Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show
Antonio Maria Delgado – August 24, 2024
Former President Donald Trump has said on different occasions that Caracas, the Venezuelan capital with a reputation for a sky-high crime rate, has now become a “safe” city because most of its criminals have entered illegally into the United States.
On Thursday night he repeated the claim in an interview with Newsmax. “We’ll go to Caracas, because it will be safer than any place in our country,” he said.
On Aug. 5, he told livestreamer Adin Ross that “If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city and now it’s very safe,” he said. “In fact, the next interview we do, we’ll do it in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’s safer than many of our cities.”
The Nicolas Maduro regime has not broken out numbers for crime in Venezuelan cities for years. But there are organizations that keep track of the figures — and they show the Venezuelan capital is still significantly less safe than most American cities.
Those numbers show that while crime has come down in recent years, a visit to the Venezuelan capital still is not recommended for the fainthearted. According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a Caracas-based non-profit group widely regarded as the authority on the nation’s homicide rate, Caracas had a rate of 50.8 homicides per 100,000 people.
That’s more than six times the U.S. national average of 7.8 registered in 2020, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national homicide average for Venezuela in 2023 was 26.8, almost four times higher than the rate in the U.S.
According to the group, the Caracas homicide rate rate for 2023 came down a bit from previous years. Part of the reason is that 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past few years, and among them are a comparatively small numbers of criminals, according to experts on Venezuelan crime. In 2020, for example, Caracas closed the year with a homicide rate rate of 56.2 per 100,000 people.
Caracas’ 2023 homicide rate is surpassed by only two large U.S. cities: New Orleans, at 58.4, and St. Louis, at 57.2, according to 2022 numbers from the CDC.
Most large American cities have numbers between the mid single digits and the low double digits. In 2022, for example, the city of Miami’s homicide rate was 8.6, while Jacksonville stood at 15.3, according to the CDC numbers.
Despite their high rates, New Orleans and St. Louis could be considered relatively peaceful in comparison with Venezuela’s most violent cities, all located in the mining region of the southern state of Bolivar. These are El Callao, with 424 violent death victims for 100,000 people, Sifontes, with 151, and Roscio, with 134, according to the violence observatory.
Concerns about the lack of security in Venezuela led the U.S. State Department to maintain a level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory on Venezuela, originally issued on January 2023, warning Americans that they would be at risk in the South American country given its high crime, civil unrest and the risk of becoming victims to kidnappings or ill treatment from local police.
“Violent crimes, such as homicide, armed robbery, kidnapping, and carjacking, are common in Venezuela. Political rallies and demonstrations occur, often with little notice. Anti-Maduro demonstrations have elicited a strong police and security force response, including the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against participants, and occasionally devolve into looting and vandalism,” the State Department warned in its advisory.
How U.S. cities rate
Here are the homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants in the 10 largest U.S. cities in 2022, according to the CDC:
By David French, Opinion Columnist– August 25, 2024
Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images
This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.
As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.
But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.
One of the most valuable and humbling experiences in life is to experience an American community as part of the in-group and as part of the out-group. I spent most of my life living in the cultural and political center of American evangelical Christianity, but in the past nine years I’ve been relentlessly pushed to the periphery. The process has been painful. Even so, I’m grateful for my new perspective.
Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.
But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.
Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.
After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.
First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.” It was “soft” in part because America never possessed a national church on par with European establishments, but it was certainly hard enough to mandate Bible readings and prayer in schools and to pass a host of explicitly anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments that were intended to blunt Catholic influence in the United States.
This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.
In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.
The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.
I started my legal career in 1994, when equal access was very much in doubt. I spent the better part of two decades filing lawsuit after lawsuit that made essentially the same claim: State actors must treat religious speech the same as they treat secular speech. The proper interplay between the free exercise clause and the establishment clause ought to mean that private religious speech should neither be favored nor disfavored by the government. The state can’t run the church, and the church can’t run the state.
Conservative and liberal justices have created a different, sustainable equilibrium, but the religious liberty culture war rages on anyway — in part because millions of Americans don’t want to strike a balance. They actually prefer domination to accommodation. Many conservative evangelicals miss the old Protestant establishment, and they want it back. This is part of the impulse behind the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for example, or the recent effort in Oklahoma to establish a religious charter school, a public school run by the Catholic Church.
Combine these efforts at religious establishment with red-state legislation aimed at progressive and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and one could fairly assert that Christians are persecuting their opponents.
But there’s more to it than that. There are secular Americans who do take aim at Christian expression and at Christian institutions. They don’t want separation of church and state so much as they seek regulation of the church by the state, to push the church into conformance with a secular political ideology.
Then both sides tear into each other with an inexcusable level of fury and malice. When I was representing conservative Christian organizations, I could regale Christian audiences with stories of extreme secular intolerance, and I never ran out of material — especially when discussing religious liberty on college campuses.
Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.
Every culture war battle has casualties. Take a 2022 Supreme Court case about a praying high school football coach. He was seeking the right to pray on the field, and he won. The Supreme Court said his personal prayer was constitutionally protected. But that’s not the entire story.
Employees in the coach’s school district endured their own ordeal. I was struck by the opening sentence of an essay I read by a former teacher in the district: “‘That was another death threat,’ our high school secretary said to me after hanging up the phone.” A legal dispute isn’t proof of persecution, but threats most definitely count.
Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.
A stark social divide: Adults without a college degree more likely to have no close friends, survey finds
Aria Bendix – August 25, 2024
For those without a college degree, there may be fewer opportunities to engage in social activities.
The Summary
In a survey, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults without a college degree said they had no close friends.
People without a college degree also reported less participation in social activities like going to parks or restaurants than college-educated adults.
The findings come amid a documented rise in loneliness and social isolation.
Nearly all U.S. adults used to have close friends.
In 1990, the share of the population that said they didn’t was low and roughly the same no matter one’s education level: just 2% for people with college degrees and 3% for those without.
But a recent survey suggests that share has risen overall, particularly among those who did not graduate college — creating a kind of class divide in people’s level of social engagement and connection. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults with a high school diploma or lower education level said they had no close friends. The number was even higher for Black adults in that group: 35%.
Just 10% of those with a college degree said the same.
The findings come from a survey of around 6,600 adults conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, a nonprofit that researches how people’s lives are shaped by culture, politics and technology.
“Our social fabric seems to have two layers now,” said Daniel Cox, the center’s director and a co-author of a report published this week summarizing the findings. “It has one for college-educated folks that seems to be relatively intact, and then one for those without college degrees, which seems to be in tatters.”
The findings come amid a documented rise in social isolation nationwide. Around 30% of adults say they’ve felt lonely at least once per week over the past year, and 10% say they’re lonely every day, according to a January poll from the American Psychiatric Association.
The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic last year, citing its links to heart disease, stroke, dementia and premature death. San Mateo County, California, which includes part of Silicon Valley, subsequently declared a public health emergency over high rates of loneliness among residents.
“There’s been considerable decline and atrophy in American social connection,” said Cox, who is also a senior fellow of polling and public opinion at the conservative Washington think tank American Enterprise Institute, adding that although the pandemic helped bring the issue to light, “this decline had gone on for decades before.”
He offered a few ideas that might explain the trend. One is that being alone is less boring now, thanks to video games and streaming services, so people may be less likely to join social groups or spend time with friends or family. Another is that for those without a college degree, there are fewer opportunities to engage in social activities, perhaps because their access to free public spaces is more limited or they lack the time or money to frequent venues like bars and restaurants.
Cox’s survey found that college-educated adults were more likely to go to restaurants or coffee shops and to strike up conversations with neighbors, compared to people without a college degree. They were also more likely to be members of a neighborhood association, sports league or hobby group (like a book club or regular poker game).
“We put so much of the onus of creating and maintaining friends on individuals instead of institutions,” Cox said. “We’ve shifted all the work, all the effort, onto individuals who now have to coordinate, organize, schedule their social engagements, as opposed to having them occur organically out of the things that they’re already doing.”
People with a college degree were also more likely to be part of a labor union or to regularly attend church, the survey found — two venues that have historically given people with less formal education opportunities to socialize.
The survey even found an educational divide when it comes to free public venues like libraries and parks. Nearly 4 in 10 college-educated adults said they had visited a park or community garden at least once a month in the past year, compared to less than a quarter of those without a college education. And nearly half of college graduates said they had visited a library at least a few times in the past year, compared with a quarter of adults with a high school diploma or less.
“The places that are legitimately free — community centers and libraries — their hours of operation aren’t regular enough for a lot of folks,” Cox said. “Many of those places are closed in the evenings, and then there’s just not enough of them to meet the need.”
Part of the issue may have to do with geography: A 2022 study found that neighborhoods with higher poverty rates have fewer public gathering spaces. And many communities don’t have the money to invest in their public spaces, Cox said.
Limited free time and poor access to transportation likely play a role, as well, said Adam Roth, an assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, who wasn’t involved in the survey.
“If you live out in the suburbs and you have to change buses or trains or get in your car and do that however-long commute, that is going to be a prohibitive factor,” Roth said.
The story isn’t entirely bleak, though. A collection of surveys from 2022 and 2023 found that even though people in the U.S. desired to be closer to their friends, less than 3% reported having no friends at all. The surveys looked at both close friendships and casual acquaintances.
“Our data didn’t really spell doom and gloom,” said Amanda Holmstrom, a communication professor at Michigan State University who conducted that research. “People have friends — they feel like they don’t necessarily have the time to nurture those friends.”
“The bottom line is, all types of social interactions and relationships matter, particularly for health and well-being,” Roth said. “But the probability of actually experiencing certain types of social interactions is at least partially dependent on the communities we live in.”
Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times.
In purely military terms, Ukraine’s surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the Donetsk front, a main focus of the current fighting, and the physical cost in dead or captured troops and evacuated citizens does not concern Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
The more significant potential of the invasion lies on the other front — that of information, propaganda, morale, image and competing narratives. That is where the fight is being fought to keep the West involved, to keep Ukrainians hopeful and to get Russians worried about the toll of the war in lives and treasure. And this is where Ukraine may see an advantage.
The very invocation of Kursk, the region where Ukraine made its advance, is familiar to every Russian as the site of not only a great World War II Soviet triumph but also the catastrophic accident that sank a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in 2000. By moving into Kursk, Ukraine’s military has loudly advertised its boldness just when it looked like its troops might never regain the initiative.
The surprise and speed of the Ukrainian attack and the flaccid Russian response have given new strength to calls by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the United States and his other Western supporters to abandon their insistence that he not use their weapons to attack Russian territory. Mr. Zelensky calls this the “naïve illusion of so-called red lines,” and so far, his allies have not complained about the Kursk invasion. They may see little value in scolding Ukraine, the plucky David in this war, right after he has landed an audacious strike against a plodding Goliath.
Just as important, Ukraine’s move into Kursk highlights the inherent contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the conflict as a proxy war against Western powers trying to deny Russia its destiny, and one in which a calm, united and prosperous Russia is certain to prevail. But that illusion falls apart once Ukrainian forces have succeeded in slicing into Russia and forcing tens of thousands of Russians to flee their homes.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
The overriding imperative of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to enforce the belief that whatever is happening, however grave it may seem and whatever the cost, the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin, to be precise — is in full control. The depth of the disaster precipitated by Russia’s war is revealed by the intensity of the effort — the euphemisms, insinuations, scapegoats and excuses — marshaled toward propaganda.
Mr. Putin, a product of the old K.G.B., is well practiced in this dark art. From the moment the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, he has been ruthless in enforcing a ban against even calling it a war. Russians are subject to arrest if they fail to call it a “special military operation,” even though Mr. Putin himself has occasionallyslipped. When the Russian caterer and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash after sending his mercenaries who were fighting in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin kept a straight face as he offered his condolences, noting only that his latest victim had “made serious mistakes in life.”
So when the Ukrainian army launched its unexpected drive into the Kursk region on Aug. 6, the Kremlin propaganda mill got to work. There was no invasion, of course, only an “armed provocation,” a “situation,” a “terrorist attack” or “events in the Kursk region.” And of course, the insidious West was to blame. At a televised meeting at his residence with security chiefs and regional governors six days into the Kursk invasion, Mr. Putin declared that once again, it was “the West fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” He insisted that Russian forces would retaliate appropriately and still accomplish “all our goals.”
When the acting governor of the Kursk region, speaking over a video link, began giving some actual details of the invasion, including the number of towns and villages affected and the amount of territory seized by the Ukrainian army, Mr. Putin sharply cut him off, saying he should leave such detail to the military and focus on the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who probably never imagined having his remote province invaded by anyone, must have assumed that his president wanted to learn what was really happening. Perhaps he was unaware that his job was not to worry the population with facts, but only to show that the government was in control and taking care of its people.
Mr. Putin has so far held firm to the line “We have everything under control.” He has not bothered to visit Kursk, and he has not delivered a rousing speech calling for a grand defense of the motherland. The state-controlled media has focused on showing the government ensuring that evacuees are safe and cared for and that the nation was rallying with an outpouring of humanitarian aid. The latest report from Russia’s emergencies ministry on Tuesday said more than 122,000 civilians had been relocated, including more than 500 in the previous 24 hours, many to shelters across Russia.
At the same time, the Kremlin has not reined in bellicose bloggers and commentators who are demanding a brutal retaliation for Kursk or shaming evacuees for not standing and fighting against the foreign invaders. Such critics actually serve a purpose for Mr. Putin. Hawks who call on an authoritarian ruler to be even more authoritarian are a useful foil, presenting the ruler as relatively reasonable.
Though public opinion is hard to gauge in a country where candor is dangerous, some discontent over Kursk has been gleaned on social media, and it does seem that Mr. Putin has been rattled. His irritation with the acting governor was one sign; another was his display of anger when he declared that the Ukrainian initiative undermined the possibility of negotiations. “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities?” he asked, oblivious to the rich irony of his words.
Whether the rant revealed that Mr. Putin was considering negotiations or that he was warning the West that it has to keep Ukraine in check if it wants negotiations is unclear. Mr. Zelensky has said only that the goal was to push the Russians further back from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in Kursk after the initial assault, while to the south, Russian troops are advancing on their next major target, the city of Pokrovsk.
Whatever happens next in this unpredictable war, the importance of the information front must not be underestimated. Any operation that raises Ukrainian morale, bolsters Western support and jolts Mr. Putin’s narrative is a battle won.
Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
Fed’s Powell says ‘time has come’ for interest rate cuts
Myles Udland and Jennifer Schonberger – August 23, 2024
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sent a straightforward message to markets in a key speech on Friday, saying “the time has come” for the central bank to begin lowering interest rates.
Speaking at the Kansas City Fed’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Powell said: “The time has come for policy to adjust.”
“The direction of travel is clear,” Powell added, “and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks.”
Powell’s speech comes just over three weeks out from the Fed’s Sept. 17-18 meeting, which should see the central bank announce its first interest rate cut since 2020.
Powell acknowledged recent softness in the labor market in his speech and said the Fed does not “seek or welcome further cooling in labor market conditions.”
The July jobs report rattled markets earlier this month, revealing that there were just 114,000 jobs added to the economy last month while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, the highest since October 2021. Data earlier this week also showed that 818,000 fewer people were employed in the US economy as of March, suggesting reports have been overstating the strength of the job market over the last year.
“It seems unlikely that the labor market will be a source of elevated inflationary pressures anytime soon,” Powell said.
Ahead of Powell’s speech, investors had priced in nearly 100% odds the Fed would lower rates next month, with odds on a cut of 0.25% vs. 0.50% standing at roughly two to one.
“Four and a half years after COVID-19’s arrival, the worst of the pandemic-related economic distortions are fading,” Powell said.
“Inflation has declined significantly … Our objective has been to restore price stability while maintaining a strong labor market, avoiding the sharp increases in unemployment that characterized earlier disinflationary episodes when inflation expectations were less well anchored. While the task is not complete, we have made a good deal of progress toward that outcome.”
Powell’s remarks on Friday were reminiscent of those he delivered at Jackson Hole in 2022, in which the Fed chair offered a direct assessment of the economic outlook and, at the time, the need for additional rate increases.
Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, walks in Teton National Park, where financial leaders from around the world gathered for the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium on Aug. 26, 2022. (REUTERS/Jim Urquhart) (Reuters / Reuters)
“At this podium two years ago, I discussed the possibility that addressing inflation could bring some pain in the form of higher unemployment and slower growth,” Powell said.
“Some argued that getting inflation under control would require a recession and a lengthy period of high unemployment. I expressed our unconditional commitment to fully restoring price stability and to keeping at it until the job is done.”
Friday’s speech more or less suggests that the job is indeed done.
“All told, the healing from pandemic distortions, our efforts to moderate aggregate demand, and the anchoring of expectations have worked together to put inflation on what increasingly appears to be a sustainable path to our 2% objective,” Powell said.
Wet Winter Whirlwind; What Farmers’ Almanac Predicts for the 2024-2025 Winter
Joshua Hallenbeck – August 23, 2024
(WJET/WFXP) — Farmers’ Almanac has released its 2024-25 Winter Outlook, describing this winter as a “Wet, Winter, Whirlwind.”
Overall, this description perfectly fits the general trend predicted in the outlook, no region is expected to see higher-than-normal snowfall. This, however, is just a general prediction broken down by regions. A more area-specific list will be released alongside the release of the 2025 edition of the Farmers’ Almanac on August 27th.
It is important to look at the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of these predictions. A study conducted by John E. Walsh and David Allen, published in the 1981 edition of Weatherwise, showed that only 50.7 percent of the monthly temperature forecasts and 51.9 percent of the precipitation forecasts were verified with the correct sign. This is essentially the same as flipping a coin for each day.
This year’s winter outlook is largely affected by a major climate pattern known as La Niña which can cause a major shift in winter weather. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), La Niña is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific, compared to El Niño, which is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific.
La Niña [Click to Expand] || Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)El Niño [Click to Expand] || Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
During a La Niña year, winter temperatures are warmer in the Southeast and cooler in the Northwest. La Niña brings cooler waters off the West Coast, which brings cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface. These cold waters push the Polar Jet Stream northward, increasing the chance of drought in the Southern U.S., and heavy rain and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. According to the National Weather Service, El Niño and La Niña are typically strongest during the period from December to April because the equatorial Pacific sea-surface temperatures are normally warmest at this time of the year
A La Niña year is also associated with a more severe hurricane season, which is a concern this hurricane season. NOAA previously predicted an 85% chance for an above-normal hurricane season. However, some of the strongest recorded hurricanes occurred during a period known as the neutral phase. Neutral indicates that conditions are near their long-term average.
Despite the atmospheric cooling this pattern presents, the Earth’s average temperatures continue to rise with 2024 on track to be one of the warmest years ever recorded.
Negative remarks on social media have increased since Ukrainian troops launched an incursion, according to a firm that tracks Russian attitudes.
Julian E. Barnes, from Washington – August 22, 2024
A heavily damaged statue of Vladimir Lenin in Sudzha, Russia, after Ukrainian troops crossed the border in a counteroffensive this month. Credit…Yan Dobronosov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Negative feelings about President Vladimir V. Putin have appeared to increase across Russia since Ukrainian troops pushed into Russian territory two weeks ago, according to a firm that tracks attitudes in the country by analyzing social media and other internet postings.
While news outlets in Russia have tried to put a more positive spin on the developments in the war, focusing on the Russian government’s humanitarian response, some Russian social media users have expressed discontent.
Many of the online postings, according to the analysis by FilterLabs AI, say Ukraine’s advance is a failure of the Russian government and, more specifically, Mr. Putin.
It is difficult to accurately gauge public opinion in Russia, or any other authoritarian country, because people responding to polls often give answers that they think the government wants. To address that shortcoming, FilterLabs tracks comments on social media sites, internet postings and news media sites, using a computer model to analyze sentiments expressed by ordinary Russians.
Positive attitudes about Mr. Putin took a hit last year after a short-lived armed rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a Russian paramilitary force. But the shift in sentiment has appeared sharper in the days since Ukrainian troops launched their incursion into the Kursk region of western Russia.
“Putin’s response to the incursion was seen as inadequate at best and insulting at worst,” said Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs.
Attitudes toward Mr. Putin remain more positive in Moscow, where Russia keeps a firmer hand on the news media and public debate. But views of Mr. Putin have soured even there, though not as quickly as elsewhere in the country. In Russia’s outlying regions, frustration with the Kremlin is growing, according to the analysis.
American officials cautioned that it was too early to know whether any damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation would be lasting. Mr. Putin’s standing in Russia quickly rebounded after Mr. Prigozhin ended his rebellion, the officials said, and the Russian president has consistently demonstrated an ability to manipulate the public view of himself.
Still, a permanent loss of popularity could complicate the Kremlin’s ability to wage war in Ukraine.
“It is right now difficult to determine the effect of the Ukrainian counteroffensive,” Mr. Teubner said. “But it is clear that is shocking and, for Putin, embarrassing. Kremlin propaganda, spin, and distraction can only do so much in the face of bad news that is widely discussed across Russia.”
Sentiment toward Mr. Putin has fallen sharply in the regions of Russia where the Kremlin focuses its military recruiting efforts. The Kremlin’s recruiting strategy depends on its ability to manage perception of the war.
“If Putin’s prestige and popularity fall in these key regions (especially if Russians feel that the war is going badly), the Kremlin may find it more difficult to fill its military ranks,” the FilterLabs analysis said.
The Kremlin continues to exert influence on how Russia’s national news outlets cover the war, with few running prominent stories, the analysis showed. But regional news outlets are less likely to sugarcoat the news, Mr. Teubner said.
FilterLabs also tracks Russian disinformation. Mr. Teubner said the firm found that the Kremlin began targeting Russians in border regions with a propaganda campaign after the Ukrainian counteroffensive began.
The campaign, which was reminiscent of Soviet propaganda, warned that Ukrainian “psychological operations” were targeting Russians.
But even as localized news sites pushed out the propaganda, they also mixed it with reports of the Ukrainian incursion, information that was harder to find in Moscow. In the Soviet Union, the technique of wrapping bad news in propaganda, Mr. Teubner said, was known as “rotten herring.”
One article, for example, featured paintings of Russian military might even as it chronicled the artillery duel Ukrainian troops were forcing in Kursk.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Crime has declined since Donald Trump was president. He insists on lying about that.
Chris Brennan, USA TODAY – August 22, 2024
Former President Donald Trump, in his weeklong attempt to counterprogram the Democratic National Convention, visited Michigan on Tuesday to accuse Vice President Kamala Harris of being soft on crime.
Here’s why: Trump has a sliver of statistics to offer and a national sentiment that tends to see crime as a much larger issue than it really is. So first, let’s get a few simple truths out here in the conversation:
Crime rates have been steadily falling in America since the early 1990s but did see a significant increase, especially in murder, in 2020 during Trump’s last year as president as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the country. The decline in crime rates resumed after he left office.
That’s great for America, but not so great for Trump’s nonstop melodramatic claims that the country is some dystopian hellscape and only by returning him to power can we live in peace and prosperity again.
That’s bunk. Here’s why.
Trump and his campaign pick pieces out of a larger crime puzzle
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks on crime and safety at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Mich., on Aug. 20, 2024.
Trump on Tuesday claimed that Harris, as vice president, “presided over a 43% increase in violent crime.”
His campaign later told me that he referred to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that showed a 42% increase in nonfatal violent crime in 2022. That September report, which is now nearly a year old, also noted that the particular rate of crime had just reached “a 30-year low” during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
No surprise that Trump left that part out of his speech.
Trump really grabbed hold of the second method this week. Why? Because the first method, conducted by the FBI, debunks his lies about America being caught in some terrible, prolonged crime wave.
Of course, Trump then attacks the FBI for reporting factually about crime
If you’re Trump and a federal agency’s data disproves your claim, what do you do? You attack the agency, of course.
Trump has repeatedly derided the FBI data as “fake numbers” because of a change the agency made in 2021 in how those reports are compiled. That change was long in the planning but happened in the middle of a pandemic, and some law enforcement agencies didn’t immediately switch to the new way of reporting to the FBI.
Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center For Justice, told me the FBI faced “a data hiccup in 2021” and addressed the problem by collecting information through its previous system and the new system for 2022 and 2023.
Grawert noted that the murder rate is a reliable data point in this discussion because, unlike other crimes, “murder is pretty much always reported.” And “murder is one of the offenses that’s falling fastest nationwide,” he said.
“We have very, very good reason to believe that violent crime is falling in 2023 and 2024 very fast, offsetting much, if not all, of the increase in violence we saw in 2020,” Grawert told me. “And nothing President Trump said (in Michigan Tuesday) really undermines that.”
Truth is crime reporting happens at a slower pace than political rhetoric
Trump won’t let facts get in the way of a horrible story. He suggested on Tuesday that the average American out shopping for a loaf of bread faces a threat of being robbed or shot or raped.
Do you have a loaf of bread in your house right now? If so, did you face an arduous and dangerous journey to obtain it?
Trump is leaning hard on a standard American perception that has been true since long before he entered politics. We tend to believe that the national crime rate is worse than the data shows, even when we don’t see crime as a major threat closer to home.
John Gramlich, an associate director at Pew Research Center, told me that long-standing sentiment was typically stronger in Republicans but has recently become more bipartisan, even as the data shows crime rates are falling.
“Republicans are almost always more likely than Democrats to be concerned about crime or to prioritize the crime issue,” Gramlich said. “But what’s interesting is that people in both parties have become more concerned about it since the beginning of the Biden administration.”
One factor might be helping to prompt that: Crime data takes time to compile. Politics is happening around us every day. Gramlich said a temporary “vacuum” of data can allow “misperceptions to fill the void.”
“An election is a very fluid discussion about what’s happening right now,” he told me, and the lag for the data to catch up “can sometimes be filled with misinformation or fear or any number of other things.”
Are you safe buying groceries?
That’s why Trump was in Michigan this week claiming that Harris “will deliver crime, chaos, destruction and death” if she is elected president.
He held what looked like a healthy lead in the race until last month, when Biden dropped his bid for a second term and endorsed Harris.
Trump was president when the crime rates spiked in 2020. That doesn’t mean he’s to blame for that. He certainly wouldn’t accept responsibility for it (or anything else).
Now he’s trying to hang one sliver of statistics on Harris as she pulls ahead of him in the presidential race. Think about that and then ask yourself this: Do you feel safe shopping for a loaf of bread right now in your community? If you do, consider the possibility that people all across America probably feel that way, too.
Scientists warn grocery shelves may soon be missing pantry-staple food because of poor crop conditions: ‘Emphasizing the importance of sustainable farming’
Susan Elizabeth Turek – August 22, 2024
Strawberries are synonymous with the start of longer days and warmer weather, served up on tables as part of popular summer desserts. But scientists are warning this popular staple may be harder to come by soon because of warming global temperatures.
What’s happening?
A study from the University of Waterloo predicts that strawberry yields could see a dramatic reduction of 40% if temperatures rise by just 3 degrees Fahrenheit. This potentially threatens an industry that brought in more than $3 billion to the United States economy in 2022, according to a media release from the university.
Farmers in California could be hit particularly hard by changes in the industry. The analysis notes that the Golden State grows more than 80% of the country’s fresh strawberries.
According to the release, the data model provided “the most accurate findings to date” after linking air temperature anomalies to strawberry yields.
Why is this important?
While it isn’t too late to lower average temperatures, the Earth has been warming at an accelerated rate since the preindustrial era. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the 10 hottest years on record all occurred in the past decade.
It isn’t uncommon for extreme weather events to occur from time to time — and natural weather patterns such as El Niño and La Niña make them more likely to occur in certain regions. However, scientists overwhelmingly agree that supercharged weather events are one of the effects of warming temperatures primarily linked to the burning of dirty fuels such as coal, oil, and gas.
“This research shows how climate change can directly impact the foods we love, emphasizing the importance of sustainable farming practices to maintain a stable food supply for everyone,” Department of Systems Design Engineering postdoctoral fellow Dr. Poornima Unnikrishnan said in the University of Waterloo’s media release.
Other popular products that have become more scarce or expensive amid challenging weather conditions include chocolate, olive oil, and tomato-based items such as ketchup.
What can be done about reduced food yields?
The University of Waterloo researchers advocated for the continued adoption of sustainable farming practices to ensure there are no severe disruptions in the global food supply, and they believe their analysis can help.
“We hope the better understanding of the influence of rising temperatures on crop yield will help in the development of sustainable agriculture responses from the government and farmers,” Dr. Kumaraswamy Ponnambalam said in the media release. “There is an urgent need for farmers to adopt new strategies to cope with global warming.”
The Waterloo team also listed existing strategies that have been successful in varying climates, including drip irrigation (which more effectively delivers water to plants’ roots) and shading structures to protect crops from extreme heat.
Agrivoltaics is one such solution to the latter recommendation. Not only do the solar panels provide clean, low-cost energy to farmers, but they also aid crop productivity.
Average auto loan interest rates by credit score 2024
AJ Dellinger – August 19, 2024
Key takeaways
The average auto loan interest rate for new cars in early 2024 was 6.73 percent, while used cars had an average rate of 11.91 percent.
Your credit score plays a significant role in determining your interest rate, but other factors such as the lender, amount borrowed, length of the loan and economic conditions also play a role.
The best way to secure a competitive interest rate on your auto loan is to shop around and work to improve your credit score.
If you’re in the market for a car and plan to finance with a car loan, remember to consider car loan interest rates in your budget. According to Experian’s State of the Automotive Finance Market report, the average auto loan interest rate for new cars in 2024’s first quarter was 6.73 percent, and 11.91 percent for used cars.
Generally, the lower your credit score, the higher your annual percentage rate (APR) will be. However, you don’t need a perfect credit score to get a reasonable rate. To find the best auto loan rate, shop around and work to improve your credit score if it isn’t in the best shape.
Average auto loan interest rates by credit score
Lenders base interest rates primarily on your credit score, but you can still get a decent rate without top-tier credit.
To see how much of a difference a higher credit score can make for your rates, check out the average car loan interest rates by credit score.
Your hometown also impacts the rate you receive. Discover your state’s average auto loan rates.
Factors that affect auto loan interest rates
While your credit score plays a large part in determining your interest rate, there are other factors to consider.
Credit score
The two most common scores used when underwriting car loans are FICO and VantageScore. Both account for several measures of financial wellness, including payment history, credit utilization, credit mix and average age of accounts.
There are differences in the number of metrics used and how they’re weighted. But both scores fall between 300 and 850. Competitive rates go to buyers with scores in the mid-600s and higher.
Lenders may instead use an auto industry-specific scoring system, such as the FICO Auto Score, which ranges from 250 to 900. These scores consider the same factors but give more weight to risk factors associated with your likelihood of repaying an auto loan.
Lender
Different lenders have different credit underwriting criteria. All will consider your credit score, income and debt-to-income ratio, but lenders differ in what they find acceptable. Some may also consider your education or professional experience.
Plus, some lenders simply offer lower rates than others.
Amount borrowed
Buyers typically borrow the price of the car minus the down payment. If you’re unwilling to put more than the required amount down, the lender may see an increased risk, so they might raise the interest rate to compensate.
Length of the loan
Typically, the longer your loan term, the more interest you’ll pay as interest accumulates. Additionally, lenders may charge higher interest rates for longer loans.
This is because there is more perceived risk for the lender. The longer the loan, the higher the likelihood it won’t get paid back in full.
Economic and market conditions
Broader market factors also play a role in setting the industry’s minimum rates. When the federal funds rate is high, as dictated by the Federal Reserve, it costs lenders more to borrow money. In turn, you are likely to face higher interest rates.
The current Federal Reserve target interest rate is 5.25 to 5.5 percent. It’s at its highest in 22 years. But the Fed hasn’t increased the benchmark rate since July of 2023. Experts forecast that auto loan rates will drop slightly for those with strong credit this year.
Those with poor credit are less likely to see relief in 2024. If that’s you, focus on comparing bad credit auto loan rates.
How to get a better auto loan interest rate
There are a few ways to improve your chances of getting a reasonable interest rate, regardless of your credit score.
Shop around: Shop around with multiple lenders, including banks and credit unions, and compare auto loan interest rates. Not all lenders report to credit bureaus, so if you’re trying to build your credit, make sure to pick one that does.
Apply for preapproval: Apply with at least three lenders before choosing one. You must provide personal and employment information. Preapproval requires a hard credit pull, temporarily dropping your score by a few points. So, it’s best to keep your application window to 14 days so you only take one ding.
Make a larger down payment: A down payment decreases the amount you need to borrow. That means the lender takes on less risk, which translates to lower interest rates. Experts recommend aiming for at least 20 percent of the car’s purchase price.
Get a co-signer: If you have a lower credit score, consider asking a family member or trusted friend with an excellent credit score to co-sign your auto loan. Your co-signer will assume the debt if you can’t pay it back, which means the lender has less risk. Remember that it may strain your relationship if you cannot pay.
The bottom line
The lowest car loan rates are typically reserved for borrowers with near-perfect credit scores. While you’re not guaranteed to get the figure corresponding to your credit bracket, keep it in mind while shopping around for a good deal.
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![El Niño [Click to Expand] || Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/CuhxHTD6XJI04u6yDOqFYw--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTU2MjtjZj13ZWJw/https://media.zenfs.com/en/wjet_erie_articles_149/6211cfba8712aea274d55a1f342559ca)
