the first quarter of the year, reversing a decade of growth and causing its stock to tumble. Mr. Bakish said that competitors like Netflix — which he cheekily calls “legacy streamers” — are only now coming around to the importance of the revenue strategies Paramount has embraced for years, including advertising.

The box office, another traditional business largely eschewed by Netflix, is another example, Mr. Bakish said. “Top Gun: Maverick,” is on pace to generate $150 million in ticket sales during its opening weekend, but, in an exception to most movies produced by the studio, it won’t appear on Paramount+ within the typical 45-day window.

Still, some experts think Paramount’s strategy is sound. Brett Feldman, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, said that the global market for streaming subscribers is far bigger than the audience for pay-TV subscribers. Paramount+ added 6.8 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Mr. Feldman is in the minority of analysts who have a “buy” on Paramount.

“Not everybody pays for cable, especially outside the U.S.,” Mr. Feldman said. “Most people have an internet connection or cellphone to stream video.”

Paramount got a recent vote of confidence this month from Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by the billionaire Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway said in a filing that it had amassed a $2.6 billion stake in Paramount. Berkshire Hathaway did not explain its rationale for investing in Paramount, and the company declined to grant an interview to The Times. But the news caused Paramount’s shares to spike 15 percent.

Ms. Redstone said Berkshire Hathaway’s investment in Paramount took her by surprise. She got the news hours after it had become public.

“I was out to dinner and the person said to me, ‘What do you think of Buffet’s investment?’” Ms. Redstone said. “And I was like, ‘What?’”

Paramount’s ultimate fate will most likely be determined by Ms. Redstone, who emerged victorious in 2018 from a bitter legal fight with Les Moonves, then the chief executive of CBS, to keep control of the entertainment assets her family had owned for decades. Like her father, the shrewd and bellicose lawyer-turned-mogul Sumner Redstone, Ms. Redstone controls Paramount through National Amusements, a holding company she runs that owns voting stock in the company.

Whereas Mr. Redstone was known for cantankerous and impulsive decisions — he once threatened to sever Paramount’s ties with Tom Cruise after his couch-jumping episode on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — Ms. Redstone is a more understated leader. She underscored the contrast with a joke.

“As I said to my dad once, I said, ‘Everything I am is because of you, except for the nice parts — that came from my mother,’” she said, laughing.

Ms. Redstone said she weighs in on the direction of the Paramount in one-on-one conversations with Mr. Bakish and spends time cultivating business relationships inside and outside the company. She introduced Mr. Bakish to Brian Robbins, who eventually became chairman of Paramount with her support, and helped broker a deal with the South Korean entertainment firm CJ ENM by connecting Mr. Bakish to Miky Lee, the vice chairwoman of the firm’s parent company.

Ms. Redstone was an early supporter of Paramount’s decision to compete directly with major players like Disney and Netflix in direct-to-consumer streaming — a strategy that was still up in the air when Viacom and CBS merged in 2019.

In the aftermath of the merger, leaders at the company debated whether to invest in its existing subscription streaming service — then known as CBS All Access — or to forgo streaming for an “arms dealer” strategy: selling movies and TV shows to other streaming companies, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

So In early 2020, just weeks after the deal closed, Paramount decided to make an initial foray into streaming: The company would put some content from Viacom on CBS All Access, effectively bulking up the service quickly without spending to produce original content.

A few months later, with encouragement from Ms. Redstone and Marc Debevoise, then the company’s digital chief who had co-founded CBS All Access, Paramount decided it would spend money on original movies and TV shows for the service, effectively entering the streaming fray, the people said.

That spring, Mr. Bakish called a series of meetings and asked the heads of each of the company’s network groups to pitch projects for inclusion in a companywide subscription streaming service.

By July of that year, the company was finalizing its current course. At a board meeting, company executives summarized the strategy, along with several possible names for the as-yet unnamed streaming service: Paramount+, Honeycomb, The Eye and Pluto+. (The last option was inspired by the company’s popular advertising-supported streaming service.) Over the summer, they settled on Paramount+, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Under the revamped streaming strategy, major Paramount movies — with the exception of some hits, like “Top Gun: Maverick” — are released on Paramount+ within 45 days of theatrical release. The idea behind that approach is that it gives Paramount one foot in the emerging streaming era and one planted firmly in the traditional moneymaking ways of old Hollywood.

At the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick” last month, shortly after a splashy promotion on a rented aircraft carrier in San Diego, Mr. Cruise paid homage to Sumner Redstone. As Ms. Redstone looked on, Mr. Cruise noted that the movie was being widely released on May 27, which would have been Sumner Redstone’s 99th birthday. (He died in 2020.)

Ms. Redstone said she believed that her father would generally agree with her approach toward Paramount. And she said she thinks that Wall Street will ultimately come around, provided the company delivers on its promises.

“I think the market keeps saying, ‘Show me, show me,’” Ms. Redstone said. “And I really believe we keep showing them.”

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As Boris Johnson Stumbles, Labour Struggles to Offer a Clear Message

LONDON — When Boris Johnson hit energy companies with a windfall tax last week as a way of providing more aid for struggling consumers, it was a bittersweet moment for the opposition Labour Party, which had been promoting just such a plan for months.

For once, Labour could claim to have won “the battle of ideas.” But at a stroke, Mr. Johnson had co-opted the party’s marquee policy and claimed the credit.

This might have been a moment of opportunity for Labour. Mr. Johnson’s leadership has been in jeopardy because of a scandal over illicit lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street — missteps highlighted by a civil servant’s report last week that said senior leadership “must bear responsibility” for the failure to follow the rules.

But some political analysts think Labour should focus less on the “partygate” scandal and more on outlining a clear agenda to British voters, who face rising inflation and a possible recession.

Now out of power for 12 years, Labour has lost the last four general elections, including a thrashing in 2019 when Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger and the party’s leader at the time, was crushed by Mr. Johnson’s Conservatives.

John McTernan, a political strategist and onetime aide to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, said that while Labour had made a decent recovery under the current leader, Keir Starmer, it had not yet “closed the deal” with the electorate.

“It looks like modest progress because it is modest progress” said Mr. McTernan, while adding that it was still a “massive rebalancing” after the 2019 defeat.

He praised the advances made under Mr. Starmer, but said the party still had work to do if it hoped to install a Labour government in place of the Tories. “This is the year the tempo has to pick up,” he said.

And while the Conservatives lost badly in recent local elections, Labour has made only limited progress, with smaller parties doing well.

Mr. Starmer suffered a setback recently when the police reopened an investigation into whether he, too, broke coronavirus rules. He promptly promised that he would resign if he were fined by the police — in contrast to Mr. Johnson, who suffered that fate in April but refused to quit.

But whatever Mr. Starmer’s future, the Labour Party has yet to draft a convincing message to win back rust belt regions that abandoned it in the last election and that — judging by the local election results — remain to be convinced.

In the 2019 general election, parts of England that for decades had voted for Labour switched en masse to the Conservatives, allowing Mr. Johnson to recast the political map just as Donald J. Trump did in the United States in 2016.

Since then, Mr. Starmer has junked much of Mr. Corbyn’s socialist agenda, posed frequently alongside the British flag to illustrate his patriotism, taken a tough line against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and become the first Labour leader in more than a decade to visit NATO.

But the party has yet to define itself with a clear new vision to British voters, and Mr. Starmer, a former chief prosecutor, has little of the charisma that distinguishes leaders in the mold of Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson.

Even he accepts that Labour is not yet in a solid, election-winning position.

“I always said the first thing we needed to do was to recognize that if you lose badly, you don’t blame the electorate, you change your party,” Mr. Starmer said in an interview this year after meeting with voters at a town-hall meeting at Burnley College in northwestern England. “We have spent the best part of two years doing that heavy lifting, that hard work.”

Yet Labour’s task is huge.

In 2019, the Conservatives captured areas like Burnley, in Britain’s postindustrial “red wall,” and Labour polled poorly in Scotland, once another heartland, losing out to the Scottish National Party. Looming changes to electoral boundaries are likely to favor the Conservatives in the next general election, which must take place by the end of 2024 but that many expect next year.

So Labour is hosting a series of town-hall meetings where uncommitted voters are asked what would lure them back to the party.

After the gathering in Burnley, Lisa Nandy, a senior member of the Labour Party, reflected on the project to mend what she called “a breakdown in trust” between Labour and its traditional voters.

“It broke my heart in 2019 when I watched communities where I grew up and that I call home turning blue for the first time in history,” said Ms. Nandy, referring to the campaign color used by the Conservatives. She represents Wigan, another former industrial town, speaks for Labour on how to spread prosperity to areas outside England’s prosperous southeast, and knows that her party has work to do.

People at the meeting in Burnley liked the idea of cutting energy bills by placing a windfall tax on the profits of oil and gas firms, said Ms. Nandy, speaking before the government announced the plan. Yet few at this time knew this was one of Labour’s main policy proposals.

“The question is, why don’t they know this is what we have been saying?” Ms. Nandy lamented earlier this year, referring to voters.

The reason, she thinks, is that politicians spend too much time in London and too little “on people’s own territory having conversations with them about things that matter to them.”

Labour is also reaching out to a business community whose ties to the government have been strained over Brexit rules that pile mounds of extra red tape onto many exporters. At a digital meeting with businesses in the Midlands, Seema Malhotra, who speaks for Labour on business and industrial issues, heard a litany of problems, including customs bureaucracy, inflation, rising energy and wage costs, and supply-chain difficulties.

“I don’t think anyone is expecting full policy across the board until the time of the next election,” she said. “A lot of what we need to do is about rebuilding our relationship with the country and setting out our values, and people need to get to know the Labour Party again.”

“Whilst people are prepared to listen to Labour again, we cannot be complacent,” she added. “Many people have yet to feel that we have fully moved on from the past enough to now trust us. We have work to do on continuing to demonstrate that our party has changed.”

Some analysts argue that what Labour really needs is a sharper message.

“I know so many progressives who think that politics is like a football game: If you have a 10-point plan on health and your opponents only have a five-point plan you win 10 to 5,” Mr. McTernan said. “You don’t.”

Instead, he added, “You have to say: ‘This is Britain’s big challenge. Labour is the answer. Here’s why and here’s how.’”

To succeed, the party needs to convince people like Ged Ennis, the director of a renewable energy company that equipped Burnley College with solar panels. He has voted for Labour and the Conservatives over the years, but opted for the centrist Liberal Democrats in 2019.

Mr. Ennis said he had been convinced that Labour was keen to listen but confessed to having a hazy picture of Mr. Starmer’s politics. “I think what he needs to do is to be brave and to be really clear about what he wants to deliver,” he said.

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Russians Crowdsource Supplies for Their Army in Ukraine

Natalia Abiyeva is a real-estate agent specializing in rental apartments in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. But lately, she has been learning a lot about battlefield medicine.

Packets of hemostatic granules, she found out, can stop catastrophic bleeding; decompression needles can relieve pressure in a punctured chest. At a military hospital, a wounded commander told her that a comrade died in his arms because there were no airway tubes available to keep him breathing.

Ms. Abiyeva, 37, has decided to take matters into her own hands. On Wednesday, she and two friends set out in a van for the Ukrainian border for the seventh time since the war began in February, bringing onions, potatoes, two-way radios, binoculars, first-aid gear and even a mobile dentistry set. Since the start of the war, she said, she has raised more than $60,000 to buy food, clothes and equipment for Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine.

“The whole world, it seems to me, is supporting our great enemies,” Ms. Abiyeva said in a phone interview. “We also want to offer our support, to say, ‘Guys, we’re with you.’”

Across Russia, grass-roots movements, led in large part by women, have sprung up to crowdsource aid for Russian soldiers. They are evidence of some public backing for President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort — but also of the growing recognition among Russians that their military, vaunted before the invasion as a world-class fighting force, turned out to be woefully underprepared for a major conflict.

The aid often includes sweets and inspirational messages, but it goes far beyond the care packages familiar to Americans from the Iraq war. The most sought-after items include imported drones and night vision scopes, a sign that Russia’s $66 billion defense budget has not managed to produce essential gear for modern warfare.

“No one expected there to be such a war,” Tatyana Plotnikova, a business owner in the city of Novokuybyshevsk on the Volga, said in a phone interview. “I think no one was ready for this.”

Ms. Plotnikova, 47, has already made the 1,000-mile drive to the Ukrainian border twice, ferrying a total of three tons of aid, she says. Last week, she posted a new list of urgently needed items on her page on VKontakte, the Russian social network: bandages, anesthetics, antibiotics, crutches and wheelchairs.

Medical gear is in high demand in part because of the growing firepower of Ukraine’s military as the West increasingly fortifies it with powerful weapons. Aleksandr Borodai, a separatist commander and a member of the Russian Parliament, said in a phone interview that materials to treat shrapnel wounds and burns were needed “in great quantities” on the Russian side of the front. More than 90 percent of Russian injuries in some areas, he said, have recently been caused by artillery fire.

Mr. Borodai said that his units had noted the use of 155-millimeter shells fired by American howitzers, and that Russia’s leadership may have underestimated the determination of the West to support Ukraine.

“It’s not making the military operation go any faster from our point of view — it’s making our situation more difficult, I don’t deny it,” Mr. Borodai said, referring to Western weapons deliveries. “It’s possible that our military leaders were not ready for there to be such massive support on the part of the West.”

Ukraine’s military, tapping into Western support for its cause, is benefiting from a far more extensive crowdfunding campaign that is delivering millions of dollars’ worth of donations in items like drones, night vision scopes, rifles and consumer technology.

Most of the groups collecting donations for Russian soldiers appear to be operating independently of the Russian government. They mostly rely on volunteers’ personal contacts in individual units and at military hospitals who pass along lists of what they most urgently need.

In Russia’s state media, these groups are rarely mentioned, perhaps because they undermine the message that the Kremlin has the war firmly in hand. But sometimes the message filters through to the Russian audience.

“Our service members keep saying they have all they need,” a television segment in April about such volunteers explained, “but a mother’s heart has a will of its own.”

Outside state media, however, supporters of the war are pointing to private donations as a key to victory. Pro-Russian military bloggers, some of them embedded with Russian troops, are urging their followers to donate money to buy night vision equipment and basic drones.

“Our guys are dying because they lack this equipment,” one blogger wrote, while “the entire West is supplying the Ukrainian side.”

The needed equipment, largely imported, can be bought at Russian sporting goods stores or ordered online. Starshe Eddy, a popular military blogger, wrote that consumer drones made by the giant Chinese company DJI “have become so firmly entrenched in combat operations that it’s become hard to imagine the war without them.”

Ms. Abiyeva, the real estate agent, showed off on her Telegram account a Nikon Prostaff 1000 laser-equipped range finder that she bought for $400. Nikon says the item “makes seeing — and ranging — deer out to 600 yards a reality.”

“With this kind of tech everything goes better and faster, wouldn’t you say?” Ms. Abiyeva wrote, adding a winking emoji and a heart emoji.

Ms. Abiyeva says she started crowdsourcing aid after her husband, a captain, was deployed to Ukraine and she felt “powerless” to affect the course of events. She visited the hospital attached to her husband’s local military base and got the contact information for surgeons deployed to the war. Ever since, they have sent requests to her directly and passed her contacts along to colleagues.

When one surgeon at a field hospital asked for arterial embolectomy catheters, for treating clogs in arteries, Ms. Abiyeva found another volunteer in St. Petersburg to make the 700-mile trip to deliver 10 of them immediately. Ms. Abiyeva said that when she met the surgeon on her own trip to the region a week later, he told her that six of the catheters had already been used.

“It’s possible that we saved six lives,” she said.

The Russian military’s apparently urgent need for essential medical equipment and basic, foreign-made consumer devices has led some Russians to wonder how the Kremlin has been spending its enormous military budget, more than 3 percent of the country’s total economic output. On the VKontakte page of Zhanna Slobozhan, a coordinator of donations in the border city of Belgorod, a woman wrote that talk of raising money for drones and gun sights “makes me think that the army is totally being abandoned to the mercy of fate.”

“Let’s make sure that at least we won’t abandon our guys,” Ms. Slobozhan wrote back. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Putin visited a military hospital on Wednesday for the first time since the war began. He later told officials that while the doctors he met had assured him that “they have all they need,” the government should “promptly, quickly and effectively respond to any needs” in military medicine.

Still, the notion that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are underequipped is increasingly seeping into Russian public discourse — among both opponents and supporters of the war. In a documentary about soldiers’ mothers released last weekend by the Russian journalist Katerina Gordeyeva, seen some three million times on YouTube, one woman describes her son using a wire to reattach soles to his boots.

An association of retired Russian officers published an open letter on May 19 noting that the public was raising funds for equipment the military sorely lacked “even though the government has plenty of money.” The letter excoriated Mr. Putin’s war effort as halfhearted, urging him to declare a state of war, with the aim of capturing all of Ukraine.

But on the ground, the concerns are more prosaic. With the approach of summer, Lyme disease-bearing ticks are out, and volunteers in Belgorod have been making homemade insect repellent, putting it into spray bottles and delivering it to the front.

A group of women collecting donations in the area learned that some of the Russian-backed separatist forces were so badly equipped that they were using shopping bags to carry their belongings. In their Telegram account with about 1,000 followers, the group put out an urgent call for backpacks, along with shoes, Q-tips, socks, headlamps, lighters, hats, sugar and batteries.

“This is so they understand that they are not alone,” said one of the coordinators of the Belgorod group, Vera Kusenko, 26, who works at a beauty salon as an eyelash extension specialist. “We hope this ends soon.”

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Why the Champions League Final Was Delayed

PARIS — A logjam of fans that led to a 35-minute delay of the start of Saturday’s Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool was caused by people attempting to use “fake tickets” to enter the match, the tournament’s organizer said.

The problems with crowd control and access saw thousands of fans, many of them Liverpool supporters with valid tickets, locked out of their team’s biggest game of the season. The confusion, and rising anger, created a potentially dangerous situation in which French police officers, wearing helmets and carrying shields, used canisters of what UEFA, which runs the Champions League, said was tear gas to keep the surging crowds at bay.

“In the lead-up to the game, the turnstiles at the Liverpool end became blocked by thousands of fans who had purchased fake tickets which did not work in the turnstiles,” UEFA said in its statement. “This created a buildup of fans trying to get in. As a result, the kickoff was delayed by 35 minutes to allow as many fans as possible with genuine tickets to gain access.”

The statement went on, “As numbers outside the stadium continued to build up after kickoff, the police dispersed them with tear gas and forced them away from the stadium.”

In the chaos, fans pleaded with stadium stewards to be allowed in, pressing their tickets through the iron gates, and many were left coughing and gasping for breath on the sidewalks outside the Stade de France, a modern arena built for the 1998 World Cup.

Other fans looked for alternate ways in, climbing fences and locked gates. One group of V.I.P.s, delayed because of a problem scanning the Q.R. codes attached to their tickets, scaled a fence in an effort to get to their seats. Once over it, one of the officials said, they watched as the police fought with spectators still outside.

Inside the stadium, where the teams had completed their warm-ups, two 15-minute delays were announced. But even before the crowds outside had dispersed, UEFA went ahead, incongruously, with an elaborate pregame ceremony starring the singer Camila Cabello. Once she finished, the teams took the field and traded handshakes, and the final began.

Police officers stationed at the entrances to the stadium pinned much of the blame for the chaos on the local population of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, where the stadium is located, saying it was not fans wearing the colors of the competing teams but those dressed in what they described as “civilian clothing” who had tried to enter the stadium without tickets.

But France’s interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, repeated UEFA’s version of events in a Twitter post. “Thousands of British ‘supporters’ without tickets or with counterfeit tickets forced entry and sometimes assaulted the stewards,” he wrote. “Thank you to the very many police forces mobilized this evening in this difficult context.”

Fans blamed a lack of organization, saying several entrance gates were closed, forcing those attending the game to funnel into long lines that developed into a crush of bodies as kickoff time neared.

UEFA officials initially seemed to lay the blame for the problems on “late-arriving fans,” even though huge crowds had been stuck at the gates for hours before the scheduled kickoff.

Tommy Smith, a Liverpool fan who had traveled to Paris from Ireland with a group of friends and family, said his group had arrived two hours before the scheduled kickoff and found that there were few entrances where fans could present their tickets. “They closed every turnstile Liverpool-related,” Smith said. “Fans waited two hours, orderly, nothing out of order, and we were tear-gassed.” He said there was little information or direction from stadium staff.

Liverpool released a statement during the game in which it said the club was “hugely disappointed at the stadium entry issues and breakdown of the security perimeter that Liverpool fans faced.” The team said it had requested a formal investigation into the events.

Ronan Evan, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella group for fans, told The New York Times that the fans were blameless.

“Fans at the Champions League final bear no responsibility for tonight’s fiasco,” he said. “They are victims here.”

By halftime, a UEFA security official said, the Stade de France had been locked down, with all entrances and exits closed, while the police were still deploying tear gas outside the stadium concourses.

“For now it’s safer for you inside than outside,” the UEFA official told an Australian executive looking to leave the stadium at halftime. The security official said that “it was a police decision” to close entry and exit points.

In its statement after the game, UEFA said it would investigate the causes of the crowd problems, which came almost a year after surging crowds of ticketless fans attending the European Championship at Wembley Stadium, in London, overwhelmed stewards to gain access to the final of that tournament. The tournament was also a UEFA event.

“UEFA is sympathetic to those affected by these events,” the organization said, “and will further review these matters urgently together with the French police and authorities, and with the French Football Federation.”



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Massacres Test Whether Washington Can Move Beyond Paralysis on Gun Laws

WASHINGTON — Days after 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in Texas, politicians in Washington are tinkering around the edges of America’s gun laws.

A bipartisan group of senators is scheduled to hold virtual meetings early next week and has some proposals on the table: the expansion of background checks, legal changes to prevent the mentally ill and teenagers from getting guns, and new rules for gun trafficking.

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and the leader of the effort, said he had not seen so much willingness to talk since 20 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

But the emerging details of the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday suggest that few of the proposals under discussion would have made much of a difference. The gunman did not have a criminal record that might have been caught by expanded background checks. There is no evidence that the gun had been part of a trafficking ring. And so far, there have not been reports of mental illness that might have triggered a so-called red flag law.

More far-reaching efforts — such as banning military-style weapons, raising the age for gun purchases and requiring licensing and registration for firearm ownership — have already been all but ruled out, the result of Republican opposition, Democratic resignation and court rulings.

This month, before the Texas shooting and another massacre at a grocery story in Buffalo, N.Y., a federal appeals court struck down a California law that banned the sale of some semiautomatic weapons to people under 21. Both shootings were committed by 18-year-olds.

The reaction in Washington to the horrific scenes is a familiar combination of pain and paralysis. There is a sense in Congress, at the White House and around the country that it should, somehow, be different this time.

In Uvalde, anguished parents grew angrier on Friday as a top state law enforcement official acknowledged that the police were wrong to have waited more than an hour to confront the gunman as he holed up inside a classroom, firing sporadically while students who were still alive lay still among the bodies of classmates. Hundreds of protesters raged outside the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston — less than 300 miles from the massacre — where the group was celebrating its longstanding partnership with Republicans to block gun control measures.

“How Many More Kids?” read one sign. “You Are Responsible,” read another, painted to look as if it were splattered in blood.

And yet, even in the wake of the slaughter of so many children, Washington’s leading political players are reprising their usual roles.

“There is more Republican interest and involvement today than any time since Sandy Hook,” Mr. Murphy said. “So by definition, that’s different, right? But I also have failed every single time. Almost without exception, these talks, when they start, don’t go anywhere, right? And so I worry about claiming optimism, given that history.”

As the United States entered a holiday weekend on the heels of the two mass shootings, senators headed home for recess. President Biden is set to go to Uvalde on Sunday to once again console a community in the wake of unthinkable losses.

What remains is an enormous gap between the scale of the problem — over 1,500 people have been killed in more than 270 mass shootings since 2009, according to Everytown for Gun Safety — and what America’s political leaders can agree are the right responses to the carnage.

“None of this meets the moment,” said Igor Volsky, the executive director of Guns Down America, a gun control advocacy group. “None of this meets the enormity of the crisis that we’re in, both in terms of mass shootings and the everyday gun violence that’s been spiking. None of it. None of it is resetting the conversation.”

Polling suggests that many Americans are eager for a broader reset.

Nearly 90 percent of adults in the United States support the idea of doing more to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year. And about 80 percent of people say gun purchasers should be subject to background checks, even when they buy their guns in a private sale or at a gun show.

But surveys also reflect the deepening polarization in the country, where about 30 percent of adults say they own a gun.

At the federal level, 51 percent of Americans favor a nationwide ban on the sale of AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic weapons, while 32 percent are opposed, according to a poll this month by The Associated Press and NORC. Three-quarters of Democrats were supportive, compared with barely a quarter of Republicans.

And the divide is also wide between people who own guns and people who do not. (Republicans are roughly twice as likely to say they own a gun as Democrats.)

A sizable majority of people who do not own guns favor banning high-capacity ammunition magazines and creating a federal database to track all gun sales, according to Pew. Fewer than half of gun owners support the same restrictions. By contrast, large majorities of gun owners favor arming teachers in schools and allowing people to carry concealed weapons in more places — changes that are broadly opposed by people who do not own firearms.

The response to mass shootings in the United States is starkly different than the decisive action taken in other developed countries around the world. Britain banned semiautomatic weapons and handguns after shootings in 1987 and 1996. Australia held a mandatory gun buyback after a 1996 massacre and the rate of mass shootings plummeted. Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Norway all tightened gun laws after horrific crimes.

For Republican lawmakers in the United States, even a national tragedy like the two recent mass shootings may not be enough to break through the fear of angering their supporters, who have been fired up over the last several years by former President Donald J. Trump, Fox News and social media.

Since 2017, when Mr. Trump became president, support for banning assault weapons among gun owners, for example, has dropped to 37 percent from 48 percent, according to Pew.

The pressure that Republican elected officials feel to toe the line among their gun-supporting constituents was evident within hours of the grisly news in Texas. A steady stream of Republican lawmakers once again delivered a two-step that has worked for them for years: declaring that none of the measures Democrats favor would have stopped the gunman — even as they steadfastly oppose broader efforts that might.

Republicans have used the delayed police response to the Texas shooting as a way of shifting the debate to school security rather than guns, which have surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death for American children ages 1 to 19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a video that quickly went viral, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, focused blame on “some violent psychopath” when he was questioned by a British reporter in Uvalde.

“If you want to stop violent crime, the proposals the Democrats have, none of them would have stopped this,” Mr. Cruz said. And in Washington, he faulted Democrats and the news media for rushing to “try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.”

That rigidity by most Republicans for the past decade has contributed to a sense of gloomy inevitability among Democrats in Congress and at the White House. In remarks the day after the Texas shooting, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said he accepted “the fact” that Republicans are unwilling to prevent more killings.

Describing his hope for finding a compromise, he said: “Maybe, maybe, maybe. Unlikely. Burnt in the past.”

Mr. Murphy said he spoke to members of Mr. Biden’s White House staff on Friday, who told him the president was eager to do anything he could to support the nascent negotiations over new gun safety measures.

“He can’t be hands off and he won’t be hands off,” Mr. Murphy predicted, adding, “I think you’ll see him being actively involved over the weekend and into next week.”

But the president and his aides remain wary. There is little appetite for Mr. Biden to pledge action that he knows will fail, setting himself up to look politically impotent. Aides also have cautioned that too much involvement by the president could further politicize the debate, making it harder for Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill to reach consensus. And forcing moderate Democrats to take a symbolic, tough-on-guns stand could cost the party even more seats in the midterm elections this fall.

White House officials say it is clear to voters and lawmakers alike that Mr. Biden supports aggressive action on gun safety measures and that Republicans do not. “This isn’t a case of Republicans hiding their position,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor.

Now, White House aides say, it is long past time for the other party to get behind those proposals.

But some activists have run out of patience with that explanation. They say Mr. Biden could — and must — be doing more.

“In your recent address to the nation over the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, you posed the question, ‘Where in God’s name is our backbone?’” Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union, a group that advocates on behalf of children and families, wrote in a letter to Mr. Biden on Friday. “We now pose this question back to you as the leader of this nation.”

Ms. Rodrigues called on Mr. Biden to take executive actions to make guns less accessible, such as changing the way gun sellers are defined so that more of them would be required to conduct background checks. And she urged him to convince Senate Democrats to set aside the filibuster in order to ban assault weapons, raise the age limit for buying guns and vastly expand the federal background check system.

Mr. Volsky said he was deeply disappointed in what he called a lack of urgency by Mr. Biden after the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde.

“They have this learned behavior that after tragedies like this one, you say all the right things,” he said of Democrats. “And when all of that fails, you throw your arms up and you blame the Republicans. It’s absolutely pathetic.”

Mr. Murphy is not exactly optimistic, but he is more hopeful.

He said that taking some small steps with Republicans could accelerate the decades-long effort to pass new gun safety measures by demonstrating slow but important progress, much the way gay rights and civil rights activists won minor victories before they won big ones.

Mr. Murphy said Republicans needed to see proof that they could vote for new gun restrictions and not be punished by voters. Outrage over the deaths in Buffalo and Uvalde could provide Republicans with a chance to test that theory, he said.

“The story here could be that Congress is discussing a set of measures that are much less than what is necessary to save the maximum number of lives,” Mr. Murphy conceded. “But I also have another story, which is, we’ve done nothing for 30 years, and if we were to do something that was significant and that demonstrably moved the needle on our gun laws, it would be historic.”

“It would,” he said, “break this logjam.”



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What Happened on Day 94 of the War in Ukraine

Russia edged closer on Saturday to occupying the entirety of Luhansk, a key province in eastern Ukraine, after its forces entered a critical eastern city still under partial Ukrainian control.

Aided in part by thermobaric warheads, one of the most fearsome conventional weapons available to contemporary armies, the Russian advance in eastern Ukraine highlighted the dividend that Russia has gained by seizing a port on the Black Sea and halting its attempts to capture the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.

That has allowed the Russian Army to concentrate its forces in a small pocket of eastern Ukraine, where Russian supply lines are less vulnerable; where Russian forces have shored up their control of some newly captured territory; and where Ukrainian officials say their army is now considerably outnumbered and outgunned.

The latest indicator of this dividend came on Saturday, when two senior Ukrainian officials said that Ukrainian and Russian forces were locked in heavy street fighting inside the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk, where Russian soldiers had advanced to within a few blocks of the administrative headquarters. By Saturday morning, the Russians had captured a bus station and a hotel in the city’s northeast and damaged 14 high-rise buildings during at least three rounds of shelling overnight, the head of Luhansk Province’s military administration, Serhiy Haidai, said.

Credit…Host Photo Agency, via Getty Images

The last remaining Ukrainian-controlled route into the city was still open, across a bridge spanning a river to the city’s west, said Oleh Hryhory, the provincial police chief. But there was heavy shelling around it, making access to the town extremely dangerous, Mr. Hryhory said.

In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said late Saturday that his country’s forces were holding off the Russian assaults on Sievierodonetsk, but acknowledged that they faced “indescribably difficult” conditions.

A railway hub with a peacetime population of about 100,000, Sievierodonetsk is the Ukrainian military’s last significant redoubt in Luhansk Province. While the city is not expected to fall imminently, Russian forces have been making slow but steady gains toward what would be a strategically important victory there.

Its capture would open the way for the Russian forces to set their sights westward to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last major Ukrainian-held cities in the Donbas region, which includes Luhansk and its neighbor Donetsk. Taking them would all but fulfill a goal set forth by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine in February. Russian-backed separatists seized control in 2014 of parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, and Mr. Putin initially justified his invasion as an attempt to preserve the independence of the two breakaway territories.

Russia’s entry into Sievierodonetsk follows the capture, earlier this week, of Lyman, another strategic city in the region.

In other signs of tightening Russian control in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces reopened a harbor at Mariupol, the Black Sea port that was recently captured by Russia after months of devastating airstrikes and artillery fire that destroyed much of the city. A ship left the port carrying thousands of tons of scrap metal seized from the occupied city, according to Ukrainian officials and a Russian state news agency. It was the first confirmed instance of the port’s use since Russia gained full control of Mariupol.

Credit…Associated Press

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has repeatedly vowed that Ukraine will retake the entirety of Donbas, rebuffing growing international calls for his country to cede some territory to Moscow in eventual peace talks to end the war.

“Donbas will be Ukrainian,” Mr. Zelensky said in a speech overnight on Friday. For months, Mr. Zelensky has called for heavier weapons to relieve pressure in the Donbas region and turn the tide in the war. United States officials said on Friday that the Biden administration had approved sending long-range multiple launch rocket systems to Ukraine, a move that the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, has said would be “a serious step toward unacceptable escalation.”

But for now, Ukraine is evacuating civilians from near Sievierodonetsk, in a sign that Ukrainian officials expect further Russian advances in the coming days, amid fears that Russia might encircle the main Ukrainian positions in Donbas.

Out on the highways in Donbas on Saturday, flatbed trucks carrying tanks and trucks towing howitzers rumbled east, suggesting that the Ukrainian military was reinforcing. The Ukrainian Army does not disclose its force numbers but has publicized the arrival of Western weaponry, including long-range American M777 artillery pieces.

Still, military analysts, Ukrainian officials and soldiers on the ground say the Ukrainians remain outgunned by Russia’s far larger arsenal of artillery.

In one engagement on Thursday and Friday in a forest north of the town of Sloviansk, a dozen Ukrainian soldiers were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds after a nearby Ukrainian artillery unit was outgunned by a Russian mortar crew.

Credit…Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Two officers injured in the exchange said Western nations needed to hasten the supply of long-range weapons, including rocket artillery, to even the odds in the battle for Donbas.

“We try to push them back but it doesn’t always work,” said Oleksandr Kolesnikov, a company commander interviewed on a gurney in an ambulance outside a military hospital in Kramatorsk. “We don’t have enough people, enough weapons.”

“You ask how the fighting is going,” Mr. Kolesnikov added. “There was a commander of the company. He was killed. There was another commander. He was killed. A third commander was wounded. I am the fourth.”

The Russian advance has been aided by liberal use of one of its most damaging conventional weapons, the thermobaric warhead, according to Ukrainian military commanders, medics and video from the battlefield.

The weapon, a track-mounted rocket artillery system nicknamed Solntsepek, or the Heat Wave, fires warheads that explode with tremendous force, sending potentially lethal shock waves into bunkers or trenches where soldiers would otherwise be safe.

The missiles scatter a flammable mist or powder that is then ignited and burns in the air. The result is a powerful blast followed by a partial vacuum, as oxygen is sucked from the air as the fuel burns.

“You feel the ground shake,” said Col. Yevhen Shamataliuk, commander of Ukraine’s 95th Brigade, whose soldiers came under fire from the weapon in fighting this month near Izium, a town northwest of Sievierodonetsk.

Credit…Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times

“It’s a hollow booming sound and the ears ring when it explodes, more than from ordinary artillery,” Colonel Shamataliuk said. “It destroys bunkers. They just collapse over those who are inside. It’s very destructive.”

The United States and other militaries also deploy thermobaric warheads in missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, but analysts say the Russian military’s deployment of the weapon in Ukraine has been among the most systematic uses in recent wars.

But while Russia currently seems to hold the advantage, its advances also come with their own disadvantages. By extending their supply lines, Russian forces themselves become more vulnerable to counterattacks and the logistical complications that plagued Russian maneuvers earlier in the war.

Within Russia, there are also increasing misgivings about whether Russia’s military has the force and resources to continue fighting.

Five opposition deputies in the local legislature of Primorsky Province in Russia’s Far East signed an open letter to Mr. Putin demanding that Russia stop fighting and withdraw its forces. Russia would be better served by using the young men fighting in Ukraine to work in Russia, said the statement read out by Leonid Vasyukevich, a deputy from the nominally opposition Communist Party.

Earlier this week, a diplomat at Russia’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva resigned over the war, the most senior official to leave their post out of opposition to the invasion.

Credit…Nicole Tung for The New York Times

And while it supports the war, a grass-roots Russian movement argues that the Kremlin hasn’t done enough to help its soldiers prepare for a major conflict. Led in large part by women, the group is crowdsourcing aid for Russian soldiers, including food and medical supplies.

Within Ukraine, the war has formalized a long-brewing schism within the Orthodox church. Late on Friday, the leaders of the central branch of the Orthodox church in Ukraine made a formal break with the hierarchy in Moscow.

The Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church said on Facebook that it was breaking with the Moscow leadership because it disagreed with Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, over his support for the war.

Patriarch Kirill has repeatedly blessed the Russian military forces invading Ukraine. Because he is the church’s spiritual leader in both countries, many of the Ukrainians dying under the onslaught are his followers. He has also avoided condemning attacks on civilians.

The church has been under the wing of the Moscow Patriarchate for centuries, and its departure will markedly decrease the size of the patriarch’s flock because Ukrainians attend church in greater numbers than Russians.

But it is unclear how many of the bishops and parishes in Ukraine will follow the lead of the council, or how many might try to stick with Moscow.

Disputes within the church, which can last for centuries, revolve around complicated questions of doctrine and authority. The church in Ukraine has been wrestling with an internal split since 2014, the year that Russia annexed Crimea and sparked a separatist war in eastern Ukraine.

Credit…Ivan Alvarado/Reuters

Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall from Bakhmut, Ukraine; Maria Varenikova from Kramatorsk, Ukraine; Anton Troianovski from Istanbul; Erika Solomon from Lviv, Ukraine; and Nadav Gavrielov and Alexandra E. Petri from New York.

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Ted Sarandos Talks About That Stock Drop, Backing Dave Chappelle, and Hollywood Schadenfreude

Over a three-hour dinner, Mr. Sarandos was charming and upbeat, dressed down in Levi’s and sneakers. You would never know he had been through a Job-level run of bad fortune in the last few months. First, his father, with whom he was very close, died. Soon after, his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Avant, with whom he was also very close, was shot to death when she encountered a burglar in the middle of the night at her Beverly Hills home. Ms. Avant, renowned in Hollywood for her elegance, art collecting, philanthropy and community organizing in Watts, Calif., was the wife of Clarence Avant, a music mogul known as the “Black Godfather.”

Then, on top of Mr. Sarandos’s personal woes, Netflix skidded from rapid growth to grind-it-out. (Its stock peaked above $700 a share in November 2021 and has now fallen below $200.)

The rise of Mr. Sarandos, a community college night-school dropout, from a video store clerk in Arizona to the pinnacle of Hollywood, is legendary.

“He’s had more singular influence on movies and television shows than anyone ever had,” Barry Diller told me. “He has denuded the power of the old movie companies that had held for almost 100 years. They are now irrelevant to setting the play and rules of the day. If there is still a Hollywood, he is it.”

Only a few years ago, the Netflix lobby was the coolest place on earth. Now it’s suddenly gloomy. In her “Saturday Night Live” monologue last weekend, Natasha Lyonne, the star of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” sarcastically cracked that the “two things you definitely want to be associated with right now are Russia and Netflix.”

After winning the pandemic, Netflix now finds itself in its own version of its survival drama “Squid Game.” The company hit a ceiling, for now, of some 220 million subscribers, after thinking it could get to a billion with its global empire, and that has thrown a wrench into the future of Netflix and streaming in general. Wall Street suddenly turned a cold shoulder on its former darling, telling Netflix, Guess what, guys, you’ve got to make money, not just grow subscriptions.

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Gun in Texas Shooting Came From Company Known for Pushing Boundaries

Before the 2000s, most gun makers did not market military-style assault weapons to civilians. At the largest industry trade shows, tactical military gear and guns were cordoned off, away from the general public. That started to change around 2004, industry experts say, with the expiration of the federal assault weapon ban.

“Companies like Daniel Defense glorify violence and war in their marketing to consumers,” said Nick Suplina, a senior vice president at Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that supports gun control.

In 2012, the Sandy Hook shooting led to an industrywide surge in gun sales, as firearm enthusiasts stocked up, fearing a government crackdown. In an interview with Forbes, Mr. Daniel said the shooting “drove a lot of sales.” (Forbes reported that Daniel Defense had sales of $73 million in 2016.)

After the shooting, Daniel Defense offered employees extra overtime to meet skyrocketing demand, according to Christopher Powell, who worked for the company at the time. “They kept people focused on the task at hand,” he said.

But in the late 2010s, some colleagues started to worry that Mr. Daniel had become distracted by the glamour of marketing the brand and rubbing shoulders with celebrities and politicians, according to a former Daniel Defense manager. They voiced concerns that some of the marketing materials were inappropriate for a company that manufactures deadly weapons, said the manager and a former executive, who didn’t want their names used because they feared legal or professional repercussions.

Some ads featured children carrying and firing guns. In another, posted on Instagram two days after Christmas last year, a man dressed as Santa Claus and wearing a military helmet is smoking a cigar and holding a Daniel Defense rifle. “After a long weekend, Santa is enjoying MK18 Monday,” the caption states, referring to the gun’s model.

The industry’s aggressive marketing has landed some companies in trouble. Earlier this year, the gun maker Remington reached a $73 million settlement with families of children killed at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Conn. The families had claimed that Remington improperly marketed its assault rifles, including with its weapons appearing in “Call of Duty,” which the killer at Sandy Hook had frequently played.

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What the Racist Massacre in Buffalo Stole From One Family

Wayne’s family was already familiar with racism’s physical threat.

In Philadelphia, Miss., where a relative on his father’s side lived decades ago, Ku Klux Klan members were known to ride by his home in hoods, the family lore goes. The relative often kept a shotgun in his lap when he sat on his porch.

Generations later, Celestine fell victim to a similar hatred.

The massacre at Tops was excruciating enough. The persistence of racism made the days that followed all the more exhausting.

Wayne was dissatisfied by the answers the country offered. The stagnation of gun control efforts frustrated him, along with the idea that such killings are an inevitable facet of American life. The suggestion that the pandemic helped foment the violence seemed cruel, when his family had suffered so deeply these past two years.

Wayne’s grandmother was hospitalized after contracting the coronavirus, and in September 2020, she died. When Celestine was busy, his grandmother had filled in to help raise him.

Neither was around anymore.

Amid the funeral preparations, Wayne’s eyes sometimes landed on no place in particular, and his mind wandered. His children worried. How would he fare when his house emptied? When he had more time to linger on the what-ifs, whether things would have been different had he just woken up earlier that Saturday and visited her.

All that hindsight was for later.

Wayne Jr., 27, stopped by a salon to get a strand of color in his twists. It looked red to his sisters; it was meant to be pink. The women took trips to get their nails done, all in rosy shades. And Wayne wrangled his three sons to get fitted for their funeral attire of black suit jackets, white shirts and pink ties.

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