El Salvador refused to return a U.S. deportee

At a White House meeting with President Trump, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said yesterday that he would not return a man who was wrongly deported from the U.S. and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said when reporters asked if he was willing to help return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. The deportation case is at the heart of a legal battle that has gone to the Supreme Court. Here’s what else to know.

Bukele said returning Abrego Garcia would be like smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.” As the Salvadoran president spoke in the Oval Office, Trump smiled in approval.

Background: The Trump administration has said that the deportation was an “administrative error,” and has been ordered by the Supreme Court to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. But Trump has defied the order.

Quotable: “This meeting is one of the starkest examples of a foreign leader fawning over and placating Trump during a visit to the Oval Office,” said Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House reporter for The Times.

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Zuckerberg took the stand in landmark Meta antitrust trial

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, took the witness stand yesterday on the first day of a landmark antitrust trial that could dismantle his company.

The U.S. government has accused Meta of illegally creating a monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups. The trial poses the most consequential threat yet to Zuckerberg’s business empire.

In a packed courthouse in Washington, Zuckerberg responded by describing the social media market as much larger than how the government was defining it. Meta, he said, is involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.”

What’s next: During the eight-week trial, the government and Meta are expected to tell competing versions of Meta’s 20-year growth story. If the judge rules against Meta, Zuckerberg may be forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. This could alter a long pattern in Silicon Valley of Big Tech companies snapping up younger rivals.

In an essay published just before his arrival, Xi called on other countries to join China in defending stability, free trade and “an open and cooperative international environment.”

While the Chinese leader will be welcomed during his tour, Vietnam and its neighbors are also trying to appease Trump to get tariffs lowered, which may make them resistant to making bold pro-China pronouncements.

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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket yesterday launched the singer Katy Perry and five other women into space. Blue Origin pitched the space tourism flight as a way to encourage more women to pursue careers in science.

Amanda Hess, one of our critics at large, writes that the effort may have fallen short. “If the flight proves anything, it is that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most decadent spoils alongside the world’s wealthiest men,” she wrote.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

Remembering Mario Vargas Llosa

The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at 89, was the last surviving member of the Boom movement of socially conscious Latin American writers that included Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, among others.

He was the world’s savviest and most accomplished political novelist, our book critic Dwight Garner writes. His political novels are morally complex and meticulously observed, but life’s absurdity sneaks into them. Read Dwight’s appreciation here.

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Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, disclosed on Monday that she had purchased between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock on April 8 and 9, the day before and the day of President Trump’s announcement that he was pausing a sweeping set of global tariffs, a pivot that sent the stock market soaring out of a sizable slump.

Ms. Greene bought between about $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks on those days. The day before Mr. Trump’s move, she also dumped between $50,000 and $100,0000 in Treasury bills, according to required public disclosures made to the House.

The report came as Democrats in Congress have demanded investigations of whether the president’s whipsawing moves on trade might have been aimed at manipulating the market and giving his allies a lucrative opportunity for insider trading.

Members of Congress are required to report their stock trades within 30 days of making them, though they only have to mark down broad ranges rather than specific dollar amounts. Ms. Greene’s April 8 and 9 trades — 21 each in the range of $1,001 to $15,000 — are some of the first among members of Congress that will be reported over the coming month as lawmakers detail their financial moves around the time the president encouraged people to buy the dip ahead of his pause on tariffs.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media the morning of April 9. About four hours later, he said he was pausing most tariffs on every country except China, an announcement that resulted in massive one-day gains in stocks.

Ms. Greene, one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies in the House and an active stock trader, appeared to heed the advice, making an unusually large volume of stock purchases. That day, she bought stock in several companies, including Apple, which has since gone up in value by about 5 percent. She also bought stock in other technology companies, as well as energy firms such as Devon Energy Corporation and the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Company, according to her public disclosures.

The day before, she purchased stock in Palantir, whose value has since gone up 19 percent, and in Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., whose stock has since risen 21 percent. She also sold the Treasury bills as government bond yields were rising amid the tariff chaos, (Ms. Greene had previously purchased up to $500,000 in Treasuries before April 2, when Mr. Trump announced his most expansive tariffs to date.)

Ms. Greene, who is the chairwoman of the DOGE subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, did not respond to a request for comment. When her stock trades were examined in the past, she told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution that she relies on a financial adviser to trade on her behalf and does not have input on which companies are being traded, or when.

Lawmakers in both parties have long championed legislation to ban individual stock trading by members of Congress as a way to appeal to growing populist sentiment among constituents.

The tumult in the stock market caused by Mr. Trump’s erratic moves on tariffs has led Democrats to question who is gaining financially because of it. Ms. Greene is not alone in appearing to have capitalized on the market volatility.

Representative Rob Bresnahan, a Pennsylvania Republican who has emerged as one of the most active stock traders in the freshman class despite saying during his campaign that he wanted to ban congressional stock trading, also appears to have profited from Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Mr. Bresnahan sold up to $50,000 in Alibaba stock on March 4, the same day Mr. Trump doubled the tariff on Chinese imports to 20 percent. Alibaba is an e-commerce giant with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The stock price rose by about 30 percent between Mr. Bresnahan’s initial purchase and his final sale.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Bresnahan said that he relies on a financial adviser to trade stocks for him, and never knows about the trades before they happen or when they occur. The Alibaba trade, she said, was part of a larger strategic stock package. When it was reported in his disclosure, Mr. Bresnahan’s team put in guardrails so that he would not be able to trade that stock again.

While there has been no evidence of insider trading, Democrats have zeroed in on the potential for malfeasance as a way to attack Mr. Trump’s tariff moves and suggest that he and his friends are exploiting decisions that have hurt ordinary people.

“It is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the president, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public,” a group of Democrats led by Senators Adam Schiff of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote in a letter last week to Paul Atkins, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the letter, they demanded that Mr. Atkins open an investigation to determine whether Mr. Trump or any “insiders” had engaged in insider trading or other securities law violations.

Separately, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, wrote in a fund-raising appeal on April 11 that “any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now,” after Nasdaq call volume spiked ahead of Mr. Trump’s announcement. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been a longtime proponent of legislation to ban stock trading for members of Congress.

Pope Francis on Monday placed Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan modernist once called “God’s architect” for his work on the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s world-famous basilica, on the path to sainthood.

Francis recognized his “heroic virtues” and authorized a decree declaring him “venerable,” a move toward sainthood, the Vatican said in a statement. For the next step, beatification, a miracle attributed to him would have to be verified. After that, a confirmation of yet another miracle would be required for Gaudí to be declared a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. The process can take years, even centuries.

The basilica marked the pope’s decision by noting on its website that after Gaudí died at 73, a leading prelate at the time called him God’s architect, and that the Sagrada Familia “opens hearts to beauty with its beauty.”

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was born on June 25, 1852, most likely in Reus, Spain. He moved years later to Barcelona, where he studied architecture, earning his degree in 1878. After working on some small projects, according to the basilica’s website, “he soon became one of the most sought-after architects and began taking on larger commissions.”

The Gaudi Foundation notes that his association with the architect Joan Martorell i Montells brought Gaudí into contact with the rich industrialist and prominent Barcelona figure Eusebio Güell, which “helped to engender many of the imperishable works” still admired today.

Construction of the Sagrada Familia began in 1882, and Gaudí took over the project a year later, when he was 31. He worked on the basilica for more than four decades, the last 12 years of his life exclusively. It remains unfinished.

Gaudí was hit by a tram in Barcelona on June 7, 1926, and taken to the city’s hospital for the poor because he was not recognized. He died three days later.

In 2010, the basilica was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI, who described Gaudí, as “a creative architect and a practising Christian who kept the torch of his faith alight to the end of his life, a life lived in dignity and absolute austerity.”

“Gaudí, by opening his spirit to God, was capable of creating in this city a space of beauty, faith and hope, which leads man to an encounter with him who is truth and beauty itself,” Benedict said in 2010.

In announcing the decree, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which oversees the canonization process, described Gaudí as a faithful layman who, “moved by the yearning for union with the Lord,” led a “good spiritual and moral life above the ordinary.”

It added that Gaudí “offered to God the fruits of his own labor understood as a mission to make the people know and draw them closer to God, and made art a hymn of praise to the Lord.”

Cardinal Juan José Omella, the archbishop of Barcelona, said in a video statement on Monday that “it was a joy to receive the news” that Gaudí had been declared “venerable.” It was a recognition, he said, “not only of his architectural work, but of something more important than his holiness, that he is a man who was good.”

An association to promote Gaudí’s beatification was established in 1992, with the aim of achieving that goal “through the organization of lectures, exhibitions and publications; and to collect testimonies of favors granted by his intercession,” according to a book published by the association.

In 2023, the cause was submitted to the Vatican, and the Archdiocese of Barcelona became officially involved.

Not many artists have achieved saintly status. Some are prelates who also wrote poetry. One is an abbess who wrote musical compositions.

Fra Angelico, the Renaissance artist and Dominican friar who was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982, may be the best known. A major Fra Angelico exhibition opens in Florence, Italy, on Sept. 26 and looks set to be one of the major European art shows of the fall.

As Gaudí inches toward sainthood, so, too, is the Sagrada Familia creeping toward completion. Two towers were finished in 2023, and the Sagrada Familia Foundation has said it hopes that the central, and tallest, tower will be finished by 2026 — the centennial of Gaudí’s death.

“He was a visionary, and a Christian visionary, so the cause for beatification is more than merited,” said the Italian historian Giovanni Maria Vian, who called the Sagrada Familia “the last great church” in the long history of ecclesiastical architecture in Europe.

Gaudí had conceived the basilica “as a religious monument to give praise and praise God,” he said, much like the craftsmen who worked on the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

A charred piano. A singed light fixture dangling by a cord in a fire-scarred room. Plates strewn with ash, not far from a dinner table just cleared from a Passover Seder.

The scorched rooms inside the official residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania were the work of an arsonist who the authorities say admitted “harboring hatred” for Mr. Shapiro. Officials say the suspect revealed that if he found the governor, he planned to beat him with a hammer.

The attack on Mr. Shapiro and his family was only the latest prominent attempt on the life of an American elected official. A string of violent outbursts in recent years has raised alarms about the threats lawmakers are confronting and the country’s often poisonous political environment.

President Trump faced two assassination attempts last year, a bullet grazing his ear at a rally in Pennsylvania. A group of extremists planned to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. A man broke into Representative Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulted her husband with a hammer. A gunman attacked Republican members of Congress as they practiced for a baseball game, wounding Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

Yet while the attacks on top officials have rattled Americans in both parties, research shows that political violence overall is not necessarily on the rise. Large-scale eruptions — with the notable exception of the Trump-inspired riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — have not become more frequent. Support among Americans for acts of political violence like murder or arson remains exceedingly low, according to a weekly study conducted by the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College.

“The high-profile nature of the attacks definitely makes it so that the public perceives political violence as a threat to the country that is disproportionate to the actual nature of the problem,” said Sean J. Westwood, a professor at Dartmouth College and the director of the Polarization Research Lab.

But the relative rarity of political violence has done little to settle an American public increasingly on edge, and threats continue to flood the inboxes of elected officials, election workers and journalists.

Before the 2024 election, more than 70 percent of voters said they were “very worried” about political violence, according to a poll by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

On Sunday, Mr. Shapiro stood outside his residence, where broken and blackened windows sat behind yellow caution tape, and vowed to work harder as governor in the face of threats.

“This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society, and I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, or one particular person or another,” Mr. Shapiro said, his voice rising with anger. “It is not OK, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.”

Condemnation of the attack was swift and bipartisan.

“Thanks be to God that Governor Shapiro and his family were unharmed in this attack,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media. “Really disgusting violence, and I hope whoever did it is brought swiftly to justice.”

“Acts of violence have no place in our politics,” Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from neighboring New Jersey, said in a statement. “Those responsible should be held accountable.”

Mr. Trump, who twice survived attempts on his life — and who has pointed to the specter of domestic terrorism as justification for his aggressive immigration agenda — did not issue a statement on Sunday or on Monday morning. Asked on Monday in the Oval Office about the attack, he said the assailant was “probably just a wack job.”

“Certainly a thing like that cannot be allowed to happen,” Mr. Trump said.

The authorities have yet to reveal more information on the suspect’s political leanings, but several Democrats and Jewish groups noted that the attack against Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, came on the first night of Passover. Law enforcement authorities have not commented on whether the arson is being investigated as a hate crime.

“Political violence of any kind is never acceptable, and it is especially unconscionable to attack a Jewish family during the first night of Passover,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, said in a statement. “Everyone responsible must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Federal and state officials have taken steps to address threats of political violence. In 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland created an elections threat task force based in the Justice Department’s public integrity unit. Last year, numerous election offices were fortified with bulletproof glass and an increased security presence.

Such steps have helped to ferret out and prevent attacks before they happen. Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado, received more than 1,800 death threats and violent threats last year. Law enforcement officials arrested and charged multiple people said to be responsible.

But the threats still prompted many local election officials and workers to resign or back away from working in the next election. In Colorado, county clerks had roughly 40 percent turnover, Ms. Griswold said in an interview, as “we have seen people step down because they are not willing to continue to work in this type of atmosphere.”

“It is very hard to live under that threat environment,” she said, adding how relieved she was that Mr. Shapiro and his family were safe. “It definitely takes a toll on just how you live your daily life, and it absolutely has affected elections here in Colorado and across the nation.”

It may not have been the tax-evasion trial of the century — the second century, that is — but it was of such gravity that the defendants faced charges of forgery, fiscal fraud and the sham sale of slaves. Tax dodging is as old as taxation itself, but these particular offenses were considered so serious under Roman law that penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals.

The allegations are laid out in a papyrus that was discovered decades ago in the Judean desert but only recently analyzed; it contains the prosecutor’s prep sheet and the hastily drafted minutes from a judicial hearing. According to the ancient notes, the tax-evasion scheme involved the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan.

Both tax dodgers were men. One, named Gadalias, was the impoverished son of a notary with ties to the local administrative elite. Besides convictions for extortion and counterfeiting, his catalog of misdeeds included banditry, sedition and, on four occasions, failing to show up for jury duty at the court of the Roman governor. Gadalias’s partner in crime was a certain Saulos, his “friend and collaborator” and the supposed mastermind of the caper. Although the ethnicity of the accused is not explicitly stated, their Jewish identities are assumed, based on their biblical names, Gedaliah and Saul.

This ancient legal drama unfolded during the reign of Hadrian, after the emperor’s tour of the area around A.D. 130 and presumably before A.D. 132. That year, Simon bar Kochba, a messianic guerrilla chief, led a popular uprising — the third and final war between the Jewish people and the empire. The revolt was violently suppressed, with hundreds of thousands killed and most of the surviving Jewish population expelled from Judea, which Hadrian renamed Syria Palestina.

“The papyrus reflects the suspicion with which the Roman authorities viewed their Jewish subjects,” said Anna Dolganov, a historian of the Roman Empire with the Austrian Archaeological Institute, who deciphered the scroll. She noted that there is archaeological evidence for coordinated planning of the Bar Kochba revolt. “It is possible that tax evaders like Gadalias and Saulos, who were inclined to disrespect the Roman order, were involved in the preparations,” Dr. Dolganov said.

In the current issue of Tyche, a journal of antiquity published by the University of Vienna, Dr. Dolganov and three Austrian and Israeli colleagues present the court proceedings as a case study. Their paper brings to light how Roman institutions and imperial law could influence the administration of justice in a provincial setting where relatively few people were Roman citizens.

“The document provides rare and highly interesting evidence for the slave trade in this part of the empire,” said Dennis P. Kehoe, a classicist at Tulane University, who was not involved in the study, “as well as the circumstances under which Jews might have slaves.”

Following the papyrus trail

No one is certain when or by whom the papyrus was unearthed, but Dr. Dolganov said that it was probably found in the 1950s by Bedouin antiquity dealers. She suspects that the discovery site was Nahal Hever, a steep-walled canyon west of the deep cleft of the Dead Sea where some Bar Kochba rebels, fleeing the Romans, took refuge in natural fault line caves in the limestone cliffs. In 1960, archaeologists found documents from the era in one of the Jewish hide-outs; others have been discovered since.

Initially misclassified, the ragged 133-line scroll lay unnoticed in the archives of the Israel Antiquities Authority until 2014, when Hannah Cotton Paltiel, a classicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, realized that it was written in ancient Greek. In light of the document’s complexity and extraordinary length, a team of scholars was assembled to conduct a detailed physical examination and cross-reference names and locations with other historical sources.

Deciphering the papyrus and reconstructing its intricate narrative posed major challenges to Dr. Dolganov. “The letters are tiny and densely packed, and the Greek is highly rhetorical and full of technical legal terms,” she said. Unlike in documents such as contracts, there were no formulaic expressions that made the translation easier. “It certainly does not help that we only have the second half, or less, of the original,” Dr. Dolganov said.

The researchers deduced that the tax scheme was designed to escape notice, which meant careful detective work was required to piece together what happened. “I had to adopt the perspective of the Roman fiscal administration to understand what the text is talking about,” she said. Dr. Dolganov also had to imagine the dodge from the standpoint of the accused: To commit tax fraud with the slave trade in the most remote corner of the Roman world, what would you have to do, and what would have made the effort profitable?

The ancient scheme has resonated deeply with modern tax lawyers. A German lawyer told Dr. Dolganov that the shenanigans of Gadalias and Saulos were not all that different from today’s most common forms of tax fraud — shifting assets, phony transactions. And the Roman interrogation methods were largely in line with Untersuchungshaft — investigative custody — for financial crimes, which involves intimidation and often brutal questioning.

“Dr. Dolganov has performed wonderful feats of scholarship in unraveling the meaning of the contents and their significance for the history of the region and the empire,” said Brent Shaw, a classicist at Princeton University with no connection to the project.

Rebels with a cause

The case against Gadalias and Saulos was bolstered by information provided by an informant who tipped off the Roman authorities — and the text even suggests that the informant was none other than Saulos, who denounced his accomplice Chaereas to protect himself in a looming financial investigation. The most likely scenario, Dr. Dolganov said, was that Saulos, a resident of Judea, arranged the bogus sale of several slaves to Chaereas, who lived in the neighboring province of Arabia.

By being sold across the provincial border, the slaves would have vanished in print from Saulos’s assets in Judea. But because they physically stayed with Saulos, the alleged buyer, Chaereas, could opt not to declare them in Arabia. “Thus, on paper, the slaves disappeared in Judea but never arrived in Arabia, thereby becoming invisible to Roman administrators,” Dr. Dolganov said. “Henceforth, all taxes on these slaves could be avoided.”

The empire had sophisticated systems for tracking slave ownership and collecting various taxes, which amounted to 4 percent on slave sales and 5 percent on manumissions. “To free a slave in the empire, you had to present documentary evidence of the slave’s current and previous ownership, which had to be officially registered,” Dr. Dolganov said. “If any documents were missing or looked suspicious, Roman administrators would investigate.”

To hide Saulos’s double-dealing, Gadalias, the notary’s son, evidently forged the bills of sale and other legal agreements. When the authorities became aware of the matter, the defendants allegedly made payments to a local city council for protection. At the trial, Gadalias blamed his late father for the forgeries, and Saulos pinned the manumission on Chaereas. The papyrus offers no insight into their motive. “Why the men took the risk of freeing a slave without valid papers remains a mystery,” Dr. Dolganov said.

One possibility is that, by faking the sale of slaves and then releasing them, Gadalias and Saulos were observing a Jewish biblical duty to free enslaved people. Or maybe there was profit to be made in capturing people — perhaps even willing participants — from beyond the border, bringing them into the Empire and then releasing them from their “slavery” to become free Romans. Or maybe Gadalias and Saulos were human traffickers, plain and simple — Dr. Dolganov emphasized that the alternate story lines were entirely speculative, as nothing in the text supported them.

What surprised her most about the trial, she said, was the professionalism of the prosecutors. They employed deft rhetorical strategies worthy of Cicero and Quintilian and displayed an excellent command of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek. “This is the edge of the Roman Empire, and boom, we see legal practitioners of high caliber who are competent in Roman law,” Dr. Dolganov said.

The papyrus does not reveal the final verdict. “If the Roman judge was convinced these were hardened criminals and execution was in order, Gadalias as a member of his local civic elite may have received a more merciful death by decapitation,” Dr. Dolganov said. “At any rate, almost anything is better than being eaten by leopards.”