US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure “an act of international piracy”.
Trump confirmed the operation on Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”
“It was seized for a very good reason,” the US president added, declining to say who owned the vessel.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, posted footage of the seizure on X. The grainy, unclassified 45-second video shows US forces landing on the tanker from a helicopter.
In an accompanying statement, Bondi said the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of Defense, had “executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.
She said the tanker had been sanctioned by the US for “multiple years” due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted its own video edit of the seizure, soundtracked with an excerpt from LL Cool J’s song Mama Said Knock You Out. DHS has repeatedly faced criticism for poaching music for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment ads. DHS recently used a Sabrina Carpenter song, without permission, prompting the pop star to respond that the video was “evil and disgusting”.
LL Cool J did not immediately address the use of his song.
Venezuela’s government said in the statement that the seizure “constitutes a blatant theft and an act of international piracy”.
It continued: “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed … It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”
Earlier, speaking at a rally in Caracas, Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”.
Maduro has been in power since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death from cancer. Widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election, Maduro has clung to power after launching a wave of repression that forced Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the 2024 vote, into exile in Spain.
Since August, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.
On Tuesday, two US fighter jets circled the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes. The aircraft flew just north of Maracaibo, one of Venezuela’s most populous cities.
On Wednesday, González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado, was awarded the Nobel peace prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a peaceful and just transition from dictatorship to democracy”.
Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the prize, telling a ceremony in Oslo that her mother’s struggle to end years of “obscene corruption” and “brutal dictatorship” would go on.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and, although years of mismanagement and corruption have done severe damage to its oil industry, oil exports remain Venezuela’s main source of revenue. The main customer is China.
The objective of this week’s reported tanker seizure was not immediately clear.
In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s former chief Latin America adviser, Juan González, said that at around the time of last year’s election he had pushed for the US to station two navy destroyers off Venezuela’s coast “and even impose an oil blockade”.
That never happened, but González believed one possible way out of the current crisis might be for the Trump administration to push Maduro into accepting a recall referendum, perhaps in 2027, but threatening “real hardline consequences” such as a blockade if the result was not respected.
“I think it is potentially a viable option where there should be a very credible and aggressive snapback associated with it,” González said, adding: “Imposing an oil blockade would shut down the entire economy.”
“It’s less aggressive [than a land strike] but it’s still considered an act of war,” added González, who was the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration.
“He [Trump] could take unilateral action by blocking oil tankers from leaving or entering the country, and that I think would precipitate Maduro’s departure.”
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Footage shows US forces taking control of oil tanker off Venezuelan coast – video
Opinions on Donald Trump’s mental state vary widely; some critics label him as “insane” due to his behavior and rhetoric, while others argue he is simply a product of mediocrity and privilege. Ultimately, whether he is considered “crazy” is subjective and depends on individual perspectives.
Hours after missing the ceremony in Norway’s capital that awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado appeared in the city’s streets after midnight on Thursday, greeting a cheering crowd.
She appeared on the balcony of the historic Grand Hotel in Oslo, the capital, around 2:30 a.m., waving to journalists and supporters who had been waiting for hours. People in the crowd started to sing the Venezuelan national anthem. Ms. Machado emerged from the hotel and approached the crowd, climbing over a metal barrier to embrace supporters and grasp their hands.
Ms. Machado’s decision to leave Venezuela, after more than a year in hiding, has thrust her back into the global spotlight and escalated the intensifying standoff between President Trump and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president. She was expected to hold a news conference in Oslo later on Thursday.
Ms. Machado, 58, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for leading a successful electoral challenge to Mr. Maduro last year. He disregarded the election results, declared himself the winner, and cracked down on dissent.
In an audio message published by the Nobel Peace Prize committee on Wednesday, Ms. Machado said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo to participate in the day’s festivities surrounding the awarding of the prize. But she arrived too late to attend the ceremony, at which her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the Nobel on her behalf.
Mr. Trump’s administration, which accuses Mr. Maduro of leading two drug cartels, has deployed the largest U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis, carrying out fatal strikes on boats that it says were trafficking drugs and, on Wednesday, seizing an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.
Yet the two leaders spoke by phone last month, and Venezuela recently began accepting U.S. deportation flights, raising the possibility that both sides could be edging toward a diplomatic settlement.
Ms. Machado has consistently rejected talks with the Venezuelan government and backed a hard-line, force-based approach, embracing the Trump administration’s military pressure and refraining from criticizing its strikes on alleged drug traffickers.
Her challenge now will be to turn this moment in the spotlight into real political leverage. Past opposition leaders who left Venezuela have faded from relevance, and the government has already branded her a fugitive. Given that hundreds of her supporters have been arrested, analysts say that Mr. Maduro is unlikely to let her return unless he secures guarantees that keep his government intact.
Aides to Ms. Machado had said in the past that she would never leave Venezuela. In an interview last year, a top opposition leader, Perkins Rocha, said, “My knowledge of María Corina Machado is to have the certainty that she would never abandon the country.”
By her side in Oslo on Thursday were two senior aides, Magalli Meda and Pedro Urruchurtu, who spent more than a year sheltered at the Argentine diplomatic residence in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, before making their way to the United States in May.
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María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, greeted supporters in the Norwegian capital, hours after missing the ceremony at which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.CreditCredit…Jonas Been Henriksen/NTB Scanpix, via Associated Press
In 2018, at a Dubai resort next to the blue-green waters of the Persian Gulf, Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, stood before an audience of hundreds of petrochemical executives to set out his vision for the future of the world’s largest oil company. The goals he described weren’t primarily about energy. Instead, he announced plans to pour $100 billion into expanding production of plastic and other petrochemicals.
Nasser predicted that with a growing global population wielding more purchasing power every year, petrochemicals—compounds derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels and of which plastics and their ingredients constitute as much as 80 percent—would drive nearly half of oil-demand growth by mid-century. About 98 percent of virgin plastics are made from fossil fuels. In sectors that include packaging, cars, and construction, he said, “the tremendous growth in chemicals demand provides us with a fantastic window of opportunity.”
In the years since Nasser’s 2018 speech, Saudi Aramco, owned mainly by the government of Saudi Arabia, has acquired a majority stake in the country’s petrochemical conglomerate SABIC. Together, the companies have bought into huge Chinese plastic projects and built petrochemical plants from South Korea to the Texas coast. Aramco aims to turn more than a third of its crude into petrochemicals by the 2030s—a near tripling in 15 years.
Although the industry has framed its plans to pivot to plastic as a response to consumer demand for a material central to modern life, another factor is clearly at play: As the looming dangers of climate change are pushing the world away from fossil fuels, the industry is betting on plastic to protect its profitability. Ramping up plastic and petrochemical output, according to Nasser, will “provide a reliable destination for Saudi Aramco’s future oil production.” As one industry analyst observed of the company’s strategy, “the big picture imperative is to avoid being forced to leave barrels in the ground as demand for transportation fuels declines.”
Even ExxonMobil has acknowledged that electric vehicles’ widespread adoption will probably reduce cars’ need for oil. In one market forecast, the company, already the world’s largest producer of single-use plastics, assured investors that its plans to increase petrochemical production by 80 percent by 2050 will help the industry to pump and sell even more oil at mid-century than it does today.
But there is growing public awareness that all the plastic made for packaging and goods from the absurd to the essential comes at steep costs: the health impacts of the chemicals it contains, the emissions from its production, the mountains of waste that have built up as it is discarded, and the microplastics found everywhere from the most remote corners of the planet to our brains. Some governments have begun enacting legislation, such as bans on certain single-use items, but efforts to deliver more sweeping change hit a wall with the collapse in August of contentious negotiations on a global plastic-pollution treaty. More than 70 nations had pushed for limits on the amount of plastic produced to reduce the flow of waste into the environment. The industry has lobbied heavily against such caps, arguing that improved waste management and recycling are the solution, even though only a small percentage of plastic is currently recycled, and many types cannot be recycled by conventional means.
Companies “know they can’t hold their finger in the dike” of an energy transition, says Judith Enck, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official and president of Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group based at Bennington College. “They have to find a gigantic new market, and they have landed on plastic.”Plastic production has been rising steadily since the end of World War II, when companies poured resources into finding and promoting peacetime uses for a material whose military applications—from nylon parachutes to polyethylene insulation for radar sets—had proved invaluable. Consumers snapped up the flood of new goods and disposable packaging, and the annual output of plastic has climbed from two million metric tons in 1950 to more than 500 million today. A cumulative 8.3 billion metric tons had been produced by 2015, according to a landmark study that was the first to quantify the total amount of plastic created. According to Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who co-authored the study, the total has since risen past 10 billion metric tons. About three quarters of all that plastic has become waste, Geyer’s team reported: 9 percent was recycled, 12 percent was incinerated, and 79 percent ended up in landfills or the environment. If current trends continue, 1.1 billion metric tons of plastic will be made annually by 2050—and the cumulative total will be enough, Geyer says, to cover the U.S. in an ankle-deep layer.
Today, half of all plastic goes into single-use items, which are often tossed away almost as soon as they’re acquired. A million plastic bottles are purchased each minute, according to the United Nations’ environment agency, and five trillion plastic bags are used every year. In 2016, Americans alone used more than 560 billion plastic utensils and other disposable food-service items.
Plastic, of course, is not just in throwaway packaging. It is a defining, inescapable part of modern life, widely used in construction, clothing, electronic goods, and cars. It plays a key role in health care as a component in gloves, syringes, tubing, and IV bags, not to mention artificial joints, limbs, and hearts. It is also not just one material: there are thousands of types and subtypes, each with its own combination of chemicals that yields desired properties—varying degrees of hard or soft, rigid or flexible, opaque or transparent. One analysis found that 16,000 different chemicals are used in making plastics, including additives such as stabilizers, plasticizers, dyes, and flame retardants. More than 4,000 of those substances pose health or environmental dangers, and safety information was lacking for another 10,000, the researchers estimate.
By design, plastic does not readily decompose. Instead, it fragments into increasingly minuscule pieces—reaching down to the nanoscale—that have been found just about everywhere scientists have looked. They suffuse the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. They’ve been detected in blood, semen, breast milk, bone marrow, and placentas. Scientists are only beginning to explore what this omnipresence means for the health of humans and the environment, but the signs are worrying. One recent study found microplastics in tissue from human kidneys, livers, and brains, and a study of 12 dementia patients’ brains showed greater accumulations than those of people without the disease. Other research found the tiny particles in the neck-artery plaque of nearly 60 percent of patients tested; three years later, the rates of heart attacks, strokes, and death were 4.5 times higher among people whose samples contained microplastics.
Buying toys this time of year can be so overwhelming. Everywhere you look, there’s some new, must-have toy being shoved in your face, and it’s incredibly hard to quiet the noise. You want to give your kids toys they’re excited about, but so many options means you’re bound to give them gifts that they are bored with 36 hours after opening the box. This year’s Romper Toy Box is all about toys that are made to last. Some are heirloom quality, some are sturdy and built to take a beating, and some are just the kind of simple toy we’ve forgotten about — the kind of toy that your kids can spend hours playing with.
From pretend play to activity sets, STEM kits, and more, this list has plenty of toys you won’t regret buying for your kids. There are varying price points, as well, and a lot of these are also chosen with you, the parent, in mind. Do you really need toys in your house that take two adults to set up, with 800 small pieces, only for your kids to be over it after 10 minutes?
I think every parent is looking for a toy that will unlock their child’s creativity, their love of play, and actually hold their attention — and that’s what Romper Toy Box 2025 is all about.
There are a million dollhouse options out there, but I love one that’s built to last, like The Dollhouse from Blueberry and Third. It comes completely blank, so you can decorate it however you want with paint, wallpaper, and accessories, and it’s built in a 1:12 scale, so you can add in your own furniture and dolls. It’s also enormous and just so classic. A great, heirloom-quality toy this Christmas.
I know it’s not new anymore, but my son has used his Yoto daily for over a year, and it still looks and works like it’s brand new. This year, we’re asking grandparents for the Yoto Club membership so my son can pick a new card or two each month (we keep them all in this inexpensive little organizer for compact storage and easy travel). We love the classic bedtime stories and the daily kids’ podcasts they put out, and that it’s nice screen-free background noise when we’re playing and drawing together.
I had a microscope set as a kid, and I still remember the countless hours I spent looking at the slides it came with and making my own from leaves, bugs, and feathers I found outside. For the curious kids in your life, it’s a top tier gift.
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Defense bill: The House on Wednesday approved a $900 billion defense policy bill that would give U.S. troops a raise and codify much of President Trump’s national security agenda. It also seeks to curb his pullback from Europe and mandate more Pentagon consultation with Congress, including sharing unedited videos of attacks on suspected drug boats that officials have so far been unwilling to show lawmakers. The bill goes next to the Senate, which is also expected to approve it overwhelmingly, sending it to Mr. Trump for his signature. Read more ›
Gold card: The Trump administration launched a website that opens up applications for a “gold card,” an expedited visa that the federal government plans to sell for at least $1 million to visitors who provide a “substantial benefit” to the country. It costs a nonrefundable $15,000 processing fee, then $1 million to “receive U.S. residency in record time” and become lawful permanent residents. Read more ›
National Guard deployment: A federal judge said the Trump administration must end its deployment of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the order, which was stayed until Monday. Read more ›
House Gives Bipartisan Approval to $900 Billion Defense Bill
The House on Wednesday approved a $900 billion defense policy bill that would codify much of President Trump’s national security agenda but seek to curb his move to withdraw from Europe and to mandate more Pentagon consultation with Congress.
The 312-112 vote on the legislation, which would provide a 3.8 percent pay raise to U.S. troops, reflected bipartisan support for what is commonly regarded as a must-pass bill. It goes next to the Senate, which is also expected to approve it overwhelmingly, sending it to Mr. Trump for his signature.
The House just approved 312-122 the final version of the annual defense policy bill, sending the must-pass, $900 billion legislation to the Senate, where lawmakers in that chamber are expected to vote next week on sending it to President Trump’s desk. The legislation would codify much of the president’s national security agenda, but also includes last-minute additions to exert congressional authority over decisions like troop withdrawals and the military campaign against suspected drug boats.
Trump administration opens applications for million-dollar visas.
The Trump administration debuted a website on Wednesday that opens up applications for a “gold card,” an expedited visa that the federal government plans to provide to people who pay at least $1 million.
To apply for the card, people have to pay a nonrefundable $15,000 processing fee, according to the site. After applicants are vetted and approved by the Department of Homeland Security, they will then have to pay $1 million to “receive U.S. residency in record time” and become lawful permanent residents.
Judge Emil Bove faces an ethics complaint for attending a Trump rally.
Judge Emil Bove III, a federal appeals court judge who made his career as a stalwart supporter of President Trump, is now facing a complaint over his attendance at a campaign-style rally held by Mr. Trump at a Pennsylvania casino resort on Tuesday.
The complaint, which was filed on Wednesday with the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and was written by Gabe Roth, who heads the advocacy group Fix the Court, said that Judge Bove’s attendance at the rally violated rules that prohibit judges from “the appearance of impropriety” and engaging in “political activity.”
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Speaker Mike Johnson at the Capitol on Wednesday.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
Right now, one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever built is scouring the surface of Mars. Supported by a team of hundreds of scientists back on Earth, the Perseverance rover has traveled nearly the distance of a marathon to answer some of the biggest questions about our neighboring world: What was the planet like eons ago? Was it ever habitable? Did it host life?
One rock visited by Perseverance, called Cheyava Falls, is speckled with iron-rich minerals that might be able to answer these questions, scientists announced in September. On Earth, the presence of these minerals usually means microbes that used iron in the chemical reactions essential to their metabolism once lived there. Does the same hold true on Mars? A piece of Cheyava Falls is safely tucked inside the rover’s storage cache. If it can be shipped to Earth, analysis with the full range of laboratory equipment here could tell us the answer.
But Cheyava Falls’s ride to our planet might have fallen through. The Perseverance rover is the first phase of a multistep mission to bring bits of Mars to Earth, known as Mars Sample Return (MSR), and the next step is dangling by a thread. The Trump administration has proposed canceling the return portion of the endeavor. The mission’s fate, as of press time, rests with the U.S. Congress.
The situation has dismayed scientists who have longed to get their hands on Martian rocks. “We’ve been working for so many decades to try to make this happen,” says Vicky Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute’s Colorado branch. Now that Perseverance has scooped up prized samples, scientists are faced with the prospect of leaving them on Mars to languish. “It’s hard to watch.”
Even if the mission isn’t canceled, how to finish it remains an open question. In 2024 NASA said it was scrapping its initial, troubled plan for MSR—deemed too costly and too far behind schedule—to seek cheaper commercial approaches. The agency now has multiple options on the table but has yet to decide which course to take, if any.
At stake are potentially profound insights about Mars. We know that some three billion to four billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, with lakes and seas on its surface. What we don’t know is whether life ever took hold there. Can we find out?
Perseverance touched down on Mars in February 2021 following a nail-biter of a landing. After the spacecraft had torn through the Martian atmosphere and descended toward the surface by parachute, a crablike, rocket-propelled platform called Sky Crane lowered the rover on cables to the surface. It landed inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) dent in the Martian landscape. A river once flowed there, and the bone-dry delta it left behind is visible from space.
If anything ever lived on Mars, Jezero is as good a place as any to look for signs of it. It’s nearly impossible, however, to send a mission to Mars that would be capable of finding life without help from labs on Earth. That’s why scientists have been lobbying since the 1960s for a way to bring pieces of Mars here.
MSR is the culmination of those efforts. In 2000, Scott Hubbard, NASA’s first Mars program director—sometimes called the “Mars Czar”—was tasked with turning around the fortunes of an ailing program that had experienced multiple failures in the 1990s, including the loss of two orbiters and a lander. “I took the existing program down to the roots, almost a bare sheet of paper,” Hubbard says. The top priority, he says, was to find out: “Did life ever exist on Mars, and could it be there today?”
Interest in Martian life had been spurred by a now infamous announcement from the White House lawn in 1996, when President Bill Clinton declared that signs of life had been detected in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. That claim was later refuted—but it caused enough clamor to put the search for Martian life at the top of NASA’s agenda.
NASA put a plan in place. Rovers and orbiters would probe the planet to identify good places to look for evidence of life. Then a rover would head there to grab samples, and a third phase would bring them to Earth. In 2012, NASA announced the Mars 2020 mission, which would land a rover, later named Perseverance, to collect the samples. By 2030, a follow-up mission would collect these samples and return them to Earth at an estimated cost of slightly less than $6 billion. Perseverance launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in July 2020. Not far behind, scientists hoped, the retrieval mission would follow.
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NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on Mars in July 2024. The rover stands next to a rock named Cheyava Falls, which scientists say may hold clues about whether the planet ever hosted microbial life. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A man on a plane TikTok’ed about getting a refund after a baby in a nearby aisle cried for 45 minutes. That man was a dick. A few years back, a lady on a South Korea–to–US flight gave out handwritten notes and care packages—earplugs, gum, candies—to atone for flying with a baby who might cry. That woman was a benevolent fool.
I can’t get my head around either of those standards—neither the “I’m sorry I cannot control the behavior of this defenseless human in my arms” position, nor this new “Why has this baby ruined my day?” schtick.
It’s the season of mass travel, December being the month we have to touch base with uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even MAGA-hatted distant cousins, lest we summon bad tidings and bah-humbugs—especially when a newborn’s involved. This time of year, it’s your duty as a parent to serve up your baby, oft dressed in velvet and doily, to cooing relations.
I am a loud person by nature—God blessed me with a voice that carries—but the thought of negatively impacting someone else’s experience with my presence is, by no stretch of the imagination, mortifying. I don’t talk during the movie or use speakerphone for public calls. But I have no qualms about my daughter’s lack of absolute silence in any situation. I’m sure you can Labrador-train a child to be seen and not heard, but a new-ish-born baby is a lasso of foghorns you can’t predict the trigger for, and parenting toddlers, on the whole, is fighting for your fucking life—every minute trying to swerve the carnage mainly seen in disaster movies. Many a traveling parent knows the piercing pain of their kid melting down when they should be buckling up, and shoving Cheeto after Cheeto into their mouth, or a sticky iPad into their stickier hands, to ease the onset of Armageddon. You’ve heard the verging-on-shrill pitch to their voice, the rising panic as their mile-high cub breaks the sound barrier.
To state the blindingly obvious: Babies cry. Without vocab or motor skills, a baby can’t indicate even the smallest discomfort without Niagara-ing into their bibs. If a baby is wet, they cry. If a baby is tired, they cry. If a baby is hungry, they cry. A baby can cry at the scratchy label in a onesie, a slight gust of cold air, the 12-second gap between Ms. Rachel videos. A baby’s Spotify Wrapped is just the sound of them wailing at different pitches.
And it should go without saying that a baby crying isn’t a reflection on the parent or their parenting style. Happy, non-future-serial-killer babies cry. Well-watered, well-tended babies cry. A baby that doesn’t cry may seem aspirational for Christmas travel, but it’s more likely an issue for a medic.
I’m wondering what brings people online to bemoan babies crying on flights. Were they expecting to be shielded from the general public when they purchased their ticket for public travel? Were they hoping to pay for extra soundproofing along with their legroom? There’s something about the echo chamber of social media that has siloed us into hyper-individuals, fixated not only on our personal experience but on the things that threaten it. Rather than co-exist, we have refused to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.
The public-shaming aspect, especially of mothers, carries a certain subtext; it’s about a woman failing to disappear into the passing montage of a man’s day—about making herself known to him without courting his attention. There’s a sense that a woman is meant to carry out her job as a mother in perfect silence, like a fresco of the Madonna and child.
But the people judging babies that cry seem to forget that they were once babies that cried. And in a way, the complainers are still the babies—unable to modify their own emotions, to empathize, to rationalize. Where a baby lacks the development to properly express themselves, the complainers lack the maturity to shut up and noise-cancel. Instead of acting out, what they really need to do is grow up.
On President Trump’s proclaimed “Liberation Day” in April, when he announced the tariffs that have upended global trade, he vowed that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” The imposition of taxes on imports, the president promised, “will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers,” leading to lower prices for Americans.
So far, it has not worked out that way, forcing Mr. Trump to move to contain the economic and political damage.
At the White House on Monday, the president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers who have been battered in large part by his trade policies.
Tariffs continue to put upward pressure on prices, putting the Trump administration on the defensive over deep public concern about the cost of living. On Tuesday, the president will go to Pennsylvania for the first of what the White House calls a series of speeches addressing the “affordability” problem, which last week he dismissed as “the greatest con job” ever conceived by Democrats.
China, the world’s second-largest economy and the United States’ main economic and technological competitor, released figures on Monday showing that it continues to run a record trade surplus with the rest of the world, even as its overall trade and surplus with the U.S. narrows. That suggests Beijing is quickly learning how to thrive even in a world in which the United States becomes a tougher place to do business.
And there is scant evidence to date of any wholesale return to American towns and cities of the manufacturing jobs lost to decades of automation and globalization.
Mr. Trump insists that his signature decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 is working, or will soon. He continues to blame his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., for every economic woe, though the argument is getting thinner and thinner as he approaches, in just six weeks, his first anniversary in office.
He finds himself in roughly the place Mr. Biden did in early 2024: Telling the American people that they are doing great, when many don’t feel that way. He has dismissed talk of high prices at grocery stores, insisting they are coming down. But inflation edged upward in September, to about a 3 percent annual increase, almost exactly where it was when his predecessor left office.
Manufacturing jobs have continued to decline gradually this year, with losses of roughly 50,000 since January. (Such numbers contributed to the dismissal in July of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Mr. Trump announced that downward revisions to the official jobs reports were “rigged.”)
Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump tried on Monday to portray the $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers as a victory, another piece of evidence — at least to him — that his decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 are working, or will soon.
In recent weeks, he has promised to use the tariff income flowing into the country to cut a government check of $2,000 for every taxpayer (“not including high income people!” he exclaimed on Truth Social in November). Last week, he declared at a cabinet meeting that “at some point in the not too distant future, you wouldn’t even have income tax to pay.”
The numbers don’t quite add up: The U.S. has collected about $250 billion in tariff revenue this year — a bit shy of the $2.66 trillion in federal individual income taxes in the 2025 fiscal year.
The president has promised that tariff revenue will pay down the national debt, now at $38.45 trillion. Over the summer, he told lawmakers that other deals he is striking — some in return for lowering tariffs — would reduce some drug prices by 1,500 percent, a piece of mathematical gymnastics that left some in his audience mystified.
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The president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers, who have been battered in large part by his trade policies. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
Earlier this year, I got an Oura ring to track the state of my health. Soon, I was obsessing over my sleep and activity scores. The reports were generally positive except for one: heart rate variability, or HRV. That’s a measure of how much the time between heartbeats changes. Every morning, in bright red, my ring’s app singled out HRV and told me: “Pay attention.”
That didn’t sound good, although I had no idea why. Before wearable fitness watches, rings, and bracelets became so common and started including HRV as a data point, I had never heard of it. Even among heart doctors, its use has been limited. “I don’t think HRV is used in day-to-day clinical medical practice,” says Bryan Wilner, an electrophysiologist at the Baptist Health Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute. “But it’s gained a lot more popularity in regular consumers with these noninvasive monitors.”
Suddenly, we are all paying attention to HRV. And as reams of data are collected from hundreds of thousands of people like me, the measure has the potential to become a far more significant tool for diagnosis and therapy, although it isn’t there yet.
The average person’s heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute when they’re at rest, but it fluctuates all day long. Standing up after lying down changes your heart rate, as does jogging or fielding stressful questions at work. The time between beats changes, too, and that’s what HRV captures. Unlike arrhythmias, which are potentially dangerous disruptions in the heart’s electrical activity, HRV measures the very slight variation in periods—a matter of milliseconds—between consecutive heartbeats, tracked over a few minutes or longer.
“There is no specific [HRV] number for what’s bad, what’s good.” —Attila Roka, electrophysiologist
Both heart rate and HRV reflect the differing effects of the two branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system, colloquially known as “fight or flight,” increases heart rate; the parasympathetic, or “rest and digest,” slows it down. Generally, the lower a person’s heart rate, the higher their HRV. A high HRV indicates a body that adapts to stressors and can recover more quickly.
It’s a sign of a balanced autonomic nervous system and a higher level of cardiovascular fitness. Low HRV signals the opposite—that the body is less able to adjust to the ups and downs of life. Stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, inadequate sleep, dehydration, and new medicines are among the many things that can lower HRV. Disease can reduce it, too. In people recovering from heart attacks or living with heart failure, low HRV is associated with a higher risk of death and further illness. “HRV is a window into how the autonomic nervous system is interacting with our heart,” Wilner says. Oura states on its app that it flags HRV because it is a sign of stress and recovery.
“There is no specific number for what’s bad, what’s good,” says Attila Roka, an electrophysiologist at the CHI Health Clinic Heart Institute and an assistant professor at Creighton University in Omaha. Anywhere from roughly 20 to 70 milliseconds is considered within normal range. The measure is highly individual, although it generally goes down with age. Mine hovered around an unusual 14 for weeks, and that’s why my ring alerted me.
An electrocardiogram is the gold standard for measuring HRV. Cutting-edge pacemakers and defibrillators monitor it, too, and experts are investigating the use of HRV with heart disease patients to predict the onset of atrial fibrillation (Afib) in time to prevent it, says Pamela Mason, chief of cardiac electrophysiology at UVA Health in Virginia. Afib is an irregular, rapid heart rhythm that can lead to blood clots and other problems. Physicians also use Holter monitors, small devices that patients wear on their chests for a few days, to capture a full picture of cardiac activity, including HRV.
Devices like Apple watches and Oura rings work by looking at pulse fluctuations rather than electrical heart signals. Few studies have examined how accurate these devices are. But what’s more important for the average person, experts say, is the relative change over time. “You need to get a baseline HRV,” Wilner says. “HRV is most powerful when you’re measuring it over several weeks and can see a graphic trend on how it’s being affected by everything that’s going on in your life.”
HRV might one day be used to assess mental health. “If you’re in a constant fight-or-flight kind of state mentally, you’re going to lose heart rate variability,” Mason says. Conditions such as depression and bipolar disorder are likely to be associated with dysregulated nervous system activity. Even among people without medical or psychiatric disorders, studies have found a link between decreasing parasympathetic activity and emotional upset, suggesting HRV tracks psychological states.
Low HRV, in relatively healthy people, does have some remedies. “The best way to improve heart rate variability is exercise,” Mason says, “and it’s going to need to be more strenuous than gentle walks.” Pick up the pace to pick up your HRV. Drinking more fluids—water is good—also helps.
For people like me, Mason’s advice is to not obsess. Instead, consider what you could do to take better care of yourself. Prodded by red HRV alerts, I drank more water and consumed less caffeine, went to bed earlier, and engaged in vigorous exercise more regularly. Since then, my HRV has been higher than 30! Not that I’m obsessing over it.
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