Poland’s presidential election was a fight between two distinct visions of the country’s future. Our correspondent explains how the nationalist victor, a political newcomer, will shape Europe. Why drunken bar brawls are declining in Britain (7:31). And remembering the “Wonga Coup” mercenary, Simon Mann (12:18).
A.M. Edition for June 2. Beijing points to recent export controls on AI chips and a crackdown on student visas in contending the U.S. broke a tariff reprieve between the two countries. Plus, Poland elects a conservative leader with ties to President Trump, breaking a streak of victories by centrists across Europe. And reporter Vicky Ge Huang joins us from a major bitcoin summit as the crypto industry shows off its newfound sway in Washington. Luke Vargas hosts.
A new COVID subvariant is spreading in California just as the Trump administration moves to ease vaccine access. Meanwhile, one San Diego avocado farmer is battling climate change, Mexican imports, and industry politics to save California’s iconic crop. On the economic front, inflation cooled last month, but experts say new tariffs could reverse that trend. And a judge dismissed the high-profile lawsuit from Richard Montañez over the origin of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual.
What he finds is not as straightforward as the headlines alluded to above. Take China and its remarkable ascent and how that impacted the United States.
“[The rise] benefited a lot of people. It lowered prices. It allowed American companies to kind of produce a lot of products more cheaply. You know, it's hard to imagine Apple's growth without China, for example, to do all that assembly, which would have been extremely expensive to do in the United States. At the same time, it displaced a lot of people, more than a million, and in a very geographically and temporarily concentrated way, extremely scarring the labor market. Now those people also got lower prices, but that's not even remote compensation for what they lost. And now there are new jobs -- even in those places where those trade shock occurs -- but it's not really the same people doing them. It's not the people who lost manufacturing work.”
Concerns about these shocks have been widespread in the 2020s, but the tough if erratic talk about tariffs coming from the U.S. president centers on the idea of restoring something (while ignoring question of that thing ever existed or if it makes sense to go back). Autor argues that the administration actually is asking the right question – but they are arriving at the wrong answers, He notes that the U.S. currently has a half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs open already, a sizeable figure relative to the nation’s 13 million manufacturing workers. But that number itself is roughly a tenth of China’s 120 million.
“We cannot compete with them across every front. .. What we should be very deeply worried about is losing the frontier sectors that we currently maintain. Those are threatened. So aircraft, telecommunications, robotics, power generation, fusion, quantum computing, batteries and storage, electric vehicles, shipping. These are sectors that we still have (except for shipping, actually) but China is making incredibly fast progress, and instead of trying to get commodity furniture back, we need to think about the current war we're in, not the last war.”
At MIT, Autor is co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, while off campus he is a research associate and co-director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
A Times investigation has found that as Elon Musk became one of President Trump’s closest and most influential advisers, he was juggling an increasingly chaotic personal life and a drug habit far more serious than previously known.
Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey, two investigative reporters at The New York Times, discuss why those closest to Mr. Musk are finally sounding the alarm.
Guest:
Kirsten Grind, an investigative business reporter at The New York Times.
Megan Twohey, an investigative reporter at The New York Times.
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
Photo: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Professor Frank Close looks at how the quest to understand radioactivity and the atomic nucleus was initially fired by scientific curiosity and then by more human motives. What began as collaboration between scientists in the pursuit of atomic energy was overwhelmed by politics and opened the way to the possibility of nuclear war. Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965 shows how scientific knowledge is often advanced by personal convictions and relationships and takes us into the rooms where discoveries and decisions were made.
Nuclear energy is the most promising tool that we have to tackle the climate emergency, so argues Tim Gregory in his new book Going Nuclear How the Atom Will Save the World. He says it is time to debunk the myths about nuclear waste and radiation and that nuclear power is reliable and safe. Harnessing the atom is our best hope of providing abundant and clean energy to ensure an equitable and prosperous future.
For Baroness Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green Party, nuclear has been a continual disaster. As an energy source nuclear it has been impractical, inflexible and unreliable; a dinosaur technology whose use has declined. She believes that the continued appearance of nuclear in policy debates is a distraction from renewables and energy conservation. She believes that we have not found an adequate solution to the problem of nuclear waste. And in the field of defence, the majority of countries want a ban on nuclear weapons.
Presenter: Shahidha Bari
Producer: Ruth Watts
Multiple demonstrators at a march to support Israeli hostages suffer burn injuries after the FBI says a suspect used a makeshift flamethrower and yelled, “Free Palestine.” Ukraine launches a surprise attack deep inside Russia using smuggled shipping containers and drones. And massive Canadian wildfires prompt evacuations and concerns about air quality in the U.S.
Facial recognition systems use artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in faces, and they've come under increasing scrutiny, particularly in policing. There have been multiple instances of false positives leading to the arrest and detainment of innocent people. There's no federal regulation of this technology, but at least a dozen states have laws that limit its use. So, some law enforcement authorities have turned to a new system called Track, made by a company called Veritone. It doesn't analyze faces, but looks to the rest of the body for clues — things like clothing, body type or hair — according to recent reporting by James O'Donnell for MIT Technology Review.
A terrorist assaults and injures several, including children, with molotov cocktails at a walking event in support of the remaining Hamas-held hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
Legacy media outlets like CNN, CBS, and the Washington Post are lambasted for dishonest news coverage.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz calls on Democrats to change tactics by being “meaner.”
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