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However, two-thirds of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of evangelicals think wedding vendors should be allowed to deny service. While 60 percent of women oppose denying service, only a 48 percent plurality of men do.

A majority (54%) of white evangelical Protestants oppose same-sex marriage, although a significant minority (43%) now expresses support

“There is continued strong support for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and non-discrimination laws. More than seven in ten (72%) Americans favor laws that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from discrimination in jobs, public accommodation, and housing.

As for transgender people serving in the military, the partisan divide reappears, with Democrats “more than twice as likely as Republicans (83% vs. 37%, respectively) to say that transgender people ought to be allowed to serve in the armed forces.

On same-sex marriage, we see a familiar pattern: “Nearly two-thirds (66%) of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally, while fewer than one-third (28%) oppose.

Support for such service refusals has increased since earlier this year. In February 2017, two-thirds (64%) opposed allowing small businesses to refuse goods or services to gay and lesbian people, compared to fewer than one-third (32%) who supported such actions. …

“A majority (53%) of Republicans, two-thirds (67%) of independents, and more than eight in ten (81%) Democrats oppose allowing religiously affiliated adoption agencies that receive federal funding to refuse to place children with gay and lesbian couples.

The percentage of evangelicals who would prevent gay couples from adopting is 63 percent.

In sum, evangelicals and Republicans more generally are increasingly out of step with other Americans on issues affecting the LGBT community. Once commanding an overwhelming majority of opinion, these Americans may well feel as though the culture has “declined” or they have “lost something.”

Among partisans, 21% of Democrats agreed with the statement to some extent compared to 63% of Republicans. Conversely, 59% of Democrats disagreed (47% strongly) while just 17% of Republicans disagreed.

Sixty-three percent of Republicans strongly or somewhat agree that whites are under attack.

a very large number of evangelicals, and even more Republicans in general, are convinced it is true. That may also account for high levels of opposition to immigrants among these groups.

Other polling by PRRI also shows that these two groups are much less likely to believe minorities suffer from discrimination.

If enacted, Mexico would join Canada and Uruguay in a small but growing list of countries that have legalized marijuana in the Americas, adding further momentum to the legalization movement in the region. In the United States, Democrats in the Senate have also promised to scrap federal prohibition of the drug this year.

Critics say it is unlikely to make a serious dent in Mexico’s soaring rates of cartel-fueled violence, and argue that it is unwelcome in a country where nearly two-thirds of people oppose legalizing marijuana, according to recent polling.

Security experts agree that the law’s practical impact on violence will likely be minimal: With 15 American states having now legalized marijuana, they argue, the crop has become a relatively small part of the Mexican drug trafficking business, with cartels focusing on more profitable products like fentanyl and methamphetamines.

Legalization “is an important step toward building peace in a country like ours, where for at least a decade or more, we’ve been immersed in an absurd war,” said Lucía Riojas Martínez

“But this bill falls short of achieving that,” she added.

“Doing this right could give Mexico an economic surplus,” he said.

“It’s a law for the rich, and marijuana should be for everybody,” said Ivania Medina Rodríguez, 18, a local activist. “They’re going for business before rights.”

Some activists fear that the law will overly favor large corporations that could obtain what the bill terms an “integral license,” giving them access to the entire marijuana supply chain, from seed to sale, while leaving small-scale producers and vendors locked out of the lucrative market.

“We live in a country where corruption and extortion is the norm,” said Zara Snapp, co-founder of the RIA Institute, a Mexico-city based drug policy research and advocacy group.

The top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee argued that the new guidance from Cordray "bows to the whims of state-based Democrat politicians who are more interested in putting companies out of business than helping struggling student loan borrowers."

The new federal student aid policy is one of several changes the Biden administration has made in Department o Education policy. In March, the department reversed a controversial Trump-era policy that will lead to the cancellation of roughly $1 billion in student debt for borrowers who were defrauded by their colleges.

The Biden administration, however, is still facing pressure by some congressional Democrats to forgive $50,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. Advocacy groups are also calling for a complete overhaul of the current borrower defense process.

It believes the hackers are part of the same Russian group behind last year's devastating attack on SolarWinds -- a software vendor -- that targeted at least nine US federal agencies and 100 companies.

The White House's National Security Council and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are both aware of the incident, according to spokespeople. CISA is "working with the FBI and USAID to better understand the extent of the compromise and assist potential victims," a spokesperson said.

When asked about the United States' ability to get ahead of any further cyberattacks, Austin told Starr on Friday it is his responsibility to present President Joe Biden with offensive options.

Cybersecurity has been a major focus for the US government following the revelations that hackers had put malicious code into a tool published by SolarWinds. A ransomware attack that shut down one of America's most important pieces of energy infrastructure — the Colonial Pipeline — earlier this month has only heightened the sense of alarm. That attack was carried out by a criminal group originating in Russia, according to the FBI.

"I'm confident that we can continue to do what's necessary to not only compete, but stay ahead in this in this, in this domain."

The main work will fall to governors and state legislators, mayors and city councils, county executives and commissioners, school superintendents and boards.

While they fend off padded proposals from vendors, the normal political process churns toward what policy wonks call the “peanut butter spread” problem — in other words, giving everyone something, yet falling short of lasting change.

Putting these principles into action, we’d focus on serving the children who have suffered most from the pandemic. School closures, parents’ job losses and social isolation have set back children in ways we are only starting to understand. Here’s just one stunning example: The share of Virginia’s early elementary students at high-risk for reading failure increased by more than 50 percent this fall, with the biggest increase seen among children who are Black, Latino, or poor

Rescue Plan dollars can meet all these challenges. Start with lead: As part of his infrastructure plan, Mr. Biden has committed to eliminating all lead service pipes. But there’s no reason to wait for that bill to pass, and we can’t focus on pipes alone. In addition to some nine million U.S. homes with lead service lines, 24 million homes (built before 1978), including four million with young children, have lead-based paint hazards. Lead exposure in children — from inhaling the dust or eating the paint — may lead to reductions in educational outcomes and potentially criminal behavior. This is a perfect use of Rescue Plan dollars: one-time, proven impact and huge results for those at greatest risk.

We know these connections are crucial so families get the help they need when they need it. The platform also generates data essential to determining the results investments are getting.

The counterfeit products are being marketed to people who need to board planes, cross borders,

just like on the real ones

"vendors are capable of pumping out fake vaccination cards by the thousands, if not tens of thousands,

negative Covid-19 test results for $25 (or "buy 2, get the third for free").

roll-outs are slow in many countries, and people are tired of lock-downs and curfews,

"If people can easily get hold of a fake passport to avoid restrictions, then they will

Unless they united around changing Senate rules, which now require 60 votes for most bills to advance, their chance to enshrine expansive voting protections could quickly slip away.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., making a rare appearance at a hearing, said Wednesday it took “mighty movements and decades of fraught political conflict” to achieve the basic dignities of current election laws and “any American who thinks that the fight for a full and fair democracy is over, is sadly and sorely mistaken.”

“In the end, that insurrection was about an angry mob working to undermine our democracy,” Klobuchar said. “And it reminds all of us how very fragile our democracy truly is, and how it is on all of us to not just protect that democracy, but to ensure that it thrives.”

the Senate legislation would create automatic voter registration nationwide, allow former felons to vote, and limit the ways states can remove registered voters from their rolls. It would expand voting by mail, promote early voting and give states money to track absentee ballots. Millions of people took advantage of those practices during the pandemic last year — and after some Republican states tried to restrict them in favor of voting in person.

The bill would increase oversight for election vendors and boost support for state voting system upgrades after Russia attempted to breach some of those systems in the 2016 election. It would overhaul federal oversight of campaign finance and encourage small donations to campaigns, while requiring more disclosure of political donations.

Testifying at the hearing, former Attorney General Eric Holder, who served under President Barack Obama, said the legislation would help fight politicians who want to maintain an “unjust status quo.”

“The events of the past few months have brought into stark focus what has been true for too long: There is a large and powerful faction in this country intent on retaining power and who will bend or break the rules of our democracy in order to do so,” Holder said.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a longtime opponent of restrictive campaign finance laws, also made a rare hearing appearance, sitting across the dais from Schumer. He said the bill is full of “silly new mandates” that would create “an invitation to chaos” for states that would have to put them in place.

Lacking the 60 votes needed for passage, Democrats have discussed options like lowering the threshold to break a filibuster, or potentially breaking the bill into pieces. For now, Democrats have suggested they will start with bringing up potentially popular proposals like the voting rights measure and expanded gun background checks and let them fail, forcing Republicans to go on the record in opposition.

Republicans called West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner to testify in opposition to the bill. He said the legislation would force his state and others to follow “arbitrary guidelines, most of which are impossible or unattainable under the deadlines.” He urged the senators to “leave election administration up to the states.”

nnual sales in excess of $86 billion.

Until recently, Mr. Ma, who is a Communist Party member, was held up as a role model by the Party for his contribution to the “digital economy.”

Regulators regarded the speech as a direct attack against them, and Ant’s public debut was halted just two days before its big day, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally intervening to scuttle the market listing,

spoke at a financial forum in Shanghai.

delivered a speech that was highly critical of Chinese regulators, who he said had stifled innovation in the financial industry.

Shortly after the speech, regulators scrapped a planned initial public offering of Ant that would have been the world’s largest to date, raising more than $34 billion from listings in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Mr. Ma last appeared publicly in late October,

Beijing is now looking to shrink Mr. Ma’s technology and financial empire and potentially take a larger stake in his businesses,

Alibaba is now facing an antitrust probe by Chinese market regulators, who are investigating claims that the company abused its dominant position in the e-commerce industry to pressure some merchants to work only with its platforms.

In November last year, Mr. Ma didn’t appear on an episode of a television show in which he was set to appear as a judge,

An Alibaba spokeswoman said his absence was due to a scheduling conflict, and declined to comment on Mr. Ma’s activities.

t isn’t uncommon for Chinese billionaires to disappear from the public eye for long periods during legal and regulatory investigations.

I

Its market capitalization dropped in the final days of 2020 to less than $600 billion, from a high of $859 billion just before the Ant IPO was scuttled.

Alibaba owns one-third of Ant. Its shares have fallen by a further 2% so far in 2021.

Mr Trump and his supporters allege that Mr Biden abused his power to persuade Ukraine to back away from a criminal investigation that could implicate his son, Hunter, who worked for a Ukrainian energy company.

"I don't think Donald Trump has done any impeachable offence that's a high crime or misdemeanour.

The president's supporters don't believe there is any substance to the allegations against him.

They've tried to impeach Trump since before he was in office. It's not really the Democratic Party - it's just anti-Republican. If they want an official investigation, they should just go to the courts and do it."

If Trump treats his rallies like a rock concert, these are the devoted hardcore fans, buying merchandise as vendors walk past with badges and t-shirts. There's a cardboard cut out Trump people are posing for pictures with.

She also says only "high crimes and misdemeanours" are impeachable offences.

If Obama had that same conversation would any of this be coming up? The answer is 100% no. That's all it is. They're out to get him.

By the 2010s, the once-bipartisan organization had become almost completely Republican in its orientation, hardening political divides. Republicans coveted its money — the N.R.A. donated $20 million to six Republican Senate candidates in the 2016 election cycle — but also its ability to rally grass-roots support with endorsements and independent expenditure advertising campaigns.

Over the years, the N.R.A. had become more nonprofit in theory than in practice. Revenue passed $350 million last year, with some prodigious donors continuing into the afterlife

In 2017, eight N.R.A. executives outearned the head of the American Red Cross, another tax-exempt organization, and one with 10 times the revenue, according to a previous analysis by The New York Times

LaPierre’s compensation rose from less than $200,000 a year in the mid-1990s to more than $2.2 million in 2018. Oversight has been complicated by paydays to the 76-member board:

Ackerman lawyers, in court filings, called NRATV “LaPierre’s brainchild,” and said he “routinely urged” the company to “give him ‘more gasoline,’ ” seeking more “notoriety for the N.R.A.

Richard Feldman, a former N.R.A. lobbyist, once explained the challenges to me more bluntly: “The worse it is for the people you represent,” he said, “the better it is for you.”

When Donald Trump emerged as a presidential front-runner in 2016, the N.R.A. spent $30 million to help him get elected, much of it on attack ads warning that Hillary Clinton would “leave you defenseless.”

Brewer decided to take the case. Whatever he felt about the N.R.A., he said, he saw a principle at stake. Government investigators should not target political enemies. “People were not only crossing the lines that are appropriately drawn by our Constitution,” he said, “they were aggressively determined to blur, cross, obliterate those lines. And you know what? If they could do it to those guys, they could do it to me. They could do it to all of us.”

In the early days of the relationship, McQueen worked to soften the N.R.A.’s rough edges. “We’re advertising people, we’re optimists,” McQueen, who died at 74 in July after a struggle with lung cancer, once said in a speech. “Our work fills the spaces that distract the eye from tragedy.”

In recent years, however, that work became increasingly dark, promoting the N.R.A. as the last defense against a threatening world. The apocalyptic promotional effort reached its apotheosis with NRATV, an online streaming service that evolved beyond gun rights into a sort of paranoid-lifestyle channel.

While the N.R.A. had faced many legal troubles over the years, the February 2018 attack, in which a former student murdered 14 students and three staff members with a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle, had renewed widespread revulsion toward efforts to block gun-control measures. Corporations fled. United and Delta airlines, along with the car-rental giant Enterprise Holdings, stopped offering discounts to N.R.A. members, and the First National Bank of Omaha stopped offering an N.R.A.-branded Visa card.

LaPierre, for his part, told me that the relationship “started to go wrong when they” — McQueen — “started NRATV.” While he was initially supportive, he said he and other N.R.A. officials found some content disturbing. In a court filing, the N.R.A. complained that it had spent millions of dollars on a network “viewed as a dystopian cultural rant that deterred membership growth.

Ackerman now says in court filings that “several millions of dollars annually” in expenses for N.R.A. officials were run through the company, adding that LaPierre “made false representations” about expenses used “for his own personal benefit.

When the N.R.A.’s 2017 tax filings were released last year, they showed a nearly-tapped-out $25 million line of credit, backed in part by the deed to its Fairfax headquarters, and that the N.R.A. borrowed against insurance policies taken out on executives. Gun-control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords were ascendant, amid outrage about mass shootings, and they outspent the N.R.A. in midterm elections.

Both the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Texas Association of Defense Counsel were among those who filed a joint amicus brief against Brewer. “It’s very unusual that a defense bar and a plaintiffs’ bar agree on an issue so much that they file a consolidated brief,” said Brian Lauten, lead attorney on the amicus brief. “The conduct of Bill Brewer directly threatens that constitutional right to a fair and impartial jury.”

Housing in the best cities has become too expensive for first-time buyers

Young people who have borrowed from a new generation of online lenders, like Mr. Ma’s Ant Group, have debts they increasingly resent.

For all of China’s economic success, a long-running resentment of the rich, sometimes called the wealthy-hating complex, has long bubbled below the surface. With Mr. Ma, it has emerged with a vengeance.

“An outstanding people’s billionaire like Jack Ma will definitely be hanged on top of the lamppost,”

The Communist Party seems more than willing to tap into that resentment. This could mean trouble ahead for entrepreneurs and private businesses

Some businesspeople say that the hostility toward Ant and Mr. Ma makes them wonder about the fundamental direction of the country.

“You can either have absolute control or you can have a dynamic, innovative economy,”

Mr. Ma has his own high-profile philanthropic projects, like several initiatives in rural education and a prize to help develop entrepreneurial talent in Africa.

He has long enjoyed a better reputation than his peers in manufacturing, real estate and other industries whose edge may derive from cultivating close government ties, ignoring the environmental rules or exploiting employees.

He is as famous for making bold statements and challenging the authorities. In 2003, he created Alipay, which later became part of Ant Group, putting his business empire square in the center of the state-controlled world of finance.

He sometimes subtly dared the government to punish his defiance. Regarding Ant’s business, he said on multiple occasions, “If the government needs it, I can give it to the government.” His top lieutenants repeated the line, too

. “Given what has happened, eventually Ant will have to be controlled or even majority owned by the state,” said Zhiwu Chen, an economist at the University of Hong Kong’s business school.

Today, Alibaba and its archrival, Tencent, control more personal data and are more intimately involved in everyday life in China than Google, Facebook and other American tech titans are in the United States.

Instead of disrupting the state system, the companies have cozied up to it. Sometimes they even help the authorities track people. Still, the government has increasingly seen their size and influence as a threat.

some pro-market people in China worry that the country is drifting toward the hard line of the 1950s, when the party eliminated the capital class, using language that compared capitalist leanings to impurities, flaws and weaknesses.

To these people, some of the language recently used by Eric Jing, Ant’s chairman, evoked the era. At a conference on Dec. 15, he said the company was “looking into the mirror, finding out our shortcomings and conducting a bodily checkup.”

Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss, leading to a rampage that left five people dead. The rally was planned on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. On Parler, people posted advice on which streets to take to avoid the police; some posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol.

Parler grew slowly until early 2020, when Twitter began labeling Mr. Trump’s tweets as inaccurate and some of his supporters joined Parler in protest. After November’s election, Parler grew even more quickly as Facebook and Twitter clamped down on false claims that the vote had been rigged. So many users signed up that, at times, they overloaded the company’s systems and forced it to pause new registrations.

The tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others.

“I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet,” he said.

But Parler had a significant advantage: money.

In total, people downloaded Parler’s app more than 10 million times last year, with 80 percent in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, the app data firm.

“I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”

There is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” Apple said in a statement. Google said, “We do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content.”

“It’s devastating,” Mr. Matze told Fox News on Sunday. “And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day.” He said he was struggling to find another company to host Parler’s website.

American lawmakers may be distracted under a Trump presidency by hot-button issues at home such as health care and immigration.

and even closed the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas

nearly four years of Trump and a coronavirus pandemic that he blames on China have left Beijing anxious about a second term.

Others see an opportunity for China to hunker down and build its resilience as the U.S. rolls out trade sanctions on Chinese tech firms.

Trump's gone from calling leader Xi Jinping a "friend" to putting sanctions on senior Communist Party officials and the country's biggest technology firms.

Zou says Chinese decision makers hope for stability under a potential Biden administration. But he warns that no matter who wins November 3, policymakers in Beijing expect the U.S. to continue to be tough on Chinese trade and pursue further economic restrictions on technology firms.

China has been restrained in its relations with the U.S. the last few months, with the exception of ratcheting up tensions with Taiwan, as it waits to see who wins the election.

On Thursday, China's Communist Party Central Committee concluded its 5th Plenum, a gathering of some 300 top Party officials during which the country's economic plans for the next five years are decided.

aims to build resilience into China's high tech sectors and wean the country's economy away from foreign trade.

That, and a successfully contained coronavirus epidemic, means Beijing feels confident it can prepare for whoever wins the U.S. presidential race

the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.

In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.

The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.

There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.

Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.

The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.

“This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”

“Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’

“The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”

But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.

Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.

As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?

“They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.

As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”

He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.

To help fill the gaps, Taliban officials are reaching into Pakistan.

Now, the Taliban are privately recruiting them to return and work in the new government.

It is unclear how many former fighters have returned from Pakistan, but there have already been several high-profile appointments, including Mr. Ghayoor.

The new hires are walking into a mounting catastrophe. Hunger is rampant. Many teachers and other public sector employees have not been paid in months. The millions of dollars in aid that helped prop up the previous government have vanished, billions in state assets are frozen and economic sanctions have led to a near collapse of the country’s banking system.

“Running insurgency and state are two different things,” said Noor Khan, 40, an accountant who fled Kabul for Islamabad in early September, among hundreds of other Afghan professionals hoping for asylum in Europe.

A similar mass exodus of Afghanistan’s professional class occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviets withdrew and the Taliban wrested control from the warlords who filled the leadership vacuum.

Then as now, the Taliban preferred filling the government ranks with jihadis and loyalists. But this time, some civil servants have also stopped showing up for work, several of them said in interviews, either because they are not being paid, or because they do not want to taint their pending asylum cases in the United States or Europe by working for the Taliban.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the militant Haqqani network and labeled a terrorist by the F.B.I., was appointed acting minister of the interior, overseeing police, intelligence and other security forces.

“They have no experience to run the departments,” said Basir Jan, a company employee. “They sit in the offices with guns and abuse the employees in the departments by calling them ‘corrupt’ and ‘facilitators of the invaders.’”

Taliban leaders blame the United States for the collapsing economy. But some analysts say that even if the United States unfreezes Afghanistan’s state assets and lifts sanctions, the Finance Ministry does not have the technical know-how to revive the country’s broken banking system.

“Their response to the catastrophic economic situation is ‘It’s not our fault, the internationals are holding the money back.’ But the reality is that they don’t have the capacity for this kind of day-to-day technical operation,”

Foreigners intentionally evacuated Afghans, most importantly, the educated and professional ones, to weaken the Islamic Emirates and undermine our administration,” Mr. Hashimi said.

“We are in touch with some Afghans in different parts of the world and are encouraging them to return to Afghanistan because we desperately need their help and expertise to help their people and government,”

Mr. Ghayoor, the baker turned police chief, said that Kabul changed markedly in the two decades that he was away. As part of his duties, he tries to instill order at a busy produce market in Kabul as vendors tout fruit and vegetables, and taxi drivers call out stops, looking for fares.

Mr. Ghayoor said in December that neither he nor any other member of the Kabul police force had been paid in months. Nevertheless, he said he decided to sell his bakery in Quetta, a city in southwestern Pakistan, and move his extended family, including nine children, to Kabul.

WeRide has a valuation of $4.4 billion, according to CB Insights, with backers such as Nissan and Qiming Venture Partners. WeRide operates robotaxis and robobuses in parts of the southern city of Guangzhou, where it’s also testing self-driving street sweepers.

“Because Bosch is in charge of integration, we have to really spend 120% of our time to help Bosch with the integration and adaptation work,” Han said. WeRide has yet to go public.

picks for autonomous driving include ArcSoft and Desay SV.An outsourcing business model in China gives independent software vendors more opportunities than in the United States, where software is developed in-house at companies like Tesla, the analysts said. Beijing also plans to have L3 vehicles in mass production by 2025.“Auto OEMs are investing significantly in car software/digitalization to 2025, targeting US$20bn+ of obtainable software revenue by decade-end,” the Goldman analysts wrote in mid-March.

They estimate that for every car, the value of software within will rise from $202 each for L0 cars to $4,957 for L4 cars in 2030. For comparison, the battery component costs at least $5,000 today. By that calculation, the market for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving software is set to surge from $2.4 billion in 2021 to $70 billion in 2030 — with China accounting for about a third, the analysts predict.

Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force in 2023 had grown by 5.2 million people, thanks especially to net immigration

The sudden snapback in demand sent inflation soaring. Supply chain issues were a main reason prices rose quickly. But labor shortages posed a problem, too, and economists feared that rising wages — as employers scrambled to find workers — would keep price increases dangerously high.

he flow of migrants to the United States started slowing during the Trump administration, when officials took hundreds of executive actions designed to restrict migration.

Right before the pandemic, there were about 1.5 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than pre-2017 trends would have predicted, according to the San Francisco Fed. By the end of 2021, that shortfall had widened to about 2 million

But the economy overall wound up rebounding aggressively from the sudden, widespread closures of 2020, bolstered by historic government stimulus and vaccines that debuted faster than expected.

economy grow. But today’s snapshot still represents a stark turnaround from just a short time ago.

That’s because the labor force that emerged as the pandemic ebbed was smaller than it had been: Millions of people retired early, stayed home to take over child care or avoid getting sick, or decided to look for new jobs entirely

In the span of a year or so, employers went from having businesses crater to sprinting to hire enough staff to keep restaurants, hotels, retail stores and construction sites going. Wages for the lowest earners rose at the fastest pace.

About the same time, the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back Trump-era restrictions.

Experts argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since January 2023

But the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were desperate to hire.

lus, it would be exceedingly difficult for immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force,

“What it can do is lower the wages of a specific occupation in a specific area, but American workers aren’t stupid. They change jobs. They change what they specialize in,” Nowrasteh said. “So that’s part of the reason why wages don’t go down.”

In normal economic times, some analysts note, new immigrants can drag down wages, especially if employers decide to hire them over native-born workers. Undocumented workers, who don’t have as much leverage to push for higher pay, could lower average wages even more.

Particularly for immigrants fleeing poorer countries, the booming U.S. job market and the promise of higher wages continue to be an enormous draw.

“More than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the day.”

Upon arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January, Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories manufacturer making $20 an hour.

But for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.

Federal law requires migrants to wait nearly six months to receive a work permit after filing for asylum. Wait times can stretch for additional months because of a backlog in cases.

While they wait, many migrants find off-the-books work as day laborers or street vendors, advocates say. Others get jobs using falsified documents, including many teenagers who came into the country as unaccompanied minors.

Still, many migrants miss the year-long window to apply for asylum — a process that can cost thousands of dollars — leaving them with few pathways to work authorization, advocates say. Those who can’t apply for asylum often end up working without official permission in low-wage industries where they are susceptible to exploitation.