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the new Brazil saw a former shoeshine boy and factory worker – Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – win the presidency in 2002. Now his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, herself a former political prisoner, is president. Their dual policy of generating rapid economic growth and providing generous social programs helped lift 30 million people into the middle class.

The symbolism of a black American president will encourage people here like nothing else,

Earl Browder, general secretary of the party during this period, dubbed communism “twentieth century Americanism.” The party devoted itself to fervent support of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and gave even more enthusiastic support to Stalin's purges and the counterrevolutionary terror

1956 and 1958 the majority of CP members, increasingly demoralized and lacking any clear analysis of the upheavals taking place within the Soviet bloc, simply left the party.

They remained unswerving in their support for the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy. Millions of American workers, students and youth found themselves well to the left of the misnamed Communist Party during the 1960s and 1970s. The CPUSA, or what remained of it, could always be relied upon—in the struggle for civil rights, the movement against the war in Vietnam, and upsurges of working class militancy—to prop up the AFL-CIO and the Democrats in the White House, Congress and state and local office.

The CP, in fact, has supported every Democratic candidate for US President from Roosevelt to Gore, with the single exception of the 1948 race,

The Stalinists barely complained of the AFL-CIO's record of corruption, strike-breaking and anti-immigrant chauvinism, and avidly backed its support for the Democratic Party representatives of big business. All they wanted was the opportunity to serve the American trade union bureaucracy as they had before the Cold War. Hall would often hark back to the days when the “center-left” alliance of Stalinists and labor bureaucrats worked in tandem for Roosevelt.

Breeding in American zoos has done little to improve genetic diversity, experts say, because China typically sends abroad animals whose genes are already well represented in the population.

Yet American zoos clamor for pandas, and China eagerly provides them. Zoos get attention and attendance. Chinese breeders get cash bonuses for every cub, records show. At the turn of the century, 126 pandas lived in captivity. Today there are more than 700.

Kati Loeffler, a veterinarian, worked at a panda breeding center in Chengdu, China, during the program’s early years. “I remember standing there with the cicadas screaming in the bamboo,” she said. “I realized, ‘Oh my God, my job here is to turn the well-being and conservation of pandas into financial gain.’”

Kimberly Terrell, who was director of conservation at the Memphis Zoo until 2017, said, “There was always pressure and the implication that cubs would bring money.” She noted that zoo administrators insisted on inseminating its aging female panda every year, despite concerns among zookeepers that it was unlikely to succeed. It never did.

“The people who actually worked day to day with these animals, who understand them best, were pretty opposed to these procedures,” she said. The zoo said its breeding efforts followed all program requirements.

The Times collected key documents and audiovisual materials from the Smithsonian archives and supplemented them with materials obtained through open-records requests. The trove, which spans four decades, includes medical records, scientists’ field notes and photographs and videos that offer crucial evidence of breeding procedures, side effects and the conditions in which pandas were held.

They show that the riskiest techniques happened in the program’s infancy, but that aggressive breeding continued at the National Zoo and at other institutions for years. A panda in Japan died during sperm collection in 2010. Chinese breeding centers, until recently, separated cubs from their mothers to make the females go back into heat.

This panda proliferation has prompted debates among zoo workers and scientists over whether it is ethical to subject animals to intensive breeding when they have no real prospect of being released into the wild. But those discussions have largely played out privately because researchers and zookeepers said that criticizing the program could hurt their ability to work in the field.

when a species is on the verge of extinction, conservationists sometimes make a last-ditch effort to save it.

with pandas, zoo administrators take chances again and again simply to make more cubs, while keeping the grimmest details from the public.