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Pete Marocco, Who Helped Gut Foreign Aid for Trump, Leaves State Department

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Pete Marocco, Who Helped Gut Foreign Aid for Trump, Leaves State Department


Pete Marocco, who worked with Elon Musk’s team to oversee the gutting of foreign aid and the dismantling of the main U.S. aid agency, has left the State Department, administration officials said on Monday.

The abrupt departure comes in the middle of the department’s efforts to merge the remnants of that aid group, the U.S. Agency for International Development, into the department by mid-August.

Mr. Marocco had been acting as the head of foreign aid at the department and would have overseen the remaining aid operations, which amount to only a fraction of those active before President Trump took office.

Mr. Marocco is expected to take another job in the administration, U.S. officials say.

The State Department did not provide official comment on Mr. Marocco’s departure. But a statement from the department’s press office that was attributed to a “senior administration official” praised Mr. Marocco for finding “egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars” during his tenure. The statement provided no examples of such abuses.

Mr. Marocco’s critics said they planned to continue scrutinizing how he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have gutted foreign aid.

“Pete Marocco’s tenure brought chaos to U.S.A.I.D., reckless and unlawful policy to the State Department, and dismantled longstanding U.S. foreign policy,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said in a statement, adding, “His actions deprived millions of people around the world of lifesaving aid and jeopardized U.S. credibility with our partners.”

Mr. Marocco took a senior post in the State Department in late January to oversee foreign aid. After Mr. Rubio was named the acting administrator of U.S.A.I.D. on Feb. 3, he appointed Mr. Marocco acting deputy of the agency. Mr. Rubio has publicly defended the cuts to foreign aid, saying they have been necessary to rein in an overly expansive use of aid.

Mr. Marocco left the deputy role last month, and his duties were taken over by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old employee of the government-cutting task force headed by Mr. Musk, the billionaire adviser to Mr. Trump. Mr. Marocco and members Mr. Musk’s team entered the headquarters of U.S.A.I.D. in late January to take apart the technical infrastructure of the agency, and Mr. Musk later called it a “criminal organization” on social media.

In recent weeks, some U.S. officials have talked about severe tensions between Mr. Marocco and senior colleagues, including ones in top offices at the department.

But Mr. Rubio has approved all the foreign aid cuts. He announced in early March that he and Mr. Musk’s team had cut more than 83 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s programs that had been active under 5,200 contracts. A vast majority of the agency’s 10,000 employees have been fired.

The New York Times reported last month that the cuts had gutted U.S.A.I.D. operations to such a degree that the agency had struggled to muster a response to a devastating earthquake in Myanmar, while China, Russia and other nations had sent teams immediately. After a three-person team of U.S.A.I.D. workers finally arrived in the country, they got emails saying they were being fired.

Mr. Marocco and other officials have also ended contracts that some aid agency employees had thought would be preserved. In a round of cuts early this month, Mr. Marocco and other State Department officials ended all U.S. humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Yemen, where millions of people are suffering from a lack of food. Contracts for food aid to Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo were also cut, as well as other programs helping about a dozen nations.

Mr. Marocco also met with an official from the government of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian leader, and promised to halt all aid programs that “intervened” in the country’s internal affairs, according to statements released by the official, Tristan Azbej.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Mr. Marocco had left the State Department.

Mr. Marocco worked at U.S.A.I.D. briefly during the first Trump administration, as well as at the State Department and the Pentagon. Employees at the aid agency filed a 13-page memo in September 2020 accusing Mr. Marocco of mismanagement. “Intervention is urgently needed,” it said.

In 2018, while working at the State Department as a political appointee, Mr. Marocco secretly met in the Balkans with ethnonationalist Bosnian Serb separatist leaders, whom the department had deemed off limits, according to a ProPublica report. The U.S. ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina rebuked Mr. Marocco. That rebuke was confirmed to The Times by a U.S. official.

A group of investigators has stated publicly that Mr. Marocco and his wife, Merritt Corrigan, who was also an appointee at U.S.A.I.D. during the first Trump administration, are in a photo of people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Neither was charged, and neither has confirmed being at the building that day.

The State Department has not replied with any public comments to various email requests sent since late January about Mr. Marocco’s activities since the first Trump administration.



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Lego Black Market Fetches Big Prices for Little Plastic Bricks

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Lego Black Market Fetches Big Prices for Little Plastic Bricks


It’s one Lego kit, a collection of small plastic bricks and related accessories. What could it cost? The answer, it turns out, could be thousands of dollars.

Lego kits and minifigures, figurines that are a little over 1.5 inches tall, are commanding high prices on the secondary market, with some, like the LEGO San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Spider-Man, valued as high as $16,846.

The children’s toys have even become something of an investing opportunity for those savvy enough to know what to look for.

But with the eye-popping price tags comes a dark side: Lego kits have become a hot commodity on the black market and the target of brazen thieves.

Last year, burglars hit Bricks & Minifigs outlets in California. Thieves made off with at least $100,000 worth of Lego kits and accessories.

Last month, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in California recovered nearly 200 Lego sets after arresting a person in connection with a burglary at Crush Comics, a comic book store in Castro Valley, Calif.

Joshua Hunter, the owner of Crush Comics, said that members of his staff found the store’s stolen comic books for sale on eBay within hours of the theft.

The store worked with law enforcement and alerted other small business owners, including Five Little Monkeys, a toy store that recently had $7,000 worth of Lego stolen, to solve what turned out to be a spree of burglaries in the area.

Five Little Monkeys was able to recover a lot of its stolen Lego, said Meghan DeGoey, the company’s marketing director, but the theft was only the latest in what has been a growing problem.

“It’s been a problem for probably, I mean, forever, but it’s really ramped up in the last five, six years,” she said.

Five Little Monkeys has eight stores around the Bay Area, said Ms. DeGoey, and Lego stands out among its top-stolen items.

“People are really brazen when they’re going to steal,” she said, describing the way thieves will sometimes come into a store and walk right out or “do some like crazy misdirect and have a second person that tries to distract us.”

“It’s for a Lego, like for pieces of plastic, just everybody think about that,” she said.

The Lego Group, the makers of Lego, did not respond to requests for comment about the black market for its products. (The company says, by the way, that the plural of Lego is Lego, and “never, ever” Legos.)

Lego sets spend an average of two years on store shelves, and then those kits are not manufactured again, according to Shane O’Farrell, who has built a community with his Lego investing YouTube channel, where he informs others on how to get started.

The secondary Lego market is fueled by this scarcity as collectors look to complete their sets. This also means it’s not just limited editions or rare variants that go up in price — even the cheaper kits increase in value over time, he said.

Calling the underground market for Lego “unfortunate,” Mr. O’Farrell said he’s not surprised at its emergence. Lego are just like other coveted merchandise, like shoes, Pokémon cards and jewelry, that are stolen and then resold.

Other valuable Lego kits include a Piper airplane (valued at nearly $13,000); a T-rex kit (nearly $9,000); and a castle (nearly $8,500), according to the website BrickEconomy, which tracks the Lego market and trends.

“It is something that people love and it’s something that it’s easy to sell,” Mr. O’Farrell said, emphasizing that the Lego black market is “not good for anybody.”

Mr. O’Farrell stumbled onto the world of Lego investing in 2017 after he moved to the United States from Ireland and looked up a few Lego sets from his childhood purely out of nostalgia.

Then he noticed the pricing.

“The more I kind of looked into it, the more I realized it wasn’t just one or two Lego sets that were going up in value, it was like the entire market was going up in value,” he said. “It’s a very uncommon way to invest, but it’s a very sure thing from the research that I was doing.”

Mr. O’Farrell said he made $500,000 in sales in 2023. Last year, he made $250,000 in sales after purposely shrinking his business after the birth of his daughter.

Read Hayes, a research scientist and criminologist at the University of Florida and the executive director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, said the Lego black market caters to collectors in search of a “very coveted item.”

“It’s not exactly like art theft, but to a certain extent, there are collectors that just aren’t bothered by buying somebody else’s property that was stolen from them,” he said.



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Meta’s Antitrust Trial Begins as FTC Argues Company Built Social Media Monopoly

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Meta’s Antitrust Trial Begins as FTC Argues Company Built Social Media Monopoly


The Federal Trade Commission on Monday accused Meta of creating a monopoly that squelched competition by buying start-ups that stood in its way, kicking off a landmark antitrust trial that could dismantle a social media empire that has transformed how the world connects online.

In a packed courtroom in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, the F.T.C. opened its first antitrust trial under the Trump administration by arguing that Meta illegally cemented a monopoly in social networking by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups. Those actions were part of a “buy-or-bury strategy,” the F.T.C. said.

Ultimately, the purchases coalesced Meta’s power, depriving consumers of other social networking options and edging out competition, the government said.

“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, the F.T.C.’s lead litigator in the case, in his opening remarks. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”

“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he added.

The trial — Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms — poses the most consequential threat to the business empire of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder. If the government succeeds, the F.T.C. would most likely ask Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, potentially shifting the way that Silicon Valley does business and altering a long pattern of big tech companies snapping up younger rivals.

Still, legal experts cautioned that it might be challenging for the F.T.C. to win. That’s because the government must prove something unknowable: that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, wouldn’t have achieved the same success without the acquisitions. It is also extremely rare to try to unwind mergers approved years ago, legal experts said.

“One of the most difficult things for antitrust laws to deal with is when industry leaders purchase small potential competitors,” said Gene Kimmelman, a former senior official in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. Meta, he added, “bought many things that either didn’t pan out or were integrated. How are Instagram and WhatsApp different?”

The efforts continue a yearslong bipartisan pursuit to curtail the vast power that a handful of tech companies have over commerce, the exchange of ideas, entertainment and political discourse. Despite attempts by tech executives to court President Trump, his antitrust appointees have signaled that they will continue the course.

The F.T.C.’s case against Meta is the third major tech antitrust lawsuit to go to trial in the past two years. Last year, the D.O.J. won its antitrust case against Google for monopolizing internet search. A federal judge is set to hear arguments over remedies, including a potential breakup, next week. The D.O.J. also completed a separate trial against Google for monopolizing ad technology, which is still being decided by a federal judge.

The Justice Department has also sued Apple, and the F.T.C. has sued Amazon, accusing the companies of antitrust violations. Those trials are expected to begin next year.

The case against Meta could affect its 3.5 billion users, who on average log onto Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp multiple times a day for news, shopping and texting. Instagram and WhatsApp have attracted more users in recent years as Facebook, Meta’s flagship app, has stopped growing.

F.T.C. Chairman Andrew Ferguson was in the courtroom to listen to the government’s opening statement. Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead, and Joel Kaplan, its chief global affairs officer, also attended.

Presiding over the case is Judge James Boasberg, 62, the senior judge in the federal court. He is already in the national spotlight for rejecting the Trump administration’s effort to use a powerful wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants it deemed to be members of a violent street gang.

Judge Boasberg said he had never been a user of Meta’s apps, but was familiar with Facebook Live, which has been featured in criminal trials.

During what is projected to be an eight-week trial, the government and Meta are expected to tell competing versions of the company’s 20-year growth story.

The F.T.C.’s argument hinges on Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which forbids a company from maintaining a monopoly through anticompetitive practices.

The F.T.C. accused Facebook, as the company was previously known, of struggling to build a mobile app and fearing that Instagram would rapidly outpace it in popularity. The company overpaid when it purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, the F.T.C. argued.

In 2014, as WhatsApp grew, Meta offered to buy the company for $19 billion — also far above its market value, the government said.

The F.T.C. plans to highlight a paper trial of emails between Meta executives, alongside other evidence, to argue that the company bought the start-ups because they were threats.

The government is set to call witnesses from Meta, as well as competitors, venture capitalists, economists and media industry executives. Mr. Zuckerberg was expected to be called as the first witness as soon as Monday. The F.T.C. said former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, will testify this week.



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Rory McIlroy's thrilling Masters win: Essential reading

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Rory McIlroy's thrilling Masters win: Essential reading




Our one-stop shop with all of the best written content, videos and highlights from Rory McIlroy’s thrilling 2025 Masters triumph.



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Scammers Stole Their Retirement Savings. Then the Tax Bill Arrived.

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Scammers Stole Their Retirement Savings. Then the Tax Bill Arrived.


They were conned by skilled online criminals into draining their retirement savings. After the shock, shame and grief that followed, the victims were often left with something else: an enormous income tax bill.

Mary Ellen Strange, a 75-year-old widow who was deceived by fraudsters impersonating federal investigators, now owes the Internal Revenue Service an estimated $100,000 this year.

Linda Gilmore, an 80-year-old former nurse, has to pay nearly $50,000.

Cindy, 62, and Tina, 51, a married couple in California, owe roughly $250,000 to the federal and state governments.

Lori, a sales executive in North Carolina who owed $225,000 in the 2023 tax season, decided that filing for bankruptcy was her best option. (Several victims agreed to participate in this article if only their first names were used because of privacy concerns.)

Like thousands of others, they were drawn into cybercriminals’ fabricated worlds, which are built upon intricate plot lines and a mastery of manipulation. They had been led to believe that the scammers were government officials, Amazon fraud investigators or potential love interests, and they were tricked into transferring large sums for any number of concocted reasons.

The punishing tax bills arise because the victims pulled from individual retirement accounts or 401(k) plans, where money is taxed when it’s taken out. The withdrawals inflated their incomes, even though the funds disappeared shortly after being passed to the criminals. The victims are left with few options.

Ms. Strange lost nearly $378,000 — and that’s before taxes.

“It is a double punch,” she said. “It is a gut punch from your own government after you have been robbed blind.”

There used to be an easier way for people with the largest tax bills to deduct these losses from their income, using a tax deduction for victims of personal casualties, disasters and theft. But that and many other individual breaks were eliminated or narrowed as part of the Republican-led tax overhaul known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which helped to pay for broader tax cuts, including a reduced corporate tax rate.

The current structure of the deduction now treats victims unevenly. It can be used only with certain types of scams, even though all scams are built on a similar foundation of lies, often spun by organized criminals in faraway scam factories overseas.

The tax deduction, in its pared down form, says that personal casualty and theft losses can be claimed only in situations like federally declared disasters or “transactions entered into for profit.”

That means deductibility now depends on whether the victims had a goal of profiting when they entered into transactions with scammers.

Victims who lost money on a sham crypto trading platform operated by criminals working in Thailand, for example, have a more clear-cut path to tax relief than a person who lost the same amount to criminals posing as government officials claiming the money needs to be moved to be protected from a global hacking ring.

“This leads to profoundly disparate impacts: those that thought they were making a buck by investing with a cryptocurrency ‘guru’ are better positioned than those who fell victim to a romance scam,” Patrick Thomas, a tax lawyer, said in a letter included in a 2024 report from the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

Victims may also qualify for another type of relief, offered after the Bernie Madoff scandal, if their circumstances qualify as something related to a Ponzi scheme, which is also generally investment related.

But the relief options are less clear for the many others lured into different schemes.

“It’s a complete inequity in the current system,” said James Creech, a director at the tax advocacy and controversy practice at Baker Tilly, a large accounting and advisory firm in San Francisco.

He said there were three reasons people were usually pulled into these schemes: financial, fear and love. “But when you get to fear, that is where you get into the gray area” of the law.

He said he still tried to navigate the possibilities for his clients. Some victims who don’t fit neatly within the confines of the casualty loss deduction may still have defensible cases, he said, particularly those who thought they were safeguarding their income-producing retirement money from criminals so that it could continue to grow over time.

“But there’s a lot of work to get there,” Mr. Creech said. “This is one of those things where it really involves kind of a deep conversation with the client. My caveat with that is that it’s truly an unknown,” he added.

The I.R.S. hasn’t issued any broad guidance for online victims, but some tax lawyers have said they hear it is being developed.

To help support a case, tax experts say you need to document everything the moment you realize you’ve been a victim of a scam: File a police report with local officials (though they’re not always familiar with these crimes) and federal ones, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

If you decide to confront your scammers, first take screen shots of any online platforms or apps that you used to communicate with them, as well as online conversations, photos or anything related (such as a snapshot of a company name they used or a web address that you realize isn’t quite right). You should also create a timeline or narrative of the events.

“If you don’t have the evidence and the substantiation because it’s 18 months later and you’ve been paralyzed with fear, there isn’t much you can do,” Mr. Creech said.

Ms. Strange, the widow who lost nearly $378,000, received the initial call from her scammers last June while her dog was chasing the carpet cleaners in her home, “barking up a storm.”

That was the beginning of a seven-week ordeal of transferring money to multiple fake federal agents, using Bitcoin, gold bars and cash, all in an effort to prove her money was indeed hers and not obtained through money laundering.

“You think they are taking care of you,” she said, adding they made sure she had enough money to pay for her extensive dental work. “You think they have your interests at heart.”

Instead, they took off with her retirement savings, leaving her with $100,000 in an annuity.

Ms. Strange is now trying to navigate how to approach her 2024 tax return and liability of $100,000. She said she planned to pay her typical tax amount, and then weigh the options available given her circumstances.

One option she is considering is a settlement with the I.R.S. known as an offer in compromise. That allows taxpayers to pay the I.R.S. less than they owe because of an economic hardship, but settlements can be difficult to qualify for, especially for people with any home equity or other assets.

“With offers, generally the worse situation a taxpayer is in, the easier it is to get an offer accepted,” said Nancy Rossner, executive director of the Community Tax Law Project, which provides free advice to lower-income taxpayers with complicated tax situations.

Lori, whose romantic impostor left her with a $225,000 federal tax bill, decided to pursue a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, where she will pay her creditors, the I.R.S. chief among them, about $5,700 a month for five years.

That cleared away the $200,000 in loans she took out to help the impostor with his business, and it allowed her to keep her home and a car — a better outcome than the payment plan the I.R.S. had offered, which was only slightly less but would have left her saddled with the other debts.

“I have one choice — and it’s to get through it,” Lori said, adding that she was thankful for her AARP support group. “The real outrage is the protections that were in place through the federal government regarding income tax have been removed. It’s a disgrace.”

Ms. Gilmore, the 80-year-old retired nurse, is now living on Social Security benefits and two small annuities, and she has secured affordable housing for $2,100 a month.

She was defrauded by an online criminal posing as a priest she had known for 30 years. The scammer reached out to her on Facebook and ultimately made off with all of her liquid retirement savings. That generated a nearly $47,000 tax liability, which includes about $11,000 in state taxes owed to California. The way the states treat these situations can amplify a victims’ losses, tax experts said, generating huge tax liabilities of their own.

“I didn’t sleep for seven weeks,” said Ms. Gilmore, who started seeing a therapist and taking a small dose of an antidepressant. She said she was also carrying credit card debt from the scammer.

“I’m waiting for a reply from I.R.S. after I sent them papers they requested,” she said. “I reported everything, but I’m sure they can’t do anything about it.”

For now, the future of tax relief for victims of online scams is uncertain.

The casualty and theft loss deduction is set to spring back in its original form at the end of this year if the sweeping 2017 tax law expires. But Republicans are trying to extend that package.

There were efforts in Congress last year to bring attention to these giant tax bills, including the 92-page report from the Senate Special Committee on Aging, led at the time by Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. Other lawmakers drafted legislation to offer more comprehensive and retroactive relief, dating back to 2018 when the deduction was curtailed. But they haven’t made it into law.

Even the original casualty loss deduction was limited. It could be claimed only by taxpayers who itemized deductions on their returns, which means the total amount of those deductions had to exceed the standard deduction for it to be worth it. And the deduction applied only to losses that exceeded 10 percent of their adjusted gross income.

“It’s really like a triple punch,” said Tina, who, with her spouse, Cindy, lost $1.2 million over six weeks to internet thieves. “We lost all of our retirement, we owe the I.R.S. a lot of money and then we have to go into further debt to hire legal representation.”

Ron Lieber contributed reporting.



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UK Cuts Tariffs on Dozens of Products as Global Trade Tensions Rise

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UK Cuts Tariffs on Dozens of Products as Global Trade Tensions Rise


The British government ramped up actions to help protect businesses and households from some of the economic tumult created by President Trump’s decision to raise tariffs and upend the norms of global trade.

The government said on Sunday it would suspend tariffs on 89 products for about two years to help businesses and consumers save money. The products include those for construction, such as plywood and plastics, and everyday household items, such as pasta and fruit juices.

Officials will also increase financing support for exporters by 20 billion pounds ($26 billion), through partial loan guarantees, and give small businesses access to loans of up to £2 million.

As Mr. Trump raises tariffs on most imports, including those from Britain, to a 10 percent base line and even higher for certain goods like cars and steel, the British government has sought to calm anxieties at home. Officials have said they want to move quickly to support companies as they try to sustain fragile economic momentum.

“This week, we witnessed the uncertainty of a changing world,” Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote in The Observer, a Sunday newspaper. In response, the government “must rise to meet the moment,” she wrote.

The announcements on Sunday followed other interventions by the government in recent days to bolster protections for firms affected by tariffs. On April 6, the government eased rules on electric vehicle sales after Mr. Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on cars imported into the United States. British officials also relaxed regulations to speed up timelines for clinical trials to support the life sciences sector with Mr. Trump also expected to impose levies on the pharmaceutical industry.

And on Saturday, the government took control of British Steel, the country’s last large plant producing crude steel, from its Chinese owners, Jingye, to protect jobs and make sure the blast furnaces keep operating.

“Our economy is too exposed to global disruption and supply shocks,” Ms. Reeves wrote in the Observer column. “We need a strong, smart and agile state to support key industries and back those sectors of the economy particularly affected by tariffs.”

As President Trump’s trade policy has led to widespread uncertainty, many countries are not waiting to see where tariffs settle and are already putting in place protections for their economies. Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain announced more than 50 billion euros’ worth of financial support last week in “tariff shields” for businesses. There are concerns that the region’s weak growth could be stifled as consumers and firms spend and invest less.

The British economy is relatively trade intensive and vulnerable to outside shocks. Its largest trading partner, the European Union, is struggling with slow growth that will weigh on Britain, too. The nation’s finances are also exposed to global turmoil. For example, as the yield on U.S. Treasury bonds rises, so do those in British government debt, raising borrowing costs for the government.

Data published last week showed that the economy grew 0.5 percent in February, an unexpectedly strong rebound, driven by an increase in manufacturing output. Analysts said this could have been caused by exporters trying to front run expected tariffs and that economic strength would not be sustainable.

Despite the stronger growth, economists at Pantheon Macroeconomics slashed their forecasts for Britain’s economic growth to 0.7 percent this year, down from 1.1 percent, and forecast 0.5 percent growth in 2026, half of their previous forecast.



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Trump Calls Russia’s Strike on Sumy a ‘Mistake’

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Trump Calls Russia’s Strike on Sumy a ‘Mistake’


President Trump has said Russia’s deadly missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy was “a mistake,” calling it a “horrible thing” even as members of his administration went further with condemnation that served as a rare critique of Moscow while the White House is pushing for a cease-fire.

Two ballistic missiles hit the center of Sumy on Sunday morning, killing at least 34 people and injuring more than 100. The attack was the second in just over a week to cause large numbers of civilian casualties in Ukraine, which Kyiv has said shows that the Moscow is not truly interested in stopping the fighting despite U.S.-led negotiations for a truce.

“I think it was terrible. And I was told they made a mistake. But I think it’s a horrible thing,” Mr. Trump said about the Sumy attack when he was aboard Air Force One on Sunday.

It was not immediately clear what Mr. Trump meant when he said he had been “told” Russia had “made a mistake” — a formulation that could also be interpreted as an attempt to make excuses for Moscow. Mr. Trump has generally avoided criticizing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia since taking office in January.

Some top officials in the Trump administration were more explicit. Keith Kellogg, a retired U.S. general and Mr. Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, said that Russian forces had crossed “any line of decency” by targeting civilians in Sumy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also condemned what he described as a “horrifying Russian missile attack on Sumy.”

“This is a tragic reminder of why President Trump and his Administration are putting so much time and effort into trying to end this war and achieve durable peace,” Mr. Rubio wrote on social media.

The condemnations came as the U.S. efforts to broker a cease-fire have failed to yield results. In recent days, White House officials have said that Russia was running out of time to convince the Trump administration that it is serious about striking a peace deal — and not just playing for time.

Mr. Zelensky, along with other top Ukrainian officials, has said that Russia is slow-walking the negotiations because it has no interest in halting the fighting while its army retains the advantage on the battlefield.

In an interview broadcast on Sunday but recorded before the attack on Sumy, Mr. Zelensky invited Mr. Trump to Ukraine to witness the realities of the war firsthand.

“Come, look, and then let’s move with a plan on how to finish the war. You will understand with whom you have a deal. You will understand what Putin did,” Mr. Zelensky told “60 Minutes” on CBS.

Mr. Zelensky was speaking with the broadcaster from Kryvyi Rih, his home city, where a Russian missile strike killed 19 people, including nine children, earlier this month.

“We respect your position,” he added, apparently a reference to Mr. Trump’s efforts to restore ties with Russia. “But, please, before making any decisions or plans for negotiations, come to see the people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead.”

Ukrainian officials said that Russian missiles hit Sumy, just 18 miles from the Russian border, as many people were out on the streets celebrating Palm Sunday, a Christian holiday widely observed in Ukraine. Videos of the aftermath showed scenes of devastation, with bloodied bodies lying motionless in the street and charred cars.

“There was a girl, maybe 14 years old — dead. A young woman — I won’t even describe the injuries, they were horrific. Another middle-aged woman had her jaw torn off,” said Volodymyr Boiko, a 69-year-old resident of Sumy who was in a bus hit by the blast wave. He suffered cuts to his face from flying shards.

The strike came just two days after Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Mr. Putin in St. Petersburg to discuss a potential cease-fire.

The timing led some in Ukraine to suggest that Mr. Trump’s attempts to re-engage with Russia were only emboldening the Kremlin to continue its aggression. On Sunday, memes proliferated on Ukrainian social media showing Mr. Witkoff shaking Mr. Putin’s hand with the carnage in Sumy as a backdrop.

In his nightly address on Sunday, Mr. Zelensky noted that it had been two months since Russia had refused to agree to the unconditional cease-fire that Ukraine had accepted with U.S. urging.

“They are not afraid. That’s why they keep launching ballistic missiles,” he said. “Only pressure — only decisive action — can change this.”



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What We Know About the Arson Attack on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s House in Pennsylvania

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What We Know About the Arson Attack on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s House in Pennsylvania


Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and his family were forced to flee from the governor’s official residence early Sunday after an arson attack severely damaged the mansion.

The authorities arrested a man who they said had broken into the mansion in Harrisburg, Pa., and thrown objects into the home that started at least two fires and caused significant damage. No one was injured in the attack.

The man, who they identified as Cody Balmer, 38, has been charged with attempted murder, aggravated arson, terrorism and other offenses. Law enforcement officials have not provided any information about a motive.

Here is what to know about the attack.

Mr. Shapiro said that he, his wife and children were awakened shortly after 2 a.m. by a state trooper who warned them of a fire. They were rushed to safety while firefighters extinguished the flames, he said. The F.B.I. was assisting in the investigation, he added.

Mr. Shapiro, a Democrat, rose to prominence last year when he was on the short list of possible running mates for Kamala Harris, the party’s nominee for president. He helped oversee the law enforcement response to the assassination attempt against Donald J. Trump in Butler, Pa., who was then campaigning for president.

The 51-year-old governor, who has said that there is too much vitriol in American politics, noted that the attack on the residence occurred shortly after his family and others members of the local Jewish community had celebrated the first night of Passover in the state dining room.

The authorities said surveillance footage showed a person checking out the governor’s mansion before scaling a fence and using a hammer to break a window on the south side of the residence. He threw an object into the house, igniting a fire, the Dauphin County District Attorney said in a statement.

He then broke into the building through a window on the east side and threw at least one more object into the house, starting another fire, before fleeing, the district attorney said.

Once state police became aware of a security breach on the property, they set out looking for an intruder, officials said. But within minutes, officials said, Mr. Balmer was able to break in, set the fires and escape.

He was arrested in Harrisburg on Sunday afternoon, officials said at a news conference. He admitted to state troopers that he had set the fires and was charged with attempted murder, aggravated arson, burglary, terrorism, and related offenses, the district attorney’s office said.

According to an affidavit filed with the charges early on Monday, a woman contacted the police to tell them that Mr. Balmer, her ex-partner, had confessed to her that he had committed the attack. He later turned himself in at state police headquarters in Harrisburg, the affidavit said.

When state troopers questioned him and asked what he would have done if Mr. Shapiro had found him, Mr. Balmer said that he would have beaten the governor with his hammer, the affidavit said.

The fire caused significant damage to parts of the residence, particularly the dining and piano rooms, the authorities said.

Photos released by the authorities showed singed walls, broken windows and blackened floors.

The governor’s residence is a 29,000-square-foot Georgian-style building on the Susquehanna River that was completed in 1968, according to the state government. Its landscaped grounds occupy a full block about a mile and a half from the State Capitol complex.

The public is able to tour the residence, which exhibits art and artifacts on the first floor.



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Tariff News Is Scant Relief for Restaurants

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Tariff News Is Scant Relief for Restaurants


Every waiter knows the type: the volatile diner who barges in with a list of demands, orders an off-the-menu item that sends the kitchen into a panic and then at the last minute changes his mind and decides he’ll just have the steak.

So if anybody knows how to handle President Trump’s stunning reversal on tariffs, it’s people in the restaurant business. Still, it’s safe to say that they’ve had a rough week.

Chefs who had been furiously calling their suppliers, stockpiling imported ingredients ahead of what seemed certain to be drastic price jumps, got a temporary reprieve on Wednesday. Hours after they’d gone into effect, Mr. Trump put on hold a patchwork of tariffs that targeted 57 countries with rates ranging from 11 to 51 percent. For three months, he declared, all imports would be hit with a flat 10 percent tariff except products from China, which face tariffs that have vaulted to 145 percent. Nobody knows what will happen after the three months are up.

If you are a restaurateur, none of this makes it easier to sleep at night, or to decide how much to charge for dan-dan noodles.

The National Restaurant Association has brought in supply-chain experts to advise restaurateurs on handling disruptions in the flow of imported seafood and vegetables. Owners who drew up their business plans in the era of free trade are asking whether they still make sense when governments around the world are using shrimp and wine as chips in a high-stakes poker game.

“Restaurants are the least profitable businesses on any Main Street in America,” said Sean Kennedy, the group’s executive vice president for public affairs. “With razor-thin profit margins, we are not equipped to deal with dramatic changes in food prices. Long-term tariffs leave us with no margin for error in holding menu prices as low as possible.”

On Tuesday, Jarrett Wrisley, a chef who serves dishes from southwestern China and northern Thailand at his restaurant Shan in Bozeman, Mont., ordered two pallets of dark soy sauce, Zhenjiang vinegar, Sichuan peppercorns, roasted sesame paste and other ingredients from China. At the time, he thought those products were facing a mere 104 percent tariff. Now, his suppliers say they aren’t sure they will be available in a month or two.

The bison, pork and other meats on Shan’s menu are raised in Montana. But nearly all the seasonings in Mr. Wrisley’s pantry are imported from China and Thailand, which until Wednesday had been threatened with a 34 percent tariff. After his suppliers raise their prices, he expects he will have to change some recipes. He said he can adjust to using Kikkoman soy sauce from factories in Wisconsin and California. There is no American-made substitute for many other ingredients, like fermented fava-and-chile paste from Sichuan.

“It’s aged in amphorae, it undergoes a long fermentation, the chiles are from Sichuan,” he said. “It can’t be reproduced in the United States. And I don’t think the point of this trade war is to onshore the production of niche Asian food products.”

One of his purveyors, Susie Kasem of ARJ Oregon, an importer in Portland, has heard from almost every restaurant she supplies with sticky rice, fish sauce and other Thai staples. She had to put limits on their orders because so many chefs were trying to load up their shelves before the tariffs went into effect.

“I’m so busy because everyone’s calling me today, yesterday, the day before,” Ms. Kasem said. “I don’t have any idea how to answer them.”

For restaurants that buy tequila or anything else from Mexico, Wednesday’s abrupt turnaround — the White House said that the 10 percent flat rate did not apply to Mexico and Canada a short time after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that it did — was all too familiar. Mr. Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods in February, then removed it two days later. He did the same thing again in March.

Trucks carrying avocado, huitlacoche and other key ingredients that the Colorado chef Johnny Curiel uses in his four Mexican restaurants parked on the far side of border for several days in March as the dispute played out. Worried about future shortages, Mr. Curiel recently bought five tons of the imported corn that goes into his tortillas. He is negotiating directly with farmers who grow chiles and herbs in Mexico, a move that would hurt his longtime distributors.

“It’s not helping them, it’s helping me,” he said. “And that weighs heavy on me.”

Next month, a farmer north of Boulder will plant 10 acres of heirloom Cónico corn for him and another Colorado chef. They had been discussing the idea for some time, but finally decided to do it after Mr. Trump threatened Mexico with new tariffs early this year. Although those are now delayed, Mr. Curiel said that changing his supply chain will help him make plans.

“It’s great that it’s not going into effect,” he said. “But at the same time, there’s the uncertainty of not knowing what’s going to happen.”

That uncertainty was a sore topic for those who attended an annual chefs’ conference in Philadelphia earlier this week. After listening to peers who were worried that their costs would spike on Wednesday, the Chicago chef Erick Williams tried to bring some perspective to the coming crisis.

“When people say, “We’re screwed,’ I have a hard time believing it,” Mr. Williams said in an interview later. “If we managed to survive and adapt during the pandemic, then surely we have the capacity to navigate this moment, too.”

As he pointed out, restaurants sell more than food and drinks. They specialize in creating environments where people want to spend time together, swapping ideas and sharing cultures.

In many restaurants, though, the culture people come to immerse themselves in is one from another country. Imported ingredients aren’t the only thing on offer, but they help get customers through the door. Any policy that makes those items less profitable threatens to undermine the whole enterprise.

At Orion Bar in Brooklyn, N.Y., soju and instant ramen from South Korean serve as gateway drugs for other national exports like K-pop, K-movies and televised K-dramas.

“As someone who works a lot in sharing and spreading Korean culture, interest in it has been increasing and the tariffs are concerning because it potentially could affect that growth,” said Irene Yoo, the chef and an owner, the day before a 25 percent levy was paused.

Many customers, she said, “want to come into our place to experience what they’ve seen in a K-drama.” Orion Bar sells a lot of soju and imported Terra Lager, so she was particularly worried about higher prices on alcohol.

Eric Sze, the chef and an owner of the Taiwanese restaurants Wenwen and 886 in New York, was relieved this week by the hiatus on the 22 percent tariff on ingredients like sacha sauce and soy paste. These Taiwanese condiments are essential to dishes like 886’s sacha black-pepper beef, which help him to tell his customers about the country where he and his business partner grew up. “Food acts as the most accessible cultural ambassador,” he said.

Roscioli NYC, the SoHo outpost of a popular string of restaurants in Rome, has been worried about the cost of Italian wine, cheese and pasta, as well as the bottled sauces and preserved vegetables it sells.

“It’s impossible to imagine operating a restaurant without these products,” said Mattia Moliterni, the managing partner. “We don’t want to give up on that.”

Restaurants now have to wait to learn how far the prices of imported food and beverages will rise under the new 10 percent tariffs. And they are being left in suspense as they wonder when, or whether, the more severe rates will come back. Tariffs of any size are a shock to American restaurant culture, which has grown larger and more interesting in part because free-trade policies of the past few decades have made it possible to get almost anything from almost any country on earth.

“That’s been wonderful for chefs and also for consumers,” said Mr. Wrisley, the chef in Montana. “To take that away in the interest of reindustrializing the United States doesn’t make any sense.”

Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.





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Justice Dept. Disbands Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit

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Justice Dept. Disbands Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit


The Trump administration is disbanding a unit in the Justice Department that was responsible for investigating cryptocurrency crimes, criticizing the Biden administration as too aggressive against the fast-growing industry.

In a memo issued late Monday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, denounced his predecessors for investigating cryptocurrency operators in a manner he called “ill conceived and poorly executed.” He instead instructed the department to narrow the focus of cryptocurrency investigations to crimes like fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism.

The directive is in keeping with President Trump’s broad embrace of the crypto industry during his campaign and in office as he moves to relax enforcement.

The Trump family has expanded its business interests in the industry, including by establishing a crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Shortly before taking office, Mr. Trump issued his own memecoin. And Trump Media & Technology Group, the social media company he is the majority shareholder in, has said it plans to introduce a number of digital asset investment products this year.

The Justice Department directive follows similar moves at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has dismissed lawsuits and pending investigations involving matters in which crypto firms had not registered as exchanges. A number of S.E.C. lawyers on those cases have left the regulatory agency.

The S.E.C. has also drastically cut staffing of a crypto enforcement unit. As a matter of policy, the S.E.C. has said it is not going to seek to regulate memecoins because the novelty digital assets are not securities.

The Justice Department, in its memo, accused the Biden administration of a “reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution” toward the world of digital currencies.

Going forward, Mr. Blanche wrote, prosecutors should pursue only cryptocurrency cases “that involve conduct victimizing investors,” scams, hacking and use of crypto to finance other crimes like fentanyl or human trafficking. Such prosecutions, the memo said, “are important to restoring stolen funds to customers, building investor confidence in the security of digital asset markets and the growth of the digital asset industry.”

He ordered a group of prosecutors who investigate market integrity and major frauds to stop pursuing cryptocurrency enforcement and focus instead on immigration matters and contractor fraud.

He also disbanded the national cryptocurrency enforcement team, a group within Justice Department headquarters that was created in recent years to handle such cases. Individual U.S. attorneys’ offices may still pursue cases involving cryptocurrency-related investigations, Mr. Blanche wrote.

The new approach seems intended to prevent cases like the one filed in 2023 against the Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires financial institutions to verify the identities of their customers and report suspicious activity that might be evidence of money laundering. The company agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine as part of its guilty plea.

In the first days of the administration, Trump officials signaled their displeasure with such cases when they effectively demoted the prosecutor who had founded the cryptocurrency enforcement team, Eun Young Choi.

That team was created in 2022 to help prosecutors penetrate the often murky world of cryptocurrency, as transnational criminals began to use digital money more and more to facilitate crimes.

Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting from New York.



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