The Evening: Uvalde failure was ‘unimaginable,’ Justice Department finds

Also, a slowdown in fighting in northern Gaza.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story January 18, 2024 By Matthew Cullen Good evening. Here's the latest at the end of Thursday. The Justice Department's Uvalde report Slowdown in northern Gaza fighting Plus, where (and how) to travel in 2024 Surveillance footage from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. The New York Times 'Unimaginable failure' in Uvalde response A near-total breakdown in policing protocols hindered the response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 that left 21 people dead, the Justice Department concluded today after a nearly two-year investigation. "Lives would have been saved, and people could have survived" if officers had not refused to rapidly confront the killer, Attorney General Merrick Garland said. The department blamed "cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training" for a passive law enforcement response that allowed an 18-year-old gunman to remain inside Robb Elementary School for more than an hour before he was confronted and killed. (Here's a minute-by-minute timeline of the 78-minute ordeal.) The most significant failure, investigators concluded, was the decision by local police officials to classify the incident as a barricaded standoff rather than an "active-shooter" scenario, which would have demanded instant and aggressive action. Most of the officials in charge that day have been fired or have retired. The nearly 600-page report, compiled from 260 interviews and 14,000 documents and videos, is the most comprehensive assessment to date of a killing spree that continues to haunt Uvalde. Vanita Gupta, a top Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation, said the shooting caused "a loss of faith and trust" in law enforcement. "It was an unimaginable failure," she added. Palestinians on the Al-Rashid coast road after crossing from northern to southern Gaza, today. Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock Fighting has eased in northern Gaza Israel has dialed back its military campaign in the northern Gaza Strip, where Israeli officials say their military succeeded in degrading Hamas's local battalions. Airstrikes are no longer as common and many Israeli troops have pulled out of the area. Residents there have said they can now walk around without the sounds of guns or explosions. Northern Gaza is largely in ruins, with entire neighborhoods rendered unrecognizable and displaced Palestinians squatting in abandoned homes. Food is scarce and few aid shipments are reaching the north. Makeshift markets have popped up with vendors selling what many residents presume are stolen goods. In related news, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to rule out a postwar peace process that would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney. Kenny Holston/The New York Times Trump prosecutor in Georgia tries to quash a subpoena Fani Willis, the district attorney in Georgia prosecuting a criminal case against Donald Trump, is trying to quash a subpoena seeking her testimony in the divorce proceedings of a prosecutor she hired to manage the case. Last week, she was accused of having an improper romantic relationship with the prosecutor, Nathan Wade. In a legal filing today, Willis said there was no reason for her to testify because both Wade and his wife had declared their marriage to be "irretrievably broken." Willis also accused Wade's wife of conspiring with one of Trump's co-defendants "to annoy, embarrass and oppress" her. Separately, my colleague Richard Fausset obtained emails in which Willis and another member of her team suggested that some of Trump's lawyers were disrespecting them because they are Black. "In the legal community (and the world at large)," Willis wrote, "some people will never be able to respect African Americans." The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in January 2020. Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Chinese scientists sent Covid's code to the U.S. in late 2019 Chinese scientists sent eight pages of the coronavirus's genetic code to a U.S. data repository on Dec. 28, 2019, according to new documents released by House Republicans. That was two days before Chinese officials warned of an unexplained pneumonia sickening patients in Wuhan. With the importance of the code not yet clear, the U.S. never published the submission and instead asked for more details. It took two more weeks until other scientists put the code online, setting off a frantic effort to build tests and vaccines. That delay reinforced questions about when China learned of the virus that was causing its unexplained outbreak — and about gaps in the American system of monitoring dangerous pathogens. More top news Congress: Both the House and the Senate passed a spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown one day before the deadline. Yemen: For the fifth time in a week, the U.S. attacked Houthi anti-ship missiles. Trump: A judge in Washington State said the former president could remain on the state's primary ballot. Abortion: Reproductive-rights groups are campaigning to establish a right to abortion in Missouri, the first state to officially outlaw abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Politics: Nikki Haley's chance to beat Donald Trump in New Hampshire depends on her ability to win over its freethinking voters. Weather: Bitter cold is forecast for much of the U.S. tomorrow. Pakistan: After strikes within its borders by Iran, Pakistan said it had carried out airstrikes on locations 30 miles inside the Iranian border. Environment: California farms dried up the Merced River for months. Nobody stopped them. Education: Spelman College said it had received a $100 million donation, which it called the largest-ever single gift to a historically Black college. Health: New research suggests a daily vitamin can improve cognition. But that doesn't mean everyone should take it. TIME TO UNWIND Chanelle Nibbelink What travelers should expect in 2024 This year, London, Paris, Las Vegas and Tokyo will assuredly see an influx of tourists. But after a rush to hot spots last year following the pandemic's peak — which were especially warm during the summer — some travelers are now looking for cooler, less crowded destinations. Top picks include Norway and Denmark, or even Malta. Unfortunately, international ticket prices are rising. But travel is easing in other ways: A.I. bots could help you plan, biometrics will expand at airports and hotels will adopt more residential features. For more, check out all of our 2024 travel predictions. Crystal Hefner at her home in Los Angeles. Amy Harrity for The New York Times Life outside the mansion Hugh Hefner died more than six years ago, and around the same time, Crystal Hefner, his third and last wife, moved out of the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. But she is still adjusting to life on the outside. Next week, she will step back into the public view with a tell-all memoir titled "Only Say Good Things." In the book, Hefner re-examines her initiation into the Playboy world, details the objectification and misogyny she said she experienced under Hefner, and mines the trauma that she's still processing. Harrison Dyar's tunnels in Dupont Circle in Washington in 1924. Library of Congress Dinner table topics Just keep digging: Hobby tunneling is a rare, but storied, pastime. One man dug for 40 years before he was discovered. Better not laugh: An Amazon Prime comedy show in which contestants try not to crack up has spawned spinoffs in more than a dozen countries. An expert's struggles: The sex educator Emily Nagoski wrote a best seller on women's sex lives. Then her own fell apart. A reader asked: A fellow cop let my father-in-law slide on a breathalyzer test. What should I do? Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT WHAT TO DO TONIGHT Scott Loitsch and Vaughn Vreeland/The New York Times Cook: This buffalo chicken dip is a quick one-pan snack. Read: "Gator Country" is one of the nine new books that our editors recommend. Listen: Our music critic picked eight songs to get you excited about upcoming albums. Nourish: Nuts and seeds are nutritional powerhouses. Cut back: There are easy ways to reduce your screen time. Scrape: Wirecutter found the best snow brush to keep in your car. Hunt: Which Manhattan apartment would you buy with an $800,000 budget? Play: Here are today's Spelling Bee, Wordle and Mini Crossword. Find all our games here. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ONE LAST THING A sign in Boston urges drivers to "Use Yah Blinkah" when changing lanes. Associated Press/Michael Dwyer Don't laugh and drive American highways for several years have been scattered with humorous safety messages that get drivers to chuckle (or groan). In Iowa there was "Texting & Driving? Oh Cell No!" In New Jersey, drivers were warned to "Slow Down. This Ain't Thunder Road." The federal government now wants to get rid of them. In the latest guidance, officials warned that attempts at humor or pop culture references can be distracting or misunderstood. But amid conflicting research, some states said they plan to keep them up. Have a witty evening. Thanks for reading. I'll be back tomorrow. — Matthew We welcome your feedback. Write to us at evening@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Writer: Matthew Cullen Editorial Director: Adam Pasick Editors: Carole Landry, Whet Moser, Justin Porter, Jonathan Wolfe Photo Editor: Brent Lewis Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for The Evening from The New York Times. To stop receiving The Evening, unsubscribe. To opt out of other promotional emails from The Times, including those regarding The Athletic, manage your email settings. To opt out of updates and offers sent from The Athletic, submit a request. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

Already Hot, the Middle East Gets Even Hotter

More cross-border conflict and the continuing risk of wider war, plus: Russia sets in; Guatemala's 'Jan. 6 in reverse'; and where chaos can be found …

View this email in your browser  Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good   Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.   January 18, 2024 Already Hot, the Middle East Gets Even Hotter Will the Middle East explode into a full-blown regional war? 2024 has featured disquieting developments. This week has brought even more.   On Tuesday, Iran struck sites in Syria, Pakistan, and northern Iraq—Tehran claimed the last was an Israeli intelligence base—flexing itself as "a missile power in the world," as Iran's defense minister told reporters. Pakistan has since struck back. (At Bloomberg, Ismail Dilawar and Patrick Sykes explain that the Iranian and Pakistani strikes have revealed bilateral tension and have heightened fears of regional conflict, but Iran and Pakistan typically have cordial relations, and each country said it had struck at Baloch separatist militants in the other's territory, not at government or national-military targets.)   The US, meanwhile, has continued an air campaign begun last Friday in conjunction with the UK against Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militants, who have attacked international shipping in the Red Sea. As Ben Watson notes in Defense One's The D Brief newsletter, Charles Lister of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy tweeted to point out an "insane scale of cross-border conflict" in the Middle East just in the last week.    What to make of all this? Some analysts see a dance of warning and deterrence between the US, Israel, and Iran.   "US strikes on Houthi positions inside Yemen aim to deter the militant group, and its Iranian backers, from any serious escalation in the Red Sea," writes Middle East Institute President and CEO Paul Salem, in a roundup of expert analysis. "In Iraq and Syria, US attacks on militias allied with Iran carry the same message. In all three of those arenas, the jury is still out as to whether this deterrence is working." At CNN Opinion, Yemen expert Elisabeth Kendall told Peter Bergen that the Houthis are particularly difficult to deter, as they're independent and accustomed to war. Elsewhere at CNN, Tamara Qiblawi has written that amid current conflicts with Israel and the West, the "popularity" of these Iran-backed groups "has soared in the region. They have largely redeemed themselves in a galvanized Arab and Muslim street, after having been mired in internal politics and plagued by allegations of corruption for years."   Comfortingly, as the Middle East Institute's Salem writes, Iran does not seem to want a full-on war with the US and Israel. "A policy of what we can call 'limited and measured escalation' suits Iran just fine," Salem writes. "It does not want a large flare-up … but it hopes that raising and sustaining the costs for the US in the region is both popular in Arab and Muslim public opinion and unpopular with American voters in an election year." Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft observes the same to CNN's Qiblawi: "The Iranians are trying to stay out of a war. Their population absolutely does not want a war." Russia Sets In The front lines in Ukraine may be stalemated, but that stalemate leaves Russia in control of much Ukrainian territory: 17.92% of it, according to Institute for the Study of War geospatial-intelligence researcher Daniel Mealie.   As Russian control persists in those areas, so has a project of Russification, David Lewis writes for Foreign Affairs: "An army of (pro-Moscow) technocrats is overseeing the complete absorption of these territories, aligning their laws, regulations, and tax and banking systems with Russia, and getting rid of any traces of institutional ties to Ukraine. ... In occupied Ukraine, bureaucrats have been effective at enforcing the compliance of locals. Even as some people resist, authorities impose Russian education, cultural indoctrination, and economic and legal systems to rope these lands ever more tightly to Russia. The longer Russia occupies these territories, the harder it will be for Ukraine to get them back. ... At schools in the Russian occupied areas, children cannot avoid the propaganda. They are forced to sing the Russian national anthem every week. Schools have completely switched over to using Russian curriculum, with Ukrainian reduced to an optional second language. ... Most people simply try to get by without ending up 'in the basement,' as locals term the grim brutality of Russian detention." Guatemala's 'Jan. 6 in Reverse' In December, commentators noted a dramatic test of democracy unfolding in the Western hemisphere. In Guatemala, as Frida Ghitis described the situation at the World Politics Review and as Graciela Mochofsky similarly relayed at The New Yorker, victorious reformist presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo faced stacked odds as the established order, widely seen as corrupt, sought to block his inauguration following his August election win. An unlikely Indigenous-led protest movement supported his assumption of power in keeping with the vote results.   After Arévalo was sworn in as president on Monday, Ghitis revisits the story at the World Politics Review, hailing the "survival of Guatemala's weak democracy" and finding a positive lesson: "News about attempts to subvert democracy have become a staple of our time. The phenomenon is dispiriting, to say the least. But amid this deeply worrisome trend, it's easy to miss one encouraging development: Those attempts appear to be failing with some regularity. And they have been failing because those who support democracy are getting better at defending it."   At Persuasion, Quico Toro invokes the above headline, drawing a similar conclusion and lamenting that global media haven't paid more attention. Toro writes: "Ahead of last summer's vote, every high-profile reformist candidate was disqualified from the ballot on one technicality or another. It was a very obvious stitch-up … only they left one loose end: A single, mostly-unknown reformer—an egghead former diplomat and academic—was polling so low, the pacto de corruptos didn't even bother disqualifying him. His name was Bernardo Arévalo. Nobody had heard of him. Two days ago, Bernardo Arévalo was sworn in as president. … (T)he story has everything: enough plot twists and 11th-hour reversals to read like a tropical House of Cards, only with the good guys coming out on top. Amid a million stories of democratic backsliding everywhere … here's this tiny poor country showing us the way regular people, indigenous people, can fight back against the enemies of democracy and win. It sounds like a movie. But it's real." Random Rules The world is a crazy place. At The Atlantic, Brian Klaas reminds us of the bearing that chaos theory—in lay terms, the study of randomness—has on world affairs, revisiting what became known popularly as the "butterfly effect": small, seemingly inconsequential events influencing big ones through chain reactions. As a case in point, Klaas notes that Kyoto avoided the atomic bomb because US war secretary Henry Stimson had vacationed there with his wife in 1926 and, having fallen in love with it, lobbied President Harry Truman directly to remove the city from America's nuclear target list.   In the course of exploring this intellectual terrain, Klaas advances a theory about human life and the locations of order and disorder. Klaas writes: "For most of the 250,000 or so years that Homo sapiens have graced the planet, things ticked along more or less the same way from one generation to the next. Day to day, however, life was dangerous and unpredictable. Childbirth was a death trap. Starvation was a constant threat … Most of the human story is one of local instability but global stability. … Today the dynamic is inverted. Most people in rich, industrialized societies live according to routines, patterns, and a rigid sense of daily order. In one study, researchers using geolocation data from cellphones found that they could predict, with 93 percent accuracy, where a given person would be at any specific time of day. But the familiar routines take place within a superstructure that is constantly shifting. Children now teach parents how to use technology, not the reverse. Three decades ago, few people had heard of the internet; now no one can function without it. We have the opposite of our ancestors: local stability, but global instability. In this upside-down world, Starbucks remains unchanged while rivers dry up and democracies collapse." What did you think of today's newsletter? 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