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Live Commentary – Birmingham vs Peterboro

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Live Commentary – Birmingham vs Peterboro



Full Time
After Extra Time
This is a live match.
Extra Time
Half Time

Birmingham City
vs Peterborough United. Vertu Trophy Final.

Wembley Stadium.



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The Many Ways Kennedy Is Already Undermining Vaccines

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The Many Ways Kennedy Is Already Undermining Vaccines


During his Senate confirmation hearings to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented himself as a supporter of vaccines. But in office, he and the agencies he leads have taken far-reaching, sometimes subtle steps to undermine confidence in vaccine efficacy and safety.

The National Institutes of Health halted funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy and hoped to find ways to overcome it. It also canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shelved an advertising campaign for the flu shot. Mr. Kennedy has said inaccurately that the scientists who advise the C.D.C. on vaccines have “severe, severe conflicts of interest” in promoting the products and cannot be trusted.

The Health and Human Services Department cut billions of dollars to state health agencies, including funds needed to modernize state programs for childhood immunization. Mr. Kennedy said in a televised interview on Wednesday that he was unaware of this widely reported development.

The Food and Drug Administration canceled an open meeting on flu vaccines with scientific advisers, later holding it behind closed doors. A top official paused the agency’s review of Novavax’s Covid vaccine. In a televised interview last week, Mr. Kennedy said falsely that similarly created vaccines don’t work against respiratory viruses.

Some scientists said they saw a pattern: an effort to erode support for routine vaccination, and for the scientists who have long held it up as a public health goal.

“This is a simultaneous process of increasing the likelihood that you will hear his voice and decreasing the likelihood that you’ll hear other voices,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said of Mr. Kennedy.

He is “decertifying other voices of authority,” she said.

H.H.S. disagreed that Mr. Kennedy was working against vaccines.

“Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine; he is pro-safety,” Andrew Nixon, a department spokesman, said in a statement. “His focus has always been on ensuring that vaccines are rigorously tested for efficacy and safety.”

The statement continued, “We are taking action so that Americans get the transparency they deserve and can make informed decisions about their health.”

After attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles in West Texas on Sunday, Mr. Kennedy endorsed the measles vaccine on X as “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”

But he has also described vaccination as a personal choice with poorly understood risks and suggested that miracle treatments were readily available. On Sunday, he praised two local doctors on social media who have promoted dubious, potentially harmful, treatments for measles.

Even as cases of measles in the United States have surged past 600 in 22 jurisdictions, Mr. Kennedy has claimed in a recent interview that the measles vaccine causes deaths every year (untrue); that it causes encephalitis, blindness and “all the illnesses that measles itself causes” (untrue); and that the vaccine’s effect wanes so dramatically that older adults are “essentially unvaccinated” (untrue).

According to an email obtained by The New York Times, H.H.S. intends to revise its web pages to include statements like “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one” and “People should also be informed about the potential adverse events associated with vaccines.” (Vaccines are already administered only after patients provide informed consent, as required by law.)

Tensions with mainstream experts came into sharp focus last week, when Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator, resigned under pressure from the F.D.A.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks said in his resignation letter.

Mr. Kennedy’s position on vaccines has raised alarm for decades. But it has become particularly notable now, against a backdrop of rising skepticism of vaccines and worsening outbreaks of measles and bird flu, experts said.

The M.M.R. vaccine — a combination product to prevent measles, mumps and rubella that has been available since 1971 — has long been a target of anti-vaccine campaigns because of the disproved theory that it can cause autism. Mr. Kennedy has said that he would like to revisit the issue, in part to assuage parents’ fears that the vaccines are unsafe.

But he has hired David Geier to re-examine the data. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, a doctor and the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, has sharply criticized the decision to spend tax dollars testing a discredited hypothesis even as the administration is cutting billions for other research.

“If we’re pissing away money over here,” he said last month, “that’s less money that we have to actually go after the true reason.”

The refusal to accept scientific consensus is “disturbing, because then we get into very strange territory where it’s somebody’s hunch that this does or doesn’t happen, or does or doesn’t work,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists.

In interviews, Mr. Kennedy has downplayed risks of measles and emphasized what he sees as the benefits of infection.

“Everybody got measles, and measles gave you protected lifetime protection against measles infection — the vaccine doesn’t do that,” he said in an interview on Fox News.

Two doses of the M.M.R. vaccine do provide decades-long immunity. And while immunity from the infection may last a lifetime, “people also suffer the consequences of that natural infection,” Dr. Jameson said.

One consequence was discovered just a few years ago: A measles infection can destroy the immune system’s memory of other invading pathogens, leaving the body vulnerable to them again.

Measles kills roughly 1 in every 1,000 infected people, and 11 percent of those infected this year have been hospitalized, many of them children under 5, according to the C.D.C. Two girls, ages 6 and 8, died in West Texas.

By contrast, side effects after vaccination are uncommon. But Mr. Kennedy has suggested that people should apprise themselves of the risks before opting for the shot.

The phrasing implies that “if you are more fully informed, you might make a different decision,” said Dr. Jamieson, of the Annenberg center.

Doctors have long expected health secretaries and the C.D.C. to urge widespread vaccination unequivocally amid an outbreak, and in the past they have.

But Mr. Kennedy has spoken enthusiastically about cod liver oil, a steroid and an antibiotic that are not standard therapies. Some of those treatments may be making children more sick.

“The messaging I’m seeing is focused on potential treatments for measles,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy promised that he would not change the C.D.C.’s childhood vaccination schedule. About two weeks later, he announced a new commission that would scrutinize it.

The schedule is based on recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of medical experts who review safety and effectiveness data, potential interactions with other drugs and the ideal timing to maximize protection.

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy claimed that 97 percent of A.C.I.P. members had financial conflicts of interest. He has long held, without evidence, that federal regulators are compromised and are hiding information about the risks of vaccines.

“It’s frankly false,” said Dr. O’Leary, who serves as a liaison to the committee from the pediatric academy.

Mr. Kennedy’s statistic came from a 2009 report that found that 97 percent of disclosure forms had errors, such as missing dates or information in the wrong section.

In fact, A.C.I.P. members are carefully screened for major conflicts of interest, and they cannot hold stocks or serve on advisory boards or speaker bureaus affiliated with vaccine manufacturers.

On the rare occasion that members have indirect conflicts of interest — for example, if an institution at which they work receives money from a drug manufacturer — they disclose the conflict and recuse themselves from related votes.

The committee’s votes were public and often heavily debated.

“When I was C.D.C. director, people flew in from Korea and all over the world to observe the A.C.I.P. meetings, because they were a model of transparency,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who led the agency from 2009 to 2017.

Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly promised greater transparency and accountability, but he has proposed ending public comment on health policies.

His department canceled a meeting of the A.C.I.P. in February at which members were set to discuss vaccines for meningitis and flu, rescheduling it for April.

The department also canceled a meeting to discuss the seasonal flu vaccine. Officials met later without the agency’s scientific advisers.

“After all that conversation about how they want to be transparent, one of the first things he does is take things behind closed doors and diminish the amount of public input we’re getting,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy repeated a fringe theory that Black Americans should not receive the same vaccines as others because they “have a much stronger reaction.”

Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Democrat of Maryland, who is Black, admonished him for his “dangerous” opinion: “Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to.”

Two weeks later, at a clinic for teenage mothers in Denver, a 19-year-old woman refused all vaccines for herself and her 1-year-old son — including the measles and chickenpox shots he was supposed to have that day.

She told the pediatrician, Dr. Hana Smith, who described the incident, that she had read online that vaccines were bad for people with more melanin in their skin.

There are reams of evidence to the contrary. Still, it quickly became clear to Dr. Smith that nothing was going to change her patient’s mind.

“No matter how much information I can give to the contrary on it, the damage is already done,” Dr. Smith said.

Misinformation is particularly difficult to counter, Dr. Smith said, “when it’s someone that has a leadership position, especially within the health care system.”



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Trump’s business acumen has long been his armor. It’s being put to the test.

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The normally bullish Trump over the weekend declined to rule out the possibility of a full-blown recession as his tariff policies threaten to spark a massive global trade war.



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Rick Levine, Who Gave Commercials Cinematic Flair, Dies at 94

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Rick Levine, Who Gave Commercials Cinematic Flair, Dies at 94


Rick Levine, an award-winning television commercial director who brought a big-screen sensibility to the small screen with widely celebrated spots, including a Diet Pepsi Super Bowl ad from the 1980s featuring Michael J. Fox risking life and limb for love, died on March 11 at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif. He was 94.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Abby LaRocca.

Mr. Levine was a product of what is often called the golden age of advertising. He rose in the business through the “Mad Men” era of the 1960s and founded his own company, Rick Levine Productions, in 1972. It was a time when network television held a hypnotic sway over the average American household and advertising, like so many other cultural arenas of the era, was exploding in creativity.

Often serving as his own cinematographer, Mr. Levine approached his big-budget commercials like a director of Hollywood blockbusters.

“We decided to make our ads look as good as films,” he said in a 2009 interview with DGA Quarterly, published by the Directors Guild of America. “I would direct and shoot, so I would have complete control.”

The Guild named him the best commercial director in 1981 and again in 1988, in particular for three specific spots.

Most notable among them was the Diet Pepsi commercial with Mr. Fox, which Mr. Levine made for BBDO New York. It was one of many ads he shot for Pepsi.

Known as “Apartment 10G,” the commercial stars Mr. Fox as a timid New York professional who turns heroic after he hears a knock on his apartment door and opens it to encounter a beautiful blond new neighbor (played by Gail O’Grady, later of ABC’s “NYPD Blue”). She flirtatiously asks if he has a Diet Pepsi to spare.

When a two-liter Pepsi bottle in his refrigerator turns out to be empty, a bedazzled Mr. Fox, determined to fetch what she asked for, climbs out of his bedroom window and clambers down the fire escape into a pounding rainstorm on a busy street. Mr. Fox, who did many of his own stunts, survives near-miss collisions with oncoming traffic in a mad dash to a Diet Pepsi vending machine. He returns, soaking and breathless, to present a can to the woman, only to find that her equally lovely roommate has shown up with the same request.

The ad aired during Super Bowl XXI (the New York Giants versus the Denver Broncos) on Jan. 25, 1987. It was named the world’s best video commercial the next year at the International Broadcasting Awards in Los Angeles; cited by ESPN as one of the best Super Bowl spots ever; and honored at the Smithsonian as an artifact of Americana.

Mr. Levine was admired as well for another BBDO commercial, for the chemical company DuPont, which featured Bill Demby, a real-life Vietnam veteran. He is first seen lacing up his basketball shoes in his New York City apartment before heading to a local schoolyard to shoot hoops with friends.

When he arrives, he strips down from sweatpants to basketball shorts, revealing two prosthetic legs — made from DuPont plastic — that he has relied on since being maimed in a Vietcong rocket attack. What appears to be a noble, if doomed, effort to keep up with the other players turns into a star turn for Mr. Demby, as he races around the court dishing assists and draining buckets.

Mr. Levine won a total of four Clio Awards — advertising’s equivalent of the Oscars — for both spots in 1988. In explaining his success, he told The New York Times: “I attract the story kind of commercial. People don’t come to me just for pictures; they come with stories.”

Richard Laurence Levine was born on July 10, 1930, in Brooklyn, the only child of Harry and Sally (Belof) Levine. His father was a philatelist.

After graduating in 1957 from the Parsons School of Design (now part of the New School), he worked as a graphic designer for NBC and CBS. He later became an art director for the storied Doyle Dane Bernbach agency, known for its “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen, before moving to Mary Wells Lawrence’s agency, Wells Rich Greene, hailed for its landmark “I ♥ NY” campaign. He also served as a creative director for Carl Ally Inc.

Mr. Levine started directing ads in about 1970, creating memorable spots for a host of U.S. clients, including Coca-Cola, Federal Express, Polo Ralph Lauren and General Electric, as well as for international companies.

He became known for his episodic approach, following the same characters through a series of commercials. One campaign in the 1980s — for Pacific Bell, the California telephone company, shot for the San Francisco agency Foote, Cone & Belding — played out like a TV mini-series, with 13 spots following three characters, the close friends Garland, Lawrence and Mary Ellen, from their youth in the 1920s into their golden years.

One episode, “The Depression,” set in the desperate 1930s, portrays an act of selfless friendship when an unemployed Garland, who has been chosen to travel to a day job, purposely slips off the back of a truck crowded with other men and pretends to injure himself so that Lawrence can take his place.

The commercial, which had the warm look and feel of scenes from Don Corleone’s early years in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II,” concludes with Lawrence in his later years, bathed in memories of the incident, phoning Garland to give thanks. It won a Gold Lion award at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France (now the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity).

In addition to his daughter Abby, Mr. Levine is survived by another daughter, Susan Levine Henley, who like her is from his first marriage, to Ina Levine, which ended in divorce; two grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. His second marriage, to Lark Levine, also ended in divorce.

Despite his cinematic flair, Mr. Levine never forgot his mandate. “It’s a beautiful craft, but a craft,” he said in a 1976 interview with the trade newspaper Backstage. “It’s possible to be artistic within the confines of a commercial, of course, but that is not really my job as a commercial film director. My purpose is to make the advertising come across.”



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Robert W. McChesney, Who Warned of Corporate Media Control, Dies at 72

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Robert W. McChesney, Who Warned of Corporate Media Control, Dies at 72


Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25 at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72.

The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Inger Stole, said.

Professor McChesney was grounded both in academia — he had a Ph.D. in communications and taught at universities — and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana’s first single.

His primary thesis, expressed in more than a dozen books and in scores of articles and interviews, was that corporate-owned news media was overly compliant with the political powers that be, and that it restricted the views Americans were exposed to. He further argued that the promise of the internet — of a Wild West market of opinions — had been throttled by a few giant owners of online platforms.

An early book, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy” (1999), warned that consolidation in journalism would undermine democratic norms. In perhaps his best-known work, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy” (2013), he rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would usher in an open frontier of information sources and invigorate democracy.

Instead, he showed how the internet was devastating the business model for newspapers, while supplanting civically minded coverage of local government with lowest-common-denominator fluff: celebrity gossip, cat videos and personal navel gazing.

Professor McChesney blamed capitalism.

“The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising — all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism — are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop,” he wrote.

An unapologetic socialist, Professor McChesney argued that the government should give all Americans $200 vouchers to donate to nonprofit news outlets of their choice.

He campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential races. Mr. Sanders returned the favor by writing a foreword to Professor McChesney’s book “Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America” (2013), written with John Nichols.

In an interview with Truthout, a nonprofit news site focused on social justice, Professor McChesney attacked the mainstream media’s coverage of Mr. Sanders in the 2016 presidential primaries, which he lost to Hillary Clinton. CNN and MSNBC, he said, were deeply biased in favor of “centrist” candidates representing the status quo.

“One can only imagine how Sanders would have done if he had coverage from MSNBC similar to what Obama received” in 2007 and 2008, Professor McChesney said.

The conservative writer David Horowitz put Professor McChesney on a list of the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” in 2006, including him among “tenured radicals” who were indoctrinating U.S. students.

On the other hand, in 2008, Utne Reader named Professor McChesney one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”

Professor McChesney warned in 2016 that when corporate giants dominate online information — at the time, those giants were Facebook and Google — they hold too much power over what people know of the world.

“This is really antithetical to anything remotely close to a free press and a free society,” he said in an interview with the left-leaning news outlet “Democracy Now!”

The way to deal with such monopolies was to nationalize them, he said. He suggested a government takeover that would make internet behemoths into a quasi-public service, like the post office.

Professor McChesney was one of the founders, in 2003, of a public interest group, Free Press, that opposed corporate consolidation in the news business and that led a national campaign for net neutrality, calling for equal access to the internet for all content producers, from giants like Netflix to individual bloggers.

Robert Waterman McChesney was born on Dec. 22, 1952, in Cleveland, one of two sons of Samuel P. McChesney Jr., an advertising executive at This Week, a syndicated magazine inserted in Sunday newspapers, and Edna (McCorkle) McChesney.

He grew up in the Cleveland suburb Shaker Heights and attended Pomfret, a prep school in northeast Connecticut. In 1977, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash., where he studied politics and economics.

In 1979, after working as a sports stringer for U.P.I. and an editor at The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly, he became the publisher of The Rocket, which charted the emergence of the Seattle grunge-rock scene in the 1980s and ’90s.

Intellectually restless, he then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Washington, earning a Ph.D. in communications in 1989. For a decade, he taught in the journalism and mass communication department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor McChesney and his wife, Dr. Stole, who also has a Ph.D. in communications, then moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Gutgsell endowed professor in the communications department.

His other books include “Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights?” (2011), with Victor Pickard, and “Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy” (1997).

In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughters, Amy and Lucy McChesney, and a brother, Samuel P. McChesney III.

In a late book, “People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy” (2016), written with Mr. Nichols, Professor McChesney argued that artificial intelligence and the digital revolution would wipe out numerous categories of jobs.

“Capitalism as we know it is a very bad fit for the technological revolution we are beginning to experience,” he said in an interview about the book.

“Our argument is that we currently have a citizenless democracy,” he went on. “By that we mean a governing system where all the important decisions of government are made to suit the interests and values of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans, and the corporations they own.”



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What’s Happening to Social Security Under Trump? Here’s What Retirees Need to Know.

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What’s Happening to Social Security Under Trump? Here’s What Retirees Need to Know.


President Trump has vowed that he wouldn’t cut Social Security benefits, but his administration’s actions, led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, have upended the agency, leaving many beneficiaries concerned that the popular program and their payments may be imperiled.

Several players from the private equity world are now embedded inside the Social Security Administration, which is embarking on deep jobs cuts and other policy changes. At the same time, top Trump administration officials continue to perpetuate falsehoods about widespread fraud, even after the allegations are quickly debunked.

These rapid-fire changes have unfolded ahead of the arrival of the incoming commissioner, Frank Bisignano, whose nomination was advanced by the Senate Finance Committee but awaits a full vote by the chamber.

Many beneficiaries have questions. Here’s what we know.

Only Congress can make changes to the program’s benefits, which are sent to 73 million people each month. But hollowing out critical pieces of the program’s operations also presents risks, current and former employees said, especially at an agency like Social Security, which has complex policy rules and an aging technical infrastructure. The employees serving the public have institutional knowledge that takes time to acquire and master.

But the agency announced plans to cut about 12 percent of its work force, or roughly 7,000 employees, when staffing is already at a 50-year low. Not having enough seasoned staff to handle the rising tide of baby boomers and other claimants, as well as the complex system that pushes out payments, could threaten its ability to serve the public and potentially delay benefits.

Some cracks have already begun to show, with increased system outages to the agency’s online services, including my Social Security accounts. Field staff members say various outages have always occurred, but not at the frequency they’re experiencing now.

So far, the technology offices are losing 326 members of their 1,600-person staff, according to the union that represents many agency workers. Employees have said more cuts are expected.

Employees inside the agency said they agreed that modernization was needed and that there were plenty of efficiencies to be found. But making haphazard cuts to critical staff before making changes to technology and processes is a risky endeavor, current and former employees and executives said.

Many of those employees specialize in maintaining Social Security’s complex set of computer systems, in which dozens of web applications are layered on top of a programming language developed in the 1970s. As crucial members of the technical staff leave the agency, there are fewer experienced hands to perform routine maintenance and address issues when they arise.

I’ve recently heard from many readers who have had different experiences. Some have filed for retirement benefits online without any issues, and began receiving them within 30 days. But others have been unable to log in to their Social Security accounts to download tax documents, have struggled to make appointments for field offices or have waited for several hours on the phone to reach a customer service representative.

Your experience may vary based on where you live, the staffing levels nearby or the phone centers you reach. Calls to the agency have risen 30 percent from last year, according to agency data, with more people getting “polite disconnects,” where a prerecorded message tells callers to try again later.

The agency has said it has “not permanently closed or announced the permanent closure” of any field offices. But many of them are losing critical mass. More than three dozen offices are each losing at least a quarter of their staff, as we reported here. The agency has said it plans to reassign more employees to the front lines, but it will take time to retrain workers.

Many former executives and policy experts are concerned about rising system outages as more employees depart, which can also affect individuals’ access to benefits.

If you are already receiving benefits, you do not need to go to a Social Security field office to prove your identity. In fact, the agency recently put out several messages on social media platforms stating that enrolled beneficiaries do not need to do anything.

The agency had announced a plan in mid-March to curtail its phone services, forcing everyone to file for benefits online or in person. But after facing fierce backlash, it rolled back the plan less than a month later.

Now, everyone, including those filing retirement and survivor claims, can continue to do so over the phone, unless their application is flagged as being suspicious. (In that case, individuals will need to provide identification in person, just as they do when online claims are flagged.) Beneficiaries looking to make changes to their direct deposit accounts, however, will need to do so either online or in person at a field office.

During the Biden administration, the agency said it would no longer withhold a full monthly payment to claw back overpayments — which are often caused by agency errors — but would instead withhold a maximum of 10 percent until the balance was repaid. The goal was to avoid creating a financial hardship for beneficiaries, who often rely on these payments.

The Trump administration has reversed the policy and resumed collecting the entire check until the overpayment is repaid.

Potentially. The agency keeps vast troves of personally identifiable information, including earnings records and medical information, at least some of which members of Mr. Musk’s team have sought access to. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the agency from granting DOGE workers access to sensitive records stored in its systems, or keeping any data they may have already taken.

Social Security has a 99.7 percent payment accuracy rate, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, while 0.5 percent of its budget goes to administrative costs.

Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Mr. Musk and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have spread falsehoods about rampant fraud inside the program, often even after their claims have been quickly debunked. Many current and former employees, along with policymakers and advocates, are concerned that they’re trying to undermine trust in the program.

  • Mr. Musk continues to repeat unsubstantiated claims that social insurance programs like Social Security are used as a “gigantic magnetic force” that attracts “illegal aliens” from all over the world. There is no evidence to support that, and undocumented workers actually pay more into Social Security than they receive in benefits. The program receives about $20 billion in net cash flow from undocumented workers each year, the agency told The New York Times last year.

  • After learning that millions of people in the database did not have recorded deaths, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump claimed that millions of dead people were receiving payments. As my colleagues have reported, there aren’t zombie beneficiaries, a conclusion the agency reached in 2023, when it said cleaning up the database wasn’t worth the investment because almost none of the beneficiaries were being paid.

  • Mr. Musk, and most recently Mr. Vance, made the false claim that 40 percent of calls to the agency are made by fraudsters. That allegation seems to stem from a statistic that the agency released, but that was misunderstood: Criminals try to redirect beneficiaries’ deposits into their own accounts — and 40 percent of that direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling the agency to try to change bank information, while the other 60 percent is attempted online. (My colleague Linda Qiu has provided a more detailed explanation.)

Mr. Musk is not the first to refer to the program as a Ponzi scheme, which is a criminal investment fraud where early investors are paid with money collected from later investors in order to create the illusion of a profit or investment returns.

Social Security is not an investment scheme. It’s an insurance program that provides retirement, survivors and disability benefits to roughly 73 million people. But critics like Mr. Musk often turn to that analogy because Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, which means that the incoming payroll contributions that finance the program are used to pay for benefits to eligible retirees, disabled workers and survivors.

Social Security is a public program, funded by payroll taxes and run by civic servants, who, like all federal workers, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Revenue is largely invested in Treasury bonds. The program is not overseen by Wall Street firms, taxpayers do not pay high fees for investment management and its systems are largely operated and maintained by federal employees.

Privatizing Social Security, in part or entirely, could take different forms. Instead of running most of the machinery, for example, the government could outsource more of it to for-profit corporations, which would be in keeping with Mr. Trump’s ethos, though it would increase the program’s costs.

But privatization usually refers to establishing individual private accounts, an idea that was last thrust into the public debate roughly two decades ago by President George W. Bush, who proposed diverting some payroll taxes into investment accounts. The idea faced fierce public opposition, and it hasn’t gained any traction since.

Privatization had been suggested as a way to strengthen the program’s finances, though most proposals would hasten the depletion of the program’s trust fund, reduce guaranteed benefits and require borrowing. It would also fundamentally shift the underpinnings of the program toward becoming one based on notions of property and private ownership, and away from social insurance, where risks are pooled and spread across a population.

Proponents of Social Security have laid out incremental changes that would shore up its finances without such major shifts.

Larry Fink, the chief executive of the investment giant BlackRock, recently raised the idea at a conference, suggesting private accounts to supplement the program.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt intended the program to be self-sufficient. It has a dedicated revenue source, primarily from payroll taxes (also known as FICA taxes). In many cases, workers split the burden with their employers; each currently pays 6.2 percent on earnings up to $176,100, for a total of 12.4 percent. By law, Social Security, unlike Medicare, cannot use money from the federal budget’s general revenues to pay benefits.

The payroll taxes go into the agency’s trust funds. When there is a surplus, the extra money is largely invested in a special type of Treasury security that pays interest to the trust fund.

No, though it depends on whom you ask.

Because Social Security is a self-contained system, cutting benefits would not shrink the deficit. President Ronald Reagan explained its effect on the budget in this 1984 clip: “If you reduce the outgo of Social Security, that money would not go into the general fund to reduce a deficit. It would go into the Social Security Trust Fund. So Social Security has nothing to do with balancing a budget.”

Although Social Security is considered “off budget,” economists and government prognosticators may also view it as part of the so-called unified budget, which includes all federal activities when evaluating everything that affects the economy. From that perspective, Social Security can make the deficit look larger.

Social Security has experienced a financing shortfall for years, partly because of demographic changes. Falling birthrates mean fewer people are paying into the program, thousands of baby boomers are retiring daily and retirees are living longer and collecting benefits for longer periods. In addition, a larger share of the country’s income base is not subject to the tax, compared with years past. This is because an ever-growing share of high earners’ income is not subject to payroll taxes.

As a result of these shifts, the trust fund that pays the program’s retiree benefits is expected to run dry in 2033, when tax revenue will be enough to pay 79 percent of scheduled benefits. That means beneficiaries’ checks would be reduced by 21 percent if Congress did not intervene and make fixes to bolster the program.

Several of Mr. Trump’s policy initiatives, if enacted, are expected to worsen that shortfall.

Using one measure, U.S. consumer spending is $20 trillion annually. Assuming all beneficiaries spend their payments in a given year — or roughly $1.6 trillion — that would fund about 7.5 percent of spending.

“That’s huge,” said Jason Fichtner, who held several positions at Social Security, where he was appointed by Mr. Bush, including chief economist. “Regardless of the measure you use, Social Security benefits provide the economic security for millions of Americans and is the primary source of income for many people over age 65.”

“Without Social Security, 22 million more adults and children would fall below the poverty line,” he added. “While the macro economy would withstand a short shock due to a disruption in Social Security benefits, the impact on many households could be insurmountable.”

No.

When there is a surplus of payroll tax revenue, it’s invested in a special type of Treasury security, which pays interest to the trust fund. Since the trust fund money is invested in Treasury securities, the money is essentially being lent to the federal government (to use however it wants, and it must eventually be repaid).

That’s where the confusion arises and why some people believe that the trust fund is used to pay for things unrelated to the program. But it’s really no different from what happens when the government sells Treasury securities to other investors, like China.



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Gaza Medic Missing Since Israeli Attack Is in Israeli Custody, Palestinian Group Says

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Gaza Medic Missing Since Israeli Attack Is in Israeli Custody, Palestinian Group Says


Mr. al-Nasasra was part of a convoy of emergency crews sent by the Red Crescent and Gaza’s Civil Defense, another rescue service, to search for a Red Crescent ambulance that had disappeared earlier in the morning of March 23. Israeli forces had opened fire on that first ambulance, killing two members of its crew and detaining the third, Munther Abed, according to both the Israeli military and Mr. Abed, who was later released.

When the rescue convoy arrived on the scene and paramedics got out to look at the first ambulance, Israeli soldiers began shooting again in a barrage that lasted about five minutes, according to the video of the attack, which was discovered on the cellphone of one of the paramedics who was killed, published by The New York Times and later released by the Red Crescent.

Soldiers found Mr. al-Nasasra alive after firing on the convoy and detained him alongside Mr. Abed, the survivor from the first ambulance, Mr. Abed told The Times in an interview. Two other witnesses who were held with the paramedics — Saeed al-Bardawil, a doctor, and his 12-year-old son, Mohammed, who had been detained as they headed to the beach to fish — confirmed Mr. Abed’s account.

Mr. al-Nasasra was stripped, handcuffed and blindfolded, Mr. Abed and Dr. al-Bardawil recalled.

The two paramedics spoke in whispers about the fate of their colleagues, Mr. Abed said. The Israeli soldiers detaining them later questioned the paramedics, asking them for their names, ages and ID card numbers, and appeared to scan their faces with a device Mr. Abed did not recognize, Mr. Abed said.

At some point, Mr. Abed and Dr. al-Bardawil recalled, Mr. al-Nasasra was taken elsewhere and they had no more contact with him.

In all, Israeli troops killed eight Red Crescent paramedics, six other emergency responders from the Civil Defense, and a United Nations worker who happened to drive by later that morning, according to the Red Crescent and the Civil Defense. Their bodies were not found for days.



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Texas Muslims Want to Build Homes and a Mosque. Gov. Greg Abbott Says No.

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Texas Muslims Want to Build Homes and a Mosque. Gov. Greg Abbott Says No.


In most circumstances, the development of a 400-acre field of corn and hay outside Josephine, Texas, would hardly stand out in the state, just another parcel of farmland set to become houses in the ever-expanding sprawl of the Dallas suburbs.

Yet in recent months, Gov. Greg Abbott has thrown himself into stopping the planned community. The reason? It would be anchored by a mosque.

“To be clear, Shariah law is not allowed in Texas,” the Republican governor wrote on social media in late February, reposting a video advertising the project. “Nor are Shariah cities.”

Nearly a quarter century has passed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, raised anti-Muslim sentiment around the country, often under the banner of fighting Islamic law, or Shariah. It has been 15 years since politicians in New York and Washington fanned the furor over a proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan near where the Twin Towers fell.

Over that time, the population of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area has swelled by more than 60 percent, to around 8.3 million. Its growth has included a diverse influx of new Texans from all over the world, many of them Muslim, but also Hindu, Christian and Jewish.

But Josephine’s master-planned community of about 1,000 homes proposed by members of the East Plano Islamic Center, known as EPIC, has shown how old sentiments can linger.

“There is no crime here,” protested Dan Cogdell, a veteran criminal defendse lawyer hired by the Islamic Center to defend the development. “It’s 9/11 all over again in terms of the reaction.”

Before Mr. Abbott’s involvement, few outside of North Texas had heard of the development. Now, nearly the whole state has.

Mr. Abbott has posted about the development at least 11 times in recent weeks. He suggested the developers may have violated fair housing and financial laws, and accused the Islamic center of conducting illegal funerals.

The governor ordered multiple overlapping investigations. Not to be outdone, the state’s conservative attorney general, Ken Paxton, added his own criminal inquiry.

The state’s actions have fueled opposition to the proposed housing development, known as EPIC City, before any initial plans have been submitted. At a hearing on the project in Collin County, where part of it would be located, hours of public comment included expressions of anti-Muslim hostility.

“This is so wrong,” one speaker, Kyle Sims, said. “This country is based on Judeo-Christian values.”

“I know what this would mean,” said another speaker, Krista Schild, a Republican precinct chair in Hunt County, where a portion of the project would be also be located. “Honor killings, stonings, marrying their young girls off to older men.”

Leaders at the East Plano Islamic Center say such views reflect a lack of knowledge of their religion.

Imam Nadim Bashir, who was born in Florida, raised in Texas and leads the mosque, said the governor had created “unnecessary fear” based on misunderstandings of religious ideas like Shariah.

“It’s a personal moral code of life, that’s all it is,” he said. “Standing up for people, serving people, taking care of your family, being honest, this is all part of Shariah.”

It is not, he said, about imposing Muslim religious rules on others, as the governor suggested. “Why is he making up things which we have never, ever said?” the imam said. “We will always work within the laws of the United States and the state of Texas.”

A spokesman for the governor, Andrew Mahaleris, said in a statement that “shining a light on potential misconduct serves to protect Texans — not stoke anger toward violators.”

There have been other attempts to block smaller projects by Muslim developers elsewhere in North Texas, including an ongoing fight in the town of Blue Ridge. Many of them have been highlighted by a frequent online critic of Islam, Amy Mekelburg. It was her social media post about EPIC City that was reposted by Mr. Abbott in February.

The Texas governor has long kept tabs on emerging social media outrage on the right and has occasionally responded with state action. In 2015, Mr. Abbott deployed the Texas State Guard to “monitor” a U.S. military training exercise that conspiracy theorists said was really a clandestine effort by President Obama to take over the state.

And recently Republican leaders in Texas have been alarmed by residential communities that appear to cater to particular home buyers, especially a sprawling development outside of Houston known as Colony Ridge where many buyers were undocumented.

Still, the sudden attacks from Mr. Abbott caught members of the East Plano Islamic Center off guard. The center and its congregants have been fixtures in Plano for two decades, providing a food bank, mobile medical services and, in recent years, the city’s only warming center during cold weather.

To respond to the investigations, they hired Mr. Cogdell, who helped successfully lead Mr. Paxton’s defense team during his impeachment trial in 2023.

Mr. Cogdell then invited state investigators to visit with the developers and inspect the paperwork.

“We never thought the project would get this much attention,” said Imran Chaudhary, who has been leading the project for a private entity, Community Capital Partners, connected to the Islamic center.

One of his partners, Sarfraz Ahmad, surveyed the empty, muddy fields and said ruefully, “This is EPIC City.”

Shortly before visiting the site, Mr. Chaudhary received a call from a masked number, one of many he had gotten in recent weeks, often in the middle of the night.

“Get out of America,” a man said with an expletive, with Mr. Chaudhary’s phone on speaker, before hanging up.

Mr. Chaudhary, a senior manager at an information technology company, and Mr. Ahmad, a custom home builder, said they had been excited to close on the land and announce the project last year. They quickly found 500 people interested in investing in the project, including members of the mosque, who each put in $80,000 for the right to later buy a plot.

Opponents of the development pointed to statements and marketing materials that appeared aimed at attracting only Muslim buyers. “It’s a way of life, a meticulously designed community that brings Islam to the forefront,” according to a promotional video posted last year.

Mr. Chaudhary said the intention was never for the community to be only open to Muslims.

Officials in Josephine declined to discuss the project, which has been a topic of conversation among local residents since last year.

“I heard about this at least six months ago,” said Pastor Wayne Slay of the First Baptist Church of Josephine, which has been at the center of the city since 1888. “I don’t think our church is going to go out and protest. I don’t think that’s an appropriate response.”

The development could be an opportunity to reach people for Jesus, Pastor Slay said. “Jesus says love your neighbor like yourself,” he said. “So why would I want to antagonize my neighbor?”

At the East Plano Islamic Center on a recent weekday, a mobile camera tower stood conspicuously in the middle of the parking lot. An armed guard watched the door while inside, elementary students at the faith-based elementary school played basketball on the center’s large hardwood courts.

The Islamic center in Plano resembles the kinds of large religious campuses — Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist — that are found all over the diverse suburbs of Dallas.

“People need to understand that Muslims here in Plano, we’re just like everyone else,” said Imam Bashir.

“We have doctors, we have engineers, we have professors, we have IT workers,” he said. “And we want what everyone wants,” he added, safe neighborhoods and good schools.

For funerals held in the mosque, there is a specialized room where the body can be washed and shrouded as per the religious ritual that includes prayers. What must be done to the body under Texas law is done under contract with a funeral home, said Mohamad Baajour, the mosque’s director of education.

But last month, the Texas Funeral Service Commission sent a cease-and-desist letter ordering the mosque to stop “funeral service operations” and making a criminal referral to the local district attorney.

Since then, the mosque has stopped holding funeral services, Mr. Cogdell said.

“I wish my words could get across to every single American,” said Imam Bashir, “and that is that if you have questions about our religion, come to us, sit down with us, talk to us, and we will tell you.”

The congregation has grown to several thousand from a few hundred when it began in the early 2000s. Andy Odom, the pastor at a nearby Presbyterian Church who has had regular breakfasts with Imam Bashir, said he found the community welcoming.

“They’ve done nothing but try and be the best neighbors to everyone around them,” he said. Amid the negative attention, Pastor Odom said he reached out to offer support. “I’ve been personally praying for them,” he said.

At the same time, Pastor Odom was hesitant about the proposed residential development, which he worried might appear to be an attempt to live separately. “I’m ambivalent about the project,” he said. “But I am not ambivalent about them as a mosque or community in our neighborhood.”



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In U.S.- China Tariffs Standoff, Trump Showed Xi He Has Limits

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In U.S.- China Tariffs Standoff, Trump Showed Xi He Has Limits


President Trump didn’t seem to mind as his worldwide tariffs set off stock market sell-offs and wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth.

“Be cool,” he told Americans.

Then he blinked on Wednesday afternoon in the face of financial turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields that could shake the dominant position of the dollar and the foundation of the U.S. economy. And late Friday, Mr. Trump exempted smartphones, computers, chips and other electronics from some of his tariffs on China.

By pausing some tariffs for dozens of countries for 90 days and exempting electronics from some of his tariffs, he also gave away something to his main rival, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with whom he has engaged in a game of chicken that risks decoupling the world’s two biggest economies and turning the global economic order upside down.

Mr. Xi learned that his adversary has a pain point.

As reckless and ruthless as Mr. Trump may seem to some parts of the world, in Mr. Xi and China he is squaring off with a leader and a party state that have a long history of single-minded pursuit of policies, even when they resulted in economic and human catastrophe.

Among Chinese, a consensus among both Beijing’s critics and its supporters is that the endgame may come down to which leader will be able to make his people endure misery in the name of the national interest.

“Tariffs and even economic sanctions are not Xi Jinping’s pressure points,” Hao Qun, an exiled Chinese novelist who writes under the name Murong Xuecun, wrote on X. “He is not particularly concerned about the hardships tariffs may cause for ordinary people.”

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Xi does not speak to the Chinese public through social media platforms, although he controls all of them. Everything he says and does is choreographed. It is impossible to get into his head because the public knows little about him beyond his official facade. But insights into how he might react in his standoff with Mr. Trump can be found by looking at how he views hardship, his relations with the Chinese public and his record as the leader of a nation of 1.4 billion people.

The Chinese internet is full of nationalistic chatters about the need to “resolutely fight back and stand our ground to the very end.”

People shared a video clip of Chairman Mao Zedong talking about the Korean War: “We will fight for as long as they want to fight, and we will fight until we win completely.”

Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, shared comments made by Chairman Mao in 1964, calling the United States “a paper tiger.” “Don’t believe its bluff,” Chairman Mao told a French Parliament delegation visiting China. “One poke, and it’ll burst!”

Some commentators online invoked the Great Leap Forward to show the Communist Party’s ability to enforce austerity at times of difficulty. The party waged the campaign between 1958 and 1962 to rapidly industrialize China. Its policies defied science and the laws of nature, resulting in a famine and tens of millions of deaths.

While starving people in the countryside were resorting to cannibalism, Chairman Mao instructed the farmers to eat grain bran and edible wild plants. “Endure hardship for one year, two years, even three years, and we’ll turn things around,” he said.

Mr. Xi, whom some Chinese view as Mao’s successor to the mantle, likes talking about the benefits of withstanding hardship.

Born in a revolutionary family, Mr. Xi experienced political turmoil and adversity at a young age. His father, a vice premier, was purged when Mr. Xi was 9 years old. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Xi’s father was severely persecuted. The son, not yet 16, had to move to a village deep in the Loess Plateau and work as a farmer.

“The seven tough years I spent living and working in the countryside were a great test for me,” he was quoted as saying in a long feature by the official Xinhua News Agency. “Whenever I encountered difficulties later on, I would think of how, even under such harsh conditions back then, I was still able to get things done.”

It was 2023, and China’s economy was struggling to recover from the Covid pandemic. Youth unemployment skyrocketed. Mr. Xi told young people that they should learn to “eat bitterness,” using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.

In a state media article about Mr. Xi’s expectations for the young generation, the word “hardship” was mentioned 37 times.

Early in 2022, it was evident that the Omicron variant was too contagious to contain, but that nearly all other countries that had embraced vaccines were able to reopen their economies. But Mr. Xi insisted that China live through his draconian “zero Covid” measures while resisting importing Western vaccines. Hundreds of millions of people endured lockdowns, daily tests and forced quarantines. Many lives and livelihoods were ruined.

In the past few years, Mr. Xi has resisted the calls of many economists and even his own officials to provide cash support to the public to boost consumption. In a 2021 speech, he urged against “welfarism,” saying, “Once welfare benefits go up, they don’t come back down.”

The truth is 600 million Chinese take home less than $140 a month and have minimum social benefits, a major reason they save so much and consume less than the economy needs.

Mr. Xi did end zero Covid eventually, but did so abruptly without proper vaccination. Many were quickly infected, seniors died and long lines formed outside crematories.

China’s chronic real estate meltdown seems to have finally pushed Mr. Xi closer to accepting the idea of helping consumers, although some economists believe it may be too late, especially in the face of the trade war.

Mr. Xi does have a pain point on the economy: He can’t let things get so bad that it jeopardizes the legitimacy of the party’s rule. Nationwide protests in November 2022 helped bring the zero Covid to an end. The tariffs threaten China’s exports, which are driving the country’s economy. On Friday, Mr. Xi made his first public comments about the tariff war.

“China’s development has always relied on self-reliance and hard work; never on the charity of others, and never fearing any unjust suppression,” he was quoted saying by the state media.

As the world learned this week, Mr. Trump cannot completely ignore the financial markets or the Wall Street and tech billionaires who supported his campaign. They reached out to his cabinet members to convey their concerns. Even loyalists like Elon Musk and William A. Ackman, the hedge fund manager, expressed their disagreement with the president’s tariff policies.

It’s hard to imagine that any Chinese entrepreneurs would dare to do the same or, like Mr. Musk, have the channel to convey their concerns to Mr. Xi, who has pushed aside his political opponents and cracked down on private companies. If Mr. Trump aspires for absolute power like Mr. Xi, he has a long way to go.

I have been checking Chinese social media the past few days hunting for any well-known company or entrepreneur complaining about the trade war. I found none. Ordinary people who lamented online that they faced pay cuts or lost business because of the tariffs were shot down by nationalistic commenters and labeled “unpatriotic.”

That’s a base Mr. Trump can’t compete with.

“Submitting to hegemony has never been an option for China,” a Weibo user wrote on Thursday. “If we could kick out the Americans during the Korean War, we have nothing to fear its tariff stick. We must respond with an iron fist.” The comment was liked more than 3,000 times.



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Did Trump Manipulate the Stock Market?

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Did Trump Manipulate the Stock Market?



President Trump’s post on social media caused the stock market to respond in an unusual way. Rob Copeland, a finance reporter for The New York Times, explains whether this could be considered market manipulation by the president.



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